The Troupe

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  George glanced up at his father. His shirt was unbuttoned to the waist so that his brown long johns showed through, and a hint of gnarled, graying chest hair peeked out at their top. He sat slouched in his chair with his belly rising up, and his tobacco-stained, monkeyish fingers rested on its top. But his eyes were the most disconcerting thing about him: George had always felt that his father had unsettling, dispassionate eyes, but sometimes they seemed blue and faded enough to be unreal. George often felt that his father had spent long hours staring into things not meant to be seen.

  He was not what George wanted, or needed. He was impossible to know, and even harder to love. And so long as the song needed to be protected, George would never have a place in his life.

  “When will it end?” he asked.

  “End?” said Silenus. “You think this will end?”

  “Yes,” said George. “Please tell me it will. Please tell me there’s something we’re moving toward.”

  Stanley raised his head. His eyes were sad, and he wrote: THERE IS NO ENDING.

  “He’s right,” said Silenus. “There is no grail at the end of our quest, George. There is no finish. There is only survival. Day after day, year after year. We are fending them off with every minute of our lives. I will not lie to you, George, there is no respite from this burden. There is no point where it will be lifted. We must simply carry and maintain it, or die.”

  George shook his head. “No. That’s not true. It’s a lie.”

  “No, George,” said Silenus. “It is the truth. The greatest truth, the only truth. Things do not stop. They move on without us. It is a truth so great that most people must invent and live lies to deny it.”

  “You don’t believe it,” said George. “You imagine an end, Harry.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes. I can see it in you,” said George.

  “And what end do I imagine, George?”

  “When you showed me those wastes, that place that the wolves had consumed… you said the whole world would be like this, when the wolves won. You didn’t say ‘if,’ though. You said ‘when.’ As if it was sure to happen.”

  Silenus seemed to crumple a little in his chair. He stared into the fire, and when he spoke his voice was a croak. “Yes. That’s so.”

  “So you think we’re going to lose?” asked George.

  Silenus sighed. “I think it is inevitable, yes. The purpose of our mission is survival, George. And one thing about survival is that it doesn’t last forever. Nothing lasts forever. It may not happen today, or tomorrow, or this year or even within my lifetime. But I know we can’t keep running forever. One day we will stumble, or stop.”

  “But the previous troupes have kept it up for so long,” said George. “We’re just the most recent version, right?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Silenus. “I believe there was a Bunraku troupe that was very efficient in the East for over a century, for instance. But think of what we’re facing, kid—the wolves never tire, never sleep, never die. And eons are but the blink of an eye to them. They were here before time, and they’ll be here after it. We can’t outrun them forever. We are simply delaying the inevitable.”

  “Then why on Earth would you ever keep going?” asked George.

  “It is rather stupid, isn’t it?” said Silenus.

  “Well, maybe not stupid… Futile might be better.”

  Silenus leaned back in his chair. “Whatever word you’d like, then. But it remains the same. We dangle by a string over the maw of something huge and vast and terrible. Even if we stretch the hours and the days out until their breaking point, how can they have meaning in the face of what’s coming?”

  “Well, yes.”

  Silenus cocked his head. “Hm. Let me tell you a story, kid,” he said. “This took place a long, long time ago, in England of all places, before I ever joined up with this troupe or even knew it existed. I was in a bad spot, did a few stupid things, and I found myself tossed in the clink with the likely punishment of deportation awaiting me. Now, I thought I had it rough, but my cellmate had it even worse. He was a skinny little Irishman, name of Michael Feenan, and he was meant for the gallows, to dance from the hemp until he’d shed his mortal coil and what have you. Unlike a lot of folk in the clink, he didn’t claim innocence. He said he’d done what he’d done—that being knifing a fella in a gin house—and he knew it was worth nothing to protest it, since we was all English bastards and we’d hang him no matter, you see. Which, you know, might’ve been true.

  “Now, Feenan was set to dance a week from when I was thrown in his cell, but he was already in a bad state—when they’d arrested him he’d gotten a serious beating, and his right leg was broke in a couple of places. His shin and ankle were as swolled up and purple as a fucking plum, let me tell you. He could hardly sit up, it pained him so much. So when his time came, the guards were going to have to drag him up the scaffold steps like a cripple. But Feenan, he had different plans.

  “He had his wife smuggle in some rope and some pieces of timber, and for that entire week he kept trying to make a brace for his leg. It was some of the most painful stuff I ever saw. Can you imagine what that’s like, some yuck who knows nothing about anatomy strapping a brace around his own swollen, broken leg? And then he’d try and walk on it of all things, testing it out. And nearly each time he’d fall. But Feenan never cried, or wept, or cursed. He’d just pull himself up, rearrange some of the brace, and try again.

  “Finally on the day before his drop I asked him what he was doing. I mean, he was dead anyway, so why go to all this trouble? Why does the way a man walks to the scaffold matter? And he said,

  ‘The walk to the scaffold is the last walk I’ll ever get, Willie,’—for that was the name I’d given them—‘And after that, it’s naught but the drop. And when the walk is all that’s left, it matters.’

  “So when his day came they took him out and let him walk by himself. I got to watch from the window of my cell. He stumbled only three times. And each time he picked himself up, rearranged himself until he was as dignified-looking as could be, and kept walking. Even though his leg pained him and his very body was a burden, he kept walking, right up until he was hanged. He was hanged on this very beam, in fact,” said Silenus, and he tapped the warped piece of black wood. “Probably the best death it’d ever seen.”

  He lit a cigar. “The way things end matter, George,” he said. “They matter more than the ending, or even where we’re going to. I never forgot what Feenan told me, and I took it to heart when I realized we could never keep this up forever. This very office is a reminder.”

  “It is?” said George. “How?”

  “Come here,” he said, and stood up and went to the bay window. “You’ve seen these stars before, haven’t you?”

  George stood by his father and looked out the bay window. There below them were the cold, rocky wastes he’d glimpsed in the shadow in Hayburn, the endless gray cliffs and the cold white stars and the yawning black abysses. They seemed suspended several feet above it all, as if the window was floating in all that blackness, and he noticed the window had no knobs or locks, as if it should never, ever be opened.

  “I put my office right in the middle of the death they threaten us with,” Silenus said. “They still have yet to find it, stupid things. I’ve got it so it moves around pretty frequently. But here I sit, every day, hanging over all this wasted nothing. I will never forget what the world could be, should my vigilance ever fail. And more than that, I will never forget that in a way we are all hanged men and hanged women, awaiting those deaths which cannot be avoided. Yet I will make sure that we live and die the way we choose for as long as we possibly can. And I’ll do what it takes to ensure that. They can threaten me all they want, but I’ll never stop.”

  George nodded. He thought he understood, even though it was a very strange story; he did not know much history, but he could not remember the last time anyone in England had been threatened with deportation. Then he remembered
what Franny had first told him on the train, and asked, “What if they threaten the others, though?”

  “Others?”

  “Yes,” said George. “Would you risk the lives of the rest of the troupe? Or mine?”

  Silenus looked at him, startled. “You I would protect at all costs. We cannot bear to lose you.”

  George noticed that he had said “we.” “Because I have the song in me, or because I’m your son?”

  Silenus looked down at the floor. Stanley turned to stare at him, concerned. Silenus said, “Well, because you’re my son, of course.”

  George was quiet. Then he said, “But you had to think about it.”

  “I… I didn’t. It’s just an upsetting question, that’s all.”

  “An upsetting question,” echoed George.

  “Well, yes.”

  George laughed bitterly. “Protect at all costs… You talk about burdens, Harry, but I’m your burden, aren’t I? Something to be handled carefully, something never allowed out?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Silenus. “You know we have to hide the song, at any cost.”

  “But there are better ways of doing it,” said George. “Oh? And how have I mistreated you so terribly?”

  George flushed. He knew he should not say this, since he had promised Stanley he’d try and forget about it, but he could not stop himself. “Well, you had me pelted with rotten tomatoes, for one!”

  Silenus jumped a little, and George knew that Stanley had not told his father he knew. “W-what?”

  “That’s right!” George said. “I know you arranged to have me humiliated! And I’ve kept quiet about it for too long. How could you even think of doing something like that? Do you have any idea how horrible it was for me? And then you came and talked to me, but it was all a damn lie!”

  “How did you…” Silenus stopped and recomposed himself. “Well, horrible it might’ve been, but it needed to happen! You were sabotaging the troupe, kid! What else could I have done?”

  “You could have talked to me!”

  “We tried talking, and that sure as hell didn’t work.”

  “No, you just flat out told me what to do. As if I had no choice! You treated me like a disobedient dog, and when I didn’t immediately obey you forced me to come to heel!” George half wanted to break the bay window, but wondered what effect that would have. Perhaps they would get sucked out into those awful wastelands.

  Silenus bristled at his comments, but for once he did not reply. Stanley looked back and forth between them. He appeared so agitated it looked like he would burst.

  “I know I’m right,” said George. “I am your burden. Well, I’m sorry you had to carry me this far.” Then he turned around and walked out without looking back.

  George walked into his hotel room and slammed the door and locked it. He was so upset he was shaking slightly. He sat down on his bed and waited, though he was not sure what he was waiting for. Would Silenus come and try to apologize? Or, perhaps, berate him for being ungrateful?

  He told himself that he was being very rational about all this, and to prove his calmness he poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher on his dresser and sat down on his bed to drink it. Surely an upset, irrational young man would not be able to calmly do such a thing, he thought.

  But he was upset, he knew. He hated that he had been put through all of this misery and danger by a man who thought of him as little more than a commodity, however precious. George was so upset, in fact, that he did not notice the amber tinge to the water he was drinking, and it was not until he was about halfway through the glass that he realized that it had a funny taste to it, along with a funny smell. As he struggled to place it his mouth began to tingle.

  It was just as the room began to feel very heavy to George that he realized what the smell was. It had been with him for most of the past two days: that tart, pungent aroma of the professor’s tinctures, especially the laudanum ones that put him to sleep.

  The glass fell from his hand and broke on the floorboards. George did not fall backward onto the bed, but tumbled forward, cracking his head on the floor, yet he barely felt it. As things began to grow dark he struggled to look at the pitcher of water he’d poured the glass from, and he saw that the drawers in the dresser it sat on were curiously arranged: they’d been slightly pulled out one by one, with the drawers on the bottom pulled out the farthest and the ones on the top hardly pulled out at all. It looked, George thought, as if an extremely short person had made a series of steps out of the drawers in order to climb them and reach the top.

  Then things faded.

  CHAPTER 18

  Blessings

  When George awoke his head ached both within and without. A large bump had formed on the top of his brow, and his brain felt as though it were soaking in a horrid brine. He moaned and rolled over, and looked out the window and saw the white light of morning. He’d been out all night.

  He sat up. Someone had drugged him, he knew, but he had no idea why. Why would anyone want to put him to sleep, and in his own room at that? Maybe the intention had been to poison him, he thought, but that idea was even more ludicrous than the drugging.

  He shakily stood up, found his balance, and tried to ignore the nausea that gripped his stomach. Then he walked to his door and tried to open it. It was locked, and he remembered he’d locked it himself last night. He unlocked and opened it and stepped out into the hallway.

  He stopped immediately. The hallway was unusually dark for day. He looked to the ends and saw that someone had thrown sheets over the windows there, and all the gas lamps along the walls had been broken. Some were even ripped out of the wall. He wondered who could have done such a thing, since besides the troupe there were no other guests at the little flophouse.

  He shut his door, and as he pulled away from it his knuckles grazed something rough. He turned around to look, and gasped.

  Dozens of deep gouges ran across the lower face of his room door, like some short animal had been clawing to get in. From the looks of it, it had been several animals rather than one, all with very tiny paws… but judging from the marks, they were more like little hands than paws. He looked up and down the hall and saw no other door had been touched. He must have never heard it while he was unconscious, and he wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t locked the door.

  He heard footsteps from somewhere upstairs. It was day, so the rest of the troupe had to be at rehearsal, leaving George behind to care for Kingsley. Kingsley had to still be upstairs. Maybe that was him moving? Yet when he’d last seen Kingsley he’d been unable to even get out of bed.

  George walked to the stairwell and up to the next floor. The vandalism had not been confined only to George’s floor; this hall was just as dark as the one below. He went to Kingsley’s door and knocked.

  “Professor?” he asked quietly. “Professor, are you in there? Are you awake?”

  There was no answer. George tried the knob and found the door was unlocked. He pushed it open.

  The room was much the same as it’d been when he left it. The bottles and glasses and tinctures were still standing around the sink, except for one, presumably the one that’d been used on George. Professor Kingsley lay on the bed with his blanket draped over him, as usual, except he was on his side, facing away, rather than on his back. George frowned; Kingsley rarely lay that way due to his side, but then George noticed his bad side was the one in the air rather than the one pressed into the mattress.

  “Professor?” George asked. “Are you all right?”

  Kingsley did not move or answer. He was very pale, even paler than he’d been before.

  “Kingsley?” said George. He walked into the room. “Has someone been at your medicines?”

  Still Kingsley did not move. There was something strangely infantile about the way he lay in the bed, curled up in the fetal position with his hands under his head. It was how George imagined cherubs slept.

  George was about to wake him when he n
oticed that there was a line of something on the floorboards below the bed. He peered at it, and saw it was shining in the light, very faintly, like oil. It was very dark and viscous, and when he leaned down to examine it he found its scent was coppery and harsh.

  George froze. Something dripped from the side of the bed, underneath the blanket. It was dripping from all along the mattress, it looked like, congealing into a line on the floor. He swallowed and reached out, uncertain if he wanted to touch the dripping fluid or Kingsley or the blanket. Then he grasped the top of the blanket and slowly pulled it back.

  The mattress was so soaked with blood that it was now a deep, dark red. In some places there was so much blood the fabric shone. Kingsley was fully dressed, but the coat and shirt on his side had been pushed away, and the skin there was pockmarked with dozens of old suture wounds. One recent laceration at the end of his rib cage had been torn open, with rivers of pus trailing down to lie upon the bed in cloudy streaks. A rib was exposed and it looked somehow thin, as if it’d been whittled down, and it seemed as if something had been eating at it and the surrounding flesh with many tiny mouths…

  George cried out and stumbled back. In his drugged nausea he tripped and stumbled into the cabinet before tumbling to the floor. Bottles and glasses fell clanking around him and rolled off into corners of the room.

  Then he heard the patter of tiny feet from somewhere in the hotel, and a raspy, rattling voice: “It knows.”

  And from another part of the hotel, the same voice: “It’s found Father.”

  And from a third place: “Father, Father, sleeping Father.”

  George’s eye fell upon the corner. All three marionette boxes were there, but their lids were open and the boxes empty.

  His skin went cold and he began to sweat. He stood up as quietly as he could and went to the door, and stuck his head out and looked down the hall.