The Troupe (53 page)

Did the girl love him? Did he love her? She hoped so. It would be so nice, for them to love one another…

Fran. Franny. Fran Beatty. Franny Marie Beatty. Where do I know these names from?

And she remembered one day when the girl and the young man had been traveling yet again, the young man leading his troupe to the next town, and he’d said he’d been doing this for a long, long time, but now that he had found her he felt he could stop, and pass the duty on to someone else. He would stop, he’d said to the girl, and let himself grow old with her, for he’d taken special cares to make sure that he was very bad at growing old, and the girl had smiled and asked if that was so why he would want to do a silly thing like grow old, and he’d said that when he was with her every moment was perfect, and against a perfect moment the centuries and millennia are as a fly batting at a windowpane. And he’d kissed her neck then, the pale creamy spot at the corner of her jaw, and the girl had laughed and embraced him, and all the world was golden and good and their sky would never have a cloud.

I wonder what happened to that girl, she thought as she carried the train car up the hill. I bet they lived happily ever after, didn’t they. I bet they lived together and had lots of babies. I bet it was sunsets neverending.

Maybe I will see them, she said to herself. Maybe that’s why I’m carrying this awful weight. Maybe they are at the top of the hill and I am carrying this up to them and they need it for something, I don’t know what but they need it for something, and then once I am there and they have it we will all live together and everything will be happy and good.

She nodded to herself as she carried the train car.

I know these stories. That’s what happens in these stories. That’s what will happen.

It would not be long now. Only a few feet more.

Far down the valley from where Colette carried George, Stanley ducked and wove west through the pines, softly chanting the song to himself, letting the echoes spill out to trail across the shoreline. For
Stanley it was always painful to perform the song; it was like having a charging river pour out of his eyes and mouth, and it took so much control. It all wanted to be sung, to reverberate throughout the world it’d made when time was not time, so it had to be harnessed back at every second. The urge was so great that he could not even speak a word; to open his mouth and make any noise might cause the song to come spilling out.

Stanley hoped Colette and George had climbed far enough to be out of danger. He glanced back at his pursuers. Some were dark, protean shapes that were difficult to make out, and others wore the images of men in gray suits, yet they leaped down the hillside with astonishing speed and agility. Their numbers appeared limitless.

But that was good. He wanted as many as he could get. All of them, if possible.

The gray tidal wave of the dam rose up on his right. Hopefully Annie would be nearly there, he thought. Before the dam the waters churned out to tumble over the rocks, and Stanley searched for a set of trees hopefully close to the middle. He spotted a promising set and began wading across as fast as he could.

He picked the hugest, stoutest tree and grasped its lower branches. But as he did he thought he saw someone out of the corner of his eye… someone gray and faint, standing in the water…

No. No, that hadn’t been it. They’d been standing
on
the water, as if it’d been frozen.

He turned to look. And for the quickest moment, Stanley felt as if everything stood still. The winds did not blow, the waters did not trickle. Everything had stopped. It was the most perplexing sensation.

Then the moment ended, and he looked around. There was no one there. The specter he’d seen appeared to be gone. He shook himself, and felt the side of his face. It was as if something had just touched him there, very, very gently…

He heard the sound of the wolves sprinting down the hills, and he remembered what he was doing. He grasped the lowest limbs of the
tree, picked himself up, and climbed up several levels of branches. Then he took his chain and wrapped it around his waist and the trunk and locked it tight. He kept his eyes averted from the wave of darkness descending the hills to surround him and instead hugged the trunk tight with both hands, and hoped that Colette and George had gotten as far away as possible.

When the darkness grew close it again calcified into the forms of men in gray suits. Beyond the front line they faded into shadow and obscure movement. All of their blank, gray eyes were fixed on Stanley.

“We’ve treed you?” said a calm, low voice below. “Is that how this is to end? How ignominious.”

Stanley did not respond, but clutched the tree tighter.

“A few feet does not matter,” said the wolf at the bottom of the tree. “Not for what is coming. How horrible it must be to carry all that within you. Almost as horrible as it is for us to live with this world growing within us, like a tumor. We are tired of being broken up. We wish to be whole once more. And we shall be, soon.”

The sound of the river began to fade away, and all was silent. It was a sensation George had described many times, but Stanley himself had never felt it; the song affected different people in different ways, depending on which piece you had. Yet now he knew the deep horror of feeling like the world was falling away from him, bit by bit, and he cracked one eye to see what they were doing.

The river before the dam had gone as flat and still as a mirror. Before Stanley had been able to see the rocks at the bottom, but now the bottom seemed curiously dark. It was as if there was a dark split in the middle and it was spreading outward until all the rocks and water were gone and he was looking into an endless abyss. Only there was something down there at the very bottom, something unimaginably huge looking up at him, and it was trying very hard to claw its way out.

Stanley remembered what George had said he’d seen in the
burned-down remains of his theater. The wolves there had called something out of the shadows, given something terrible a name and an entry point…

“Yes,” said the wolf. “It is coming for you. Don’t you see it? Can you not feel it watching you?”

Yet rather than looking down into the abyss, Stanley looked up at the dam. The wolf, surprised by this reaction, followed his line of sight.

The wolf squinted at the dam. “What is that?” he said.

There was something moving on the hill where the dam ended. It was very big and bulky, and it trundled across the hilltop with the unhappy pace of a large beetle. Then as it heaved itself to one side it happened to pass just before the moon, and with such light shining behind it one could see the form of a small, thin woman below it, and she seemed to be dragging the huge object forward with a very great resolution.

The wolf’s eyes widened. “What?” he said. “Wait… No, no!”

But by then, of course, it was far too late.

She finally crested the small knoll at the edge of the dam. The effort of dragging the train car up the rocky hill had rendered her unrecognizable: her face was wreathed in blood from where her eyes and nose had started bleeding, both of her legs were riddled with fractures and rends, and the toes of her right foot were mostly gone. Yet the inscriptions on her skin still held, though she could tell that they were finally straining, so with deep, heavy gasps she powered herself up the last few feet. She was finally before the lake, and she blinked the blood out of her eyes and looked.

The moon had risen high in the sky, and now its face was caught in every angle of the lake’s waters, thousands and millions of little broken moons dancing among the waves. In her fatigue she could not tell the difference between the lake and the night sky; each one
was a black sea peppered with shreds of white. She was not at all sure why she was there, but she thought it a powerfully beautiful sight to behold, almost a heavenly one, and she began to laugh.

She saw the edge of the dam ahead, and suddenly she knew what she had to do. She knew she could never lift the train car up and throw it down on the dam. That left only one option, then.

She took a breath, dug her feet in, and charged forward. The train car groaned as its mangled wheels jostled over the last few stones, but it did not break up or fall apart, and she did not take her eyes away from the shining sea before her; she wished to join it, to jump out among all those stars, and perhaps she would float then, suspended among all those dancing lights, and then maybe, just maybe, she could sleep.

When she came to the edge of the knoll she crouched down with the train car on her back and sprang off. She felt her feet leave the ground and heard the train car sliding off the rocks behind her. The axle ripped her around and around as the car tumbled down to the dam, and as she twirled the boundaries between the lake and the sky blurred even more than before, turning all the world around her into a star-strewn sky, and she shut her eyes and crossed her arms and smiled and waited for sleep to take her.

As Stanley watched, the dam did not precisely break like he’d expected;
unzip
was more the right word, as the train car smoothly split it down the southern side and the stone began to peel back with a roar. He thought he saw a tiny rag-doll figure fall with the train car, and his heart froze at the sight. He moaned softly and hugged the tree tighter.

“Run!” cried one of the wolves below. “Run, run!”

But it was too late for that. Though the wolves tried to move, they were just at the foot of the dam, and the water was already surging down upon them. It was an enormous wave, a blank wall of water,
and as it approached Stanley saw it was much, much bigger than he’d expected, easily tall enough to reach him. He wrapped one arm up in the chain and watched with wide eyes as the water rolled toward him.

He realized then that some situations, no matter how dire, provide an outside chance of outrageous luck that allows one to believe one just might survive; yet on seeing this tremendous crush of water roaring down to him, Stanley knew this was not one of them. The vast wave was already swallowing trees on either side of the river, ones much sturdier than his, and his chain and his grasp on the tree would be like paper beneath its crushing tons.

And as he watched, Stanley realized he had always known in his heart that this had been a possible outcome, and yet he’d done it anyway. But he did not feel regret, or any fear. The only thing he thought of was George. Though his time with his son had been brief and he’d allowed his duty to come between them, this last act would be the greatest of all of his presents.

And besides, he thought, he was immensely tired of carrying the song. It was so heavy these days, so incredibly heavy. As he began to feel the first waves of mist, he wondered if perhaps this would be a peace for him.

Colette turned when she heard the train car crack through the dam and watched wide-eyed as the water burst through the crumbling wall and cascaded down into the river valley. “Oh, Jesus,” she said, and laid George down on the ground to see the rest of the fallout. Small trees sank down below the waves and taller ones took on an uncomfortable, drunken lean. She saw dark figures rolling with the water, but they seemed limp and broken, and they began to melt back into the shadows after a moment.

George moaned and turned over. Then he sat up, rubbing his head. “What happened?” he asked.

Colette simply pointed. George looked behind them and his mouth fell open. “What happened?” he asked again.

“Someone broke the dam,” she said. “I’m guessing Stanley. It looks like he flooded out the wolves. Can wolves be killed by water?”

“Sort of, I think… Franny killed one with her bare hands,” said George.

“Annie,” corrected Colette.

George did not pay attention. He nervously watched where the flood crept up the side of the hill. For a moment it passed where
they’d originally hidden underneath the backdrop, and George was thankful Colette had carried him as far as she did. Then it lessened, and though the river still poured over the broken remains of the dam it was not as violent as it’d initially been.

“He’s down there,” said George.

“Who?” Colette asked.

“My father,” he said.

She gave him a worried look. “Harry’s dead, George. We saw it happen.”

“Silenus isn’t my father, Colette,” he said.

“What? Are you joking?”

George shook his head.

“Then who is?”

He looked down at the cardboard still clutched in his hand and Stanley’s last message written there. She saw and realized what he was thinking. “Are… are you serious?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Harry and Stanley are related, just like you said, but Harry wasn’t my father. They lied to me, to everyone, right from the start. I don’t know why, not yet. But he’s down there. I can sense it.”

“How?”

“Have you ever noticed how things seem calmer around Stanley? How sometimes it’s just nice to sit with him, or how he makes everything make sense?”

“I… I guess,” she said.

“It’s the song,” said George. “It’s all the pieces of the First Song inside of him. I was just too ignorant to notice it. But now I know what to look for. I can feel it in him.” He put the piece of cardboard in his pocket. “I was so cruel to him… I never even said thank you for all the little things he did for me. I never even got the chance to tell him that I loved him. Or the chance to love him at all.” Then he stood.

“What are you going to do, George?” asked Colette.

“I’m going to find him,” he said. “If there’s even the slightest chance he’s still alive, I’ve got to try.”

“Still alive?” said Colette. “What do you mean, still alive?”

George remembered how Stanley had looked at him before he’d handed him the card. It had been the look of a man who was readying to stare into death. Wherever Stanley had been going, he had not expected to return.

“Stay here,” said George, and started off down the hill.

The lower woods were a soggy, dripping ruin. It was impossible to walk ten feet without being soaked by the water dripping from overhead. Trees and shrubs had been uprooted or pushed over, and in places the forest was nothing but yards of dark, tangled branches. Bands of washed-up leaves marked the edges of the flow, creating bizarre little pathways on the ground or strange insignias on trees. Besides the distant river there was not a sound.