Skycircus

by Peter Bunzl

  “Here, use this one,” Madame said, taking the Lunk’s winding key from her pocket and handing it to Droz. “They’re the same model.”

  “Thank you.” Dr Droz stood and placed the winding key in the keyhole on Mr Creak’s thick neck, then turned it once anticlockwise.

  The mechanical came to a stop.

  “There,” she said, and she took the tea tray from him, before winding him up again.

  He sprang back to life soon enough and left the room in a haze of jitters and odd movements.

  “Apologies for his malfunctioning,” Droz said. “I’ll open his head up later and see what’s wrong with him, but I imagine one of the cogs in his primary motor cortex has got out of line. Now, Madame Verdigris,” said Dr Droz. “If you might do the honours?”

  “Bien sûr.” Madame began pouring out the tea through the strainer into the three cups, and when she was finished she added a drop of milk to each one and stirred them.

  Dr Droz leaned towards Lily conspiratorially. “I gleaned a lot of useful data from your mama’s notes which helped me complete my most recent creation, Angelique.”

  Lily was horrified. She hadn’t realized that Mama’s notebook had helped Droz as much as that.

  Dr Droz took one of the cups of tea from Madame. “After I was finished,” she said, “Madame here suggested I send you the notebook. I thought it was a good idea. We wanted you to have it. At least until I could meet you in person.” She smirked as if she’d told a joke.

  Madame laughed too, though mirthlessly. She took up the plate of biscuits and offered one to Lily.

  Lily decided she hated them both. She worried about what was happening to her friends while she was up here having fancy tea in the middle of the night. Droz was acting nice, but her words seemed as much for Madame as for her and Lily wondered if they were just trying to lull her into a false sense of security. She couldn’t, however, refuse their hospitality. Even if the biscuit was drugged like the chocolates, she was too hungry to care. Though, perhaps not? The two women were eating them too. She balanced her teacup on her lap and took one, biting into it. It tasted of almonds and sugar.

  “Tell me,” Droz said, watching Lily’s face, intrigued. “How did you like it, the notebook? And our little birthday card? What it is that makes you tick – I suggested that part. Madame thought it might tip our hand, but I suspected you’d find it interesting. She told me you love solving puzzles and I thought, with a little persuasion, such a gift would encourage you to investigate its origin.”

  Lily folded her arms. She refused to reply. She felt angry and betrayed. Was the doctor trying to goad her?

  “Your mother loved mysteries too,” Droz continued. “She thought that behind everything there was a fundamental truth. She was interested in using science to search for that truth.” She took a sip of tea. “Yes, Grace was a great mechanist and a good friend. Though, like me, she was hamstrung by a lack of opportunity and support. The Guild actively discouraged her ideas, in the same way they did mine.”

  She waved that last thought away then, as if it was of no consequence. “But we have talked enough. Why don’t you wait here? Have another biscuit, and I shall speak to Madame in private.”

  Dr Droz and Madame stood up and walked across the large room to a set of double doors hidden in the shadows, opposite the ones they had come in by. As Droz opened the door for Madame and stepped through, Lily caught a glimpse of a stark, white room and heard a terrible humming noise. Then the door closed behind them.

  Lily had no idea how long they would be gone for. As quickly as she could, she got up and stalked the circumference of the room – in case there was anything she hadn’t yet spotted that might help her to get away.

  The window was too high up to climb from, and the bars too narrowly set, and anyway, it didn’t even appear to open. The walls beside it were covered with blueprints for various mechanical hybrid devices – combinations of human and machine that Lily had never heard of or seen before. Springs and engine parts wove in and out of the wall between these drawings, clicking and ticking loudly – the source of the sound Lily had heard earlier – as if the space itself was part of a massive living clock.

  When Lily investigated the cabinets, her skin crawled with shock, for they were stacked with glass jars filled with preserved animal carcasses – each one with a tiny mechanical adjustment. She glimpsed a mouse with a mechanical ear on its back, a monkey with an extra metal arm and a kitten with six spidery legs, each floating in milky white water. Their eyes stared out at Lily, goggled wide by the magnifying curve of their glass jars. They felt somehow horribly alive and inarguably dead at the same time. The rest of the shelves were filled with old, rotting books.

  She could find little else of use in the room – no implements of any kind. When she returned to the chaise and table, she noticed the three teaspoons on the tea tray. She picked up two of them and hid them in her dress pockets, just in case.

  Then she went to the door Madame and Droz had left through and peered through the keyhole. The hairs on her arm stood on end, for it felt as if an electric energy was dissipating from the space beyond in waves.

  On the far side of the room was an iron machine the size and shape of a small coffin. Its outside, painted a faded medical green, was covered in conductor loops, screws and levers. As Lily glimpsed it, the nervous drumming inside her chest grew louder and louder, until the noise of her heart had become an unbearable cacophony of anxious, clattering beats, mixing with the ticks and clicks that the room itself was making.

  Dr Droz stood beside the machine. She was in the middle of saying something. Lily listened as hard as she could. “…and I’ve been able to combine the Hoffmans and van Kleef X-ray with the Lumière cinematograph to create the device,” she explained to Madame, as she fiddled with various dials and switches on the machine’s control panel. “I call it the X-ray-cinematograph.”

  The machine hummed, making a terrible atonal purring noise that echoed around the tiled room. Lily could barely understand what any of this meant, but the machine itself felt bad to her, as if it was emitting waves of pulsing, repellent energy that Lily could sense even through the door.

  “I thought you said you were having trouble with it?” Madame said.

  “Oh, it works fine now,” Dr Droz assured her. “And it’s relatively simple to operate. Let me show you… First, you adjust the conducting rod.” She wound a handle on an outer panel. “Then turn it on with the switch, here.” Droz pushed a button. “And it’s ready to use.”

  Lily heard a click of engaging clockwork. The horrible whine that had been emanating from the machine’s guts ratcheted up a notch, and she felt her own guts drop in terror at the sound.

  Madame leaned forward to inspect the machine. She seemed pleased with the invention. “Très bien,” she told Dr Droz. “You’ve done a marvellous job.”

  “The patient to be X-rayed is placed here.” The doctor ran her hand inside the coffin-shaped compartment. “Above them is a lens that will focus the X-ray image through this box here.” She tapped the far end of the machine. “Which will then project the tiny image through the front lens, much like a pinhole camera. But I’ve adjusted the standard so that, instead of making a photographic plate, the cinematograph projects a live moving image out of the lens directly onto a screen.”

  Madame ran a hand across the machine. “And we can use this now, in the circus show?”

  The doctor nodded. “It will be a spectacular debut that will get people talking. Something new to the audience. Most have never seen an X-ray before, or a moving image. The two together will jolt them from their seats.”

  “A magnifique combination,” Madame said.

  “And,” said the doctor, “it will expose the inner workings of the Cogheart. Nature and machine working in unison, which will prove to everyone that hybrids are a viable and worthy area of study.”

  “People will come especially to see it,” Madame added. “It will be the highlight of
our show – the entire city will bear witness to it, and soon money and fame will flood in through the doors of our little circus!”

  The doctor flicked a switch on the other side of the machine. Immediately, lightning flickered from a copper rod that ran down the machine’s centre, crackling off a metal plate and running through a glass tube, lighting up the gas inside. This threw out an eerie green glow that illuminated the room at short, steady intervals, pouring across the women’s faces and throwing their shadows against the walls.

  The sight made Lily squirm. She watched through the keyhole as the little shaft of lightning flickered between the rod and the plate of the machine, and thought of the terrible lightning storm she and Robert had survived on the Thames earlier in the summer – how frightened she had been that the lightning would hit her and how it could have destroyed her heart if it hadn’t hit Jack Door instead. Could this machine do the same? Would it reveal her heart but destroy it at the same time?

  Dr Droz put an apple inside the coffin beneath a large glass magnifying lens. The lightning crackled, there was a smell of burning dust, and then from the pinhole came a flickering negative, black-and-white picture which was projected onto the wall opposite.

  The X-ray image showed the inside of the fruit, filled with seeds.

  Madame clapped her hands together in joy.

  “It works!” she cried. “With this machine, Lily will be the pièce de résistance. Our masterpiece.”

  Lily stared at the ghostly image of the apple. Its grey skin was shrivelling slowly in plain sight. If the X-ray-cinematograph did that to an apple, then surely it would do the same to her? She felt sick.

  “I’m afraid with multiple exposures to this machine the girl will likely not live long,” Droz admitted.

  “How long?” Madame asked.

  “I’d estimate about six months.”

  “That’s long enough for us to make our fortunes.”

  “And for me to find out everything I need to know about the workings of her heart,” Dr Droz agreed.

  The image on the screen flickered and the bright light of the projector went out. Droz’s eyes turned to the door and, before Lily had a chance to react, she walked over and opened it to reveal Lily crouched on the other side.

  “One never hears good things eavesdropping at keyholes, Lily,” she said. “Now you know what we have planned for you tomorrow night.”

  “My papa will come for me,” Lily said. “The gendarmes will have got a telegram to him. He’s sure to be in France by tomorrow, and when he finds me, either here or at the Skycircus, you will be arrested.”

  “It’s too late for that now,” Dr Droz said.

  “The world is waiting for you, Lily,” Madame added.

  Lily was about to reply when there was a knock at the door.

  It was Mr Creaks, bearing an envelope on a silver platter. “A wire has come,” he said in a low monotone.

  “Read it out then, Creaks,” Dr Droz commanded.

  Creaks opened the envelope and began to read.

  “The police searched the circus and found nothing, stop. We’re in the clear, stop.”

  “Ah, splendid!” Madame exclaimed, clapping her hands together. “Did you hear that, Lily? The show will go on after all!”

  Then Lily knew with a giddy certainty that Madame was right. Their plan would play out to the bitter end, and if anyone was going to save her friends and stop it, it would have to be her.

  Robert, Malkin and Angelique sat together on the dirty floor of the abandoned pharmacy, hoping and waiting for Lily’s return. The others had all fallen asleep on a pile of old blankets under a workbench in the far corner, so the three of them were the only ones who heard the commotion in the hallway before Lily was thrust through the door.

  She collapsed next to them, ashen-faced, her eyes red from blinking away the tears. “The police found nothing suspicious at the circus,” she said. “Madame and the others are taking us back later, when the coast’s clear. Along with the X-ray machine.” Fear prickled in her chest. “I wish Papa was here to stop all this,” she blurted out. “The thought of being forced into that terrible machine of Dr Droz’s…” She couldn’t hold her sadness in any longer, and burst out crying. “They’re going to put me in it during the show, Robert,” she sobbed. “I’ve seen it – and it’s so dangerous it might kill me.”

  Robert placed a steadying hand on her shoulder. “It’ll be all right,” he said. “We’ll come up with a plan.”

  Malkin jumped up on her lap and licked her face. Lily sniffled and wiped her eyes. “What plan? Madame took everything when she caught us. The lock picks, your note, even my pocket watch. All I have left is these.” She took out the few remaining pages of Mama’s notebook and the two teaspoons she’d stolen earlier and showed them to him.

  “They might come in handy,” Robert said.

  “Very.” Malkin snorted. “If we decide to have a tea break or do some reading in the next few hours.”

  “Malkin’s right,” Lily said. “They’re useless.”

  Robert shook his head. “No, we’ll think of something.”

  Angelique shifted uncomfortably and folded her wings behind her.

  “Maybe you should rest, Lily?” she suggested.

  “I’m too churned up inside,” Lily replied. “I can’t think straight. I’ve no ideas left. Madame’s always one step ahead. I don’t know how I’m going to save myself, or the rest of you, and I don’t think I can sleep for worry.”

  “Panic never solves a problem,” Angelique said. “Answers will come, I promise. Think of something else,” she suggested. “Why don’t you tell me the rest of the tale of Icarus?”

  “What about it?”

  “When you stopped he’d plunged into the ocean and I never got to find out what happened next.”

  “There was no next. That was the end,” Lily said. “He drowned. That’s it.”

  Angelique shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s just one ending. That’s the beauty of stories – they’re like clay, you can mould them into whatever shape you like. They don’t always have to be the same. They can change.”

  Lily leaned towards her. “No matter what words are written on the page?” she asked.

  Angelique nodded. “If they’re stories for telling out loud,” she said, “then who’s to say what the words are? You can rewrite the ending. Like with your mama. It’s not her notebook that’s her legacy, Lily, but you. Through you she lives on, and so does her story.”

  Lily sat up straighter. “But this story…it’s been the same for thousands of years, so it must be right. You can’t go changing stories like that, can you? Tweaking them as you see fit? Things are as they are.”

  “No, Lily, things are as you choose to see them.”

  “Who taught you that?” Lily asked.

  “You did, when you forgave my betrayal. And when you opened the door to our cell, you gave us another choice – to go with you, or to stay in our prison.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a choice any more,” Lily said.

  “It is,” Angelique told her. “You made me see what our choices truly are. That even if they lock us up, if we’re free in here –” she put a hand to her chest – “if we’re free in our hearts, they can never truly imprison us.”

  “You could be right,” Lily said. But she still wasn’t sure. Everything over the last few days had confused her, and she was so tired and afraid. Robert and Malkin were slumped down beside her and looked like they’d given up too. Only Angelique’s deep brown eyes still contained a tiny flicker of hope.

  “So what do you think happened next in Icarus’s story?” Lily asked her.

  “I think Icarus was rescued from the water by—”

  “Fishermen?” Deedee suggested. It appeared she’d woken up and had been listening in on their conversation.

  “Who nursed him back to health,” Luca added. He was also awake, sitting up next to Deedee.

/>   “Icarus got well again, in their village,” Angelique said, opening her wings wide like a feathered blanket around them all, and then Lily saw that Silva and Dimitri were awake too and listening. “But he never forgot his father,” Angelique said. “And one day he decided he would go and look for him.”

  “Daedalus could’ve been anywhere,” Lily said. “He thought his son had drowned, but he couldn’t even stop to mourn Icarus until he reached land on the far side of the ocean.”

  “Icarus imagined his papa had gone home,” Angelique said. “To their old house, where they used to live.”

  At this, Lily thought of Brackenbridge Manor, and her own papa waiting for her, and how much he must be missing her. She hoped he was on his way. She took a deep breath before she continued the story.

  “His old home was a long way across the Mediterranean,” she said. “Icarus would need a proper ship to sail so far, or some other way of travelling… But the fishermen wouldn’t let him go. They thought he was a miracle when he’d fallen from the sky. He’d brought them luck, fish and money, after a long period of hunger. So they tried to keep him prisoner.”

  “But he was the son of an inventor,” Robert said. “He’d watched his papa make the wings in the first place.”

  “That’s right,” Angelique said. “They’d defeated one prison together and so Icarus knew he could defeat another.”

  “He’d been his papa’s apprentice so long,” Robert said, “helping out on bits of construction, he found he could probably make wings himself from memory, to fly high again like he had with his da.”

  Lily realized everyone was working together now to tell the story. “The only thing stopping Icarus,” she said, “was that last time the wings had almost killed him. He’d flown too close to the sun and they’d melted. A risk like that can be deadly.”

  Angelique nodded; she knew such things from her own experience. “But not always,” she said. “Failure, especially a big failure – and surviving it – that can make you stronger. You learn from your mistakes. You make better plans. The bigger the mistake, the stronger you become. You come out the other side and, if it’s bad enough, you adjust your path and never make that mistake again.”