Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE DEPARTURE OF MISS FINCH

To begin at the end: I arranged the thin slice of pickled ginger, pink and translucent, on top of the pale yellowtail flesh, and dipped the whole arrangement-ginger, fish, and vinegared rice-into the soy sauce, flesh-side down; then I devoured it in a couple of bites.

“I think we ought to go to the police,” I said.

“And tell them what, exactly?” asked Jane.

“Well, we could file a missing persons report, or something. I don’t know.”

“And where did you last see the young lady?” asked Jonathan, in his most policemanlike tones. “Ah, I see. Did you know that wasting police time is normally considered an offense, sir?”

“But the whole circus…”

“These are transient persons, sir, of legal age. They come and go. If you have their names, I suppose I can take a report…”

I gloomily ate a salmon skin roll. “Well, then,” I said, “why don’t we go to the papers?”

“Brilliant idea,” said Jonathan, in the sort of tone of voice which indicates that the person talking doesn’t think it’s a brilliant idea at all.

“Jonathan’s right,” said Jane. “They won’t listen to us.”

“Why wouldn’t they believe us? We’re reliable. Honest citizens. All that.”

“You’re a fantasy writer,” she said. “You make up stuff like this for a living. No one’s going to believe you.”

“But you two saw it all as well. You’d back me up.”

“Jonathan’s got a new series on cult horror movies coming out in the autumn. They’ll say he’s just trying to get cheap publicity for the show. And I’ve got another book coming out. Same thing.”

“So you’re saying that we can’t tell anyone?” I sipped my green tea.

“No,” Jane said, reasonably, “we can tell anyone we want. It’s making them believe us that’s problematic. Or, if you ask me, impossible.”

The pickled ginger was sharp on my tongue. “You may be right,” I said. “And Miss Finch is probably much happier wherever she is right now than she would be here.”

“But her name isn’t Miss Finch,” said Jane, “it’s-” and she said our former companion’s real name.

“I know. But it’s what I thought when I first saw her,” I explained. “Like in one of those movies. You know. When they take off their glasses and put down their hair. ‘Why, Miss Finch. You’re beautiful.’”

“She certainly was that,” said Jonathan, “in the end, anyway.” And he shivered at the memory.

There. So now you know: that’s how it all ended, and how the three of us left it, several years ago. All that remains is the beginning, and the details.

For the record, I don’t expect you to believe any of this. Not really. I’m a liar by trade, after all; albeit, I like to think, an honest liar. If I belonged to a gentlemen’s club I’d recount it over a glass or two of port late in the evening as the fire burned low, but I am a member of no such club, and I’ll write it better than ever I’d tell it. So here you will learn of Miss Finch (whose name, as you already know, was not Finch, nor anything like it, since I’m changing names here to disguise the guilty) and how it came about that she was unable to join us for sushi. Believe it or not, just as you wish. I am not even certain that I believe it anymore. It all seems such a long way away.

I could find a dozen beginnings. Perhaps it might be best to begin in a hotel room, in London, a few years ago. It was 11:00 AM. The phone began to ring, which surprised me. I hurried over to answer it.

“Hello?” It was too early in the morning for anyone in America to be phoning me, and there was no one in England who was meant to know that I was even in the country.

“Hi,” said a familiar voice, adopting an American accent of monumentally unconvincing proportions. “This is Hiram P. Muzzle-dexter of Colossal Pictures. We’re working on a film that’s a remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark but instead of Nazis it has women with enormous knockers in it. We’ve heard that you were astonishingly well supplied in the trouser department and might be willing to take on the part of our male lead, Minnesota Jones…”

“Jonathan?” I said. “How on earth did you find me here?”

“You knew it was me,” he said, aggrieved, his voice losing all trace of the improbable accent and returning to his native London.

“Well, it sounded like you,” I pointed out. “Anyway, you didn’t answer my question. No one’s meant to know that I was here.”

“I have my ways,” he said, not very mysteriously. “Listen, if Jane and I were to offer to feed you sushi-something I recall you eating in quantities that put me in mind of feeding time at London Zoo’s Walrus House-and if we offered to take you to the theater before we fed you, what would you say?”

“Not sure. I’d say ‘Yes’ I suppose. Or ‘What’s the catch?’ I might say that.”

“Not exactly a catch,” said Jonathan. “I wouldn’t exactly call it a catch. Not a real catch. Not really.”

“You’re lying, aren’t you?”

Somebody said something near the phone, and then Jonathan said, “Hang on, Jane wants a word.” Jane is Jonathan’s wife.

“How are you?” she said.

“Fine, thanks.”

“Look,” she said, “you’d be doing us a tremendous favor-not that we wouldn’t love to see you, because we would, but you see, there’s someone…”

“She’s your friend,” said Jonathan, in the background.

“She’s not my friend. I hardly know her,” she said, away from the phone, and then, to me, “Um, look, there’s someone we’re sort of lumbered with. She’s not in the country for very long, and I wound up agreeing to entertain her and look after her tomorrow night. She’s pretty frightful, actually. And Jonathan heard that you were in town from someone at your film company, and we thought you might be perfect to make it all less awful, so please say yes.”

So I said yes.

In retrospect, I think the whole thing might have been the fault of the late Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. I had read an article the previous month, in which Ian Fleming had advised any would-be writer who had a book to get done that wasn’t getting written to go to a hotel to write it. I had, not a novel, but a film script that wasn’t getting written; so I bought a plane ticket to London, promised the film company that they’d have a finished script in three weeks’ time, and took a room in an eccentric hotel in Little Venice.

I told no one in England that I was there. Had people known, my days and nights would have been spent seeing them, not staring at a computer screen and, sometimes, writing.

Truth to tell, I was bored half out of my mind and ready to welcome any interruption.

Early the next evening I arrived at Jonathan and Jane’s house, which was more or less in Hampstead. There was a small green sports car parked outside. Up the stairs, and I knocked at the door. Jonathan answered it; he wore an impressive suit. His light brown hair was longer than I remembered it from the last time I had seen him, in life or on television.

“Hello,” said Jonathan. “The show we were going to take you to has been canceled. But we can go to something else, if that’s okay with you.”

I was about to point out that I didn’t know what we were originally going to see, so a change of plans would make no difference to me, but Jonathan was already leading me into the living room, establishing that I wanted fizzy water to drink, assuring me that we’d still be eating sushi and that Jane would be coming downstairs as soon as she had put the children to bed.

They had just redecorated the living room, in a style Jonathan described as Moorish brothel. “It didn’t set out to be a Moorish brothel,” he explained. “Or any kind of a brothel really. It was just where we ended up. The brothel look.”

“Has he told you all about Miss Finch?” asked Jane. Her hair had been red the last time I had seen her. Now it was dark brown; and she curved like a Raymond Chandler simile.

“Who?”

“We were talking about Ditko’s inking style,” apologized Jonathan. “And the Neal Adams issues of Jerry Lewis.”

“But she’ll be here any moment. And he has to know about her before she gets here.”

Jane is, by profession, a journalist, but had become a best-selling author almost by accident. She had written a companion volume to accompany a television series about two paranormal investigators, which had risen to the top of the best-seller lists and stayed there.

Jonathan had originally become famous hosting an evening talk show, and had since parlayed his gonzo charm into a variety of fields. He’s the same person whether the camera is on or off, which is not always true of television folk.

“It’s a kind of family obligation,” Jane explained. “Well, not exactly family.”

“She’s Jane’s friend,” said her husband, cheerfully.

“She is not my friend. But I couldn’t exactly say no to them, could I? And she’s only in the country for a couple of days.”

And who Jane could not say no to, and what the obligation was, I never was to learn, for at the moment the doorbell rang, and I found myself being introduced to Miss Finch. Which, as I have mentioned, was not her name.

She wore a black leather cap, and a black leather coat, and had black, black hair, pulled tightly back into a small bun, done up with a pottery tie. She wore makeup, expertly applied to give an impression of severity that a professional dominatrix might have envied. Her lips were tight together, and she glared at the world through a pair of definite black-rimmed spectacles-they punctuated her face much too definitely to ever be mere glasses.

“So,” she said, as if she were pronouncing a death sentence, “we’re going to the theater, then.”

“Well, yes and no,” said Jonathan. “I mean, yes, we are still going out, but we’re not going to be able to see The Romans in Britain.”

“Good,” said Miss Finch. “In poor taste anyway. Why anyone would have thought that nonsense would make a musical I do not know.”

“So we’re going to a circus,” said Jane, reassuringly. “And then we’re going to eat sushi.”

Miss Finch’s lips tightened. “I do not approve of circuses,” she said.

“There aren’t any animals in this circus,” said Jane.

“Good,” said Miss Finch, and she sniffed. I was beginning to understand why Jane and Jonathan had wanted me along.

The rain was pattering down as we left the house, and the street was dark. We squeezed ourselves into the sports car and headed out into London. Miss Finch and I were in the backseat of the car, pressed uncomfortably close together.

Jane told Miss Finch that I was a writer, and told me that Miss Finch was a biologist.

“Biogeologist actually,” Miss Finch corrected her. “Were you serious about eating sushi, Jonathan?”

“Er, yes. Why? Don’t you like sushi?”

“Oh, I’ll eat my food cooked,” she said, and began to list for us all the various flukes, worms, and parasites that lurk in the flesh of fish and which are only killed by cooking. She told us of their life cycles while the rain pelted down, slicking night-time London into garish neon colors. Jane shot me a sympathetic glance from the passenger seat, then she and Jonathan went back to scrutinizing a handwritten set of directions to wherever we were going. We crossed the Thames at London Bridge while Miss Finch lectured us about blindness, madness, and liver failure; and she was just elaborating on the symptoms of elephantiasis as proudly as if she had invented them herself when we pulled up in a small back street in the neighborhood of Southwark Cathedral.

“So where’s the circus?” I asked.

“Somewhere around here,” said Jonathan. “They contacted us about being on the Christmas special. I tried to pay for tonight’s show, but they insisted on comping us in.”

“I’m sure it will be fun,” said Jane, hopefully.

Miss Finch sniffed.

A fat, bald man, dressed as a monk, ran down the pavement toward us. “There you are!” he said. “I’ve been keeping an eye out for you. You’re late. It’ll be starting in a moment.” He turned around and scampered back the way he had come, and we followed him. The rain splashed on his bald head and ran down his face, turning his Fester Addams makeup into streaks of white and brown. He pushed open a door in the side of a wall.

“In here.”

We went in. There were about fifty people in there already, dripping and steaming, while a tall woman in bad vampire makeup holding a flashlight walked around checking tickets, tearing off stubs, selling tickets to anyone who didn’t have one. A small, stocky woman immediately in front of us shook the rain from her umbrella and glowered about her fiercely. “This’d better be gud,” she told the young man with her-her son, I suppose. She paid for tickets for both of them.

The vampire woman reached us, recognized Jonathan and said, “Is this your party? Four people? Yes? You’re on the guest list,” which provoked another suspicious stare from the stocky woman.

A recording of a clock ticking began to play. A clock struck twelve (it was barely eight by my watch), and the wooden double doors at the far end of the room creaked open. “Enter…of your own free will!” boomed a voice, and it laughed maniacally. We walked through the door into darkness.

It smelled of wet bricks and of decay. I knew then where we were: there are networks of old cellars that run beneath some of the overground train tracks-vast, empty, linked rooms of various sizes and shapes. Some of them are used for storage by wine merchants and used-car sellers; some are squatted in, until the lack of light and facilities drives the squatters back into the daylight; most of them stand empty, waiting for the inevitable arrival of the wrecking ball and the open air and the time when all their secrets and mysteries will be no more.

A train rattled by above us.

We shuffled forward, led by Uncle Fester and the vampire woman, into a sort of a holding pen where we stood and waited.

“I hope we’re going to be able to sit down after this,” said Miss Finch.

When we were all settled the flashlights went out, and the spotlights went on.

The people came out. Some of them rode motorbikes and dune buggies. They ran and they laughed and they swung and they cackled. Whoever had dressed them had been reading too many comics, I thought, or watched Mad Max too many times. There were punks and nuns and vampires and monsters and strippers and the living dead.

They danced and capered around us while the ringmaster-identifiable by his top hat-sang Alice Cooper’s song “Welcome to My Nightmare,” and sang it very badly.

“I know Alice Cooper,” I muttered to myself, misquoting something half-remembered, “and you, sir, are no Alice Cooper.”

“It’s pretty naff,” agreed Jonathan.

Jane shushed us. As the last notes faded away the ringmaster was left alone in the spotlight. He walked around our enclosure while he talked.

“Welcome, welcome, one and all, to the Theater of Night’s Dreaming,” he said.

“Fan of yours,” whispered Jonathan.

“I think it’s a Rocky Horror Show line,” I whispered back.

“Tonight you will all be witnesses to monsters undreamed-of, freaks and creatures of the night, to displays of ability to make you shriek with fear-and laugh with joy. We shall travel,” he told us, “from room to room-and in each of these subterranean caverns another nightmare, another delight, another display of wonder awaits you! Please-for your own safety-I must reiterate this!-Do not leave the spectating area marked out for you in each room-on pain of doom, bodily injury, and the loss of your immortal soul! Also, I must stress that the use of flash photography or of any recording devices is utterly forbidden.”

And with that, several young women holding pencil flashlights led us into the next room.

“No seats then,” said Miss Finch, unimpressed.

The First Room

In the first room a smiling blonde woman wearing a spangled bikini, with needle tracks down her arms, was chained by a hunchback and Uncle Fester to a large wheel.

The wheel spun slowly around, and a fat man in a red cardinal’s costume threw knives at the woman, outlining her body. Then the hunchback blindfolded the cardinal, who threw the last three knives straight and true to outline the woman’s head. He removed his blindfold. The woman was untied and lifted down from the wheel. They took a bow. We clapped.

Then the cardinal took a trick knife from his belt and pretended to cut the woman’s throat with it. Blood spilled down from the knife blade. A few members of the audience gasped, and one excitable girl gave a small scream, while her friends giggled.

The cardinal and the spangled woman took their final bow. The lights went down. We followed the flashlights down a brick-lined corridor.

The Second Room

The smell of damp was worse in here; it smelled like a cellar, musty and forgotten. I could hear somewhere the drip of rain. The ringmaster introduced the Creature-“Stitched together in the laboratories of the night, the Creature is capable of astonishing feats of strength.” The Frankenstein’s monster makeup was less than convincing, but the Creature lifted a stone block with fat Uncle Fester sitting on it, and he held back the dune buggy (driven by the vampire woman) at full throttle. For his piece de resistance he blew up a hot-water bottle, then popped it.

“Roll on the sushi,” I muttered to Jonathan.

Miss Finch pointed out, quietly, that in addition to the danger of parasites, it was also the case that bluefin tuna, swordfish, and Chilean sea bass were all being overfished and could soon be rendered extinct, since they were not reproducing fast enough to catch up.

The Third Room

went up for a long way into the darkness. The original ceiling had been removed at some time in the past, and the new ceiling was the roof of the empty warehouse far above us. The room buzzed at the corners of vision with the blue-purple of ultraviolet light. Teeth and shirts and flecks of lint began to glow in the darkness. A low, throbbing music began. We looked up to see, high above us, a skeleton, an alien, a werewolf, and an angel. Their costumes fluoresced in the UV, and they glowed like old dreams high above us, on trapezes. They swung back and forth, in time with the music, and then, as one, they let go and tumbled down toward us.

We gasped, but before they reached us they bounced on the air, and rose up again, like yo-yos, and clambered back on their trapezes. We realized that they were attached to the roof by rubber cords, invisible in the darkness, and they bounced and dove and swam through the air above us while we clapped and gasped and watched them in happy silence.

The Fourth Room

was little more than a corridor: the ceiling was low, and the ringmaster strutted into the audience and picked two people out of the crowd-the stocky woman and a tall black man wearing a sheepskin coat and tan gloves-pulling them up in front of us. He announced that he would be demonstrating his hypnotic powers. He made a couple of passes in the air and rejected the stocky woman. Then he asked the man to step up onto a box.

“It’s a setup,” muttered Jane. “He’s a plant.”

A guillotine was wheeled on. The ringmaster cut a watermelon in half, to demonstrate how sharp the blade was. Then he made the man put his hand under the guillotine, and dropped the blade. The gloved hand dropped into the basket, and blood spurted from the open cuff.

Miss Finch squeaked.

Then the man picked his hand out of the basket and chased the Ringmaster around us, while the Benny Hill Show music played.

“Artificial hand,” said Jonathan.

“I saw it coming,” said Jane.

Miss Finch blew her nose into a tissue. “I think it’s all in very questionable taste,” she said. Then they led us to

The Fifth Room

and all the lights went on. There was a makeshift wooden table along one wall, with a young bald man selling beer and orange juice and bottles of water, and signs showed the way to the toilets in the room next door. Jane went to get the drinks, and Jonathan went to use the toilets, which left me to make awkward conversation with Miss Finch.

“So,” I said, “I understand you’ve not been back in England long.”

“I’ve been in Komodo,” she told me. “Studying the dragons. Do you know why they grew so big?”

“Er…”

“They adapted to prey upon the pygmy elephants.”

“There were pygmy elephants?” I was interested. This was much more fun than being lectured on sushi flukes.

“Oh yes. It’s basic island biogeology-animals will naturally tend toward either gigantism or pygmyism. There are equations, you see…” As Miss Finch talked her face became more animated, and I found myself warming to her as she explained why and how some animals grew while others shrank.

Jane brought us our drinks; Jonathan came back from the toilet, cheered and bemused by having been asked to sign an autograph while he was pissing.

“Tell me,” said Jane, “I’ve been reading a lot of cryptozoological journals for the next of the Guides to the Unexplained I’m doing. As a biologist-”

“Biogeologist,” interjected Miss Finch.

“Yes. What do you think the chances are of prehistoric animals being alive today, in secret, unknown to science?”

“It’s very unlikely,” said Miss Finch, as if she were telling us off. “There is, at any rate, no ‘Lost World’ off on some island, filled with mammoths and Smilodons and aepyornis…”

“Sounds a bit rude,” said Jonathan. “A what?”

“Aepyornis. A giant flightless prehistoric bird,” said Jane.

“I knew that really,” he told her.

“Although of course, they’re not prehistoric,” said Miss Finch. “The last aepyornises were killed off by Portuguese sailors on Madagascar about three hundred years ago. And there are fairly reliable accounts of a pygmy mammoth being presented at the Russian court in the sixteenth century, and a band of something which from the descriptions we have were almost definitely some kind of saber-tooth-the Smilodon-brought in from North Africa by Vespasian to die in the circus. So these things aren’t all prehistoric. Often, they’re historic.”

“I wonder what the point of the saber teeth would be,” I said. “You’d think they’d get in the way.”

“Nonsense,” said Miss Finch. “Smilodon was a most efficient hunter. Must have been-the saber teeth are repeated a number of times in the fossil record. I wish with all my heart that there were some left today. But there aren’t. We know the world too well.”

“It’s a big place,” said Jane, doubtfully, and then the lights were flickered on and off, and a ghastly, disembodied voice told us to walk into the next room, that the latter half of the show was not for the faint of heart, and that later tonight, for one night only, the Theater of Night’s Dreaming would be proud to present the Cabinet of Wishes Fulfill’d.

We threw away our plastic glasses, and we shuffled into

The Sixth Room

“Presenting,” announced the ringmaster, “The Painmaker!”

The spotlight swung up to reveal an abnormally thin young man in bathing trunks, hanging from hooks through his nipples. Two of the punk girls helped him down to the ground, and handed him his props. He hammered a six-inch nail into his nose, lifted weights with a piercing through his tongue, put several ferrets into his bathing trunks, and, for his final trick, allowed the taller of the punk girls to use his stomach as a dartboard for accurately flung hypodermic needles.

“Wasn’t he on the show, years ago?” asked Jane.

“Yeah,” said Jonathan. “Really nice guy. He lit a firework held in his teeth.”

“I thought you said there were no animals,” said Miss Finch. “How do you think those poor ferrets feel about being stuffed into that young man’s nether regions?”

“I suppose it depends mostly on whether they’re boy ferrets or girl ferrets,” said Jonathan, cheerfully.

The Seventh Room

contained a rock-and-roll comedy act, with some clumsy slapstick. A nun’s breasts were revealed, and the hunchback lost his trousers.

The Eighth Room

was dark. We waited in the darkness for something to happen. I wanted to sit down. My legs ached, I was tired and cold, and I’d had enough.

Then someone started to shine a light at us. We blinked and squinted and covered our eyes.

“Tonight,” an odd voice said, cracked and dusty. Not the ringmaster, I was sure of that. “Tonight, one of you shall get a wish. One of you will gain all that you desire, in the Cabinet of Wishes Fulfill’d. Who shall it be?”

“Ooh. At a guess, another plant in the audience,” I whispered, remembering the one-handed man in the fourth room.

“Shush,” said Jane.

“Who will it be? You sir? You madam?” A figure came out of the darkness and shambled toward us. It was hard to see him properly, for he held a portable spotlight. I wondered if he were wearing some kind of ape costume, for his outline seemed inhuman, and he moved as gorillas move. Perhaps it was the man who played the Creature. “Who shall it be, eh?” We squinted at him, edged out of his way.

And then he pounced. “Aha! I think we have our volunteer,” he said, leaping over the rope barrier that separated the audience from the show area around us. Then he grabbed Miss Finch by the hand.

“I really don’t think so,” said Miss Finch, but she was being dragged away from us, too nervous, too polite, fundamentally too English to make a scene. She was pulled into the darkness, and she was gone to us.

Jonathan swore. “I don’t think she’s going to let us forget this in a hurry,” he said.

The lights went on. A man dressed as a giant fish then proceeded to ride a motorbike around the room several times. Then he stood up on the seat as it went around. Then he sat down and drove the bike up and down the walls of the room, and then he hit a brick and skidded and fell over, and the bike landed on top of him.

The hunchback and the topless nun ran on and pulled the bike off the man in the fish-suit and hauled him away.

“I just broke my sodding leg,” he was saying, in a dull, numb voice. “It’s sodding broken. My sodding leg,” as they carried him out.

“Do you think that was meant to happen?” asked a girl in the crowd near to us.

“No,” said the man beside her.

Slightly shaken, Uncle Fester and the vampire woman ushered us forward, into

The Ninth Room

where Miss Finch awaited us.

It was a huge room. I knew that, even in the thick darkness. Perhaps the dark intensifies the other senses; perhaps it’s simply that we are always processing more information than we imagine. Echoes of our shuffling and coughing came back to us from walls hundreds of feet away.

And then I became convinced, with a certainty bordering upon madness, that there were great beasts in the darkness, and that they were watching us with hunger.

Slowly the lights came on, and we saw Miss Finch. I wonder to this day where they got the costume.

Her black hair was down. The spectacles were gone. The costume, what little there was of it, fitted her perfectly. She held a spear, and she stared at us without emotion. Then the great cats padded into the light next to her. One of them threw its head back and roared.

Someone began to wail. I could smell the sharp animal stench of urine.

The animals were the size of tigers, but unstriped; they were the color of a sandy beach at evening. Their eyes were topaz, and their breath smelled of fresh meat and of blood.

I stared at their jaws: the saber teeth were indeed teeth, not tusks: huge, overgrown fangs, made for rending, for tearing, for ripping meat from the bone.

The great cats began to pad around us, circling slowly. We huddled together, closing ranks, each of us remembering in our guts what it was like in the old times, when we hid in our caves when the night came and the beasts went on the prowl; remembering when we were prey.

The Smilodons, if that was what they were, seemed uneasy, wary. Their tails switched whiplike from side to side impatiently. Miss Finch said nothing. She just stared at her animals.

Then the stocky woman raised her umbrella and waved it at one of the great cats. “Keep back, you ugly brute,” she told it.

It growled at her and tensed back, like a cat about to spring.

The stocky woman went pale, but she kept her umbrella pointed out like a sword. She made no move to run in the torchlit darkness beneath the city.

And then it sprang, batting her to the ground with one huge velvet paw. It stood over her, triumphantly, and roared so deeply that I could feel it in the pit of my stomach. The stocky woman seemed to have passed out, which was, I felt, a mercy: with luck, she would not know when the bladelike fangs tore at her old flesh like twin daggers.

I looked around for some way out, but the other tiger was prowling around us, keeping us herded within the rope enclosure, like frightened sheep.

I could hear Jonathan muttering the same three dirty words, over and over and over.

“We’re going to die, aren’t we?” I heard myself say.

“I think so,” said Jane.

Then Miss Finch pushed her way through the rope barrier, and she took the great cat by the scruff of its neck and pulled it back. It resisted, and she thwacked it on the nose with the end of her spear. Its tail went down between its legs, and it backed away from the fallen woman, cowed and obedient.

There was no blood, that I could see, and I hoped that she was only unconscious.

In the back of the cellar room light was slowly coming up. It seemed as if dawn were breaking. I could see a jungle mist wreathing about huge ferns and hostas; and I could hear, as if from a great way off, the chirp of crickets and the call of strange birds awaking to greet the new day.

And part of me-the writer part of me, the bit that has noted the particular way the light hit the broken glass in the puddle of blood even as I staggered out from a car crash, and has observed in exquisite detail the way that my heart was broken, or did not break, in moments of real, profound, personal tragedy-it was that part of me that thought, You could get that effect with a smoke machine, some plants, and a tape track. You’d need a really good lighting guy, of course.

Miss Finch scratched her left breast, unselfconsciously, then she turned her back on us and walked toward the dawn and the jungle underneath the world, flanked by two padding saber-toothed tigers.

A bird screeched and chattered.

Then the dawn light faded back into darkness, and the mists shifted, and the woman and the animals were gone.

The stocky woman’s son helped her to her feet. She opened her eyes. She looked shocked but unhurt. And when we knew that she was not hurt, for she picked up her umbrella, and leaned on it, and glared at us all, why then we began to applaud.

No one came to get us. I could not see Uncle Fester or the vampire woman anywhere. So unescorted we all walked on into

The Tenth Room

It was all set up for what would obviously have been the grand finale. There were even plastic seats arranged, for us to watch the show. We sat down on the seats and we waited, but nobody from the circus came on, and, it became apparent to us all after some time, no one was going to come.

People began to shuffle into the next room. I heard a door open, and the noise of traffic and the rain.

I looked at Jane and Jonathan, and we got up and walked out. In the last room was an unmanned table upon which were laid out souvenirs of the circus: posters and CDs and badges, and an open cash box. Sodium yellow light spilled in from the street outside, through an open door, and the wind gusted at the unsold posters, flapping the corners up and down impatiently.

“Should we wait for her?” one of us said, and I wish I could say that it was me. But the others shook their heads, and we walked out into the rain, which had by now subsided to a low and gusty drizzle.

After a short walk down narrow roads, in the rain and the wind, we found our way to the car. I stood on the pavement, waiting for the back door to be unlocked to let me in, and over the rain and the noise of the city I thought I heard a tiger, for, somewhere close by, there was a low roar that made the whole world shake. But perhaps it was only the passage of a train.