“Can you think of a better method?” said Silenus. “We are allowed to—no, expected to—travel all around the country, going from theater to theater and doing our short act in front of enormous crowds. No other kind of entertainer has ever covered more ground than a vaudevillian.”
Stanley wrote: AND OUR TRAVELS ARE A USEFUL SCREEN FOR OUR SEARCHES, AS WELL.
“What are you searching for?” asked George.
“For other pieces of the song,” said Silenus.
“Other pieces? I’d have thought you’d have it all by now.”
Again, there was that bitter smile. “No,” said Silenus. “We do not. Over time we think we’ve found a lot of it. Not quite all, but most. But we are still missing a few key fragments. As such, when we perform the First Song we are only playing a portion. There are many dimensions to Creation we cannot help, or renew. So we are always searching for those missing pieces, to gather them up and fill in the empty portions.”
George was about to ask how they did this, when he suddenly remembered the two of them trudging through the rain with that enormous steamer trunk held between them. He remembered how angry Silenus had been, as if he’d gone out looking for something and been hugely disappointed. And then there was what the girl in green had said: Silenus always seemed to be carrying something very, very heavy.
“Oh,” said George. “Your trunk!”
Silenus narrowed his eyes. “What?”
“That’s how you collect it. It’s… it’s that trunk you have, with all the locks. You and Stanley have to get it in there, right?”
Silenus was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “The particulars of collecting or singing the song are a very delicate and secret matter, kid. Stanley is my assistant, and only he is allowed to know exactly what I do with the song. I’m telling you a lot of stuff right now, stuff people have gotten killed trying to protect. But right there is where I’m going to stop. Those are our most protected secrets, and I’m not willing to share them with you. Not yet.”
“People have gotten killed?” asked George. “Over a song?”
“Not just a song,” said Silenus. “The song. Do you know what’s at risk? What could be lost if they caught up to us?” He stood up and replaced his hat. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you what would happen.”
“Where are we going now?” asked George.
“I’m not sure yet. But I’ll know it when I see it.”
Silenus led them out back to the street behind the theater. The snow had lessened, but it was still bitterly cold. He took a right and followed a meandering little alleyway that ran behind several shops and homes. He held up a finger as though testing the wind, and changed direction and kept walking until they came to a neighborhood behind an old abandoned mill, next to a dribbling little stream. The buildings appeared to be deserted, and the lots were crisscrossed with cracked wooden fencing. In the weak starlight it was a lonely, disquieting place, snow-decked and littered with old industrial equipment and rusting chains, and splintered wood that sometimes had the look of bones. Every surface was ringed with frost, and armies of cats wove in and out of the machinery and the broken fences, sometimes pausing to observe these intruders before disappearing down a gutter.
George was not sure what Silenus was looking for, but he could not imagine finding anything of worth here; yet then he recalled how both Parma and Rinton had felt when Silenus’s troupe had performed, and realized this place had the same sort of atmosphere: it felt dark and thin, as if one could scratch at the ground or the sky and it would tear away like paper.
“This place doesn’t seem right, does it?” asked Silenus.
George shook his head.
“It’s one of the fading parts. When more people who have heard the song come here it will return to what it once was. We’re helping it now, even as we speak.”
“I thought you caused this feeling,” said George.
“Caused?” said Silenus. “No. I am specifically here to remove this feeling, in a way. Though when the wolves follow us this feeling only increases, at least until the song’s effects take hold.” Then Silenus spied something, and he pointed at the tumbled-down remains of a red-brick building. Nearly all of the structure was gone except for a single lonely corner, and the way the starlight fell across it made dark shadows in its center. “There,” he said. “Do you see it?”
“See what?” asked George.
“That shadow, in between those walls. Is it not much darker than all other shadows? Does it not seem somehow deeper?”
George looked at the broken corner of the building, and admitted that it did seem very black.
“All right,” said Silenus. “Stanley, put down that lamp. And George, take your shoes off.”
“Why would I want to do that?” said George, who was sure there’d be rusty nails and broken glass under all that snow.
Stanley took out his blackboard and wrote: BECAUSE YOU DO NOT WANT THEM TO BE FROZEN TO THE GROUND. Then he set it aside.
George did not know what he meant, but did as Silenus said. Silenus and Stanley removed their own as well. Silenus stuck his hand out and said, “Join hands. Everyone.” Once they had they approached the corner of the building in a human chain with Silenus leading. “You will want to take a deep breath before we enter,” he said, “so that you will not have to take in much of the cold air.”
“The what?” said George, but he heard Stanley breathing deep behind him, and hurriedly did the same.
Silenus slowly led them toward the dark corner, moving forward step by step, until he entered the shadow. It was so dark that Silenus seemed to disappear entirely, though George could still feel the man’s hand in his own. Silenus kept leading them ahead, even when, by George’s estimation, there was not much space left within this corner of the red-brick building. Yet Harry kept pulling him forward, as though there had been a door there George had not seen, and soon he entered the shadow as well and could see nothing.
The shadow seemed impossibly deep, the darkness stretching on and on. The three of them kept walking forward, traversing a space several times longer than the fragment of the building, by George’s reckoning. Then the ground changed beneath them, and they were walking on what felt like icy stone that sucked at the moisture on the soles of George’s feet. Then George saw that there were stars up above them, though they were poor imitations of the ones he’d just seen behind the mill: these seemed more like needle punctures in the darkness above. When his eyes had finally adjusted he looked out at what was before him, and gasped.
It was not a landscape in any conceivable sense of the word. For one thing, it did not obey any of the rules of physics that George was aware of and comfortable with: he was not sure if he was looking out, or down, or possibly even up, or maybe he was stuck to the side of a cliff and was looking along the precipice. But no matter the angle at which he looked, George saw an endless gray wasteland arranged out among the stars, riddled with abysses and canyons whose breadths were so wide it took George minutes (or was it hours?) to look from one side to the other. There was no vegetation of any kind, nor any sign of life: only the barren, starlit stone. Desolate gray peaks stared down (or up, or across) at him, like a volcanic eruption frozen at the height of its violence. There seemed to be far too much sky in places around him, and very little earth, like the horizon was eaten up by the gaps between the stars. It was a frigid, brittle, awful place, hanging in space without any sense of dimension or depth or purpose. The wastes looked terribly cold, and as George had just gasped he had to take in a breath of air, and it was indeed so frozen that it was shocking.
“What is this?” said George.
“This is one of the lost places,” said Silenus. His words made an astounding amount of steam, and George saw their very bodies were steaming as well. “I don’t know what it was originally. I just know it isn’t, anymore. Places like these are accessible through deep shadows in the thin parts of the world, parts that the darkness has rubbed away until
they are barely there, with a few holes finally appearing. Our presence has renewed this place a little, since we have heard the song—that’s why your feet don’t freeze off of you, and why you are not frozen solid—so that’s good, but it’s not enough in the face of this. It’s one of the places that the First Song cannot bring back. The wolves have utterly consumed it. And when they triumph over us, even these remains will fade.”
George noticed that Silenus had said “when,” not “if.” He was about to remark on it when he noticed a smattering of small white lights among the shadows of the cliffs. At first he mistook them for more stars, buried among the stones of this strange place, but he saw that they seemed to be holes of some kind, or tunnels, and some led to light and others led to someplace dark…
Silenus said, “There is more than this. Unbelievably more, if distance still functions in such a ruined state. The amount of Creation that was lost in the first days is unthinkable.”
“That can’t be,” said George. “I’ve seen maps of the world, of all the continents. It’s all accounted for. The world has a start and an end. There aren’t any lost pieces.”
“Are you so sure?” said Silenus. “Don’t you sometimes feel like the world is getting smaller, George? Have you never heard any of the ancient stories and felt the world they took place in was far larger than the one we know today? Or haven’t you wondered why there are stories of fabulous places and fantastic beasts, yet we can find no sign of them anywhere anymore?”
“I thought people had made all that up,” said George.
“No,” said Silenus. “They existed, if only for a little while. But they and the places they dwelled in are now… well…” He gestured to the barren wasteland before them. “Consumed. Collapsed into a meaningless little pocket of reality found only in shadow. Now the world balances upon a mere scrap of fundament, floating unevenly in nothing. And what’s left could easily be lost as well, if we allow the wolves to catch up to us and devour what we have spent our whole lives protecting. And if you do not take our purpose seriously, it may just happen. Do you understand?”
George nodded.
“Have you seen enough?”
“Yes,” said George, who wanted to be far away from that terrible place.
“Then we’ll exeunt quickly,” said Silenus. He turned them around and George saw that in the darkness before them was a small, oddly shaped hole that looked out on the fenced-in lots they’d just left. It was not until they were right before it that he realized the hole was in the general shape of the shadow in the red-brick corner, which made him think about the little tunnels of light he’d seen in the cliffs…
They staggered out of the shadow and into the mill lot. Stanley and George gasped for air, since the atmosphere in that horrible landscape had been too cold and thin for them to breathe comfortably. Silenus appeared to be less affected: he coolly watched as they tried to compose themselves, and said, “Come on. Back to my office.”
George sat up to pull his shoes and socks on. As he did he saw the soles of his feet had been burned black, just like Silenus’s and Stanley’s. He poked at the arch of his foot. It did not hurt, but when he licked his finger and rubbed at it the blackness did not come away. It seemed to have been stained by the brief journey in that miserable place.
Stanley gave him a weak smile, and wrote: ONE OF US NOW. LIKE IT OR NOT.
CHAPTER 11
“Her name was Alice Carole.”
Even though they’d traveled through several different towns, Silenus’s office door had somehow always traveled with them. George took it as a sign of his adjustment that he had not been surprised to discover this. He had even intuited it, to a certain degree: before they’d caught the train to Milton the entire troupe had simply taken their bags and props and stacked them in the office, and apparently left them all behind. Then when Silenus had “discovered” the door among the rooms in the new hotel in Milton (as the door, like Kingsley’s backdrop, was apparently a sometimes-fickle thing) he’d opened it to reveal the same room, with their bags in the same places that they’d left them. Ever since then the door had always appeared to them in some shadowy section of the wall of whatever hotel they were staying in. It must have saved wonders in train fare.
Now George huddled before Silenus’s ancient medieval desk, his hands clasped around a hot cup of tea. The office was much more cluttered than when he’d last seen it: books and papers lay stacked on the desk and several of the chairs, and many cabinet doors stood ajar. Stanley held a cup of tea as well and sat in a chair before the bay window, morose and still. Silenus took his only comfort in a bottle of wine that was very syrupy and stank horribly, though he slurped it down as though it were water. Behind him the stars in the window had shifted slightly, with some growing larger and some smaller, yet George now found them familiar: they were reminiscent of the stars he’d seen over the gray wastes in the shadow.
George finally found the strength to voice a question that had been on his mind since the moving picture show: “Why did He leave?”
“The Creator?” asked Silenus.
George nodded.
“Well, for starters, what you saw is just a story,” said Silenus. “It’s trying to make sense of bigger things in the easiest way possible. As such, it doesn’t make perfect sense. But as for me, I’m inclined to believe that part.” He filled up his glass, took a sip, and pulled a face. “Who can say why the Creator left? We’re not equipped to guess its mind. I don’t even know why it made the world, or what purpose or impulse it was trying to fulfill. Not yet, at least. But sometimes people just leave, kid. You can’t let the leaving or the absence rule you. We must all be the authors of our own lives now.”
George huddled closer to his cup of tea, shaken, but said nothing.
But Stanley frowned, and took out his board and wrote: IT IS POSSIBLE THAT THE CREATOR DID NOT LEAVE, THOUGH.
Silenus turned around in his chair to read what he’d written. Then he rolled his eyes and said, “If it’s still here and watching, it’s very quiet. No one’s seen the hand of the Creator in the world since it was made. Most likely it’s gone, though to where I can’t say.”
Stanley wrote: WE HAVE THE SONG. THAT CANNOT BE COINCIDENCE. IT LEFT US A TOOL TO SURVIVE.
“The song was found only after so much was lost,” said Silenus. “The Creator has a funny way of looking after what it makes, if it allowed that to happen. It abandoned us, and leaving the First Song behind was inadvertent. It’s an echo. You don’t sing a song intending to make an echo.”
The chalk clicked and scraped: BUT ANECHO THAT BEHAVES THAT PERFECTLY?
“The Creator didn’t intend for the wolves to happen, either, but they did. And they’re perfectly suited to destruction. Is that part of the Creator’s original intent, then?”
Stanley’s face was fixed in a rare expression of frustration, and Silenus kept his back resolutely turned to his friend, as if he refused to look at him except to read his next response. George got the impression that he was witnessing a revival in a long-running argument between the two men, one that had engendered a fair amount of scars and flown fur in its time. Stanley’s chalk clicked and clacked away, and he fumbled as he turned the blackboard around to show what he’d written:
CANNOT JUDGE WHAT WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND. YOU SAY STORY TRIES TO MAKE SENSE OF BIGGER THINGS, BUT WE DON’T UNDERSTAND THE BIGGER THINGS.
“I understand what’s been taken from us,” said Silenus. “And who. That’s all I need to understand, and there can’t be a reason justifying that. A good one, at least.”
YOU CANNOT JUDGE A PLAN IF YOU CANNOT SEE IT FULLY.
“You’re correct to say that I don’t see the plan,” snapped Silenus. “But if the Creator’s plan involves so many pointless deaths, then He is a son of a bitch!”
This upset Stanley so much that he slammed the blackboard and chalk down beside him and crossed his arms. Silenus paid no attention, but angrily slopped down more wine. He scowled and muttered,
“Fucking philosophy. Do I, draped in cheap velvet and drinking piss-poor Madeira, look anything like a philosophe to you? Am I to be a man of greater queries, of fucking metaphysic theoreticals?” He addressed these questions over his shoulder, but still refrained from looking directly at Stanley. “No. For Christ’s sake, we’ve got knives to our very throats. Why waste our time on these questions when we have so much more to worry about? I’ve no interest in the hand that made me, only in keeping boards below our feet and train tracks ahead.”
But Stanley did not pay attention to him, or if he did he did not accept his rejoinder. Silenus looked to George as if expecting support. “I agree that sometimes we miss the forest for the leaves, but why look at either when you can’t even find the fucking road? Do you follow me, kid?”
George shrugged. Then he thought, and nodded, and shrugged again and shook his head.
Silenus gave him a baleful stare. “A very definite answer. You seem to have run the gamut of expressions there. But it brings me to the trickiest problem out of all of the ones currently piled on our shoulders.”
“What’s that?” said George.
Silenus extended a finger and pointed at him. “You,” he said. “Me?”
“Yeah, you,” he said.
“Why am I tricky?” said George.
“Come on, kid, you’re not stupid or anything. You can put two and two together. You saw the pictures and you heard the story. You’ve got to have figured out what’s inside of you by now.”
“Inside of me?” asked George. The air seemed to have gone as cold as the cliffs again. “Wh-what do you mean?”
“We told you how we found the parts of the song—in the deep places, frozen in ice or within mountains, or in hills—don’t that sound familiar to you?”
As a matter of fact, up until now it had not. George had been so overwhelmed with everything that he hadn’t yet imagined that the story and the moving images could have had anything to do with him. When he realized what Silenus was suggesting, his hands went to his belly as if he could feel the corners of something within pushing through his skin.
The Troupe Page 15
