The Troupe (28 page)

“How did you…” Silenus stopped and recomposed himself. “Well, horrible it might’ve been, but it needed to happen! You were sabotaging the troupe, kid! What else could I have done?”

“You could have talked to me!”

“We
tried
talking, and that sure as hell didn’t work.”

“No, you just flat out
told
me what to do. As if I had no choice! You treated me like a disobedient dog, and when I didn’t immediately obey you forced me to come to heel!” George half wanted to break the bay window, but wondered what effect that would have. Perhaps they would get sucked out into those awful wastelands.

Silenus bristled at his comments, but for once he did not reply. Stanley looked back and forth between them. He appeared so agitated it looked like he would burst.

“I know I’m right,” said George. “I am your burden. Well, I’m sorry you had to carry me this far.” Then he turned around and walked out without looking back.

George walked into his hotel room and slammed the door and locked it. He was so upset he was shaking slightly. He sat down on his bed and waited, though he was not sure what he was waiting for. Would Silenus come and try to apologize? Or, perhaps, berate him for being ungrateful?

He told himself that he was being very rational about all this, and to prove his calmness he poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher on his dresser and sat down on his bed to drink it. Surely an upset, irrational young man would not be able to calmly do such a thing, he thought.

But he was upset, he knew. He hated that he had been put through
all of this misery and danger by a man who thought of him as little more than a commodity, however precious. George was so upset, in fact, that he did not notice the amber tinge to the water he was drinking, and it was not until he was about halfway through the glass that he realized that it had a funny taste to it, along with a funny smell. As he struggled to place it his mouth began to tingle.

It was just as the room began to feel very heavy to George that he realized what the smell was. It had been with him for most of the past two days: that tart, pungent aroma of the professor’s tinctures, especially the laudanum ones that put him to sleep.

The glass fell from his hand and broke on the floorboards. George did not fall backward onto the bed, but tumbled forward, cracking his head on the floor, yet he barely felt it. As things began to grow dark he struggled to look at the pitcher of water he’d poured the glass from, and he saw that the drawers in the dresser it sat on were curiously arranged: they’d been slightly pulled out one by one, with the drawers on the bottom pulled out the farthest and the ones on the top hardly pulled out at all. It looked, George thought, as if an extremely short person had made a series of steps out of the drawers in order to climb them and reach the top.

Then things faded.

When George awoke his head ached both within and without. A large bump had formed on the top of his brow, and his brain felt as though it were soaking in a horrid brine. He moaned and rolled over, and looked out the window and saw the white light of morning. He’d been out all night.

He sat up. Someone had drugged him, he knew, but he had no idea why. Why would anyone want to put him to sleep, and in his own room at that? Maybe the intention had been to poison him, he thought, but that idea was even more ludicrous than the drugging.

He shakily stood up, found his balance, and tried to ignore the nausea that gripped his stomach. Then he walked to his door and tried to open it. It was locked, and he remembered he’d locked it himself last night. He unlocked and opened it and stepped out into the hallway.

He stopped immediately. The hallway was unusually dark for day. He looked to the ends and saw that someone had thrown sheets over the windows there, and all the gas lamps along the walls had been broken. Some were even ripped out of the wall. He wondered who
could have done such a thing, since besides the troupe there were no other guests at the little flophouse.

He shut his door, and as he pulled away from it his knuckles grazed something rough. He turned around to look, and gasped.

Dozens of deep gouges ran across the lower face of his room door, like some short animal had been clawing to get in. From the looks of it, it had been several animals rather than one, all with very tiny paws… but judging from the marks, they were more like little hands than paws. He looked up and down the hall and saw no other door had been touched. He must have never heard it while he was unconscious, and he wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t locked the door.

He heard footsteps from somewhere upstairs. It was day, so the rest of the troupe had to be at rehearsal, leaving George behind to care for Kingsley. Kingsley had to still be upstairs. Maybe that was him moving? Yet when he’d last seen Kingsley he’d been unable to even get out of bed.

George walked to the stairwell and up to the next floor. The vandalism had not been confined only to George’s floor; this hall was just as dark as the one below. He went to Kingsley’s door and knocked.

“Professor?” he asked quietly. “Professor, are you in there? Are you awake?”

There was no answer. George tried the knob and found the door was unlocked. He pushed it open.

The room was much the same as it’d been when he left it. The bottles and glasses and tinctures were still standing around the sink, except for one, presumably the one that’d been used on George. Professor Kingsley lay on the bed with his blanket draped over him, as usual, except he was on his side, facing away, rather than on his back. George frowned; Kingsley rarely lay that way due to his side, but then George noticed his bad side was the one in the air rather than the one pressed into the mattress.

“Professor?” George asked. “Are you all right?”

Kingsley did not move or answer. He was very pale, even paler than he’d been before.

“Kingsley?” said George. He walked into the room. “Has someone been at your medicines?”

Still Kingsley did not move. There was something strangely infantile about the way he lay in the bed, curled up in the fetal position with his hands under his head. It was how George imagined cherubs slept.

George was about to wake him when he noticed that there was a line of something on the floorboards below the bed. He peered at it, and saw it was shining in the light, very faintly, like oil. It was very dark and viscous, and when he leaned down to examine it he found its scent was coppery and harsh.

George froze. Something dripped from the side of the bed, underneath the blanket. It was dripping from all along the mattress, it looked like, congealing into a line on the floor. He swallowed and reached out, uncertain if he wanted to touch the dripping fluid or Kingsley or the blanket. Then he grasped the top of the blanket and slowly pulled it back.

The mattress was so soaked with blood that it was now a deep, dark red. In some places there was so much blood the fabric shone. Kingsley was fully dressed, but the coat and shirt on his side had been pushed away, and the skin there was pockmarked with dozens of old suture wounds. One recent laceration at the end of his rib cage had been torn open, with rivers of pus trailing down to lie upon the bed in cloudy streaks. A rib was exposed and it looked somehow
thin
, as if it’d been whittled down, and it seemed as if something had been eating at it and the surrounding flesh with many tiny mouths…

George cried out and stumbled back. In his drugged nausea he tripped and stumbled into the cabinet before tumbling to the floor. Bottles and glasses fell clanking around him and rolled off into corners of the room.

Then he heard the patter of tiny feet from somewhere in the hotel, and a raspy, rattling voice: “
It knows.
”

And from another part of the hotel, the same voice: “
It’s found Father.
”

And from a third place: “
Father, Father, sleeping Father.
”

George’s eye fell upon the corner. All three marionette boxes were there, but their lids were open and the boxes empty.

His skin went cold and he began to sweat. He stood up as quietly as he could and went to the door, and stuck his head out and looked down the hall.

It was very dark, but he could see a little. For a while there was nothing. Then the sound of slow, small footsteps came from the far end, near the staircase. Something walked into the shadowy hall, very casually, like a person out on a stroll. It was very, very small, not more than two feet tall, and as it moved it happened to cross a stream of light that pierced the sheet across the window, and George glimpsed a tiny, manlike form with a bald, comically large head, tiny, stiff arms, and a ragged little suit, one that any Cockney aspiring to greater class would wear.

The little figure stopped when it saw George watching. It leaned forward, as if it could not believe what it’d seen, and leaped back. “
There! There!
” cried a voice in the darkness, and the little thing sprinted across the hall to hide in another room.

George began to tremble. He remembered what Franny had said:
I guess the professor’s right. They’re getting harder to control every day.

“
It’s the boy, the boy
,” whispered a voice from the floor below, and George thought he heard many voices in it, somehow.

“
We hate the boy
,” said another from below, this one in a different part of the hotel. “
Father talked to it, trusted it. Not worthy of Father’s love, no, no. Only we are worthy of Father’s love.
”

“
We are blessings
,” said the voice from down the hall. “
Blessings.
”

It was one voice, coming from many directions. He recognized it
as the voice behind the professor’s marionettes, voicing each separate puppet as if they had their own personalities. But he realized now that it had all been one intelligence, one mind, somehow…

“
Father sleeps
,” said the voice downstairs. “
Must not wake him, must not disturb him.
”

“
Fed us too much
,” said another. “
And now we are whole, finally whole and free, but he sleeps. But no worries, no worries. Father will wake in the morning and then he will be whole too, won’t he?
”

“
Unless the boy wakes him
,” said the voice down the hall. “
Then he will be cross, so cross.
”

“
Kill him
,” said a voice downstairs. “
Kill the boy. Break his bones, rend his flesh.
”

“No!” called George. He began backing down the hall, away from the voices in the dark. “Why would you do that?”

“
Shouldn’t wake Father
,” said the voice. More tiny footsteps from downstairs. And there, in the room at the end, was that a tiny bald head peeking out to look at him?

“
Father made us from himself, just as the angry man said to do
,” said the voice from downstairs.

The angry man? George thought. Did they mean Harry? He wasn’t sure, but he kept backing down the hall. He glanced around. Surely there had to be someone here? Could they all be at the rehearsal? Of course they could, he realized with a sinking stomach. They would think he was tending to Kingsley. Only last night he’d been furious with his father, but now he would give anything to have him there.

“
Gave us voices, gave us lives
,” said the second voice from downstairs.

“
Gave us himself, gave us his own life
,” said the voice at the end of the hall.

The second voice from downstairs affected a womanly tone: “
He made us just as the Maker made Eve from Adam. He took a part of himself and filled us up with it, gave us love, gave us freedoms.
”

“
No, not freedoms, no, no
,” said the voice at the end of the hall angrily.
“Father kept us in boxes, in the dark, never let us live our own lives.”

“
True, true
,” said the womanly voice from downstairs.

“
Tied to him, always tied down, making us dance through our bondage
,” said the other voice below.

“Out of the dark now. Out, out, and whole, and free.”

There was more movement at the dark end of the hall. George thought he could make out two more figures crowning the stairs, their heavy, balloon-like heads peering around the corner. They emerged and stood still in the middle of the hall, staring at him. One’s gleaming pate was ringed with golden curls, the other wore a tiny black bowler. As they stared a third childlike figure emerged from the room it was hiding in and joined them. Then they began slowly walking toward him with the dreamy canter of children at play.

“
The boy knows
,” said the voice. “
Kill the boy.
”

“Throw him down, break his bones.”

“Pluck his eyes out.”

“No!” cried George. “No, please! Please, don’t! I didn’t mean to do anything! I just talked to him, that’s all!” He ran to the end of the hall and ripped the sheet off. The window looked out on the road outside, but it was at least three floors below, and he’d never make that jump without breaking a leg. Surely there had to be a clerk or an innkeeper downstairs? He shouted for help, but there was no answer.

The three little figures were now halfway down the hallway to him. George tried one of the doors and found it locked. He tried another, but it was locked as well.

Then he remembered—
the door
. Silenus had said his office door would appear to him in emergencies. But how to get it to come? Harry had never said how to do that. He had always just walked forward from door to door, looking at them…

Walked forward, thought George with a sinking stomach.
Perhaps that was how he called it to him. But for George to try it now, he’d be moving toward the three little figures.

He swallowed and steeled himself. It was his only chance.

He walked to one room door and inspected it, trying to mimic Silenus’s movements in his head.

“
It comes to us, yes, yes
,” whispered the voice.