The Troupe (11 page)

“Then you saw us before Rinton?”

“No,” said George. “Tonight was the first time I saw you. But it wasn’t the first time I heard the song you played.”

Stanley and Silenus both sat forward. Their eyes were fixed on George, searching every part of him, and Silenus hardly noticed that the ash from his cheap cigar was threatening to fall upon his lapel. “Do tell,” he said.

“I didn’t remember it at first,” said George. “I never even knew it’d happened. Then just tonight, when I heard your chorale, it… it woke something up in me. Something recognized the song that you played. I remembered what had happened, a little. But what it means is beyond me.”

“Then please be so kind as to remember it again, kid,” said Silenus. “I’d like to hear this.”

George nervously glanced at Stanley again.

“I already told you Stan is safe,” said Silenus impatiently. “Now go on, kid. Tell us. Tell us about the song you heard.”

The train car rattled around them, and the lamps flickered. George waited for them to return, then took a deep breath and began to speak.

It had taken place when George had just entered the second grade, and like most of George’s beginnings with anything this one had been a fair disaster. On his first day he’d managed to exasperate his teacher and irritate his fellow students, chief among them Benny Russell, a squat boulder of a child who’d somehow taken a comment of George’s out of context and assumed that George was ridiculing his shoes. After receiving more than his fair share of bloody noses and bruised ribs, George had begun hiding out in the old dead creeks
on the north side of town after school. Benny Russell had eventually forgotten about his grudge, but by that time George had become fascinated by his hideout, turning his attention to the gulleys and the ravines, the sides of each one layered and lined like crumpled silk, with strange, earthy treasures peeking from their many creases.

George found old tin cans, ancient signs, lumps of quartz, and roots grown into strange shapes and patterns. These he especially prized, since many of them seemed to have grown into the shapes of masks or faces, with malformed eyes and bulging pig snouts. He used a roll of twine to tie the root-faces to sticks, and set them along the ravines to ward away spirits and enemies, or at the very least Benny Russell.

He passed that summer like the overseer of a quarry, making detailed plans that accomplished little but were discussed in important tones with many invisible assistants. Sometimes he shifted his hoard of tin cans with his stockpile of iron stakes, pretending that the cans were coveted by an enemy that would love to catch him unawares. On these days he’d move his army of root-faces, lining them up to stare down his assailants and prevent a new attack.

It was the day after moving one squadron of root-faces that George returned to find something had changed. When he approached his miniature army, he stopped short and barely managed to stifle a cry of surprise.

He looked his wards over. He wasn’t seeing wrong: though he’d very definitely left them facing out of the creek in different directions toward the Allsten fields, they were now all facing in, and seemed to focus upon one point in the woods, like they had all witnessed some strange event and were still gaping at it.

George, suspecting meddling, began circling through his kingdom, looking for marks of disturbance, but he could find none. He arranged the root-faces differently, not moving them far but making it clear that they were his, and daring whatever saboteur it’d been to try again.

When he returned the next day he found that the root-faces had turned again, all of them staring into the woods with their uneven eyes and twisted, slack mouths, and again they seemed to be looking at one thing in particular. George inspected each of the sticks, looking at their bases for any bent grass blades or shoe prints, but he could find none. It was as though they had all spun around of their own accord.

George turned to see what they were looking at. He walked from pole to pole, peering through their eyes, and decided that the root-faces had all been made to stare into the side of a very small hill, not more than forty yards into the woods.

George surveyed the area around the hill. He was no fool, and immediately felt it was some sort of trap, possibly set by some of his old enemies who’d finally found his hideout. He selected a stout stick, and swung it several times to feel its heft, with the additional bonus of intimidating anyone who was watching. Then he ventured toward the hill, shifting from tree to tree and looking to see if anything moved. When nothing did, he approached the hill directly, calling out, “I’m armed and I’m mad and I don’t care who knows it!”

There was no answer. He looked around at his army of wards. They were silent, but seemed watchful. George wondered if he’d somehow invested them with intelligence, and they’d actually seen something.

He stopped when he came near the hill. It seemed a very old thing, a raw mass that had been shaped by slow, glacial forces, chewed by teeth of ice weighing thousands of tons. Yet there was something about its lumpy edges, or perhaps the way the wet, black stones peeked from beneath its bright green grass, that made him feel as if it had been constructed around a point, perhaps to conceal some object below. Then he noticed that there was a very small path that ran up the side and almost split the knoll in half.

He walked to the mouth of the path and looked back, and saw his dozens of root-faces staring at him. Perhaps it was the way they were
situated on the outskirts of the forest, but it almost felt like the very landscape was arranged around this spot as well. Maybe the rocks and the trees and the streams themselves were also watching the mouth of this path, their attention magnetically drawn here, if they had any attention to give.

George felt the fleeting instinct to turn and run. But he did not, and instead walked up the path to the top of the hill.

He found that the hill was actually hollow, and there was a small, shady dell set in the middle, the edge ringed with holly trees. He began to follow the path down and discovered that the center was very moist and the earth very soft, perhaps fed by an underground stream. The center was deeper than he’d expected, as though the dell was actually below the rest of the earth, but he forgot about this when he heard a sound: a soft moaning, like the wind dragging over some hard aperture, though it was not unpleasant. It was almost like a chime, faint and atonal. He listened to it grow and fade, and climbed the rest of the way down into the dell in search of its source.

In the center of the dell the skies seemed gray and the air wet and cold. The black granite that had peeked out from under the tussocks on the outside were bare and exposed here, the loamy flesh of the knoll scraped away to reveal its bones. Yet though this place should have felt strange and frightening, it did not: it felt calm and peaceful here, like the chaotic comings and goings of the world outside could never pierce the skin of this place. Star lilies grew from the wet gravel in the bottom of the dell, and in some places there was a blue-fringed moss that almost seemed to glow. It felt, in some way, eternal.

George heard the soft moan again. It seemed as though the sky shivered with it, and he realized the moan now sounded like someone singing.

There was a crevice in between two of the black stones, and George guessed the sound was coming from between them. He went to the stones and peered through the large crack, and there the song seemed louder, like a low, breathy hum.

He squinted and saw there was something on the wall of the crevice. It looked, he thought, almost like a squiggle of light wriggling across the stone, like light reflected off a nearby brook. George saw no water, nor any light to reflect off of it, yet there the little glow remained, a faint, miniature lightning bolt that jiggled and danced in the dark.

Curious, George reached out to touch it. As his fingers grew close, the small vein of light slowed its dance, as if it could sense his fingertips, and almost seemed to wait for him.

When his fingertips were mere millimeters away, George began to feel an immense pressure pushing in on him from every side. It built until it was as if he were submerged under thousands of pounds of cold iron, pushing him down and smashing him against the earth. If he could have opened his mouth to scream, he would have, but the weight was so immense that he could not even blink. And yet his finger kept moving toward the little light, drawn in like a stone tumbling down a cliff side.

Then he heard it: a voice, or perhaps many voices, even millions of them, droning very low with a deep bass note pulsing, and some of the voices switched and found some higher register, while others swiveled through their ranges to reach notes that his ears could barely understand. And somehow George knew that these voices were doing more than singing, that for each second they sustained a note they were pushing and pulling at something, teasing at enormous things he could not see…

Then his finger made contact, and the voices rose to a loud shout. The squiggle of light flashed bright, and he felt as if the sky opened up and something rushed into him, like he had swallowed the seas and the stars and the shadows themselves, and he was certain he would split down the sides. The little vein of light pulled him closer and closer until it seemed to finally swallow him, and the world went blessedly silent and dark.

When George awoke later, curled up in a hollow in one of the dead creeks, he felt as though he’d had the best sleep of his life. He
remembered his strange dream of the hill and the singing voices in the dell, but once he cleared the sleep from his eyes he saw that the root-faces were not actually facing in one direction at all, and the hill was little more than a mound of dirt. When he walked to it he found it solid through and through. He walked away, feeling slightly loopy, wondering what the dream had been about. And the rest of that strange summer afternoon he dismissed, and eventually forgot entirely.

When he finished his story, Stanley and Silenus stayed utterly still. The ash of Silenus’s cigar had finally followed through on its threat and was now streaked down his lapel. Then he took the cigar out of his mouth and said, “That’s all you remember? You left nothing out?”

“I don’t think so,” said George. “But even though I heard it only for a moment in that hill, I know it was the same as the one you played in your fourth act.”

“Hm.” Silenus stared back out the window. “I’ll have to think on this for a while.”

“Do you know what happened?” said George. “Or what it was?”

“What did I just tell you?” snapped Silenus. “Let me think.”

George fell quiet, abashed. Silenus turned to look at Stanley, whose face was fixed in a look of confused dread, and they seemed to share some silent communication. Silenus bowed his head, thinking. Then he looked up and stared into George’s face. He shifted his head from side to side, as if trying to see George in a better light. Finally he asked, “And you say you’re from Ohio?”

“Yes?”

“You’re sure? You’re positive you’re from here?”

“Well… yes. I’m pretty sure. I certainly don’t remember being from anywhere else.”

“Hm,” said Silenus. Then he shook his head, as if disappointed. “It’s the oddest fucking thing…”

“What is?”

“Never mind. I’m going to make a proposition to you, kid. I can answer your questions for you, but I’m going to need some time. Three weeks, in fact.”

“Three weeks!” said George. “You can’t answer those questions for three weeks?”

“Unfortunately, yes. It’ll take me a bit to figure all this out.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Too much for me to be willing to answer without reservations,” said Silenus. He scratched the side of his head, putting his top hat on a tilt, and sighed.

“What am I supposed to do until then?” said George.

“Come with us,” said Silenus. “We have three theaters we’re hitting in those three weeks. Come with us, help us load and unload, do whatever needs doing, and most of all, stay close and stay safe. I’ll compensate you for your time.”

“How much?” said George.

“How much? I don’t know… I’ll kick in for your food, and your lodgings, and—”

“I was getting forty a week at my position before,” said George.

“Forty a week!” cried Silenus. “Christ, kid, I’m not made of money! I can’t afford to pay some kid forty a week!”

“But I’m not just some kid. You won’t tell me what I am, but apparently I’m important to you.”

Silenus glared at him, but said, “Twenty.”

“Twenty? That’s pocket change! I wouldn’t consider less than thirty! I could be making twice that performing, if I wanted to. I’m in very high demand, you know.”

“Oh, is that so?” said Silenus.

“I am a classically trained pianist,” said George loftily.

“Jesus,” said Silenus. “High demand, he says. Classically trained pianist, he says.
Pocket change
, he says. I weep for the coming generations.”

“I saved your life,” said George.

“And I saved yours,” said Silenus, his voice a low purr. “You don’t have any idea what’s looking for you, but I do. You’re in worse trouble than you could ever know, kid.”

George considered it, and reflected that he did not want to know what Kingsley had seen in that street, the mere sight of which seemed to have aged or wounded him in some invisible manner. “Fine, then,” he said. “Twenty a week.”

Silenus stuck his hand out, and the two of them shook. “Now listen closely: there will be times in those three weeks when Stanley and I will have to leave you and the group,” he said. “You will not come with us, nor will you ask any questions about our absence. In those instances you will stay with the group and do whatever Colette says to do. But in all others you stick close to me or Stanley, and do not wander off and talk to strangers.”

“Fine,” said George.

“And whatever happens,” said Silenus, “if you ever hear that… that silence you heard outside the hotel again, you drop whatever it is you’re doing and get me straightaway.”

“I understand,” said George. “Can I ask you a question, Harry?”