The Troupe

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  A naturalist camping at Clamshell Pond also noticed something wrong with the sky, but he had a very good reason to awake: the air had become filled with the sound of cheeping, chirping, and honking. He fetched his binoculars and climbed out of his tent, and he looked up to find the air was filled with birds flying in many formations. But the most astounding thing was that all of them were flying in one direction: east. Some of the loner birds, he saw, were predatorial raptors, and yet they did not prey upon the abundant smaller birds around them, nor did any of the smaller birds appear wary of them at all; they all appeared too preoccupied to bother with their usual bird business. As he reflected on this he noticed that there was also something wrong with the far side of Clamshell Lake: it appeared to be creeping up the shore, as if the water was defying all physics and attempting to flow uphill. Unless he was mistaken, it was trying to flow in the exact direction the birds were flying in.

  And just up the valley from George, Colette was debating going down to check on him when she was nearly bowled over. It felt as if a hook had been attached to her waist, and someone had just given it a strong tug. “What the …” she said on standing back up, and she looked down and saw her feet were slowly sliding down the hill.

  She was not the only thing to move. The very leaves on the ground began to coalesce into lines that all pointed down toward the riverbed. She reached out and grabbed hold of a tree branch to steady herself, but when she looked up she saw the entire tree was bent in the same direction; it looked like an enormous wooden comb, with all its branches pointing the same way. Part of the trunk had played host to a nest of ants, but the ants were fleeing their home, walking down the trunk in a straight line to continue across the forest floor, parallel to all the branches and the leaves. It was, she thought, as if the entire valley were rushing to pay respects to someone very important who’d just arrived.

  Every one of them witnessed different phenomena, but unbeknownst to them they all experienced the same queer, unsettling sensation. Though they could not articulate it, they all felt as if the center of the world had suddenly shifted to just several miles away, and all the elements were bending to meet it. Only one of them knew what the epicenter of that pull could be.

  “George!” cried Colette. “What are you doing?”

  The shadow under the river ice kept growing, and the entire valley shook as the thing in the dark tried to force its entry. But George did not pay attention. He crawled forward on his hands and knees and sat by his father.

  Stanley was not breathing anymore, and George knew he was gone. He stared into his father’s face for a moment. Then he reached into his father’s right pocket. It was cold and damp from the dam water, but still he felt some package in there.

  He took it out. It was a soggy handkerchief, all rolled up. George gently unwrapped it, and the interior of its wet surface sparkled with broken glass and tiny wheels, and in the center was the fat, cracked watch.

  He stroked one side of the watch. “It’s broken,” he said, and when he did his words echoed through the valley with a strange, ghostly timbre.

  Behind him the ice finally cracked, and floes bent up and shattered as the thing below shouldered its way up. The very riverbed crumpled around it, and soon there was a huge, scarred snout, and black, empty eyes, and seemingly miles and miles of yellowed teeth. If a random onlooker had happened to glance on the thing emerging from the ice they would have been immediately driven mad; yet for the one second before they would have had a fleeting impression of an enormous, black-eyed wolf, with ancient, mottled fur and patches of scarred hide, a thing so terrible it defied naming and comprehension. One could not fear the thing pushing its way though the river; one was merely nothing before it.

  Yet George still did not take his eyes off the watch. “But I can fix it,” he said softly.

  The great wolf turned its eyes on him. It began to lunge forward, jaws so wide they could touch both the Earth and the moon if it wished, ready to swallow this tiny boy and the hateful treasure he hid within himself …

  George shut his eyes, stood up, and turned around. “No,” he said, and again his voice echoed across the valley. Yet it kept going, echoing on and on, rolling across the face of the Earth until it echoed in the very skies and seas.

  And the great wolf, to its surprise, stopped. It looked around itself.

  The world had frozen around them both, like a spinning top suddenly hanging still in space. And, now that it had stopped, the great wolf saw that the clouds had frozen in mid-swirl just above George’s head, and all the valley was bent toward him, and on every tree was a bird or a squirrel or some other creature, eagerly watching him.

  In the infinite abysses of the great wolf ’s mind, it began to feel troubled. Something was wrong. It was as if all of existence was waiting on the boy’s command. There was nothing that could do something so powerful, thought the great wolf. Nothing except …

  The wolf began to growl. It realized it recognized that voice the boy had used: it had heard it long ago, when Creation had first been founded, a voice in the dark summoning the fundament out of nothing …

  The wolf stared at the child, and it began to understand that while George did not have the entirety of the song, he now had enough of it. Enough to hold infinity and Creation itself within the palm of his hand, and do with them as he wished.

  George opened his eyes. Their color had faded, as if he had beheld something so great they could now see nothing else. Which was true: when they looked out upon the world, his eyes saw everything at every point in time. His mind now held nearly all the structure and form of Creation itself, almost every second of every year, every particle of every piece of matter; inside him were a billion tiny lives flaring and dying all at once, millions of mountains teetering between rising and eroding, the waters of all the world frozen between low and high tides, the warp and weft of all the web. And yet in spite of all this it seemed a terribly fragile thing, a tiny construct spun out of spider’s silk. If he wished, he could blow it all away right now with but a puff of his lungs.

  The great wolf retreated a few steps, gathering the valley in darkness. As it did, more dark, feral shapes came crawling out of the rent in the river. These lesser wolves padded down the riverbank to gather below their own father. They were tiny things in comparison, none of them rising higher than its toes, but there were so many that George wondered if all of the shadows under Creation had been emptied for this. Soon they looked like a black ocean with a single enormous wave rising out of its center. Some of the smaller waves looked like wolves; others looked like men with gray eyes and blank faces.

  The great wolf growled again, and George considered what to do. Even though he had nearly all of the song, he could not destroy the wolf, that he knew; it would be like the king of an island declaring war on the ocean. But neither could the great wolf attack him: Creation was one thing, but its Creator … that was quite another.

  But then he began to realize what he could do.

  It would take so much—a change so fundamental he would have to start it all over again—but he could try it.

  He looked down at his father. Stanley’s face was still beaded with water, and his expression was oddly peaceful. George kissed two fingers of his hand and laid them upon his father’s cheek. Stanley was still warm. Then George looked up to face the wolves.

  Before the wolves could attack, he opened his mouth, took a breath, and began to sing.

  The wolves shook their heads, proving their imperviousness to the First Song, but then George did something they did not expect: as he sang, he changed the song, rearranging the notes and pitches, and he began singing of something wholly new.

  And when he did, he reached up and took the entire sky in his hands and wiped it away, the clouds and atmosphere vanishing with one swipe. Once he was done he shook his hands out, and then the sky itself was gone and there were only the stars above. It was as if the sky had never been; he had sung it out of existence altogether.
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  The wolves stared in confusion. Of all the things they’d expected, they’d never thought of that. And as George continued to sing, Creation began to shrink around them.

  George clapped his hands, and as the sound echoed across the world all the many forms of life blinked out as if they had never been born at all.

  He reached up again as he sang and he plucked the very stars down and crushed them in his fingers, and then the stars were gone.

  He reached down and gathered up the mountains and the hills about his feet as if they were but toys, and he shrank them down one by one, and then the mountains were gone.

  He reached down once more and he cupped his hands and scooped up all the waters, all the seas and oceans and little lakes, and once he had them all he wiped his hands, and then the oceans were gone.

  He took the sun and the moon in each hand and lifted them up, and with a little puff blew both of them away as if they were no more than dust, and then the sun and the moon were gone.

  Then George peered up into the air, and he clapped his hands on something invisible, and he then held Time itself within his hands. He sang and gathered up all of its flow, and he pushed it down and down, reducing it from eons to millennia to centuries to decades, and then to years and months and days and seconds, until there was only one second left, and George took it and crushed it, and then Time itself was gone.

  And once that was done George reached out to either side and

  took both ends of Creation itself, and he began to press inward as he

  sang, changing each note of the song as he did, telling it all to go

  down, down as far down as it could, and Creation began to

  erode away, falling away to the darkness, and though

  George began to weep at the sight of what he

  did he kept pushing and pushing

  until finally there was

  nothing

  but

  CHAPTER 36

  The Second Song

  Look.

  There is nothing. No skies, no Earth; no day, no sun, no time; there is only nothing here. Nothing.

  Except:

  There is a boy. He stands in the darkness, alone. Around the boy is a ring of wolves, and they watch the boy from the shadows, wondering what he is going to do. They did not expect to find themselves here, never expected to see the boy pull the curtains down upon all the world. And yet that is what the boy has done, and the wolves are not sure if they should be glad or not.

  The boy looks out at the wolves. He is frightened, but he knows what he has to do.

  This is a performance, the boy says to himself. There is an audience. There is a song. And the song must be played. And they will listen.

  So the boy opens his mouth, and he begins to sing.

  He sings of a world. He sings of a world like a candle flame, a small, hot fluttering in the dark, forever fighting back shadow, yet always dying down, bit by bit, falling away into night. This the boy makes a truth, perhaps the only truth easily found: the world exists, he sings, and like all that exists it must one day die. All things die, sings the boy, no matter how precious.

  As he sings he looks down at his hand, and in his hand is a broken watch.

  Yes, he thinks to himself. I know that now. No matter how precious.

  He sings of a world that is constantly shifting and eternally mysterious, a world with countless shadowed corners and hidden truths that always remain just beyond your grasp. He sings of a world filled with perceptions and assumptions, and desperate hopes and dreams, and always the desire to make this world and all its hidden truths conform to those dreams. The world should know, sings that desire, it should know us and listen to us. The melody of that desire does not end; as the boy sings of it, it is clear that it is meant to last for as long as the world itself. So long as the world remains there will always be the wish to look out at Creation, and see something looking back.

  And once he has done this the boy begins to re-sing Creation. He puts back everything as it was; he sings of light on the shadow, and then mountains, and oceans and many seas, and the cloud-dappled skies and the blazing sun. He sings of years of history, all of them exactly as they once were; he sings of every position of every particle, every ripple and drop of every water. And once this is done he begins to sing of all the billions of lives that once crawled or walked or flew across the face of this Earth, from the smallest flea to the oldest, wisest human, centuries and centuries of history, rebuilt moment by moment.

  He puts them all back, every one. The wolves are confused to witness this. If he is putting everything back, they ask, why did he tear it all down? Yet the great wolf behind them is not so sure; the boy is constantly changing the song as he sings it. Is there some subtle difference between this world and the last? The wolf tries to shake off the uneasy feeling that the boy is building Creation around them all, penning them in …

  Soon the world is almost as it was when the boy destroyed it. He has rebuilt time all the way up to his own life, his own story, and almost to the very events that led to where he stands now. And there he stops.

  For the first time he is uncertain. He knows what he is about to see. But he is not sure what he will do.

  He blinks, and suddenly he is standing on the waters of a wide, dark river. Behind him is a huge cement wall, damming the river back. And even though he shuts his eyes, the boy knows what is emerging from the black mists ahead: a small island, and on that island are many tall trees, and at the base of one of the tallest trees is a man.

  The man is tall and thin and his hair is a bright bottle blond. Even though he is muddy, he is impeccably dressed. He is grasping one of the lower branches of the trees as if he intends to climb it, but he has turned and is staring out across the waters at the boy. Yet he does not see him; time does not work in this place, not yet, and so the man can see nothing. It is as if he is a statue.

  The boy opens his eyes and looks at the man, and all the breath leaves his body. The boy has rebuilt so much history with no more than a thought, and yet this one event, so tiny in comparison to all the rest of what he has made, is the grain of sand within the marvelous workings of his creation. The very sight of this man wounds the boy in some deep, hidden part of himself. And yet it is not entirely painful. In some ways, the boy rejoices to see this muddy, pale, anxious figure. He feels like he has done this before. After all, the last time he saw the man whole and unhurt he’d been standing beneath a tree, and the man had not seen or spoken to him then, either …

  The boy hesitates, and waves to the man. The boy drops his hand and says, “You can’t see me. I know that. It was stupid of me to wave, but … I thought I should anyway.”

  His lips tremble. He knows that if he does not say what he wishes to say, he never will. So he walks across the waters to the man, and asks, “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me what you were?”

  Of course, the man does not answer; he simply stares ahead, as still and frozen as the rest of this new world.

  “I wish you had told me,” the boy says. “I know why you didn’t, but … I still wish you had.”

  The boy realizes he is breathing very fast. He looks up the tree, and tears begin to well up in his eyes. “I know what’s going to happen,” he says to the man. “I know what will happen if you climb that tree. You’ll chain yourself to it, and Annie will break the dam, and then, then …”

  He cannot stop himself now. The boy begins crying. The man stares ahead, ignorant of his tears. In a way the boy is the only person in the world, and yet somehow he feels even more alone than that.

  “You don’t have to!” the boy shouts at the man. “You don’t have to climb the tree! The dam doesn’t have to break! I could … I could snap my fingers, and none of this could happen! We could be … be back at the theater, in your dressing room, and I could be watching you practice. You played Claudio Merulo. I remember that. It was so pretty, Father. You did so good.

  “Or maybe we could be some
where else,” the boy says to the frozen figure. “I could make a home for us. Somewhere where there are trees. We could go on walks together. And you could talk. You could talk to me. You wouldn’t have to write anymore! Do you hear me? You wouldn’t have to write anymore! Wouldn’t you like that? I could do that for you! I could do that, with just a wave of my hand!”

  But the man does not answer. He stares across the water, face fixed in an expression of curious concern. And yet there is peace in his face. It is the look of a man who knows exactly what he is doing, and would gladly do so again.

  The boy looks into the man’s eyes, tears streaming down his cheeks, and he sniffs. “But we don’t get that, do we?” he asks him. “We don’t get those moments. It wouldn’t be right, to make the world something it isn’t, just because we want it to be.” He looks down at his hand, and the broken watch clutched there. “It wouldn’t be right. And it wouldn’t be real.”

  He looks back up at the frozen man. The boy nods. “What will happen will happen. I’m … I’m glad we got what we did. And I’m sorry if I was mean to you. But you know that, don’t you.”