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

Blinking, she took in the scene in front of her. An entire circus had just materialized in front of her eyes, supplanting a Parisian landmark. Lara looked around. The waiter at the nearby café continued to stack chairs as though the entire square had not transformed in front of him. Without a ticket, perhaps it hadn’t.

“For goodness’ sake, get in or get out.”

Lara looked around the pillars to find a clown holding a miniature version of himself—a ventriloquist dummy. Doro. From Cecile’s journal, Lara felt like she already knew him.

“Yes, you.” The clowns were dressed identically—all in white, from the face paint to the fez hat to the costume.

Above her, a horse whinnied. Was the statue alive as well?

Amazed, she spun around, not unlike Dorothy who had just entered Oz.

“Ms. Barnes.” The dummy’s hand pointed to the door. “This way, s’il vous plaît.” As the clown walked, the dummy peered around him. “I am Doro. Or, he is.” The little wooden hand pointed up to the clown, who held out his hand to claim her ticket.

She was reluctant to give it up.

“The ticket does not belong to you,” snapped the dummy.

It was the same dread she’d felt entering a fake haunted house for Halloween. She expected to be entertained, yet there was a foreboding sense in the background. Lara nodded and handed the larger clown the ticket and watched as it melted into his hand. As she stepped onto the carpet, it rolled up behind her, giving her the sinking feeling that perhaps the ticket was one-way. She gulped, regretting she’d been so impulsive. She should have told Gaston. But what would he and Barrow have done? This building wasn’t real—or at least wasn’t real in this dimension. And they hadn’t been invited.

Entering through the giant mouth, she then stepped through a set of ten-foot-tall arched doors that snapped shut tightly behind her. Unfurling in front of her was a hallway—not any old mundane hallway, but a corridor lined with windows, light shining in brightly through them. Which was an impossibility, because it was now night in Paris. For a moment, Lara wasn’t sure if this was a circus or Versailles, as the walls were adorned with gold reliefs. As she continued through the hallways, she found a series of adjoining rooms with doors positioned in the center of each room. In front of her were nine more sets of matching white lacquered arched doors, all open; their elaborate gold-leaf inlay and handles looked like something out of a rococo dream—the colors like a macaron shop window. Below her, the floor was a black-and-white harlequin pattern, followed by a dizzying beige spiral floor past the next doorway. The walls of the arcade were painted white, gold, and aqua. White and gold reliefs adorned the walls, and heavy crystal chandeliers dripped from the ceiling—she tried counting and there had to be a hundred of them, reflecting light and making the place drip and sparkle.

It was then that she noticed it. The colors were like a 1960s Technicolor film—the blues and golds more pronounced and everything bathed in a kind of glow, almost a soft focus. This world didn’t look real, as if she’d stepped into a Claymation puppet show. Perhaps Giroux had tried to mimic it with his dripping technique. In each room she saw a different attraction: a fortune-teller, shooting games, cakes and food trays, even the smell of popcorn. While elegant, the gauges and machinery were old, like they’d been installed during the Belle Époque period, causing her to feel like she was walking through a time capsule. The place also smelled like a stale house that had been shut up for the winter before enduring a furious spit-and-polish attempt at freshening.

Each room was painted in hues like macarons. As they entered the next room, another scent greeted them at the doors. It was sweet. “What is that smell?” She looked down at the small puppet for an answer.

“Melting chocolate, I’d say, although I cannot smell.”

Lara inhaled sharply. “God, that was amazing.”

“We have the almond room next.” The clown pointed. “This way,” said the dummy, leading her through the doors as the sweet smell of almonds and sugar engulfed her. “We call this hallway the Grand Promenade.” While she’d entered the building at night, outside the windows the sun was streaming down on elaborate hedges and mazes in the lawns outdoors.

At the fourth room, they stopped at an old carousel. With its double-decker platform, it was the grandest carousel that Lara had ever seen.

He motioned for her to get on.

“You’re kidding?” She cocked her head. This carousel looked familiar. When the dummy didn’t reply, she reluctantly grabbed the pole. There was a carousel horse in front of her, and its tail began to swish. Surely it didn’t move? As if to answer her, the tail flicked again. The dummy said, “Get on.”

Lara took a moment to think. She was in what appeared to be another dimension, talking to a clown’s dummy, who was trying to get her onto a carousel with what might be live animals. “What the fuck. This can’t get any weirder.” She shrugged and placed her foot in the stirrup, sliding over the horse’s back. Lara felt the animal move under her, as though it were breathing. Its neck began to move up and down of its own accord like it was waking up from a long sleep. On cue, the organ music started and Lara began to feel dizzy as she lost sight of the clown and matching dummy.

She definitely felt a little fuzzy—as if she’d had two glasses of champagne. Then something unexpected happened. The carousel began to move backward. The first image struck her hard. The carousel lights became brighter until all she could see were images of Ben Archer’s face. She was sitting on the stool at the bar in Delilah’s listening to him telling her about the widow hitting on him. Gripping the edges of the chair, she