11

Helene was sure that her face would split from smiling. At the end of her last dance she had a sheen of sweat over her nose and her right arm was tired to death from being held upright, but she couldn't remember she last time she'd been this sort of happy. The string quartet next began a little sonata, and as the crowd dispersed around the square to talk and drink, she too pulled away to the side, positively flush. Corpses tipped their hats to her from across the area, and she surprised herself over and over by curtseying in response. She'd never made a willful curtsey before in her life.

"Sweetie!" cried the dead woman named Dottie, stumbling up with a gin in one hand and Bonejangles' arm in the other. "Oh, darling." She dropped the arm to give the girl a weepy hug, and it clattered on the ground before its owner loped up to retrieve it, looking only mildly inconvenienced. "This has been b-beautiful," Dottie sobbed, her heavy makeup beginning to smear. "You can't know how much… how much th-this…" She hiccupped and pulled away with a hand over her mouth. Bonejangles looked on impassively.

"It's been lovely, really," Helene said, taking the dead woman's hands. Hours ago she wouldn't have imagined making such a personal gesture toward anyone, much less a corpse. It felt like there must be some kind of magic in the air here. "Both of you. I can't remember enjoying myself so much."

"Damn right," said the skeleton, tilting his eyeball into the other socket. "No one throws a party like me n' the boys."

"Ohh, hush, now, it was hardly all you," Dottie fussed, brushing at him. He ambled away with a shrug and she looked back to Helene, still whisking at her eyes. "How long will you stay, darling? There are ever so many gowns I could put you in."

"Actually…" Helene wrung her hands a bit, wishing that she could have relayed the information secondhand. "I don't think I can stay much longer at all. Really, this time." It must have been near to two o'clock in the morning. "I won't be allowed outside until Christmas if they notice I've gone."

The woman sighed dramatically with a hand over her heart, but said, "I understand, dear thing. And it's a good thing to know you'd be so missed." She fluffed her feather boa and tried to straighten up. "I hope we will see you again next year, at least."

The thought hadn't even occurred to her. "I'd love to," she said, and in her mind's eye saw herself at the center of a ballroom floor again – in purple this time, perhaps, purple trimmed in gold. But she pushed the thought away, remembering that she wasn't the sort of girl to fantasize about dresses. As Dottie turned away, she asked her, "Have you seen my father?"

"I'm sorry, dear?" the woman said. "Not in a while, I'm afraid." Helene frowned as she was left alone, but decided not to let it bother her. Surely, he'd show up again before the hour was out.

Now, though a part of her never wanted to leave, she knew it was time to go home again, and in thinking things through she decided that she had no desire to make a production of it. Let the evening end on a good and peaceful note; in all likelihood they'd never notice her gone. She walked slowly around the back of the pub in her ball gown and climbed the stairs there one at a time, determined not to muss the dress any more than necessary. The steps rose up and up onto the rooftops, where an entire small city of its own seemed to have once been built, full of tiny bridges between close buildings and doorways into bright little rooms, still lit well into the middle of the night. As she was crossing a small path between the pub's rooftop and its neighbor's, she stopped and turned her head up to the dark sky, with its sheer coat of green light, and promised herself that this wasn't the end. Nothing ended in the Land of the Dead.

There was always next year.

She turned the handle to Dottie's room when she reached it and thought immediately that she'd somehow managed to break something, because from within came a distinct crash and the sound of tearing cloth. Startled, she pushed the door open in entirety and looked about. One of the lamps along the wall was smoking dark and the room had the look of having been lightly shaken, but it was nothing terribly out of place from the bright pink chaos of the last time she'd seen it.

As she stepped inside there sounded a scuttling in the corner, so faint it might have been imagined. She turned to all quarters of the room, but saw nothing. A strange little something was gnawing at her, but she couldn't imagine what could be making her feel so wrong. Strange things just happened on Hallowe'en. Everybody said so.

She stepped into the boudoir to find her clothes still in a heap near the window where they'd been thrown. Simultaneously, she realized that she'd also brought no one up to help her undress, and sighed as she gathered up her shirtwaist, before taking pause.

In the pile beneath the waist lay an envelope. It wasn't large, nor was it sealed, and she might have been mistaken, but the corners looked a bit chewed. She reached down slowly to ease the paper open and draw out the letter within. It was written with a flourish on the fine stationery:

Darling,

I've prepared a surprise for the end of this evening. Join me in the woods west of town, at the amusements. You'll know the place when you see it. Come alone, it is for you only.

Victor

As Helene read the short note, twice and then a third time, every trace of her good sentiment from the evening vanished. Something seemed off, but she didn't have the words to say why. She stood up slowly, twisting a lock of hair around her finger. She had read enough of the penny dreadfuls to take careful note of mysterious letters, and her father didn't seem the type to enter a lady's private boudoir just to deliver one. So what was this strangeness?

Join me in the woods west of town.

This was not right.

She clutched the paper in her hand until it had creased five ways with her fingers. Her heart was beginning to pound with a nervous flutter. What would Mrs. Hall have done? She took her frock coat from the pile and wrapped it around her shoulders, stuffing the note into its pocket and exiting the room again. It was difficult not to trip on her skirt on the way down the stairs, but she was much less concerned now with the state of the gown than she had been going up. Every moment she spent in the dark of the alley before emerging into the square felt like a moment spent with a knife at her back. Many partygoers had retreated back inside with the string quartet, it seemed, but she called out, "Has anyone seen my father?"

Several looked up. "My father," she insisted, turning to a few ladies near the skeletal horse and then around again to a trio of soldiers who'd been sharing a toast. "Victor. Victor Van Dort. Have you seen him?" She was hoping badly that everything would be revealed as a poor joke when he turned up, wondering what all the fuss could be, but the more she asked the less anybody seemed to know.

"Saw him during the waltz," said one man, unhelpfully, because that was the last time she'd seen him as well. She should have kept a better eye out. If fathers couldn't be trusted not to disappear under mysterious circumstances then clearly the responsibility would be on her shoulders in the future.

Inside the pub was no better. The music had caught back up into a swinging baroque piece now, and many patrons had returned to dancing. She could hardly be heard at all. "My father," she tried to insist, over and over, but no one seemed to have anything to say other than to note an admiration for her waltz. Bonejangles was onstage and Dottie was nowhere to be seen. Helene turned desperately in the crowd. "My father!" she called, to anyone who might listen. "Please! He's very tall, have you seen him?"

She turned again, straight into someone's side. "Henry!" she gasped as she looked up, nearly poking her eye out on his enormous nose. He looked as surprised as she was.

"Miss Van Dort!" he said, offering an arm. "Would you like to dance again?"

"Not now," she said desperately, and took his elbow only to pull him toward the door. When they'd reached the corner, she pulled out the letter and nearly crushed it in her shaking hands. "Read this," she said, wrapping herself tightly in her arms. "Please, have you seen my father? Anywhere?"

Henry read the note with a look of bemusement. "It sounds like he's in the woods," he said, as if worried she might be a little slow.

She snatched the paper back, working very hard to not snap. "This doesn't sound like him," she insisted, spreading it out smoothly again against the brick wall and reading it herself once more. Darling? It was too cloying. She couldn't imagine Victor saying any such word, much less to her, but there was another voice in her head from which it seemed to flow easily, slimy and deep. The very thought of it felt like a slug's thin trail inside her ears. "I don't think he wrote it." She looked back up at Henry. "I'm worried something's gone wrong. Will you come with me?"

"Me?" he asked, apparently flabbergasted that anyone would want him around.

She said, "Please." It was a little harder than she'd anticipated, but she was determined not to become weepy. "I think something's happened to him. I don't want to go alone."

Henry looked down at her with a sympathetic expression for a second before saying, "'Course I'll come. If you need me."

Helene cracked back into a smile for a second before realizing that it was an open pathway for tears, and shook her head quickly to clear up. "Thank you," she sniffed, composure as tight as she could make it. She took his hand and pulled him out of the pub into the night. She might have been mistaken, but it almost felt like a breeze was picking up. That didn't seem right for the underworld. The very air felt wrong.

Henry took careful steps to keep pace with her as she marched onward. "You're calling him your father, now," he said. "Does this mean you've worked all through the what-it-was earlier?"

She shot him an irritated glance and sped up as quickly as she could in the skirt, but he still looked earnest. What a time for this. "I knew you could," he said happily.

"Oh hush," she said, and set her eyes set stubbornly toward the dark western hills.


The possibility that her worry might actually be about to ruin a wonderful surprise occurred to Helene as they passed the first line of trees on the path out of town, an unmaintained road overgrown with dead shrubs. She didn't truly believe it, but the nagging prospect remained. The high spindly tree trunks stretched far above them like crows' claws in the sky, and the ground was swaddled in a thick blue mist. Helene found something very disturbing about not being able to see her own feet. Henry seemed equally aware the strange atmosphere; where he had still seemed fairly lighthearted in town, he was quiet now, and noticeably somber.

"He's really in here?" he asked nervously, stepping carefully around a trailing root on the path.

"Someone's in here," she said grimly, following his hop-and-a-skip. "You've really never heard of this place? 'The amusements?'"

"Never," he assured her. "I didn't know there was anything out here at all, but trees." Helene started chewing on the inside of her lip, as she'd been doing a lot of this night. It was starting to go a bit raw.

The further they walked, the darker it got, though there was no foliage to block the thin light of the sky. Rather, the air itself seemed sooty, and ready to swallow them up if they strayed too deep. "Did you hear that?" Henry asked suddenly. She turned around and the crunching of their feet on the ground ceased.

"I don't hear anything," she said after a moment.

"There was something," he said nervously. They took pause, but nothing sounded.

"We should go," she started to say, but Henry hissed suddenly, "Sshh!"

From around a tree was cornering a small shape in the fog, bristly and hunched, like a tiny bear. Helene was caught aghast for a moment before she realized that the figure wasn't an unfamiliar sight at all. "Cat?" she asked quietly.

"Brrwr," came the response from the thing by the tree, and it stepped proudly out of the gloom with its head held high.

Helene dropped to her knees in the mist and the fat tom jumped into her lap. "Oh, Cat!" she cried, wrapping him up in her arms and kissing the top of his head, while he purred. His body had been cold for a while now, and his fur was still crunchy with blood. She bit her lip and whispered, "Oh, I'm so sorry. Poor, poor cat."

While she cuddled him on the ground, Henry looked on. "Your cat?" he asked.

"Not really anybody's cat," she said gently, scratching beneath his chin. "But a very good one nonetheless." Henry bent down to give him a pat, which the tom turned into a rub down the spine by pushing against his hand.

"You're a big fellow," he said, to which the cat made a small noise that sounded like an affirmation.

Helene sniffed a little and kissed him again before standing up. "You really don't have to come along this time," she said gently. "I think you've earned it."

"Mawwr," said the cat. Helene smiled.

"Then you wouldn't know the way to a place called 'the amusements,' would you?"

The cat blinked at her, big-eyed, before hunching and flattening its ears against its head. "Sss," it said, like a warning, and Helene felt her heart sank as she realized that the reaction was a fair justification for her worries.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but I have to." The cat gave her a very long look before sitting up and marching off with its stumpy tail held high. It traveled a few yards before stopping and looking back, clearly waiting for them to move.

"Oh, thank you," Helene said, rushing forward to follow and pulling Henry along with her.

"Prrf," said the cat, and she was quite sure that if cats could roll their eyes, this one would have.

He led them slightly southward from their path, through a deep thicket of trees with high roots and tight trunks. Helene had trouble squeezing through at places in her voluminous skirt; she really ought to have taken the time to change. The going was slow, and the path was long and much better-suited for a cat-sized traveler than a human-sized one. The first sign of what had been called 'the amusements' would have been nearly unnoticeable if Henry hadn't managed to trip over it. While he was climbing back to his feet, Helene crouched down to the small, snapped signpost on the ground. It had no words on it, but a painting of a skeleton pointing to its right. A shiver dropped down her spine. After a night carousing with the dead, she wouldn't have thought the sight of another one could bother her, but something about the little picture was disturbing. The skull didn't have the look of a true eye socket to it; it was too black, and much too deep, and the smile was too wide with too many teeth. She stood up again slowly.

Up ahead, the cat had come to a stop again between two trees. It was not looking back at them, but upward. Helene pushed past the last low branch and stepped up to where the fat tom was sitting, and her jaw dropped.

"What is it?" Henry whispered, stumbling forward himself. When he caught sight of it himself his arms fell straight down to his sides. "Oh my…"

The three of them stood at the edge of a small clearing in the trees. The ground was bare dirt with some dry moss here and there, and not a scrap of vegetation more, either dead or alive. Everything beneath the treetops was nearly too dark to see, but into the sky above them rose the black thin skeleton of the largest Ferris wheel Helene had ever seen in her life. Its base was obscured by the pines to the south, but it must have risen above them two hundred feet or more, set in silhouette against the purple-green sky above. Its cars sat still and quiet, but from somewhere, she thought she could hear something creaking. As she raised her hand to brush a lock of hair out of her face, she realized she was shaking violently.

"Where did it come from?" Henry whispered. She gave him a sidelong glance. "No, really," he said, meeting her gaze with a very worried look. "I've never heard of anyone being out here to make such a thing. Never. Not in stories, not…" He gulped, but there was no use waiting about. Helene wanted badly to be gone as soon as possible. She stepped out, still trembling like a leaf, and the creaking immediately stopped. The clearing, she saw now, seemed to twist off to the right like a snake through the forest, and so she began to follow it. Henry broke out of the trees to follow her and skipped quickly forward to stay by her side. "It's alright," he said, without prompt. "We'll figure this out. It'll be alright." He didn't sound quite convincing, but Helene appreciated the sentiment.

They went around the curve of the clearing and before them saw the second structure of the amusements. The edge of an enormous tent was pushing from between the trees, striped canvas barely clinging to its metal bones. Through the branches along the path were strung lanterns on a wire, as dark and dead as severed heads. A painted archway stretched between the trees, on which only the word "SPECTACLE" was still readable. Helene's feeling of dread was nearly palpable between her fingers.

"…pretty girl…"

She felt the blood in her body freeze as a whisper from the trees touched her ears. She grabbed Henry's wrist, and they both stared out blindly into the deep of the trees.

"Hello?" Helene asked, so bare it was almost a whisper.

"Well, hello," came a woman's voice in response, from where out of the darkness were forming moving shapes. It was a dead man and woman, dressed in ragged finery that caught on the stickley branches around them as they walked. They were both smiling, as skeletons do, but their movements were odd, jerky and jilting, dragging their feet like drunkards. Helene looked to Henry.

"I don't know," he said to her, though she'd asked nothing. "I don't know…" He gulped and stepped in front of Helene protectively. "S-sir?" he called to the approaching shapes. "Ma'am? We're looking for someone. You wouldn't happen to…?"

"Do we?" drawled the woman at the tree line, turning her head to her fellow. Her skull flopped off to the side like a doll's. "Do we know?"

"Do we ever, m'dear," said the man, his voice a thick brogue. "Lookin' fer someone? All the time, we are."

"Could we only remember who 'e was," sighed the woman. "And what a help these two coulda been. Too bad, too bad…"

The both of them were stumbling out of the darkness, arms limp, heads lolling. Henry pressed Helene backward further as she squeezed his bad hand tightly.

"Victor Van Dort," he tried again. "Have you seen him?"

"Ha' we seen, dearest?" asked the man, swiveling his torso to the side sickly. "Ha' we seen at all?"

"Not in much too long," she responded, throwing her head back so her hat flopped clean off. "Oh, but if we did, darling, you'd be the first to know. What celebration to be had!" Within her black eye sockets, something seemed to be moving.

"They're mad," Helene whispered, pulling Henry down the path. "We should go, we -"

"Oh, but don't leave us, please!" cried the lady with sudden focus, stumbling forward tippily like a badly-directed puppet. Helene didn't hesitate a second to yank Henry's arm again, their backs nearly against the trees on the far side of the path now. "Oh, you can't know what it's like alone, in the dark, with their little hands, all the time."

"Relentless, like," said the man, spasming at the shoulder. His suit looked to be bulging near the collar.

"We'd help, love," the woman said, and as she spoke fell over onto her side, with no effort to catch herself. Her upper body lifted itself from the ground before collapsing again. "We'd love, help. Can't know what it's like. Little hands." Something like a worm was snaking from her eye socket. A dozen shapes were squirming under her skirt. The man tripped over to help her and wound up hopping the way on one foot like a marionette. His jawbone wagged, but nothing came out of it.

"Henry," Helene cried, pulling him with as much force as she could.

The woman grumbled, "Too much," her voice like a cracked record.

The man opened and closed his jaw once more, managed the word, "Spectacular -" and then from his mouth and sleeves tumbled a dozen rats, squealing like rusty gates. Helene clapped a hand to her mouth as they poured from beneath the woman's skirt, the man's hat.

"'Orrible, ain't it?" said a voice at Helene's ear, where another corpse had come up behind them, hands stretched outward like a crucified man. He had one eye yellow, and one marbled white. "Damn shame, damn shame. Do 'ope nothin' like that would ever happen to a nice girl like you."

Helene hadn't the voice to scream; she simply held on to Henry's hand, and ran. As they fled down the path, the lanterns in the trees burst suddenly into sickly green and blue light, and more corpses manifested from the shadows, uniformly contorted with bulging black eyes peeking out of their joints. Far ahead, a glow had risen, and the cars on the Ferris wheel ahead were beginning to brighten one-by-one. They passed under the "SPECTACLE" arch and stumbled to a halt in the clearing with a crash of noise and a flash. A ghastly circus was opening its doors just for them.

The trees were pushed back by wooden borders of ugly, painted wood, against which sat what looked like the ghosts of true amusements. The rabbit-shoot, the test of strength, and the ring-toss were all there, but as shells of those Helene knew from Upstairs, these ones painted black and red and splintered and scratched. From out of the shadows bounded a jerking corpse in the ringleader's outfit; "And guests!" he roared as he swung around them, dangling by his own shoulder blades along the ground, his feet barely grazing and a dozen rat-tails wrapped around the brim of his hat. "A pretty couple for the greatest spectacle under the earth!" A chittering went up beneath his words, and Helene, backed madly against the wooden wall, made a dash beneath his arm. She tripped, and immediately upon hitting the ground tens of rats manifested out of the darkness around her knees and wrists, squirming around her fingers and tearing at her dress. She screamed.

Henry cried, "Miss Van Dort!"

She was nearly blinded with trying to push the rodents away from her as the young man dashed by, snatching her arm and pulling her to her feet. A spotlight went up above their heads; from the slung trapezes hung three men with nooses around their necks. "Spectacular," they groaned as the two passed beneath them.

They ran, stumbling, deeper into the bright fray. Rats were crawling up lantern poles, following them uniformly with their eyes. Tiny voices squealed at them as they ducked beneath a flapping flag. The troupe of corpses called from behind, "Do stay for the spectacle!" and Helene felt nearly mad with fear of the little pale rodent hands pushing them onward.

They took a sharp turn on the lantern-lit path, and found the side of an enormous tent looming before them, with stained striped canvas and a gaunt look. They stopped just for a second; the voices were drawing closer. "Go, go!" Helene thought Henry had said it, but realized with a start that it was her own lips moving. She pushed blindly against the canvas as the voices of the entertainment grew louder in her ears, and with a rush felt herself finally meet the edge as she pulled herself underneath on her hands and knees. Henry stumbled in behind and let it drop behind him, and immediately the noise was quieted. The group that had been just on their tail now sounded half a mile away. Henry and Helene sat wide-eyed in the darkness until the noise faded entirely, him quiet as the grave, her sucking in the dust-laden air hysterically, but as silently as possible.

It felt like hours before Helene dared to move again. Her hands felt numb and clumsy as she tried to brush her hair from her face; the neat bun was coming undone. It was close to too dark to see inside of the tent, but a little light leaked down through the tattered roof. It was difficult to tell just how large the area was; a hundred feet in diameter, perhaps, or maybe more, but it was suffocatingly quiet and very, very still. In the center sat a pile of wooden crates fashioned haphazardly into some sort of chair, draped in curtains and quite worn-in looking. Helene did not like the idea that someone (or thing!) might call this a home.

"Is there a door?" she whispered to Henry, dreadfully aware of how little control she had over her voice. "Can we see what's out there?" But Henry did not respond. His eyes were fixed against the opposite side of the tent, where tucked against the canvas sat what looked like a lion's cage, barely distinguishable against the black. Only a few bare strands of light were long enough to touch the bars, and between them sat a shape that looked an awful lot like…

"Hello?"

The voice was weak, but it struck her like lightning. Helene rushed forward and fell to her knees at the base of the cage. It was him! "Oh my Lord," she said, with a knot in her throat. "I can't believe we found you!" Victor sat on the floor and reached for her hands as she placed them on the iron bars.

Henry came jogging up behind. "Mister Van Dort!" he said. "Thank the Lord!"

She felt as though she could hardly breathe. "Oh, I knew it wasn't real," Helene said, beginning to blindly search with her hands for a lock or key to the cage. "I knew the note couldn't be from you, I knew it was a trap but I couldn't just go -"

"Stop. Listen to me," Victor interrupted snagging her elbow to stop her and looking very intently in the darkness. He had no thankful greeting for her and no trace of uncertainty in his voice; it was a disconcerting welcome. "You have to leave, right now, and not ask any questions." She looked up in shock; his face was noticeably gaunt and his fine burial clothes were torn. More than anything else, he looked scared, more than any dead man should be. "Please. Don't wait to find out why. Just listen to me and go."

She was stayed by confusion. "But I came for you -"

"Forget me! He doesn't want me! Get out, before he -"

"Before I what?" asked a fourth voice from the darkness behind them.

It was so sudden that Helene felt like a heavy cold blanket had just been dropped over her shoulders, but bravely she blinked away the stars that were winking before her eyes and turned her gaze upward. The madman had arrived. He was as large as ever, his horrible face concealed by the darkness but his shape imposing as a mountain. "Y-you," she said, removing her hands from the bars of the cage so that they would not rattle and give away her fear. "Why – why have you done this?"

"Oh, darling," he said, bowing slightly. Upon his shoulder sat the biggest rat that Helene had ever seen in her life, nearly the size of a terrier. "The fact that I need you… Consider it a gesture of admiration."

She stepped backward, and he stepped forward into where the light touched the skeletal half of his face. "Hey, now," Henry said, trying to interfere, but the madman turned so suddenly that the boy was about thrown back against the cage with shock.

"Shut up," he snarled, before turning back to Helene with a snarl. "I'm fairly sure you were told come alone."

Helene's heart was in her throat, but she didn't let it stop her from shakily snapping, "You must think me extraordinarily stupid."

His face twitched slightly, but then relaxed into a slimy smile. "Oh, not at all, dear thing. I have nothing but respect for your mind and… the rest of you." She instinctively wrapped her coat tighter around her shoulders. "Which is why I needed you here today, of course. I need a favor. From an old friend."

"A… favor?"

"Don't listen to him," Victor instructed from the cage next to her. "Don't listen to a word -"

With a gesture of the madman's finger, five rats leapt from the darkness, pressing their little hands and feet against his lips and ears to muffle him.

"Don't make them do worse," said the madman with a sneer. "Yes, dearest, a favor." He swept around her toward the strange throne in the center of the area, surprisingly graceful despite his limp. She looked desperately toward her father, being smothered by fur, and Henry, looking utterly helpless as to what to do. "It's fairly simple, you see," the man at the center of the room continued. "It's been dreadfully dull, all the time spent being dead these last many years. I have spent time in deep introspection and decided – it's time for me to move on. Do you know how a man does that?" Helene shook her head wordlessly. "We finish the business that keeps us down here in the first place. Do you know what my business here is?" Helene shook her head again, more slowly this time.

His voice was deep and textured, and almost convincingly dramatic. "Neither did I, for many years. Until one day, finally, I saw the truth – it had been you. It was always you. The one that got away." He looked to her, his partial face like a mask, half-malevolent, half-stolid, and threw up a hand in a gesture of despair. "I realized that my dissatisfaction at our ending kept me bound to a world that wanted me no longer. To pass on… I would need you." Helene's mind was racing to make sense of his mad words. "That is why I've brought you here today, my love. To help me finish the story we started together. That's all I ever really wanted. A wedding, and nothing more. And then… freedom."

He began approaching her again with a purposeful, limping stride. This made no sense. She had never met this man before tonight. As he knelt in front of her and took her limp hand from her side, Victor tried to yell something from near the wall. In a flash she recalled what he had said before. "Has anyone told you that your mother and I were both married to other… people… before we wed?"

"Victoria," said the dead man, pressing a hand to his chest with a flourish and a sick smile on his face, "will you marry me?"

Surely this wasn't happening. Something was ringing in her ears. She thought she saw her father shaking his head from out of the corner of her eye, but was too thunderstruck to follow his movements, and the words fell from her lips without thought: "I'm not Victoria."

For a moment, the very air in the tent seemed to have been sucked away. The madman stood up slowly, and she became aware again just how much bigger than her he was. "What did you say?" he asked after a second, a very worrying undercurrent in his voice.

Still, Helene did not want to let herself be cowed. "I've – I've never met you before in my life," she said, glowering at him with matching intensity. "My name is Helene Winifred Chastity Philomena Van Dort. Victoria was my mother." She crossed her arms, feeling a victorious buzz that vanished instantly as a broad smile spread across the dead man's face.

"Really?" he asked, sweeping her with his eyes, up and down, so that even beneath her coat she felt underdressed. "Oh, really, now… Is this true, Van Dort?" He looked over to Victor, speaking to him as if she had left the room. Victor still could not answer. Henry, who had been trying to edge away from the cage toward a scrap pile, froze. "Why, you should have told me. Tsk. What an embarrassing miscommunication this has turned out to be." He said so, but his expression spoke of delight. He turned slowly and began wandering back to the center of the room, rubbing his chin like a wise man, still with that awful smile splitting his face. Helene had the idea that she'd made a terrible mistake.

Slowly a low laugh came drifting through the air toward them. The dead man was laughing. Not cackling or choking on a mad exultation, but chuckling rather lightly and seeming to ignore them altogether. He settled slowly in his wooden throne and the enormous rat on his shoulder crawled downward into his lap, like an ugly Persian cat.

"The offer still stands," said the madman, and Helene's throat pinched with dread. She looked back at him, splayed lazily like spoiled prince, and felt a boiling rush of hate and fear. But he had called it an offer. Did that denote a degree of optionality?

"And what happens to me if I refuse?" she asked, voice much more high-pitched than she would have liked.

"Oh, not much," he said lightly, waving a hand as if he hadn't a care in the world. "There's very little I can do to you, being alive and all." He stretched out a finger and flicked it toward the lion cage. "Him, on the other hand…"

Helene's eyes snapped back toward her father, who was being encroached on in the cage by more rats than ever, which seemed to manifest out of the shadows like bad dreams. They were crawling up his arms and legs, as he struggled to tear them away. It was a grotesque sight. Henry was nowhere to be seen. "You can't hurt him," she said, heart in her ears. "He's dead."

"Oh no?" said the madman. "You really might be surprised just how horrific it can be, watching the boys tear your body limb-from-limb." His voice was very, very low now. "And I've been looking for a good reason to have my way with that limping butterfly of a man for longer than you… have been alive." The thought gave him brief pause, and then he smiled again. "You'll be welcome to witness if you don't believe me."

He was sitting up again, fully, crouched in his seat like a gargoyle about to take flight. Helene's blood had been replaced with ice water and she could hardly see. Something was suddenly pounding the ground, moving toward her like the beat of a drum, but she couldn't look up quickly enough to see the source and then –

"Miss Van Dort!"

Henry came thumping out of the shadows to the left like a gangly bull, snatched her hand, and began dragging her along with him at full tilt. They bolted through the darkness toward the edge of the tent with speed to ram a carriage. He held a sharp piece of dusty wood before him like a javelin, and as they reached the canvas it split in two and spilled them out into the dim light. The din that went up as they did so was deafening. A thousand rodents sent out a shrill cry and the madman in the tent howled like an animal.

"NO!"

Henry and Helene stumbled up and out as quickly as they could, but they were being swarmed. Innumerable rats were rushing toward them from all directions, and the denizens of the circus were stumbling forward with apologies on their lips: "So sorry, sir!" "Wish I didn't have to, miss!" Rats were crawling up Helene's skirt as she struggled to shake them off, and two tippety men took Henry by the arms and began to drag him off.

"Henry!" Helene screamed, snatching for his hand before he was pulled back inside of the tent, and her nerve failed her entirely. Rats were making their ways up her clothing toward her neck, biting and scratching; they were in her hair, pushing it down over her eyes, worming their way into her petticoats. A man and a woman were coming up from behind with light requests for forgiveness. "Truly sorry, miss," the man said as he hooked his clumsy arm under hers, clothes bulging with squirming bodies. "We'll just have you up, don't struggle, let's make this easy -"

Suddenly, a most terrible noise split the air, and the horde of rats divided like a sea. Into the fray dove the fat tomcat, shrieking like a banshee with raised hackles and pinprick pupils. The big cat barreled through the swarm like a lion in a herd of gazelles, swiping left and right at every rat in reach and sending them flying. The hands holding Helene tight loosened suddenly as the rats puppeteering their poor souls scattered, pouring out of hems and collars to distance themselves from the cat. The corpses fell to their knees and Helene jumped away.

The tom was so inflated that he looked like a brown cotton puff, but this was no mood to laugh about it. Helene hit the newly-vacated ground at a run and snatched the cat up without a second thought, forcing him to drop a mangled rodent from his jaws. He dug his claws into her shoulder and she ran, as fast as she could from the flickering lights while the screams of a madman tore at her ears like horrible little pale claws


This seems as good a time as any to remind the reader that real-life rats are CUDDLY WIDDLE BABIES WHO ARE JUST THE SWEETEST FUZZY LOVES EVER, YES THEY ARE, YES THEY ARE! All depictions of rodents contained herein are fictionalized and do not reflect the views of the author, unless I end up writing about hamsters, where I won't mince words, because hamsters are assholes.