The Troupe

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  He nodded. He’d been right: the little clefts opened on deep shadows in the thin parts of the world. Just as there were holes in existence that led to this place, those very same holes led out. This one in particular seemed to open on a shadow in an old garden shed.

  George did not feel amenable to stumbling into a stranger’s shed and possibly having to explain why he was trespassing. He did not look at all trustworthy, with his tattered clothes and many dark stains. But it was possible one of these shadows opened on a place closer to the troupe, so he walked on, stopping to look into every cleft to see where each shadow ended.

  George saw shadows that looked out on darkened vales, crumbling factories, empty riverbeds, and deserted streets. He saw windswept alleys, endless junkyards, and spindly bridges that seemed to stretch on forever. They were all lonely, decrepit places, places that had not seen visitors in ages. Soon the garden shed began to look very favorable to him.

  Then he came to one shadow and stopped. There at the very far end he could see a large, pristine drape of very bright green velvet curtain, with golden tassels at its bottom. Sitting next to it were four large rolled-up canvases, and one of them had unrolled just enough for George to see something painted on it: it depicted the estate grounds of a very large palace, with a small hedge maze.

  He immediately recognized it as a backdrop often used at Otterman’s in Freightly. He must’ve played for acts in front of it a hundred times or more. And that curtain there was the secondary curtain the theater used; he would recognize it anywhere by the tassels.

  George almost felt faint at the revelation that this shadow apparently opened on the backstage of his old place of employment, and with a happy whoop he got down on all fours and began crawling through the cleft to the shadow at its end.

  Soon the cold rock turned to hardwood floors under his hands and he began to smell the familiar aroma of dusty fabric and tobacco smoke and greasepaint and rope. He wondered why the secondary curtain had been stored backstage; throughout his run at Otterman’s, Van Hoever had never taken it down or even performed the necessary maintenance on it. But he pushed these thoughts aside. He would climb out, and find Tofty, and Victor, and Irina, and they would help him out of this scrape. They’d get him food, and new clothes, and maybe they’d get him a train ticket, and he’d be back to his father as soon as possible …

  As George neared the drape of curtain, however, he realized he smelled something new. It had a sweet, caramelized quality to it, like something slow-roasted, but as he neared the shadow it became duskier, more ashen, even bitter. It was not until he’d fully emerged from the shadow and was standing in the backstage of Otterman’s that he identified it as the smell of charred wood and paper. And from the strength of that aroma, there must have been a lot of it somewhere in the theater.

  He now saw that the curtain had not been stored backstage at all: it was a ravaged shred of the original, torn off and left hanging there apparently by accident. Scattered on the floor were what looked like the remains of the backdrops and curtain rigging, with knots and tangles of rope still clinging to the pulleys. As George stared at them a breeze ran through the backstage passageway, and carried on its breath were dozens of tiny little black flakes floating dreamily through the dark air. They settled on George’s shoulders and his outstretched, blackened hands, and when he touched them they fell to powder.

  Ash, he thought. What had happened here?

  George walked down the passageway. The lamps were all dark, the only source of light the weak luminescence at the passage’s end, where it led to the stage. As he walked the wind rose again, and somewhere in the dark backstage something whipped and fluttered wildly.

  This was not the place of action and life he remembered. He could not imagine people ever working here at all. Eventually he began to wonder why the shadow had opened up in this place. If Silenus was right, such things only opened up on the thin parts of the world, areas that had been worn down until they hardly existed. What could have made that the case for Otterman’s?

  Then George came to the edge of the stage, and looked out.

  The curtains around him hung in tatters, and the entire left side of the stage had been turned into a blackened husk. The framework and supports below the boards there were exposed, withered and dark from past flame, and the curtains above ended halfway down in frail webs of charred fabric. George stared at them and walked out to the center of the stage to see the rest of the devastation.

  The fire had started in the balcony, it looked like, specifically the one on the left, which now was no more than a few black spits of wood protruding from the ruined wall. On the ground below was a pile of ashen timbers and flotsam that must have tumbled down during the inferno. The entire top corner of the theater was gone above the missing balcony, replaced by a black-ringed wound that opened onto the midnight sky. As George watched, the wind rushed across the open roof and sent the ash and black flakes dancing among the remaining seats. His eyes followed the path of destruction, and he guessed that when the balcony had dissolved the fire had leaped down into the seats before advancing on the stage.

  He was so stunned by this destruction that he almost didn’t notice the five figures standing on the right side of the stage with their backs to him. When he finally did he almost shouted in surprise, but he restrained himself and shrank up against the curtain to watch.

  They did not move or speak, but stared into the orchestra pit to where a small campfire was flickering before the front row of seats. To George’s eyes the people looked very misshapen. They leaned awkwardly, mostly around the waist, and their arms were shrunken and, in most cases, lopsided. There were three men and two women, and they wore ill-fitting clothing that George found somehow familiar … One man had a red coat and a black top hat, one of the women was dressed in what looked like bandages, and the other wore bright white tights.

  George stepped out from behind the curtain to get a better look. As his angle changed he saw they were not people at all, but mannequins or large dummies. The person who’d arranged them had apparently run out of mannequins halfway though, however, and had been forced to improvise with papier-mâché and coat stands and tall, thin chairs. As a result, some of them had blank mannequin faces, while others had heads made of wads of clothing or, in the case of the man in the top hat, a globe.

  But that did not change the fact that these figures were obviously meant to resemble the troupe. The coat-stand with the papier-mâché head had to be Stanley, with its linen shirt and nice waistcoat, and the shorter dummy was clearly Kingsley, wearing his sharp tuxedo and black eye makeup, and the figure with the globe for a head had to be Harry. They were all deformed and twisted, and the representations were not exact (the mannequin meant to be Colette was male, for example, and they’d gotten the pattern of Silenus’s trousers wrong) but the intent was clear.

  George walked to them across the stage, and as he did one bare foot fell on a patch of boards that were soft and moist. He looked down. A very large, rusty stain stretched across the end of the stage. George had seen enough of that same material just hours ago to know it was blood.

  He looked out at the theater again, and thought the odds of this all being accidental were very small.

  George considered leaving, but then hopped down to examine the camp behind the orchestra pit. The fire was situated before the front row of the stage right seating, and many of the seats there were occupied by boxes and reams of paper. One seat in the center of the row, just before the fire, was empty. George guessed that this was where whoever had arranged all of this had sat.

  Wondering if perhaps some vagrant had made their home in the abandoned theater, he walked to the row of seats and looked at all the papers and boxes. They were maps, mostly, and train timetables, and notes in handwriting so illegible that George felt the person had not had much schooling. He glanced over the maps and saw they were all of the countryside, with several areas circled and notated. He wondered what this could mean b
efore remembering Silenus’s tower and the map there, and he realized these notes corresponded with where they’d detected the First Song.

  George felt the need to very quickly get out of here. The occupant of this bizarre campsite was apparently fixated upon the troupe, and knew of their mission and the First Song as well. It was all too coincidental for George’s liking, and the theater was not the place he’d once known: it was dark and crumbling and it stank of blood and ash, and the sight of those five leaning figures standing at the edge of the stage in the clothing of his friends and family set his skin crawling.

  He turned to leave, but he stopped. He saw his old piano sitting alone in the orchestra pit, and his heart leaped. He had spent so many happy hours in front of it, reveling in the praise of his peers. He walked to the piano, and as he did he saw there was someone sitting before the keys.

  As with the stage, it was not a person but another mannequin. But this one was short and hunched, and its nonexistent hands were meant to be sitting on the keyboard. It wore a ratty tweed jacket and waistcoat and an even rattier riding cap. And yet George recognized the way it sat at the keys, with its head slightly twisted to the side as if to hear the music better, perhaps relishing the tune it was playing …

  It was very clearly meant to be George himself. He backed away, horrified at the sight of his shrunken little self hunched in front of the piano.

  Then something clanked up toward the theater entrance. George jumped and huddled down, watching the broken windows in the doors. Somewhere behind them a deep voice said, “No one ever knows where he is these days …”

  A sharp, hard silence began to fill the ruined theater, and the shadows at the back trembled as if celebrating.

  “Oh, no,” George whispered.

  He bolted up onto the stage toward the back, yet as he did he accidentally brushed against the dummy meant to be Silenus, and the globe and hat began to topple. George slid to a halt and dove backward. To his complete surprise, he managed to snatch both of them before they fell. He awkwardly maneuvered them in his arms, intending to replace them, but the silence grew louder and he thought he saw something approaching the door. He abandoned the dummy and fled into the backstage, leaving Silenus headless.

  He wound through the passageways and found the wall with the shred of green curtain. Then he peered into the shadows across, thinking, and reached out. Yet where previously there’d been a gap that led to the gray wastes, now there was only brick.

  The shadow was gone. It must have been shored up when George came through, which he supposed made sense as carrying the song here would heal this thin, insubstantial place … yet now he had no way to get out.

  He heard a door swing open out in the theater. Then there were the echoes of footsteps. Yet they sounded padded, somehow, and there was a faint click to them that suggested the feet were clawed.

  “He’s getting very peculiar, if you ask us,” said the deep voice. “And we know you didn’t, but still.”

  “Sitting with his little notes, looking at them up on the stage, and his maps …” said a second voice. It was much higher and reedier. “He prefers to spend time here rather than anywhere else. He keeps his skin on all the time. And that’s not even mentioning his coat.”

  “Did it change? When he …”

  “No,” said the reedy voice. “That’s not what we’ve heard. We were told he did that to himself.”

  The deep voice gasped. “Himself ? How strange …”

  George did not know what they were talking about, but from the silence and the way the shadows were behaving he knew they had to be wolves. He was still holding the globe and the hat. He put them down and tiptoed through the hall, hoping to reach the back door where they loaded the props. But he found that the roof of the theater had caved in there, and huge timbers now blocked his way.

  “He’s given himself colors,” said the reedy voice. “And just recently we heard he’s thinking about giving himself a name.”

  Another gasp. “No!” said the deep voice. “You can’t be serious!”

  “We are. We most certainly are. It’s horrible, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. We suppose it must be the side effects of what he’s done … what he took on for us.”

  “Yes, it must,” said the reedy voice. “We can’t imagine what it’s like. It must be so awful to just … be.”

  Their conversation was making less and less sense to George. Then he remembered that there’d been a nearby room with a window in it: Van Hoever’s office. He remembered sitting in front of his employer’s desk with daylight streaming in before him … surely it still had to be there.

  George crept down the hall to the manager’s office. Then he slowly eased open the door.

  “Wait!” said the deep voice.

  George froze, thinking they’d heard him.

  “What is it?” said the reedy one.

  “Look at that one … didn’t it have something on its top?” “It did?” said the reedy voice.

  His heartbeat quickened. Did they mean the Silenus dummy?

  “It’s hard to tell,” said the reedy voice. “All these creatures look alike to us. So many parts …”

  “We’re sure it did,” said the deep voice. “A head. It had a head on it.”

  George pushed open the door and sidled into the office. The window was still there, and it was not blocked. He just had to climb up on Van Hoever’s desk, lean across, open it, and climb out.

  There was a loud snuffling noise from out on the stage. “Something’s here,” said the deep voice.

  “What?” said the reedy one.

  “Something’s been in here. Can’t you smell it? It’s all over the stage.”

  More snuffling. Then the reedy voice croaked, “Yes …”

  George knew he had no more time to waste. He went to the desk and prepared to lift himself up onto its top. Then he saw something on the other side of it and stopped.

  Someone was lying on the floor there, sprawled out and facedown as if hiding, yet they had not looked up or noticed when George had come in.

  George slowly lowered himself and rounded the desk to get a look. Yet as he did he saw discolorations on the floor, long brown streaks like something wet had been dragged in from the stage area, possibly from where that big brown stain had been. His heart began to pound and he felt cold sweat crawl across the small of his back. Then he rounded the desk and nearly retched.

  It was the body of a woman, or at least most of one. Her legs and back were still there, as was most of an arm. But though George could not see the woman’s front he knew from the stain on the floor that she must have been ravaged, even gutted, but due to the cold she was nearly perfectly preserved.

  At first he did not recognize her. But then he saw her hand, wrapped with cloth to ease her arthritis, and even though her fingers were blue with cold he knew they were the same ones that had once been used to count off three things their owner had deduced about him, just before she’d warned him not to leave the theater.

  George backed up to the wall in terror, and could not move or take his eyes away from the sight. He fell to his knees and nearly broke down. He had not known Irina well, but she had been kind to him and thought of him when he did not merit it, and she did not deserve a fate such as this. No one did, George thought.

  Then the office door flew open to reveal solid darkness outside, as if beyond its threshold was purest night. The center of the darkness quivered, and he saw something white and fleshy begin to push forward into the room. As it slowly emerged, George realized it was a nose, and below that a chin appeared, and then a brow, and then a pair of blank gray eyes that were staring right at him …

  With the perverse, determined steadiness of a crab molting from its shell, the shadow produced the image of a man in a gray coat and black bowler, and then it seemed to somehow fold up inside him once it was done. The man in gray slowly cocked his head like a curious dog. In a deep voice George recognized as the one he’d heard in the
theater, the man said, “You. We were told to watch for you.”

  CHAPTER 20

  George Meets a Fan

  George sat in the front row of the theater’s seats, lashed to the cushioned back. The wolves, being ignorant of how lungs or veins worked, had made the ropes far too tight, and he soon began to black out. He begged them to loosen the bonds a little.

  The two wolves paced around him in a circle. “How do we know that you won’t up and run?” said the wolf with the reedy voice, who was extremely tall and thin and had a large hook nose.

  “Well … you’re both probably much faster than me,” said George, wheezing. “Y-you could probably run me down before I ever reached the door.”

  The two wolves stopped pacing. “That’s true,” said the one with the deep voice, who was very thick and short. “We have, after all, killed much more difficult things than a barefooted child.”

  “True, true,” said the reedy-voiced one. “We’ve stalked the nephilim in the plains of Edom, and we toppled them like toy towers.”

  “We’ve run thunderbirds until they could fly no further,” said the fat one, “and when they landed we fell upon them with the fury of storms.”

  “We’ve swum into the darks of the seas, and devoured selkies and Samebitos and Tritons.”

  “We’ve brought down whole mountains.”

  “And continents.”

  “And stars,” added the fat one. “That was in the old days, the before days. But we don’t think we’ve lost it. It would be no issue to kill a child such as you. Something so thin and scrawny and tired.”

  “With hardly a scrap of fat on him.”

  “Just tumbling bones and strangled sounds.”

  “Little cries, like a sick cat.”

  “Almost not worth it,” said the fat one.