I smiled back. Even if this wasn’t my cup of tea, I was glad to see her so happy. “That sounds fair.”
She grabbed me by the shoulders and pointed me in the direction she wanted me to go. “You know the kind of stuff I like!” With a gentle shove, we were both off.
As soon as I rounded the curve of the winding hallway, I stopped. After a few minutes, sure the coast was clear, I backtracked to the information booth. June was long gone to the fountain pen Rome.
“Which way to the South Seas?” I asked.
The woman behind the counter had silvery hair that parted like stage curtains. “It’s in the annex,” she said, pointing in the same direction June had pointed me in. “You have to walk all the way down the hallway until it becomes a tunnel, and then you follow it until it rises up again, and then you go down into the basement, and that’s the South Seas.”
“Thank you.” I started off.
“Little girl?”
I turned back.
“Do you want me to check that coat for you? It looks so heavy.”
“Oh, no,” I said, feeling a light sweat break out on my forehead. “It’s so chilly in here. But thank you.”
The hallway, once I rounded the various beginning turns, was immensely long, like the voyage Into the underworld that had been so tough on Orpheus or the distance they always had to travel in fairy tales, East of the Sun and West of the Moon. No one else was around at all, and the air smelled musty, as if no one had been breathing it for a while. My Keds made no sound on the shiny linoleum.
The walls were decorated with various posters from around the world. They looked like circus posters, in all kinds of foreign languages. Except not regular circuses, of course.
Chinese flea circuses, Spanish freak shows. The posters had that lurid look Ripley seemed so keen on. You saw armless people smoking cigarettes with their toes. Not the happiest sort of decoration on an isolated December evening.
And the hallway began to slope down. This must be the tunnel to the adjacent mansion.
The skin over my stomach tingled, as if spiders were dancing across it.
In a few minutes, a few more steps down the tunnel, I would be okay. I wasn’t going to be scared. I was going to be free, instead.
But I wasn’t prepared for the sight that greeted me in the room the tunnel emerged into.
What were those things? Carvings? Statues? They were as tall as a three-story building, taller than Hannah, and they loomed above me, great skinny totem poles. But all weird and lacy, as if wood had been turned into cloth and then into leaves or webs. Figures with lanky legs and spindly knees balanced on the heads of other figures, and the guy on the very top, at least on the pole closest to me, held out a mysterious triangle, oddly protruding from between his legs, and it was carved with curliques and whirligigs and slithery little animals gnawing furiously at their own tails.
I walked around the towering figure next to me and stared at what was on the ground. Canoes, every bit as long as the several dozen figures were tall. They were carved to resemble enormous lean alligators, lizards, dragons, crocodiles, and carved men sat inside, with extra spaces beside them for the “real men.” Were they meant to sail on regular water?
What an enormous dusty room, an airplane hangar as still as a closed book, but with that about-to-wake-up quality that lifelike dolls have. Any minute, I figured, one of these statues would creak to life, like the Tin Woodsman after oiling.
Or, Sammy might pop out. I adjusted the unpleasantly heavy bags. The poodle toys gave off a pleasant energy, but that energy was somehow blocked.
Stupid money. I waited.
Nothing happened, and then I began to adjust to the carvings’ sleeping presence. It was peaceful, soothing, and my eyelids grew heavier, like the bags.
To keep awake, I walked over to the far wall and read the sign, moving as slowly and carefully as I would in a library or a church.
Soul Ships resemble dug-out canoes of normal size, complete with carved prows, but are made without bottoms!
I glanced back at the boats. Sure enough, no bottoms. Perhaps that was the strangeness.
Soul Ships are used in ceremonies to expel the souls of recently dead people, and in coming-of-age ceremonies: young boys are scarified while floating in the canoe!
Well, big deal. I was scared looking at those bottomless boats. No doubt it was much scarier riding inside.
These canoes are considered the medium for passing from this world to the supernatural! BELIEVE IT OR NOT!
What wasn’t to believe? They looked the natural vehicle. No one else was around, seemed like no one else ever would be around, so I went ahead and climbed into one of the Soul Ships. Maybe this was the way to find Sammy. Actually, it was pretty comfortable, the alligator. And I wasn’t afraid. All I felt was this deep, sweet urge to let go and give up, float on away into the air.
Chapter Twelve
The jingling sound I took to be Stan clicking his ring on the steering wheel. We were in motion, always in motion, across the endless pancake of land.
But when my eyes squinted open, I realized that I was not sitting in the backseat of the car or in any car at all. The bottomless boats, the dusty statues of the museum—it all flashed clear except that I’d been asleep.
And the jingling sound.
“Sammy?”
“Who’s there?” called a gruff male voice. Footsteps jingled closer.
I pried myself from my position, a fetal curl inside the Soul Ship.
“Miss,” said the guard, hovering over me. “We closed an hour ago.”
I swallowed. My throat felt ragged and dry. “Is it nine o’clock yet?”
The guard, an old man with a dark, sad face, scrunched his white brows together. “I told you,” he said. “We closed at nine. It’s almost ten-thirty now.”
June would kill me. But, I wondered as my limbs stretched out and I climbed free of the boat, why hadn’t anyone come looking for me?
“You go on out the way you came,” the guard recommended, not unkindly. “A lady there’ll let you out the door.”
Back down the tunnel, my mind was still groggy. A flash of something—what was that, a dream? This amazing woman decked out in layers and layers of clothing, all covered with objects, tiny dolls and glass beads, her face was cloudy, but it was… Deane! Deane? Deane wasn’t an old lady, she was a kid.
And this was funny too. My shoulders were aching, as if I’d lifted something heavy. Another dream, and I was all grown up, pulling a bar loaded with weights from the ground up to knee level. Why would I do that?
Besides, my shoulders hurt because I was carrying all this stuff.
I knew it was right to carry the poodle toys, and the magic book, though I could never open it again, had to be on me to be sold, but maybe my big mistake was the money. Ever since I’d stolen the money, no Sammy.
The same old circus posters in the passageway, only now they didn’t seem strange or scary. Only useless and old.
Cold sweat began to bead on my forehead. What if—what if my theft had driven Sammy away? Then the death of my family would be all my fault!
My stomach roiled up with guilt. Strong and powerful as I felt, I knew nothing at all, really, about the world of magic.
Then, for some vague reason, I had this strong sense about New Orleans. Maybe I could buy my own charms, my own amulets.