The Ladies of the Secret Circus by Constance Sayers (the little red hen ebook TXT) 📕

long-dead clover lying on the ground. The man had plucked it, not her. She gathered it up as proof that what she’d seen was real and took the flower fragments and pressed them in her Rumpelstiltskin book. Months later, she would pull out the book and see the dried flower in waxed paper.

He had plucked that flower. He had been real. She wasn’t mad.

She came back to the field every day. If she had to practice the guitar, then she could practice this. For weeks, she brightened and tugged at the old tent. Once, she brought the carousel through but held it only for a few seconds until it disappeared. A week later, a storm blew the tent over, shredding the old fabric.

As the summer went on, several elderly men and women visited Cecile to reminisce about the old circus. As if they felt the pull of the tide, performers drove their old, battered trucks up the long drive to sit on the porch with Cecile and drink iced tea or Tanqueray and tonic and reminisce about life in the old days.

Lara loved these visits. When she’d see an old truck sitting in Cecile’s driveway, she’d run through the field at a clip to see who had come. Sitting on the porch, they talked while Lara played with her Barbies or Legos, pretending not to listen, but she never missed a tale. Circus people were great storytellers. One tall, gangly man of the gin-and-tonic set cried to Cecile about the loss of his beloved show horse from colic. Lara knew from her short experience with horses that they were mysterious, fragile creatures. The man was so distraught Lara presented him with her plastic butter-colored Johnny West horse, Thunderbolt.

“You can have my horse.” Lara remembered loving the toy dearly and holding it by its legs, making sure she’d secured the little brown vinyl saddle tightly as though it would be a selling point.

The man refused the toy with a smile of gratitude and took a hankie from his back pocket and wiped his face.

After the man left, Cecile knelt down and sat next to Lara on the floor, and Lara could smell the L’Air du Temps perfume in the air. Cecile—still tan like a raisin with her cropped silver hair and heart-shaped face—was the only woman she knew who wore bright-red lipstick, but it was now faded from an afternoon of entertaining.

“That was a lovely thing to do, Lara. It was very touching.” Cecile still had a strong French accent, and Lara found herself counting un, deux, trois or saying n’est-ce pas.

Lara shrugged, making Thunderbolt gallop. “It was nothing. I just needed to take care of him.”

“What a curious thing to say.” With her accent, there was a musicality to Cecile’s voice.

“He said the circus is my destiny.”

“Who said?”

Lara looked up. She hadn’t meant to talk about him.

“Lara?” Cecile pressed; there was alarm in her voice.

“The man in the field.” Lara looked down at the floor.

“What man in the field?” Cecile’s voice rose.

She shrugged. “Just the man. Sometimes the woman is with him. Margot.”

Cecile’s face looked stricken. “Where did you see him?”

Lara pointed over to the field. “The last time was when we had the tent up.”

“Tell me exactly what he said.” She spun Lara toward her and drew close to her face. Something on Cecile’s breath smelled like Christmas trees.

Lara told Cecile every detail, and her great-grandmother’s face fell as she explained about the spinning carousel. The alarm in her voice was evident. She peppered Lara with questions as if she’d done something wrong. “You must not say anything about this. Never speak of it to anyone, do you hear me? Forget him.”

Lara nodded, fearing Cecile was angry at her. “Did I do something wrong?”

Cecile was slow to smile, but when she did, she beamed at the little girl. “No, my dear. You are absolutely perfect.”

While she had listened to Cecile that day and never told anyone about the strange man in the field, he had unlocked something in her. With the twirl or snap of her finger, she could move things.

Little corrections, she began to call them then.

“Who is he?” Lara asked Cecile once, shortly before the older woman died. Lara didn’t need to clarify the he. Cecile understood her perfectly.

“His name is Althacazur,” said Cecile. “And no good can come from him.”

From THE NEW DEMONPEDIA.com

Althacazur (/altha-ca-zhr/) The spellings Althacazar (/altha-caz-ahr/) and Althacazure (/al-tha-caz-yoor/) have also been used. One of the princes of Hell, he is considered one of the most powerful demons, often called “Hell’s king,” primarily due to representing carnal pleasures, vanity, and lust, which affords him the greatest number of legions. He is said to command the eighth layer of Hell, where his subjects are sent upon their deaths. According to several texts, the River Styx flows primarily through the eighth layer of Hell, making him very powerful in that other demons must pay a toll to cross the main river of the underworld.

In lore, he is often depicted as handsome and vain, with flowing hair and amber eyes that he often covers with sunglasses when walking among mortals due to the permanent state of his horizontal pupils—an underworld trait that cannot be masked. An 1821 painting, Althacazar, by Bishop Worth, hangs in the British Museum and features the demon in his signature purple robe. In the painting, Althacazur has the head of a ram and dragon wings sprouting from his back. Some biographers of Worth (notably Constance van Hugh in her book Worth: A Life) have claimed the demon sat for the portrait, while many scholars of Worth have dismissed the idea as rubbish and hearsay. Van Hugh’s claim largely came from the source notes of Worth’s daughter who said that she met the demon on several occasions in the parlor while her father worked on the painting and that “when his wings were contained, he [Althacazur] was perfectly able to enjoy high tea.”

Althacazur factors prominently in the book Damsel and the Demon,