Circus Mirandus Read online

  “It represents G,” Jenny said. “I’m trying to spell ‘Giles.’ Don’t you need to read the instructions?”

  “Not really.” Micah twisted the string this way and that, and then he looped it back on itself just so. He held it out for Jenny to inspect.

  Her eyes widened. “How did you do that? It’s better than the one in the picture! It looks kind of like a G.”

  Micah shrugged, but he couldn’t help being a little pleased at the compliment. “I’m good at knots. Grandpa Ephraim is too. It’s kind of our thing.”

  “Do you think you could show me how? If I make many more mistakes I’m going to run out of string.”

  Micah looked down at the knot. It was tiny and perfect, and even though he knew exactly how he’d done it, he was pretty sure it wouldn’t work for Jenny. “It would probably be faster if I did this part.”

  “Okay.” She sounded relieved as she reached for The Big Book of Big Tops. “We’ll trade jobs. I’m good at research anyway.”

  Micah didn’t argue. At least working on the quipu made him feel like he was doing something useful.

  Jenny flopped onto her stomach and opened the book to the table of contents. “Maybe we’ve been going about this the wrong way,” she said. “How did your grandfather hear about the circus? Did it come to his town every year? That might give us a clue.”

  “One day it was just there,” Micah said. He tied another knot, and Giles Darby’s name started to take shape. “Next to the beach where he used to play when he was a boy.”

  To reach his beach, Ephraim usually walked straight through town, past some tired old hotels and rickety apartments. But as he followed the sound of pipes and drums over the final dune, he saw that town was a good deal farther away than it ought to have been, as though it had been conjured to a new location over the course of the morning. A misty green meadow now rested between the dunes and the run-down buildings.

  Large round tents with pointed tops were scattered in a haphazard circle in the middle of the green. Tiny, triangular flags decorated their center posts. Each tent was a different color of satiny cloth, and each had a different pattern stitched into it. Ephraim saw silver stars on a sapphire background and golden suns on ebony and thick crimson lines striping chocolate brown. Horses with braided manes and tails were tied to stakes between the tents, and as he approached, he thought, for just a moment, that he saw a tremendous white tiger stalking around the perimeter of the circle.

  But of course that’s ridiculous, he told himself. Nobody would let a tiger run free.

  When he arrived, a curving metal sign over the top of the ticket taker’s stand informed him that he had discovered a circus.

  CIRCUS

  MIRANDUS

  MAGNIFICENT SINCE 500 B.C.

  MR. M. HEAD, MANAGER

  He was still considering the date, and whether or not such a thing might be true, when the ticket taker cleared his throat.

  The man looked unusual. He was round in the middle and thin everywhere else, and he was hairy all over except for on the top of his head. He wore a tailcoat and a golden monocle and thick-soled boots covered in mud and hay. “Comin’ in, young fellow?” he asked. “Got your ticket?”

  “No, sir,” Ephraim said. He also didn’t have money, and he doubted that his mother would give him any considering his ongoing campaign against attending school.

  “Shame.” The man took his monocle off his eye, rubbed it on his sleeve, then put it back on the other eye. “You’re just the age we like around these parts.”

  Ephraim knew he shouldn’t waste the ticket taker’s time when he wasn’t a paying customer, but the music was still telling his feet to come closer to the tents, and his heart agreed with his feet. “I could help you with something maybe?” he suggested. “In exchange for a ticket? I could brush the horses. I’m good at it.”

  In fact, Ephraim didn’t know the first thing about horses, but before the war he had sometimes watched his father brushing his mother’s hair at night. He reasoned that it couldn’t be very different.

  The ticket taker shook his head. “Sorry. I’m not authorized for barterin’.”

  Ephraim was about to say that he was exceptionally good at tying knots, which would have been true, when another boy around his age appeared out of the mist.

  “Ticket?” asked the man.

  The boy nodded and reached into the pocket of his overalls. Ephraim thought it was strange that he had never seen this boy around town before, and that he wasn’t in school. He thought it was even stranger when the boy pulled a spool of yellow thread out of his pocket and handed it to the ticket taker.

  The man switched his monocle from one eye to the other again and squinted at the thread. “Two-hour ticket.” He untied the velvet rope that blocked off the entrance to the circus, and he bowed. “Have fun.”

  The boy dashed through.

  “That wasn’t a ticket!” Ephraim protested. “It was thread!”

  The ticket taker rolled his eyes. “Shows what you know. I’ve been at this job since the very beginnin’.” He pointed up at the sign over his head. “The very beginnin’. I know what a ticket looks like.”

  Ephraim was about to argue, but the passenger in his boot, the one that had swum in when he tried to walk across the ocean to Europe, nibbled at his ankle. Inspiration bit Ephraim. “I’ve got a fish,” he said. “Will that work?”

  He pulled off his soggy boot and passed it to the man, who took it as though it were a perfectly ordinary sort of transaction.

  “Oho!” he said, plucking the silvery fish out neatly between his thumb and forefinger and watching it wriggle. “What have you been up to, to get one of these? Haven’t seen a week-long pass in an age.”

  “A week?” Ephraim hardly dared believe it. A whole week at the circus in exchange for an annoying piece of seafood?

  “A week,” the ticket taker confirmed as he removed the rope from the entrance. “Mr. Head’s been looking everywhere for this.”

  He held the squirming fish out to the side, dropped the boot to the ground, and bowed—lower than he had for the other boy—as Ephraim stepped past him into Circus Mirandus.

  Circus Mirandus was the sort of place that filled you up to the top of your head. Ephraim spent the whole of his first day dashing from one tent to the next, seeing bits and pieces of the shows and people and creatures inside each one.

  He met several Strongmen and watched one of them lift a girl right over his head using only the tip of his pinkie. Ephraim tasted candies that fizzed and popped, and he drank a dark blue fruit juice that made him sing opera for half an hour. He fed hay to an elephant that could do long division and chunks of meat to a vulture that could tell the future by plucking its own feathers.

  It told him he would one day have a little sister.

  “Really?” He wasn’t sure how he felt about this news on the whole, since girls were confusing.

  “Oui,” said the vulture. (He was French.) “She eez going to be vairy not nice I am seeing. A steenky egg.”

  Ephraim decided he would have to wait until he met her.

  He came back the next day, and the next. Sometimes he even stayed through the night. Circus Mirandus was always open, and it was never empty. Children Ephraim didn’t recognize were everywhere he looked, but there were no adults except for the performers. On the third day, Ephraim asked the ticket taker, whose name he’d learned was Geoffrey, if grown-ups weren’t allowed inside.

  The man scratched his chin. “I’m a grown-up aren’t I?” he said. “Silly question.”

  “I mean regular adults. People who aren’t working here.”

  “Oh, those,” Geoffrey said, as though adults were a kind of nasty vegetable. “It’s not that they’re not allowed so much as that they’re not invited. They spoil the mood, you see.”

  Ephraim thought his mother
would add to the mood, rather than spoil it. But she would hardly let him spend all day every day at the circus, so telling her was out of the question.

  One of the best things about Circus Mirandus was that you couldn’t make the wrong decision about what to see or do. Ephraim usually let his feet carry him wherever the circus’s music led them, or he followed the smells of horses or caramels or smoke. On that particular day, Ephraim ignored the music and the smells, and instead, he chased a darting swarm of creatures that were sometimes butterflies and sometimes fairies, depending on how you tilted your head. Their wings hummed a lazy tune while they wove in and out of the crowd, and Ephraim followed. He tried to tell himself that he wasn’t all that interested in catching one.

  Eventually they grew tired of the game and flitted out of sight, and Ephraim found himself standing before the glittering silver tent of the Amazing Amazonian Bird Woman for the second time that week. Her show had been his favorite so far, and he wasn’t at all disappointed when the chattering crowd swept him into her tent.

  He spotted her immediately. He stared up, up, up, and there she was, climbing her ladder. Ephraim’s breath caught. She was even prettier than he remembered. She was small, and she didn’t seem to be too much older than him. Her eyelashes were so thick that they looked almost like feathers, and every time she fluttered them Ephraim was certain she was looking right at him.

  Her whole costume was made of long white feathers, and Ephraim had a powerful urge to touch one. They looked as though they had been spun from clouds.

  The tent was one of the biggest in the circus, but the only thing in it other than the audience and the Bird Woman herself was a tall platform. She climbed slowly to the top and whistled. A hundred birds in every color of the rainbow swirled out of a skylight in the tent’s roof. They darted around the Bird Woman, who smiled at them so sweetly that Ephraim felt like his insides were melting.

  She stood on the very edge of the platform for a long time, turning slowly so that everyone could admire her. Then, without the slightest warning, she jumped.

  The audience gasped as a single body, even Ephraim, who had seen it once before. There were no lines to hold the Bird Woman, no nets to catch her. You were sure that she was going to crash into the earth.

  But she didn’t.

  She came within inches of the ground, and then, at the last second, she swooped up and circled gracefully around the room with her birds, singing a song that didn’t have any words. She soared right over Ephraim’s head, close enough that he could have reached out to her if he wasn’t afraid of breaking the beautiful scene above him.

  When she passed by him a second time, he thought he heard his name in her song, and he shivered. He wasn’t sure what being in love felt like, but he thought it might be a little like this.

  Eventually, Ephraim had to leave the Bird Woman’s tent. A lot of the performers stayed behind after their shows to talk with the audience, but after the finale, when she flew through the skylight and disappeared into the sky, the Bird Woman didn’t come back. Ephraim wasn’t the only one who waited hopefully for her return, but he stayed longer than any of the other children before giving up.

  Slowly, inevitably, he made his way toward the only place in the circus that intrigued him more than the Bird Woman’s. The mysterious black tent. It had caught his attention on the very first day, partly because it had a board across the entrance with the words NO ADMITTANCE painted on it, but also because something felt different about it.

  The area around the black tent was quieter than the rest of the circus, and the atmosphere was always charged. It felt to Ephraim as though lightning might strike there at any moment. The tent was such a deep black that looking at it would have been like looking down a well, except for the golden suns that decorated every inch of it. They glittered like polished coins on even the foggiest of days. As if the tent wasn’t fascinating enough on its own, a Strongman, wearing a bowler hat, stood outside of it turning children away.

  “The Man Who Bends Light is practicing a new routine,” the Strongman had said in a clipped British accent when Ephraim asked why he wasn’t allowed inside. “Interruptions could be lethal.”

  After hearing that, Ephraim couldn’t resist walking past the tent every chance he got just in case it had reopened. But the board was always in place, and the Strongman was always watching.

  When he reached the black tent that afternoon, Ephraim fully expected to be sent on his way as he usually was, but something had changed. Several children were waiting patiently behind a golden rope to be let in. Instead of a NO ADMITTANCE sign, a large poster had been fastened to the side of the tent.

  • THE •

  MAN WHO BENDS LIGHT

  SON OF THE SUN

  MASTER OF ILLUSIONS

  • SHOWINGS TODAY AT •

  NOON

  TWO

  AND MIDNIGHT

  It was nearly two o’clock. Ephraim stepped into line behind a tall boy who wore no shirt despite how chilly the breeze was that day. The boy’s broad shoulders were sunburned. Ephraim often noticed children wearing strange clothes or speaking with unfamiliar accents at the circus. He suspected that they must all have come to Circus Mirandus from different places, though he hadn’t quite figured out how. He stared at the boy’s shoulders until a gasp from the front of the line drew his attention.

  The rope was vanishing.

  It wasn’t being taken away by one of the performers. It wasn’t falling. It was simply ceasing to exist, as though it were dissolving into the air, particle by particle, until it was gone. The girl in the front of the line stared at the place where it had been with a puzzled look on her face.

  “I reckon that means we’re supposed to go in,” said the boy with no shirt.

  The girl took a tentative step.

  “Awww . . . don’t be chicken,” said the boy.

  She turned around to stick her tongue out at him, and then she straightened her skirt and stalked into the tent with her chin turned up.

  The children around Ephraim jostled him as the line moved forward. The crowd seemed larger than it had before, and he worried that they might not all fit. But somehow, the inside of the black tent was much more spacious than its outside.

  It swallowed them whole.

  Many years later and under very different circumstances, another individual had the feeling that she had been swallowed whole, and not by anything as lovely as a circus tent. Chintzy had not enjoyed her time as a tourist in the Peal municipal sewer system. In fact, she was in an appallingly bad temper.

  Chintzy was unusually large for her species to start with, and though she wouldn’t admit it even to herself, she enjoyed a nice lemon cookie more often than was good for her. She couldn’t find a big enough exit. After hours of flying through foul-smelling pipes and screeching even fouler words at the local rats, who wouldn’t give her directions, she finally managed to squeeze herself out of the storm drain just down the street from the Tuttle house.

  She looked like a week-old buzzard chick, and she smelled like a week-dead old buzzard. But Chintzy, as she was so fond of reminding the Man Who Bends Light, was a professional. She found a birdbath to dunk herself in to remedy the worst of the stench, and after she had collected herself, she headed straight for Ephraim Tuttle’s bedroom window.

  Of course, she didn’t know it was being watched.

  “It looks great,” said Jenny. She was holding the flashlight like a spotlight over their finished quipu, and Micah could just make out her broad smile in the darkness.

  They had stapled the whole thing to a poster board so that it wouldn’t get tangled. It wasn’t as fancy as Florence Greeber’s pyramid, but Jenny was sure that they would get extra credit for making up their own version of a knot language.

  Micah was just glad that she wouldn’t fail the assignment because of him. His fingers ache
d, and tucked in his pocket, he had a small bundle of knots that had refused to become letters of the alphabet. All of these were the same, and all of them were like the Grandpa Ephraim knots from that morning. They were heavy in his pocket, but he wouldn’t take them out. He didn’t want Jenny to ask about them. They were private.

  “I feel bad, though,” she was saying. “I haven’t found anything about your grandfather’s circus. I don’t know where else to look, and I don’t know how long—”

  “It was nice of you to try,” Micah interrupted. Whatever came after “how long,” he didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to think about the fact that the letter had been sent two days ago, and the Lightbender had yet to appear. “I guess magical circuses don’t make it into library books.”

  “We could call another circus on the phone.” Jenny’s voice was thoughtful. “They might know something.”

  Over the last few hours, the two of them had fallen into a pattern. Jenny pretended not to hear Micah when he said anything about Circus Mirandus that sounded impossible. And he pretended not to hear her when she talked about “the circus your grandfather based his stories on.”

  Micah enjoyed this arrangement. Jenny Mendoza was turning out to be an excellent friend.

  “Would you like to go over the presentation one more time?” she asked.

  Before he could say anything, there was a flapping sound overhead.

  “Blasted humans,” said a voice. “Can’t be bothered to leave a window open for the messenger. Of course not. I have to do everything myself.”

  “What?” Jenny asked. “Micah, was that you?”

  Micah knew who it was at once. “The flashlight!” he said. “Jenny, point it at the window.”

  Jenny spun toward Grandpa Ephraim’s bedroom window. “Holy smokes!”

  A filthy, mangy-looking bird was fluttering in front of the window. When the light touched her, she shrieked, “I’ve been spotted by the natives!”

  “It is you!” Micah cried. He felt like cheering.