Chapter 15

Almost immediately, Cordelia saw her mistake: the performers’ entrance fed straight into the wings, where only a single sweep of curtains divided her from the stage, and a trio of clowns stood awaiting their cue.

The first thing Cordelia noticed, as she stood blinking, waiting for her eyes to adjust, was the sawdust. It coated everything and hung in the air like a veil, shimmering in the darkness. It muffled the sound of her footsteps and coated the inside of her nostrils and gummed the back of her throat.

Cabal sniffled beside her. His pale nose quivered, as it did when he was about to sneeze. Cordelia whispered, “Don’t even think about it.”

Cabal swallowed.

The music was louder inside the tent, and she could hear a booming voice, which she recognized as belonging to the awful short man with the mustache. Slowly, shapes began to assert themselves in the gloom: crates upon crates stuffed with straw, overturned stools and discarded costumes, old trunks and ladders. She even saw a hot-air balloon, deflated, lying among a tangle of ropes, like a vast squid that had been lashed to the ground.

She began picking her way through the labyrinth of junk. Cordelia felt like she was on a ship, moving through vast swells of gray: furniture, half-built set pieces, and stacks of plywood loomed on either side of her. She saw no cages, though—that meant the monsters must be kept somewhere else. At least the sawdust made it easy to move quietly. . . .

The sawdust!

Now that she was paying attention, she could make out the shuffling tracks of performers, footsteps big and small.

And paws. Though the tracks were confused and blurry, she could definitely make out various animal—or monster?—tracks leading off to the left. She followed them, scanning the ground, listening, always, for signs of disturbance—a voice, a footstep, a sniffle or snort, as her father had taught her to do.

She came around an old set piece designed to look like a pirate ship and saw them: crouched in the half-gloom, massed in their cages, miserable and silent. Monsters. Dozens and dozens of monsters.

Tears welled up in her eyes and she didn’t bother to wipe them away. In the low light, she could just make out the jointed flippers of the hufflebottom and the scaly spine of the bulliehead.

She had found them.

There was no sign of her father, but she quickly put that worry aside. She would free the monsters—she wasn’t sure how yet, but she would—and worry about her father afterward.

“Don’t worry,” Cordelia whispered, drawing close to the hufflebottom’s cage. “I’m here.”

To her surprise, the hufflebottom drew back even farther into the liquid pool of shadows on the far side of the cage. She could just make out the gleam of her dark eyes and the curve of her noble beak.

“It’s me, Cordelia,” she said, threading her fingers through the cage bars. The hufflebottom adored Cordelia and liked to playfully nip at her fingertips. In fact, Cordelia had not cut her own fingernails in ages. The hufflebottom happily did it for her. But today the hufflebottom remained still, silent, and watchful, and did not approach. Cordelia felt a momentary pull of anxiety. Could this be a different hufflebottom?

No. The coincidence was too extreme. Huddled silently in their cages were diggles and squinches, and hufflebottoms and goblins: monsters rare and dangerous and difficult to procure.

Perhaps—and the thought made fury well up inside her—the monsters had been mistreated. Traumatized. Perhaps that was why they were so frightened and seemed not to recognize her.

Cordelia withdrew her hand from the cage. “I’m going to get you out of here,” she said. Each cage was encircled by a rusty chain and padlock; she jiggled one and found it sturdy. No hope of snapping it, then.

From the stage, the ringmaster’s reedy voice floated back to her. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages . . . now for a finale that will leave your ears spinning and your eyes ringing!”

The crowd roared with applause as the band swelled and the drums pounded out a frenzied rhythm.

Cordelia’s palms began to sweat. Still standing in front of the hufflebottom’s cage, she crouched down so she was eye level with the padlock. It looked as if it took a standard key; it was likely that a single key opened all the cages. But she didn’t see a keyring anywhere.

She turned out her pockets, sorting through her tools to see if any might be useful. The old metal spyglass had come partially apart in her pocket, revealing innards of glinting copper coil.

She ripped off a wire and bent it in half, so it formed a narrow metal pin. Carefully, she inserted the wire into the old lock and began pushing and twisting. One time, she and her father had tracked a pair of highly contagious ghouls to the locked basement of a hat factory. She had watched him pick a lock with her mother’s hairpin.

Then, as now, it took only a moment of wiggling before she heard the lock release with a small, satisfying click. She let the chain thud down into the sawdust and slowly swung open the cage door, wincing as it whined on its hinges. But the music and clapping were so loud, no one could possibly hear.

“All right, girl.” Cordelia stretched a hand toward the hufflebottom, who was still trembling in the far corner of her cage. “Come to me. You’re all right. It’s going to be all right.”

The hufflebottom didn’t move. Cordelia swallowed a sigh.

“Stay here,” she instructed Cabal. Then she stepped into the cage and inched forward toward the terrified monster, still keeping one hand outstretched. “What’s the matter with you?” she whispered, when the hufflebottom drew back even farther, until it was pressed against the bars of the cage. “It’s me.”

She finally got a hand around the hufflebottom’s collar. Cordelia heaved, and the hufflebottom slid forward a few inches, scrabbling desperately for purchase with her heavy hind legs and letting out a panicked whimper that Cordelia had never heard before.

“Why,” Cordelia panted, “are—you—making—this—so—difficult?” She grabbed a dorsal flipper, hoping for a better grip. . . .

And it snapped off in her hand.

Cordelia reeled backward, horrified. But the hufflebottom didn’t even seem to notice. She just sat there, blinking at Cordelia with her big brown eyes.

Brown eyes . . .

Cordelia felt her chest go hollow, as if she’d once again been whacked with the ringmaster’s cane. Hufflebottoms had gold eyes—everybody knew that. She peered more closely at the broken flipper. Now that she was paying attention, she saw small seams of glue, where the scales had been attached to a kind of flexible fabric. She saw stitching where small rents in the wing had appeared and been mended.

A fake. An illusion.

She moved once again to the hufflebottom-that-wasn’t and ran a hand over its remaining dorsal flipper, her fingers easily detecting the leather harness where it was attached. Snap. It came right off. Cordelia saw now that its “beak” was actually a curved wooden horn, painted to resemble the real thing, affixed to the animal’s face by a nearly invisible wire. She extracted a pair of clippers from her pocket and snipped the wire.

The false beak tumbled into her hands, revealing the perfectly ordinary face of a perfectly ordinary sheep. Just as quickly, the rest of the illusion was revealed: the heavy casts molded around its legs, to give the impression of huge hindquarters. The garish dye, which turned its fleece a golden color.

Cordelia stumbled backward out of the cage, practically dizzy with disappointment. The sheep opened its mouth and let out a single, plaintive bleat, as though in apology. She stumbled down the long line of cages, as the music swelled and crested and the audience shrieked with pleasure. To her, it sounded like a prolonged scream.

Fakes. Fakes. Every one of them—fakes. Lions decked out with horns and long snake tails made from rubber hose, so that they resembled griffins. Deer fitted with shaggy fur coats so they could pass as elusive slints. An enormous iguana wearing paper wings. A dog dyed white, fitted with false fangs, meant to be a zuppy. Again, it was the eyes that gave it away. They weren’t red, like Cabal’s, and they certainly didn’t glow.

They were fakes, frauds, cardboard cutouts. She’d been wrong about the monsters. Her only real clue had proved pointless. And they’d wasted time.

She was so consumed with disappointment, she didn’t hear the approaching footsteps until they were only a few yards away. Someone—no, two someones—were moving through the backstage area and headed directly toward her.

“I’ll skin her alive! I’ll feed her to the lions! I’ll poke her eyes out with a pencil! This is the second time she’s missed her cue in a week . . .”

She recognized at once the voice of the ringmaster, who had greeted them so unpleasantly and refused them entrance into the circus. For a second, she was paralyzed with fear. She couldn’t see him—yet—but from the sound of his voice, he was just on the far side of a tumbled-down series of wooden crates.

“I’m sure she was distracted, sir—there was some kind of disturbance outside—Richie and the others were helping—”

“I don’t care if there was a purple elephant dancing a jig on top of a poker stick! I’ll have them all fired . . . I’ll have the twins use them for shotput practice . . . I’ll stuff them into cannons and shoot them into space!”

Cabal caught hold of Cordelia’s pant leg and pulled. Cordelia unfroze. Quickly, she hurried back up the line of cages, calculating, estimating. Could she hide? She glanced behind her and saw the dark silhouette of the ringmaster’s top hat bobbing between the crates.

She made a sudden, desperate decision. Grabbing Cabal by the scruff of his neck, she climbed into the fake hufflebottom’s cage, which was still hanging open, and backed with him into the shadows. The sheep, now rid of its disguise, blinked lazily at her. Cordelia squeezed herself into the darkest corner of the cage, holding Cabal in her lap, making herself as small as possible. She prayed that the lights would stay off long enough for her to make an escape.

“Missing the finale . . . outrageous . . . what am I paying them for, I ask you?”

“Well . . . sir . . . to be fair . . . you aren’t paying them. . . . It’s been weeks since you paid any of us. . . .”

“And why should I? You should be grateful I don’t ask you to pay me! A useless, layabout lot . . . absolutely sickening . . . you should all be ashamed . . .”

Cordelia held her breath. The voices were closer, closer . . . nearly on top of her now. And then she saw them: the ringmaster stumping along with a walking stick, and a willowy blond woman beside him, wearing thick glasses and carrying a tall sheaf of papers. They were less than a dozen feet away and had only to look to the right to see Cordelia, huddled in the darkness next to the sheep that had once been a hufflebottom. Keep walking, Cordelia thought.

Please keep walking.

It was as if her silent pleas had the opposite effect: the ringmaster stopped directly in front of the cage in which she was hidden. Cordelia’s heart froze. She remembered that the padlock and chain were now coiled in the sawdust. Had he seen them? Cabal quivered in her arms and she squeezed him tightly.

“Now look what’s happened. My boot’s come untied. Go ahead, girl. Make yourself useful.”

“Useful, sir?”

“You don’t expect me to tie my own laces, do you? Are you a stage manager or a slug?”

The woman mumbled an apology and kneeled down to tie the ringmaster’s shoelaces, pinning her papers to her chest by tucking them under her chin. Soon they were moving off again. Cordelia exhaled. The ringmaster’s continued complaints, and the stage manager’s stuttered responses, drifted back to her. Once they were a little farther, she and Cabal would make a run for it. . . .

Cabal was still trembling like a leaf in her arms. She gave him another reassuring squeeze, but he only shook harder, as if he were the victim of his own personal earthquake.

Too late, she realized that he wasn’t shaking from fear.

He was holding back a sneeze.

Before she could clamp a hand over his nose, the shaking became a full-body convulsion, and Cabal let out the longest, loudest sneeze she had ever heard. Like a cork exploding from a bottle, he shot backward, hit the cage bars, and landed on his nose with a small whimper. The sheep let out a surprised bleating sound.

All the lights came on at once.

Cordelia sprang to her feet and plucked Cabal up and tucked him under her jacket. Panic made her bold. She burst from the cage, no longer worried about keeping quiet . . .

And fell.

She lost her hold on Cabal. Her arms pinwheeled through the air. The wind was knocked out of her as she went sprawling. Rolling over onto her back, gasping for air, she caught a glimpse of a pair of highly polished boots and the brass-topped cane that had tripped her. The ringmaster’s face floated above her like a bloated red sun.

“Not so fast, girlie,” he said. He smiled, showing all his teeth.