Page 32 of If Looks Could Kill

I woke up slowly, as though I’d had a peaceful nap. There’d been some dream involving snakes and Pearl, but it was only a dream… that wasn’t a dream.

Pearl had snakes for hair, and she was loose in a city that would be scared senseless by what she was, then take swift, decisive action.

I had to find her. I prayed I wasn’t already too late.

I forced my limbs to move and my brain to think. We’d never really been apart, these few months. Now she could be anywhere in this vast city. Or at the bottom of the East River.

Stop it.

Where might Pearl the monster—the Medusa—have wanted to go?

We work at punishing the men. The men who hurt women.

The Bowery alone crawled with men seeking cheap thrills with girls and women who were prisoners, however you slice it, to a world that gave them little or no choice in the matter.

She had sounded more animal than human tonight, if an animal could talk. Single-minded. A hunter focused on its prey. Which parts of her mind and memory were still hers, and which had surrendered to this monstrous side?

She might’ve gone to that brothel. She’d been so incensed by the men coming and going there. Or perhaps to the Lion’s Den, to confront that tall proprietor? Johnny Something?

I checked the clock. I’d been unconscious for only fifteen minutes. Emma and Carrie, it seemed, had gone to evening meetings at the base, thank God. I left the flat quickly and made my way down to the brothel, which was closer.

I searched corners and shadows of the alley for any sign of Pearl. From the fire escape, I scanned the alley’s length. Back on the ground, I lingered outside the secluded door, holding my breath. I felt as though the door might yawn open at any moment and devour me.

Faint sounds from inside sounded normal, if I had to guess. Murmurs of conversation and high-pitched laughter. No Medusa, though what was inside was its own kind of terror, and I couldn’t wait to get away from the door.

I left the alley and reached the Bowery proper, then turned north, heading for Spring Street and the Lion’s Den.

Concert saloons screamed out their bawdy songs and flashed their lurid lights.

The dime museum ballymen hawked their exhibitions.

Vonda the Snake Charmer and Giselle the Gorgon of Gotham lived for nothing so much as for me to come and see them, for the mere price of one thin dime.

Gorgon. My skin prickled.

Gorgon had something to do with Medusa. Was that what had killed her in the myths?

Paintings festooned the facade of the Curiosity Musée. Between gruesome images of Francine the Human Skeleton and Jo-Jo the Dogface Boy was a tall poster of a seductive woman with snakes sliding down her neck like long, luxurious curls. Giselle the Gorgon of Gotham.

A Gorgon was a Medusa.

Every minute I delayed hunting for Pearl could be deadly, for Pearl or for someone else. But if there was another Medusa, right here on the Bowery, she wasn’t leaving a trail of stone corpses, or this dime museum wouldn’t last long.

Perhaps this Giselle could be a source of help. At least, of information. How to find Pearl. How to hide her. What this curse might actually mean. If any miracle could reverse it.

I pulled ten cents from my coin pouch and approached the ballyman.

“I’d like to see the Gorgon of Gotham, please,” I told him.

He took my money, then eyed my uniform. “Your dime lets you in, miss,” he said, “but I didn’t think you Salvation types went for this sort of thing.” His eyes narrowed. “You’re not planning to interrupt the show, are you? With your preaching jingo?”

I wished I’d changed my clothes first. “I promise I’m not.” I sighed. “I’m off-duty.”

He eyed me doubtfully but held open the door. “Then in you go.”

I entered the museum through a long, dimly lit corridor. Red velvet drapes hung between glass cases showing various curiosities. Human skulls. Exotic stuffed birds. A monkey, which startled me by hopping up and down as I passed by.

“Does Miss enjoy the sight of live animals?” purred a smooth voice in my ear.

I turned quickly to see a thin-mustached man, slight of build and dressed in a suit of men’s evening wear that had seen better days, standing closer than I liked.

“We have a live menagerie of jungle animals upstairs,” he said. “A tiger, two leopards, a baboon, and several marmosets.”

Marmosets? “No, thank you, I—”

“And an impressive selection of reptiles. Safe behind glass, of course.”

Of course.

“Please,” I said, “I’m here to see the Gorgon.”

His eyebrows rose. “That will be in the theater, downstairs,” he said. “Her show starts in ten minutes and costs an extra five cents.”

I reached quickly into my pouch.

“However, I must say that usually only gentlemen watch Giselle’s performance.”

I groaned inwardly. One of those shows.

“It does tend,” he whispered, “toward those of exotic, er, cultural tastes.”

Cultural, my eye. I pulled out a shiny half-dollar. It glinted in the light.

“Fifty cents,” I told him, “for one minute to speak with Giselle before her show.”

The coin’s gleam reflected in his eyes. “Our performers require their privacy.”

“And fifty cents for her, too,” I added. “One minute only. I’m in desperate trouble. Only she can help.” I noticed him glance at my uniform. “I’m not here to talk about religion.”

The museum’s “inside talker” promptly relieved me of my coin. “This way, please,” he said. “One minute only.” He pulled aside a curtain and opened the door concealed behind it. I followed him through.

Gone were the plush drapes and the muted lamps.

He led me through a dark tunnel of rough boards that seemed to be held up solely by pinned posters advertising stupendous shows of strongmen, fortune tellers, jugglers, and others, in days of yore, and newer handwritten notices threatening to dock people’s pay if they were a single minute late for call time.

My escort stopped at a door and rapped softly on it.

Someone threw the door open. An old woman stood there, smoking a cigarette, holding a half-darned silk stocking and a threaded needle. Behind her, in the dim room, I saw figures move about among wardrobes, boxes, and dressing tables. Two were extraordinarily tall.

“What is it, Bert?” She gave me a scrutinizing look. “They’re not late for curtain yet.”

Bert, of the shabby suit, coughed apologetically. “Someone wanting to talk to Giselle.”

A woman in the shadows behind the cigarette woman turned then and looked at me.

I couldn’t make out much in the gloom, but her cutaway negligee glittered (in what light it could find) with beads and sequins.

I couldn’t see her hair, but I saw high-arched eyebrows framing intense eyes.

Her gaze locked onto mine, and my skin prickled. She must be the one.

“Ding-dang it, Bert, I said to keep those Romeos away from here,” the stocking-darner said. “She’s sick of all the roses. Got no place to put ’em.”

“This young lady,” Bert said, “offered to pay well for one minute of her time.”

The woman studied me. “You?” Her scowl said I was something she’d squished underneath her shoe. “Why?” she demanded. “What do you want?”

My mind went blank. “I know a Medusa,” I said, “needing help.”

The negligee woman in the dark room disappeared into the shadows.

“We got all the Medusas we need here,” the woman said. “Try someplace in Brooklyn.”

I blinked in confusion. “No, I don’t mean—”

“No visitors.” She shut the door in my face.

Bert shot me an annoyed glance. He gestured farther ahead down the corridor that had brought us here. “The exit is that way.” He sounded nothing like the warm host he’d been. “Straight ahead is the way out.”

I knew it had been pointless to come. Cursing myself for wasting time, I made my way toward the rear exit of the Curiosity Musée.

To my left, a door opened, and a young man stuck his head out into the corridor. A set of stairs wound down behind him.

“Curtain!” he hissed.

Commotion began stampeding around me. Other doors opened, and figures streamed past, in lavish costumes reeking of sweat and mildew, and made for the staircase.

They seemed to hail from all corners of the globe.

Large and small, tall and short— very tall and very short and in between—they hurried by in wigs and crowns and headdresses, with faces heavily powdered and painted.

The human skeleton’s ribs poked sharply out between the sash tied around her chest and the other tied around her waist. A gigantic pair of men who must be twins couldn’t fit walking side by side in the hallway.

They looked like paintings of Atlas, holding up the sky, that had come to life.

The next figure made me gasp. A werewolf. No, a well-muscled young man whose face and features were thick with brown hair. Jo-Jo the Dogface Boy. They and others hurrying by me glanced at me as though I were the maggot in their salad. I suppose I was.

Another figure emerged from the door where Bert had knocked. It was her. Giselle the Gorgon. Snakes sprouted from her head like cascading waterfalls. They moved in the watery light.

I took a step closer.

She whirled about and saw me. I felt caught in the glare of her accusing eyes.

“Please,” I said. “Help us.”

She frowned and hurried away.

The snakes. They were wrong. They moved, but not with life. They bounced, but with her movements, like strands of rubber. They might have fooled me if I hadn’t seen the real thing.

This was no Medusa. This was a circus gimmick. I should never have come. I turned to leave.

“Pardon.”

A petite Negro woman in ordinary clothes had emerged from the door where Giselle had been. She was perhaps thirty years old. She spoke softly, with a French accent.

“Bonsoir,” she said. “You mentioned something about a Medusa needing help?”

“I did,” I admitted. “Do you know anything that might help me?”

“Ah, so it’s you?” Her brow creased with concern for me, as if I were a wounded puppy.

“No,” I said quickly. “A friend.”

“A performer?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“I thought not.” She watched me thoughtfully. “Is she prone to flights of fancy? To… how do you say… hallucinatory, hallucin—”

“No,” I said quickly. “It’s not that.”

She offered me her hand. “I’m Veronique.”

“Tabitha.” I shook her hand.

“I help manage and train the performers,” she said conversationally.

I couldn’t see what that had to do with me. The perverse thought hit me that if Pearl were here, the real Pearl, she would try to sell this woman a War Cry .

“One of the things I manage,” she said, “for our top performers, is their mail. Not all of them can read, and some of the more popular ones, like Giselle, can’t keep up with the volume of their letters. So I go through them.”

I wanted desperately to leave, but something held me back. “I’m sure they’re grateful.”

She gave me a funny look. “Most of those who write to Gigi,” she said, “are admirers.” She shrugged. “It’s mostly men who see her show.”

I nodded, screaming only inside my head.

“And there is the occasional quack,” she went on. “Someone claiming to be, oh, say, Perseus. Athena. Hermes. Or Poseidon, even. Can you imagine?”

I pretended to be as amused and surprised as I was apparently supposed to be. These names—forgive me—were all Greek to me.

“She does receive angry letters at times,” she went on, as if correcting a grave misconception on my part, “from women who are members of moral reform societies. They think her, how do you say, pagan persona is a wicked influence.”

Here she glanced pointedly at my infernal uniform. Ah. Now this detail made sense.

“I can see how that might happen,” I said. “But that’s not my position.”

She seemed satisfied, as though I’d passed a test. If it was a test of patience, however, I was failing.

“I called to you,” Veronique said after a pause, “because—oh, perhaps I’m not quite sure why. You seemed… what is the word… singular? Yes. And sincere.”

I tried to speak, and found I couldn’t.

“Of all the people who write to Giselle,” she continued, “one was unusual. She claimed to be a Medusa like Giselle and asked repeatedly for Giselle to come visit her home.” She smiled. “She was persistent, that one. She wrote several times.”

Hope sprang up inside of me. “You wouldn’t know her name, would you?”

Veronique’s eyes grew wide. “Oh, we don’t keep such letters.”

Then why tell me about them at all?

“But I do recall…,” she began.

I held my breath.

“Mind you,” Veronique said, “she may be the greatest quack of them all.”

“I’ll take that chance.”

“She’s Stella,” Veronique said. “I remember, because Gigi gave her a nickname. Stella the Swell. Because she lives on Lafayette Place, you see, where the mansion townhomes are.”

Stella. Lafayette Place. There could be thirteen dozen Stellas on Lafayette Place.

I seized Veronique’s hand and shook it. “Thank you,” I told her. “I’m in your debt.”

“Perhaps,” she said with a smile, “if your friend visits this Stella woman, it might satisfy her enough to leave Giselle alone.” Her features softened with pity. “Good luck to your friend.”

“Thank you,” I told her. “She needs it.”