Epilogue
The sky was black, churning with gray storm clouds as I entered the ebony caravan.
Hurrying past the Hall of Oddities and The Menagerie, my goal was clear, my objective certain. The Dark Room greeted me with its usual, overwhelming atmosphere of being watched. Thousands of eyes stared at me from every corner and shadow. A faint breath raised the hairs on the back of my neck, but that was just a reflex at this point. Not wanting to run into Laurent again, I’d waited to take this little trip until I’d seen him turn in for the evening. And that was when I’d headed to The Dark Room.
I was hoping to make my visit short. I knew exactly what I was looking for.
Just before the row of posters stood Laurent’s black-petticoat doll, all fixed and perfect again, standing patiently like a sturdy soldier. I also noticed a new poster that appeared to be recently photographed. It hadn’t been there on my two previous visits. And when I saw this one, my heart dropped.
It was the image of a small girl, perhaps six years old, who was clutching a yellow blanket. I looked closely into her eyes, and there was no mistaking it. The eyes of the girl in the painted poster belonged to the little girl who’d participated in my act earlier that evening, the little girl I’d marked!
“What have I done?” I whispered out loud as something else dawned on me—Laurent had lied to me. This wasn’t an illusion or some kind of trick or sleight of hand. The posters never were. Laurent had just told me whatever he could to get me to stop asking questions.
My eyes settled on the doll with the red hair and freckles speckled across her porcelain face, and I breathed in deeply.
“You’re real… or at least, you were real,” I started as my attention turned to the girl in the poster. “And you’re also real. I met you just a few hours ago.”
The doll in the black petticoat moved her head stiffly, offering an unbending arm to me, almost in sympathy.
“You know me, don’t you?” I knelt until I was eye level with her on the shelf she occupied. Folding my knees beneath me, my voice trembled as I said, “I-I know you know me. I know you do. I can feel it. It seems impossible, but… you definitely are somebody I know… or knew.”
Again, she nodded and pointed toward the hallway of posters and photos. The lights began turning on, one by one, and the portrait closest to me flickered to life. This poster featured the two teenage boys that Rex had marked. As I studied their faces, their eyes moved, just like those of the doll. The two boys shifted within the bounds of the poster and wiggled their fingers slowly, deliberately. Except they weren’t just wiggling them for my entertainment. It looked as if they were trying to tell me something. Sign language? No, not quite. But they were definitely forming letters with their hands and trying to spell out a message.
“E, L…” I squinted, trying to piece it together. “I can’t… I can’t quite make out what you’re trying to say.” My stomach clenched when I finally figured out what they were telling me. They didn’t need to finish. Slowly, I turned my head back to the dolls. The black-petticoat doll was still there, and she looked at me with sad eyes. Tears, real tears, ran down her face. I wiped them aside with my pinky finger.
“I thought I recognized you. I’m positive we knew each other.”
And then it hit me—a word, a name, I hadn’t thought of in however long I’d been with the circus. It was like a breath from the past as it visited me now.
“Amelia,” I whispered.
Despite the doll’s frozen visage, I could sense that she acknowledged my statement.
As if in answer, every light in the room suddenly flickered off, leaving me alone in pitch-black darkness. I froze in place, crouching on the ground as I waited… And waited… And waited for whatever would happen next.
The hallway lights flickered back to life. Then, without a sound, the walls suddenly warped and broke away. Instead of being inside the ebony caravan, I was instantly outside it. Except for Amelia, all the other dolls, the posters, and strange creatures were gone.
And now? Now I was facing a dense, gnarled forest. It surrounded us, with a strange fog inching across the ground. I got to my feet, scooping Amelia into my arms before we both stared at the eerie forest.
“Where… where are we?” I whispered.
She didn’t respond.
She couldn’t respond, even though I knew she wanted to.
So that meant it was up to me to find the answers.
Clutching Amelia tightly to my chest, I took a deep breath, and stepped into the peculiar mist.
The End