A crystal ball emanated a rainbow of colors, and Mr. Grenville winced.
“Does it really work?” he asked dryly, “or do you just keep it here for the gullible visitors, like the rest of your magic act?”
The young woman sprawled on the velvet couch—marked with unsavory stains—looked at the detective with equal doses of pity and contempt.
“You might not believe in the dark forces,” she answered, “but they do exist.”
“Undoubtedly,” Max Grenville infused his voice with just the right dose of sarcasm. “Good afternoon, Miss Hunter.”
He refused to call the incarnation of Sibyl the prophetess, as the circus advertised her, by the string of silly titles. Violet Hunter, in his opinion, was a perfectly fitting name for a lady.
The said lady, sporting flaming red hair and eyes of pure lavender, was looking straight at him now. Her dressing room, hidden in the dark bowels of the leaky tent perched on the outskirts of rain-sodden and sooty Bradford, smelled of some heavy oriental scent, and the detective instantly battled an approaching migraine.
Mr. Grenville had arrived in the north on the night train from King's Cross Station, following a telegram from the local police received the previous day. Chief Inspector Bradley, whom the detective had met during last year’s investigation into the suspicious death of a local steel manufacturer, had written in his usual brisk manner:
“A body part discovered in a parcel sent to a local circus. Come at once.”
The body part was now laid out on the shaky table, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and flanked by a strapping lad in a police uniform. The pristine cardboard box, bearing the delicate little finger wrapped in an oriental silk cloth, showed no traces of blood.
“Which means the finger was cut from a dead body,” Mr. Grenville said to Inspector Bradley. “Now we just need to find the rest of it and figure out why it was sent to Miss Hunter.”
The prophetess and bearer of ancient Egyptian wisdom, paying no attention to their chatter, started to polish her nails.
Max Grenville had visited Sanger’s Circus in London, with its Nile crocodiles and African lions, but the “Great and Amazing Hunter’s Show of Might and Magic”—as the enterprise was billed in the local newspapers—seemed to possess only one wild animal.
In the dark corner of the dimly lit room, a snake dozed in a glass cage. Miss Hunter nonchalantly lit a cigarette, and the inspector coughed.
“Who owns the circus, Miss Hunter?”
“I do,” she raised an eyebrow, “after the death of my father. He did not survive a trapeze fall last year. My husband and I,” she pointed at the yellowing poster depicting a menacing-looking man in a black mask, holding a pyramid of acrobats on his shoulders.
“Where is he now?” asked the detective.
“He went to the Gypsy camp to buy some horses,” Miss Hunter shrugged her slender shoulders, shrouded in the black robe.
“And the rest of the troupe?” Mr. Grenville looked around.
“We only employ two mute midgets,” she yawned. “Husband and wife. They’re resting after the performance. The midgets do the acrobatic act, I work the snake and magic, and Fred—that’s my husband—does the weightlifting.”
She stubbed the cigarette into an Indian copper ashtray.
“Why do you call yourself 'Miss' if you’re married?” the inspector asked, and the prophetess chuckled.
“It’s better for business, as the Americans say. Now, if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen...”
She rose from the couch, and Mr. Grenville stepped forward.
“Where did you lose your little finger, Miss Hunter?”
Her lilac eyes momentarily hardened.
“My twin sister accidentally cut it when we were kids, during a magic practice. The woman-in-the-box act.”
She disappeared behind a shabby Chinese screen, and the detective raised his voice.
“Where is your sister now, Miss Hunter?”
She stuck out her disheveled head.
“Lily? She died from a snake bite when she was a teenager. Somebody accidentally put a poisonous reptile in the cage. Now I have to rehearse, so if you have nothing more to ask me...”
Her voice muffled.
“Medza, una, dooey, tray, quarter, chinker, say...”
“That’s not Italian,” the detective observed, picking up the box with its ghastly content.
“Circus jargon,” the inspector explained as they navigated the foul-smelling passages of the Hunter Circus.
Stepping outside, Max Grenville shivered. The autumn wind swayed the tent, and the raindrops hissed something in his ear.
“What goes around comes around,” the detective shook his head. “Total nonsense.”
He hurried after Inspector Bradley to a waiting police cab.
#
The police put Max Grenville up for the night in one of the new-fangled hotels next to the imposing building of Bradford Exchange station. Over supper in the hotel's restaurant, with its inevitable fare of tough roast beef, overboiled potatoes, and mushy peas, the detective and Inspector Bradley discussed the box in which the finger had arrived at the circus. The carton bore no stamps and wasn’t addressed. Miss Hunter swore she had found the box at the circus entrance, together with another, properly addressed post.
“The postman doesn’t recall any parcel arriving yesterday,” the inspector said, and Mr. Grenville nodded.
“Because it was delivered by hand and separately, Inspector,” he finished his glass of mediocre wine. “Let’s drink our port in the library, where I believe the fireplace has already been lit.”
His bare bedroom was devoid of such luxury, and the heating, which the hotel boasted about, proved to be insufficient for northern November. Max Grenville usually did not smoke in bed, but now, having been woken by the plaintive howling wind, he fumbled at the nightstand, looking for his silver cigarette case. Instead, his hand enclosed the cardboard box with the finger, entrusted to him by Inspector Bradley. The police surgeon had confirmed the finger to belong to either a child or a woman.
The flickering gaslight gave the appendage a sickening blue, almost violet shade.
“In daylight, it’s lily-white,” the detective examined the delicate fingernail. According to the surgeon, the finger had been cut from a body using something like a saw.
“The woman in the box,” the detective remembered, fleetingly touching the cold skin. Something moved under his hand, and Max Grenville again heard a hissing voice.
“What goes around comes around,” she hissed. “Set me free, Max...”
The finger grew and moved in his palm, winding around his arm like a snake, slithering under the blanket, coiling around the most private part of his body. Her elegant head, with the sparkling violet eyes, swayed next to Max's face. He could not avert his gaze from her unblinking stare. Her pink tongue tapped him on the lips.
“Kiss me, Max,” she whispered. “You know it's not a real pleasure yet.”
Something strong squeezed his throat, and the detective fell into the deep well of oblivion.
#
The wind slapped Max Grenville in the face and whirled around his feet in a vortex of discarded tickets. The early morning dawned gray and foggy, and, eschewing his usual cup of coffee, the detective found himself on the threshold of Hunter’s Circus. The nightmare had disappeared from his room, leaving behind just an empty cardboard box. The finger had vanished into thin air, and the detective found in his bed something resembling snake scales.
“Utter rubbish,” he muttered, stepping into the empty tent. “I was worried and had a troubled sleep, no more.”
The sawdust sprang under his step, and, diving under the old velvet curtain, he sneezed.
“Miss Hunter!” the detective called.
“Here!” Her voice was vicious and sweet, like treacle. Finding his way to the dressing room, the detective knocked over the familiar Chinese screen.
Miss Hunter was lazily puffing on a cigarette, and her fragile frame, twisted into almost a circle, reminded the detective of a satiated snake. The reptile in the glass cage stood on its tail. The triangular head bobbed, and the detective heard a hiss.
“She’s angry today,” Miss Hunter smiled. “One might say, even furious.”
“Why?”
The detective came closer to the couch, and Miss Hunter, in one smooth movement, sprang to her feet. She was almost as tall as Grenville himself.
“Because she misbehaved, and I punished her,” Miss Hunter licked her scarlet lips. The tip of her pink tongue was split ever so slightly.
“Where is the finger?” The detective tried to recoil, but his feet refused to move.
“This one?” She raised her hands, and Max Grenville gasped.
“But yesterday you were missing one!”
“You must have imagined something,” she smiled. “I have never missed anything, Mr. Grenville.”
“Did you say Lily was your twin?”
She did not miss a beat.
“Identical, Mr. Grenville,” the smile did not leave her face, and a trickle of cold sweat ran down his back.
“What goes around comes around,” she hissed. “Remember this, Max.”
The snake in the cage threw its body against the glass, and Miss Hunter bared her sharp teeth.
“Leave now and never come back!”
Running away from the dressing room, the detective barely avoided the life-size wax cast of a cobra standing on its tail.
“Only at Hunter’s Circus,” the letters danced in front of his eyes. “The woman transforming into a snake!”
The dirty canvas let him out, and the circus tent dissolved into the thick fog.
The End