In the Clouded Mirror

Somewhere else, it too was night.

The Ringmaster's room was ringed with candles. A lone star winked through the window. And even before he had turned around, he knew who stood by the doorway.

Carlotta.

The candles were dim, burnt to their loneliness dregs, as her icy cheeks loomed closer, closer - Carlotta, who could stay at a distance, yet wrench one's heart in ice and fire more potently than any lover. Her stare was like daggers, smooth and polished as silver. Carlotta who had once been a fantastic aerial artist herself, a stunning manipulator of the corde lisse.

"You come to see me," the Ringmaster noted.

"Indeed."

"We have much to talk about."

Her face was a shadow. Unlike the other girl in his mind, the fragile white-Ophelia of the flying trapeze. (Lucy.) The Ringmaster smiled coldly.

"You have had many years, Carlotta. Six years."

"I hadn't expected your return."

"Perhaps you need to be reminded, then."

He poured, slowly, two glasses of wine. He handed one to Carlotta. She touched them with familiar fingernails, musical daggers. She kept her face a frozen Madonna of serenity.

"Six years ago. What did you do?"

Carlotta glanced up from the mirror-glint of the twinkling glass.

"I did many things. What were you referring to?"

"The things you did with Mr. Brinks."

He said this calmly. Carlotta did not bat an eye nor shake.

He said, "Six years ago, you banished me, then took over the circus yourself with Mr. Brinks, that greedy man. He loved you because he was a fool; the circus was filled with your most vile degradations and amorous games. You sent me to faraway lands, places; you ensured I had the worst of it. The circus suffered in your hands because you had no eye for business. But I have returned, all the richer, all the more successful. You cannot refuse me because I have Mr. Brinks under my control, because I have the loyalty of our workers on my side, and because I will bring success to the circus where you and Brinks and failed."

Carlotta stood up among the candles, the blurs and smudges of amber against penumbra, saffron incense.

"How did you get him to listen to you?"

"I found him, I took him, and I told him, 'you had better hand me the circus deeds, or I will kill you.'"

"He was a puppet and a fool."

"I had him promise ... that Lucy would be mine."

"So that, naturally, you could take her to great heights," Carlotta noted. "So she could be like the living image of Celeste. It would be a resurrection... the rising of a phoenix... the raising of our circus from oblivion and back to its former splendor. Because the people would return to watch us, return to watch her."

"Indeed." The candles began to sputter. The Ringmaster's face a half-shadow.

They both thought, the circus was superstitious. Beneath their everyday glamour, the people still believed in remembrance and resurrection. As much as they hated Lucy, they recognized her potential.

"Did you eventually...slice off his little finger?"

"Yes."

Now there was nothing only the slow ebbing dance of smoke, perpetual smoke that seemed to hang throughout the hallways. Carlotta did not grimace. Brinks was a simpleton, and probably deserved to lose a finger for his transgressions.

"He was an idiot."

"More like us than we think."

"And what do you plan to do with me?"

Candlelight played against her necklace of black pearls, row upon row of dark skulls, as she leaned closer, silhouetted. Her gown was red, like blood, like spilt wine that had seen too many days, too many lovers' wraths.

The Ringmaster said, "Perhaps I should kill you."

"Kill me, then."

"You seduced Mr. Brinks. You cannot seduce me further by swooning at my feet and feigning surrender."

"Why, Ringmaster?" Shadows. "Why?"

Her face almost against his.

She whispered, "I tell you, that girl Lucy is merely a harlot with Celeste's pretty face. She is not Celeste."

The Ringmaster clenched. Flashed. Eyes lowered and smoldering, fire playing along his fingertips.

"Do not speak so."

"You think we all don't know that?"

She laughed, dark lips quivering, dark umber enclosing round her corseted waist as she dipped into the shadows. Flickers, fantasy shapes, crawled along walls, the tall wine glasses. The Ringmaster sat still; one empty glass of wine, the other barely touched. He looked to the floor.

"We spent all these years caring for her. Buttering her up. Because you think she's Celeste; you think she's a reincarnation. You think you have her, Ringmaster. You even have the entire circus believing so. But she will not last, Ringmaster. She will eventually sell herself to someone richer, handsomer, some madman burning in desire for her white body. Or she will go to the devil, like your dear Celeste, to an immortal paramour, who other than Mr. Death."

Then Carlotta was gone, back to the shadows from whence she'd come. The slightest echo of her crescent nails remained. The Ringmaster reflected: he would never banish her, at least, not yet.

It was not until he had finished his portion of wine that the door burst open once more. This time it was Carlini.

"She's drowned, sir, in the Nereid Fountain outside; unconscious, sir. Apparently she had been sleepwalking, and she just simply climbed right in. We brought her back to her quarters. She should come to her senses then."

-------

Lucy did wake. But to a trance, as though she had drowned in clouded mirror instead of a Nereid's fountain. They allowed her to loll about her apartments, her great sapphire bed, but otherwise no one visited. As though they expected her to stay in this trance, where time and silence became one white waiting.

At day, she saw shadows that moved like planets beyond a cosmic screen, at day. At night she saw horrible dreams, reincarnated from Hell through his demon voice. What had been the Ringmaster's intention, his purpose, when he spoke of her father? Yet it was no surprise that he knew; after all, her father had been a contortionist or escape artist, something of the sort.

Lucy had loved Daddy, in those sun-and-lilac days of the past, when he took her to the circus and showed her the world. He had gentle eyes. Did she remember her mother, that pale shadow of memory, her red lips smudged against a black-and-white photograph? Did she recall Mama? Perhaps not; all too musty of a memory, like dusty mirrors. Her cold, lifeless mother stirred no memory as she had never been part of her life. She had died when Lucy was two.

Daddy too had died, but much later. (In her heart, he was always a pale, warm flame flickering in the fireplace). They found him strangled by chains, death by suicide or misjudgment (he had been working, after all, on a new trick, an escape act, involving chains and playing cards). Such were the risks of performing in the circus, although she had always been fairly suspicious about his death. It was unlucky. She had kept silent about that.

Other times, Lucy dreamed of failure, of trapezes that snapped and disappeared, of silks that strangled, of bars that broke and impaled her through the spine. That would have been painful; an eternal paralysis, an undead existence within the pale mute walls of the unforgiving circus. And what use would they have of her, once she was old, broken, void? (There was no one older than thirty, apparently, in this place. Except the Ringmaster; he was ageless, although he could have easily been twenty, thirty, forty.)

She wondered if he ever thought of her.

The few years, after her father's death, had been dark, blank, nondescript. They had sent her to a filthy girl's orphanage for the sane and the insane alike; where chains rattled non-stop, and screams filtered down the jail-like halls. The sane lived in the upper prisons, the insane, in the belowground pit. The orphans were given three meals a day, thin soups, and were cursed by the caretakers and managers alike. Here, Lucy learned to dream and imagine that life would take her elsewhere.

It did. One day a kind business man simply walked in, took her by the hand, and told her she was genius: she was more than this. He wore a grey hat and spectacles. He told stories, tied knots with his silk grey handkerchief. He brought her to the Cirque du Saturne, shook hands with Mr. Brinks, and she stayed there ever since, performing with the Pleiades, the finest aerial artists on Earth.

In this trance, she saw Sir-Who-Could-Sing, dancing, wobbling, smiling, He would make a rapid gesture of hands, turning them into birds, fluttering them up and down and around the bed, so comical she was thrown to laughter, like a little girl. A different type of magic altogether, where hands suddenly became kites, shadows into birds.

Other times, her senses altered by the trance, she would look into mirrors and see, instead, Celeste du Saturne.

-----

"It's so quiet in there - deathly so-"

"She can't be dead, can she?"

"Hush, you imbecile. That Lucy tricks us, is what. That foxy thing has something up her sleeves."

"She's got the Ringmaster between the sheets-"

"She hasn't, you know, touched a morsel of food nor drink in three days."

"Neither have us."

"Don't you think she's so much like Celeste?"

Ciboulette coughed. Her wide-brimmed eyes fluttered, eerie, knowing.

"She is Celeste."

"Then we'd best leave her alone, as the Ringmaster requested."

Lucy was not dead. In her trance, she was merely entering into another era, another phase, of her being.