“I am a patron to no one else,” said the girl, a little sadly.
“I see.”
“What happened here? I can almost always find George, but then he was gone … And then I felt like he was everywhere.”
“I don’t know what happened,” said Colette. “He did something, but I can’t say what just yet.” She watched the girl out of the side of her eye. She was staring at George with unabashed longing. “You’re kind of sweet on him, aren’t you?” she asked.
“What?” said the girl, startled. “Sweet? What do you mean? On who?”
“On George.”
The girl blushed magnificently. “Well, I would never … In fact, it’s unbecoming of a patron to …” Her blush intensified. “Well. Maybe not that unbecoming.”
Colette gave her a wry smile. “I see.”
The girl struggled for a moment, and finally said, “I feel very silly.”
“Don’t,” said Colette. She stooped and picked her kindling back up. “Here, walk with me. I can do you a favor.”
“You can?”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll answer any questions you have about George, if you tell me something.”
“What would that be?” asked the girl as she followed Colette through the woods.
“Well, it’s like I said. I don’t think there’s going to be a troupe anymore. And you’ve been … How can I put this. You’re probably well traveled.”
“I have been in most places, at some point in time,” said the girl, a touch prideful.
“Yeah, that’s what I mean,” said Colette. “Do you know of any place where … where people would be willing to watch an entertainer like me?”
“Like you?”
“Yes. Like me.” Colette stopped and looked at her. “A colored.”
“Oh,” said the girl. She thought about it. “Well, I’m fairly sure I know of a few, right off the top of my head.”
“Interesting,” said Colette. “Come with me. I’d like to hear about those places.”
Once Colette came back and got a fire started Silenus finally returned to them. He had gone to his office door, which still stood open in the rock by the river, and fetched a large piece of canvas and shovels. “For Stanley,” he said.
George and Colette nodded. They laid Stanley in the canvas and all of them helped to stitch him up. George sometimes stopped and simply stared at the man lying within. When this happened Silenus or Colette took up his work without a word.
Once they were done they carried him up the valley to a hilltop. “I want him to see the sky,” George said.
All three of them helped to dig the grave. The ground was moist and parted easily for them. Then they laid him in the earth and placed stones over him and filled the grave in, and they made a marker for him out of branches. On it George carved:
STANLEY SILENUS
BELOVED FATHER
PATER OMNIPOTENS AETERNA DEUS
“Would you like to say something?” asked Silenus.
George shook his head.
“No?” asked Colette.
“He was my father,” he said. “All he wanted was for me to know what I was to him. And now I know. That’s enough.”
When they were done they returned to the fire. Silenus still shivered even though he was close to the flames, and eventually they realized he was not shivering due to the cold.
“I’m sorry, Harry,” said George.
Silenus simply stared into the fire.
“It was the only thing to do. It feels almost like the song was waiting for me to change it and use it all up. I’m not sure. I’m already forgetting parts of what happened. It’s like they’re too big for me to remember.”
“So we’ll never know,” said Silenus. “We’ll never know why. We’ll never be able to call the Creator back.” He looked up, and stared around at the dark riverbed. “And I’ll never be able to fix Annie. She was lost as well, wasn’t she?”
George nodded, his face sad.
“How? The symbols on her skin should have protected her …”
“Not against what happened,” George said. “I saw it, when I rebuilt everything.” He described what Annie had done, heaving the train car up the hill as it tore her apart, and then surrendering herself to the crushing tons of the breaking dam. “Even she could not survive that,” he said.
Silenus was quiet for a long time. As he stared into the fire he looked little and frightened.
“It was what she wanted, Harry,” said George. “She wanted to die. And she also wanted to help us. She did both.”
“If she could have only held on a little bit longer,” said Silenus softly. “And if you had not used up all the song … Why did you not change her, or fix her? Why could you not have done at least that?”
“Because I wouldn’t change the world just because it’d be nicer that way,” George said. “The world is what the world is. She had been through enough. She wanted sleep. I let her have it, as you should have long ago.”
“But she was the reason I did what I did. Why I sought out the song. I … I wanted an explanation. I wanted to know why she was taken from me, how this could be allowed to happen. And there was a slim hope that maybe, just maybe, I could make the Creator bring her back …”
“Aren’t you at least a little mad at her, Harry?” asked Colette. “She betrayed us. She got you killed. Sort of.”
Silenus thought about it. “No,” he said finally, his voice low. “No, I have no anger for her. Perhaps I am not surprised by her betrayal, because I, in my own way, betrayed her long ago. I betrayed her by keeping her alive, and finding a new love … but I admit that after so many years of looking for the song, I forgot why I started looking in the first place. The idea of saving my wife, who I could hardly remember, seemed a small thing in comparison to possessing the very explanation for all of Creation within my hands.” A gleam crept into his eyes again. Yet then it faded. “But now any chance of that is gone. And she is gone. Despite all my efforts, she’s really gone.”
“Have you forgotten the cost of your efforts, though?” asked George. “How many places were lost as a result of your search, Harry? How many lives were eaten by the darkness? Homes and towns just blinking out, as if they never were.”
“I don’t know,” said Silenus. “I know what I did was wrong, but it seemed the only choice. I had to. It was all I had left, and I thought if I succeeded then I could repair whatever harm it caused. She got even worse when you joined us, George. You look so much like me when I was young, and …”
“And she kept calling me Bill,” George realized. “I see.”
Silenus nodded. “And yet it was all for nothing, in the end.”
“When you showed me her gravestone in New York, you said that the thing it signified was gone,” said George. “That it had faded long ago.”
Silenus looked at him, eyebrow cocked. “So?”
“So I don’t think it’s gone,” said George. “I don’t think it ever faded. You still remember her. Otherwise you wouldn’t grieve at all. And she would not have done what she did if she did not remember you.”
Silenus bowed his head. “Perhaps so,” he said quietly.
“She was right, you know,” said George. “Creation isn’t a machine that’s thrown a few gears. I saw that.”
“Then what is it?”
George could not answer. Silenus grew grim, and he nodded. “Then it’s as I thought,” he said. “We know nothing. All the long years, all the generations of our family … It’s all been for nothing.”
“Would you tell me something?” asked George. Silenus shrugged.
“I know that Stanley was my father. But why do you and I look so much alike? That was what made me think you were my father in the first place.”
For the first time since he’d returned, Silenus smiled a little. “The Silenus family resemblance is extremely predominant in our clan, that’s so. But not totally predominant. Stanley got lucky. He got the hair and the eyebrows, yeah
, but for the rest he had the look of his mother. She was a lovely girl, Ellen. She and Stanley were the best of us.” He sniffed. “We had to make sure no one could realize Stanley and I were related. We got lucky with his looks and height, and we took care of the hair and eyebrows later. It’s amazing what you can do with only a difference in wardrobe and a dab of hair coloring.”
“Another performance,” said Colette, a little bitterly.
“Another in a long line of them,” said Silenus.
“So that makes you … my great-uncle?” asked George.
“Give or take a few greats. I have been the guardian of our line for a long, long time, George. I didn’t inherit the ability to host the song, but I carried it in my own way. Long ago I found certain … methods that allow a sort of suspended vitality, which ensured that I could always look over the song. These methods have all kinds of side effects, one of which is sterility. I knew I could never father a child, George, so I knew from the start you were not mine.” He looked at Colette a little shamefully. “And what I told you is true, Lettie. There was never any chance of getting you in trouble in a family way. I just had to pretend otherwise when George came along.”
Colette shut her eyes and turned away. “I still haven’t forgiven you. For what you did to Franny, and to me. The idea is just so … so …”
“I don’t expect you to understand,” said Silenus. “You are very young, in comparison to me. That was what drew me to you. I’ll accept whatever judgment you give.”
“Why did you pretend George was your son, anyway?” she asked.
Silenus recounted the story of Stanley’s idea. George had, in a way, witnessed this moment firsthand, and Silenus did not deviate much from what he’d seen. “Stanley loved your mother, George,” Harry said at the end. “I know. I was there. He was very reluctant to leave Rinton, and I know the look of a girl-addled young man. But we had to. We’d come searching for a very, very large piece of the song—the piece you once carried—but the wolves came much too close, and we had to flee in the night. It broke his heart, I think.”
“Why did he not remember her, or Rinton?” asked George. “I asked if you’d been there from the start.”
“You don’t understand how much traveling we did,” said Silenus. “After our first visit to Rinton we saw thousands of towns and states, and even countries. And holding so much of the First Song changes a person. It makes it hard to remember details. I’m sure you know the feeling.”
George nodded. He did, a bit. Stanley had been holding the blueprints for billions of lives within him. It must have been very hard to hold on to a memory of one, George realized, which made him pity his father all the more.
“But he remembered when you told us who you were,” said Silenus. “You don’t know how much it pained him, to have you so close and yet so far. I’m sorry for both of you, George. But at the time it seemed as if we didn’t have a choice. Stanley had to be protected. He was the bearer of such a valuable treasure.”
“I know,” said George, sighing. “But that reminds me of something … I’d always thought the song was stored in your trunk. You were always carrying that with you when you looked for it. Why was it important?”
“Don’t you remember what was actually in there?” asked Silenus.
“Restoratives, wasn’t it?”
“Exactly. And who would need restoratives?”
George remembered the strangled cry rising up from the little black island when they’d taken the last piece of the song. “Stanley …”
“Yes. Stanley often had issues after absorbing a new portion of the song. It’s common. Previous bearers have even gone comatose. The more he took on, the more extreme the issues became. It often took a lot to pull him back into the waking world. At first he only needed smelling salts, but then it took more and more, and soon I was using a whole host of chemicals and tinctures to get him back on his feet.
Hence the trunk.”
“Oh,” he said. “I see. I do know more about how the song worked, but … it’s getting so hard to remember it now. I know Stanley couldn’t speak because then the echoes would come rushing out. But how was it that he performed it in the fourth act?”
“That’s right,” said Colette. “I was on stage with both of you every time, and I always thought it was you, Harry! I never saw Stanley do a thing.”
Silenus smirked. “You didn’t, did you?”
“No. How was he singing it?”
Silenus took a cigar out of his pocket and lit it with a burning branch from the fire. “Who said he was singing it?”
Colette’s brow creased as she wondered what he could mean, but George sat up. “Did he not sing it? Did he just … just hum it?”
Silenus’s smile broadened. “Very good.”
“What!” cried Colette. “He just hummed it as he played the cello? That’s all?”
“That’s all it takes,” said Silenus. “The song really only needs the tiniest opening to have an effect. That was my idea, I’m proud to say. Stanley—and several of the previous singers of the troupe—would hum as they played their instrument onstage, and I would conduct. And since I did nothing else, any agent of our enemies would assume it was all me. They’d never look at the other person at all. That’s how we did it, day after day, for decades, years on end. But now it’s gone.” His face grew grim again.
“You know I had to give it up, Harry,” said George. “I told you.”
“I know in my head that what you did seemed just, George,” said Silenus. “But in my heart there is no justification for what happened. At some level, there has to be an answer.”
“I’ve been as close as anyone, Harry, and I can tell you that you will never see everything,” said George. “You can never truly know.” Silenus shook his head. “I can know. I will know, someday. You may have given up the First Song, but that doesn’t mean this is over.”
“What do you mean?”
“The song was sung,” said Silenus. “And what is sung must also echo. And those echoes can be collected, just as we’ve always done.”
George and Colette stared at him once they realized what he meant.
“You’re going to … to start all over again?” said Colette.
“I am,” said Silenus.
“But George used it all up! It’s all gone, Harry.”
“It may be gone, but I can find it again, in some form or another,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of practice at finding it.”
“But even if there is something to find, you won’t have anyone to carry it,” said George. “I won’t come with you, Harry. I’m done with this.”
“The ability to carry the song must surely exist somewhere outside of the Silenus line,” said Harry. “We can’t be the only ones. Some boy or girl must be able to hold the song. If I search long enough, I’ll find a willing carrier. Then we can begin again.”
“You may have to search longer than you think,” said George.
“What makes you say that?”
He looked a little guilty. “The world is … a little bigger than it used to be.”
Colette and Silenus both turned to him. “What do you mean?” asked Colette.
“When I put it all back, I put it all back,” said George. “Even the parts that were lost, both long ago and recently. The parts you let vanish, Harry, and the parts lost in the First Days. They are out there again, somewhere. If you come at them the right way.” He smiled a little at Silenus. “When I gave up the song the world might have lost a little magic, that’s true. But I think it may have gained another one. A winter traded for a spring.”
“Wait, so you just … stuck them back in somewhere?” said Silenus.
“They were supposed to be there, before the wolves devoured them,” George said. “They were in the First Song, and were waiting to be sung when I performed it again. It was the only right thing to do. And with the time I’ve bought, those places will remain unharmed for a long, long while.”
“But …
but what will people think?” asked Colette. “What will happen to everyone? Those people and places, they’ve been gone for so long!”
“It will definitely be an interesting time to live in,” said George. “Think of all the stories out there, waiting to be told. I’m looking forward to it.”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” said Silenus. “I don’t care where the boundaries end, or what lands the echoes reside in. I’ll always keep looking for the song.”
“Forever, Harry?” asked George.
“Until I no longer have to,” said Silenus. “Until I know.”
* * *
George and Colette tried to persuade him otherwise, but he would not listen. “I have done this for so much longer than either of you,” he told them. “To me, it’s not a lifetime. Just another day, perhaps another week.”
In the afternoon they all went back to his office door, which still stood open in the side of the rock. “A shame,” said Silenus, gesturing to where the great black door had once hung. “But it’s not necessary. It was mostly for decoration.”
He turned to them, and said, “George, I don’t know if there’s a train station at Lake Champlain, but I’m sure there’s something. It’s just east of here, you can’t miss it. You should be safe there, and warm.” Then he turned to Colette, opened his mouth, and faltered. The two of them looked at each other, and George grew aware that there were many things going unsaid.
He left them to make their goodbyes in private. He realized now, all too late, that the two of them were very close. How could he not have seen it among all their interactions, all their business discussions? Despite their different ages, it was obvious they were lovers of a very intense and contrary sort.
George glanced back and saw they were holding hands and staring into the open door together. Silenus said something to her. Then Colette shook her head, and they let each other go.
George returned as Silenus stepped through the door into his office. He fetched their bags from behind his desk and handed them off to each of them. He said, “It’s always possible we will see each other again.”
The Troupe Page 46
