The Troupe (29 page)

“Gives itself to us, yes.”

His legs shivering, George walked to the opposite room door and inspected it. Still nothing.

The little figures were less than a dozen feet away now. He could see their tiny lacquered eyes shining in the light from the window. Their movements were so human one would think them real children, dressed in colorful rags and shambling down the hall to impart a funny secret.

He turned to the next door on the opposite side of the wall, and as he did he felt something move under his feet: it was as if he were standing on a very small boat, and someone very large had moved from the prow to the stern on the opposite side from him, upsetting the balance when he hadn’t been looking.

George turned around. The great black door stared down at him.

“
What?
” said the voices. “
What is that?
”

Before they had time to realize what was happening, George leaped for the door and grabbed its handle. All of the locks sprang open as if they’d been waiting for him. He flung the door open and threw himself in and slammed it behind him just as a piercing scream rang through the hallway.

“
No, no!
” cried the voices on the other side of the door. “
No, no! Can’t get away, won’t get away! Won’t let you, no!
”

There was a scrabbling at the wood on the bottom of the door. Then it shook as though it’d been struck a hefty blow, one much stronger than such small figures should have ever managed.

“
Let us in, let us in
,” said a voice from the crack at the bottom.

“I won’t,” said George. “And good luck getting through there! My father made that door, and there’s no breaking in!”

More scrabbling and scratching. Then another heavy blow. Then there was silence.

“
We just have to wait, yes
,” said a voice then. “
Wait, wait.
”

“Wait all you want!” said George. “I’ll never come out, not while you’re there. And when my father gets back—”

“Not waiting for you. For the girl.”

George stared at the door. “What?”

“We’ll wait for the girl, yes. The little darky girl. You stare at her, yes, yes. We’ve seen it. We can hide, and wait. Wait for her. And she’ll never know we’re there…”

“No!” said George. “No, you wouldn’t!”

“
Cut off her hands, cut off her feets
,” said the voice.

“Burn her skin, her back, her face.”

“We will ruin her, yes. Break her, yes, yes.”

“No!” said George. “Stop it! You won’t! I won’t let you!”

“Can’t stop us. Not on the other side of the door.”

“But if you open it, and let us in…”

George glanced around the room, looking for something useful. There was nothing besides the hangman’s beam, and he did not think he would be much good with that. He tried a few of the cabinets, but they would not open for him. Then he spied the window, and had an idea.

It would depend on if Kingsley’s children really counted as alive, he guessed. And he did not think they did. They were false things, something monstrous dolled up and treated as if it were sweet. They were not real; Kingsley had said so himself in the very first performance George had seen.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll let you in. But you have to promise not to touch her.”

“Open the door.”

“No. Promise me.”

“Open it. Open the door.”

“Promise me first, and I will.”

A pause. “
Yes, yes. We promise, yes.
”

“All right then.” George breathed deep and pulled his coat up to cover his neck and the top of his head. Then he took hold of the handle. “I’m about to open it.”

“Do it. Do it now!”

Greedy as little children, thought George, and he threw the door open.

He did not wait to see what was on the other side. He turned and bolted away and, with an agility that surprised even him, leaped up onto his father’s desk and dove through the bay window, leading with his arms and his covered head.

Glass shattered around him, but that was not the worst part: passing through the window was like falling into arctic seas. The cold seemed to close in on him from either side the moment he passed through the window, and the air was knocked from him. He heard shrill cries behind him as the things on the other side of the door watched him fall. His coat obstructed his vision, so he could not see what was around him as he fell, but after a moment he knew he’d been falling for a long time so he was sure he’d be dashed apart upon the rocky ground below…

He was wrong. Luckily he fell flat on his face, rather than on his head or ankles. Any remaining air in his body went shooting out of him. He moaned a little and tried to sit up, but found he couldn’t: his coat and pants were somehow stuck to the rock.

Then he remembered Stanley holding up his blackboard in the mill lots, just after he’d removed his shoes, and it had read:
BECAUSE YOU DO NOT WANT THEM TO BE FROZEN TO THE GROUND.

George struggled against his clothing, bending his back and trying to push with his knees, but it did not budge. It was frozen fast to the rocky cliffs, and he was cocooned to the ground by it.

He stopped struggling. He heard scrabbling from somewhere
above him, but he could not see. Then a voice: “
There, lying on the ground, there!
”

They were coming after him. George fought even harder against his frozen coat, and heard something tearing somewhere. He placed a bare hand on the icy ground (so cold it hurt, almost burned) and pushed as hard as he could.

Somewhere a lining gave way and he was free. He twisted and saw he was lying at the foot of one of the enormous, sloping cliffs with the distant, starry sky above him, and just overhead was what looked like three golden rectangles floating before the cliff face. It took him a moment to realize it was the office bay window as seen from the outside, and there were three small figures hanging from the center window, ready to vault down to the cliff.

“Will they ever stop?” moaned George. He tried to sit up, but the seat of his pants had frozen to the ground as well. He stared down in horror and began clawing at his pants button with numb fingers.

He saw movement out of his eye, and one little figure jumped down to the cliff, then another, and another. The three little black shadows slowly climbed down the ridge toward him. He struggled faster to unbutton his pants, but the button seemed to somehow be stuck, and he could not maneuver it with his frigid fingers…

Then one of the little figures stopped in the middle of its climb, and there was a cry from the shadows:
“So cold! So cold! Cannot move! Father, Father! Where are you! Where are you!”

George stopped and looked up. He’d been right: the marionettes were not real, so they could not carry the First Song in them. They could not last in these wastes.

That did not mean they were not going to try, he saw. The frozen marionette struggled against its frozen limbs, and it snapped them off with a scream and tried to take another step down. When that leg froze as well, it howled and snapped it off too. Then its body fell to the ground and it lay there, sobbing to itself as frost crawled over its chest to envelop its head and face.

The two others learned quickly, and bounded forward, avoiding the ground as much as they could. They screamed and wailed, leaving behind a foot, a thigh, a hand or a shin, little trails of broken body parts leading back into the shadows in the cliff. George lay where he was, watching their tortured procession.

“
Father, Father! Help us, Father!
”

“
Help us! We are dying, Father! Can you hear us, Father?
”

When they entered the starlight he saw it was the two who’d been called Mary-Anne and Denny. What their true names had been, or what the name of the thing that voiced them was, George could not guess. Mary-Anne stumbled and her face grazed the cold rock. When it froze to the surface she howled and gave a mighty pull, and her head split down the middle, exposing old, worn wood with a center of wriggling red worms that clutched a glistening, fleshy interior. Something brown-red sloshed onto the ground as the doll fell, as if it had been carrying around a core of septic blood, and the worms spilled out onto the ground and shriveled as if caught in a fire.

Denny tried his hardest to make it to George, but soon he’d lost his hands, his feet, his elbows, and one knee. He dragged himself along as far as he could, trying to resist the creeping rime, but then he lay still with his gleaming, painted eyes staring up at George.

“
Father, Father
,” whispered the voice. “
Why, Father? Why?
”

George watched him, certain the doll would move again. When it did not he finally exhaled, his frosted breath curling around his head. He looked around to try to figure out how to free himself, yet before he could try anything the windows above him quivered.

He looked up. The bay window seemed to blur at the edges, and George was reminded of a torch flame being whipped around through the dark, its fire fluttering madly.

“It moves,” he said, realizing what was happening. “He moves it all the time…”

Then the window seemed to fracture, little black seams running through its golden face. George cried, “No! No!” but then it burst
apart into what looked like hundreds of little glowing fireflies, and they gathered into a swarm and flew away into the darkness. He tried to track their progress, but they moved so fast that they were miles away (if such a place had miles) within seconds. Then they were gone, and he was alone.

George wandered over the peaks and valleys of the gray wasteland. He was forced to walk barefoot, as his shoes had indeed frozen to the ground, as Stanley had warned. His clothes were in tatters from where he’d torn free of the icy stones, and he’d been burned in many new places besides the soles of his feet. But he reasoned that discoloration was the least of his problems right now. It was terribly cold there, and he ached in many places, and the images of the horrors he’d just witnessed haunted him with every step.

He was not sure where he was going, or if there was anywhere to go in a place like this. Which, if Silenus was right, was no place at all. George was lost among all the nothing that had filtered down from the remaining world to gather at the bottom of the deepest shadows, a place so slight it could barely be said to exist at all. Places like this did not start and end. They simply were, to a very small degree.

Sometimes he felt as if he were walking along the sides of a cliff. Other times he felt as if he were walking along the roof of a massive cave. When he had to hop across a large gulch his leap seemed to take far longer than it should. Then he realized he was moving much more slowly than he’d thought. Movement did not work right among
this endless desolation, it seemed. That explained how he’d survived the fall from the bay window.

Sometimes he spied ruins on the starlit cliffs. Were they dead cities? he wondered. Places the wolves had pillaged until nothing but the bones were left? Or had people somehow found themselves here and built a settlement? At times he thought he saw movement among their crumbled arches, but he did not wish to investigate.

Still other times he saw the tiny, meager stars blacken out overhead, as though something vast and dark was sailing across the sky, and he could not see it. He did not think the things were wolves… Was it possible something had learned to live here? Whatever they were, he wanted to avoid them at all costs.

Finally George came to one of the huge abysses. He nervously walked to the edge and looked down. It did not seem to ever stop, just continue straight down into darkness. Yet George noticed that small lights were spread along the sides of the abyss, shining from within deep, deep clefts.

He remembered when Silenus had first showed him the wastelands, and how he’d seen what he thought were stars buried in the cliffsides… and they’d turned around to leave, and the way out had been hanging behind them.

He began trying to find a way down. There was a fragmented, dangerous little path down along one side of the abyss. It’d eroded away in places, so George had to step carefully or even jump across the larger gaps, but the peculiar nature of physics here made it easy to control his leaps. Eventually he came to one of the clefts with the soft lights shining within, and he squatted to peer in.

After his eyes adjusted, he blinked in surprise. At the end of the cleft was a hole that looked out on what appeared to be a collection of rakes, hoes, and other common gardening tools. It was powerfully surreal to see such mundane little items sitting at the far end of the cleft as if they belonged there. When George squinted he thought he could discern that all the tools were leaning against a background of
old wood, and the tops of some were dappled with sunlight, as if from a window he could not see.

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.