Chapter Text
Allison visits the Umbrella Circus on a field trip from her posh boarding school. When her classmates return to their boring studies and lonely stone halls, she stays. Allison has always got whatever she wants — except, perhaps, her parents’ attention — and what she wants right now is to be a runaway.
When the tent comes down, she spots a tall boy coiling one of the ropes that anchored the canvas. Allison watches, entranced, as the loops curl on themselves in a beautiful spiral. He steps away to pack the coil onto a cart, and when he returns, Allison has rolled up her sleeves and is holding up the end of the next cord. “My name is Allison,” she says, “Can I help you with the ropes?”
He pauses, regarding this strange young woman in a fine wool skirt, this girl who is introducing herself instead of just calling him “boy,” and who is asking to assist instead of barking orders. “Luther,” he grunts, and then he starts to teach.
When the tent is packed away, she follows the crew onto the circus carriage, and it takes her away from her old life and to a new one at the Umbrella Circus.
It’s that easy, just as all things in Allison’s life so far have been — she wants to belong and so she does, learning all the little things that keep the circus moving day by day, week by week. She has always been surrounded by performers, society folks who put on a civilised face for the public and a crueller one behind closed doors, and she finds the unabashed theatricals of the circus refreshingly honest.
Months pass and Allison follows the circus from city to town to rural fairgrounds, finding odd jobs to keep her busy and out of the foreman’s warpath. Allison likes the labourer called Luther, strong and quiet and sensitive, and she likes Diego, the prickly boy who trails after him.
Allison and Luther somehow accrue a little band of misfits together: they find the orphan boy called Klaus waking from a fitful nightmare, hidden under the séance table in the psychic’s tent. Five — who wouldn’t give his name, only his age — leapt onto the circus train as it rumbled through an empty field, barren as far as the eye could see. When they have some extra coins, they sneak away to whatever lonely town the tent is stopped in and buy a tin of sardines, to share with The Horror in Tank Six.
And when they visit the smoggy city, how could they just leave that hungry little girl on the street corner, busking with her violin?
Allison sees Sir watching their band of misfits grow. She makes sure the children stay useful.
Sir has no patience for useless things.
And when the children show signs that they might be a little too useful — when Klaus starts to correct what ghosts are telling the circus’s aged psychic during séances, when Five hides in one magician’s trunk and reappears in another, when they make camp one night and Vanya’s music twists the tree branches — Allison and Luther make sure they look ordinary.
Allison has always wanted to feel special. As a child, she wished that her apathetic parents would have just told her she was special instead of smothering her with gifts, instead of trussing her up with bows like a doll that should be seen and not heard.
Doing odd jobs with the Umbrella Circus is hard and dirty work and leaves Allison bone-achingly tired — and she loves it. She has a knack for applying the greasepaint that morphs and grotesques the clowns’ features; she learns how to press the suits for Dr. Pogo, the amazing talking chimpanzee; and her fingers are quick and nimble enough to help Luther tie the ropes that anchor the tent.
And as much as the bright colours and enthralling music and impossible talents draw her in, Allison sees the darker parts of the circus, too.
By dreadful chance, Sir discovers Diego’s ability to hold his breath for impossible stretches, and orders the boy to repeat the feat for spectators in the deep water of one of the spare display tanks — his newest exhibition, the circus’s newest curiosity.
Allison and Luther are the ones to pull him from the tank at the end of the day, towel him off with the softest flannel they can find, and press a tin mug of hot tea into his hands. One day Diego fights and scrabbles against the lid of the tank, cutting his temple against its sharp metal edge. When they haul him from the bloodstained water, Allison stitches the cut with the last of her fine silk thread, whilst Luther confronts the foreman. Luther raises his voice so much louder and more fiercely than she ever heard before, arguing until the foreman agrees to keep Diego out of the tank while the wound heals. It’s a small and bitter victory.
And there’s the other boy, too — the one who will never be able to leave his watery confinement.
Whenever Allison has a free minute, she steals away to Tank Six, doesn’t tap on the glass like the visitors do but finds a stool to stand on and leans over the edge. She tries to soothe the tentacled boy who has no name other than The Horror by recounting the stories she learned in her literature lessons. (And does it really matter that in Allison’s telling, Romeo and Juliet marry and have a long and happy life together, or that the creature in her version of Frankenstein finds a home where people love and accept his monstrosity? The stories are all the better for it, in her opinion.)
Hugging a shivering Diego close each night, trying to quell the fear in the eyes of the tank-bound boy, she grows determined to keep the others from becoming featured attractions in Sir’s little freak show.
They’re in a sleepy steel town when it all falls apart.
The circus train runs into trouble on the tracks. Where they should have had all day to assemble the tent, now they have only a few short hours of daylight to raise the big top so they can be ready for tomorrow morning’s show.
Allison is supervising the little ones, who are helping to lace together the canvas of the tent, when she sees the foreman return from town. He has a hard smile on his face, and leads a group of rough, unkempt locals. Luther has been helping the other crewmen drag the poles into place, and Allison sees him regard these newcomers with narrowed eyes.
“They’re here to help,” the foreman announces, and raises his voice, “then beer and spirits for all!”
These labourers cheer and clamour, and Allison has the distinct impression that some of them may have started in on the libations early.
The locals start to fan out across the field, tripping over the tent’s unraised supports, handling the ropes and canvas roughly. Luther tries to direct them, tries to get them to position the poles properly, but they wave him off, this tall and awkward teenager who thinks he knows better than they do.
Luther watches one pole wobble as it’s raised, and then another, before deciding to appeal to the foreman.
“They’re being sloppy,” he says. “Give me and the crew a few hours — we can raise the poles tonight, and put up the canvas tomorrow. We’ll do it properly.”
The foreman shrugs him off. “Can’t do that without missing tomorrow morning’s show. You know what Sir’d say.”
The foreman walks off, and leaves Luther with a sour expression on his face, because Luther knows what Sir would say, if anyone dared to knock on the door of the ornate rail carriage that serves as his study and quarters.
Sir might bark one of those infuriating adages, like, 'The show waits for no man,' and perhaps add something about how they’re paying Luther for his might, and not his intellectual merit, and also maybe also that the circus is bigger and more important than Luther could possibly understand.
But more likely he’d peer at Luther frigidly through that monocle and say, 'Dismissed.'
Luther doesn’t need to hear it. He’s heard it all too many times before.
So Allison tries to give Luther a reassuring smile that he doesn’t return, and then he turns away and tries to salvage the slipshod work of these interlopers.
They finish after the sun goes down, when Allison has had to scold the newcomers for bringing a lantern too close to the striped canvas that now forms the walls and ceilings of the tent. Neither Allison nor Luther sleep well that night, both afraid of what sunrise will bring.
The next morning, the winds pick up and batter the walls of the tent. Luther argues with the foreman again, says there’s no harm in delaying the show an hour or two to make certain the king-pole, the tent’s most important support, is secure.
All the foreman has to do is point at Sir’s empty seat to get the message across.
The show waits for no man.
The children usher the audience to their seats, and when the first act starts they join Allison and Luther ringside. They dutifully turn in the coins they’ve earned to Allison, who rations them out, just enough for each of them to buy their favourite treat from the concession stand: chocolate-covered raisins for Vanya and a candy apple for Diego, a stroopwafel for Klaus and marshmallow sweets for Five, and some little sticks of barley sugar to give to their friend in Tank Six. The rest of the coins will go in the pouch that Allison carries close to her heart, for the next time one of them needs cold medicine, or a second-hand winter coat, or new shoes.
Sir surveys the spectacle from his spot on the high bench in the last row, his frown as much a perpetual feature on his face as his monocle. He makes notes as he watches, noticing every minor misstep, noticing who will need to be pushed harder in training, noticing whose stunts need to be bigger, bolder, and more dangerous.
Allison has long since given up wondering how such a joyless man could come to own a circus.
The children laugh and squabble and get their fingers sticky (all except Vanya, who is going to play her violin for the entr'acte). Allison gets distracted by the dizzying spectacle of the clowns, circling the ring on bicycles and tricycles and unicycles, honking their screeching horns, drowning out the sound of the whipping wind outside — but Luther’s eyes never leave the king-pole.
Which is why he’s the first one to notice when it starts to quake.
The pole sways back and forth, rippling the canvas ceiling above them. Luther leaps over the barrier, into the ring, nearly colliding with a careening clown.
“Luther!” Allison calls, out of surprise more than anything, at seeing this shy, awkward, boy, her closest friend in the world, jump right into such a dangerous spotlight. He looks back only slightly, taking in a brief glimpse of Allison and the little ones they’ve made a silent pact to protect.
Another burst of wind batters the tent and the king-pole starts to topple, hurtling towards the stands where terrified spectators have started to scream —
— and Luther catches it.
He grunts as he plants his feet firmly on the ground, hands pushing against the tilt of the pole, an enormous thing which takes eight grown men to mount, and for a moment Allison is afraid that it’s going to squash him flat, that he’ll fall under the weight and take the entire circus tent down with him —
Slowly, Luther starts to right the pole back in place.
Allison can’t quite believe her eyes. She and every person in the tent are struck still in awe — Luther’s strength is utterly impossible —
— but there are so many impossible things that happen at the Umbrella Circus, aren’t there?
The king-pole gives a mighty creak as Luther inches it straight, and the spell is broken. The crowd panics and the tent erupts in chaos.
Five jumps through the air to Luther, crossing half the tent in a flash of light and a resounding crack like lightning —
Klaus curls in on himself and scrunches his eyes shut — he covers his ears and his hands glow blue —
Luther calls for a hammer to drive the king-pole back in and Diego tosses it to him, cutting an impossible trajectory, hurtling through the air one way and then the other —
The spectators yell and trample the stands and start to push their way to the exit in a near-stampede, and Allison worries for a second that they will jostle the display tanks that line the entrance, frightening the boy in Tank Six and making him beat his tentacles against the glass — but when Vanya raises her violin to her chin and plays her music, an unearthly calm washes over them —
And Sir sees the whole thing.
Allison watches with dread as Sir turns the page of his notebook and starts to write.
They slip away unnoticed that very day, blending into the crowd of people fleeing the deadly circus and the others flocking to it, hoping for a glimpse of the titan who held up the world with his monstrous strength.
They gather the children and hurry them onto the next outbound train. Although the ragtag group disembarks in some anonymous city, Allison and Luther know it won’t be their new home. They both saw the gleam in Sir’s eye when he caught sight of the miraculous misfits, and know he won’t let such treasures slip from his grasp so easily.
It takes three weeks in a grimy boarding house before a fake Pinkerton detective appears, asking if the landlady has seen a group of peculiar children, who were tragically lured away from home and whose father is ever so worried about them…
Luther ushers the children out the backdoor, whilst Diego distracts the man by ricocheting pebbles off the back of his head, and Klaus whispers in Allison’s ear about the chorus of ghosts who trail the imposter. They board the next train out and don’t look back.
For the second time in her life, Allison is a runaway, but now she has Luther and four little ones with her. This time she escapes not out of folly, but because she knows they need her. She will always miss the bright colours and roars of laughter and haunting music that made the circus magical, but knowing that they’re keeping Diego, Klaus, Five, and Vanya safe and out of the reach of Sir and his grotesque exhibitions makes it all worth it.
But it still hurts that they had to leave behind the one they call The Horror — that scared little boy in Tank Six.