The Troupe

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  The boy steps forward, and takes the frozen man by the shoulders. Then, standing up on his tiptoes—for the man is very tall, and the boy very short—he places one kiss on the man’s cheek, and whispers into his ear, “I’ll see you soon. Just you wait. I’ve already been there. And so have you.”

  Then he steps back, and he nods, and the trees and the island and the man melt into darkness, and the moment passes by.

  The world will continue as it was. And besides, the boy cannot go back. Even if he were to choose a life of his own creation, and carve a blissful history for himself into the world’s face with his own hand, it would give him no joy, for he cannot forget what he has seen. Unlike all the other inhabitants of this world, he has now seen all the hidden truths, all the shadowed corners.

  All but one. As the boy makes his final changes to Creation, the First Song slipping through his fingers as he uses up every note and every voice, he begins to wonder … is he wrong, or is he seeing a structure in the song? Is there a hand invisibly working throughout all the melodies and harmonies, one that is not his own? Who sang this song, originally? Was it ever sung, or has it always been echoing in the deeps?

  He knows the wolves are but an accidental audience. So whom is he singing for? For himself ? Or something more? Is there a face drawn out among all the millions of notes of this song, and is it looking back at him, and smiling?

  As soon as he wonders these questions he understands he will never know. He has so much of the song, but he is still missing a few little notes, and one or two key voices. These gaps, as tiny as they are, upset the whole, and he is not sure if he can see any kind of plan at all in what he is singing.

  Perhaps this is not the first time. Perhaps there have been other Creators besides himself, all of them stumbling across this echoing song and re-singing the world when it is threatened by the dark. And each time it is imperfect. Maybe so.

  That truth will always be beyond him. And he nods, submitting to it. What will happen will happen.

  He is almost finished now. He has made all the changes he thinks he can. He rebuilds the valley, every twig and every tree, and the girl is there on the very edge clinging to a branch, and his father lies at his feet once again. The wolves still wait at the end of the valley, and the great wolf towers above them, head cocked, curious.

  The boy does not start time again yet. The world remains frozen. He has only a few more notes of the song left, but he refrains from singing them.

  From the great wolf comes a voice that is like the churning core of the Earth. It asks: And what did that do?

  The boy says, “I changed things.”

  The wolf asks: How?

  “For so long you’ve been the abyss,” says the boy. “We stare into you, and you terrify us. You swallow up the world piece by piece. But now I have changed that.”

  The great wolf ’s head cocks a little more.

  “Now the abyss will know what it is like to look into itself,” says the boy. “Because I have taken all your children, and made them real.”

  The great wolf looks down, shocked, and around its feet are not the dark, feral shapes that were like tiny versions of itself. Instead it is surrounded by men in gray suits, but now they are no longer pictures: they are real, with flesh and bone and skin. The men in gray look down upon themselves, and see that they now no longer imitate humans; they are humans, and each of them carries a tiny shred of the First Song within him.

  “You are all alive now,” says the boy. “Just like everyone else. And one day you will die, just like everyone else. You will be eaten by the very shadow you once were.”

  A horrified cry rises up among all the men in gray. They wail and feel their fleshy bodies, and gnash their all-too-real teeth. To exist, they scream, is the worst possible nightmare, an unimaginable horror.

  The great wolf above them wheels about, confused, and, for the first time since Creation was made, frightened. How could this be so? How could the boy have changed something so elemental?

  It looks at the boy, and says: You cannot do this. You cannot make me devour my own children.

  “Yet you must,” says the boy. “They exist, so they must end. Maybe not today, but someday. How many of our own children have we lost to you? How many fathers, how many mothers? How many will we lose if you should get what you want, and devour the world?”

  The wolf says: But we must. It pains us so. It pains us.

  “I know,” says the boy. “It hurts to be below Creation. Just as it hurts to dangle above the darkness. Then what are we to do?”

  The wolf looks at the boy, thinking. It asks: What is it you want?

  “What anyone wants. Time.”

  The wolf says: I cannot give you that.

  “Then you will lose your children, and be alone, even less than you once were. You will be broken forever, and never whole.”

  The wolf thinks. It realizes now that it must make a decision. The darkness has never made a decision before. There has only been one possible thing to do, to swallow up the light above. There has never been an alternative. But now it must take a first step into this unfamiliar country, and think of how to please this small boy in this little valley.

  The great wolf finally asks: How much time?

  And the boy tells him.

  CHAPTER 37

  Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

  There was a clap of thunder, and a soft breeze rolled across the valley. Colette jumped and swayed drunkenly as she grasped the tree branch. Then she gave up and fell to the ground and sat there.

  She felt very dizzy. For a second it’d been like the ground was lurching beneath her. But that hadn’t really been it, she decided. For a moment everything had stuttered, just like when Harry and Stanley performed the First Song, but … that gap where everything was gone had been so much longer. Hadn’t it? It had felt like so many seconds and years had been lost just now.

  Something had changed, she realized as she looked around. The trees were no longer bent toward the valley, and the lines of leaves were not there. It was just ordinary forest floor. Someone or something had just been here, she said to herself, but it had changed things, or left something behind before it departed, yet she could not see it.

  She stood back up. Then she said, “George,” and began to sprint down the hillside.

  Colette ran along the riverbank, trying to find some trace of Stanley or George, but she saw nothing, only broken trees and many upturned rocks. Then she spotted a figure crouching over something by the riverbank. They were dressed in bright blue, but it was not George, or Stanley …

  The person looked up. He smiled a little apologetically. “Hello, Lettie,” said Silenus.

  Colette stared at him, astounded. He was wearing an extraordinarily blue sack coat and checked trousers, and a clean bowler derby sat on the rock beside him. She gaped for a moment. “Harry?” she cried.

  He nodded, but he looked quite sad. “Hello,” he said again.

  She laughed and ran to him, thinking to embrace him, but stopped when she saw what he was crouching over. Her happiness vanished and she covered her mouth in horror.

  George and Stanley lay side by side on the riverbank. Stanley’s arms had clearly been broken, and there was a horrible gash in his side. His skin was pale and waxy, and his eyelids and lips were already turning blue. Colette had not ever seen anyone in such a state, but she immediately knew he was dead.

  Silenus reached down and stroked one side of Stanley’s face, and sniffed. “I … I didn’t think it could ever come to this,” he said.

  “Oh, no,” said Colette, and she walked to where George lay.

  He did not look as bad as Stanley: his skin was still pink, and he had not a mark on him. But she could see he was not breathing, and when she touched his neck he was warm but there was no pulse.

  “What happened?” said Silenus.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I was up the hill, and … and then everything bent, and it was … Wait, what happen
ed to you? I … I saw you die, Harry!” She reached out and took his shoulder with one hand and felt his face with the other. “I saw it.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said darkly. “Let’s just say it didn’t take. I got here as fast as I could from the Founding. And I just … found them here. Stanley is … He’s …”

  “He flooded the valley,” said Colette. “He distracted the wolves from us so that we could get away, and drowned them. I guess he got hurt. I’m sorry, Harry.”

  Silenus nodded, but kept stroking Stanley’s face.

  “What’s wrong with George?” she asked. “I didn’t see what happened to him. He’s got no pulse, and he’s not breathing … Oh, George.”

  “He’s not dead,” said Silenus. “He’s just … not here.”

  “What do you mean, not here?”

  “I mean George, himself, is somewhere else right now. Outside of his body. Where, I couldn’t begin to say, but it must be very, very far.” He looked at the hills around them and the sky above. “Farther than I can sense. I only hope—”

  But then George’s eyes flicked open, and Colette grabbed Silenus’s shoulder. “Harry!” she said, and they both looked down and knelt beside him.

  George did not move or say anything. He simply stared up at the sky, seemingly seeing nothing.

  “George?” said Silenus. “George, can you hear me?”

  If he did, he did not show it.

  “George?” said Colette. “Are you all right?”

  George slowly blinked. Then, as if he was trying to remember how his own body worked, he lifted his right arm and looked at his hand. Silenus and Colette saw he was holding something, something they had not noticed before. In fact, Colette could have sworn he hadn’t been holding anything at all just a second ago.

  “I held it in the palm of my hand,” he said. His voice was soft and creaky.

  He opened his fingers. In his hand was a pocket watch. It looked like it had been recently polished, and it was cleanly clicking out the seconds. If the watch’s time was correct, it was just past five in the morning.

  “I know that,” said Silenus. “That’s a family heirloom. How’d you get that?”

  “I fixed it,” said George. He sat up more. “It will run all right now. For a while, at least.”

  Silenus held George by the shoulders, steadying him. “George, what happened? Where is the song? Please, please don’t tell me it was lost with Stanley. Don’t tell me the wolves got it. Anything but that, George.”

  “He saved it,” George said. “He gave it to me, just before he passed.”

  “You have it?” said Silenus.

  He let out a sigh of relief. “Oh, thank God.” “He passed it on,” said George. He looked to his side at Stanley, pale and drawn and still. “From father to son, just like it’s always been.”

  Silenus looked at him uncomfortably. “So … you know?”

  “He told me, in his own way.”

  “I … I don’t know what to say, George.

  I’m sorry. But we had to.” George nodded.

  “We were going to tell you eventually, when we thought you were ready. I’m sorry you had to find out just before … before he passed. He was dear to me, as I’m sure he … well, as he would have been to you. I’m so sorry, George. But the important thing is that the song is safe. It’s what he would have wanted, since that’s what he devoted his whole life to, and—”

  “I don’t have the song,” said George.

  Silenus stopped and stared at him. His face grew very pale. “You … you what?” he said.

  “I don’t have it, Harry,” said George.

  “But he gave it to you, didn’t he?”

  “I used it,” he said. “I used all of it, Harry. I had almost all of the song, and the First Darkness came, and I had to use it to change … everything.”

  Silenus began to tremble. “No …”

  “I’m sorry, Harry,” said George.

  “It’s gone? It’s really all gone?” he asked.

  George nodded again.

  “No. I don’t believe it. It can’t be gone,” said Silenus. “You can’t have just thrown it away! We had so much of it! We had almost all of it, George! I worked so hard to get everything! We were almost there!”

  “We were there, Harry,” George said. “When Stanley gave it to me, I had nearly everything. The complete song.”

  “You did?” said Silenus. “But what did you see? What did you see, when you had all of it? Did you see it? Did you see the … the Creator? Did you see anything? Can you at least tell me why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why what?” shouted Silenus. “Why anything! Why all of it!”

  George thought about it. He tried to speak several times but stopped before each one, not trusting his answer. Then he said, “I can’t say. I can’t say what I saw.”

  “So you don’t know?” cried Silenus. “You don’t know!”

  “No,” said George. And, strangely, he smiled, as if the thought pleased him. “I don’t know, Harry. I’ll never know.”

  This answer gave no solace to Silenus, who grabbed his head with both hands and wailed. He stood up and staggered away several steps, and sat down on a stone and began to weep. Colette watched him, disturbed, but then George laid a hand on her arm.

  “I’m very cold, Colette,” he said. “And I’m very tired.”

  She gave Harry another wary look, but finally nodded. “I’ll get some kindling. It’s so wet here it’ll take me some time to find some, though.”

  “That’s fine,” said George. “Thank you.”

  She made to leave, but stopped. “What did you do, George?” she asked. “When the First Darkness came, what did you do?”

  “What do you think I did?” he asked.

  She looked around at the valley. She took a breath. The air was so much cleaner now. “You changed something, didn’t you? Everything feels so new.”

  “Something like that,” said George. “I struck a bargain.”

  “What sort of a bargain?” she asked.

  “I figured out a way to break the darkness up forever,” he said. “To make the snake coiled around the world eat its own tail, so to speak. I threatened to make it do that, and it gave in.”

  “What did you get in return?”

  “Time,” he said. “Time for you, for me, for Harry. Time for everyone and everything. Everything will be left alone, just as it is, for a time.”

  “How much time?”

  He looked at her and slowly raised his eyebrows. Colette saw his eyes had faded to a very pale, peculiar shade of gray. But more than that there was something very deep behind George’s eyes, something that had not been there before. He had the eyes of someone who’d seen years and years of time. Centuries, even. Maybe more. “Do you really want to know?” he asked.

  She opened her mouth, but then thought about it. “You know what, no,” she said. “No, I really don’t.”

  He smiled a little, and nodded. “I think that’s very wise of you,” he said. Then he lay back down on the ground on his side, staring at his fallen father, and in his hand the pocket watch merrily pulsed along as if it had a great many seconds left to count out and it could not wait to get to them all.

  Colette was right: it took her the better part of an hour to find dry ground. Once she did she began to search for the driest branches, and just when she had a decent bundle she was spattered with thick drops of rain. “Oh, great,” she said, and sought shelter under one of the tallest pines to wait it out. It did seem like a very peculiar storm, however: the dark clouds appeared to be making a straight line for the valley. Was it her imagination, or had that happened already today? It couldn’t happen a second time, could it?

  The storm faded as quickly as it arrived, but before Colette ventured out she saw someone was stumbling through the underbrush. It appeared to be a girl in a bright green dress and with long, blond hair. She seemed to have come out of nowhere; Colette did not ever see her approach
. The girl was apparently in some distress, as she kept attempting to charge forward, but the folds of her dress kept getting snagged on the grasping branches. When one tripped her and refused to let go, no matter how hard she tugged, the girl almost burst into tears.

  “Here,” said Colette, stepping out from under the pine. “Let me help.”

  The girl looked up, surprised, and stopped tugging. Colette laid her bundle aside and helped unwind the fabric of the girl’s dress from the pine branch. “There,” she said. “Probably not a good idea to wear such a fancy thing in these woods.”

  “I know,” said the girl. “I didn’t think to change, I came here as fast as I could.”

  “From where?” asked Colette.

  The girl waved dismissively toward the west. “You’re the dancer, aren’t you?” she asked. “In his troupe?”

  “His troupe?”

  “Yes. George’s. The pianist.”

  Colette helped the girl back to her feet. “I don’t know how you know George, but I don’t think there is a troupe anymore.”

  She looked at her, frightened. “Then they’re … he’s …”

  “George? He’s fine. Well, I don’t know. I think he is. Here, you can see him.” She led the girl to a small outcropping and pointed through the trees to where George lay.

  The girl let out a great sigh when she saw him. “Thank goodness,” she said.

  “He’s resting right now,” Colette told her. “He’s just been through a trial. And he just lost his father. So I think that for right now it’s best to let him be.”

  “Oh … Oh, I’m so sorry. But is he going to be all right?”

  Colette thought about it. “I’m not sure. But I think so. It feels like everything might be all right, for now.”

  The girl nodded.

  “You’re the one who helped him in Hayburn, aren’t you?” asked Colette. “The shepherd?”

  “I’m his patron,” she said. “I sensed he was in trouble just a while ago and came running to help. He was there, and then he wasn’t. It was the strangest thing, but I couldn’t let him get hurt.”

  “You do that for all the people who call you patron?”