The Midnight Circus

by Jane Yolen

  Written this year of Our Lord 1539, Tir a’ Gheallaidh, Isle of Lewis

  Dog Boy Remembers

  THE DOG BOY was just a year old and newly walking when his father returned to take him into Central Park. It was summer and the moon was full over green trees.

  The only scents he’d loved ’til then were the sweet milk smells his mother made, the fust of the sofa cushions, the prickly up-your-nose of the feathers in his pillow, the pure spume of water from the tap, and the primal stink of his own shit before it was washed down into the white bowl.

  When his father came to fetch him that first time, his mother wept. Still in her teens, she’d not had a lot of knowledge of the world before Red Cap had taken her up. But the baby, he was all hers. The only thing, she often thought, that truly was.

  “Don’t take him,” she cried, “I’ve done everything you asked. I promise to be even more careful of him.” Her tears slipped silently down her cheeks, small globules, smelling slightly salty, like soup.

  His father hit her with his fist for crying, and red blood gushed from her nose. He hated crying, something Dog Boy was soon to find out.

  But Dog Boy had never smelled blood like that before, only his mother’s monthly flow which had a nasty pong to it. His head jerked up at the sharpness, a scent he would later know as iron. He practically wet himself with delight. His father watched him and smiled. It was a slow smile and not at all comforting, but it was all Dog Boy would ever get from him.

  “Come, Boy,” his father said, adjusting the red cap he always wore, a cap that was the first thing Dog Boy recognized about his father, even before his smell, that odd compound of old blood and something meaty, something nasty, that both repelled and excited him. Without more of an invitation, his father reached into his pocket and pulled out a leather leash, winding it expertly about the Dog Boy’s chest and shoulders, tugging him toward the door. And not knowing why, only that it would surely be something new and interesting, Dog Boy toddled after him, never looking back at his mother who still simpered behind them.

  Off they went into the city, that big, noisy, sprawling place so full of sound and movement and smells. Dog Boy always shuddered when the door opened.

  Oh, he’d been out with his mother before, but always held in her arms, smothered by the milk-mother smell. This time he was walking out on his own. Well, walking might be a slight exaggeration. It was more like falling forward, only to be caught up again and again by the leather leash.

  Their first stop was at a spindly gingko right outside the door of the house, the tree just leafing out. Dog Boy stood by it and inhaled the green, soft and sharp at the same time. He reached over and touched the bark. That was the soft smell, and it was not—he realized in surprise—the bark itself but the mallow he could sense inside, though of course then he hadn’t the words mallow or bark. The leaves were what smelled sharp and new and somewhat peppery. The other smell was clearly much older. Old and new had different scents. It was a revelation.

  Next, he and his father walked along a stone walk that was filled with other interesting scents. People smells, lingering leather smells, the sweat of feet, plus the sweet cloy of dropped paper wrappers, and some smallish tangs of tobacco in a white cover. Then Dog Boy found three overflowing garbage cans, overflowing with smells.

  Suddenly, there were far too many odors, most of them much too strong for his childish senses, and Dog Boy ended up swooning onto the pavement, his legs and arms making quick running motions, like a dog does when it dreams.

  With great disgust, Red Cap slung him over his shoulder like some dead thing, and took him right back home.

  Once upstairs, he flung Dog Boy onto the sofa, saying in his growl of a voice, “I have kept you in comfort all this time and you raise up this . . . this wimpish thing. I need a sniffer-out, an offspring who can track and trail. Not this puling. Fainting—”

  “He’s only a baby,” his mother said quickly, picking Dog Boy up and unwrapping the leather leash from his body which—strangely—burned her hands. Dog Boy smelled the burning right before she cradled him against her milk-full breasts, before that familiar scent comforted him and made him forget everything else. “And I have kept him in this room, as you demanded . . .” his mother murmured above him, neglecting to mention the biweekly runs to the bodega when she was so lonely for an adult to speak to, she couldn’t stay in and didn’t dare leave the child in the room alone.

  For her outburst, she was hit again, this time on the cheek, which rocked her back and made Dog Boy whimper for her, though she made no sound at all. But her cheek came up quickly into a purplish bruise that his little, plump fingers explored gently, though by then Red Cap was already gone, the door slamming behind him. He didn’t return for a month, on the next moon.

  During that month, Dog Boy’s mother wept, fussed, petted, and spoiled him outrageously, thought about running, hiding out somewhere.

  “Just the two of us,” she’d whisper before the tears pooled again in her eyes. “Anywhere.” But she couldn’t think of a single place that would be safe. Red Cap could come and go to anywhere on earth, seemingly at will. He’d told her so when they’d first met, and she believed him. His fists had made her into a believer.

  Red Cap was the only name she had for him. He said it was the only name he had. She’d tried calling him Red once, and he’d hit her so hard, she lost consciousness and never tried again. Even her father had never hit her so hard. But after that, she had trouble calling him anything and spent stuttering moments whenever she had to address him directly. She thought if she could only call him by his right name, he’d forgive her, but the words never seemed to come out right.

  He wore that disgusting cap everywhere, even in bed. The only time she’d ever seen him take it off was when they were first seeing one another. It was a pearly evening, and they’d come upon a dying squirrel run over in the park, its insides squashed onto the pavement, made even more horrible by the moon overhead and the shadows it cast. She’d started to turn away from the sight. But when Red Cap took off his hat and dipped it into the squirrel’s blood, she’d been mesmerized and couldn’t stop watching. For a moment, the hat had seemed to glisten and glow, red as a sunset, though she knew that couldn’t really have happened. Then the squirrel’s eyes glazed over; so in a way, had the hat.

  After the moment in the park, she shrank away from him, which seemed to make him even more ardent. He showered her with money. Especially when he found out she was pregnant. He didn’t ask her to marry him, but by then marriage was the last thing on her mind. Escape was foremost. That and getting rid of the child in her womb. But Red Cap stayed with her, imprisoned her really, in that little house in Brooklyn, with its view of the backside of another building. Threatened her. Hit her a couple of times a week just to remind her he could. He knew how to draw blood and how to bring bruises. He did not mistake them. It was as if he knew her body better than she did. And her soul.

  He stayed just long enough for the child to be born. Childbirth tore her up so badly inside, the doctor warned she’d never have another child, though she didn’t want another. Certainly not with Red Cap.

  When she was well enough to take care of the child on her own, he showed her what to do, and then left, warning her not to run away.

  “I can find you wherever you go,” he’d said. “I’ll be back when he is walking.” She believed him.

  The money he paid her with—it came in brown envelopes stuffed under the door—was generous and arrived mysteriously after she was asleep. But it had to be given to a bank first thing in the morning because by midnight it turned into leaves or ashes or bits of colored paper. So he’d warned her, and she knew that to be true because once she’d kept an envelope a second night, first checking that it was full of the promised money. When she opened the envelope the next morning, it was filled with red and gold autumn leaves instead. And so she’d nothing for almost a month and had to go back to tricking to keep the baby and herself alive.
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br />   Predictably, Red Cap had beaten her when he returned. Somehow he’d known what she’d done without having to ask.

  “It’s written on your stupid cow face,” he told her, and flung another envelope at her. He never asked about the child.

  After that, she went early to the bank, the baby bound up tightly to her breast so that he didn’t smell anything but her and the milk, just as Red Cap had demanded. Of course, every few months she had to change banks, but since Red Cap continued his generosity that made it only a small burden.

  Of course she grew to love the child, who looked nothing like either one of them but had a dark feral beauty and a brilliant smile. He seemed content being in the little apartment, entranced by the television Red Cap’s money had purchased, and absolutely stunned by the music he heard there. She bought him a little pipe that he tootled on incessantly, and soon was able to mimic bird songs, and so she named him Robin after her favorite bird. His father refused to use that name, continuing to call him Dog Boy, which she hated.

  One time she shorted herself on food and bought Robin a small tape CD player along with a variety of CDs: Battlefield Band, Janis Ian, Steeleye Span, the Silly Sisters—all favorites of hers. None of this new stuff. Except for Amanda Palmer and the Dixie Chicks. He begged then for a fiddle, and she went on short rations for several months ’til she had enough to buy it for him, a quarter-size fiddle that he taught himself to play.

  And she talked to the child constantly. Well, she had to. didn’t she? There was no one else to talk to except when they went quickly to the bank or to the local bodega at the end of the road. She kept herself busy during the day with the boy—playing with him, singing to him, washing his clothes, teaching him numbers, nursery rhymes, dreaming of escape.

  But Red Cap came back as she knew he would. As he’d warned he would.

  He put a stupid strap around the boy’s shoulders and chest. Then off they went, her little boy trotting along in that new, funny, rolling sailor walk behind him and Red Cap yanking on the leash as if Robin had been a dog and not a human boy.

  Of course Robin was a disappointment to his father. So he worked harder at trying to please him. He learned the smells of the city as if they were his ABCs. Graduating from milk and mother to finger foods and distinguishing gingko from maple. Learned the difference between sandals, shoes, and sneakers. Then the differences between Nikes, Pumas, Reeboks; between Kurt Geigers, and Crocs; between Doc Martens, Jimmy Choos, Manolo Blahniks, Mephisto, and Birkenstocks. Though it would be years before he had names for the shoes, just the smells.

  By the time he was four, he was able to follow a woman down a street an hour after she’d walked by without ever seeing her, simply by the smell of her Jimmy Choos and the waft of perfume.

  By the time he was six, he could track two men at the same time, and when they parted, he could find one, mark that territory with his own personal scent (a piece of chewing gum, a wipe of his hand over his hair, which was now long and shaggy as a dog’s, or even by peeing around the spot if no one was watching). Then he’d go back to the place of parting, and track the second.

  The praise he got from his father was little enough.

  It felt enormous.

  “It’s time,” Red Cap told the boy on his tenth birthday.

  Dog Boy knew what he meant without having to be told. He was well-trained. He was old enough. He’d long been off the leash. This day he would be in at a kill. A blooding, his father called it. He couldn’t wait.

  His father handed him a small child’s cap. It was a school cap, blue with an insignia, a red pine tree and the numbers 1907. He sniffed it. He would know that scent anywhere.

  They walked to a small park, a kind of grove. It was filled with lovely smells that made Dog Boy shiver with delight. The sharp, new growing things, both whiterooted and green. Little mealy-smelling worms. The deep musk of the old oak’s serpentine roots that lay halfway above ground.

  There were many sneaker smells, too, mostly the rubbery scent that made his nose itch. But there was a familiar odor, faint but clear enough for him to follow.

  He lifted his right hand and pointed at a place where the path forked. Eager to be off, he was stopped by his father’s rough grasp on his shirt collar.

  “Now is when we must take care,” Red Cap told him. “Be subtle. Act like everyday humankind. An ordinary father and his ordinary son on an outing. Not a hunter and his dog.” Though there was nothing ordinary about the pair.

  Dog Boy nodded; he could scarcely contain his excitement. His father had spoken quietly, not in his usual sharp trainer’s voice, nor in his dangerous growl. Dog Boy liked this new, quiet, unexpected sound. It soothed him. It calmed him down.

  “Steady, steady now. Show me the way.” Red Cap took his son’s hand.

  This was so unusual. Dog Boy almost stopped to say something, then thought better of it and went on.

  They walked along, almost companionably, and any onlooker would have no reason to think they were not a happy pair out for a Sunday stroll. When they reached the fork, the smell drew Dog Boy to the left. And then another left. And because his father still had hold of his hand, he was drawn along as well. They came into a small, hidden, grassy place where dark trees bent nearly double.

  A boy, younger than Dog Boy, was standing, his back to them. By the way he stood, Dog Boy knew he’d come into this out-of-the-way place to pee.

  “Let him finish,” whispered his father. “We have time.” As an afterthought, almost as if laughing at the child, he added, “Though he does not.”

  Dog Boy wondered: Time for what? But deep inside he knew, had always known, had tried to keep himself from knowing. For him, it was the seeking, the finding that mattered. But not for his father. Never for his father. He shuddered.

  They moved closer to the boy who, turning, looked a bit alarmed, then relieved, then frightened, then terrified.

  Then silent.

  Dog Boy couldn’t stop staring. There was blood everywhere. The sharp iron tang got up his nose as if it had painted itself there. He wondered if he would ever smell anything else.

  Watching his father dip the red cap in the boy’s blood, he tried to weep. He tried to turn away. He could do neither.

  They walked in silence back to the house. A tall black boy his age ran by, his legs scissoring. A smaller kid, maybe a brother, cried after him, “Chim, Chim, wait for me.”

  The bigger boy stopped, turned, caught the little one up in his arms, swung him onto his shoulders. “Hold tight!” he said. “Don’t want you to fall.” Then off he trotted, the little one’s legs wrapped around his arms, his small hands in his brother’s afro. Their gales of laughter floated back to Dog Boy, who shrugged himself further into his own shoulders, as if he might disappear there. Had he ever laughed that way? Maybe with his mother, once or twice, certainly never with his father. He pictured himself swinging a small child up on his shoulders, the weight of the child, the laughter. He imagined trotting along the park path, the wind blowing the scent of lilac and azalea, the smell sweet, not cloying. Both child and laughter were light in his reverie.

  At that moment, Dog Boy had forgotten what his father looked like dipping his cap in the slaughtered boy’s blood. How his face had changed into some sort of . . . creature: An orc, maybe. Or a troll, he’d thought at the time, pulling monsters from his reading. A smiling monster. But in the wake of the two laughing boys, he couldn’t retain the horror of the child’s blood. The memory of Chim and his brother—Dog Boy was suddenly sure it was a brother—that memory was even stronger than the memory of the dead child. He couldn’t think why.

  Once home, the image of the murdered boy returned to him, as well as the smell of it so he went immediately into the bathroom where he washed his face and hands obsessively for what seemed like hours though in fact it was just ten minutes. Then he took out the neti pot his father made him use whenever they were about to go out on a practice run. The warm water through his nose and nasal passages flushe
d away the lingering blood scent and the last of the memory of the dead boy. He would remember the day as the one where he saw the black boys and their joy with one another.

  When he joined his father in the living room, Red Cap was standing awkwardly, staring at the sofa where Dog Boy’s mother sprawled. Neither one of them was moving.

  Something in the room was strange. It smelled off. Muted. Cold.

  Dog Boy ran over to the sofa and looked down at his mother’s face. All the lines in it had been oddly smoothed out. She looked almost happy. She smelled . . . For a moment, he had no name for it. And then he had it.

  Peaceful.

  Then realizing what that meant, he threw himself across her body and began to weep.

  When the weeping was over and he had no more tears to cry, he picked her up in his arms as if she were a child, and the bottle of pills she’d been clutching in one hand shook loose.

  He turned to look up at his father, to ask him what had happened. Why it had happened.

  Red Cap was smiling. It was—Dog Boy thought—the same smile he’d stretched across his mouth when sopping up the murdered child’s blood.

  “Now I can take you to the Greenwood,” Red Cap said. “Nothing holds you here anymore.”

  Dog Boy opened his mouth. For a minute no sound came out. Finally, as if it was a truth that needed telling, he said quietly, “She holds me here.”

  “She is dead,” Red Cap said as if the boy hadn’t the sense to realize it on his own. “And not even blood for the dipping.”

  That was when Dog Boy first understood how much he hated his father. How much he hated being his father’s dog. He set his mother’s body down on the couch again, carefully, as if afraid he might bring her back from her final escape. Taking the small crocheted quilt that hung on the sofa’s arm, he covered her with it. She looked tiny, small, and—suddenly—safe.