Erin Morgenstern - The Night Circus

“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.

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.