The Troupe (19 page)

It was not a landscape in any conceivable sense of the word. For one thing, it did not obey any of the rules of physics that George was aware of and comfortable with: he was not sure if he was looking out, or down, or possibly even up, or maybe he was stuck to the side of a cliff and was looking along the precipice. But no matter the angle at which he looked, George saw an endless gray wasteland arranged out among the stars, riddled with abysses and canyons whose
breadths were so wide it took George minutes (or was it hours?) to look from one side to the other. There was no vegetation of any kind, nor any sign of life: only the barren, starlit stone. Desolate gray peaks stared down (or up, or across) at him, like a volcanic eruption frozen at the height of its violence. There seemed to be far too much sky in places around him, and very little earth, like the horizon was eaten up by the gaps between the stars. It was a frigid, brittle, awful place, hanging in space without any sense of dimension or depth or purpose. The wastes looked terribly cold, and as George had just gasped he had to take in a breath of air, and it was indeed so frozen that it was shocking.

“What is this?” said George.

“This is one of the lost places,” said Silenus. His words made an astounding amount of steam, and George saw their very bodies were steaming as well. “I don’t know what it was originally. I just know it
isn’t
, anymore. Places like these are accessible through deep shadows in the thin parts of the world, parts that the darkness has rubbed away until they are barely there, with a few holes finally appearing. Our presence has renewed this place a little, since we have heard the song—that’s why your feet don’t freeze off of you, and why you are not frozen solid—so that’s good, but it’s not enough in the face of this. It’s one of the places that the First Song cannot bring back. The wolves have utterly consumed it. And when they triumph over us, even these remains will fade.”

George noticed that Silenus had said “when,” not “if.” He was about to remark on it when he noticed a smattering of small white lights among the shadows of the cliffs. At first he mistook them for more stars, buried among the stones of this strange place, but he saw that they seemed to be holes of some kind, or tunnels, and some led to light and others led to someplace dark…

Silenus said, “There is more than this. Unbelievably more, if distance still functions in such a ruined state. The amount of Creation that was lost in the first days is unthinkable.”

“That can’t be,” said George. “I’ve seen maps of the world, of all the continents. It’s all accounted for. The world has a start and an end. There aren’t any lost pieces.”

“Are you so sure?” said Silenus. “Don’t you sometimes feel like the world is getting smaller, George? Have you never heard any of the ancient stories and felt the world they took place in was far larger than the one we know today? Or haven’t you wondered why there are stories of fabulous places and fantastic beasts, yet we can find no sign of them anywhere anymore?”

“I thought people had made all that up,” said George.

“No,” said Silenus. “They existed, if only for a little while. But they and the places they dwelled in are now… well…” He gestured to the barren wasteland before them. “Consumed. Collapsed into a meaningless little pocket of reality found only in shadow. Now the world balances upon a mere scrap of fundament, floating unevenly in nothing. And what’s left could easily be lost as well, if we allow the wolves to catch up to us and devour what we have spent our whole lives protecting. And if you do not take our purpose seriously, it may just happen. Do you understand?”

George nodded.

“Have you seen enough?”

“Yes,” said George, who wanted to be far away from that terrible place.

“Then we’ll exeunt quickly,” said Silenus. He turned them around and George saw that in the darkness before them was a small, oddly shaped hole that looked out on the fenced-in lots they’d just left. It was not until they were right before it that he realized the hole was in the general shape of the shadow in the red-brick corner, which made him think about the little tunnels of light he’d seen in the cliffs…

They staggered out of the shadow and into the mill lot. Stanley and George gasped for air, since the atmosphere in that horrible landscape had been too cold and thin for them to breathe comfortably. Silenus appeared to be less affected: he coolly watched as
they tried to compose themselves, and said, “Come on. Back to my office.”

George sat up to pull his shoes and socks on. As he did he saw the soles of his feet had been burned black, just like Silenus’s and Stanley’s. He poked at the arch of his foot. It did not hurt, but when he licked his finger and rubbed at it the blackness did not come away. It seemed to have been stained by the brief journey in that miserable place.

Stanley gave him a weak smile, and wrote:
ONE OF US NOW. LIKE IT OR NOT
.

Even though they’d traveled through several different towns, Silenus’s office door had somehow always traveled with them. George took it as a sign of his adjustment that he had not been surprised to discover this. He had even intuited it, to a certain degree: before they’d caught the train to Milton the entire troupe had simply taken their bags and props and stacked them in the office, and apparently left them all behind. Then when Silenus had “discovered” the door among the rooms in the new hotel in Milton (as the door, like Kingsley’s backdrop, was apparently a sometimes-fickle thing) he’d opened it to reveal the same room, with their bags in the same places that they’d left them. Ever since then the door had always appeared to them in some shadowy section of the wall of whatever hotel they were staying in. It must have saved wonders in train fare.

Now George huddled before Silenus’s ancient medieval desk, his hands clasped around a hot cup of tea. The office was much more cluttered than when he’d last seen it: books and papers lay stacked on the desk and several of the chairs, and many cabinet doors stood ajar. Stanley held a cup of tea as well and sat in a chair before the bay window, morose and still. Silenus took his only comfort in a bottle of
wine that was very syrupy and stank horribly, though he slurped it down as though it were water. Behind him the stars in the window had shifted slightly, with some growing larger and some smaller, yet George now found them familiar: they were reminiscent of the stars he’d seen over the gray wastes in the shadow.

George finally found the strength to voice a question that had been on his mind since the moving picture show: “Why did He leave?”

“The Creator?” asked Silenus.

George nodded.

“Well, for starters, what you saw is just a story,” said Silenus. “It’s trying to make sense of bigger things in the easiest way possible. As such, it doesn’t make perfect sense. But as for me, I’m inclined to believe that part.” He filled up his glass, took a sip, and pulled a face. “Who can say why the Creator left? We’re not equipped to guess its mind. I don’t even know why it made the world, or what purpose or impulse it was trying to fulfill. Not
yet
, at least. But sometimes people just leave, kid. You can’t let the leaving or the absence rule you. We must all be the authors of our own lives now.”

George huddled closer to his cup of tea, shaken, but said nothing.

But Stanley frowned, and took out his board and wrote:
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT THE CREATOR DID NOT LEAVE, THOUGH
.

Silenus turned around in his chair to read what he’d written. Then he rolled his eyes and said, “If it’s still here and watching, it’s very quiet. No one’s seen the hand of the Creator in the world since it was made. Most likely it’s gone, though to where I can’t say.”

Stanley wrote:
WE HAVE THE SONG. THAT CANNOT BE COINCIDENCE. IT LEFT US A TOOL TO SURVIVE
.

“The song was found only after so much was lost,” said Silenus. “The Creator has a funny way of looking after what it makes, if it allowed that to happen. It abandoned us, and leaving the First Song behind was inadvertent. It’s an echo. You don’t sing a song intending to make an echo.”

The chalk clicked and scraped:
BUT AN ECHO THAT BEHAVES THAT PERFECTLY
?

“The Creator didn’t intend for the wolves to happen, either, but they did. And they’re perfectly suited to destruction. Is that part of the Creator’s original intent, then?”

Stanley’s face was fixed in a rare expression of frustration, and Silenus kept his back resolutely turned to his friend, as if he refused to look at him except to read his next response. George got the impression that he was witnessing a revival in a long-running argument between the two men, one that had engendered a fair amount of scars and flown fur in its time. Stanley’s chalk clicked and clacked away, and he fumbled as he turned the blackboard around to show what he’d written:

CANNOT JUDGE WHAT WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND. YOU SAY STORY TRIES TO MAKE SENSE OF BIGGER THINGS, BUT WE DON’T UNDERSTAND THE BIGGER THINGS
.

“I understand what’s been taken from us,” said Silenus. “And who. That’s all I need to understand, and there can’t be a reason justifying that. A good one, at least.”

YOU CANNOT JUDGE A PLAN IF YOU CANNOT SEE IT FULLY
.

“You’re correct to say that I don’t see the plan,” snapped Silenus. “But if the Creator’s plan involves so many pointless deaths, then He is a son of a bitch!”

This upset Stanley so much that he slammed the blackboard and chalk down beside him and crossed his arms. Silenus paid no attention, but angrily slopped down more wine. He scowled and muttered, “Fucking philosophy. Do I, draped in cheap velvet and drinking piss-poor Madeira, look anything like a philosophe to you? Am I to be a man of greater queries, of fucking metaphysic theoreticals?” He addressed these questions over his shoulder, but still refrained from looking directly at Stanley. “No. For Christ’s sake, we’ve got knives to our very throats. Why waste our time on these questions when we have so much more to worry about? I’ve no inter
est in the hand that made me, only in keeping boards below our feet and train tracks ahead.”

But Stanley did not pay attention to him, or if he did he did not accept his rejoinder. Silenus looked to George as if expecting support. “I agree that sometimes we miss the forest for the leaves, but why look at either when you can’t even find the fucking road? Do you follow me, kid?”

George shrugged. Then he thought, and nodded, and shrugged again and shook his head.

Silenus gave him a baleful stare. “A very definite answer. You seem to have run the gamut of expressions there. But it brings me to the trickiest problem out of all of the ones currently piled on our shoulders.”

“What’s that?” said George.

Silenus extended a finger and pointed at him. “You,” he said.

“Me?”

“Yeah, you,” he said.

“Why am I tricky?” said George.

“Come on, kid, you’re not stupid or anything. You can put two and two together. You saw the pictures and you heard the story. You’ve got to have figured out what’s inside of you by now.”

“Inside of me?” asked George. The air seemed to have gone as cold as the cliffs again. “Wh-what do you mean?”

“We told you how we found the parts of the song—in the deep places, frozen in ice or within mountains, or in hills—don’t that sound familiar to you?”

As a matter of fact, up until now it had not. George had been so overwhelmed with everything that he hadn’t yet imagined that the story and the moving images could have had anything to do with him. When he realized what Silenus was suggesting, his hands went to his belly as if he could feel the corners of something within pushing through his skin.

“We have methods of detecting parts of the First Song,” said
Silenus. “The fragments stretch the world around them, in a way, and we’ve found a means to see those effects. You were right: we’d been to your hometown once before our last performance, as our tools had indicated an extremely sizable portion of the song was somewhere in the area. The first time we came we were surprised by the wolves, and had to abandon it. But when we finally returned for it—years later, but only about half a year ago now—we found it was gone. Someone had come along and scooped it up.” He poured himself the last drops of wine. “It seems that someone was you.”

“Me?” said George for the second time, and his voice was very faint.

“Yes,” said Silenus. “Haven’t you ever wondered how you became so good at the piano, George? Without even someone to teach you? Or how you can witness the effects of the First Song, and stay awake? Or how you, of all people, are especially sensitive to the wolves, and hear them drain the world of noise while no one else notices a thing?”

George kept pressing on his stomach, but did not answer.

“Yeah,” said Silenus. “Seems like that piece was even larger and more powerful than we’d originally thought. As a matter of fact,” he said, and he settled back in his chair with his eyes heavily lidded and the glass of wine balancing on his stomach, “it looks like the biggest I’ve ever encountered. As big as what they found in the first days.”

“But I didn’t… I didn’t…”

“You didn’t want it,” said Silenus. “Yeah, I got you there. But it’s in you. Maybe it chose you. Such things are not unheard of. Certain pieces of the song act differently, because, well, they’re different pieces. Hence why you can hear the wolves, which is an effect I’ve never seen before. But that doesn’t really matter.” He picked up a long, thin knife from his desktop. “It’s in you, and it’s valuable, and some people—myself included—would dearly like to have it.”

George felt like he might be sick, and feverishly wondered if that could possibly dislodge the thing that was stowed away in him. He gagged and lurched forward, but before he could think Silenus sat up
and slammed the top of his desk with the knife handle. This startled George so much that he forgot all about being sick.

“Now you are lucky as
fuck
that I got a look at you before I learned what was in you,” Silenus said. “Because if I hadn’t, I would’ve thought you were one of
their
agents for sure. Some kid comes barging into my affairs with an enormous chunk of the First Song in him? That’s suspicious as all hell.” He tapped the point of the knife against his temple. “You can’t be too paranoid these days, not if it keeps you alive. And I’d have tried to get that goddamn thing out of you the only way I know how.” He spun the thin little knife around in his fingertips, and his eyes were colder than the stars glimmering in the bay window behind him.