Their father had been gone for nearly a decade. Hugo still remembered him, but Oskar had been newly born and if he had any memory of their father at all, it was the low rumble of the man’s voice through the intimate ocean inside their mother’s womb. No real memory, but one down deep in his subconscious, the kind of memory that provides the seeds of the person one might grow to be, without anyone ever realizing those seeds had been planted.

  “Hurry, up, Oskar!” he called.

  Hugo didn’t have to explain himself. The music had picked up in volume and intensity, the relentlessly cheerful tune surely about to kick off the Grand Finale.

  “I know, I know!” Oskar said, glancing around from behind the orangutan’s cage as the stream of his piss slowed to a trickle. The boy laughed. “I’ve got ears, haven’t I?”

  “It’s your bladder that concerns me, not your ears.”

  Oskar did up the buttons on his trousers and then he bolted back toward the main tent. Hugo pursued him, cursing his little brother through a laughing grin. He caught up, snatched Oskar from behind, and lifted him off his feet, spinning him around once as they reached the flap of the main tent. At the entrance, Oskar grabbed his arm.

  “What’s wrong?” Hugo asked.

  “Nothing. I only wanted to say thank you. This is the greatest night.”

  “It’s everything you hoped?”

  The little boy beamed. “More! How could I have known it would be so wonderful?”

  Hugo ruffled his hair and then ushered him into the tent. As they stepped inside, the audience began to cheer, and it was impossible not to feel, just for a moment, that the cheering was for himself and his brother. Hugo beamed. Ever since their father’s death, he’d been helping Mother to look after Oskar. She was a seamstress and she worked nightmarish hours to provide for them. At thirteen, Hugo had gone to work for a local blacksmith and had begun to learn the trade. Now, at twenty-two, he had his own forge, still working for Mr. Neumann but no longer an apprentice. He worked hard in the heat and sweat, year round, but he was proud of his work and the life he had been able to help Mother give to her youngest son.

  He watched the blond thatch of Oskar’s hair as the boy rushed through the crowd, glancing back and forth between the magic unfolding in the ring and the thrilled faces in the stands. The musicians marched around the ring in garishly colorful costumes, but there at the edge of the ring, with lanterns hung from posts all around the circle, it was possible to see the grime that streaked those colors. Somehow that endeared the performers to Hugo even more. It made them human, made them the same sort of worker as he fancied himself, people who got their hands—hell, their whole bodies—dirty to achieve a job well done.

  Oskar shouted his name. Hugo glanced over and saw his little brother waving for him to follow. The boy didn’t seem to be having much luck locating a place for them to sit, which was no surprise given the way the tent seemed to overflow with people. It was the last night the circus would be performing here, and even those who had been multiple times had come out to witness the beauty and wonder and chaos of Le Circus Furneaux one more time before it vanished forever. Perhaps children as young as Oskar would see such a thing again, but others...better not to think about it.

  Hugo hurried to catch up to his brother. Oskar moved around the outside of the ring. Several times he tried to muscle his way up into the stands only to be physically rebuffed. He was, after all, a young boy of very little muscle. Hugo grinned at the sight, and saw that even as he struggled to find a seat, Oskar grinned as well.

  The crowd oohed, and Hugo turned to see what had made them gasp. The acrobats had begun. Without a net, a small, lithe, gray-haired man walked the tightrope while a pair of beautiful young women—apparently his twin daughters—performed a trapeze act during which they flung themselves over his head, above the high wire. Hugo had heard of “death-defying acts,” but never imagined this. They wore skin-tight costumes of orange and blue, striped with shadows that seemed almost to swallow them, up there in the tent’s dark recesses. With each swing it was as if they moved out of the world the audience inhabited and into some other, darker, distant realm, as if they might blink out of existence for a moment between one trapeze and the next.

  A cannon fired. Music started up again, a kind of mad, reeling melody, and in response, a parade of animals was led into the ring. An elephant, monkeys in costume, regal horses who strutted with a dignity ill befitting the moment. Even the lion tamer came out with his charge, guiding it with an uncanny calm, as if the lion truly had been tamed, or perhaps enchanted. The sword-swallower moved with fluid grace, vanishing his blades down his throat and then unsheathing them again, each time a small miracle. The fire breather stomped around in a show of naked aggression, bellowing streams of flame over the heads of the audience, eliciting screams with every blazing belch.

  At this, Hugo felt a hand in his own and looked down to find that Oskar had returned to him. His little brother watched the fire-breather warily and then tugged him over to the edge of the hastily constructed stands, so their presence would not obstruct the audience’s view. They stood in shadows between the stands and the billowing curtain through which the performers would enter and exit, and from there, Hugo and Oskar watched in rapt fascination, their hearts thumping in rhythm with the roars of the crowd and the swing of each trapeze.

  At last, the clowns appeared. In the stands, anyone not already on their feet leaped up and unleashed a thunderous roar of approval. The clowns began to sow discord and absurdity amongst the rest of the circus. As the music rose in volume and timbre, they pranced and laughed, struck the strong man with a magnificently large fish, and the crowd howled with delight. Hugo joined in, throwing his head back. The strong man began a pursuit of that white-faced clown with his pointed cap, the chase weaving in and out of the Grand Finale with what appeared to be dangerous abandon. Hugo knew better—it must all be carefully choreographed—but Oskar would not realize this, and most of the crowd seemed to either believe or to suspend their disbelief, holding their breath and scooting to the edge of their seats. The clown seemed on the verge of being trampled by horses or sat upon by the elephant. The strong man lifted one of the acrobats into the air and hurled him at the clown. Both clown and strong man had to dodge to avoid the flaming breath of the fire-eater.

  All the while, the music built to a new crescendo. The trapeze artists flew. The horses reared back and danced, facing one another, like mountain goats about to smash together in battle.

  The clown ran toward the lion tamer, spotted the big cat, and thought better of his plan. Instead, he threw himself on the ground, rolled beneath the elephant, and bounded up on the other side right in front of the cannon used to loft the human cannonball into the air. As the strong man roared and raced around the elephant, the clown did the unthinkable. He socked the human cannonball in the jaw, then climbed up and slid himself feet first into the barrel of the cannon.

  Angrily, the human cannonball got up, unstrapped his leather helmet, and cast it aside. He stalked to the back of the cannon and lit the fuse.

  An eerie quiet descended on the crowd. Hugo held his breath, his eyes widening. The strong man stomped toward the cannon and then past it, glancing around in search of the clown even as the cannon’s fuse kept burning. The musicians played louder, horns and piano and violins and cello creating something that sounded like no melody Hugo had ever heard, music both riotous and beautiful.

  In the ring, the strong man marched up to an acrobat who had another—a woman—standing on his shoulders. The clown pushed him and the woman did an aerial somersault off her partner’s shoulders... and landed on the strong man’s. He shook her off into her partner’s arms, then turned to rage in the direction of several clowns who had gathered to cast worried glances at the cannon as the absurdly long fuse continued to burn. As the audience punctuated these antics with more uproarious laughter, Hugo found the smile slipping from his own face.

  Something about the clowns disturbed him. Light and shadow played across the ring, casting strange pools of darkness here and there, so that in the space behind the elephant there seemed almost a second, unseen animal. Acrobats and the sword-swallower and the horses and their trainers slid in and out of color and into a gloomy gray that turned them nearly invisible. But the clowns...they seemed to drag those shadows with them as they moved, as if they might disappear entirely if a single torch were to be snuffed.

  The cannon fired. Hugo jumped, startled, and craned his neck to watch as the clown arced through the air. He somersaulted once and then extended his body, reaching his arms up and up. All eyes were on the clown, and so the trapeze artist’s hands seemed to materialize from the darkness near the top of the tent. She caught the clown by the wrists, letting his momentum carry her swing backward. The catch and swing had been timed to perfection. A heartbeat too early or too late and the clown might have crashed to the ground, broken and bleeding, or the trapeze artist might have lost her balance and her grip, taking them both down.

  Instead she carried him backward, the two of them arcing along a pendulous swing into the darkness, and then emerging again from that gray nothing, swinging back the way they’d come. As they began to rise up on the other end of the arc, she released him. The clown did another somersault, then plummeted toward the ground.

  He snagged the high wire, swung once from it, over the top, and then dropped again...and landed on the enormous saddle on the broad back of the elephant. In the same moment, the music crashed to its final crescendo. The cannon fired again. The fire-eater brayed one last breath of flames, and everything in the ring came to a stop. Even the lion and the horses seemed to pose for effect.

  The crowd gasped.

  Hugo’s heart filled with a wonder born of disbelief, stunned that magic of this sort truly existed in the world, and then he and the crowd burst simultaneously into deafening applause. He clapped until his hands ached, whistled and cheered along with the rest. The troupe and their animals paraded in a swift circle and then began to exit in a stream of vivid color and triumph. The audience began to stream out, still roaring approval, still applauding and discussing and reeling from what they’d experienced.

  Grinning, Hugo turned to share his wonder with Oskar, but his little brother was nowhere to be seen.

  “Oskar?” he said, but the susurrus of the crowd drowned him out. He spun around, staring at the crowd pouring out of the stands and streaming from the exits. “Oskar!”

  Hugo’s chest tightened. His hands clenched into fists at his sides as panic began to seize him. In some distant fashion, he knew he was overreacting. Oskar might only be ten years old but he was a smart boy, strong and capable and charming. No shyness would keep him from tugging the coat of a friendly-looking man and asking for help once he realized he had been parted from his brother. Hugo told himself that if he failed to find Oskar, then Oskar would find him.

  The crowd began to thin. Hugo rushed up into the stands near where he and Oskar had been. From that greater height, he glanced around the ring and saw nothing out of the ordinary. The stands were full of paper sacks and other debris. The ring below had its share of trampled horseshit and even several bright green feathers from one of the acrobats’ costumes. A pair of lesser clowns had begun to clean up, along with some of the behind-the-scenes workers, the unsung heroes of the show.

  “Oskar!” Hugo shouted into the gray shadows overhead. He stared at the exits as the crowds thinned further, but saw no sign of the boy.

  When he glanced back at the place he and Oskar had been standing, he spotted the last few performers on their way out, including the strong man and a beautiful, brown-skinned woman who’d shown off her spectacular trick-riding talents on horseback. They had a little dog with them, a well-groomed beast who had done a lot of walking on its hind legs and barking on command.

  The strong man glanced at him. Despite the performance he’d just given casting the illusion of himself as a brainless hulk, his expression spoke of intelligence and empathy. Hugo knew the man saw his desperation. Even if he didn’t understand Hugo’s plight, the strong man recognized his fear, understood that something awful must be unfolding. The man’s gaze shone with a moment’s regret, and then he turned away.

  What was that?

  Hugo stared after him, watched the curtains the performers had used for their exit, and then began to descend almost unconsciously from the stands. He found himself picking up speed, from a walk to a long stride, and then breaking into a run. Racing across the horseshit-trampled earth, he ducked out between the curtains and saw the rest of the circus spread before him. The front approach emphasized the big tent, but here were the rest, the smaller tents and the many wagons with which the circus traveled. In the moonlight, he could make out the silhouettes of so many performers. Trainers put animals back into their cages or penned them into tents. Acrobats began to strip off their costumes.

  The clowns glowed in the moonlight. It must have been their makeup, but they seemed limned with a silvery, almost ghostly aura, and it drew Hugo straight toward them. He strode across the grassy field where the circus had camped. A tall, shaggy-bearded worker laid a hand on his shoulder but he tore away from the man’s grasp.

  “Here, what are you doing?” the sword-swallower demanded, moving to bar his way.

  Hugo shook his head. “My brother...” was all he managed.

  Then he spotted the strong man and darted in that direction, running across the uneven ground.

  Another hand grabbed him, a stronger grip. Someone had a fistful of his jacket and spun him around, drawing him up short. He found himself face to face with one of those clowns, the one who’d worn the pointed cap and been fired from the cannon. His white makeup seemed monstrous so close up, his eyes nearly black, pupils like tiny moons. That silvery glow seemed to sift into the air around his face, like the breeze had begun to sweep it away.

  “You don’t belong here, sir,” the whiteface clown said, his accent French, but with something else beneath it. Something guttural and echoing and distant.

  “My brother is here,” Hugo pleaded, hating the whining in his voice. “He...His name is Oskar. I’ve lost him and I—”

  “You’ve lost him,” the clown replied, the downturned smile of his garish greasepaint somehow mocking. The words weren’t a question, but a statement, almost an indictment. “Go home, sir. You’ve lost your brother.”

  Oskar frowned in confusion and then reached up to grab at the clown’s sleeve, to twist his wrist, to tear his grip away. How dare this man dismiss him, when Oskar must be here, amongst them?

  The clown kept his grip. Hugo reached out to shove him, turned halfway round to shout his brother’s name. From the corner of his eye, the clown seemed almost to vanish in that silvery glow, as if from a certain angle he might not be there at all. In that single instant, reality seemed unreliable, the impossible seemed so close, just within reach.

  “Oskar!” he shouted, desperate to take his brother out of here, and back to their home, to the world that felt solid and true. He ripped himself from the clown’s grasp and pressed on, heading for the tents toward the back. “Where are you, brother?”

  Something struck the back of his skull. Hugo heard the blow echo inside his head, and then his legs went out from beneath him and he crumpled to the dirt. Voices followed him down into darkness, laughter and anger and somewhere nearby, his little brother’s reply—a cry for help.

  The blackness enveloped him. Whatever danger Oskar might be in, Hugo could no longer answer.

  4

  Hugo woke with the stink of blood in his nostrils and a spike of pain throbbing in his skull. He groaned, squinting against the glare of morning sunlight, and slowly pushed himself to a sitting position. As he sat up, his hair stuck to the grass, tugging at his scalp and giving him another jolt of pain. He blinked to try clearing his head, and stared at the crusted brown patch on the grass. Dried blood had matted both the grass and his hair, and Hugo reached up to gingerly search his scalp for the wound that had produced it. At the center of a patch of sticky, still damp blood, he found a bump on his head that flared when he touched it, and he sucked in a quick breath, able to wonder for the first time what had happened to him. Where had he gotten such a knock, and where was he—

  Oskar.

  Images flooded into his head. The fire-eater and the sword-swallower, the horses and the elephant, and the clowns. The damnable clowns. He remembered the glance the strong man had cast in his direction and the animal stink that had greeted him when he had pursued the performers out the back of the circus tent.

  Hugo climbed to his feet, gritting his teeth against the pain as he tried to get his bearings. The memory of the blow to the back of his head felt so fresh that it seemed impossible morning had come. It ought to still be dark, but there was the sun, glaring overhead. Around him, though, he saw no trace of the circus. No debris from the camp, none of the rough, trampled ground where the tents had been erected.

  Somehow, he had moved. Or had been moved.

  “Oskar!” he cried, shouting to the morning and to the hills around him.

  Off to his left, what he gauged to be the east, he saw a steeple jutting from a valley and thought there must be a village there. His heart leapt. At least there would be somewhere for him to go, somewhere to find help if—

  No. He wouldn’t allow himself to think it. Oskar must be here.

  Yet that blow on the back of his head, and the knowing look on the face of the white-faced clown with the pointed hat, suggested a much more sinister truth.

  “Oskar!” Hugo began to run through the grass, rushing toward the west at first, away from that town. He looked to see if there were any familiar landmarks, thinking that surely he could not be that far from home. The village must be one familiar to him.