The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

The crowds along the avenue jostle by as busy as ever, unconcerned, unmoved, oblivious. A girl strides by with a baby in a sling on her chest, bare-armed. Some young men in plaid pants sidle by, their eyes hidden with dark spectacles. Appalled, helpless, I stand rooted to my spot, turning around, staring. A horse trots by pulling a carriage with two people who look down at me curiously, the man in a high hat and the woman in a bonnet, and then another trots by on its heels with two more people, unhatted this time, bare-armed, dressed in short pants both of them, one of them holding an odd box to his face. I hear a clicking sound come from the box as the horse clops past.

I’m dizzy. I put my hands on either side of my head and squint my eyes closed. But they fly open again when I hear a loud blare, or honk, and on a puff of air another landau sails by inches from me, long and black and polished and also, incredibly, without a horse.

“Help!” I try to scream, but my mouth is too dry and no sound comes out. I lean over, afraid I’m going to be sick. No one stops; no one pays any attention to me.

“Help,” I whisper to the ground, hands on my knees, gasping for breath as hot tears stream down my face and throat and neck. My nose bubbles.

“Hey,” a girl’s voice says nearby, and I look up in terror.

She’s gazing on me curiously, and looks somewhat familiar. In her face, she looks familiar, anyway. She has heavy straight-cut hair over her eyes, and something about her bearing reminds me oddly of Ed. An impish twinkle in the corners of her eyes. She lays a hand on my shoulder and says, “You okay? You need anything? Hungry, maybe?”

She’s oddly dressed, too, in frayed short trousers and stockings and a tight bodice with no sleeves, and she has tattoos of leaves along her arms and winding around her neck. I’ve never seen a woman with tattoos. I’ve only seen ink like that on the arms of whalers in bawdy houses where I wasn’t supposed to be.

“Thirsty,” I manage to say, my eyes hunting behind her, afraid that the rumbling will come back.

The street looks the same. Sort of. Does it? Two blocks away another tenement is slowly collapsing, consumed by the same brown dust cloud, while next to it another bizarre glass cliff bursts instantly up out of the ground like a mushroom, reaching impossibly high into the sky. Then another one, a block farther down. And another! The crowds moving in the streets don’t even stop. No one screams. No fires break out.

The girl, oblivious, rummages in a paper bag that she’s carrying and produces a glass bottle. She twists out the cork—no, there isn’t a cork, just a kind of foil cap—and passes it to me.

“Here. Drink up. You look like you need it,” she says.

I read the bottle, which has a paper label glued to it that reads COLT 45. I don’t understand what this means.

“But . . . what is it?” I ask. Not that beggars can be choosers.

“Go on,” the girl with the tattooed leaves says. “Trust me. You look like ass.”

She thinks I look like . . . a donkey? I’d be offended, if I weren’t so thirsty.

I take a swig from the bottle, and the liquid is an unpleasant, malty beer. But it rinses my mouth. Grateful, I swallow long and hard, feeling the bitter liquid pour into my stomach.

“All right,” the girl says. “Take it easy.”

I drink deep from the bottle and then wipe my lips on my sleeve. Before I can thank the girl, she’s vanished into the throng.

The rumbling is back, or more properly it never left, this time shaking the victualing house next door to the first tenement. Three men sit smoking pipes at a little table in the front window, and a ruddy-cheeked woman is pouring them flagons of beer. In a trice the rumble has consumed them without so much as a whisper. The victualing house folds in on itself as I watch, like a collapsing paper house, and this time my scream comes so loud that some people actually stop to watch. I fling aside the glass bottle, hearing it shatter, and an unseen voice cries, “Hey, watch it!” before I gather up my skirts and flee.

Blinded by tears, I dart and weave between the people. I have to reach Herschel’s uncle’s shop before the rumbling gets him.

What if I’m too late? What if it isn’t there?

What if I never find my cameo?





CHAPTER 7