The Night Circus

  The sensation ends abruptly. Bailey stands alone in the tent, underneath the twinkling stars.

  That is enough, he thinks. He goes back to the flap in the tent wall, careful not to disturb any of the jars or bottles nearby.

  He stops to adjust the tag that hangs from the ribbon on the tent flap, so that it is more easily visible, though he is not certain why. The illustration of the child asleep in his bed beneath the stars faces outward, but it is difficult to tell if the child’s dreams are peaceful or restless.

  He walks back to find Poppet and Widget, wondering if they might want to head to the courtyard for something to eat.

  Then the scent of caramel wafts by as he walks, and Bailey finds he is not particularly hungry after all.

  Bailey wanders down curving paths, his mind preoccupied with bottles full of mysteries.

  As he turns a corner, he encounters a raised platform with a statue-still occupant, but this one is different than the snow-covered woman he had seen before.

  This woman’s skin is shimmering and pale, her long black hair is tied with dozens of silver ribbons that fall over her shoulders. Her gown is white, covered in what to Bailey looks like looping black embroidery, but as he walks closer he sees that the black marks are actually words written across the fabric. When he is near enough to read parts of the gown, he realizes that they are love letters, inscribed in handwritten text. Words of desire and longing wrapping around her waist, flowing down the train of her gown as it spills over the platform.

  The statue herself is still, but her hand is held out, and only then does Bailey notice the young woman with a red scarf standing in front of her, offering the love letter–clad statue a single crimson rose.

  The movement is so subtle that it is almost undetectable, but slowly, very, very slowly, the statue reaches to accept the rose. Her fingers open, and the young woman with the rose waits patiently as the statue gradually closes her hand around the stem, releasing it only when it is secure.

  And then the young woman bows to the statue, and walks off into the crowd.

  The statue continues to hold the rose. The color seems more vibrant against the white and black of her gown.

  Bailey is still watching the statue when Poppet taps him on the shoulder.

  “She’s my favorite,” Poppet says, looking up at the statue with him.

  “Who is she?” Bailey asks.

  “She has a lot of names,” Poppet says, “but mostly they call her the Paramour. I’m glad someone gave her a flower tonight. I do it myself, sometimes, if she doesn’t have one. I don’t think she looks complete without it.”

  The statue is lifting the rose, gradually, to her face. Her eyelids slowly close.

  “What did you do with your time?” Poppet asks as they walk away from the Paramour toward the courtyard.

  “I found a tent full of bottles and things that I wasn’t sure I was supposed to be in,” Bailey says. “It was … strange.”

  To his surprise, Poppet laughs.

  “That’s Widget’s tent,” she explains. “Celia made it for him, as a place to practice putting down his stories. He claims it’s easier than writing things out. Widge said he wanted to practice reading people, by the way, so we can catch up with him later. He does that sometimes, to pick up bits of stories. He’ll probably be in the Hall of Mirrors or the Drawing Room.”

  “What’s the Drawing Room?” Bailey asks, the curiosity about a tent he hasn’t heard of winning out over the fleeting thought to ask who Celia is, as he does not recall Poppet mentioning the name before.

  “It’s a tent that’s made up of blank black walls with buckets full of chalk so you can draw everywhere. Some people only sign their names but others draw pictures. Sometimes Widge will write out little stories, but he draws things, too, he’s quite good at it.”

  As they walk around the courtyard, Poppet insists he try a spiced cocoa that is both wonderfully warming and slightly painful. He finds his appetite has returned, so they share a bowl of dumplings and a packet of pieces of edible paper, with detailed illustrations on them that match their respective flavors.

  They wander through a tent full of mist, encountering creatures made out of paper. Curling white snakes with flickering black tongues, birds with coal-colored wings flapping through the thick fog.

  The dark shadow of an unidentifiable creature scurries across Poppet’s boots and out of sight.

  She claims there is a fire-breathing paper dragon somewhere in the tent, and though Bailey believes her, he has difficulty reconciling in his head the idea of paper that breathes fire.

  “It’s getting late,” Poppet remarks as they walk from tent to tent. “Do you have to go home?”

  “I can stay for a while,” Bailey says. He has become something of an expert at sneaking back into his house without waking anyone, so he has been staying at the circus later and later each night.

  There are fewer patrons wandering the circus at this hour, and as they walk Bailey notices that many of them are wearing red scarves. Different types, from heavy cabled wool to fine lace, but each is a deep, scarlet red that looks even redder against all of the black and white.

  He asks Poppet about it, once so many flashes of red have passed by that he is sure it is not a coincidence, and recalling that the young woman with the rose had a red scarf as well.

  “It’s like a uniform,” she says. “They’re rêveurs. Some of them follow the circus around. They always stay later than other people. The red is how they identify each other.”

  Bailey tries to ask more questions about the rêveurs and their scarves, but before he can, Poppet pulls him into another tent and he is immediately silenced by the sight he is met with inside.

  The sensation reminds him of the first snow of winter, for those first few hours when everything is blanketed in white, soft and quiet.

  Everything in this tent is white. Nothing black, not even stripes visible on the walls. A shimmering, almost blinding white. There are trees and flowers and grass surrounding twisted pebble pathways, every leaf and petal perfectly white.

  “What is this?” Bailey asks. He did not have a chance to read the sign outside the door.

  “This is the Ice Garden,” Poppet says, pulling him down the path. It turns into an open space with a fountain in the middle, bubbling white foam over clear carved ice. Pale trees line the edges of the tent, showers of snowflakes falling from their branches.

  There is no one else in the tent, nothing disrupting the surroundings. Bailey peers at a nearby rose, and while it is cold and frozen and white, there is the barest hint of scent as he leans closer. The scent of rose and ice and sugar. It reminds him of the spun-sugar flowers sold by vendors in the courtyard.

  “Let’s play hide-and-seek,” Poppet suggests, and Bailey agrees before she unbuttons her coat and leaves it on a frozen bench, her white costume rendering her all but invisible.

  “That’s not fair!” he calls as she disappears behind the hanging branches of a willow tree. He follows her around trees and topiaries, through coils of vines and roses, chasing glimpses of her red hair.

  Bookkeeping

  LONDON, MARCH 1900

  Chandresh Christophe Lefèvre sits at the huge mahogany desk in his study, a mostly empty bottle of brandy in front of him. At one point in the evening there was a glass, but he misplaced that hours ago. Wandering from room to room has become a nightly habit fueled by insomnia and boredom. He is also missing his jacket, abandoned in a previously wandered-through room. It will be retrieved without remark by a diplomatic maid in the morning.

  In the study, between bottle sips of brandy, he attempts to work. This mainly consists of scribbling with fountain pens on various scraps of paper. He has not genuinely worked in years. No new ideas, no new productions. The cycle of mounting and executing and moving on to the next project has skidded to a halt, and he cannot say why.

  It does not make sense to him. Not this night or any other, not at any level of the brandy bottle. This
is not how it is supposed to work. A project is started, it is developed and mounted and sent out into the world, and more often than not it becomes self-sufficient. And then he is no longer needed. It is not always a pleasant position to be in, but it is the way of such things, and Chandresh knows this process well. One is proud, one collects one’s receipts, and even if one is a bit melancholy, one moves on.

  The circus left him behind, sailing forth, and yet he cannot turn away from the shore. More than enough time to mourn the creative process and ignite it again, but there are no sparks of something new. No new endeavors, nothing bigger or better for nearly fourteen years.

  Perhaps, he thinks, he has outdone even himself. But it is not a pleasant thought, so he drowns it in brandy and attempts to ignore it.

  The circus bothers him.

  It bothers him most at times like this, in the bottom of the brandy bottle and the quiet of the night. It is not terribly late, the night is fairly young in circus terms, but the silence is already heavy.

  And now, with his bottle and his fountain pen drained, he simply sits, dragging a hand through his hair distractedly, staring across the room at nothing in particular. Flames burn low in the gilded fireplace, the tall bookcases stuffed with curios and relics loom in shadow.

  His wandering eyes drift over the open doorway and settle on the door across the hall. The door to Marco’s office, tucked discreetly between a pair of Persian columns. Part of a suite of rooms that are Marco’s own, the better to keep him at the beck and call, though he is out for the evening.

  Chandresh wonders through an alcohol-soaked fog if perhaps Marco keeps the circus documents in his office. And what exactly those documents might contain. He has only seen the paperwork involved with the circus in passing, hasn’t bothered to scrutinize the details of the thing in years. Now he is curious.

  Empty brandy bottle still in hand, he pulls himself to his feet and stumbles out into the hallway. It will be locked, he thinks, when he reaches the polished dark-wood door, but the silver handle moves easily as he turns it. The door swings open.

  Chandresh hesitates in the doorway. The tiny office is dark save for the pool of light spilling in from the hall and the dim haze from the streetlamps seeping in through the single window.

  For a moment, Chandresh reconsiders. If there were any brandy left in the bottle he might close the door and wander away. But the bottle is empty, and it is his own house, after all. He fumbles for the switch on the sconce nearest the door and it flickers to life, illuminating the room in front of him.

  The office is packed with too much furniture. Cabinets and trunks line the walls, boxes of files are stacked in tidy rows. The desk in the center that takes up nearly half the space is a smaller, more modest version of the one in the study, though its surface holds jars of ink and pens and a pile of notebooks, all in perfect order and not lost in a clutter of figurines and precious stones and antique weaponry.

  Chandresh puts the empty brandy bottle down on the desk and begins searching the cabinets and files, opening drawers and flipping through papers without any clear idea of what it is exactly he is looking for. There does not seem to be a particular section for the circus; bits of it are mixed in with books of theater receipts and lists of box-office returns.

  He is mildly surprised that there is no discernible filing system. No labels on boxes. The contents of the office are orderly, but not clearly organized.

  In a cabinet, Chandresh finds piles of blueprints and sketches. Many bear Mr. Barris’s stamps and initials, but there are other diagrams written in different hands that Chandresh does not recognize. In some cases, he cannot even distinguish what language they are inscribed in, though each has “Le Cirque des Rêves” written carefully along the edge of the paper.

  Pulling them closer to the light, spreading them out over what little available floor space he can find, he scrutinizes them, sheet after sheet, letting them roll and fall in piles as he moves on to each subsequent piece.

  Even the prints that are clearly Mr. Barris’s work have been written over. Additions made in different handwriting, layers placed on top of original designs.

  Leaving the papers on the floor, Chandresh returns to the desk, to the neat pile of notebooks next to the abandoned brandy bottle. They appear to be bank ledgers, rows upon rows of numbers and calculations with notations and totals and dates. Chandresh tosses these aside.

  He turns his attention to the desk itself. He begins pulling open the heavy wooden drawers. Several are empty. One contains dozens of blank notebooks and unopened jars of ink. Another is full of old datebooks, the appointments filling the days written in some sort of shorthand in Marco’s neat, delicate handwriting.

  The last drawer is locked.

  Chandresh makes to turn to another box of files nearby, but something pulls him back to the locked drawer.

  There is no key in the desk. There are no locks on the other drawers.

  He cannot recall if there was a lock on the desk when it was placed here, years ago, when the office contained only the desk and a single cabinet and seemed almost spacious.

  After a few minutes of looking for a key, he grows impatient and returns to his study to retrieve the silver knife that is embedded in the dartboard on the wall.

  Lying on the floor behind the desk, he all but destroys the lock in his attempts to pry the mechanism open, but he is rewarded with the satisfying click of the latch as it relents to the blade.

  Leaving the knife on the floor, he pulls open the drawer and finds only a book.

  It is a large, leather-bound volume. Chandresh takes it from the drawer, startled by the weight of it, and drops it with a thump onto the desk.

  The book is old and dusty. The leather is worn and the binding is fraying at the edges.

  Hesitating only a moment, Chandresh lifts the cover.

  The endpapers are covered in an exquisitely detailed drawing of a tree covered in symbols and markings. It is densely inscribed, more ink than blank page. Chandresh cannot decipher any of it, cannot even tell if the marks are broken into words or simply continuous strings of motifs. Here and there he spots a mark that looks familiar. Some are almost numbers. Some recall the shape of Egyptian hieroglyphs. It reminds him of the contortionist’s tattoo.

  The pages of the book are covered with similar markings, though predominantly they hold other things. Bits of paper culled from other documents.

  It takes Chandresh several pages to realize each bit of paper holds a signature.

  It takes longer for him to realize that he knows the names.

  Only when he finds the page with the matching, childish scrawls spelling out the names of the Murray twins is he certain that the book contains the names of each and every person involved with the circus.

  And only upon closer scrutiny does he notice that they are accompanied by locks of hair.

  The later pages hold the names of the original conspirators, though one name is conspicuously absent, and another has been removed.

  The final page contains his own signature, a flourish of illegible C ’s, carefully snipped from a piece of paper that might have been an invoice or a letter. Beneath it there is a single lock of raven hair glued onto the page and surrounded by symbols and letters. Chandresh’s hand reaches up to touch the ends of his hair, curling around his collar.

  A shadow passes over the desk and Chandresh jumps back in surprise. The book falls closed.

  “Sir?”

  Marco stands in the doorway, watching Chandresh with a curious expression.

  “I … I thought you’d left for the evening,” Chandresh says. He looks down at the book and then back at Marco.

  “I had, sir, but I forgot some of my things.” Marco’s eyes travel over the papers and blueprints strewn on the floor. “May I ask what you are doing, sir?”

  “I might ask you the same question,” Chandresh says. “What is all this?” He flips the book open again, the pages fluttering and settling.

  “Thos
e are records for the circus,” Marco says, without looking at the book.

  “What kind of records?” Chandresh presses.

  “It’s a system of my own devising,” Marco says. “There is quite a bit to keep in order with the circus, as you know.”

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Doing what, sir?”

  “Keeping all this … whatever this nonsense is.” He flips through the pages of the book, though he finds he does not want to touch it now.

  “My system goes back to the inception of the circus,” Marco says.

  “You’re doing something to it, to all of us, aren’t you?”

  “I am just doing my job, sir,” Marco says. There is an edge to his voice now. “And, if I may, I do not appreciate you going through my books without informing me.”

  Chandresh moves around the desk to face him, stepping over blueprints, stumbling though his voice remains steady.

  “You are my employee, I have every right to see what’s in my own house, what’s being done with my own projects. You’re working with him, aren’t you? You’ve been keeping all this from me the entire time, you had no right to go behind my back—”

  “Behind your back?” Marco interrupts. “You cannot even begin to comprehend the things that go on behind your back. That have always gone on behind your back before any of this even started.”

  “That is not what I wanted from this arrangement,” Chandresh says.

  “You never had a choice about this arrangement,” Marco says. “You have no control and you never did. And you never even wanted to know how things were done. You signed receipts without so much as a glance. Money is no object, you said. Nor were any of the details, those were always left up to me.”

  The papers on the desk ripple as Marco raises his voice and he stops, taking a step away from the desk. The papers settle again into disheveled piles.

  “You have been sabotaging this endeavor,” Chandresh says. “Lying to my face. Keeping god knows what in these books—”