Sleep, Pale Sister

When shall we three meet again? I said to myself, and I laughed aloud, uncontrollably, as if in recollection of some wild and ridiculous farce.

Then a depression, as abrupt as the hilarity, seized me, and I was close to tears, the image of the crystal blurring before my eyes. I was afraid, disorientated and without memory of what had frightened me, looking into the clouded surface of the crystal and trembling.

Scheherazade was singing gently, almost idly under her breath:

‘Aux marches du palais…

Aux marches du palais…

’Y a une si belle fille, lonlà…

’Y a une si belle fille…’

I tried to stop myself from falling out of my body towards the crystal, but the pull was too strong. I could no longer feel my limbs, no longer see beyond the clouded surface where, at last, some of the cloud was begi

From far away I heard Scheherazade’s voice, gently coaxing: ‘Shh, sshhh…that’s right. See the balloons. Watch the balloons.’

Vaguely I wondered how she could have known what I had been thinking, then remembered, with a childish, absurd delight: she was Scheherazade, Princess of the Mystic East. I giggled.

‘Sleep, little girl,’ she whispered. ‘It’s your birthday, and there will be balloons, I promise. Can you see them?’

They were drifting around me, all colours, shining in the sun. I nodded. From a great distance I heard my voice in sleepy reply.

I saw the tent from above, saw Mose sitting on his stump, heard the pedlars selling their wares.

‘Hot gin’erbread’ and ‘Ribbons and bows’ and ‘Liquorice laces’. I smelled the mingled confusion of hot pies, candyfloss and animals. I hovered, directionless, for a few moments like some fairy-tale sky-ship, then I felt myself being drawn gently down towards a scarlet tent across which was stretched a ba

As I touched the ground I realized that the sun had disappeared. It was cold, and the bright ba

The Gallery of the Grotesque!

A most Admirable Display of

Murderers, Monsters

and Freaks of Nature Depicted in Wax

I felt myself moving towards the tent-flap, my elation dimming rapidly. I had begun to feel cold, with a dull, sickly chill which pulled me from my delightful dream of flying into an earthy darkness. I saw the tent-flap open by itself and, although I struggled, I was not able to escape the malignant attraction of that opening. I could smell stale straw, kept for too long out of the sunlight, the musty reek of damp old clothes and the sharp scent of wax; and as I entered the tent, and my eyesight began to adjust to the darkness, I saw that I was alone and that all around the sides of the tent-which now seemed very much larger than I had first thought-were placed wooden pens or enclosures, housing the life-sized exhibits. I wondered why I had felt such a sensation of dread as I first entered; these figures were wax, their limbs held together with horsehair and whalebone, their clothes glued on to their bodies. The blood was red paint; even the gallows in the famous hanging scene had never been used for a real execution. But I was suddenly convinced that they were all real, that Burke and Hare in the corner were waiting there just for me, assessing me greedily from under thin masks of wax…

I moved backwards, angry at myself and my childish, unreasoning terror, and cried out aloud as I ran straight into the exhibit at my back. Even in my discorporate state I felt a moment’s tension as I touched the wood of the pen, and I whipped round to face the thing behind me. An enclosure of wire and planks surrounded a still scene; tacked on to the wood was a sign which read:

THE HERMIT

Please do not touch the exhibits

I moved a little closer, squinting against the troubling light, and saw that the scene was a tiny bedroom, like a child’s, with a narrow bed covered with a patchwork quilt, a small stool, bedside table and a couple of coloured prints of the type I had had when I was a girl. There were flowers on the bedside table, marigolds in a glass jar, and by the bed a small stack of wrapped presents. Beside the open window a bunch of balloons swayed in the draught.

But why had I thought it was dark? The light was streaming in from the window on to the bare floorboards; evening light which reflected a warm rosy radiance on to the bright little room. A man was sitting on the side of the bed, no doubt to say goodnight to his little girl, who was in her nightdress, a stuffed toy frozen in one hand. She looked about ten, long black hair hanging down dead straight around a solemn, pointed face. The man’s face I could not see, as he had his back to me, but I could guess at a certain heaviness of build, a square jawline, a stiffness in the posture which I found faintly familiar. I moved forwards curiously, wondering vaguely why this comfortable domestic scene had been included in the Gallery of the Grotesque.

As I moved, the girl’s head snapped towards me and I jumped back with a stifled scream. The girl froze again, her eyes fixing me with a stare so intense that I found it difficult to believe she was merely a thing of wax and horsehair. Reluctantly I stepped forwards again, angry at myself for having been startled so by a piece of machinery; at the London Waxworks there had been similar devices, triggered by pressure on a plate in the floor, enabling the exhibits to move as the onlookers passed by. I found myself sca

There! As I passed a certain point she moved again, turning her head towards the man with a fluid, boneless movement that could surely not be mechanical. Her hair fell across her face and she brushed it back with a nervous little gesture, the other hand clenching at the thick cotton of the nightgown. I was suddenly convinced that despite the misleading term ‘exhibit’ these were real actors, playing out some ghastly charade for my benefit, and I was suddenly angry at my nervousness, angry but, at the same time, filled with a dreadful sense of predestination. I knew what I was about to see as if it were a memory from my own past and, impelled with a growing sense of urgency, I touched the wire which separated me from the scene and called urgently to the child.

‘Little girl!’

The child did not react but moved warily towards the bed. I raised my voice.

‘Little girl! Come here!’ I heard my voice rise shrilly, but the child might as well have been clockwork. I tried to call again, but found myself moving instead right into the enclosure and into the scene. Suddenly I began to feel dizzy; half falling, I reached out towards the figure of the little girl as if to ask for help…

And I was ten once more, ten and coming to see my mother, as I did every Sunday. I loved my mother and wished I could be with her every day, but I knew it wasn’t possible; Mother had work to do, and didn’t want me in the way. I wondered what her work was. I liked Mother’s house, so grand and full of pretty things-elephant statues from India and hangings from Egypt and carpets from Persia, like in the Thousand and One Nights. When I was grown up, maybe I could come and live with Mother all the time, instead of at Aunt Emma’s-except that Aunt Emma wasn’t my aunt at all but a schoolteacher, and she didn’t like Mother very much. Not that she said anything, but I could tell from the fu