Silenus’s anger continued to mount until his eye fell upon one gravestone: JOSEPH BLAKELY—1834–1872. He stopped and raised an eyebrow, thinking, and his fury dissipated. “Here. Come and stand before this one.”
“But that’s not in the time of MacCog’s burial.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Silenus. “We’ve got nothing to lose. And make sure you stay quiet for this one. This may get … personal. I had history with this man, once.”
“Is this the person you came here to bury?” said George.
“No,” snapped Silenus. “Now hurry up and fucking stand there.”
George stood before the headstone as he had for all the others. Soon a flicker began to appear in the air over the plot, but this echo was different from all the others: it did not express astonishment on being summoned, but calmly looked around. Then, on seeing Harry, it said, “Ah. William. Is that you?”
George was not sure who the echo could mean, but Silenus smiled. “It is indeed, Joseph,” he said. “I’d ask you how you’re doing, but that’s obvious.”
The echo looked down, then back at the headstone. George thought he could discern smoothly parted hair and cold, bored eyes somewhere in that ethereal face. “Ah, yes. Judging from our surroundings, I seem to have passed. I suppose it’s safe to assume, then, that I am not the real Joseph, but a shade of him?”
“Something like that,” said Silenus.
“Interesting,” the voice said. “How long have I been dead? No, wait. Don’t tell me. It’d just depress me. You don’t look a day older than when we last parted, Billy. But then, I wouldn’t expect you to. Not after the tricks we got up to. Do you still remember the bacchanalia, Bill?”
“How could I forget?” asked Silenus.
The voice laughed. “Yes. How indeed.” George felt the echo’s faint eyes sweeping over him. “Who is this?”
“That is my son.”
“Your what?” said the echo. “I thought that wasn’t possible.”
“Then you can imagine my surprise when I met him,” said Silenus. His placid smile grew a touch. “You know we haven’t summoned you up just to chat, Joseph.”
“Oh, yes, yes. I can’t say I didn’t expect this, though. You’d never let something like death prevent you from calling in a favor, you old charlatan. What are you after this time?”
“The final resting place of Finn MacCog.”
“Really? That old legend?” said the echo.
“Legend?” said Silenus. “You thought it was real. It might have been years since we last spoke, but I can remember that. You always were a scholar, so if anyone knew for sure it’d be you.”
“Hm. Why would I tell you that, and let you disturb another sleeper here?”
“Because I can tell you what happened to Freddy,” said Silenus.
The echo was quiet for a long while. Then it said, “Freddy. My God. That dear, dear boy. Would you really?”
Silenus nodded.
“Then please. Tell me.”
“He traveled with our troupe for two more years after your death,” said Silenus, “but he was never the same. Didn’t have the heart for it. Eventually he resigned, and returned home to New Jersey. The last I saw of him he was working in an export company, and had a lovely wife and two lovely children.”
“A wife?” said the echo. “A wife … Cheeky little bastard. I should have known.” It sighed. “You know, sometimes I think you introduced me to your little dancer just so you could use my expertise. And, of course, my library.”
“That may have been the case, but it doesn’t matter anymore,” said Silenus.
“True,” it said. “Finn MacCog, eh? That’s what you want to know?” There was a laugh. “Well, I’m afraid to say that you didn’t need to summon me up at all. You already know where he’s buried, William. You’ve seen it.”
“I have?” said Silenus.
“Yes,” said the echo. “You won’t find him among the others who died in that era. He was so paranoid he was buried far away from those. As time went by and more plots were added, his resting place wound up among those who’d passed much later.” The echo smiled. “In fact, William, I’m fairly certain his unmarked grave lies not far from where we buried your wife.”
George was so surprised by this statement that he nearly fell over. His movement made the spell break, and the echo dissolved, though not before giving one last unpleasant chuckle.
Silenus sat still for a long, long time. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “Well.” Then, again, “Well.”
George waited for what he had to say, but it did not come. Silenus slowly stood up, eyes distant. “I’d hoped … I’d hoped we would not have to see that. But … well.” He picked up his bag. “This way.”
It was now very dark in the graveyard, but Silenus seemed to know where he was going. They walked until they came to an ancient oak tree, and George’s father walked down the line of headstones before it until he came to one at the end. George lagged behind to give his father some time alone, but he eventually approached and stood beside him. Engraved on the headstone was:
ANNE MARIE SILLENES
LOVING WIFE
TO WAKE AND RISE AGAIN
PATER OMNIPOTENS AETERNA DEUS
1829–1862
George’s eyes lingered on the date. She had died nearly fifty years ago. But if that was true, how could his father look no more than forty or fifty himself ? George wanted to ask, but Silenus was staring at the headstone with such heavy eyes that he could not summon the nerve.
“Pater omnipotens …” said Silenus softly. “I forgot I’d put that. It was her request, not mine. But I had to honor it. She thought Latin was so lovely, though she couldn’t ken a word of it.”
“I didn’t know you were married before my mother,” said George.
“There is very little you know about me, I suspect. Some days I think I have a friend lying in every graveyard in this country, and maybe a few beyond. But there is none that stays with me more than this one.”
“How did she die?”
He tapped the side of his head. “Cancer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry for? You didn’t know her.”
“I’m sorry for you, I guess. It’s a beautiful headstone, though.”
“It is a fucking rock. No more. It doesn’t know what’s written on it or what shape it’s in. Nor does it care. What is written there is meaningless. The thing it signifies has long since passed.” He shook his head. “What fools we all are.”
“What?” said George.
“You heard them, didn’t you?” asked Silenus. “I am a simple man, a simple farmer, a simple preacher … They are dead, yet still they cling to their titles. What fools. We lard ourselves with words and labels and silly, insipid roles so that we might blinker our eyes and live in happy ignorance. And from these small titles we think we derive worth.” His voice dripped with contempt. “Loving wife … pater omnipotens … These are … they are only words!” he thundered. “They are inventions! Things and ideas we have dressed ourselves up in! But they are not … they are not real. They are only cheap comforts, flimsy half-truths, if that. What fools we are to spend our lives chasing them … There are only two truths, George, or only two worth paying attention to: the song, and what we use it to stave off, day by day. How these wretched creatures would tremble if we knew what we were saving them from.”
George frowned, concerned. Though he could see that his father was distraught, this last comment troubled him. For if the wolf in red had been right, the troupe had not really been saving anyone. He had tried his hardest to believe it couldn’t be true, but as he watched his father contemptuously describe those he was meant to be protecting, that awful suspicion returned so strongly that George could not stay quiet. He had to know.
“When I spoke to the wolf in red, he said we don’t perform like we used to,” he said.
Silenus froze. He did not speak for a long while. Then he fa
intly asked, “Oh, no?”
“No. He said that our performances … aren’t really protecting anything. Except maybe ourselves, is what I’m guessing. Is that right? We perform just enough to give us and the place we’re staying some defenses, so that we can locate and gather the remaining fragments of the song. And that’s what we’re really traveling for, isn’t it? The First Song, and not the singing of it.”
Silenus turned a slight shade of gray. He blinked and slowly nodded. When he spoke his voice was again a croak. “Yes. Yes, that … that may be true.”
“May be true? Or is true?”
Silenus could not bring himself to speak; he only nodded.
“Why would we do that?” George asked. “I thought the purpose of the troupe was to help, to maintain what was left of the world.”
“It was, George.”
“So we’re not doing that anymore?”
“No, we are!” said his father. “We are helping!”
“But we’re just getting the song, we’re not really using it.”
“Not … not yet. Not fully. We don’t have time for that anymore. But we will.”
“When?” asked George.
Silenus hesitated. “Do you understand what the song is, boy?”
“Yes, yes. It’s a blueprint, it’s a—”
“And who made that blueprint?”
George stayed quiet.
“Yes,” said Silenus. “It is the sum of all the wishes and intents the Creator had for this world. The will of the Creator itself. Right now the song is impartial. Yet can you imagine what it would be like if we had the whole?”
“The whole?” said George.
“Yes. With the whole pattern before us we could finally learn why the world was intended to be the way it is now. Why it is so often cruel, and dark, and unhappy. We would learn the mind of what made us, the thing that called Creation itself into existence. And maybe … maybe if we had the complete First Song, we could call the Creator back.”
Silenus looked euphoric, as if he was finally revealing a precious secret he’d kept hidden for too long. But George felt nothing but alarm. “Call it back?” he said.
“Yes! We could, perhaps, call it back, and make it return. And we could ask it to fix this world it made. To repair the wrongs, to save us. Wouldn’t you want such a thing, George? Doesn’t such a thought appeal to you? Parts of the world may be or, or … or might have been lost in the meantime, sunk under that growing darkness. But none of that would matter if the Creator were to return. It outweighs the cost of such a measure. I’ve seen so much life, George … I can think of nothing better. It could fix everything.”
George did not say anything for a while. Then he asked, “Does Stanley know?”
“Stanley?” said Silenus. “N-no. No, he does not. Our change in performing took place before he ever joined the troupe.”
“So he thinks this is normal. And if he doesn’t know, the others don’t either.”
“Yes,” said Silenus. “And you must not tell them otherwise! George, we are nearly there! We have so much of the song collected, so many echoes harvested … It’s almost complete, and it can’t take much longer. There are only one or two more pieces of the song that we so desperately need … Once we have those, everything may be saved.” Silenus turned away from his wife’s grave and marched across to an unmarked plot. “And what we uncover here will help us.”
George followed his father over to the plot. “How will this help, Harry?”
Silenus produced a shovel from the bag and stabbed it down into the earth. “Because what Finn MacCog was buried with will be of prime interest to some people I need to see.”
“You’re grave robbing him?” said George. He had suspected this to be the intent all along, but it was still a shock to see his father doing it right in front of his eyes.
“Yes,” said Silenus. “He won’t miss it. Besides, rumor has it he was a miserable bastard in life. Makes sense. Who the hell gets buried with his favorite malt, anyway?”
“I can’t take part in this!” said George.
Silenus looked up. “Eh?”
“I will not do any grave robbing, Harry!”
“What! But this’ll take hours longer if you don’t help! Come on, grab a shovel.”
George turned around and began walking away.
“George? George!” cried Harry. “Get back here, George! For Christ’s sake, boy …” His words dissolved into grumbles, pierced by the sound of the shovel.
George found a large white stone memorial on top of a small hill. It looked like the point of a cathedral tower, and he sat under the shadow of one of its small stone eaves and watched his father’s progress. He made quick enough work of the grave for George to conclude he’d done this several times before.
Soon night fell and the graveyard grew densely dark. The moon and stars sometimes emerged from the thin clouds to show a gleaming landscape of ornate stone and gentle hills, and at the bottom of one hill his father toiled frantically. But then the clouds would move, and everything would be dark again, and George would know nothing but the cool granite behind him and the cough and scrape of a shovel out in the night. And yet even in this blind state he could not block out the knowledge that they had not been protecting anything in their travels. Instead, a hundred little towns or valleys or lives had winked out behind them, erased from the world by the thoughtless shadow the troupe had been meant to hold back.
George buried his face in his hands. “Jesus,” he said. “My God, my God, what have we been doing?”
Then there was a golden light among the tombstones. “Aha!” cried Silenus’s voice. “I’ve found it!”
George’s eyes adjusted and he saw the light was coming from Finn MacCog’s grave. He stood and walked down to his father, sometimes feeling for the way. He saw Silenus’s head poking up from the excavated grave, yet there was something glowing very, very faintly at the bottom of it.
George neared the edge of the open grave and looked in. His father stood on a large slab of stone at the bottom. There were words written on it, but George could not read them. Silenus had dug around the slab until the coffin below was revealed, yet beside the coffin was a large iron case of some kind which had been dragged out and pulled open, and there in the case was what looked at first to be a lamp of some kind, glowing with a smooth golden light. Other trinkets lay around it—some of them appeared to be very old bones of some kind—but the glow was the most astonishing thing.
“What is it?” asked George.
Silenus stooped down and plucked it out. George saw it was not a lamp at all, but a bottle, and its contents were glowing. “It is whisky, my boy,” said Silenus. “But not any whisky. The whisky. Maybe the first one.” He cackled happily. “They were right about you, Finn my boy. You managed to steal some over from the Old Country, didn’t you?”
“It’s whisky? Why does it glow, then?”
“Because it is uisce beatha, the water of life. The whisky they made in the old days, before the darkness came. It is an extraordinarily rare and precious drink, much sought after by knowledgeable aficionados. No one knows how it was made, and there is almost none left in the world. And you,” he said to the coffin below his feet, “you miserable bastard, you tried to have it entombed with you here for eternity.” He laughed again.
“Are you honestly telling me we came all the way out here and robbed a grave for whisky?”
“Absolutely,” said Silenus. He set the bottle on the grass and climbed out. He was filthy from head to toe. “The idea came to me last night, as I stared at my wine. There are only two known bottles of uisce beatha remaining in the world, and those are closely guarded and used for rituals, if they are used at all. But the people I am going to petition for help are … very famous gourmands.”
“Gour-what?”
“Gourmands. Epicures. People who enjoy food, and drink, and refined things. And excess. They are very big devotees of excess, and I think they’ll prize this gift ver
y highly. Now give me some help. I know you won’t dig up a grave, but surely you can’t find anything morally reprehensible about filling one in, right?”
CHAPTER 24
The Midnight Visitor
When they returned to the theater Silenus called everyone to a meeting. Colette had discovered the missing funds and was borderline apoplectic, but Silenus did his best to defuse her. “I believe I’ve found a solution to all of our problems,” he said. “I ignored a vital piece of advice for some time.” He nodded to Stanley, who looked worried. “But that was because I thought it was impossible. Yet now I think I might just have figured out a way for it to work.”
“So what is it we’re going to do?” said Colette.
“What we’ve always done,” said Silenus. “We’re going to travel, and put on a show. But this show will be for some very, very discerning people. We want to make damn certain we don’t lose their attention, that’s for fucking sure. And if they like what they see, along with the gift I’m about to present to them, then they may help, which would be enormously good. So everyone needs to pack everything they need and store all of our props in my office, and we need to get as rested as possible.”
“Why in your office?” said Colette.
“Because where we’re going can’t be reached by train,” Silenus said. “Come on. Let’s get started. Even the backdrop, though I can’t imagine what we’d use it for now.”
As it turned out, George would have to move more than just props: the theater manager had informed Stanley that George’s time there was up. They had to move his trunks all the way across town to Colette’s hotel, where Silenus’s door had chosen to appear. Then his father rented him a single room for the night. It was just one more aggravation in the midst of all the moving.
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