It remained blank. George whispered to Stanley, “What does he think the backdrop will do?”
Stanley wrote: NOT BACKDROP. SKIN.
“What do you mean, skin?” asked George.
“It’s chimera skin,” said Silenus. He took out his cigar and blew on the end until it was red-hot. “A creature of many kinds—a goat, a lion, a snake—and many shapes and colors.” He lowered the lit cigar toward the backdrop. “If you skin it the right way then its hide gains certain properties. Specifically, it can project certain images and sensations, if you can control it.” The lit cigar kept slowly nearing the backdrop. “But they’re notoriously picky things, and sometimes,” he said, and the lit end of the cigar was very close to the backdrop now, “they need to be forced.”
Just when the cigar’s end was but a hairsbreadth away, the surface of the canvas (or skin, George reminded himself) changed: it bloomed into a rippling dark blue with little flickers of light in its center. The stage and theater were bathed in its unearthly iridescence and seemed all the stranger as a result.
“It moves!” cried George.
“Yeah, yeah, it moves,” said Silenus. “I knew I could talk some sense into the thing. Maybe we should have gotten Colette to come with us, it seems to like her the most.”
George was instantly enamored of it and wanted to touch it, but was somewhat afraid of what might happen if he did. “Where did you get it?”
“I won it in a card game,” said Silenus. “Honestly, that’s how I acquire most of our equipment. It’s damn useful, though. Most vaudeville shows, people wander in and out constantly. But this keeps them in their seats, at least for the start.” He stuck his cigar back in his mouth and walked to the middle of the stage. “Take a seat, kid. I’m going to put on a show for you. It’s easier to explain this in visual terms, y’see.”
George reluctantly left the moving image and took a seat in the front row. Stanley came down as well and sat a few seats across from him, but Silenus remained up on the stage. He said, “What I’m going to do up here, kid, is tell you a story. Like all stories, it’s an attempt to make sense of something larger than itself. And, like most stories, it fails, to a certain degree. It’s a gloss, a rendition, so it’s not exact. But it’ll do.”
“All right,” said George.
Silenus looked to the backdrop. “It starts with, ‘In the beginning,’” he said.
This was evidently a signal of some kind, as Stanley dimmed the lantern and the backdrop grew a solid black. Silenus cleared his throat, assumed a more theatrical pose, and said:
“In the beginning, there was nothing. There were no suns, no stars, no lands or seas or skies.” His voice echoed throughout the theater, and it gained a queer resonance that made it feel as though he were speaking very close to George. “Nothing lived, for there was nothing to live in or on. Time did not exist, for there was nothing to pass through it. There was only nothing, an endless, vasty abyss.
“But then the Creator came, and all of that changed,” said Silenus.
Then the image of pure black shattered, like someone pitching a baseball through the middle of a pane of glass, revealing a second background behind it of bright white. There was a great shout of countless voices singing one furious note, and then the voices dropped to a hum. George could not see where the voices were coming from—perhaps it was the backdrop itself ?—but before he could think on it the image began moving again: the shards of darkness drifted away from the middle until there was a space of clear white in the center that was ringed by a jagged edge of black.
“The Creator broke the darkness, and it decided that, for the first time, things should Be,” said Silenus. “There would come, amid this sea of infinite nothingness, existence. And in that small puddle of existence, a world. And so the Creator sang the world.”
The hums changed into a song. It was a very soft and curious song. It seemed somewhat toneless to George, with no major or minor mode that he could discern. Yet as the voices sang, something appeared in the center of the white space: a brown dot, like a dab of paint from an invisible paintbrush. The dab turned into a streak, which made a circle within the white space, and then the invisible paintbrush began to fill in the circle with what looked like mountains and shorelines and broad, flat plains. They were all a little crudelooking, much like something one would find on a cave wall, yet a considerable amount of expression was rendered from such simple forms.
“The Creator sang of skies and seas, of mountains and valleys, of water and rain and the touch of the sun. It sang of the slow caress of time, of the lapping of waves and the dance of light, of flame and ice and winds and rivers.”
The song changed and more shapes appeared within the little brown world: broad blue oceans and little rivulets, and small storms that waxed and waned as they advanced across the continents. The world came alive with thousands of slight animations, forces and pressures and reactions rippling across its face.
“Then the Creator sang of things that would exist within the world, and grow,” said Silenus. “It sang of grasses and trees and moss and algae. It sang of seaweed and vines and endless fruits, and other tiny green things that stretched toward the light, sucking up mere drops of water.”
The song intensified, and patches of green began to appear on the faces of the continents. The sea changed color from a dark blue to a lighter gray, and tiny green trees began popping up across the face of the world. They swayed back and forth with an invisible wind, and sometimes minuscule pinecones or fruits dropped from their branches, which were no larger than mouse bones.
“Then the Creator decided to sing of things that would live, yet would see the world, and know of it,” said Silenus. “Things that would react to it of their own accord. So the Creator sang of all the animals in the mountains and the grasslands and upon the shores, and the fishes and creatures in the blue deeps, and the birds that would drift from gust to gust in the sky.”
Small deer leaped out from amid the green and began to cavort and frolic, and among their feet were mice and asps and foxes. In the plains were cattle and other large creatures, some of which George did not recognize, like one beast with great tusks and long hair. Fish and porpoises jumped up from the waves of the seas, and sometimes whales would surface and send a fine spray up into air. Above them all small birds flickered and dodged, or sailed from enormous nests up in the peaks of the mountains.
“Then the Creator sang of a creature that would see the world most clearly and, unlike all others, possess the ability to change it,” said Silenus. “And so the last of the things the Creator sang of was Man.”
Small huts appeared around the patches of blue and under the green trees, and then tiny stick figures emerged from them, though their bodies and limbs were loose and willowy. They ate the fruit and hunted the deer and washed their miniature clothes in the streams. They grew fat and happy, and had children, and carried their little ones about, showing them the sun and the mountains and the sky.
“And then, when the world was complete, the Creator was pleased with what it had made,” said Silenus. “And it left.”
The song faded from the screen, and it seemed to George as though a light went out of the images as well. The brown world with its many creatures remained, sitting in its white pool surrounded by shards of jagged black, but it seemed slightly dimmer, and the colors were no longer quite as bright.
“The world continued as the Creator had left it—seas still surged, rivers still trickled, the winds still played with the clouds, and the creatures grew in population, or died back. But then something happened that the Creator may not have intended: the darkness came alive.”
A quiver ran through all the pieces of jagged black at the edges of the screen. Certain parts began moving, very slowly: shards and crags of the ring of black grew close together, solidifying themselves. And George thought he could discern a single pair of eyes in the darkness, little white slits that peered out at the brown world beyond it, and he thoug
ht he could see hate in that gaze.
“To have a thing exist was endless torment for all the nothing that had been there before it,” said Silenus. “It had been wounded and broken when the Creator made the world. And in its rage the darkness struck back, and began to devour Creation.”
Another quiver ran through the darkness, and the shards of black changed: they grew long, sharp ears, and thin, threatening snouts, and sharp, snapping fangs. George realized that the darkness had grown the heads of a thousand wolves, and they bit and snarled at the little brown world that was sitting in the white pool. The painting of the world began to fade, not all at once but in patches: first a small valley in the hills faded and darkened, then a piece of shore, and then the tip of a chain of mountains, until the world looked as though it were diseased, with strata of black running across it.
“The creatures of the world were thrown into despair,” said Silenus. “The winds changed course, mountains vanished, and rivers that had once led to the sea now ended in wide, black gaps, their waters flowing into nothingness. Wandering herds entered the shadows and were lost. Forests faded and fell away. Those who witnessed these things begged That Which Made the World to return, and save them. But for reasons that could not be guessed at, the Creator did not return, and the world was plunged into darkness.”
The world kept fading until only little islands of it were left. The isolated fragments trembled under the weight of all that shadow, like they all might burst apart at any moment.
“But then some of the people discovered something,” said Silenus. “They found that the song the Creator had sung when it first made the world still echoed in the deep places: under mountains, in the darkest forests, in the coldest seas, and within ancient hills, never dying. And the people found that if they took these echoing pieces of the First Song, and pooled them and sang them in the fading parts of the world, then they could renew it, and save what was left, for within the song were the commands that had made the seas and lands and skies and creatures.”
George watched as one little stick figure that was glowing bright walked before a group of people huddled before a growing shadow. The figure waved its tiny stick arms until the people were watching, and then it sang for them, and George recognized the song as the ethereal harmony he had first heard at the beginning of the show. The people who heard the song seemed to light up, gathering a small halo of bright colors about them. Then they walked into the darkness, and where they walked the darkness retreated and the world began to return. The little glowing figure who had first sung the song went to another group of people and sang again, and then another and another until almost half the world had been brought back, the shadow withdrawing as the glowing people moved forward. The wolves at the edges paced and bit and snapped, but the world stayed bright and clear, and they made soundless howls of rage.
“And though much of the world returned, some parts could not be brought back,” said Silenus. “Many lands and countries had lain under shadow for too long, and were lost. So the people decided that they would never allow such a thing to happen again, and they assigned a group to carry the First Song from fading place to fading place and renew the edges of the world, and pass on the song when needed. And so Creation would be maintained, piece by piece, performance by performance, as the First Song was carried across the face of the Earth, echoing in the deeps.”
The last image on the screen was of a group of people crossing the little brown world, weaving through tiny mountains and traveling down into a valley. There was a faint glow to them, as though they carried a light that they had to keep veiled. Out beyond the border of the world the wolves in the darkness watched them, and they stewed and paced back and forth. The glowing people did not seem to take notice, and George almost shouted at them to watch out, and take warning, but before he could the screen began to grow blank again, and the darkness and the wolves and the world turned into empty canvas.
Stanley increased the light on his lantern. Silenus walked down off the stage, took the glass chimney off of it, and lit his cigar in its flame. As he did he looked up at George, the fire’s luminescence bathing his craggy face, and said, “Good fucking show, ain’t it?”
George was not sure what to say at first. Finally he asked, “What is it you’re trying to tell me? That… that the song you sing in the fourth act is…”
“I am saying,” said Silenus, “that the strange performance at the end of our shows, where everything seems to go still and the audience grows dazed and silent… In that moment, what is being played is the First Song, otherwise known as the First Invocation, the art that called Creation out of the darkness and forged the world. Or at the very least a part of that song.”
George stared at him. “You can’t possibly be serious.”
“I dead fucking am,” said Silenus.
Stanley took out his blackboard and wrote: WHAT WAS THE FIRST TIME YOU HEARD IT LIKE?
Silenus added, “Yes, but ignore that memory that woke up inside you. That’s abnormal. Besides that, what was it like, that first time?”
George thought and said, “It was like the theater felt very small, and we could… look out and see everything. Like we were watching a machine from the outside, and we’d only ever seen it from within.”
“Exactly,” said Silenus. “Within the First Song are the… blueprints, I suppose you could say, of everything that’s ever been or ever will be. When it’s sung and heard it connects people, links them to everything that’s around them, every piece and every particle of everything until they see… well, everything. It is a glimpse of the infinite, bundled up into one three-minute act. And unlike most other experiences with the infinite, there is no sense of feeling lost, or meaningless, or any dread. Reciting the First Song is a force of renewal. It reminds the listener and even Creation itself what they are, what they were meant to be—an integral, inseparable part of a much vaster whole.”
George frowned as he tried to take this in. He remembered how those who’d seen the act in Parma had changed: their colors had become brighter, and they’d seemed somehow content and at peace. “So you sing this just to give people that feeling of… infinity?”
“Well, that’s not exactly the reason,” said Silenus. “That’s more of a pleasant side effect. The real reason is protection.”
A light went on in George’s mind. “Against the men in gray.”
Silenus exchanged a cool glance with Stanley. “Yes,” he said.
“I was approached by one of them, several months ago,” said George. “He was looking for news of you, but he didn’t give me his name, and his story was… Well, it was very unconvincing. I didn’t tell him anything. But just recently I heard someone say that you were a hunted man.”
Silenus smiled nastily. “Then that someone was correct. I am very hunted. In the past, oh, several hundred years or so, the darkness figured out how to manifest itself in the world, and disguise itself. Parts of itself, that is. It’s learned to send agents abroad to search for what’s keeping it at bay, in other words. They wear the images of people as you and I would a coat, but underneath, they’re like holes or tears in existence itself. Just their presence affects everything around them—light and colors and sounds fail, and shadows lengthen. They are not used to being real, to existing—hence why the one you met thought up such a stupid plot, or why they were fooled by our reflections—but they are still a terrible threat to us. They do not need to be intelligent. They can win by sheer numbers alone.”
“And you call them wolves?”
“That name comes from older times,” said Silenus. “Way back when wolves were what men feared most. They killed and devoured flocks, and terrified villages. These shadow-creatures seemed to do the same, so they named them the same. It was a way of making sense of what was happening.” Silenus snorted and spat carelessly on the theater floor. “When they first appeared, our forebears obstructed them as best as they could, but I suppose it was inevitable—eventually the wolves learned o
f the First Song. They realized that if they could find it and prevent it from being performed—by killing the performers, essentially—then there would be nothing holding them back. They could finally eat up this remainder of the world, and have peace. And so they have been hounding us ever since. Performing the song normally pushes them back, like fortifying a dike against the tide. That’s how it’s been for… hell, thousands of years. But somehow in the hotel in Parma, it didn’t work. I can’t say why just yet. It is extraordinarily troubling, though.”
“Did you say thousands of years?” asked George.
“Yes,” said Silenus. “This has been going on for quite some time, kid. How old did you think I was?”
“I don’t know,” said George. But he thought he detected some anger in Silenus’s face that suggested the question had a very bitter meaning to him.
“In some form throughout the years, there has always been a traveling band of players,” he said. “They’ve been of different nations, different creeds, different races and languages, and different entertainments. Not all of them performed on the stage. Some did their routine in city squares, or in fields, or in temples or on the backs of wagons. Anywhere they could get a crowd. But they always carried the First Song with them, and sang it in their performance, and passed it on when the time came.”
“Do the others in the troupe know?”
“They’ve all seen the picture show,” said Silenus. “The members have come and gone through the years, but they all drew a crowd. Which was what we needed. If I may say so, this current version of the troupe is the most efficient yet.”
“It is?” said George, and then he realized. “Ah. Because it’s in vaudeville, isn’t it? I suppose the circuits are perfect for you.”
The Troupe Page 14
