The Troupe

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “What was wrong with it?” asked George.

  “It did not feel right in the womb. There was something missing, he said. Something significant, otherwise he would not have been able to feel it at all. Perhaps its skull, he told us. And he said he had procedures to end the pregnancy, which he recommended immediately. It was a dead thing, he said. A growth inside of her. Impartial.

  “Of course, we were against it. It was our child, even if it was born… that way. We decided we would keep the child alive as best we could, no matter what it was or how it came. And if it died we would hold a funeral for it and say its name—Arthur if it was a boy, Gwen if it was a girl, as my wife liked the Camelot fables, you see—and send it back to God. So she grew this impartial creature inside of her, and we waited and prepared the funeral for when it would be born. The doctor said this was not wise. What we were growing, he said, was a corpse. It was unhealthy to do this. But we would not listen to such horrible things.

  “And, in the end, when the child came, the doctor turned out to be wrong. It was not a corpse at all. It was alive, but… it did not look like a baby. It had only one arm and its head was not right. It had one side of the jawbone, but above that, its skull was… wrong. It was bent, and it had one staring eye that never blinked, and only part of its nose. It did not cry when it was delivered, it only stared at us. It was supposed to die then. The doctor said that it would die on delivery. But it didn’t. It stayed alive.

  “Lucille could not nurse the thing, but we did have bottles for it. It could drink from the bottles, with its ruined little mouth. It was a miracle that it could, we agreed. And we had to keep it away from light. If it saw light then it would die of shock, the doctor said. He seemed to suggest that this was wrong to do, to prolong our child’s life, but we ignored him and kept our child in the dark, in the closet. We’d wake up in the night and go to the thing sleeping in the closet and feed it with the bottle.” Kingsley swallowed. “Can I have my medicine now?”

  “Oh,” said George. “Yes.” He handed him the crystal glass with the opium tincture. Kingsley drank it down quickly and leaned back, sighing.

  “It was not supposed to be taken by us,” said Kingsley. “It was supposed to die in its own time, in its own way. But Lucille… she started to become loath to feed it, and went to the closet less and less. I berated her for it, yet all she did was weep. And then one day I returned home and went to the closet and found our child was gone. I became frantic, and nearly tore the house apart searching for it. I looked everywhere, but I would have almost never thought to look in the backyard.

  “Yet that was where they were. Lucille had taken it out in its little christening dress, out into the bright sunshine. Dressed it up so it would be beautiful. And the child had been struck dead by the sun. My wife had allowed our child to die. She had killed it.”

  Kingsley took a shuddering breath. “I was furious with her. She had killed our child, and I could not understand it. I could not understand why she had taken away what we had tried so hard to have. I called in every favor I had, and I had her jailed. She had to learn that what she had done was wrong.

  “For a while then I was crazed with grief. I wandered, not knowing what to do.” Kingsley’s voice began to grow very soft as the laudanum took hold. “And then I heard of this famous performer, Silenus, and I was told he could do many strange and wonderful things. He could perform his own miracles, in a way. And I found him and asked him for a child, and he said he knew of a way to give me one, but he would not do it himself. It was my choice, and my responsibility, and he would take no part in it. But in exchange for telling me how this was done, I would have to join his act, his troupe, and perform with him and lend him my legal skills. And I agreed.”

  “What was it?” asked George. “What was it you had to do?”

  Kingsley’s eyelids slowly lowered. “It would take so much,” he said in a faint voice. “It would take so much from me, and it would hurt so much… but I had to. I had to have my children, George. And ever since I saw those things in the street, with you and Harry, I’ve been getting drastic, and taking too much… Far, far too much…”

  His eyes shut, and he was asleep. George stood over him, not moving. Then he shivered and his skin began to crawl, and although Kingsley’s story had been horrifying there was a different reason behind George’s discomfort: he had the overpowering feeling that they were being watched.

  He looked around the room, yet saw nobody. But then his eye happened to fall on the closest marionette box.

  Was its lid open? Just a tiny crack? George considered trying to shut it, or opening it up to see what was within. But what if there was actually something there? What could be on the other side of that lid?

  It made him wonder if Harry had delivered on his promise for children. But George had never once seen Professor Tyburn with any babies or toddlers of any kind, nor had he ever heard him talk about any grown children of his own. He hoped Kingsley had been delirious when he’d said that. Yes, that had to be it. Kingsley must have been inventing things in his ravings.

  He kept watching, but the lid did not move. Shaking slightly, he turned around and walked out.

  CHAPTER 17

  “We are all hanged men.”

  George quickly walked down the hall, thoroughly unnerved by Kingsley’s story. At first it had seemed so heartfelt, and George wished his father had desired children the same way Kingsley once had. But to hear that this desire could grow so perverted… The idea made him shiver.

  George stopped when he found that Silenus’s black door had returned. He thought for a moment, and opened it and walked in.

  The office was empty, which had never happened before. Silenus had always been inside whenever the door appeared. Then George saw that one extremely large, door-sized cabinet was open just a crack on the far wall. He’d never noticed it, but then, like the office door, many of Silenus’s cabinets seemed to change at will.

  George walked to the cabinet and felt a cool breeze slipping through it. He opened it up and saw there was a long, dark stone passageway behind, and at its end was a faint blue light. His curiosity got the best of him, and he walked down the passageway toward the light. At first he was nervous, but then he heard Silenus’s voice echoing back to him: “… Fucking thing takes longer and longer these days…”

  The passageway ended in a tiny stone courtyard with tall walls, almost like a large chimney, that rose up to open on the night sky. George looked up and saw the moon was directly above, and it bathed the courtyard in moonlight. In the center Stanley and Silenus stood beside a large piece of paper spread out on the stone floor. George saw it was Silenus’s odd map of North America, and they seemed to be focusing on a collection of small stones laid across it. Standing in the middle of the map was a tall, stout piece of blackened, twisted wood. It was fuzzy and seemed to be moaning very softly, yet as George’s eyes adjusted to the light he realized it was not fuzzy: it was twirling very, very quickly, as if it were on a potter’s wheel, and it hummed as it spun.

  Silenus held up one finger when George entered. “One moment,” he said. “We’re in the middle of something.”

  “What is this place?” asked George. “What are you doing?”

  “Something complicated. Please be quiet.”

  George walked over to stand beside his father. The stones on the map were small and black with minuscule figures and numerals carved into them. They gleamed strangely in the moonlight, like they sucked it up as soon as it touched them. He saw Silenus had spread most of them out across the Midwest and Northeast on the map, where the troupe was currently touring. They did not seem to be arranged in a particular pattern. Regardless, Silenus shook his head as if displeased by what he was seeing.

  “It’s not working right,” he said.

  Stanley wrote: IT IS IN THE POSITION WE ALWAYS USED BEFORE.

  “Well, things change. Maybe something’s shifted. It needs to be adjusted.”

  Stanley put on a t
hick leather glove and carefully placed one finger on top of the wood, and he pushed it one inch to the side and watched the stones. When they did nothing he shook his head and adjusted the wood again.

  George shivered and clutched his arms. It was much colder here than it’d been in the office. “Where are we?”

  “That’s a good question,” Silenus said. “If my calendar’s right, I believe we’re currently someplace in western Siberia.”

  “Siberia? How is that possible?”

  “It’s an agreement I had made,” said Silenus. He rapped his knuckles against the stone wall of the courtyard. “This tower migrates with the moon, remaining directly underneath its apex. Naturally, people tend to notice a tower just appearing in the middle of the countryside, but then we’re gone the next night, so it doesn’t matter.”

  “But your office is just down the hall.”

  “It was pretty fucking complicated to get it set up right. Took a lot of negotiating, but I managed.”

  George watched Stanley readjusting the spinning piece of wood. “And is that part of your tower?”

  “No. That is the blackened crossbeam of a gallows,” said Silenus. “It’s from a very old and very used scaffold in southern England. That very beam supported the noose that killed hundreds, maybe thousands of men and women. It’s seen a great deal of life and death, light and dark, and it knows the contours of the barrier between the two, so it’s useful to consult. Which is what we’re doing now.”

  Stanley raised a hand and motioned for their attention. They turned to look at the map. At first nothing happened, but then the little black stones slowly floated up and shifted around on the map as if magnetically drawn or repelled.

  “There they go,” said Silenus. He leaned forward to watch.

  The black stones formed little groups along the roads and cities, but most particularly they made circles around patches of the countryside, especially those with valleys and rivers and forests. Silenus frowned and checked his watch and looked up at the moon. Then, very faintly, the moonlight in the courtyard began to focus on two specific parts of the map, illuminating those spots of the parchment. Both spots were encircled by the little black stones, as though they were protecting the light within.

  “Well, shit,” Silenus said.

  “What is it?” George asked.

  “Not good,” said Silenus. “Not fucking good at all is what it is, I’d say.” He turned to Stanley. “They’re predicting our movements.”

  Stanley wrote: WORSE—THEY KNOW WHERE THE NEXT PIECES OF THE SONG ARE.

  “How in the hell could they have figured out something like that?” Silenus said. “They’re supposed to be blind to the song itself. They can only feel its effects.”

  Stanley’s chalk scraped across the board, writing: MAYBE FIGURE OUT EFFECTS JUST LIKE WE DO.

  “They’re not that smart,” said Silenus. He held his hand out over the circles of stones. Curious, George did the same, and found the patches of moonlight emitted a very strong, focused heat.

  “What is this?” he said.

  “It’s how we find the song, of course,” said Silenus. He took out a small notebook and recorded a few notes. Then he reached over and tapped the spinning wood. It stopped spinning instantly but remained upright, and the stones all dropped to clatter across the map. Then, slowly, the beams of moonlight faded. Silenus picked up the piece of scaffold beam. “Come on,” he said, and he led them back down the passageway to his office.

  “It’s not an exact procedure, by any stretch of the imagination,” he said as they walked, “and we can only use it once every couple of months thanks to the quality of moonlight. But it’s the best thing we’ve come up with.”

  “Do the stones represent the First Song, or is it the moonlight?” asked George.

  “The moonlight,” said Silenus. He set the beam down on his desk, then walked to his liquor cabinet and poured a hefty glass of brandy.

  “Then what are the stones?”

  Silenus went to another big cabinet, this one down close to the floor, and opened it to reveal a brass fireplace complete with a roaring fire. He turned around to warm the backs of his legs, parting his coattails with one hand, and sipped his brandy, looking furious.

  “The stones represent the wolves, don’t they?” asked George. Stanley nodded.

  “They’re laying traps for us,” muttered Silenus. “Fucking laying traps. They’ve been on our tails for years and years, but they’ve almost never been ahead. Something’s changed.”

  Stanley scrawled out: MAYBE SOMETHING TO DO WITH WHY THE SONG DOESN’T AFFECT THEM A NYMORE?

  “It affects them,” said Silenus. “But they’re just resisting it. Which shouldn’t be possible…”

  “Are you saying they’re tracking us?” asked George.

  “No,” said Silenus. “I’m saying they know where we’re going next. Or where we’d like to go. They’re positioning themselves around the pieces of the song we’ve had our eyes on.”

  “There has to be something you can do, though.”

  “I’m thinking,” said Silenus irritably. “Usually we’d just let the song itself pave the way, but if they’re able to resist it…” He slopped down more brandy and wiped sweat from his brow. “Seems that we can either run, find a new part of the country, or maybe perform a feint of some kind. Fake them out. But that’d be dangerous, very dangerous… We’d be risking half the troupe, probably.”

  An idea seemed to occur to Stanley. He gave Silenus a tentative look, and wrote: THERE IS A NOTHER OPTION.

  “What?” said Silenus. “What would that be?”

  Stanley wrote: SOME OF YOUR OLD AGREEMENTS ARE STILL IN PLACE. “My agreements? Which ones would those be?”

  THE OLDEST ONES. WITH THOSE WHO PROMISED YOU THE OBSERVATORY AND THE MOONLIGHT. THE INSTRUMENTS TO FIND THE SONG.

  Silenus and George both read what he wrote. While it made no sense at all to George, Silenus stared at Stanley in disbelief. “If you’re suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, you’re out of your fucking mind,” he said.

  Stanley wrote: THEY HAVE NO REASON TO LOVE YOU BUT YOUR AGREEMENTS ARE STILL IN PLACE CORRECT?

  “Yes, but they’ll be sure to find some way to gut me like a fucking trout!” cried Silenus. “Stan, I love you, but this idea is some kind of stupid. I’ve had dealings go raw with them in the past, and never has there ever been a people more treacherous and feckless than that one. They’re experts at using language and binding agreements to their own ends. And their ends will mostly involve my guts on a platter, you get me?”

  Stanley reluctantly nodded, and lowered his blackboard. “So what will you do?” asked George.

  Silenus glanced at George as though just remembering he was there. He walked over and sat behind his desk, and said, “How’s Kingsley doing? Is he any better?”

  “No,” said George. “If anything, he’s worse.”

  “Beautiful,” said Silenus. “I cannot have one fucking thing go right for me, now can I?”

  “Franny told me he’s dying,” said George.

  Silenus paused briefly. “Franny said that?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t go bothering Franny,” said his father. “She’s got it hard enough. She needs her rest, if she can get it.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with her. She just… she had an accident, all right?”

  “That’s not what she told me,” said George. “She told me she died.”

  Silenus looked at him, surprised. “She told you that?”

  “Yes. It can’t be true, can it? You can’t be… be dead and just walking around.”

  Silenus was quiet for a long, long while, and a terrible sadness crossed his face. Then he said, “I took Franny on to the troupe as an act of kindness, George. She was delivered to me by her husband, who was a friend of mine. He had attempted some very… unwise solutions to her state, you see. That state being death. He had hope
d to bring her back. But, as you can tell, his attempts didn’t work, or at least not completely. He hoped I could repair what he had done and bring her back fully, or at least reverse what he’d tried. But so far I’ve been unable to.”

  “Oh,” said George. “How long has she… been like this?”

  “For years.”

  “My God. What happened to her husband?”

  “He passed away some time ago. I keep endeavoring to help her out of respect for the promise I made to him, and to her. But you can see why I’d prefer it if you left Franny alone, George. She has her burdens, just like we all do. You, me, even Kingsley. Everyone.”

  “Kingsley’s killing himself, isn’t he?” asked George. “That’s why he keeps getting worse.”

  Silenus gave George a long, cold look. He set the glass of brandy down on the table. “Franny didn’t tell you that, did she? You got that from the professor himself. He must’ve told you.”

  “He told me a little. About where he came from.” George waited for some sort of explanation. When none came, he said, “How could you employ someone like that?”

  “Kingsley?” said Silenus. “He’s a good man.”

  “A good man? He had his own wife jailed!”

  Silenus raised an eyebrow. “He told you she was jailed?”

  “Yes! He told me all about what happened with his… child.”

  “You misunderstand me. When I say that Kingsley is a good man, I don’t mean he’s morally just. I mean he’s useful, and competent, and he serves our goal well. Almost all of our players have had alternate uses to simply attracting an audience.”

  “Protecting and performing the song,” said George bitterly.

  “Yes,” said Silenus. “It angers you. I can understand that. But it’s the only thing that matters, George. Kingsley’s made his choices, and he’s dealt with the consequences. And he isn’t the first questionable person to have aided the First Song. He’s only one in a long, long line of them. I mean, hell. Look at me.”