Where are we? George tried to ask, but he did not have the voice for it.
Then he rolled his head to the other side, and if he had possessed the energy he would have gasped.
Far, far, far below them were the dark shapes of hills and valleys and tiny townships, and here and there the winding bends of creeks or rivers. Floating above these were scraps and curling patches of clouds, which took some time for George to identify because he’d always seen them from below, rather than from above. And they were above, he realized, very far above, shooting through the air and the layers of moisture, which collected on his hair and ears and eyebrows and ran off of him in streams.
One cloud stayed directly under them, however, mere yards below, a small carpet of roiling vapor that came to a point right under George’s feet. The point itself was dark and swirling, making loops and curls that somehow reminded George of a head of very thick hair. And the point seemed to twist, and in that twist George saw soft and nebulous forms he thought he knew …
He began to lose consciousness again, but as he did the last thing he recalled was a face rendered in the hard grays and swirling softness of the rain cloud below, perhaps that of a young girl, and he thought it might have been smiling at him.
Somewhere, things flickered. Not a light of any kind, but everything: the earth and the world itself shuddered and fell away, and everything was small and thin and insubstantial, a tiny scrawl in the corner of a massive black painting whose edges no one could see.
Then everything returned. Air found its way into George’s lungs and he gasped. He opened his eyes and found he was lying on a bed in some shabby room, and there was the tinny sound of trumpets playing somewhere, and hundreds of people laughing. He felt powerfully tired, but he summoned the energy to look around the room. There was a candle on the table at the far wall, and George saw his father sitting next to it, his shirt and coat still soaking.
Then things began flickering again, and George realized he was hearing something: someone nearby was singing the First Song.
When the flickering stopped, George saw his father was no longer seated beside the candle. He tried to call his name, but he did not have the voice for it. Was Harry somewhere in the dark, invoking the song? If that was so, why? And it was far softer than George had ever heard it before.
Yet then something happened: the song twisted just very slightly, betraying the melody he’d heard so many times before, and instead became something new. And when it did, George felt something rushing into him, filling him up until he thought he would burst, and he flung his head back and cried out …
Things changed.
The room faded to darkness, but there was something very small and white at its center. It grew larger and larger, and as it grew George recognized it: it was his grandmother’s house back in Rinton. It swelled to fill his vision. He saw it was nighttime and a single light was on in his room upstairs. But the oak tree outside it was not right … it seemed much smaller than he remembered. Hadn’t its branches been so huge and long that they’d brushed up against his bedroom window? Yes, that was right; he’d used one of those very branches to sneak out of her house, scurrying out the window and down into the tree, and then he’d run to the train station to catch a coach to Freightly. Yet here the branches fell well short of his window. This tree was almost a sapling.
Then he saw there was someone standing beneath it, hidden in the shadows. They raised their head and began to sing, and from their lips came the First Song, but it was very, very faint.
A shadow moved in the window upstairs. There was someone in his room, he realized. They came to the window and opened it, and he saw it was a young girl, but he could not make out her face. The song stopped, and the person under the tree looked up at her. She waved to the figure and turned away to run downstairs, and the person below the tree ran a hand through their hair as if nervous. It was a boyish gesture, one George himself had made many a time, and he wondered who this person was. Yet before he could make out any more everything went dark.
When he awoke again he saw the candle and the table had moved and were now directly beside his bed. His father sat in a chair next to them, looking exhausted. His coat and shirt were still damp, but his hair and mustache were now dry.
“Don’t sit up,” he said when he saw George was awake.
“What happened?” said George. “My eyes, they were …”
“Your eyes are fine. You’re fine. They just couldn’t bear what they had seen, that’s all.”
George looked down at himself. Not only was he uninjured, but the black blotches of stained skin were gone as well. “Yeah, we took care of that, too,” said Silenus. “Couldn’t have you running around looking like a freak, could we?”
Somewhere nearby there was the honk of a horn and scores of people laughing. “Where are we?” George asked.
“In a storage room in a theater outside of Toledo,” said his father.
“Toledo?” said George. He tried to sit up, but Silenus prevented him.
“No, no. Stay down.”
“What are we doing in Toledo?” he asked.
“Hiding, mostly,” said his father. “The hotels in the region have proven untrustworthy. Too many watching eyes and wary ears. We stirred up a nest of fucking hornets when we came and got you. They’ve called out every spy in the country. The manager of this theater owes me a few favors, so we’re ducking out of things for a while, but it won’t last. So you need to recuperate as fast as you can.”
There was a clacking sound, and George craned around and saw Stanley was sitting behind his bed, writing on his chalkboard. He looked far, far more exhausted than Silenus. George wondered how this could be, since he had not been part of the rescue.
CANNOT RUSH THESE THINGS, he’d written. LET THE BOY BE.
“I’ll let him be,” said Silenus. “I just need to know what happened back there, and what he saw.”
“I … I don’t know what happened,” said George. “How did I get here?”
“You lost consciousness for a while,” explained Silenus. “Your mind witnessed something it badly did not wish to, so, in a way, it withdrew inside of you until it did not see anything at all. You needed attention immediately, otherwise the damage would have been irreversible. You would have never woken up again. So we had your favonian little friend bring us here.”
“Zephyrus?”
“Yes.”
“What was that you called her back there?” asked George. “A Cardinal?”
“You didn’t know what she was?” asked Silenus.
He shook his head.
“You’re a remarkably lucky kid, George,” said Silenus. “Few are befriended by the Cardinal Winds, these days. Each of them is tasked with shaping the storms and the weather of a season. Finicky fucking people, too. I’ve never met one, and have never particularly wanted to, as a result. But it seems like you found a good one, and got on her good side.” He gave George a curious look. “She was very worried about you. She stayed after much longer than she needed to.”
“Why did she leave?”
“If you are personally responsible for making sure every aspect of the weather all hangs together correctly an hour away can make a fucking headache of things. Still, she stood at the door a while asking about you.” Silenus smirked a little, and winked at him.
“Why are you winking at me?” said George. “Don’t do that, it makes me nervous.”
Silenus rolled his eyes. “Never mind. The really important thing now is to find out what happened to you. And to the professor, and his puppets.”
George paled. He hadn’t thought of Kingsley since his capture. He swallowed and slowly began to recount everything that had occurred, from when he’d been drugged to when he’d escaped through the window.
Silenus grew steadily more dismayed as George spoke. When he was finally done, he said, “Jesus. Jesus Christ. I’d always … I’d always thought it was the best decision to leave everything in Kingsley’s co
ntrol. It was his choice, his life. I guess I was wrong. I never thought it could have ended like that.”
“What were they?” said George. “The puppets. Underneath it all, they had the same voice.”
Silenus sighed and said, “There are ways to … to give voice to aspects of your personality. To make them manifest in the world around you, to make them physical, even separate. I won’t detail the precise characteristics of the ritual, it’s far too nasty for me to talk about willingly. But you take a part of yourself, and set it in a vessel, and then it can walk and speak and even think. The professor wanted children, he said. It seemed a good substitute. He was desperate for anything. He’d kill himself if he didn’t have them, he said. So I outlined what he needed to do, and … and in return, he took up a spot on the show.” He shook his head. “I can only wonder what part of himself he gave voice to.”
George was quiet. Then he asked, “Could you not control them?”
“I thought that situation was under control,” he said. “Besides, I had the troupe to run, and you to look after.” “What did we do with his remains?”
“He was buried in a little church graveyard. We left Colette a town behind to take care of it. It’s what he wanted. He wasn’t unhinged at all, in the beginning. He was just desperate. What could have changed?”
Then George remembered something Kingsley had said the night before he died … something about getting drastic, and taking too much since he’d seen those horrors in the street in Parma. When he told Silenus this his father’s face grew grim. “That would explain it,” he said. “I told him not to look.”
“What could they do to him, just from a single glance?”
“The wolves have claws and knives and many teeth,” said Silenus, “and certainly, they are terribly strong. But their greatest weapon is also their smallest, and their quietest, and their slowest to act.”
“What is it?” asked George.
There was the hiss of scraping chalk, and George looked up to see that Stanley had written a single word: DESPAIR.
“Despair?” said George, confused.
“Yes,” said Silenus. “It surrounds them like a cloak. Could you not feel such a thing in that old theater?”
George recalled that sensation of being dangled over an endless, dark chasm. “I felt something like that …”
“Yes. They shielded their true faces from you there, as despair is a disease that needs only a glance to begin its infection. If they had not, you would have been consumed by it, and possibly perished. But they did not hide their faces back in Parma, so when the professor looked at them it planted a black little seed of despair within him, and it festered until he began losing control. He fed his puppets more and more, until finally they were powerful enough to live independent of him, but achieving this killed him.”
“Fed them?”
“You saw what he’d been doing to himself, hadn’t you? The scars on his side?”
George nodded.
“He’d been using parts of his rib, apparently,” said Silenus.
“His rib? My God!”
“There are much, much easier ways to do it—a bit of hair, or spit, or clippings of fingernail, those all suffice—you need only put a little bit of yourself in the vessel, you see. But the professor was a man who found much meaning in symbols. He wanted his own little people, so he made them the way his God had made Eve—his rib. He always was the kind for big gestures. After all, look at his stage name.”
“His stage name?” asked George. “What about it?”
Silenus looked at him, confused. “What do you mean, what about it? I thought he’d told you everything.”
There was a tapping noise, and they saw Stanley had again written something on his blackboard and was trying to bring attention to his message. Written there was: TOLD GEORGE SHE WAS JAILED.
“Oh,” said Silenus upon reading this.
“What?” said George. “Who does he mean?”
“Kingsley’s wife,” said Silenus. “He told you she was prosecuted and jailed, didn’t he?”
“Well, yes.”
“That was a lie. Probably one he preferred to believe.”
“Beside what?”
Silenus watched him, face sad and wary. “Have you never wondered why he chose Tyburn as his stage surname, George?” he asked. “It was to be a constant reminder of what he’d done. He’d arranged to have his own wife prosecuted, to the point that she was finally convicted and hung by the neck until dead.”
There was nothing George could say to such an awful revelation. He shut his eyes and shook his head. Silenus took out a cigar and began slowly rolling it back and forth between the fingers of one hand. “What’s done is done, for better or worse. Why don’t you go ahead and tell me what happened in that theater.”
So George began on the second part of his story, from the moment of his capture to the wolf in red’s questioning, yet he held back a few of the answers. He did not wish to tell anyone how he felt for Colette, nor the troubling suggestions the wolf had made about Stanley. Besides, these were of little importance in comparison to what George had learned from the wolf about how they were resisting the song.
“So that’s how they’re doing it,” said Silenus when George was done. “I guess it acts like a vaccination, in a way … Expose yourself to a little bit of it, and you’re inoculated and protected against the rest. They must have been desperate to try something that crazy, though. I’d have thought for sure that if one of them simply swallowed the song, it would have destroyed them. I wonder why they don’t simply end it all now if they’re protected against it … just stop chasing us and start eating up the world again?”
Stanley wrote: MAYBE ONLY PROTECTS A SMALL AMOUNT?
“That could be it,” said George. “The wolf did say that if he’d swallowed any more it would have killed him.”
“Then they just got fucking lucky,” said Silenus bitterly.
“Is there a way that we can stop them?” asked George. “Get to the wolf in red, or remove it?”
“I highly doubt it. They’ll have that nutty bastard under every bit of protection they can muster, which is considerable. Besides, killing wolves is tricky. They’re not really mortal—you’re destroying only their physical aspect, the part of them that intrudes into our world. It’s like melting a man made of ice—it’s not dead, for it was never alive, but it can be remade just as easily. And even if we succeed in killing him, or remove it, what’s to stop another of their number from trying the same thing?”
“Then what can we do?”
“I don’t know yet. Are you sure you didn’t get any more out of him?”
“I couldn’t,” said George. “We got interrupted. The two other wolves came, and they took me … someplace else.” He then recounted that terrible moment when he felt as if he were under the sea, and the intelligence in the dark that had risen up to observe him.
Silenus nodded when George finished. “So you saw it. You actually saw it.”
“No. Like I said, I only saw part.”
“But that’s more than anyone else has ever seen,” he said. “What was it?”
“I don’t know, George. Not for sure, at any rate. But I have my ideas.” He thinned his eyes, thinking. “In some ways, the wolves are like us. They are all part of a greater whole, more or less, just as we are. But in my studies I’ve often felt there had to be a center to their whole. A progenitor. A First. I had nothing to support those ideas, not for the longest time, but … it seems you have confirmed them.
“What you witnessed was that First Darkness, George. The thing of which all the other wolves are but a part. It appears as though when enough wolves gather in a place that is secluded and dark, they can invoke it, or bring it up to the surface, like a dark inversion of singing the First Song. Yet this happens very rarely. I think that moment was the first in thousands of years, probably. And just witnessing it almost killed you.”
This made sense. George could not i
magine anything more terrible than that thing under the world. “But how did I survive?” he asked.
Silenus looked slightly uncomfortable. “Well, it was … difficult. But we have techniques at our disposal, and—”
Again, the clack and hiss of chalk. Stanley angrily held up his message: TELL THE BOY THE TRUTH.
Silenus scowled. “We can’t tell him that. He’ll get ideas.”
THE BOY DESERVES TO KNOW WHAT WAS DONE, wrote Stanley. TELL HIM.
“Tell me what?” asked George. “What do you mean?”
Silenus’s angry glance jumped back and forth between Stanley and George. Finally he gave up, shoulders sagging. “I … lied to you a little earlier. I said that your condition could have been irreversible. That wasn’t the case.”
“It wasn’t?”
“No.” He looked at George gravely. “In truth, my boy, your condition already was irreversible.”
George sat up. This time, Silenus did not tell him to lie back. “What do you mean?” he asked again.
“Merely glimpsing that thing had destroyed you, George,” said his father. “You were ruined, and … bleeding. You could hardly breathe. We knew immediately that you would never wake. So we had to … change things.”
George felt his chest nervously. “Oh, God. What did you change in me?”
“You don’t understand, George. We didn’t change anything in you. We changed everything.”
George looked to Stanley, and found he was watching him with pale, haggard eyes. He looked like he might collapse at any moment. “What do you mean, everything?” asked George.
Stanley took out the blackboard, and slowly wrote: WE CHANGED THE SONG.
“Yes,” said Silenus.
“What are you talking about?” asked George.
“The song is a blueprint of all of existence, George. And, like any blueprint, it can be fudged. Tinkered with. It is an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do, to take the song and sing it differently. One must possess the right portions of it, and have studied them in detail. But when it is done, the world changes accordingly. We changed a very slight portion of the song for you, George. We changed it so you would wake up, healthy and whole, unburned. And existence itself followed suit.”
The Troupe Page 28