‘Curiosity,’ Jude said.
‘Killed the cat,’ Mona replied.
‘Still,’ Jude murmured. ‘The cat is a necessity, betimes.’
‘What are you saying?’ This from Mona, who was resting her pert head on the circus guy-rope. She could see Dany on the sawdust floor inside the canvas flap, exercising the Arabian. It was that hot, restful hour before whatever crowds would come. He barely stroked the horse with the whip. A backwards flick, and it reared on its heels.
‘He’s asked me,’ Jude said. Her mouth barely moved. ‘How the mirror did its thing.’
‘A bit like Walter.’
‘Poor Walter. Did curiosity kill him?’
‘It made him old before his time.’
And the truth was, it exhausted him. The attempt to rationalise the fundamentally irrational. To trace the untraceable. For the carnival, by the time Walter experienced it, was such a mélange of changelings and Ur carnies, that if a proper genealogical study had been made (and no such study was ever likely to be made, because carnies would have scarpered long before such a study got close to beginning; Walter’s codex is the closest one comes to one) it would have been well-nigh impossible to distinguish between the original and the ersatz, between the one true inherited link to the Land of Spices and the interlopers, the wannabe carnies (of which Walter himself was one) and the changelings. Walter was writing before the discovery of DNA – and here the question arises: did carnies have such a thing as DNA? But any such study would have told the same mongrel tale. Denied all of the benefits of reproduction – and most carnies felt this infertility to be a blessing, the ultimate distinguishing factor between themselves and the outside world – they replenished their ranks by abductions of various kinds. A process, as Walter observes, like most carnie realities, obscured, mythicised, dramatised in the most charming of allegorical tales, but which he himself defines as the ‘changeling process’. Now the snatching of a child may have had a logic, may have even constituted a virtue in a world where children were many, and mostly unwanted. But in the middle years of the twentieth century, when the images of missing children were posted in news-papers and on street lampposts (this was long before the rash of ‘Have You Seen This Child?’ legends on plastic milk cartons) and created what in the eighteenth century would have been known as a ‘universal hue and cry’, abduction was no longer an option. So the carnie ranks went through a gradual depletion as the inevitable Fatigue thinned their numbers.
Burleigh’s efforts with his Hall of Mirrors, therefore, would have led to a solution of kinds. To wit, a steady stream of changelings (‘reflectives’) who could be observed, monitored (or to use the repellent current usage: ‘groomed’), while their reflected others happily returned to the human fold. And those that were found fitting could be inducted into the mysteries of the spice. But, as always with Burleigh, there were problems. Native ingenuity is one thing; mechanical, not to say optical, perfection, quite another. And Burleigh’s first efforts with what came to be known as the Rotterdam gold led to the most extraordinary aberrations. The moment of separation of the reflection from its bearer proved arbitrary, to say the least. And the first unfortunate reflective came out long and thin, a pitifully stretched version of the original that had viewed himself, surprise surprise, in the elongated mirror. Still, he was welcomed by the carnies, given various in-appropriate nicknames (‘Stretchy’, ‘Indiarubber’) and put to work with the roustabouts. His long, thin fingers proved invaluable in the tightening of barely reachable nuts, bolts and sprockets that would otherwise have gathered dust and rust in the inaccessible scaffolding beneath the carousel and the helter-skelter. They could now be oiled by Indy with his stretchable, pneumatically agile arms. And so, eventually and happily, he became one of them.
More thins emerged through that carnival season, before the carnies had to call a halt. And Burleigh pleaded his case, begged to be let go back to what he called ‘the drawing board’.
But the next reflectives came out with a shape even more alarming. Short, squashed versions of their originals (like the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, a film the carnies first viewed in the autumn of that fateful year, 1939). A positive bevy of them emerged from the mirror-maze on successive hot July days. Their voices were squished, as if they breathed laughing gas instead of air, and they proved addicted to the most charmless practical jokes – most of which involved belching and farts of stupendous reach. The carnival had to call another halt to Burleigh’s efforts (and Walter writes, in a scribbled footnote, that this latest mishap led to the first whisperings about his banishment).
But the squats, as they came to be called, proved as useful as the thins. With unnaturally broad shoulders, stupendous muscle mass and a centre of gravity lower than most, they could lift many times their own body weight and took their place with the thins amongst the roustabouts. But by that time, sadly, Burleigh’s banishment was almost complete.
Rotterdam began it and Rotterdam ended it. Jude, always a light sleeper, was woken by a loud, sad foghorn from the North Sea. She crawled from her hammock, clenched her pipe between her teeth and took a walk around the sleeping caravans. There was an intermittent moon shining, turbulent clouds scudding over it, and she could see the dim shapes of a new generation of battleships on the night horizon. Even without her crystal ball, she could envision the carnage they would soon create, for Jude had lived long enough on this human shore to know there was never a weapon designed that hadn’t been used. And was it that sense of endless futility that led her to the half-open door of the mirror-maze and to venture inside? Carnies rarely looked in mirrors, hated to view themselves, since they feared they would catch a glimpse of the years they had lived. They reserved that pleasure for humans. Burleigh had laboured alone in his reflective workshop; carnies had seen the questionable results and been happy to leave him to it. But some premonition of the imminent end of things led Jude inside. And she saw herself, in the barely perceptible darkness, a long, thin, emaciated ancient thing, with more years etched on the face than anyone, human or carnie, could count. Jude recognised herself, with a shudder of the Fatigue that she barely managed to keep at bay. She took the deepest of breaths and continued wandering through the Hall of Mirrors, into the gathering darkness, and saw the same image squashed, like a Neanderthal toadstool, the same ancient version of her repeated, then, an infinite number of times. All of this amused her, saddened her, filled her with an ennui that grew inescapable, and for some reason Jude kept going. And there, in the bowels of Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors, she finally glimpsed something that chilled her to the bone. The mirror-image of all carnie selves, as if the Land of Spices had never been abandoned, an image that had the elusive quality of hoar frost, of fungus on an ancient wound, of hanging tendrils of curdled whey: the Dewman.
Had Burleigh purchased more than he bargained for when he haggled his way to possession of that aardmannetje in that antique store on the Rotterdam docks? Had Burleigh himself some demonic design when he beat it meticulously into ever thinner sheaves of gold? Had forces beyond his ken – and Burleigh’s ken was as stiff and quasi-scientific as all of his optical efforts: he had little of the true carnie insight or talent for evasion – led him through that pinging door? No clarity was reached on any of these questions during the proceedings for Burleigh’s subsequent banishment. And, to be fair, the thought of carnie judicial proceedings is a contradiction in kind. As Walter records, it was more of a bear-baiting than a court, a carnie pillorying, a babel of blame and accusation, which had two recorded results. Burleigh was to be banished and his Hall of Mirrors was to be shuttered and scraped. Scraped of its Rotterdam gold, and the job of scraping fell to the roustabout children of the mirror, the squats and the thins. So they re-entered their womb of mirrors and scraped them back to clear glass, replaced the Rotterdam gold once more with dependable silver. Why not destroyed? Walter asks, and adds an asterisk, and explains in a footnote: ‘Carnies were hoarders. They would happily bleed rather than let anything go.’
Burleigh’s long banishment began. And the new-minted Hall of Mirrors took its place among the other carnival sideshows in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, in the spring of 1940. But the scraping and the silvering left much to be desired. Among the swathes of mirrored silver there remained some tentative threads of gold, a kind of palimpsest of the original intention and design. And Andy’s emergence from the mirror-maze, many generations later, would have been the culmination of all of Burleigh’s ingenuity, had he only been there to witness it. A perfect reflective, a true child of the mirror, of the Rotterdam gold, identical in every possible way to its source, all of his features intact and each of his limbs in accordance with what should have been. In fact, Burleigh’s ingenuity, as we shall later learn, had surpassed even his hopes for it. Because in Andy’s case, the difference between reflector and reflected was reversed. And the Rotterdam gold had finally and impeccably worked its magic.