The Infinity Circus

Chapter One

Alice Canterbury woke with a start.

The remnants of the night's dream were already receding into the fuzzier parts of her mind. Something about a circus, a strange beast, and a short woman with a horribly high-pitched voice. She pressed her clammy hand to the side of her neck, feeling her skin prick with sweat. She shivered unconsciously, certain that it hadn't been a particularly pleasant dream.

Her golden grandfather clock swung on the mantle above, its spindly limbs resting on the number seven. She sighed in dismay. Just fifteen minutes before her overly eager maid Rhea would bound into her room and shake her from bed with far too rough enthusiasm.

Sliding out of her cool sheets, body slick with sweat, Alice rested her shivering feet on the plush carpet below her bed. She could almost hear the sick laughter of the decaying crowd ringing in her ears. Her stomach had settled into a series of uncomfortable knots at the memory- she had been experiencing the same dream an awful lot of late.

Calm yourself, Alice. She scolded herself. She took several deep breaths, steadying the shaking in her legs and steeling her nerves as she trained herself to do many times before. The dream surely didn't mean anything, she reasoned. Just her nerves showing themselves at inappropriate times. Of course they were. It was nearly her seventeenth birthday, after all.

Her dark oak vanity table sat beside the great glass window overlooking the forest below, and beyond it, the village, already bustling with traders heaving their carts across cobbled squares, young men in tweed suits extinguishing the lamps for the day, and young children out riding their bicycles, playing tag or darting in and out of alleyways with fake bows and swords, playing war. Burlington was always busy, even in the early breakings of the dawn. There was always someone doing something. Cars had now begun to rumble down the cobbled roads, shopkeepers hanging open signs on their front doors.

Alice gazed at herself in the mirror with an almost dismayed look. Her dark chestnut brown hair, long and thick yet messy from her tumultuous night of dreams hung loosely around her waist. The waves that coated her hairline were still perfect, seeing as she slept on her back. Her olive green eyes looked dulled, puffy from her sudden rude awakening. She slid a brush gently across the top layer of her hair, pulling the strands into a silky sheen. She hated to admit it, but she had begun seeing her mother more and more in her own appearance. The low nose, the sharper glare of her eyes, the darker brown undertones of her hair. It made Alice want to shatter the mirror each time she remembered. The last thing she wanted was to be anything close to her mother's daughter.

She sighed as she brushed a hand across her tired eyes. The last few days before her seventeenth birthday were escaping her. Most teenagers her age couldn't wait to be seventeen, because for most, it meant more freedom, more fun, more choice of who you were or what you wanted to be. But for herself, it meant the opposite. It meant more expectation, more demand, and more pressure from her mother to be the queen she'd groomed her to be all her life. Seventeen marked the day of her imprisonment, and she was not excited.

"Alice, deary? It's Marta!" Alice cringed at the sudden chirpy voice that sounded from behind her door. She was never in the mood for Marta's overbearing cheerfulness, but so early in the morning was possibly the worst time for it. "It's time to get up, your mother expects you in the dining room."

"Come in," Alice sighed, suppressing an irritated groan. Of course her mother wasn't going to let her spend her last days of sixteen in peace. Why would she?

Marta bustled into the room, a jolly smile on her painted face. "Goodness deary, you're already up! I would've thought you'd still be dead asleep."

Her eyes took on a glimmer of jovial excitement. "Perhaps you stayed up all night because of your birthday, hm? Too excited to fall asleep?"