The Troupe (3 page)

No one in the town had ever felt anything like it. No one, that was, until George Carole’s train pulled into the station and he leaped off, humming with excitement, and came to a stop when he dashed out the station doors.

George took one look at the dark streets and the star-strewn sky and identified the feeling immediately. As strange as it was, he’d experienced the exact same thing once before, in his hometown of Rinton: there’d been a series of evenings when the air seemed full of darkness, and everything felt
thin
, as if you could lick your finger and rub at the horizon and it would smear.

This pervasive feeling had coincided with another event in town: the performances of the Silenus Troupe. And it had vanished when the troupe moved to the next stop on the circuit, and no one had been sure what it’d all been about. Most had tried to forget about it, but George treasured every memory of when Silenus’s show had come so near, so he still remembered the odd sensation as if it’d been only yesterday.

On that occasion he’d been prevented from seeing the man he thought to be his father. Yet now that he’d gotten close once more, he was struck with wonder. Was it possible there was a connection between this strange feeling and the performances of the troupe? He felt sure that was the case… but who were these players, if their mere arrival could affect the moon and stars? Could it be possible that some of the stories—not all, surely, but some—about Silenus and his troupe were true?

George shook himself. That was ridiculous. He was just anxious about meeting his father, he said to himself, and it was making him imagine things. And, really, why should he be anxious? He was
George Carole
, unspoken star of the Freightly theaters (even if he was just an accompanist). He wasn’t some country rube, or at least not anymore. In his time at Otterman’s he had played for lines of glamorous chorus girls, for armies of parading mice, and for a group of clowns who performed Lebanese ladder tricks. He’d played for magicians, for tumblers, for statue acts and female impersonators, the fatter the better. He’d played for dancing children dressed like lobsters, for dwarfs and freaks and ballerinas. He’d played for regurgitators, who would swallow items whole and produce them in the order the audience requested. He’d played for opera singers. He’d played for gun shows. He’d played anything and everything.

Any father would be glad to have him as a son. Now that he thought about it, Silenus should be impressed, or even grateful. So George shrugged off his needling fear, clapped his hat to his head, and ran on into the streets, briefcase swinging by his side.

He had figured that Silenus, no matter the nature of his show or performers, would travel and make arrangements like any other vaudevillian, which would mean he’d have booked the hotel closest to his theater. Hoping this was true, George had asked the conductor on his train exactly which hotel this was, and since it was a question a lot of conductors heard he had gotten the directions immediately.

To his surprise, the hotel was a fairly fancy place, with red brick and white-bordered windows. It was a change of pace from most theater and circuit hotels, which were ramshackle flophouses: the owners knew performers could not afford to be far away from their stage, so since their clientele had no choice, it was not necessary to bother with such trivialities as comfort, appearance, or general functionality.

George decided he would get a room, and then try to figure out the best way to approach Silenus. If the man happened to be staying there, as was likely, would George arrange a chance meeting in the lobby? Or maybe the theater? Would he try to impress him with his piano playing? Despite his self-assurances, he began to feel anxious again to the point that he was almost sick.

Then, for the second time that night, he stopped where he stood.

He stared at the hotel. All the excitement and agitation drained out of him.

George cocked his head, listening, and cupped a hand behind his ear. As he listened, a deep dread bloomed inside him. “No,” he whispered to himself. “No, no, no. It can’t be. Not here.”

He backpedaled down the street and listened again. He then took several slow steps forward, head cocked toward the hotel all the way. Then he finally stopped in the middle of the street and looked around, and shook his head.

Somewhere about halfway through the block all sound began to fade from the world. Every noise died until it was a hollow echo of its former self, and the colors past the halfway point seemed drab and muted, like the light was being sucked out of them. George watched the other people on the street. They did not seem to notice anything,
yet when they neared the hotel they pulled their coats tight about them, as though they’d been touched with a deep chill.

This, too, was a sensation familiar to George. But he dreaded it far more than the surreal darkness throughout Parma.

It could only mean one thing: he was not the only one who had tracked Silenus here.

George walked to the end of the block, and the queer silence increased with each step. He kept his eye on the hotel, making sure to mark the windows and the doors. It wasn’t until he was right in front of it that he saw a curtain on the second story twitch aside, and he caught a flash of a black-gloved hand and a gray sleeve, and a blank face surveying the street.

George jumped back. He found cover behind some bushes in front of an office building, and there he squatted down to watch and think. “They’re
here
?” he said to himself. “How could they be here?”

As George had searched for Silenus over the past half year, he had gradually become aware that he was not the only one doing so: there were other agents, ones of a far stranger sort, who were asking nearly the same questions he was.

He had first realized this at the start of fall, when he had traveled across Freightly to a different theater to inquire about Silenus. As always, there’d been no news, and he’d left the theater disappointed. But it was as George had passed a little alley beside the theater that he’d realized something was wrong: he heard something. Or maybe, he thought, he didn’t hear something. After a while he realized he actually couldn’t hear anything at all.

At first George thought he’d somehow gone deaf, but when he heard the carriages clattering through the streets he realized it was something else: on some level the world had fallen quiet to him. But this was a new type of quiet to George, who had very keen senses. If silence could have a frequency, with some silences soft and others
harsh, then this one’s was overpowering and fierce, and he could
hear
it, like a needle in his ear. It rendered the sounds in the street hollow and lifeless, like they barely existed at all. And no one else on the street paused or looked up; it seemed as if only George could hear it.

Then a cheerful voice said, “I take it you’re a Silenus fan, too?”

George turned to look. Standing a far ways down the alley under one of the streetlamps was a man. Or was it? George thought. Somehow the man seemed too
perfect
: his collar was too starched and sharp, his bowler too black and clean, the knot in his tie too straight, and there wasn’t a speck of dirt anywhere on his shoes, which gleamed hungrily in the lamplight. George wondered if he was maybe just a picture of a man, like someone had made a painting of a gentleman in a gray suit and stood it up in the middle of the lane.

“I’m sorry?” George asked.

“You’re another Silenus fan,” the man called in that same cheery voice. “I heard you asking about him inside.”

“Oh. Well. Yes, I suppose you could say that.”

The man did nothing, as if thinking. Then he walked toward George with a bizarrely mechanical gait, arms stiff at his sides. As the man neared the queer silence grew, and George’s impression of a picture of a man increased as well: his face was blankly handsome, his eyes a gray a shade lighter than his suit, and all of his features were clean and smooth and symmetrical. But though he seemed perfect, the man also seemed strangely indistinct, like your eyes would pass over him unless you were looking for him. He looked, George thought, like a man out of an advertisement, like one for shoe polish.

“I doubt if you heard anything new in there,” the man said. His small smile did not leave his face. “I would know. I’ve been desperate for him to come back to town ever since I saw him last.”

“You saw Silenus?” George asked, excited. “What was his show like? Do you remember it?”

There was a pause, as if the man had not expected this question. “Well, it was a very long time ago,” he said. “I can’t really remember
it now, I’m afraid. I suppose I wish to see him so that I can get a refresher.”

“Oh,” George said, disappointed even more.

“I’ll tell you what,” said the man in gray. “Why don’t we pool our resources? I’m eager to hear any news of my favorite performer, as I’m sure you are. If you find anything, would you please come and let me know about it? And when you do, I’ll tell you all I know.”

“I suppose I could.”

There was a pause, the man’s smooth gray eyes flicking up into the distance as he considered his reply, and then back. “Well, that’s excellent,” the man said. “Really, it’s very good of you. I’m in town for a long while, and I can be reached at the Liddell Hotel, on Maynor. I’m so eager to see Silenus again, why, I’d be willing to pay you for it. Would this be acceptable?”

George was not sure what to say. There was something unnatural about the man that he found disturbing. He only nodded.

“Good,” the man said. Then he stared at George, not moving or saying anything more.

“Is there… anything else I can do for you?” George asked.

“Have we met before?” the man asked.

“I don’t believe so.”

“Are you sure? You seem somewhat familiar.”

“I believe I’d remember someone like you,” George said.

“Do you,” said the man. “Well, please remember, the Liddell Hotel. Any news at all would be welcome.”

“All right,” George said.

“Good evening,” the man said, and he turned and walked back down the lane in that same stiff, jerky stride with his hands by his sides. The silence subsided, like a fog following him down the lane. And then, almost thoughtlessly, the man reached out with one hand as he passed the streetlamp and brushed his knuckles against its pole. The light winked out, and the man continued into the dark.

George watched him go before hurrying back across town to his
lodgings. It took him several hours to realize the man had not given him his room number; in fact, when he thought about it, George realized he’d never even gotten the man’s name. Either way, he did not want to see the man again, and he certainly did not wish to give him any news concerning his father.

But it was after this that George had begun noticing strange members of Otterman’s audiences: men in gray suits, with clean black hats and blank gray eyes. He’d catch glimpses of them among the patrons, watching the show and never laughing or applauding. At first George had thought he was seeing the gentleman who’d made the odd request of him, but he’d never been sure. And each time he’d spotted them he had heard that awful silence slowly pervading the room along with them, as though wherever these men walked all noise faded.

George now heard that same awful silence there in the street before the hotel. The men in gray had to be inside. But he had never heard the silence they projected be so utterly overpowering, nor had he ever witnessed the very colors draining out of everything. There must have been a great deal of them inside, waiting, yet only he was able to notice anything.

He was not at all sure what was happening tonight. He only knew two things: Silenus was almost certainly staying here, and the men in gray had found the hotel first, and were now lying in wait. George could not bring himself to trust them; whatever interest they had in Silenus, he did not think they meant him well.

George spotted a clock in a nearby diner. If the Parma theater was like any other, the evening performance would be going on right now. Then Silenus and his company would close out the show, and come back to the hotel…

He knew he had to tell them. He carefully slipped out from behind the bushes and walked away.

When George finally got to the theater he saw the thick folding sign out front with the words
WEEKLONG PERFORMANCE—SILENUS
and
5 CENTS ENTRY
blaring up and down its sides, and all thoughts of the men in gray faded from his mind. He wandered up as if in a dream, took a bill of acts from the ticket box, and read: