An Early Excerpt of the Journal of a Music Box Maker

March 28th, 1902

"The unsolved mysteries of the cirque are whimsical and seductive. They are like unnamed islands hidden in the black spaces of old maps, like dark shapes glimpsed descending the far wall of a chaos into the abyss. They draw us forward and stir strange apprehensions. The unknown and prodigious are drugs to the unfed imagination, stirring insatiable hunger with a single taste. In our hearts we hope we will never discover everything. We pray there will always be another world to discover, that we always wander in darkness, awaiting the light of these mysteries to guide us onward. The cirque in its secrecy is one of the last reserves on earth of that timeless dream."

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Interlude I: Jaggery

The pale lady removes something from her bag, something that clinks against her nails, and places it on the countertop.

A green-tinted jam jar holding a yellow round brick. The faded label on the front reads, in hastily scribed cursive, Jaggery.

The old woman picks it up and turns it around in her hands, inspecting it as a miser inspects his gold. The pale-eyed lady seems on edge as the silence stretches on, punctuated by the clock ticking in the corner.

“Yes, very hard to find sugar from palm sap,” the shopkeeper decrees.

The lady’s shoulders sag in relief, tension in them vanishing, dissipating in the air like smoke. 

Text by Lucie MacAulay

An Illusion of Flesh

She idly turns her hand before the window. Where the black sunlight touches it, illuminating it in a smoky haze, it appears like an apparition, a pale shadow of her hand. She turns her hand and it becomes solid again. She inspects it thoroughly, the soft skin on her palm, the spider web cracks on her calloused fingers. It looks no different than it always has been.

She has not noticed that her hand has faded, a pale shadow with the pigment of her skin. Where the sunlight hits it, it is gone completely, disappearing beyond her wrist, catching the edges of it softly when the light shifts. 

Art by Tere Arigo

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Shades of Grey

The castle looks dirty surrounded by sparkling white snowflakes, as grey as the sand buried under snow. The sky is a white flurry; the sea frosted as though covered with sugar crystals, crests frozen before the waves break.

If she hadn’t been standing close to the fireplace indoors moments before, soaking up the heat from the bright flames, she would be shivering with cold. She wears no shoes or hat, no scarf or gloves or coat, only her white gown and the ribbons that are a permanent embellishment on her attire.

It is so rare she is allowed out in broad daylight, but no shadows of people move about in the flurry, everyone has escaped to their houses or offices, or their friends’ houses or crowded cafes to wait out the storm. It is the pinnacle of Austrian winter, and far harsher than many can remember. Though the castle is seen by few, for their attention is diverted from the shape looming out of the mist on the innocuous grey beach. It simply fades into the background, to the extent in which it may be a trick of the light out of the corner of one’s eye.

Despite her best efforts, she cannot say the same about herself.

She has diverted others’ attention before, though she has never been able to divert her fathers’, but the blend so well into the landscape that she is a part of it, unnoticeable, would take a skill she does not possess. Indeed, a skill she does not believe her father possesses, either.

She enjoys the occasion, despite the warmth that is slowly dissipating into the air like smoke. She focuses on the water, the feel of it beneath the ice, and wonders if she could separate it from the salt through the ice; how much time it would take, how much effort, down to the second and the amount of respite she would require after. She decides it would depend on the thickness of the ice.

She stands on the seashore, digging her toes into grey sand and ice crystals. Plumes of white clouds billow from her mouth, snow laces her hair like a net of white.

The hem of her gown is moving, lace floating up and down in ripples. She steps back slowly, her gown trailing over the snow. It takes a moment for her to spot the bird against the snow, as its feathers are just as sparkling and white, but it is nestled in the cold, flapping and cooing with the cold.

She stand in momentary shock that a dove would be out in the snow in Austrian winter, even more that it would find the castle on the beach, never sighted by any person or creature outside the white marble residence. She bends down to scoop it up out of the snow.

The dove coos with fear, and as it warms it begins to flap its wings. She waits, patiently, for it to calm, coercing it to trust her. Strangely, her fathers’ skill would be useful here, as he has always been able to earn others’ trust with a wave of his hand and a piercing gaze, but he is not fond of doves. They are too pretty, he declares, too showy and frivolous, as opposed to the ravens he has raised her to keep in his study, dark with watchful eyes, always learning and thinking.

She holds the dove in her cupped hands, focusing on passing her warmth to its shivering body. The snow on its feathers begin to melt, sparkling like dew.

It would be a very bad idea, she thinks, to bring it home. Her father would only cast it out into the snow, or it would become a test she is incapable of passing, at the expense of the bird.

She narrows her eyes at the dove, as though squinting through its feathers and into its rapidly beating heart. Her eyes soften, as though she sees through the bird, into some cosmos in the snow before her.

Slowly an inky blackness, beginning at its beak and ending at its tail feathers, bleeds over the dove. Where it is still changing in hue, its feathers are grey, like that of a newborn sparrow.

When she carries the dove inside, black as night, it is silent. 

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Prerequisites

She has seen her father pour over piles of paper before, many of which she had not been able to understand when she was younger, and some scripts and volumes she still doesn’t. Yet these aren’t the organized chaos she is used to, these papers have been piled so high they have become the desk. Stacks of books and leather cases with the curling ends of parchment protruding from them are lined around the desk, supporting large sheets of blueprint paper, or scraps with delicate sketches in black ink. The blueprints and sketches are held down with a number of objects plucked off the shelves around the study; a butterfly encased in glass, a black widow trapped in amber, a paperweight resembling a black knight from a chess set, a heavy ancient silver coin with fading archaic Greek letters, a tarnished silver pocket watch engraved with F.I. They are layouts of something large, a structure of some sort with protrusions, potential lengths and measurements listed in the margins, various materials and tools scrawled at the tops of each page. There are more blueprints of a room; with so many sides it is almost completely circular. These blueprints have symbols around the edges, some of them, she reads, regarding intent and sizes of empty space.

“What are these for, Father?” she asks, compelled by her curiousity to take a step closer.

Her father does not seem to hear her at first, then he puts his hands on the desk and looks her in the eye. “You need not concern yourself with these. Go study, or practice. You need it.”

She does not retreat, instead, she moves closer, craning her neck to see the angle of a particular plane-

When her father lifts the black knight paperweight and brings it heavily down on her hand, resting on the edge of the desk. She pulls it back quickly, toppling a tower of books which rest on their spines and covers, or open on bent white pages. She cannot bring herself to care, as she cradles her injured hand, feeling the shattered bones in her fingers.

The books right themselves, coming to rest under the corners of blueprints they had previously held aloft. Her father returns to the blueprints.

“You need to practice. Begin with that, and do not attempt to glance at these papers again.”

She turns on her heel, still cupping her crushed fingers, and marches out of the room, biting her lip to keep from crying. Her cheeks are salt burned before she can calm enough to set her shattered knuckles back together again. 

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Suspicious Sentiments

Thrice a month, a single piece of black cardstock arrives in a black envelope, bearing Sage’s name in silver ink, but no address. The card within has a date and an address, no embellishments or notes. No well wishes or comments. The staff are convinced Sage has a secret admirer, though they cannot be certain from the passive expression on her face when she receives the letters, then disappears to her room or the library to read it in private. It is at these times that the nosiest of staff find excuses to enter the room she occupies, to sweep or dust or to ask if she would like tea. She takes no notice of them, and seems to read the cards so swiftly that whenever a staff member should pass her and cast a glance over her shoulder, she puts it face down, concealing whatever sentiments they suspect is embossed on it.

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Unusual Gift Giving

His presents are not bound in shiny paper or silk bags, except for a deck of tarot cards he receives on his ninth birthday from the fortuneteller, but in canvas tents, labeled with signs instead of cards. Though new tents are constantly appearing, special exhibitions are born each April 13^th, and though patrons do not know of the corrolation between the new tents and his birthday, he has suspected long before learning to read the sparkle in the fortune teller’s eyes. He is given snowflakes and fire, indeed, the Snowglobe is a gift for his fourteenth birthday, after his particular delight with the Bone Forest is taken note of. New confections are introduced in the vendor’s stalls around the Moon Mirror, exotic flavours that become quite popular, though he is always the first to taste them. One birthday results in an underground cavern, filled with mist and tubers, a waterfall that leaves each patron dry, as though they have passed through a curtain of silk instead of water. Another birthday he discovers a tent with a jar, named after Pandora’s Box. The contortionist is chaperoning him this evening and smiles sadly while he reads the sign, perplexed when he encounters the earthenware vessel beyond the curtain. “Your sister would have been thirteen as well, today,” the contortionist, Paikea, says. “This jar, while it held all the evils of the world, including death, which took your sister, also held hope. You will be the first to hope here.”

Text by Lucie MacAulay