Circus Solace Read Online Free PDF Page A

gentlemen.”
    “Could you tell us one thing?” Matt said and was surprised at how small his voice sounded.
    “At a push, vanilla…but not just any vanilla,” he said, looking over to the plate. His eyes grew wide and excited, as if he was listening to his favourite piece of summer music being played after a long, cold winter. “It comes from Mount Vesuvius. Some of the white ash hardened and solidified in the air with the pods and bingo-bango, Vesuvius Volcanic Vanilla.”
    “And…” Pa said, leaving the words hanging in the air.
    “And…that’s your lot for a first time. I’ve had folks wait five years just to find out that one ingredient, so think yourself honoured.” He closed his eyes for a moment and smiled. “Once , we had a competition in the town to guess all the ingredients that went into a Star Ship Pie. Winner got a lifetime’s supply. Old Em from the post office, this was back when she was Emily Drinkwater and the biggest heartbreaker in town, she submitted a list of a thousand and three different spices and flavours. She spent one whole winter writing it out. She didn’t even come close; I gave her a month’s free slices just for her hard endeavours. You ready?”
    Marcus pushed the plate to the centre of the table and for a second, Matt thought the pie itself vibrated where it sat. He set down two spoons and sat back. Pa looked over questioningly but the old man shook his head.
    “If I help make what I love disappear, I’d go crazy,” he said with a smile. Matt noticed that after a second or two, the grin faltered and shifted into something else, something sadder. The history of the town and the way Marcus told it ran through Matt’s mind and he realised how many meanings words could have when they came out attached with memories.
    “ Stop right there !”
    Matt and Pa dropped their spoons as the door swung open to reveal two burly men with badges. They were almost identical, apart from the fact that one had a broken nose and the other cauliflower ears, as if they’d fought each other inside their ma’s belly while waiting to get out.
    “ This is not allowed,” the one on the left said.
    “By law,” the other finished. Both slipped their badges away at the same time and parted left and right, leaving the doorway open.
    What bounded in made Matt gasp, as the cake had done minutes before, but for all the wrong reasons. A man-and it was a man- ricocheted into the diner, dressed in a clown’s outfit. He moved jaggedly and then slowed abruptly; making the last few steps to the table seem as if he were almost oozing out from the costume. A man, sure, but Matt saw how the make-up seemed caked too bright and thick, as if it wasn’t paint at all but a second skin. It had cracked in places, leaving thin strips of pink flesh to poke out, but it was the colour of bacon gone bad and rotten. The colours were coarse and vulgar, the too-bright shades of migraines and nightmares. The clown was too thin, as if he were made of a stack of twisted coat-hangers; arms wiry, legs bandy, a neck that was little more than pins gathered together. All of that but not skinny, not quite, but lithe , as if he could pull out a slingshot full of ball-bearings, or a bouquet of stinging nettles from his chest pocket, at a moment’s notice. Matt thought the clown stood like a jutting, poisonous, streak of lighting.
    “Well, well, well, what do I see here but three fellows’ waiting to tuck in to something naughty-naughty and illegal in this fair land of ours.” His voice was light but full of snap, like a bully giving out orders from a safe place in the tree tops.
    “Fellows, I am mayor Cirrus but some say Se-ri-ous and make no doubt about it,” he went on his voice rising to a pitch that was just below a scream. “I am one serious clown!”      
    “I was just offering up an old recipe,” Marcus said. His voice was strong but even Matt could hear the slight tremor underneath it, just at the back of the