The Troupe

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  The night sky was visible outside. He saw the wind toying with a few scraps of clouds. And then he had an idea …

  I am your patron. You stood up for me when it did you little good … If you ever need me, you can simply call my name. If I am close, I will come to you.

  He was not sure how this would work, or if she was close enough to hear him at all. But George had no other option, so he ran over until he was directly below the opening, raised his head, and called one word to the sky: “Zephyrus!”

  The wolves spun around and stared at him. “What?” said the fat one.

  The reedy-voiced wolf leaped down from the stage and grasped George by the shoulders. “It’s nothing. Probably calling for help. But there’s nothing that can help you, child. Nothing can save you from us.”

  George kept watching the sky through the open ceiling. He waited, but nothing seemed to happen. His heart fell. He was alone, and no one could stop what was coming, whatever it was.

  The two wolves finally killed the fire. The darkness in the theater seemed magnified in its absence, and were the flakes of ash in the air dancing faster now?

  “Bring him over here,” said the fat wolf.

  The reedy-voiced wolf picked George up as if he weighed nothing at all and bodily dropped him before the stage. Then he took one of George’s arms and the fat wolf took the other.

  “Are you sure it is coming?” said the wolf in red.

  The stage began to darken. Shadows at the back began to bleed out, growing to conceal the remaining curtains, the ragged backdrop, the splintered boards. Soon almost nothing on the stage was visible at all.

  “We are sure,” said the fat one.

  George was shaking in their grasps. He kept turning to look at the entry to the theater and the open ceiling, hoping someone would happen upon them and stop this. But no one came.

  He turned back to the stage. It was as dark as the entry to a cave now. And George began to sense that there was something at the back of it, something very big, watching them …

  It was then that he remembered something from the moving pictures Silenus had showed him: when the world had first been created and the darkness came alive, there had not been throngs of wolves then, not yet. Originally there’d been only one set of eyes out in the darkness, watching this new creation with utter hate. And George also recalled that short blast of silence that the wolf in red had used as a word, and now he wondered if it had perhaps been a name. But a name for what, he wondered? What could be terrible enough to match the dread inspired by the mention of that strange word?

  Then something in the shadows shifted, and suddenly they were at the bottom of the sea.

  * * *

  George did not know this, but the human mind is very good at recontextualizing the world when it stops making sense. When a person encounters an event that goes beyond their normal five senses, the mind filters the information and changes it so that the event is experienced in normal, understandable terms. In essence, it creates a realistic metaphor to relate what’s happening. Sometimes the metaphor can be very different from the normal world, like suddenly switching things so it seems as though you are at the bottom of the sea; but then such changes may be necessary, if the event experienced is great enough.

  And what George was witnessing was so great and terrible that merely seeing it threatened to destroy him.

  He felt as if they were standing on the ocean floor with miles and miles of cold water above them. Sunlight barely filtered down to this place, trickling through the briny depths to fall upon their shoulders. Before them was what looked like the edge of an enormous continental shelf, and there at the bottom was a gap between the continent floating above and the ocean floor. In that gap the shadows were intensely dark, so dark George’s eyes could not penetrate them, but it seemed as if the gap went on forever. And yet he sensed that something was moving there, down in the darkness underneath the world.

  The ground shook below them. There was a pause, and then it shook again. George wondered if chunks of rock were falling off the continental shelf, but when the ground shook for a third time he began to think that whatever was falling was far too rhythmic for that … and he wondered if perhaps what he was hearing was footfalls.

  Something was coming. He struggled in the grasp of the two wolves, but they stayed firm. He felt something unraveling in the back of his mind, and he wondered if he was going mad.

  He glimpsed something enormous in the dark. Was that a scaly jaw? Two enormous, pointed ears? The flex and ripple of thousands of miles of corded muscle … was that fur covering its vast bulk, or was it scales, or was its skin barren and cracked and leathery? George could not see. But he thought he could make out a pair of eyes in the dark, each as huge as worlds themselves, round and black and empty like the eyes of a shark. They were eyes that had seen the rise and fall of countless civilizations, and did not care.

  A single massive forepaw emerged from the dark to fall upon the ocean floor. It had four huge toes, each with jet-black claws the size of buildings. It was scarred and old and had once had fur of some kind, though the countless years had worn that away until there were only graying bunches of skin. The forepaw flexed, digging huge gouges in the earthen floor, and George realized it was trying to drag itself forward, heaving some unimaginably colossal body that surely had to stretch completely under the world itself. Whole nations must teeter on the back of that giant spine, George thought, and the thing must desperately want to throw them off …

  It was going to come out from under the world, he realized. It was going to crawl out and look at him. The thought horrified him to the bone.

  George thrashed in the grip of the wolves, but they would not let him go. Every part of his body was in revolt. His eyes rolled in his head, his skin crawled, his hair writhed with the brush of the wind …

  Wait a minute, he thought. Wind?

  He realized that the two wolves holding him were staring about themselves, confused. In the darkness under the world a pair of jaws opened, readying to give a tremendous roar. But before it came something enormous crashed nearby, and the spell broke.

  Just as suddenly as he’d left the theater, he returned. The shadows withdrew from the stage, and that horrible vision of the thing under the world vanished with it. George was still in the grip of the two wolves, and he was very wet, but it was not from the ocean deeps: it was raining very, very hard in the theater from a storm above.

  The storm was so great that it had knocked in more of the ceiling, which must have been the crash he’d heard. The wind rose so hugely that chunks of charred wood rained down on them, and the wolves let George go to cover their heads.

  “Where did this come from?” cried the fat one.

  The entire sky was dark. A bright flash of lightning lit everything up, blinding them. Then a rattling boom shook the floor as thunder followed the lightning across the sky. As their vision returned they saw the dilapidated wall of the theater tremble. Several of the topmost bricks began to plummet down to smash upon the seats.

  “It’s going to come down!” shouted the wolf in red, and he grabbed his notes in handfuls and sprinted backstage.

  George tried to follow him, but the reedy-voiced wolf leaped after him and seized his arm. “Where do you think you’re going?” he snarled at him.

  “The building’s going to fall apart!” said George. “Didn’t you hear him?”

  “That’s just what you’d like us to think, wouldn’t y—”

  But the wolf never got any further, as the wind screamed and pounded against the feeble wall. The bricks seemed to fold inward then, creasing along the middle, and then the entire soggy construction wilted over; but while it fell in a smooth, rather dreamy motion, its collision with the theater seats was devastating. Seats and bricks went flying, churning white clouds of pulverized stone rushed over the aisles, and George and the reedy-voiced wolf were flung across the theater.

  George coughed and lifted his head, and he squint
ed through the clouds at the gaping hole in the wall. There was another flash of lightning, and George thought he saw someone standing outside on the other side of the rubble: a short but lithe young woman with bright blond hair and shining green eyes, wearing a tattered emerald dress. At first George thought she was a stranger, but then he saw something in her face reminiscent of the little girl in green … She could be her big sister, he thought. But then more white clouds piled up in the theater, and the flare of lightning died away, and she was gone.

  “Do you see him?” roared the voice of the fat wolf from somewhere near the entrance. “Where has he gone?”

  “We can’t see anything in all of this!” cried the reedy-voiced wolf from the stage. “There’s something out there! It’s attacking the theater!”

  “Forget about that!” said the fat wolf. “Just find the boy! Nothing matters but him!”

  George crouched down behind a nearby pile of rubble. He heard snuffling noises from somewhere out in the seating, and the sounds of brick being crushed underfoot by something very large. He did not think the wolves were politely wearing the images of men anymore.

  “We can’t smell anything but dust!” said the reedy-voiced wolf. George was relieved to hear he sounded like he was on the other side of the theater.

  “Stop talking, you fool!” said the fat wolf, who turned out to be very close. “He’ll hear you!”

  There was another flash of lightning. George lifted his head to see if he could spot the girl in green again, but to his terror he saw someone was standing right in front of him, looking down. Yet in that split second he recognized that weathered face, and that black mustache, and those cold, cold blue eyes …

  “Father?” he whispered, but the flare died away. George reached out to feel the space in front of him, but there was no one. Had he imagined him?

  “Maybe he died,” suggested the reedy-voiced wolf from the stage. “Perhaps he was crushed under all that stone.”

  “Well, you had better hope not.”

  “Why not, we could … wait.”

  “Wait for what?” asked the fat wolf.

  More snuffling. “There’s someone in here with us,” said the reedyvoiced wolf.

  “Well, of course there is! There’s the boy!”

  “No,” said the reedy-voiced wolf. “It … it isn’t the boy. It’s someone else.”

  “Someone else?” said the fat wolf. “Who?”

  “Be quiet,” said the reedy-voiced wolf. “We’re not sure. We think it’s—”

  But the reedy-voiced wolf never finished his thought. From the stage there was the sound of fabric tearing, and something whipping through the air, and the wolf ’s voice was cut off by a horrible choking, or gagging.

  “What is it?” said the fat wolf ’s voice. “Are you there? Are you all right?”

  Another flash of lightning tore through the sky above, and the theater glowed brilliant white for one second. It did not last long, but George glimpsed someone standing on the stage. It was his father, and Silenus was looking up with his arms raised and fingers bent at odd angles, like he was strangling an invisible enemy. Suspended in the air above him was something very strange-looking: it appeared to be a huge knot made of all the remains of the curtains, and they were wrapped around something very tightly and they were trying to make themselves tighter with every second, like a boa constrictor around its prey. George could not quite see what was trapped within the knot, but it looked like a dark, ursine creature, with two long, pointed ears and spindly, sinewy limbs, and many, many claws. It was struggling very hard against the knot of curtains, though its efforts did little good, since the dark green bands just made themselves tighter and tighter.

  The light died away again, but the fat wolf must have seen it as well, for there was a roar of “No!” from the entrance, and something extremely large bounded forward. Yet then George heard someone running—running on two legs, and normal human feet—and a noise like two bodies colliding in midair. The voice of the fat wolf cried out in pain, and it shrieked, “What! Who are—” Yet there its words stopped, for then there came a series of hard cracking sounds and the wolf began to howl and scream terribly. To George’s ears they were cries of incredible agony, and when the lightning flashed again he raised his head to see.

  His father still stood on the stage, guiding the curtains into strangling the reedy-voiced wolf, but down in the center aisle was Franny, wearing her large, lumpy sweater and her many scarves, and she was wrestling something dark and huge. To George’s amazement, she seemed to be handily winning. Her face remained in an expression of quiet serenity as she took one flailing limb of the enormous, monstrous creature and slowly bent it back with her bare hands until a series of harsh pops sounded from somewhere in the joint, and the voice of the fat wolf loosed a fresh stream of cries. Her hands smoked where she touched it, but she did not seem to care in the least.

  The lightning faded again. George kept his head down and listened to the two battles as they raged throughout the theater. One ended with a harsh snap and a sigh; the other, presumably Harry’s fight on the stage, died away with a series of whimpers. There was a thud, and for a moment there was nothing but the rain and the dark.

  The campfire suddenly flared to life. Silenus was on the stage next to a heap of smoking green velvet, and George could just barely make out Franny standing motionless in the center aisle. He thought he could see the twisted arms and legs of something huge lying behind her, but then it was gone, as if it had melted into the shadows.

  “You,” said Silenus angrily, and he pointed at George. “You have got some big fucking explaining to do.”

  George sat up and stared at them. “How … how did you get here? How did you do that? What on Earth is going on?”

  “Forget all that,” said Silenus. “Why didn’t you ever tell me you were chummy with a fucking Cardinal?”

  “A what?”

  Silenus’s finger turned to point at the fallen wall. Someone was walking out of the opening there, and when they came into the light George saw it was the young woman in green. She smiled at him, and said, “Hello, boy.”

  He peered at her. Again, he found something in her face he found familiar. “Zephyrus?”

  She nodded.

  “But … but I thought you were a little girl.”

  “Times have changed,” she said. “I’m growing closer to my possession, my zenith, with every day.”

  George gaped for a bit, and finally managed, “But how did you all get here?”

  “I carried them,” she said. “I heard you call for me, but even though I was near it was like it was coming from a very deep hole. I looked on this building, and saw that something was … happening inside of it. There was an opening inside, and something was coming through. It seemed far beyond my strength, so instead I found your family.”

  “And I never want to travel that way again,” said Silenus. “I thought trains were too fucking fast, but I was dead wrong.”

  “I liked it,” said Franny softly. “We swooped, and spun, and there was so much water …”

  Silenus looked around the theater. His eye fell upon the dummy that had been dressed as him. “What was going on here? These things look like … us. But even more, there’s something wrong with this stage. There are remnants of some passage here. What happened, George?”

  The image of the thing in the darkness returned to him in a rush. “It wanted to look at me,” he said softly, and shivered.

  “What?” said Silenus. “What did?”

  George struggled to recount what he’d seen. He could hardly describe it. He started by saying that the wolves had taken him under the water, but then he backtracked and said that no, they’d actually been under everything, and then there’d been something that’d come out to look at him. And just bearing the sight of that thing in the dark had hurt …

  “What are you saying?” said Silenus. “What is it you saw?”

  “There was something down there,” s
aid George. “Somewhere, at the bottom of … everything. And it pulled me down, or maybe this entire theater, so that it could look at me.”

  For the first time that George could remember, Silenus blanched. “You were down there with it? You really saw it?”

  “I didn’t see it,” said George. “Not … not all of it. But I thought I could make it out … Just thinking about it hurts.” He held one hand to his brow. Something at the back of his head throbbed. It was reminiscent of that sense of unraveling he’d experienced earlier during the vision.

  He staggered, and saw red drops appearing on the front of his shirt. He thought perhaps he had a nosebleed, but found he was wrong: his eyes were bleeding, as if he were crying bloody tears.

  “George?” said Silenus. He leaped down off the stage and ran to him. “George! Stay up, George! Stay awake!”

  But he could not, and fell to the ground. He heard Zephyrus shouting his name somewhere nearby, and she cradled his head in her long, cool fingers. His eyes rolled, and the last thing he saw was the blackened stage. Yet just above it he thought he saw two enormous, dark eyes still hanging there, eyes the size of planets, and he imagined they were searching for him.

  CHAPTER 21

  In Which a Song Is Changed

  George felt as though he were slipping down inside of himself, washing away and dripping down through old, musty pipes in the back of his mind. He’d been liquefied, melted, ruined beyond all return, and he wanted only to slip away forever …

  But he could not. There was something holding him back, like he was a fish hooked on a line. He realized after a moment that it was the sound of someone’s voice, chanting softly, and when he did he also realized he was very, very cold, and very wet.

  He cracked open his eyes and at first saw only bursts of blue-tinged whiteness. But then the whiteness seemed to ebb and flow, and when it ebbed he saw darkness behind it, and many stars. He opened his mouth, and tiny streams of icy water wormed their way in to pool around his teeth. Then he rolled his head and saw Silenus was carrying him, and it was he who was chanting. His face was pearled with condensation, his mustache a band of dewy jewels. Yet he did not seem to be walking, or even sitting, and yet the open sky was passing by above him …