When a strange circus arrives by the river, Lena, Ada, and Philip sneak backstage and discover that the star lion is missing just as the lights begin to fail.
In the little town by the river, the days usually drifted by without much to disturb them. Then, one morning, posters bloomed across the main square like bright warnings from another world: the Circus of the Night had come.
The paper was covered in gold stars and twisting red letters. It promised roaring lions, flying acrobats, and illusionists who could make secrets disappear. By lunchtime, everyone at school was talking about it. Lena, Ada, and Philip were talking about it too, and by Friday they had made a promise to each other: they would be in the front row.
They went just after dusk, crossing the meadow while the sky deepened to violet. The circus lights glimmered ahead of them, strung across the grass like a net of fireflies. Above the ticket booth, balloons bobbed in the cool air. The tent itself was enormous, striped in midnight blue and silver, and music spilled out from inside as if the whole place were breathing.
The moment they stepped beneath the canvas, Lena forgot the town behind her. Lanterns glittered overhead. A clown on stilts glided past, waving one enormous glove. White pigeons swept in a slow circle under the dome, so close she could hear the soft beat of their wings.
The show began with a burst of drums. Acrobats in cobalt costumes flew through hoops and swung from ropes high above the ring. Then a magician in a velvet cape turned a handful of plain wooden balls into shining coins with a flick of his fingers. The audience gasped and clapped, but the children barely blinked.
Still, it was the lion act that held them most tightly. The trainer, Mr Lucien, stepped into the ring in a black top hat and a long dark coat, moving with such calm certainty that even the crowd seemed to quiet around him. Beside him walked Bartek, the great lion, broad-maned and alert, as if he knew every eye in the tent was fixed on him.
Bartek was the star of the night. He leaped through burning hoops, padded across a narrow platform, and even nudged the edge of the ring so gently that a child in the front row shrieked with delighted laughter. Lena noticed that Mr Lucien kept speaking to him in a low voice between each trick, as though he were confiding a secret to an old friend.
When the final applause faded, the children should have gone home. Instead, they lingered near the back of the tent, hoping to catch Mr Lucien for an autograph. They slipped past hanging ropes, painted crates, and strings of small lights that trembled overhead.
Then Philip stopped so suddenly that Ada nearly bumped into him.
Do you hear that?
At first Lena thought it was only the music still echoing in the fabric walls. But then she heard it too: a strange dragging sound, followed by a muffled thump somewhere deeper in the shadows. The children exchanged a quick look and edged toward a narrow corridor beside the arena.
Where Bartek’s enclosure should have been, there was only an open space and a half-latched gate swinging slowly back and forth.
No lion.
No handler.
Just the dim smell of straw and something else, sharp and metallic, hanging in the air.
A whisper floated from the darkness ahead. The lights overhead flickered once, twice, and went weak and pale. Lena’s skin prickled. Then, from beyond the curtain, a shadow moved into the corridor and stopped dead in front of them, as if it had been waiting all along.