Free Ravencliffe (Blythewood series) by Carol Goodman

My horse sped up and overtook the others.
    “Go, Ava!” I heard Nathan cry as I passed him and Helen, then two other riders. Only one horse was still in front of me. The man had already dismounted and was helping his companion down. I heard her giggling voice declaiming, “We won! We won!” It was the girl I’d heard before. She was wearing a sailor suit and a flower-trimmed bonnet. She threw her arms around the neck of her companion, her back to me.
    “Yes,” I heard him say, his voice a deep rumble. “I always do.”
    The bass bell in my head clanged as I passed the finish line, as if signaling my victory, but that wasn’t why it was ringing. It was because the man in front of me was Judicus van Drood. I recognized the Inverness cape and Homburg hat he habitually wore, looking heavy and out of place in the summer crowds. Our eyes met and he smiled, a wisp of smoke curling out of his parted lips. Then he slipped from his companion’s arms and vanished through the exit.
    I jumped off my horse and ran after him, pushing rudely past the girl in the sailor’s outfit and through a curtained doorway . . .
    Where the ground gave out beneath me. I was tumbling down into darkness, my arms flailing for purchase on slick walls, plummeting into the abyss.

7

    I LANDED HARD on the wooden floor, lights blazing around me like the fires of hell. A face loomed out of the glare, distorted and strange, the eyes circled with shadows, the nose bulbous and red, the mouth stretched unnaturally wide. The creature held out a red-gloved hand to me, beckoning me toward the hellfire. Ignoring it, I got up on my own and found myself towering over a little man. He shrugged and doffed his hat, and marched forward. Was he leading me to van Drood? A gust of hot air shot up my legs, lifting my skirts up above my knees. From behind the glare of lights I heard a low rumble. Laughter. I blinked into the glare and made out the shapes of heads and hats—feathered women’s hats and men’s straw boaters. It was an audience gathered to watch my humiliation. I pushed my skirts down and strode across the stage, where the little man—a dwarf in clown face—waited.
    “Don’t be mad!” he cried in a loud falsetto. “Be bad! Join the audience and laugh at our next performers!”
    So that was how it worked. They humiliated you, then offered you the chance to laugh at their next victims. Even if I would stoop that low, I had van Drood to find. I rushed past the dwarf.
    “Try the fun house,” he whispered under his breath. “The humbug went that way.”
    Had I heard him right? Could I trust him? And what was a humbug? Was he referring to the Homburg hat van Drood wore?
    After exiting the stage, which looking back I saw was called the Blowhole Theater, I found myself in a vast vaulted pavilion full of screaming crowds. I looked in vain for van Drood as I passed a ride called the Human Roulette Wheel that spun people around in a mad circle and one called the Barrel of Love that tossed men and women around like bits of laundry in a tub. Then I spied the dark Homburg hat at an arched gateway that looked like the gates of hell. A Hellgate. Yes, that’s where van Drood would go. I entered a long narrow corridor that seemed to get narrower and narrower as I went forward. At the end of it I spied a wisp of smoke trailing behind van Drood. I rushed forward and collided with a wide-eyed, frightened girl.
    Was it the girl from the Steeplechase? She looked familiar. But when I reached for her, my hand hit glass. I was staring into a mirror at my own frightened reflection. I wheeled around and a dozen Avas turned with me, all with their mouths gaping open and their eyes popping wide.
    Foolish girl
, a deep male voice chided.
You don’t even recognize yourself.
    I spun around again, searching for the source of the voice, and glimpsed the hem of a cloak and the brim of a hat vanishing on the edge of each mirror, as if van Drood had somehow slipped
behind
the