“Get that door open!” shouted Silenus as they approached.
George stood up and shoved open the back door. Silenus and Stanley charged up and fell through, gasping and heaving their steamer trunk forward. George noted its deep black wood and recognized it as the one from the office upstairs.
“Why were you carrying that out in the town?” he said.
“Because I need the exercise,” snapped Silenus. Though the two men seemed exhausted, they did not drop the box once they were inside; they lowered it gently, and Silenus kept his head tilted as if listening for the sound of anything breaking. When none came, he let out a great sigh of relief.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” said Colette.
“You don’t ask about my private matters,” said Silenus, “and I won’t ask about yours.”
“But these matters don’t seem particularly private.” She eyed their spreading puddle of water, which had grown enough to kiss the toes of her shoes.
Silenus gave her a glare and stomped up the stairs, dripping water all the way. Colette sighed and followed, making sure to step around the muddy footprints.
“Are you all right?” George asked Stanley.
He nodded and sat in a nearby chair. Rather than angry, Stanley appeared incredibly fatigued, and he sat bent in his chair as though he’d strained his back.
“What happened?” said George.
Stanley seemed to debate answering him, and shrugged and took out the blackboard and wrote: WE FOUND SOMETHING, BUT IT WAS NOT WHAT WE WA NTED TO FIND.
George considered asking him what that meant, but knew he would not get an answer. He saw that the trunk featured nearly as many locks as Silenus’s door, and had been polished to a fine shine; he could see his own face within its wood, staring back at him uncertainly. He reached out to touch it.
But before he did, Stanley cleared his throat and wrote: HELP ME GET THIS UPSTAIRS? And his face was so drawn and tired that George could not say no to it.
CHAPTER 8
The First Rehearsal
When it came time to begin rehearsals the next day, George hardly had a chance to get his bearings. He was awoken in the morning by a pounding on his room door. He opened it to find Colette standing in the hall with three heavy bags in her hands, which she immediately tossed to him with no more than the words, “Time to get going. Get these to the theater.”
“What?” said George. “I’m supposed to carry these?”
“If you know a better way to get them there, be my guest,” said Colette.
George, grumbling, heaved them into his arms. He’d been exempt from most manual labor at Otterman’s, and he’d expected the same treatment from his father’s troupe. But when he thought to complain he was met with Colette’s bright green eyes, and he instead found himself working all the harder.
From the morning on it was pure chaos. George spent most of the day running: he ran back and forth from the theater to the hotel fetching luggage and props that hadn’t been sent ahead; he ran throughout the backstage fetching music and rosin, and chalk for Franny’s hands; and when he inevitably made an error in all of these arrangements he had to run even faster to correct it before Silenus or Colette discovered.
The only time he really got in a hot spot was when he was late getting to the stage to help them arrange Kingsley’s backdrop. “Are we interfering with your dinner plans, Your Highness?” shouted Silenus from a balcony when he finally arrived.
“I came as fast as I could!” George called back. At first he couldn’t see what he was needed for—the backdrop was simply a large roll of paper that had to be maneuvered into place above the stage—but when he took his end of the rope to haul it up he found that the thing was shockingly heavy.
After they’d gotten it hung, Silenus pulled the backdrop down to make sure it’d traveled unscathed. George was startled to see that it was completely blank. The painting of the eerie, dilapidated farmhouse had vanished. But this did not trouble Silenus, who nodded and said, “Good. We’ll rehearse with it down and roll it up later.”
“But it’s blank!” said George.
“So?”
“Isn’t there supposed to be something there?”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Silenus as he moved on to the next task. “That’ll be taken care of.”
George cast a concerned look at the backdrop as they went backstage. The curious painting of the farmhouse had made a strong impression on him, and he had wanted to see it again.
His concerns regarding the backdrop only increased later, but not in the way he expected. When he had to run out and fetch Colette some aspirin, he dashed back into the theater and headed for her dressing room, but stopped when he saw the preparations on the stage. The backdrop was still hanging up, but it was no longer blank: the painting of the blue-and-gray farmhouse had returned, and once more the stage was lit by the strange moonlight from its large window. Yet in the lower right pane of the window the painting now showed a boy’s face peeping in and smiling, and unless he was imagining things the boy looked much like George himself, with a pug nose, a large chin, and a pronounced brow. George got the overpowering impression that the boy in the window was watching him. He was greatly unnerved by this, and fled backstage to tell Silenus.
Silenus snorted when he heard George’s story. “Cheeky fucking thing,” he said. “Don’t pay attention to it. It was just funning with you.”
But as to how a common canvas backdrop could mock someone in the audience, he did not say, and when George next saw the backdrop it was blank again.
The troupe members themselves were just as strange. For one thing, Franny was treated as though she was another prop, despite being one of the most effective performers. “Go and move Franny over there,” was a common order Silenus gave when arranging the stage. And Franny often seemed to behave like one. She was perfectly compliant with anyone’s requests, but when she had nothing to do she did literally nothing at all. She would place a small chair in the corner out of everyone’s way, sit on it, and stare into the wall. Only once, when George was speeding by her, did she do anything: she whispered, “Hello, Bill.”
“I’m George,” he said.
“Oh, yes,” she said, smiling. “Of course you are.”
Professor Kingsley Tyburn was far less amenable. He acted as though moving his puppets out onto the stage were a terrible last resort, and preferred to hole up with them in his dressing room, sitting beside the little coffin-like boxes and reading aloud from Madison’s Budget (a dependable joke source for small comedy acts) or a Bible, for he was a very religious man. George dreaded carrying any messages to him, as Kingsley would berate him to no end for the disruption, but more than that he found Kingsley’s boxes and his relationship with them disturbing. He once glanced into Kingsley’s dressing room to see the man sprawled out facedown with his arms over the boxes, and he might have been weeping. On that occasion George said nothing, but continued on in his labors with a shiver. Yet later when he’d been sent to ask Kingsley’s opinion on a change in his act’s music George found his dressing room dark and seemingly empty. He called Kingsley’s name. There was no answer from within, but then he heard footsteps from the far back, and a door closing. Due to the darkness of the room he could not see who it was.
He called again, yet still no one responded, so he walked in and laid a hand on the lamp to turn on the light. But before he could, a deep, rattling voice with a twangy accent growled, “Go away. You’re not welcome here.”
George jumped in fright, and ran out as fast as he could. He ran until he found Franny, sitting on her chair and staring into the wall, and he sat next to her to catch his breath. When she asked what was the matter and he told her, all she said was, “Ah. Well, I guess the professor’s right. They’re getting harder to control every day.”
George wished he could spend more of his time with Colette, who was now clad in the dazzling tights he’d first seen her in, yet the moment she entered the theat
er she became nothing but business. She encountered some difficulties with the stagehands, who, like the men from the billiards hall, mistook her for a colored, and she again had to forcibly inform them she was Persian. After she’d sent them hustling she told Kingsley he needed to cut two minutes (and nominated the bit about the puppets’ being real as what needed to go), and she told Franny to move her bit with the safe on the rail to the end, since that was a much bigger finish than the statues. Franny nodded obediently, hardly paying attention, but Kingsley protested at first: that was their favorite part, he said (though he never explained who “they” were), but he eventually agreed. Colette then monitored their rehearsals, and when she ran into issues with the orchestra and the pianist George literally leaped forward to volunteer.
“Wow,” she said after George played along with their act. “That was…”
George leaned forward. “That was?”
She nodded, impressed. “That was good.” “Good?” he asked. “Just good?”
“Yeah. That’ll definitely work,” she said, and turned to other business.
George was miffed to hear her call his playing workable, but he supposed any compliment from Colette was better than none at all. It was more than Silenus had given him so far, at any rate. Silenus seemed to have other business, some he deemed more important than the rehearsals. His brief appearances at the theater were always terse and impatient, as if the show was an irritating distraction and he had other places to be. He spent much of his day in his office in the hotel, though on the few occasions when his door could be found George heard no voice or noise within. Silenus claimed he was doing research, but when he emerged in the afternoon George could have sworn he saw snow on the man’s shoulders, yet Alberteen had gone without snow for nearly a month.
But whatever Silenus’s endeavors were that day, they seemed to be going badly. He was more and more agitated each time they saw him, and began snapping and barking at the slightest provocation. When Kingsley complained that his dressing room was too high in the theater and there was too much of a draft, Silenus shouted, “What should I do, tell the sun to fucking shine down and warm you? Build another fucking theater? Or are you asking me to scale the walls of this one here, and plug up its many faults?” Kingsley was too stunned to reply, and Silenus simply fixed him with a cold glare before stumping out.
Once more George wondered what Silenus would say if he ever heard the true reason behind George’s presence. He could hardly see what his mother could have found desirable in this man.
But whenever Silenus stormed through their ranks, Stanley was always there in his wake, tending to bruised egos and patching things up. Stanley would smile, think upon it, and write down a mere handful of words that would somehow make sense of everything. After Silenus’s outburst at Kingsley, Stanley consoled him with: FOUND SOME FUR COATS IN A CLOSET UPSTAIRS. WOULD THAT HELP? To which Kingsley agreed.
Stanley seemed an eternal source of comfort for the group. There was a quiet calmness to him that was somehow infectious. George or other troupe members would sometimes just sit next to him without saying a word. It was pleasant to simply be there with him, letting the seconds slip past you. And unlike the others he almost never asked anything of George: while Kingsley, Silenus, and Colette would have orders whenever they saw him, Stanley only had an apologetic grin.
He and George also shared a similar appreciation for music. George’s one peaceful moment on that first day was when he got to listen to Stanley practice the cello, whipping through scales and arpeggios with a fluid ease. He paid incredible attention to every tone and stroke of the bow, and his long, delicate fingers were able to search through the strings and find the purest pitches.
“What was that?” George asked when he finished playing one piece.
Stanley showed him the music.
“Claudio Merulo,” he read. “I’ve never heard of him before. Will you play it tonight?”
Stanley shook his head, and wrote upon his blackboard: ONLY EVER PLAY ONE SONG.
“Yeah,” said George, disappointed. Vaudeville players rarely changed their acts. Many played the exact same show for years on end. If the act worked then it worked, and doing anything different was unthinkable in the face of success.
Stanley seemed to sympathize, and was pleased to find a fan. He took out his blackboard and wrote an appreciative comment for George’s audience, yet as he crossed his legs to support his writing George saw his feet were bare and his soles were burned black, just as Silenus’s were. When he held up the blackboard (IT IS NICE TO HAVE SOMEONE WHO TAKES TIME TO LISTEN), he saw George staring and quickly put his foot back down. He erased the blackboard and wrote: SOMETHING WRONG?
George swallowed. “No,” he said. “I guess there isn’t.”
That night their first performance went off without a hitch, and for the third time George let the song in the fourth act wash over him. The memory of the hollow hill did not violently overtake him as it had before, but he still felt it rise inexorably in his mind until he could almost smell the moist earth and feel the gray light upon his neck. It seemed as if the song’s stupefying nature was less and less effective on the listener the more they heard it, which would explain how the troupe themselves were not spellbound each time they performed.
When they were done they packed up and hurried back to the hotel, leaving the people sitting stunned in their seats, each one lit by the curious light and colors that seemed to mark the Chorale.
“What will happen to them?” George asked.
“You saw it from the audience before, didn’t you?” Silenus said. George admitted that he had.
“Well, what happened then?”
“They… stood up and filed out. But they seemed different. They seemed…” George struggled to avoid the word he’d thought of, as it was so trite and meaningless, but he could think of nothing else: “Happy,” he finished.
Silenus nodded. “Exactly.”
“So you’re making people happy?”
“Why not?” said Silenus. “We’re performers, ain’t we?”
Their remaining shows went by without issue. George became so well versed in their acts that Colette eventually asked Silenus if they could make him a permanent fixture, as his playing was a welcome reprieve from what they usually had to contend with. Since she was in charge of their budget, she knew they had the financial room for him.
Silenus considered it. “Where’d you train, kid?” he asked.
“Nowhere,” George said, a touch proudly. “I am self-taught.”
Colette scoffed. “That can’t be. No one gets to your level all by themselves.”
“I did,” George said. “I never had anyone to teach me in Rinton.”
“So you just figured it out, did you?” Colette asked. “All on your lonesome?” “Well, yes.”
She rolled her eyes. “Come on, George. Be straight with us. Who’d you learn under?”
“No one,” said George, coloring. “And I’m not lying!”
Before Colette could say more, Silenus raised a hand. He studied George for a moment, and said, “If he says he’s self-taught, then he’s self-taught. He has no reason to lie, and I see no reason to doubt him.”
“What?” Colette said. “Harry, you can’t possibly believe this, can you?”
“I can,” said Silenus. But though it was the first positive thing his father had said about his playing, George was not comforted; there was something distant and cold in Silenus’s face.
The next week they continued on to Milton and went through nearly the same routine. Almost nothing changed, except perhaps for Kingsley’s health, which seemed to decline a little, though he refused all attentions. On Sunday Stanley and Silenus again disappeared with the steamer trunk and just as mysteriously returned, though they seemed more pleased than they had in Alberteen. And after that came Hayburn, where they did it all over again, though exactly what they were doing George was never told.
CHAPTER 9
A Mee
ting of Shepherds
It must be said now that George was not a stupid young man. On the contrary, when he was not getting in his own way he had a great aptitude for cleverness. But he was, perhaps to his own misfortune, overwhelmingly used to getting what he wanted. His grandmother had tried her hardest to keep him cloistered throughout his upbringing, and her best tools for this had been flattery and bribery. And after fleeing her grasp and following his father, George had wound up at Otterman’s, where his superior skills had given him a great deal of leverage. So far in his life he’d experienced very few obstacles, and it was only natural for him to think that he deserved such easy treatment through some innate quality of his own.
In the third week with Silenus he began to suspect he deserved a lot of things he wasn’t getting. First and foremost, he felt he deserved an explanation. Had he not risked his life for the troupe? And had he not turned his back on a lucrative and cushy career in order to join them? The least his father could do was tell him what they were really doing.
But Silenus did not. In the final of their three weeks, George’s father became more distracted than ever, spending more and more time in his office, and seeming more and more frustrated whenever he emerged. The only time George could ever talk to him was right after their nightly performance. And though George knew better than to ask outright about the song, or his memory of the barrow, or the men in gray, he began to ask innocent questions or make leading comments that he thought just might entice some truth from Silenus.
“I hope they make it home all right,” George said after one performance, gesturing to the audience. “Are they sensible enough for that?” To this, Silenus only shrugged.
“Are the acoustics of this theater too poor for the Chorale?” he asked after another. “Will it be too muffled, maybe?” This question was met with a terse order to mind his own business.
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