The Troupe (17 page)

He opened it to find Stanley and Silenus standing in the hall with a lantern shining in Stanley’s hand. “Where the hell have you been?” asked Silenus.

“What do you mean?” asked George.

“We knocked here nearly an hour ago and there was no answer.”

“Oh,” said George. But he was not inclined to tell his father what he’d seen; Silenus had been keeping so many secrets that George thought it only fair to have a few of his own. “I was… out.”

Silenus cocked an eyebrow.

“I was delayed by a very interesting conversation with a stranger,” George added primly.

“If you say so,” said Silenus. “Get dressed. We’re going out.”

George nearly despaired at the idea of venturing out into that weather again. “What? Why?”

“Your three weeks are up, kid,” Silenus said. “It’s time for you to
know.” He turned and began to walk down the hall with Stanley close behind.

George struggled back into his clothes and followed them. “To know what?” he asked.

Silenus said, “How the world was made.”

George was not at all sure where they were taking him, but when they were outside they headed directly for the theater. On finding the door to the backstage locked Silenus stepped aside and said to Stanley, “Do your thing. And hurry. I’m fucking freezing.” Stanley knelt and produced a set of lock picks, and within seconds his nimble fingers had sprung the door open.

The inside of the theater was a threatening place in the night. No outside light found its way in, so it was lit only by the lamp in Stanley’s hand. The wind beat against the walls and window, moaning and whistling. The looming vacancy of the place grew oppressive as George walked onstage and stared out at the dark curtains, or the distant hint of rafters, or the row upon row of empty seats. It felt like the theater was playing host to an invisible audience, and they were not impressed by the show.

Stanley went to pull down Kingsley’s backdrop (which was now blank again) and Silenus walked to the edge of the stage, looking out on the empty theater. “There are few things creepier than a place that is intended to be full of people, and yet is empty,” he said. Then a
thought seemed to strike him, and he said, “Let me ask you something, kid—why did you get into vaudeville?”

George was startled by the question, since he had not yet tried to explain his relation to Silenus. He did not feel especially ready now, at any rate. “I’m not sure I know.”

“An honest answer. And probably a common one. We get into this game with grand plans and great delusions, but after a while the reasons we started with fade. Why do we keep doing it? I wonder. We spend our whole lives preparing and perfecting an illusion that will last only for a handful of minutes, the less the better. Our daily employment is but a momentary flash and flame, then nothing. Most of us old ones no longer do it for the audience. That attraction is the first to go. To us, every day is like performing for an empty theater. So why keep going? Is it just routine, the comfortable familiar? Or are we playing only for ourselves? Or perhaps for the amusement of something greater, something beyond men and mortals… It vexes me so.”

Then they heard the click of chalk, and turned to see Stanley writing on his blackboard with great agitation. “Now what’s going on here?” said Silenus.

Stanley finished what he was writing, and held it up to the empty backdrop as though it could see him and read. He’d written:
PLEASE BE REASONABLE, WE DO NOT HAVE ALL NIGHT
. While George could not understand what Stanley expected from the backdrop, it still did nothing.

Silenus passed by Stanley and walked right up to the sheet of canvas. “Listen, you touchy fuck,” he said to it, “I’ve spent too much of my time dragging you around to be willing to abide one more minute of your little fucking temper tantrums! I ain’t the one that killed your originator, but I’d be willing to start a bonfire and kill
you
all the same! Now wise up and get on with the show, or I swear to God, I will put this cigar out on you and smile.”

It remained blank. George whispered to Stanley, “What does he think the backdrop will do?”

Stanley wrote:
NOT BACKDROP. SKIN
.

“What do you mean, skin?” asked George.

“It’s chimera skin,” said Silenus. He took out his cigar and blew on the end until it was red-hot. “A creature of many kinds—a goat, a lion, a snake—and many shapes and colors.” He lowered the lit cigar toward the backdrop. “If you skin it the right way then its hide gains certain properties. Specifically, it can project certain images and sensations, if you can control it.” The lit cigar kept slowly nearing the backdrop. “But they’re notoriously picky things, and sometimes,” he said, and the lit end of the cigar was very close to the backdrop now, “they need to be
forced
.”

Just when the cigar’s end was but a hairsbreadth away, the surface of the canvas (or skin, George reminded himself) changed: it bloomed into a rippling dark blue with little flickers of light in its center. The stage and theater were bathed in its unearthly iridescence and seemed all the stranger as a result.

“It moves!” cried George.

“Yeah, yeah, it moves,” said Silenus. “I knew I could talk some sense into the thing. Maybe we should have gotten Colette to come with us, it seems to like her the most.”

George was instantly enamored of it and wanted to touch it, but was somewhat afraid of what might happen if he did. “Where did you get it?”

“I won it in a card game,” said Silenus. “Honestly, that’s how I acquire most of our equipment. It’s damn useful, though. Most vaudeville shows, people wander in and out constantly. But this keeps them in their seats, at least for the start.” He stuck his cigar back in his mouth and walked to the middle of the stage. “Take a seat, kid. I’m going to put on a show for you. It’s easier to explain this in visual terms, y’see.”

George reluctantly left the moving image and took a seat in the
front row. Stanley came down as well and sat a few seats across from him, but Silenus remained up on the stage. He said, “What I’m going to do up here, kid, is tell you a story. Like all stories, it’s an attempt to make sense of something larger than itself. And, like most stories, it fails, to a certain degree. It’s a gloss, a rendition, so it’s not exact. But it’ll do.”

“All right,” said George.

Silenus looked to the backdrop. “It starts with, ‘In the beginning,’ ” he said.

This was evidently a signal of some kind, as Stanley dimmed the lantern and the backdrop grew a solid black. Silenus cleared his throat, assumed a more theatrical pose, and said:

“In the beginning, there was nothing. There were no suns, no stars, no lands or seas or skies.” His voice echoed throughout the theater, and it gained a queer resonance that made it feel as though he were speaking very close to George. “Nothing lived, for there was nothing to live in or on. Time did not exist, for there was nothing to pass through it. There was only nothing, an endless, vasty abyss.

“But then the Creator came, and all of that changed,” said Silenus.

Then the image of pure black shattered, like someone pitching a baseball through the middle of a pane of glass, revealing a second background behind it of bright white. There was a great shout of countless voices singing one furious note, and then the voices dropped to a hum. George could not see where the voices were coming from—perhaps it was the backdrop itself?—but before he could think on it the image began moving again: the shards of darkness drifted away from the middle until there was a space of clear white in the center that was ringed by a jagged edge of black.

“The Creator broke the darkness, and it decided that, for the first time, things should Be,” said Silenus. “There would come, amid this
sea of infinite nothingness, existence. And in that small puddle of existence, a world. And so the Creator sang the world.”

The hums changed into a song. It was a very soft and curious song. It seemed somewhat toneless to George, with no major or minor mode that he could discern. Yet as the voices sang, something appeared in the center of the white space: a brown dot, like a dab of paint from an invisible paintbrush. The dab turned into a streak, which made a circle within the white space, and then the invisible paintbrush began to fill in the circle with what looked like mountains and shorelines and broad, flat plains. They were all a little crude-looking, much like something one would find on a cave wall, yet a considerable amount of expression was rendered from such simple forms.

“The Creator sang of skies and seas, of mountains and valleys, of water and rain and the touch of the sun. It sang of the slow caress of time, of the lapping of waves and the dance of light, of flame and ice and winds and rivers.”

The song changed and more shapes appeared within the little brown world: broad blue oceans and little rivulets, and small storms that waxed and waned as they advanced across the continents. The world came alive with thousands of slight animations, forces and pressures and reactions rippling across its face.

“Then the Creator sang of things that would exist within the world, and grow,” said Silenus. “It sang of grasses and trees and moss and algae. It sang of seaweed and vines and endless fruits, and other tiny green things that stretched toward the light, sucking up mere drops of water.”

The song intensified, and patches of green began to appear on the faces of the continents. The sea changed color from a dark blue to a lighter gray, and tiny green trees began popping up across the face of the world. They swayed back and forth with an invisible wind, and sometimes minuscule pinecones or fruits dropped from their branches, which were no larger than mouse bones.

“Then the Creator decided to sing of things that would live, yet would see the world, and know of it,” said Silenus. “Things that would react to it of their own accord. So the Creator sang of all the animals in the mountains and the grasslands and upon the shores, and the fishes and creatures in the blue deeps, and the birds that would drift from gust to gust in the sky.”

Small deer leaped out from amid the green and began to cavort and frolic, and among their feet were mice and asps and foxes. In the plains were cattle and other large creatures, some of which George did not recognize, like one beast with great tusks and long hair. Fish and porpoises jumped up from the waves of the seas, and sometimes whales would surface and send a fine spray up into air. Above them all small birds flickered and dodged, or sailed from enormous nests up in the peaks of the mountains.

“Then the Creator sang of a creature that would see the world most clearly and, unlike all others, possess the ability to change it,” said Silenus. “And so the last of the things the Creator sang of was Man.”

Small huts appeared around the patches of blue and under the green trees, and then tiny stick figures emerged from them, though their bodies and limbs were loose and willowy. They ate the fruit and hunted the deer and washed their miniature clothes in the streams. They grew fat and happy, and had children, and carried their little ones about, showing them the sun and the mountains and the sky.

“And then, when the world was complete, the Creator was pleased with what it had made,” said Silenus. “And it left.”

The song faded from the screen, and it seemed to George as though a light went out of the images as well. The brown world with its many creatures remained, sitting in its white pool surrounded by shards of jagged black, but it seemed slightly dimmer, and the colors were no longer quite as bright.

“The world continued as the Creator had left it—seas still surged, rivers still trickled, the winds still played with the clouds, and the
creatures grew in population, or died back. But then something happened that the Creator may not have intended: the darkness came alive.”

A quiver ran through all the pieces of jagged black at the edges of the screen. Certain parts began moving, very slowly: shards and crags of the ring of black grew close together, solidifying themselves. And George thought he could discern a single pair of eyes in the darkness, little white slits that peered out at the brown world beyond it, and he thought he could see hate in that gaze.

“To have a thing exist was endless torment for all the nothing that had been there before it,” said Silenus. “It had been wounded and broken when the Creator made the world. And in its rage the darkness struck back, and began to devour Creation.”

Another quiver ran through the darkness, and the shards of black changed: they grew long, sharp ears, and thin, threatening snouts, and sharp, snapping fangs. George realized that the darkness had grown the heads of a thousand wolves, and they bit and snarled at the little brown world that was sitting in the white pool. The painting of the world began to fade, not all at once but in patches: first a small valley in the hills faded and darkened, then a piece of shore, and then the tip of a chain of mountains, until the world looked as though it were diseased, with strata of black running across it.

“The creatures of the world were thrown into despair,” said Silenus. “The winds changed course, mountains vanished, and rivers that had once led to the sea now ended in wide, black gaps, their waters flowing into nothingness. Wandering herds entered the shadows and were lost. Forests faded and fell away. Those who witnessed these things begged That Which Made the World to return, and save them. But for reasons that could not be guessed at, the Creator did not return, and the world was plunged into darkness.”

The world kept fading until only little islands of it were left. The isolated fragments trembled under the weight of all that shadow, like they all might burst apart at any moment.

“But then some of the people discovered something,” said Silenus. “They found that the song the Creator had sung when it first made the world still echoed in the deep places: under mountains, in the darkest forests, in the coldest seas, and within ancient hills, never dying. And the people found that if they took these echoing pieces of the First Song, and pooled them and sang them in the fading parts of the world, then they could renew it, and save what was left, for within the song were the commands that had made the seas and lands and skies and creatures.”