The Troupe (33 page)

“Yes,” said the wolf. “It
burns
me inside, this little flame, this jewel. It is my diametrical opposite, my absolute antithesis. I was lucky—if there’d been any more, it would have killed me. And yet I bear it.”

“Why would you ever want to do that?” asked George.

“Oh, for many reasons. For one, it lends all of my brothers who are close to me a resistance to it. Now, when your father spreads his Light, we are not burned or pained. And also I am more sensitive to that same Light. I can tell when it is near.”

George’s eyes went wide. He strained to mask his thoughts, which were many. To begin with, in one swoop he’d just learned how the wolves were resisting the effects of the song and how they were predicting the troupe’s movements. But more troubling was that if the wolf could tell when the First Song was near, then it could possibly tell that George had a huge piece of it inside of him. “Y-you can?” George asked.

“Yes,” said the wolf. He stared him up and down, eyes thin, and George felt very nervous. “For example, its residue and effects are very strong on you…”

“They are?”

“Yes. I presume this is because you have been in its presence for so long, and have been so close to so many performances?”

Again, George tried to hide his feelings, but this time they were mostly relief. “Y-yes, that’s it. That’s definitely it.”

“I see,” said the wolf. He wrote that down. “Anyway, those are the most obvious reasons for why I carry this bit of the Light in me. But… in another way, I enjoy it, somewhat. There is a pain to it, but it is a bittersweet pain.” An idea seemed to come to him. “Tell me—will I
die
?”

“Will you what?”

“Die. Do you think I will? I suppose I must… I exist now, and everything that exists must end, one day. I wonder how I will die, and what it will be like. It will be most interesting, don’t you think?”

George was so astounded with this line of thought that he had no idea what to say.

“Yes. Yes, I think it will,” said the wolf. “I look forward to it. On the whole, I think it a very strange and terrifying thing, to exist. I really don’t understand how you do it. Tell me—how do you deal with the fear?”

“The fear?” asked George.

“Yes. That fear that comes from the feeling that there is you, and then there is… everything else. That you are trapped inside of yourself, a tiny dot insignificant in the face of every everything that could ever be. How do you manage that?”

George considered how to answer. “I… guess we just never think about it.”

“Never think about it!” cried the wolf. “How can you not think about it when it confronts you at every moment? You are lost amid a wide, dark sea, with no shores in sight, and you all so rarely panic! Some days I can barely
function
, so how on Earth can you never think about it?”

“Well, I… suppose we distract ourselves,” said George.

“But with what?”

“I don’t know. With all kinds of things.”

The wolf furiously wrote all of this down. “Can you give me some examples?”

“Examples?”

“Yes. Are there no elements in your life you feel are great distractions?”

George wondered if he’d just painted himself into a corner, but he supposed he had at least a few. His father, for instance, was a very great distraction to him. Yet George did not want to tell him any
thing about Silenus, as it could endanger the troupe. But then he thought of another who occupied his mind just as much.

So to his surprise he began telling the wolf about Colette. He did not divulge anything important, but he began talking about “this girl” who was strong and beautiful, and he described the way she could make you feel stupid or smart with a glance, and talked about her questioning, sardonic eyebrows, and the way she laughed when she knew she shouldn’t, which George found enchanting.

“So you love her?” asked the wolf.

“I… suppose so,” said George. “I don’t really know her, not as much as I want to. I don’t think she really knows me.” And then he could not help but talk about how she was distracted herself, forever caught up in the abstract mechanics of show business, and how she had little time and no eyes for him. And he admitted that this hurt him greatly, but there was a little antipathy to his words as well: she was so wrapped up in running the troupe that she spent more time with his father than she ever did with him. They were the same, really: two adults who deemed him a child, and George envied both of them for the attention each one got from the other.

“It sounds as if some distractions are even worse than what you are distracting yourself from,” said the wolf in red. “Are there none that are pleasant for you?”

George was a little miffed to hear this, but said that yes, there were. There was Stanley, for one, though George vaguely described him as “a friend,” and he talked about how this friend was always giving him gifts, and cheering him up, and telling him stories; and once when George had fallen asleep in a hotel lobby Stanley had carried him up to his room and put him to bed, and when George was lying there Stanley had just stood looking down at him, not aware that George was now awake, and he sighed deeply before leaving. He cared so much, it felt.

“I see,” said the wolf. “And this friend is in love with you?”

“What?” said George, startled.

“This friend of yours. He is in love with you?”

“In love? No, he’s not!”

“He isn’t?” said the wolf. He consulted his notes. “It certainly sounds like he is.”

“He isn’t,” said George faintly. “He… he can’t be.”

But now he was not so sure. He had never considered exactly why Stanley was so kind to him; he’d always thought Stanley was simply a very kind person. But now he wondered: could Stanley be in love with him in the same way that George was in love with Colette? Was such a thing possible? Stanley never did seem to show anyone but him such affection. He remembered the night on the rooftop outside Chicago, and the way Stanley had stared at him with his sad eyes, and the way he had felt George’s shoulder, his fingers trailing down his arm…

The thought made George powerfully uncomfortable, but he did not know why. It felt like a betrayal, as if Stanley had been providing such kindness without ever letting George know the intentions behind it.

The wolf tutted unhappily. “I don’t think I understand this,” he said. “It is starting to feel like the more I find out about all this, the less I understand. I’d hoped you would explain it all to me, and then…” He shook his head and tossed his notes down beside the chair. “I don’t know. I’d thought you would at least mention why your troupe has started traveling differently.”

“You mean changing to vaudeville?”

“No,” said the wolf. “It’s something else. Your troupe has stopped performing as often as they used to, in the old days. Previous troupes would spend weeks or months in one little part of the world, walling it off from us, but your troupe is constantly traveling at a breakneck pace.”

“But that’s to cover more ground, isn’t it?” said George.

“If so, it is not accomplishing much. You do not stay and perform until the places you visit are protected against my brothers. You
play a handful of times, and then move right along. When this change first took place we could not understand it. We were hesitant to even begin eating at the edges of the world again, fearing some plot. But now that we know about the Light, and how you find and gather it… Are you always looking for the Light now? Rather than performing?”

George was confounded by this. He had never known any other method of performing than the one they were using now. They stayed a week and moved on. But if the wolf was right, then this method was not really achieving anything at all. Why would Silenus be doing this if it directly contradicted their mission?

Suddenly the shadows in the room began to tremble again. The wolf in red turned to look at the front right corner of the stage. The fat and skinny wolves emerged from the shadows there, their empty eyes fixed on George.

“What are you doing?” said the wolf in red. “I’m not finished with my examination.”

“Yes, you are,” said the fat one.

“What? What do you mean?”

The reedy-voiced wolf said, “Well, you said that if we caused you any problems, you’d report us.”

“So?”

“So we decided to be preemptive,” said the fat wolf. “And we went ahead and reported this captive ourselves.”

If wolves could go pale, George thought the one in red certainly would have now. “You what?” he said.

“Yes,” said the fat one. “We reported this discovery. And now there are Suspicions. It is, in fact, suspected that this boy is not ordinary. It is suspected that there is something different about him.”

“Different? And what are we to do about that?” said the wolf in red.

“You are not to do anything,” said the fat wolf slowly. “It wants to see for itself.”

The wolf in red stood up and stared at them both. “W-what? Here?”

“Yes,” said the reedy-voiced wolf. “It is coming. Right now.”

“Put out that damn fire,” growled the fat wolf. He strode forward and leaped down into the orchestra pit and began to stamp out the flames. The wolf in red went to assist, though he was now trembling like a leaf.

George backed away. He was not sure about what was happening, but he had an idea: something, some superior to the wolves, suspected he had the song in him, and it was coming to examine him itself. He could not be here when it came, he knew. But he could not run, as the wolves would certainly catch him. So what could he do?

He looked up at the open ceiling. Was it possible that he could climb up and out? Would the wolves be good climbers? He then realized that the issue was moot: there was hardly enough of the balcony left for him to climb up.

The night sky was visible outside. He saw the wind toying with a few scraps of clouds. And then he had an idea…

I am your patron. You stood up for me when it did you little good… If you ever need me, you can simply call my name. If I am close, I will come to you.

He was not sure how this would work, or if she was close enough to hear him at all. But George had no other option, so he ran over until he was directly below the opening, raised his head, and called one word to the sky: “Zephyrus!”

The wolves spun around and stared at him. “What?” said the fat one.

The reedy-voiced wolf leaped down from the stage and grasped George by the shoulders. “It’s nothing. Probably calling for help. But there’s nothing that can help you, child. Nothing can save you from us.”

George kept watching the sky through the open ceiling. He waited, but nothing seemed to happen. His heart fell. He was alone, and no one could stop what was coming, whatever it was.

The two wolves finally killed the fire. The darkness in the theater seemed magnified in its absence, and were the flakes of ash in the air dancing faster now?

“Bring him over here,” said the fat wolf.

The reedy-voiced wolf picked George up as if he weighed nothing at all and bodily dropped him before the stage. Then he took one of George’s arms and the fat wolf took the other.

“Are you sure it is coming?” said the wolf in red.

The stage began to darken. Shadows at the back began to bleed out, growing to conceal the remaining curtains, the ragged backdrop, the splintered boards. Soon almost nothing on the stage was visible at all.

“We are sure,” said the fat one.

George was shaking in their grasps. He kept turning to look at the entry to the theater and the open ceiling, hoping someone would happen upon them and stop this. But no one came.

He turned back to the stage. It was as dark as the entry to a cave now. And George began to sense that there was something at the back of it, something very big, watching them…

It was then that he remembered something from the moving pictures Silenus had showed him: when the world had first been created and the darkness came alive, there had not been throngs of wolves then, not yet. Originally there’d been only
one
set of eyes out in the darkness, watching this new creation with utter hate. And George also recalled that short blast of silence that the wolf in red had used as a word, and now he wondered if it had perhaps been a
name
. But a name for what, he wondered? What could be terrible enough to match the dread inspired by the mention of that strange word?

Then something in the shadows shifted, and suddenly they were at the bottom of the sea.

George did not know this, but the human mind is very good at recontextualizing the world when it stops making sense. When a person encounters an event that goes beyond their normal five senses, the mind filters the information and changes it so that the event is experienced in normal, understandable terms. In essence, it creates a realistic metaphor to relate what’s happening. Sometimes the metaphor can be very different from the normal world, like suddenly switching things so it seems as though you are at the bottom of the sea; but then such changes may be necessary, if the event experienced is great enough.

And what George was witnessing was so great and terrible that merely seeing it threatened to destroy him.

He felt as if they were standing on the ocean floor with miles and miles of cold water above them. Sunlight barely filtered down to this place, trickling through the briny depths to fall upon their shoulders. Before them was what looked like the edge of an enormous continental shelf, and there at the bottom was a gap between the continent floating above and the ocean floor. In that gap the shadows were intensely dark, so dark George’s eyes could not penetrate them, but it seemed as if the gap went on forever. And yet he sensed that something was moving there, down in the darkness underneath the world.

The ground shook below them. There was a pause, and then it shook again. George wondered if chunks of rock were falling off the continental shelf, but when the ground shook for a third time he began to think that whatever was falling was far too rhythmic for that… and he wondered if perhaps what he was hearing was footfalls.

Something was coming. He struggled in the grasp of the two wolves, but they stayed firm. He felt something unraveling in the back of his mind, and he wondered if he was going mad.