The Night Circus Read online

  “How long have you been here?” the man asks after silently examining the boy’s shabby appearance for a few moments.

  “Always,” the boy says.

  “How old are you?”

  “I’ll be nine in May.”

  “You look younger than that.”

  “It’s not a lie.”

  “I did not mean to suggest that it was.”

  The man in the grey suit stares at the boy without comment for some time.

  The boy stares back.

  “You can read, I presume?” the man asks.

  The boy nods.

  “I like to read,” he says. “There aren’t enough books here. I’ve read all of them already.”

  “Good.”

  Without warning, the man in the grey suit tosses his cane at the boy. The boy catches it in one hand easily without flinching, though his eyes narrow in confusion as he looks from the cane to the man and back.

  The man nods to himself and reclaims his cane, pulling a pale handkerchief from his pocket to wipe the boy’s fingerprints from the surface.

  “Very well,” the man says. “You will be coming to study with me. I assure you I have a great many books. I will make the necessary arrangements, and then we shall be on our way.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Do you wish to remain here?”

  The boy considers this for a moment.

  “No,” he says.

  “Very well.”

  “Don’t you want to know my name?” the boy asks.

  “Names are not of nearly as much import as people like to suppose,” the man in the grey suit says. “A label assigned to identify you either by this institution or your departed parents is neither of interest nor value to me. If you find you are in need of a name at any point, you may choose one for yourself. For now it will not be necessary.”

  The boy is sent to pack his small bag of negligible possessions. The man in the grey suit signs papers and responds to the headmistress’s questions with answers she does not entirely follow, but she does not protest the transaction.

  When the boy is ready, the man in the grey suit takes him from the grey stone building, and he does not return.

  Magic Lessons

  1875–1880

  Celia grows up in a series of theaters. Most often in New York, but there are long stretches in other cities. Boston. Chicago. San Francisco. Occasional excursions to Milan or Paris or London. They blend together in a haze of must and velvet and sawdust to the point where she sometimes does not recall what country she is in, not that it matters.

  Her father brings her everywhere while she is small, parading her like a well-loved small dog in expensive gowns, for his colleagues and acquaintances to fawn over in pubs after performances.

  When he decides she is too tall to be an adorable accessory, he begins abandoning her in dressing rooms or hotels.

  She wonders each night if perhaps he will not return, but he always stumbles in at unseemly hours, sometimes petting her gently on the head while she pretends to be asleep, other times ignoring her entirely.

  Her lessons have become less formal. When before he would sit her down at marked, though irregular, times, now he tests her constantly, but never in public.

  Even tasks as simple as tying her boots he forbids her to do by hand. She stares at her feet, silently willing the laces to tie and untie in messy bows, scowling when they tangle into knots.

  Her father is not forthcoming when she asks questions. She has gathered that the man in the grey suit whom her father called Alexander also has a student, and there will be some sort of game.

  “Like chess?” she asks once.

  “No,” her father says. “Not like chess.”

  *

  THE BOY GROWS UP in a town house in London. He sees no one, not even when his meals are delivered to his rooms, appearing by the door on covered trays and disappearing in the same manner. Once a month, a man who does not speak is brought in to cut his hair. Once a year, the same man takes measurements for new clothing.

  The boy spends most of his time reading. And writing, of course. He copies down sections of books, writes out words and symbols he does not understand at first but that become intimately familiar beneath his ink-stained fingers, formed again and again in increasingly steady lines. He reads histories and mythologies and novels. He slowly learns other languages, though he has difficulty speaking them.

  There are occasional excursions to museums and libraries, during off-hours when there are few, if any, other visitors. The boy adores these trips, both for the contents of the buildings and the deviation from his set routine. But they are rare, and he is never permitted to leave the house unescorted.

  The man in the grey suit visits him in his rooms every day, most often accompanied by a new pile of books, spending exactly one hour lecturing about things the boy is unsure he will ever truly understand.

  Only once does the boy inquire as to when he will actually be allowed to do something, the kinds of things that the man in the grey suit demonstrates very rarely himself during these strictly scheduled lessons.

  “When you are ready” is the only answer he receives.

  He is not deemed ready for some time.

  *

  THE DOVES THAT APPEAR ONSTAGE and occasionally in the audience during Prospero’s performances are kept in elaborate cages, delivered to each theater along with the rest of his luggage and supplies.

  A slamming door sends a stack of trunks and cases tumbling in his dressing room, toppling a cage full of doves.

  The trunks right themselves instantly, but Hector picks up the cage to inspect the damage.

  While most of the doves are only dazed from the fall, one clearly has a broken wing. Hector carefully removes the bird, the damaged bars repairing as he sets the cage down.

  “Can you fix it?” Celia asks.

  Her father looks at the injured dove and then back at his daughter, waiting for her to ask a different question.

  “Can I fix it?” she asks after a moment.

  “Go ahead and try,” her father says, handing it to her.

  Celia gently strokes the trembling dove, staring intently at its broken wing.

  The bird makes a painful, strangled sound much different than its normal coo.

  “I can’t do it,” Celia says with tears in her eyes, lifting the bird up to her father.

  Hector takes the dove and swiftly twists its neck, ignoring his daughter’s cry of protest.

  “Living things have different rules,” he says. “You should practice with something more basic.” He picks up Celia’s only doll from a nearby chair and drops it to the floor, the porcelain head cracking open.

  When Celia returns to her father the next day with the perfectly repaired doll he only nods his approval before waving her away, returning to his preperformance preparations.

  “You could have fixed the bird,” Celia says.

  “Then you wouldn’t have learned anything,” Hector says. “You need to understand your limitations so you can overcome them. You do want to win, don’t you?”

  Celia nods, looking down at her doll. It bears no evidence that it had ever been damaged, not a single crack along the vacant, smiling face.

  She throws it under a chair and does not take it with her when they depart the theater.

  *

  THE MAN IN THE GREY SUIT takes the boy for a week in France that is not precisely a holiday. The trip is unannounced, the boy’s small suitcase packed without his knowledge.

  The boy assumes they are there for some manner of lesson, but no particular area of study is specified. After the first day, he wonders if they are visiting only for the food, entranced by the luscious crackle of fresh-baked bread in boulangeries and the sheer variety of cheeses.

  There are off-hour trips to silent museums, where the boy tries and fails to walk through galleries as quietly as his instructor does, cringing when each footfall echoes. Though he requests a sketchbook, his
instructor insists it will be better for him to capture the images in his memory.

  One evening, the boy is sent to the theater.

  He expects a play or perhaps a ballet, but the performance is something he finds unusual.

  The man on the stage, a slick-haired, bearded fellow whose white gloves move like birds against the black of his suit, performs simple tricks and sleight-of-hand misdirections. Birds disappear from cages with false bottoms, handkerchiefs slip from pockets to be concealed again in cuffs.

  The boy watches both the magician and his modest audience curiously. The spectators seem impressed by the deceptions, often applauding them politely.

  When he questions his instructor after the show, he is told the matter will not be discussed until they return to London at the end of the week.

  The next evening, the boy is brought to a larger theater and again left alone for the performance. The sheer size of the crowd makes him nervous, he has never been in a space so full of people before.

  The man on this stage appears older than the magician from the previous night. He wears a nicer suit. His movements are more precise. Every exhibition is not only unusual but captivating.

  The applause is more than polite.

  And this magician does not hide handkerchiefs within his lace shirt cuffs. The birds that appear from all manner of locations have no cages at all. These are feats that the boy has seen only in his lessons. Manipulations and illusions he has been expressly informed again and again must be kept secret.

  The boy applauds as well when Prospero the Enchanter takes his final bow.

  Again, his instructor refuses to answer any of his questions until they return to London.

  Once in the town house, falling back into a routine that now feels as though it had never been disrupted, the man in the grey suit first asks the boy to tell him the difference between the two performances.

  “The first man was using mechanical contraptions and mirrors, making the audience look different places when he did not wish them to see something, to create a false impression. The second man, the one named for the duke from The Tempest, he was pretending to do similar things, but he did not use mirrors or tricks. He did things the way you do.”

  “Very good.”

  “Do you know that man?” the boy asks.

  “I have known that man for a very long time,” his instructor says.

  “Does he teach those things as well, the way you teach me?”

  His instructor nods, but does not elaborate.

  “How can the people watching not see the difference?” the boy asks. To him it is clear, though he cannot properly articulate why. It was something he felt in the air as much as observed with his eyes.

  “People see what they wish to see. And in most cases, what they are told that they see.”

  They do not discuss the matter further.

  While there are other not-quite holidays, though they are rare, the boy is not taken to see any other magicians.

  *

  PROSPERO THE ENCHANTER uses a pocket knife to slit his daughter’s fingertips open, one by one, watching wordlessly as she cries until calm enough to heal them, drips of blood slowly creeping backward.

  The skin melds together, swirls of fingerprint ridges finding one another again, closing solidly once more.

  Celia’s shoulders fall, releasing the tension that has knotted in them, her relief palpable as she draws herself safely together.

  Her father gives her only moments to rest before slicing each of her newly healed fingers again.

  *

  THE MAN IN THE GREY SUIT takes a handkerchief from his pocket and drops it on the table, where it lands with a muffled thump, something heavier than silk hidden in the folds. He pulls the square of silk upward, letting the contents, a solitary gold ring, roll out onto the table. It is slightly tarnished and engraved with something that the boy thinks might be words in Latin, but the script is looping and flourished and he cannot make them out.

  The man in the grey suit replaces the now empty handkerchief in his pocket.

  “Today we are going to learn about binding,” he says.

  When they reach the point of the lesson that includes the practical demonstration, he instructs the boy to place the ring on his own hand. He never touches the boy, regardless of the circumstances.

  The boy tries in vain to pry the ring from his finger as it dissolves into his skin.

  “Bindings are permanent, my boy,” the man in the grey suit says.

  “What am I bound to?” the boy asks, frowning at the scar where the ring had been moments before.

  “An obligation you already had, and a person you will not meet for some time. The details are not important at this point. This is merely a necessary technicality.”

  The boy only nods and does not question further, but that night, when he is alone again and unable to sleep, he spends hours staring at his hand in the moonlight, wondering who the person he is bound to might be.

  *

  THOUSANDS OF MILES AWAY, in a crowded theater that thunders with applause for the man onstage, hidden in the shadows formed between disused pieces of scenery backstage, Celia Bowen curls herself into a ball and cries.

  Le Bateleur

  LONDON, MAY–JUNE 1884

  Just before the boy turns nineteen, the man in the grey suit removes him from the town house without notice, setting him up in a modestly sized flat with a view of the British Museum.

  At first he assumes that it is only a temporary matter. There have been, of late, journeys of weeks or even months, to France and Germany and Greece, filled with more studying than sightseeing. But this is not one of those not-quite holidays spent in luxurious hotels.

  It is a modest flat with basic furnishings, so similar to his former rooms that he finds it difficult to feel anything resembling homesickness, save for the library, though he still possesses an impressive number of books.

  There is a wardrobe full of well-cut but nondescript black suits. Crisp white shirts. A row of custom-fitted bowler hats.

  He inquires as to when what is referred to only as his challenge will begin. The man in the grey suit will not say, though the move clearly marks the end of formal lessons.

  Instead, he continues his studies independently. He keeps notebooks full of symbols and glyphs, working through his old notes and finding new elements to consider. He carries smaller volumes with him at all times, transcribing them into larger ones once they are filled.

  He begins each notebook the same way, with a detailed drawing of a tree inscribed with black ink inside the front cover. From there the black branches stretch onto the subsequent pages, tying together lines that form letters and symbols, each page almost completely covered in ink. All of it, runes and words and glyphs, twisted together and grounded to the initial tree.

  There is a forest of such trees, carefully filed on his bookshelves.

  He practices the things he has been taught, though it is difficult to gauge the effectiveness of his illusions on his own. He spends a great deal of time regarding reflections in mirrors.

  Unscheduled and no longer under lock and key, he takes long walks around the city. The sheer volume of people is nerve-racking, but the joy in being able to leave his flat whenever he chooses outweighs his fear of accidentally bumping into passersby as he attempts to traverse the streets.

  He sits in parks and cafés, observing people who pay him little notice as he blends into crowds of young men in interchangeable suits and bowler hats.

  One afternoon, he returns to his old town house, thinking perhaps it would not be an imposition to call on his instructor for something as simple as tea, but the building is abandoned, the windows boarded.

  As he walks back to his flat, he places a hand on his pocket and realizes that his notebook is missing.

  He swears aloud, attracting a glare from a passing woman who steps aside as he stops short on the crowded pavement.

  He retraces his steps, growing more anxio
us with each turn.

  A light rain begins to fall, not much more than mist, but several umbrellas spring up amongst the crowd. He pulls the brim of his bowler hat down to better shield his eyes as he searches the dampening pavement for any sign of his notebook.

  He stops at a corner beneath the awning of a café, watching the lamps flickering on up and down the street, wondering if he should wait until the crowd thins or the rain lets up. Then he notices that there is a girl standing some paces away, also sheltered beneath the awning, and she is poring over the pages of a notebook that he is quite certain is his own.

  She is perhaps eighteen, perhaps a bit younger. Her eyes are light, and her hair is an indeterminate color that cannot seem to decide if it is blond or brown. She wears a dress that would have been quite fashionable two years ago and is damp from the rain.

  He steps closer, but she does not notice, she stays completely absorbed in the book. She has even removed one of her gloves to better handle the delicate pages. He can now see that it is, indeed, his own journal, open to a page with a card pasted onto it, printed with winged creatures crawling over a spoked wheel. His handwriting covers the card and the paper around it, incorporating it into solid text.

  He watches her expression as she flips through the pages, a mixture of confusion and curiosity.

  “I believe you have my book,” he says after a moment. The girl jumps in surprise and nearly drops the notebook but manages to catch it, though in the process her glove flutters to the pavement. He bends down to retrieve it, and when he straightens and offers it to her, she seems surprised to see that he is smiling at her.