Erin Morgenstern - The Night Circus

“It is difficult to discern the effect of such things, you know. Your perspective is from the inside, after all. The smallest charms can be the most effective.”

“It doesn’t seem to be very effective.”

“Perhaps it is controlling the chaos within more than the chaos without.”

Isobel does not reply. Tsukiko shrugs and says no more.

After a moment they turn to leave together without discussion.

The snow-white angel alone remains, hovering over Tara Burgess’s fresh grave, holding a single black rose in one hand. She does not move, does not even bat an eyelash. Her powdered face stays frozen in sorrow.

The increasing rain pulls stray feathers from her wings and pins them to the mud below.

You walk down a hallway papered in playing cards, row upon row of clubs and spades. Lanterns fashioned from additional cards hang above, swinging gently as you pass by.

A door at the end of the hall leads to a spiraling iron staircase.

The stairs go both up and down. You go up, finding a trapdoor in the ceiling.

The room it opens into is full of feathers that flutter downward. When you walk through them, they fall like snow over the door in the floor, obscuring it from sight.

There are six identical doors. You choose one at random, trailing a few feathers with you.

The scent of pine is overwhelming as you enter the next room to find yourself in a forest full of evergreen trees. Only these trees are not green but bright and white, luminous in the darkness surrounding them.

They are difficult to navigate. As soon as you begin walking the walls are lost in shadows and branches.

There is a sound like a woman laughing nearby, or perhaps it is only the rustling of the trees as you push your way forward, searching for the next door, the next room.

You feel the warmth of breath on your neck, but when you turn there is no one there.

Leaving the fortune-teller’s tent and heading right, as she had suggested, Bailey almost immediately encounters a small crowd watching a performance. He cannot tell what it is at first, there is no raised platform involved. Peering through the space between spectators, he can see a hoop, larger than the one the contortionist used, held in the air. As he moves closer, he glimpses a black kitten leaping through it, landing somewhere out of sight.

A woman in front of him with a large hat turns and then he can see a young man about his own age, but a bit shorter, dressed in a black suit made of all manner of fabrics, and a matching black hat. On his shoulders sits a pair of stark-white kittens. As he lifts his black-gloved hand, palm open, one of the kittens jumps into it and bounces off his palm, leaping through the hoop, executing a rather impressive somersault at the pinnacle of its leap. Several members of the small audience laugh, and a few, including Bailey, applaud. The woman in the large hat steps aside completely, clearing Bailey’s line of sight. His hands freeze in mid-clap when he sees the young lady who has just caught the white kitten and is now lifting it to her shoulder where it sits along with the black kitten.

She is older, as he expected, and her red hair is somehow concealed within a white cap. But her costume is similar to the one she had been wearing when he last saw her: a patchwork dress of every fabric imaginable, each in tones of snowy white, a white jacket with lots of buttons, and a pair of bright-white gloves.

She turns her head, Bailey catches her eye, and she smiles at him. Not in the way that one smiles at a random member of the audience when one is in the middle of performing circus tricks with unusually talented kittens but in the way that one smiles when one recognizes someone they have not seen in some time. Bailey can tell the difference, and the fact that she remembers who he is makes him inexplicably and utterly pleased. He feels his ears getting rather hot despite the cold of the night air.

He watches the rest of the act with rapt attention, paying a fair deal more attention to the girl than the kittens, though the kittens are too impressive to ignore, and they steal his attention back periodically. When the act is finished, the girl and boy (and kittens) take a short bow, and the crowd claps and hoots.

Bailey is wondering what he should say, if he should say anything, as the crowd begins to disperse. A man pushes in front of him, another woman blocks his way to the side, and he loses sight of the girl completely. He pushes through the throng of people, and when he is free of them, the girl and the boy and the kittens are nowhere to be seen.

The crowd around him quickly dwindles to only a few people wandering up and down the pathway. There are no other directions to go, as far as he can tell. Only tall striped walls of tents line the area, and he turns around slowly, looking for any possible place they might have disappeared to, some corner or door. He is kicking himself for coming so close only to fail, when there is a tap on his shoulder.

“Hello, Bailey,” the girl says. She is standing right behind him. She has taken off her hat, her red hair falling in waves around her shoulders, and she has replaced her white jacket with a heavy black coat and a knit scarf in a vibrant violet. Only the ruffled hem of her dress and her white boots give any indication that she is the same girl who was performing in the same spot moments ago. Otherwise, she looks like any other patron at the circus.

“Hello,” Bailey says. “I don’t know your name.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “I forgot that we were never properly introduced.” She holds out her white-gloved hand, and Bailey notices that it is larger than the glove he was given as proof of a long-ago dare. “I’m Penelope, but no one ever calls me that and I don’t really like it anyway, so for all intents and purposes my name is Poppet.”

Bailey takes her hand and shakes it. It is warmer than he expected, even through two layers of glove.

“Poppet,” Bailey repeats. “The fortune-teller told me that, but I didn’t realize it was your name.”

The girl smiles at him.

“You saw Isobel?” she asks. Bailey nods. “Isn’t she lovely?” Bailey continues to nod, though he’s not sure nodding is an appropriate response. “Did she tell you anything good about your future?” Poppet asks, lowering her voice to a dramatic whisper.

“She told me a lot of things I didn’t understand,” Bailey confesses.

Poppet nods knowingly.

“She does that,” Poppet says. “But she means well.”

“Are you allowed to be out here like this?” Bailey asks, indicating the steady stream of circus patrons that continues to wander by, completely ignoring them.

“Oh yes,” Poppet says, “as long as we’re incognito.” She indicates her coat. “No one really gives us a second glance. Right, Widget?” She turns to a young man standing nearby, who Bailey had not even recognized as Poppet’s performance partner. He has switched his black jacket for a tweedy brown one, and his hair under his matching cap is just as shockingly red as Poppet’s.

“People don’t pay much attention to anything unless you give them reason to,” he says. “Though the hair helps, too, for looking like we don’t belong in a black-and-white circus.”

“Bailey, this is my brother, Winston,” Poppet says.

“Widget,” he corrects.

“I was getting to that,” Poppet says, sounding a bit cross. “And Widge, this is Bailey.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Bailey says, offering his hand.