When they were finally done Silenus told them to clean their very best clothes and lay them aside for tomorrow. “We’ll want to make as good an impression as we possibly can,” he said. He was sweating and kept drinking from his flask. “This will be our toughest audience yet.”
George did as his father asked, but when he was done he lay in his bed, staring at the creaky ceiling. He was far too troubled by everything that’d happened to even think of sleep. He eventually rose to find his father, but as he walked by Franny’s room he heard Silenus’s voice: “Hold still.”
“That hurts,” said Franny’s voice.
“Well, it hurts because you won’t sit still, and you haven’t done it in a while. Sit still, please.”
George walked to her door and looked in. Franny sat at the vanity in the corner, staring blankly into the mirror, and Silenus stood behind her. To George’s amazement, he was brushing her hair, gently taking her orange-red curls and running the brush through them. It was such an intimate act that for a moment George thought he was seeing two completely different people.
“Do you not ever brush your hair, my dear?” asked Silenus. “Or am I the only one who ever does?” Franny shook her head, and he tsked. “I can’t have you looking like this, you know. Not tomorrow. Doesn’t that feel good?”
Again, she shook her head, like a willful child.
“It doesn’t feel good?”
“Nothing you do feels good,” she said. “I’m mad at you.”
His brushing slowed. “Mad at me? What are you mad at me for?”
“I can’t remember. But it’s something.”
“Please don’t be mad at me,” he said. “It troubles me to see you angry.”
Then Franny looked up and saw George in the mirror. She smiled and said, “Hello, Bill.”
Silenus stopped brushing and stared at her. Though George could only see part of his father’s face in the vanity mirror, he could see the man had just turned white. “Wh-what did you say?”
Then Franny waved to George in the mirror, and Silenus turned around and saw him standing in the door. “George?” he said. “What are you doing in here?”
“I could ask the same of you,” said George. “Why are you brushing her hair?”
Silenus’s face darkened, and though George had seen his father’s fury many times it had never been as threatening as this. “That is none of your fucking concern, boy,” he spat. “Now what is it you want?”
George stammered. “I … I wanted to know if maybe I could get a bottle from you.”
“A bottle? A bottle of what? Whisky?” George nodded.
Silenus pointed to the top of the chest of drawers. A half-empty bottle sat next to his father’s hat. “Take it. I don’t fucking need it. Just fucking get out, all right?”
George grabbed the bottle and fled. He’d infuriated his father before, but it’d never been like that. It was as if Silenus thought it was a terrible violation for George to witness that moment.
As he walked away he heard Franny speak again: “There he goes again … I haven’t seen him in so long. Did you ever know Bill?”
With a soft tremble, his father’s voice answered: “Yes. Yes, my dear. I believe I once did.”
***
George was so miserable with his situation that he could only find solace in thinking about Colette. Maybe, he thought, there was a way to repair the damage he’d done. Eventually around midnight he began to devise a grand gesture to win her back. He knew he’d fouled things up terribly, but if he went to her now, he thought, when they were both alone before a huge performance, and he tried to express how he really felt about her, maybe then she’d understand.
He did not ever think that his reasoning might have had something to do with the near-empty bottle of bourbon by his bed. Instead he began stringing together an extensive speech, one that would put his stifled confession on the rooftop to shame and inspire the love he felt he truly deserved.
Then he dressed in his very best tweed, drank one final glass of bourbon, and crept out of his hotel room. The halls were very dark and confusing, and he wandered for a while, squinting at room numbers, before again catching the scent of Colette’s perfume.
He followed it to one of the rooms. He was not sure if this was hers, yet he figured it was the best lead he had. He raised a fist to knock, but then realized something: he could not remember the first line of his speech. Or, for that matter, the second or the third. He struggled with himself for a moment and withdrew down another hallway to review it. It now seemed very labyrinthine and complicated in his head, and he tried to untangle his many amorous professions one by one.
When George had it sorted out he turned to go back to her room. But before he took a step, the handle twitched, and the door very slowly fell open. George froze and stepped back to watch.
Someone slipped out of the room. It was not Colette, but someone short and thick. And judging by the mustache, he was most definitely male.
Confused, George shrank up against the wall of the hallway as the figure walked past. The man stopped to readjust his pants, then sighed and drooped a little as though saddened. Then he continued on down the hall.
George knew that gesture very well; it was something he saw every day. It could be no one but his father.
In his drunkenness George assumed he’d gotten turned around, and witnessed his father walking out of his own office door. The scent George had smelled must have been from when Colette last visited the office. Yet when he followed his father down the hall out of curiosity, he found that the big black door was on the other side of the hotel, and his father quietly walked in without a word. So whose room could that have been? George wondered. Who had he been visiting?
It was as he tiptoed back to the room door that he realized the scent of Colette’s perfume was now much stronger, as if she’d been walking there herself. But only his father had been in the hall. Had Harry been wearing Colette’s perfume? No, thought George, that’d be absurd. He would never wear such a thing, unless …
Unless.
Unless, unless, unless.
Maybe he had not been mistaken. Maybe that had been her room. George’s knees began to feel very weak. He suddenly remembered how Colette’s eyes had gleamed as she’d spoken of Harry’s plan to doll her up like a princess. “Smart-ass,” she had said fondly, shaking her head and smiling. He remembered how Colette and Harry were always in some argument or another, dragging one another away to squabble, and Harry’s doting nickname for her: “Lettie.” And she’d been so upset when she’d heard Harry had a child. And then there was how she and Harry spent so much time together in his office, talking about business and budgets …
But were they? Were they really? What else could they have been doing together, alone?
“Oh, no,” whispered George miserably. “It … it can’t be. It can’t be.”
He went and stood before her door, wishing to knock and beg her to tell him it wasn’t so, it couldn’t be so. But before her door the scent of her perfume was headier than ever, and he knew that it must have been soaked into his father’s skin …
“No,” George whimpered. “No, no.”
He trudged back to his room as if in a dream. He remembered how she had always been so loath to touch him or be close to him, and how she’d been so embarrassed when he’d proclaimed his love for her on the rooftop.
It was not that she did not love him. It was that he was her lover’s son. The very idea of any love between them was perverse.
George walked into his room and shut the door. He drank another enormous tumbler of bourbon, and lay facedown on his bed and shouted into his pillow.
CHAPTER 25
The House on the Hill
Stanley tapped at George’s door well before sunrise, then pushed it open and reluctantly looked in. When he saw George look back, with his skin drawn and his eyes swollen from tears and blackened with fatigue, Stanley withdrew slightly, shocked. Then he gestured and George nodde
d. “All right,” he said. “All right.”
They all rose and, in their finest clothes, took a streetcar to the outskirts of town. Franny said to him, “My, George. You look almost as bad as me.” She smiled a little.
“Didn’t sleep,” said George.
“Terrible, isn’t it?” Her eyes wandered away and she began to hum tunelessly to herself.
“Why the hell didn’t you sleep?” said Silenus. “I told you we needed everyone rested.” But George could not even look at his father, let alone answer him.
Silenus carried a small canvas sack, and he kept checking the time on his pocket watch. “I think I know where we need to be for this,” he said. “But we may have to wander for a little while to find the right spot.”
“You don’t know where these people are?” asked Colette.
“I know where they are, but getting to them is different,” said Silenus. “You’ve got to come at them the right way. We need the right place. A good set of crossroads should do … I know this area pretty well, so I think I’ve found a place that will work.”
“Why do we need crossroads?” said Colette.
Stanley wrote: BECAUSE THEY PRESENT A CHOICE.
“A what?” she said.
“A choice,” said Silenus. “They represent a chance when things can go in more than one direction. At that moment, all roads before you and what you encounter upon them are possible. And in that moment you are exposed to other elements. Ones you would normally never be vulnerable to.”
The streetcar let them off, and Silenus led them across crumbling ditches and frigid, wet fields that had not yet awoken to spring. It was bitterly cold out, and in the distance there was a gray, misted forest. The fields sloped down, and at the bottom were two spindly little intersecting roads that must have seen very little traffic. A small, withered sapling sat in one corner of the intersection.
George’s sense of foreboding increased as they approached the little crossroads. “What people are we meeting here again?” he asked no one in particular.
To his surprise, it was Stanley who turned and considered answering him. He took out his blackboard and wrote as he walked. He gave George a doubtful glance, and turned the board around. It read: DO YOU BELIEVE IN FAIRIES?
Silenus took out his pocket watch again and checked it. “Still an hour until sunrise. Good. That’ll give me some time to prepare. We’ll have to arrange tokens to catch their attention.”
They watched as Silenus set down the bag and took out what looked like a bundle of sticks. They were soaked in something dark and syrupy that reeked horribly. “Nothing like tar fumes to wake you up in the morning,” said Silenus. “This is very old tar, as well. It has lain untouched for countless years in the darkest places. Which is what we want.”
He arranged the tarred timber on the side of the intersection facing the forest. Then he took out his bag again and rummaged around until he produced a small cloth sack. He opened it up and dumped its contents into his palm. They looked like tiny, fragile bones.
“The wings and ribs of a crow that has spent much of its life aloft,” said Silenus. He began searching through the tiny bones with one finger. He selected one very small vertebra and examined it. “Burn the bones of the earth, sing the songs of the sky,” he muttered. Then, to the disgust of nearly all of them, he popped it in his mouth. He grimaced and maneuvered it around until his cheek bulged.
“Are we really doing this?” asked George. “Are we really going to see … well …”
“Yes,” said Silenus. “We are. But seeing them shouldn’t worry you.”
“No?”
“No.” He continued rummaging in his bag. “You should worry about them seeing you.” He took out a large silver hand mirror. He spun it around in one palm, and George saw it was mirrored on both sides. Silenus hung it from the sapling by a string so that one side reflected the wood while the other reflected their own faces.
“Harry, what is all this for?” asked Colette.
“The fae folk are generally a mercurial and superficial breed,” said Silenus. “They don’t engage in most worldly affairs because they believe themselves above us. The rest of the world is sort of in a mist to them, and—lucky for me—they never go outside of their little kingdom. So it takes a lot to get their attention. Certain vestments, tokens and totems suggesting power, that kind of thing. One who burns the very Earth and keeps the skies below his tongue is someone worth considering.”
“But you aren’t actually like that,” said Colette. “You’re just faking.”
“Am I?” said Silenus. “How do you know?”
“What’s the mirror for?” asked George.
“They’re also very vain,” said Silenus. “The first thing I want them to see is themselves, and mirrors do not work properly where they come from. They’re highly valued.”
Franny looked around herself, confused. “You know, I … I think I
remember this,” she said. “I’ve done this before. Haven’t I?”
“No,” said Silenus sharply. “You have not. I would know if you had.”
“Oh,” she said, and nodded.
Silenus checked his pocket watch. “All right. It’s time.” He knelt and lit a match and started the kindling. Blue flames began to dance along the tarred branches. Then he stood and said, “We’ll need to go over a few rules before we actually encounter any of them. First, never address one of them as an equal. Always refer to them as ‘my lord’, or ‘my lady.’ That is of absolute importance. Second, do not rise to any insult, should any come. And they will come. But you’ll just have to grin and bear it.”
“Why are we asking for help from these snobs, then?” said Colette. “They sound unbearable.”
“They are unbearable, but they are also very powerful,” said Silenus. “So we’ll all just have to be fucking polite, all right?”
A cold wind rolled across the field, and the hanging mirror began to spin on its string. George was so surprised by this that he hardly noticed the mist intensifying in the wood beyond.
“Now, the third rule—they may offer you things,” said Silenus. “Under no circumstances should you ever accept them. Their gifts do not come free, and, though they live and function by very specific binding agreements, they are extremely skilled at twisting words to their own ends. It may be something you want very desperately—something you almost feel you cannot live without—but you must not accept it. All right?”
“All right,” said Colette.
“All right. And the last rule is—you must not ever draw attention to their masks.”
“Their what?” said George.
“Their masks. Don’t look at them too long. Don’t touch them. And, for the love of fucking Christ, do not ever ask them to remove them.”
It seemed to have gotten even colder now. Stanley was shivering in his nice sack coat. The mirror kept spinning on its string, but it began to slow, and when it did George thought he saw that one side of the mirror was reflecting something that should not have been there: it showed the troupe standing in the intersection, true, but behind them was a tall, spindly wood, with graying trunks and many twisting vines, and above the wood was a dark night sky with thousands and thousands of stars …
George looked behind them, but saw nothing resembling what he was seeing in the mirror. It was day, and there was no wood. The coldness of the air grew so great that he began to shiver along with Stanley, and it felt as if they were being slowly pulled to somewhere much denser, much harder, and much colder than the world they had just recently been within. “Something is wrong …” he said, but no one heard.
“Why do they wear masks?” asked Colette.
“The seelies are immortal,” said Silenus. “They do not die naturally, only by violence. But when your life span is eternal, you eventually see everything. And you can’t avoid a few accidents or mishaps. So though the remaining fey folk are still immortal, they … do not resemble their original selves. And they are very, very vain
, so they hide their faces …” The spinning mirror abruptly came to a halt. Silenus looked up at the misted woods across the field. “Behind masks.”
The rest of the troupe looked. There was an odd, fluttering light in the forest, and a figure was emerging from the tree line. It was very tall and dressed in such deep black that George could make out nothing but a bright white face and a gray cap. For some reason the sight of this bizarre thing in the woods inspired a terrible dread in him. Its movements were strange, as if its legs were too long and it had to wade forward, like a man on stilts.
“Here he comes,” said Silenus quietly.
The figure strode across the stony field to them. It looked like a man, but if so it was the tallest man George had ever seen, reaching nearly seven feet. He was dressed in a fine black suit made of a fabric that seemed to glint even in the lowest light. In a manner somewhat like Franny, he had no visible skin: he wore black gloves, and at his neck and his wrists he wore black and gray handkerchiefs or scarves. On his head he wore a gray homburg hat, and upon his face he wore an ornate white mask. It was meant to mimic noble, Roman features, with a long, delicate nose, a thin, thoughtful mouth, and a smooth, clean brow. But though the features were close enough to human, they were not exact, and along with the mask’s blank, dark eyeholes they made the white face alien and disturbing.
The man stopped when he was several feet away and examined them. He glanced at the mirror, and for a moment stared at himself, transfixed. This seemed to put him in a better mood. Then he turned back and said in a high, soft voice that was muffled by his mask, “Greetings, Heironomo Silenus, Oldest Wanderer, Harvester of Echoes, Bearer of Lights Eternal, Master of Stage and Speech and Song.”
For a moment they did nothing. The troupe and the man in black simply looked at one another. He was such a foreign and uncomforting creature that George was not sure what they were to do.
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