But thinking about it now made what had happened after the show even more troubling.
They had exited together, and George, still ignorant but sensing her discomfort, had asked her what was wrong. Did she feel ill? Or cold? Had she not found the show funny?
At that, she had stood up straight, and slowly picked her head up until her nose was in the air and her shoulders were thrown back, a posture of immaculate haughtiness. She’d smiled coldly, as if she would never be so vulgar as to admit genuine amusement, and said with a trace of a French accent, “Oh, certainly. After all, they are a very funny people.” And she had walked away, her stride stately, almost queenly.
It had been, he’d recognized, a part of her Princess Colette act.
But now he wondered how she’d meant those words. Had she referred to the actors on the stage? Or had she meant something more? Or perhaps she had briefly felt that she would rather be a false person, a fabricated character, than a real one in such a bitter and callous world, and sought comfort in her little creation.
George thought about it. After a while, he sadly realized she was right: he did not really know her at all.
CHAPTER 23
The Water of Life
George did not sleep that night. He sat in his bed thinking of how he had misjudged or mistreated Colette, or she him, sometimes cursing himself for his forwardness. Then in the early morning he heard his door creak open. He rolled over to see the short, bulky figure of his father sidle its way into the room, hat in hand.
“Harry?” whispered George.
“You’re awake,” said Silenus. “Good. Get dressed.”
“Why?”
“We’re going on a trip. Don’t wear your nice shoes.” Then he put his hat back on and walked out, shutting the door.
George half-dressed and came down to find Silenus and Stanley in the street behind the theater. They appeared to be in the midst of a new argument: Silenus had his arms crossed and was trying to ignore Stanley’s pleas, while Stanley held up his blackboard, which was marked with: IT SHOULD NOT BE HIM. There were other halferased messages in the borders that read things like NOT WELL YET and ME INSTEAD.
“Ah,” said Silenus when he saw George. “You’re ready.”
“Where are we going at his awful hour?” said George. He was in a bad temper. The lack of sleep and humiliating rejection had cast a pall over him.
“We’re going fishing,” said Silenus. Stanley did a double take on hearing this.
“But not for fish,” said Silenus. “And not at a river. We’re going fishing at a cemetery, George.”
Stanley rolled his eyes and wrote: DO NOT MAKE THE BOY GET OUT OF BED. I WILL COME INSTEAD.
“No,” said Silenus. “You won’t. I don’t need you at all. I need George. You need to stay here, and look after the rest of the troupe.”
TOO MUCH EXPOSURE, wrote Stanley.
“The wolves are looking, but they haven’t found us yet,” said Silenus. “Things are only dangerous near the parts of the song they’ve found, where they’re watching. And we won’t be going near those.”
Stanley did not seem convinced. He frowned and shook his head.
“What do you need me for, anyway?” said George.
“Let’s say I need a catalyst, and you should serve nicely,” said Silenus. “It’s nothing dangerous. I just need a reed to catch the wind, and sing for me.”
“I’m not singing,” said George.
“You have no gift for the metaphorical,” said Silenus. “Let’s get to the fucking train station, all right? I need to make some stops near there before we can go.”
When they arrived Silenus bought the tickets and hurried off to a hardware store down on the corner. He would not say what he was looking for. George and Stanley sat on a station bench to wait for him.
Stanley anxiously watched George out of the side of his eye, and reached out as if to put his arm around him. George flinched and ducked away.
“Don’t,” he said. “What are you doing?”
Stanley blinked, hurt, and smiled a little. He wrote: YOUR COLLAR ISN’T RIGHT.
“I can take care of it.” He did so, but avoided looking Stanley in the face. Then he moved over to put more distance between himself and the older man. He was not sure if the wolf in red had been right, but he did not want to be touched or tended to by Stanley right now, when he was in such a foul and unforgiving mood.
Stanley shifted in his seat. He appeared to look around to make sure Silenus was not near, and pulled out his blackboard and wrote: HAVE SOMETHING FOR YOU.
George glanced sideways to read his message, but did not look at the man.
Stanley reached into his coat. He seemed a little ashamed by what he was doing, but then he smiled and shrugged and pulled his present out. There was a twinkle of gold from his fingers, and George glanced to the side again to see he was holding a very thick pocket watch.
FIGURED YOU COULD USE A WATCH, wrote Stanley. NOT NEW. OLD. STILL TELLS TIME, THOUGH IT IS SLOW. He opened the watch to show him, and smiled and turned the knob at the top. DON’T FEEL THE NEED TO KEEP TRACK OF TIME THESE DAYS. LESS IMPORTANT.
He held it out to George. George looked at it, but did not take it. “Why?” he asked.
Stanley faltered. He took his board and wrote: DO YOU HAVE A WATCH ALREADY?
“Is that it? You just want to give me a watch?”
Stanley looked at him, confused.
“You give me clothes, combs,” said George. “Razors and shoes, and … and now jewelry? Why? What is it you want from me?”
Stanley thought and picked up his blackboard. He wrote several things, erasing each one before he finally showed one to George. He’d written: DO NOT WANT A NYTHING.
“Then just stop, all right? Stop giving me stuff. Stop hovering over me all the time. Just stop.”
Stanley stared at him. The man looked heartbroken, and George felt sure that the wolf in red had been right.
“I don’t want anything to do with you, all right?” said George. “Just leave me alone.”
Stanley slumped over a little. Then he nodded and replaced the pocket watch and turned away.
Silenus finally returned with some large canvas bags over his shoulder. “That took longer than it should have,” he said.
“What did you get?” George asked. Whatever was in the bags clanked when Silenus moved, and George got the very bad feeling it was shovels.
“It doesn’t matter. Come on, kid. We don’t have much time to lose. We’ve got to be there by nightfall, and I don’t want to be in the same county with Lettie when she realizes I’ve dipped into the budget for train tickets again.”
George stood and prepared to follow him. Silenus bade Stanley goodbye, but George did not. For some reason this irked his father. “Say goodbye, why don’t you?” he said. “It’s rude not to.”
Neither George nor Stanley looked at the other. “Goodbye,” George mumbled, and Stanley nodded.
They climbed aboard and within several minutes the train began moving. As it pulled away George and Silenus looked out the window to see Stanley standing at the station with the few other watchers. Yet unlike them he did not look at the train, but at his feet, and as the distance between them increased George thought he saw a flash of white from his breast pocket that rose to his face. It was, George realized, a handkerchief, and he knew immediately that Stanley was using it to wipe away tears.
It was an extremely long train ride for such short notice. George slept at the beginning in short bursts, but each nap was dreary and gave him little rest. Eventually he again asked where they were going.
“To a cemetery, like I told you,” said Silenus. “But this is a very special cemetery. It is extremely old, so old that people are not really aware of how old it is, otherwise it would be considerably more feted. And it has, over time, quietly collected some of the most prestigious residents these lands have ever seen. By which I mean dead people, of course. There’s one in particular I’m looki
ng for.”
“You’re dragging me across the country to find a dead person?”
“Right,” said Silenus. “Finn MacCog, specifically. He made some unusual burial requests, and I’d like to investigate them.”
“And how am I supposed to help you investigate them?”
“Why don’t you go back to sleep, eh?” said his father.
They arrived in a tiny New York town by evening and tried to hire a horse-drawn coach to take them out to the cemetery. The coachman gave them a nervous look when he heard their destination, and Silenus had to up the fare considerably before he would agree to take them.
Soon they pulled up to a large iron gate set between two stone pillars before a path that led into the woods. The end of the path was dark and shadowed, and none of them could see where it ended. The driver was so unnerved that Silenus had to pay him extra to wait, which he did far away down the lane.
The gate was not locked, to George’s surprise. It opened for Silenus with a creak, and the two of them walked in.
“How did you find out about this place?” George asked.
“I once buried someone here,” Silenus said. “Long, long ago.”
They came to the cemetery proper. There were hundreds of lines of headstones of many shapes and types of stone, and some looked very old and crumbling. The forest itself served as its fence, yet no tree encroached on the many plots. It was an extremely quiet and still place, lit only by the fading evening light.
“Do you feel it?” asked Silenus.
“Feel what?”
“Time,” he said. “It forms pools and eddies in certain places. In graveyards its effects are most noticeable. So much time and life is stored up here … like an underground cavern, full of water. There is good slumber here for the dead.” He squinted at the stones around him. “Hm. Now. My research said that Finn MacCog was buried here in 1796.”
“That long ago?” said George.
“Yes. But it’ll be a little hard to find his resting place. He requested that his headstone be buried with him.”
“What sort of person would be buried with his own headstone?” asked George.
“Well, he also requested that he be buried with his finest possessions, so that he could enjoy them in the afterlife. This put Finn in a bit of a conundrum—he didn’t want to lie in an unmarked grave, since then he wouldn’t be found and woken when the Rapture came, yet he was also a suspicious bastard and didn’t want any grave robbers to dig him up and steal his prizes. So, figuring that Christ and His angels wouldn’t have a problem with a few feet of dirt, he is buried with his headstone mere inches above his coffin in the ground.”
George began to get a bad feeling about this. “And what are we here to do?”
“For now, you’re to do nothing but stand where I tell you to,” said Silenus.
“To what?”
“Hmm … 1796 … so that would be, what?” his father said to himself. He scanned the headstones. He pointed. “We’ll start over there.”
They walked to a corner of the graveyard. Silenus surveyed the plots and headstones, making sure to note all the empty ones, and he turned around, looking at the sky and testing the wind. Then he said, “Here. Stand right there.”
He positioned George before a very old headstone that read ARCHIBALD EHBERTS 1737–1799. “So all I have to do is stand on this man’s grave?”
“You have it exactly,” said Silenus.
“Did you really need to bring me all the way out here for this, Harry?”
“Let me amend my instructions. Stand there, and don’t talk.”
George did as he asked, irritated. Silenus sat down on the grass so that George stood between him and the headstone. Then Silenus stared at the stone, focusing on the words written there with a fearsome intensity. George waited, wondering what would happen. Soon the wind picked up, and tufts of grass waved around his feet, and George began to get the strangest feeling, as if something was rushing to him across long, long distances.
There was a twitch in the air above the headstone. At first George thought it was just a flick of dust caught by an errant breeze, but it did not blow away. And as he looked George thought the dust appeared to take the shape of a brow, and a long, crooked nose, and pendulous jowls …
“What? What is this?” said a croaking, distant voice. It was like no more than a scratching at the very back of George’s skull. “What’s going on? Where … where am I?”
“Archibald Ehberts?” said Silenus.
“Who’s there?” said the voice. “Where are you? I can’t … I can’t see you … Wasn’t I just in my bed, and then I was sleeping? Sleeping there, and then later … later I was sleeping in the dark …”
George was so alarmed he could hardly move. He thought he could see shoulders now, bent and very crooked, like those belonging to a terribly old man.
“We have woken you, good sir, to ask you a simple question,” said Silenus. “Do you know the final resting place of Finn MacCog? He is said to lie here in the earth which you share.”
“You woke me? How?”
“The question, sir,” said Silenus patiently. “We only want the answer to that, and we will let you sleep again.”
“I would not know such a thing,” said the creaky voice. “I am but a cobbler, a simple cobbler. I lived simple days and I died a simple death. Such things are beyond me. I do not know …”
“Thank you,” said Silenus. He motioned to George to step aside. George did so and the faint image in the air evaporated.
“W-what was that?” said George. “Was that a … was it a g—”
“It was an echo,” said Silenus. “An echo of a past life. Didn’t I tell you that time has been stored up here, like a pool underground? All that needs to be done is allow a very small drop to fall in certain places, and as its effects ripple and echo across and back, we can listen carefully, and learn.” He picked up his bag and continued on into the graveyard.
“And what are we dropping in to make that echo?” asked George as he followed.
“Can’t you imagine why I brought you here, George? What distinguishing characteristic would make you suitable for such work?”
“The song, I’d guess.”
“Very good. Each part of the song has connections to all of existence. It is all of existence, in a very tight, packaged way, regardless of time or place. You carry a bit of eternity next to your heart, George, just a bit. But that’s all it takes to make the slight echoes we need. Sometimes it’s damn convenient, having you around.”
They continued across the graveyard in this manner, George standing in front of the headstones and Silenus focusing and bringing up those strange, unearthly faces and voices. They mostly originated in the late eighteenth century, though sometimes Silenus would make an error and bring up someone from the nineteenth. When this happened he’d immediately dismiss them, much to their surprise and indignation. On one occasion the echo they summoned up was not the person indicated on the gravestone at all, but neither George nor Silenus had the heart to tell her she was buried in the wrong grave.
Yet no matter when they died or who they were, none of the echoes could say where Finn MacCog was buried. “I am just a simple weaver,” they would say, or perhaps a simple farmer, or a simple reverend, or a simple wife or Christian or son. They doggedly stuck to one little label, and would not venture any knowledge beyond it.
They both grew frustrated, especially George, who had not slept well and was still in a bitter mood. “What’s eating you?” said Silenus.
George was not sure if he wanted to tell him. But he’d been aching to share his troubles for some time, and if he could not speak to his own father then who could he speak to? So as they wandered among the headstones and memorials he related the confusing events of the previous evening.
“I see,” said Silenus when George had finished his story. “You know … I think it would be best if you left Colette alone.”
“Why?”
; “She’s a troubled girl, George. She came from a hard, hard place. I should know, I’m the one that found her.”
“Then can’t I help her? Can’t I … can’t I give her something to make it better for her?”
“Some people don’t want help,” said Silenus. “And Colette is one of them. She runs on pride, and little else. To accept help is to admit weakness.”
“Sometimes she doesn’t seem that proud,” said George. “Sometimes she seems ashamed. Like she wishes to be someone else.”
“What do you mean?” asked Silenus.
George told him about the night they saw the minstrel show together, and how afterward she’d behaved not like herself but like the princess she was often forced to be. As he finished Silenus’s face blackened and curdled until George was almost afraid to keep speaking.
“It didn’t seem right,” said George after a while. “She shouldn’t go around … pretending.”
“Right?” said Silenus. “Right? What the hell do you know about right? Who are you to judge her? Do you have any idea what she came from? How she’d be treated if she was honest? Maybe she has to pretend every once in a while, because the other option is sticking a gun in her fucking mouth and taking the easy way out! Maybe it’s not about right, but about survival.”
“Survival?” said George, shocked. “What do you mean?”
“Who would want to live in a world where you get treated in such a way? Maybe she has to lie to herself, just so she can get up in the morning and fucking walk outside! Colette isn’t doing anything new, George. She’s doing what people’ve done the world over, since the beginning of time—pretend the world is something it isn’t, just so they can feel better about it. You think those bastards laughing at that minstrel bit were any different? Pretending the darkies are clowns, or animals? They aren’t any such thing, and deep down those fools knew that, but it made them feel better to pretend it’s so. I’ve seen it everywhere, anywhere. There hasn’t been an ugly truth yet that man can’t spin into a soothing lie, or, better yet, ignore. Now shut the hell up and come along.”
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