The Troupe (61 page)
Authors: Robert Jackson Bennett
Tags: #Gothic, #Action & Adventure, #Fantasy, #Contemporary
Macy scratches his head. This, like the sudden intrusion of color, is a new experience for him: he has never received a present before. He wonders what to do with it. Though his familiarity with this process is limited, he knows there is really only one thing one does with a present: open it.
So he does. He lifts the top off, and inside is heaps and heaps of pink tissue paper. He prods his way through the top layer yet finds no gift inside, so he reaches in, arm up to the elbow in pink paper, and he wonders: why would the present not fit its box? Or (and even he knows this is absurd) does the box contain nothing but pink tissue paper?
Yet then his fingers brush against something small and dry and rough, some item nestled among all the tissue paper. He jerks back, and as he does he cannot help but notice that all the lights in the house flickered a bit just now, coinciding almost exactly when his fingers touched that hidden little… whatever it is.
Curious, Macy starts pawing through the paper, digging past its layers until he grasps the hard little object. He rips it out, stuck in its own ball of paper, and begins to peel away each pink sheath.
And as he does, the form of the object becomes clear (and the lights flicker more and more and more) until finally the last layer is gone and his disbelief is confirmed:
He holds in his hands a small rabbit skull, its eyes empty and its teeth like little pearls. He turns it over in his hands,
(and does he feel a door opening somewhere in the house, invisible and tiny, a perforation in the skin of the world through which something comes rushing?)
examining it and wondering what a bizarre little gift this is, but his examination is interrupted.
There is a clicking sound in his hallway. He looks up, searching for its source, and he tracks it to the little (black, of course) table at the end of the hall. There is a plate of decorative black marble balls on it, and they are all clacking against one another like someone is shaking the plate.
And then something happens that even Macy finds strange: slowly, one by one, the marble balls lift off from the plate and begin floating into the air.
Macy stares at this, astonished, his eyes beginning to hurt from the flashing lights. He turns and looks at the window at the end of the hall. He can see the reflection of the living room there, and he sees that all his belongings in that room are floating, too: the womb chairs dangle in nothing as if hanging from invisible string, the copies of
National Geographic
drift by with pages fluttering.
Then he feels it, a sensation he has not felt in a long, long time.
The world is bending. Something from elsewhere—something from the other side—is making its way through.
Macy rises, and walks to his open front door.
There is a man standing on the front walk.
(you know this man)
His figure is pale and somewhat translucent, as if his image is rendered in the blue flame of a dying candle, but Macy can see two long horns, or maybe ears, rising up from the side of his skull…
(brother, brother, do you see me)
Macy stares at him, and whispers, “No, no. It can’t be you, it
can’t
be.”
Yet the figure remains, watching him impassively. Macy does not wait: he throws the door shut, locks it, and sprints down the hallway.
All around him his possessions are leaving the ground to hang in the air. The floor and walls shake like the mountain is threatening to cut the house loose and send it sliding down into
the valley. And each room begins to flood with an awful smell, a scent of horrific rot and hay and shit…
“No, no!” screams Macy. “Not you, not here! I didn’t do anything to you! Leave me alone, please!”
He hits the stairwell, grabs the post, swings himself around, and leaps down the black marble steps, knees protesting with each bound. The lights from the floor above him are dying out, leaving each room dark, and he feels he can hear something rushing through the house after him, moving with the sound of a thousand dead leaves striking pavement…
The floor below is no different. The filament of each bulb sputters, and everything—chairs, tables, lamps—hangs suspended in the air. Macy dodges through these obstacles and throws himself toward a large black door tucked away under the stairs. He opens it, falls through, and slams it behind him.
The other side is dark. Macy, breathing hard, fumbles for the switches on the wall beside him. When his fingers finally find them he slaps them all on, and the room fills with bright, piercing light.
The room is huge, nearly two hundred feet on each side, and the ceiling is lined with bright fluorescent lamps. Were this a normal house—and if it had a normal owner—this room would be the garage, and it would be filled with expensive, fancy cars that would suit the taste of the house’s owner. But few people have cars in Wink, and those who do certainly don’t need more than one, so Mr. Macy’s garage is totally empty, nothing but blank gray surfaces on all sides except the ceiling.
This room has one advantage, however: none of its doors have ever been unlocked or used except the one Mr. Macy has just run through. It is completely barricaded off.
How could it be here? he wonders. Such a thing is impossible. Yet then he thinks of the
(invitation)
skull in the box… and he begins to realize that there are many more machinations operating within Wink than he ever suspected, and he has just stumbled into one.
He puts his ear to the door. He cannot hear anything on the other side, nor can he see any hint of flickering lights through the crack at the bottom. He wonders what this could mean… yet just as he does the lights above flicker, just a little, and he begins to smell a horrible odor pervading the room. It is the smell of an untended barn, stables and coops of livestock lying dead and rotting in the hay…
“No,” he whispers.
He sits up and looks around. And he sees he is not alone.
There is a man standing in the exact center of the garage. He is very tall (and still he appears to be made of a faint, flickering blue light), and he stands motionless with his arms stiff at either side. He wears a filthy blue canvas suit, streaked with mud in a thousand places, and sewn into the surface of this suit are dozens and dozens of tiny wooden rabbit heads, all with huge, staring eyes and long, tapered ears. On his face he wears a wooden helmet—or perhaps it is a tribal mask—whose crude, chiseled features suggest the blank, terrified face of a rabbit, complete with curving, badly carved ears. Where its eyes should be are two long, square-shaped holes. Somewhere behind these, presumably, are the eyes of the mask’s wearer, yet only darkness can be seen.
Mr. Macy falls to his knees, mouth open. “No,” he whispers. “No, no.”
The figure does not move, yet when the lights flicker out and come back on he is suddenly closer, just yards away.
“You can’t be here,” says Macy. He hugs his chest and wilts before the intruder. “You can’t have followed us. You can’t have been here all along…”
The lights flicker again and the figure in the rabbit suit is closer, standing only a few feet in front of Mr. Macy. He stares up into that blank wooden face, and those dark, square-shaped eyes, and he sees…
(a cracked plain, red stars, and a huge black pyramid rising from the horizon, and all around it are thousands of broken, ancient columns, a place where a people once worshipped things that departed long ago)
(a scar-pocked hill, at the top of which is a twisted white tree, and from the tree’s branches are many swollen, putrid fruit, unplucked and untended for centuries)
(endless darkness, stars flickering through the ether, and then empty, sunless cities made of black stone, each leaning, warped structure abandoned eons ago)
(falling, falling through the black, forever)
(a mesa, sharp and hard against the starlit sky, and clouds gather around its tip and lightning begins to leap from cumulus to cumulus, staircases of light waiting to be lowered to the ground)
And though the figure does not speak, Mr. Macy knows what it is trying to say, and he thinks he sees eyes behind the mask now. They are wild and mad, filled with an incomprehensible fury. The figure’s hands, fingers thick and scarred and filthy, are bunched into fists. And slowly, bending at the waist, the figure leans down to him.
Mr. Macy begins screaming. And the last thought that enters his mind is:
By Robert Jackson BennettHe was right. Parson was right. The wildling is in Wink. It has been in Wink, all along.
Mr. Shivers
The Company Man
The Troupe
Mr. Shivers
“A ravishing debut… supremely chilling, it never loses its grip in its journey to the edge of the apocalypse.”
—
The Daily Mail
(UK)
“Imaginative and beautifully written,
Mr. Shivers
is a powerful book that reads as though presented by an author at the peak of his abilities.”
—Charles de Lint,
SFF
magazine
The Company Man
“Bennett combines horror, science fiction and alternative history in a slow-burning novel which is both a superb character study of an alienated individual and a critique of heartless capitalism.”
—
The Guardian
(UK)
“
The Company Man
made me realize how far sci-fi has come in my lifetime.”
—
The Wall Street Journal
Chapter 3: “A man of mechanism and wit, of ingenuity never before seen…”
Chapter 6: “He sees what he wants to see.”
Chapter 7: Colette de Verdicere of the Zahand Dynasty, Princess of the Kush Steppes
Chapter 8: The First Rehearsal
Chapter 9: A Meeting of Shepherds
Chapter 10: “In the beginning…”
Chapter 11: “Her name was Alice Carole.”
Chapter 12: “Are you coming or not?”
Chapter 16: The Professor’s Miracle
Chapter 17: “We are all hanged men.”
Chapter 19: An Unexpected Return
Chapter 20: George Meets a Fan
Chapter 21: In Which a Song Is Changed
Chapter 22: A Very Funny People
Chapter 24: The Midnight Visitor
Chapter 25: The House on the Hill
Chapter 26: Suggestion and Assumption
Chapter 27: “He has harmed me grievously.”
Chapter 28: The Little Black Island
Chapter 29: Anne Marie Sillenes
Chapter 31: “You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”
Chapter 32: “What will happen will happen.”
Chapter 33: A Man Very Bad at Dying
Chapter 34: In Which Burdens Are Laid Down
Chapter 37: Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
A Preview of
Robert Jackson Bennett’s next novel
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2012 by Robert Jackson Bennett
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copyright © 2012 by Robert Jackson Bennett
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First e-book edition: February 2012
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ISBN 978-0-316-19271-2