George did not tell anyone what had happened. It was easy to avoid Franny when he tended to Kingsley, but the few times she came near he grew shameful and hot and had to excuse himself. He felt sure she would tell someone, and then the rest of the troupe would look at him with disgust and throw him out onto the street. But Franny did not tell anyone, apparently; she seemed to have forgotten it the moment it happened, and was unaware that anything wrong had occurred.
He was not sure why he had reacted the way he had. That brief, painful glimpse of so much brown skin had filled him with a warm, sweet wetness, a cold and trembling flame. Yet he did not desire Franny in any way. He wondered what could be wrong with him.
George did not have long to think about it, for despite all his tending Kingsley got worse and worse. He started entering bouts of delirium, speaking incessantly of children and babies and infants, and in many cases he cried that the children were in pieces or parts, or were horribly mangled or eyeless. He would become so terrified in these fits that he would weep for hours, yet in his more lucid moments he could never recall them.
It was in one of these rare clearheaded moments that Kingsley said suddenly to George, “Lucille.”
“What?” said George, who had been mixing a new tincture.
“My wife’s name,” said Kingsley. He propped his chin up on his blanket. “Her name was Lucille.”
“Oh. Yes, I remember asking you about her the other day. What was she like?”
Kingsley was quiet. “Proud,” he said. “And beautiful. We lived in Maryland, in a very small town. I was a lawyer there.”
“I didn’t know you were a lawyer. You didn’t start out in show business, then?”
“No,” said Kingsley. He smiled a little. “And I am not a professor either, George, though I am probably the most overeducated person I know of on the circuits. And my last name is not Tyburn,” he said softly. “My real name is Kingsley Harrison. Very few people use their real names on the stage. I doubt, for example, that your father’s real name is Heironomo.”
“How did you get into the business?”
Kingsley’s eyelids lowered slightly. “That was Harry’s idea. It was a deal we made, you see.”
George stopped mixing and turned to listen, curious. “A deal? In exchange for what?”
Kingsley was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “For children. Harry said he could give me children, if I wanted. And I did. In my old life my wife and I had encountered a great difficulty conceiving, you see. And when we finally conceived, we were so happy. But when she was seven months pregnant the doctor came and felt her belly to make sure that everything was all right. And he said it wasn’t.”
“What was wrong with it?” asked George.
“It did not feel right in the womb. There was something missing, he said. Something significant, otherwise he would not have been able to feel it at all. Perhaps its skull, he told us. And he said he had procedures to end the pregnancy, which he recommended immediately. It was a dead thing, he said. A growth inside of her. Impartial.
“Of course, we were against it. It was our child, even if it was born… that way. We decided we would keep the child alive as best we could, no matter what it was or how it came. And if it died we would hold a funeral for it and say its name—Arthur if it was a boy, Gwen if it was a girl, as my wife liked the Camelot fables, you see—and send it back to God. So she grew this impartial creature inside of her, and we waited and prepared the funeral for when it would be born. The doctor said this was not wise. What we were growing, he said, was a corpse. It was unhealthy to do this. But we would not listen to such horrible things.
“And, in the end, when the child came, the doctor turned out to be wrong. It was not a corpse at all. It was alive, but… it did not look like a baby. It had only one arm and its head was not right. It had one side of the jawbone, but above that, its skull was… wrong. It was bent, and it had one staring eye that never blinked, and only part of its nose. It did not cry when it was delivered, it only stared at us. It was supposed to die then. The doctor said that it would die on delivery. But it didn’t. It stayed alive.
“Lucille could not nurse the thing, but we did have bottles for it. It could drink from the bottles, with its ruined little mouth. It was a miracle that it could, we agreed. And we had to keep it away from light. If it saw light then it would die of shock, the doctor said. He seemed to suggest that this was wrong to do, to prolong our child’s life, but we ignored him and kept our child in the dark, in the closet. We’d wake up in the night and go to the thing sleeping in the closet and feed it with the bottle.” Kingsley swallowed. “Can I have my medicine now?”
“Oh,” said George. “Yes.” He handed him the crystal glass with the opium tincture. Kingsley drank it down quickly and leaned back, sighing.
“It was not supposed to be taken by us,” said Kingsley. “It was supposed to die in its own time, in its own way. But Lucille… she started to become loath to feed it, and went to the closet less and less. I berated her for it, yet all she did was weep. And then one day I returned home and went to the closet and found our child was gone. I became frantic, and nearly tore the house apart searching for it. I looked everywhere, but I would have almost never thought to look in the backyard.
“Yet that was where they were. Lucille had taken it out in its little christening dress, out into the bright sunshine. Dressed it up so it would be beautiful. And the child had been struck dead by the sun. My wife had allowed our child to die. She had killed it.”
Kingsley took a shuddering breath. “I was furious with her. She had killed our child, and I could not understand it. I could not understand why she had taken away what we had tried so hard to have. I called in every favor I had, and I had her jailed. She had to learn that what she had done was wrong.
“For a while then I was crazed with grief. I wandered, not knowing what to do.” Kingsley’s voice began to grow very soft as the laudanum took hold. “And then I heard of this famous performer, Silenus, and I was told he could do many strange and wonderful things. He could perform his own miracles, in a way. And I found him and asked him for a child, and he said he knew of a way to give me one, but he would not do it himself. It was my choice, and my responsibility, and he would take no part in it. But in exchange for telling me how this was done, I would have to join his act, his troupe, and perform with him and lend him my legal skills. And I agreed.”
“What was it?” asked George. “What was it you had to do?”
Kingsley’s eyelids slowly lowered. “It would take so much,” he said in a faint voice. “It would take so much from me, and it would hurt so much… but I had to. I had to have my children, George. And ever since I saw those things in the street, with you and Harry, I’ve been getting drastic, and taking too much… Far, far too much…”
His eyes shut, and he was asleep. George stood over him, not moving. Then he shivered and his skin began to crawl, and although Kingsley’s story had been horrifying there was a different reason behind George’s discomfort: he had the overpowering feeling that they were being watched.
He looked around the room, yet saw nobody. But then his eye happened to fall on the closest marionette box.
Was its lid open? Just a tiny crack? George considered trying to shut it, or opening it up to see what was within. But what if there was actually something there? What could be on the other side of that lid?
It made him wonder if Harry had delivered on his promise for children. But George had never once seen Professor Tyburn with any babies or toddlers of any kind, nor had he ever heard him talk about any grown children of his own. He hoped Kingsley had been delirious when he’d said that. Yes, that had to be it. Kingsley must have been inventing things in his ravings.
He kept watching, but the lid did not move. Shaking slightly, he turned around and walked out.