Free Wax by Gina Damico Page A

Viking had gone back to his fearsome, unblinking gaze.
    It could have been a trick of the light.
    It could have been a mechanical device.
    It could have been her imagination.
    It could have, but Poppy knew it wasn’t.
    Because of all the reactions that might have gone through her head as she processed what had happened, the one that came through the loudest and clearest wasn’t
This is impossible
or
Wax can’t move
or even
I am losing my goddamn mind.
    It was
Yes.
    Paraffin was unusual​—​everyone in town knew it but never spoke of it. Never gave voice to that eerie feeling they got when they looked at the factory in the moonlight or smelled the scents that wafted across the lake and bored dark, petrified holes into their psyches. It hid in the shadows, like the legend of the Hollow Ones. Biding its time. Buried so deep that no one would be able to find it without looking,
really
looking, without picking away at the layers like a vulture gnawing clean the bones of a carcass​—​
    Wait, what?
    Poppy gave her head a hard shake.
    No.
    No eeriness. Nothing unnatural. Just a gritty workshop with a loony old bat who spent way too much time inhaling shellac, and now she was dragging Poppy down into her well of insanity too. Had the last two minutes even happened, or had Poppy imagined them? This was exactly the kind of delirium that had fogged her mind on the Radio City Music Hall stage, and she’d be damned if she was going to succumb to it again.
    â€œAre you all right, my doll?” Madame Grosholtz asked, her face inscrutable.
    â€œYeah.” Poppy fought to regain a regular breathing pattern. “I thought I​—”
    Madame Grosholtz now looked concerned.
So I did imagine it,
thought Poppy. And just like that, all the mysticism of the workshop vaporized with an almost palpable
whoosh.
    â€œNothing,” Poppy said. “I’m fine.”
    Things got quiet for a moment. Feeling awkward, Poppy looked down at the paint-spattered floor, at the center of which had been carved the logo of the candle factory.
    â€œYou’re that girl, aren’t you?”
    Poppy’s head snapped up. “What?”
    â€œThe one from the talent show. They gave you that ghastly orange car, no?”
    Poppy squeezed her nails into her palms. “Yes. That was me. How did you know?”
    â€œWell. I
do
have a television.”
    Poppy grimaced. She was starting to feel pretty damn silly under the harsh glares of all those glass eyeballs.
    She walked toward a section of more contemporary figures. No fur loincloths or togas here, but rather modern clothing that looked as though it had been purchased at the Essex Outlets. They could have easily donned fanny packs and I LO♥ERMONT T-shirts, walked out into the store, and blended right in with the other tourists.
    In the corner, several of them lay jumbled in a pile, discarded: a woman with snarled red hair, a teenage boy wearing neon yellow Velcro sneakers, a portly gentleman with an arm broken off at the elbow. “What happened to these guys?” Poppy asked.
    â€œThey’re just duds.” Regret passed through Madame Grosholtz’s face, followed by something a bit darker. “Sometimes I think I’m onto it, getting closer, and then . . .”
    The look she gave Poppy was laced with a streak of madness. She gave the chubby man’s leg a hard kick​—​harder than Poppy would have imagined her small frame capable of performing. The leg shattered against the wall, pieces rocketing across the floor.
    â€œIt all falls apart,” she said, bitter.
    The old wooden floor must have warped over the years, because the man’s big toe kept rolling until it hit the exact center of the room, atop the carved factory logo. For a moment, the only sound in the room was of the toe slowly rolling back and forth across the sunken depression, back and forth, back and forth