George was not at all sure where they were taking him, but when they were outside they headed directly for the theater. On finding the door to the backstage locked Silenus stepped aside and said to Stanley, “Do your thing. And hurry. I’m fucking freezing.” Stanley knelt and produced a set of lock picks, and within seconds his nimble fingers had sprung the door open.
The inside of the theater was a threatening place in the night. No outside light found its way in, so it was lit only by the lamp in Stanley’s hand. The wind beat against the walls and window, moaning and whistling. The looming vacancy of the place grew oppressive as George walked onstage and stared out at the dark curtains, or the distant hint of rafters, or the row upon row of empty seats. It felt like the theater was playing host to an invisible audience, and they were not impressed by the show.
Stanley went to pull down Kingsley’s backdrop (which was now blank again) and Silenus walked to the edge of the stage, looking out on the empty theater. “There are few things creepier than a place that is intended to be full of people, and yet is empty,” he said. Then a thought seemed to strike him, and he said, “Let me ask you something, kid—why did you get into vaudeville?”
George was startled by the question, since he had not yet tried to explain his relation to Silenus. He did not feel especially ready now, at any rate. “I’m not sure I know.”
“An honest answer. And probably a common one. We get into this game with grand plans and great delusions, but after a while the reasons we started with fade. Why do we keep doing it? I wonder. We spend our whole lives preparing and perfecting an illusion that will last only for a handful of minutes, the less the better. Our daily employment is but a momentary flash and flame, then nothing. Most of us old ones no longer do it for the audience. That attraction is the first to go. To us, every day is like performing for an empty theater. So why keep going? Is it just routine, the comfortable familiar? Or are we playing only for ourselves? Or perhaps for the amusement of something greater, something beyond men and mortals… It vexes me so.”
Then they heard the click of chalk, and turned to see Stanley writing on his blackboard with great agitation. “Now what’s going on here?” said Silenus.
Stanley finished what he was writing, and held it up to the empty backdrop as though it could see him and read. He’d written: PLEASE BE REASONABLE, WE DO NOT HAVE ALL NIGHT. While George could not understand what Stanley expected from the backdrop, it still did nothing.
Silenus passed by Stanley and walked right up to the sheet of canvas. “Listen, you touchy fuck,” he said to it, “I’ve spent too much of my time dragging you around to be willing to abide one more minute of your little fucking temper tantrums! I ain’t the one that killed your originator, but I’d be willing to start a bonfire and kill you all the same! Now wise up and get on with the show, or I swear to God, I will put this cigar out on you and smile.”
It remained blank. George whispered to Stanley, “What does he think the backdrop will do?”
Stanley wrote: NOT BACKDROP. SKIN.
“What do you mean, skin?” asked George.
“It’s chimera skin,” said Silenus. He took out his cigar and blew on the end until it was red-hot. “A creature of many kinds—a goat, a lion, a snake—and many shapes and colors.” He lowered the lit cigar toward the backdrop. “If you skin it the right way then its hide gains certain properties. Specifically, it can project certain images and sensations, if you can control it.” The lit cigar kept slowly nearing the backdrop. “But they’re notoriously picky things, and sometimes,” he said, and the lit end of the cigar was very close to the backdrop now, “they need to be forced.”
Just when the cigar’s end was but a hairsbreadth away, the surface of the canvas (or skin, George reminded himself) changed: it bloomed into a rippling dark blue with little flickers of light in its center. The stage and theater were bathed in its unearthly iridescence and seemed all the stranger as a result.
“It moves!” cried George.
“Yeah, yeah, it moves,” said Silenus. “I knew I could talk some sense into the thing. Maybe we should have gotten Colette to come with us, it seems to like her the most.”
George was instantly enamored of it and wanted to touch it, but was somewhat afraid of what might happen if he did. “Where did you get it?”
“I won it in a card game,” said Silenus. “Honestly, that’s how I acquire most of our equipment. It’s damn useful, though. Most vaudeville shows, people wander in and out constantly. But this keeps them in their seats, at least for the start.” He stuck his cigar back in his mouth and walked to the middle of the stage. “Take a seat, kid. I’m going to put on a show for you. It’s easier to explain this in visual terms, y’see.”
George reluctantly left the moving image and took a seat in the front row. Stanley came down as well and sat a few seats across from him, but Silenus remained up on the stage. He said, “What I’m going to do up here, kid, is tell you a story. Like all stories, it’s an attempt to make sense of something larger than itself. And, like most stories, it fails, to a certain degree. It’s a gloss, a rendition, so it’s not exact. But it’ll do.”
“All right,” said George.
Silenus looked to the backdrop. “It starts with, ‘In the beginning,’ ” he said.
This was evidently a signal of some kind, as Stanley dimmed the lantern and the backdrop grew a solid black. Silenus cleared his throat, assumed a more theatrical pose, and said:
“In the beginning, there was nothing. There were no suns, no stars, no lands or seas or skies.” His voice echoed throughout the theater, and it gained a queer resonance that made it feel as though he were speaking very close to George. “Nothing lived, for there was nothing to live in or on. Time did not exist, for there was nothing to pass through it. There was only nothing, an endless, vasty abyss.
“But then the Creator came, and all of that changed,” said Silenus.
Then the image of pure black shattered, like someone pitching a baseball through the middle of a pane of glass, revealing a second background behind it of bright white. There was a great shout of countless voices singing one furious note, and then the voices dropped to a hum. George could not see where the voices were coming from—perhaps it was the backdrop itself?—but before he could think on it the image began moving again: the shards of darkness drifted away from the middle until there was a space of clear white in the center that was ringed by a jagged edge of black.
“The Creator broke the darkness, and it decided that, for the first time, things should Be,” said Silenus. “There would come, amid this sea of infinite nothingness, existence. And in that small puddle of existence, a world. And so the Creator sang the world.”
The hums changed into a song. It was a very soft and curious song. It seemed somewhat toneless to George, with no major or minor mode that he could discern. Yet as the voices sang, something appeared in the center of the white space: a brown dot, like a dab of paint from an invisible paintbrush. The dab turned into a streak, which made a circle within the white space, and then the invisible paintbrush began to fill in the circle with what looked like mountains and shorelines and broad, flat plains. They were all a little crude-looking, much like something one would find on a cave wall, yet a considerable amount of expression was rendered from such simple forms.
“The Creator sang of skies and seas, of mountains and valleys, of water and rain and the touch of the sun. It sang of the slow caress of time, of the lapping of waves and the dance of light, of flame and ice and winds and rivers.”
The song changed and more shapes appeared within the little brown world: broad blue oceans and little rivulets, and small storms that waxed and waned as they advanced across the continents. The world came alive with thousands of slight animations, forces and pressures and reactions rippling across its face.
“Then the Creator sang of things that would exist within the world, and grow,” said Silenus. “It sang of grasses and trees and moss and algae. It sang of seaweed and vines and endless fruits, and other tiny green things that stretched toward the light, sucking up mere drops of water.”
The song intensified, and patches of green began to appear on the faces of the continents. The sea changed color from a dark blue to a lighter gray, and tiny green trees began popping up across the face of the world. They swayed back and forth with an invisible wind, and sometimes minuscule pinecones or fruits dropped from their branches, which were no larger than mouse bones.
“Then the Creator decided to sing of things that would live, yet would see the world, and know of it,” said Silenus. “Things that would react to it of their own accord. So the Creator sang of all the animals in the mountains and the grasslands and upon the shores, and the fishes and creatures in the blue deeps, and the birds that would drift from gust to gust in the sky.”
Small deer leaped out from amid the green and began to cavort and frolic, and among their feet were mice and asps and foxes. In the plains were cattle and other large creatures, some of which George did not recognize, like one beast with great tusks and long hair. Fish and porpoises jumped up from the waves of the seas, and sometimes whales would surface and send a fine spray up into air. Above them all small birds flickered and dodged, or sailed from enormous nests up in the peaks of the mountains.
“Then the Creator sang of a creature that would see the world most clearly and, unlike all others, possess the ability to change it,” said Silenus. “And so the last of the things the Creator sang of was Man.”
Small huts appeared around the patches of blue and under the green trees, and then tiny stick figures emerged from them, though their bodies and limbs were loose and willowy. They ate the fruit and hunted the deer and washed their miniature clothes in the streams. They grew fat and happy, and had children, and carried their little ones about, showing them the sun and the mountains and the sky.
“And then, when the world was complete, the Creator was pleased with what it had made,” said Silenus. “And it left.”
The song faded from the screen, and it seemed to George as though a light went out of the images as well. The brown world with its many creatures remained, sitting in its white pool surrounded by shards of jagged black, but it seemed slightly dimmer, and the colors were no longer quite as bright.
“The world continued as the Creator had left it—seas still surged, rivers still trickled, the winds still played with the clouds, and the creatures grew in population, or died back. But then something happened that the Creator may not have intended: the darkness came alive.”
A quiver ran through all the pieces of jagged black at the edges of the screen. Certain parts began moving, very slowly: shards and crags of the ring of black grew close together, solidifying themselves. And George thought he could discern a single pair of eyes in the darkness, little white slits that peered out at the brown world beyond it, and he thought he could see hate in that gaze.
“To have a thing exist was endless torment for all the nothing that had been there before it,” said Silenus. “It had been wounded and broken when the Creator made the world. And in its rage the darkness struck back, and began to devour Creation.”
Another quiver ran through the darkness, and the shards of black changed: they grew long, sharp ears, and thin, threatening snouts, and sharp, snapping fangs. George realized that the darkness had grown the heads of a thousand wolves, and they bit and snarled at the little brown world that was sitting in the white pool. The painting of the world began to fade, not all at once but in patches: first a small valley in the hills faded and darkened, then a piece of shore, and then the tip of a chain of mountains, until the world looked as though it were diseased, with strata of black running across it.
“The creatures of the world were thrown into despair,” said Silenus. “The winds changed course, mountains vanished, and rivers that had once led to the sea now ended in wide, black gaps, their waters flowing into nothingness. Wandering herds entered the shadows and were lost. Forests faded and fell away. Those who witnessed these things begged That Which Made the World to return, and save them. But for reasons that could not be guessed at, the Creator did not return, and the world was plunged into darkness.”
The world kept fading until only little islands of it were left. The isolated fragments trembled under the weight of all that shadow, like they all might burst apart at any moment.
“But then some of the people discovered something,” said Silenus. “They found that the song the Creator had sung when it first made the world still echoed in the deep places: under mountains, in the darkest forests, in the coldest seas, and within ancient hills, never dying. And the people found that if they took these echoing pieces of the First Song, and pooled them and sang them in the fading parts of the world, then they could renew it, and save what was left, for within the song were the commands that had made the seas and lands and skies and creatures.”
George watched as one little stick figure that was glowing bright walked before a group of people huddled before a growing shadow. The figure waved its tiny stick arms until the people were watching, and then it sang for them, and George recognized the song as the ethereal harmony he had first heard at the beginning of the show. The people who heard the song seemed to light up, gathering a small halo of bright colors about them. Then they walked into the darkness, and where they walked the darkness retreated and the world began to return. The little glowing figure who had first sung the song went to another group of people and sang again, and then another and another until almost half the world had been brought back, the shadow withdrawing as the glowing people moved forward. The wolves at the edges paced and bit and snapped, but the world stayed bright and clear, and they made soundless howls of rage.
“And though much of the world returned, some parts could not be brought back,” said Silenus. “Many lands and countries had lain under shadow for too long, and were lost. So the people decided that they would never allow such a thing to happen again, and they assigned a group to carry the First Song from fading place to fading place and renew the edges of the world, and pass on the song when needed. And so Creation would be maintained, piece by piece, performance by performance, as the First Song was carried across the face of the Earth, echoing in the deeps.”
The last image on the screen was of a group of people crossing the little brown world, weaving through tiny mountains and traveling down into a valley. There was a faint glow to them, as though they carried a light that they had to keep veiled. Out beyond the border of the world the wolves in the darkness watched them, and they stewed and paced back and forth. The glowing people did not seem to take notice, and George almost shouted at them to watch out, and take warning, but before he could the screen began to grow blank again, and the darkness and the wolves and the world turned into empty canvas.
Stanley increased the light on his lantern. Silenus walked down off the stage, took the glass chimney off of it, and lit his cigar in its flame. As he did he looked up at George, the fire’s luminescence bathing his craggy face, and said, “Good fucking show, ain’t it?”
George was not sure what to say at first. Finally he asked, “What is it you’re trying to tell me? That… that the song you sing in the fourth act is…”
“I am saying,” said Silenus, “that the strange performance at the end of our shows, where everything seems to go still and the audience grows dazed and silent… In that moment, what is being played is the First Song, otherwise known as the First Invocation, the art that called Creation out of the darkness and forged the world. Or at the very least a part of that song.”
George stared at him. “You can’t possibly be serious.”
“I dead fucking am,” said Silenus.
Stanley took out his blackboard and wrote: WHAT WAS THE FIRST TIME YOU HEARD IT LIKE?
Silenus added, “Yes, but ignore that memory that woke up inside you. That’s abnormal. Besides that, what was it like, that first time?”
George thought and said, “It was like the theater felt very small, and we could… look out and see everything. Like we were watching a machine from the outside, and we’d only ever seen it from within.”
“Exactly,” said Silenus. “Within the First Song are the… blueprints, I suppose you could say, of everything that’s ever been or ever will be. When it’s sung and heard it connects people, links them to everything that’s around them, every piece and every particle of everything until they see… well, everything. It is a glimpse of the infinite, bundled up into one three-minute act. And unlike most other experiences with the infinite, there is no sense of feeling lost, or meaningless, or any dread. Reciting the First Song is a force of renewal. It reminds the listener and even Creation itself what they are, what they were meant to be—an integral, inseparable part of a much vaster whole.”
George frowned as he tried to take this in. He remembered how those who’d seen the act in Parma had changed: their colors had become brighter, and they’d seemed somehow content and at peace. “So you sing this just to give people that feeling of… infinity?”
“Well, that’s not exactly the reason,” said Silenus. “That’s more of a pleasant side effect. The real reason is protection.”
A light went on in George’s mind. “Against the men in gray.”
Silenus exchanged a cool glance with Stanley. “Yes,” he said.
“I was approached by one of them, several months ago,” said George. “He was looking for news of you, but he didn’t give me his name, and his story was… Well, it was very unconvincing. I didn’t tell him anything. But just recently I heard someone say that you were a hunted man.”
Silenus smiled nastily. “Then that someone was correct. I am very hunted. In the past, oh, several hundred years or so, the darkness figured out how to manifest itself in the world, and disguise itself. Parts of itself, that is. It’s learned to send agents abroad to search for what’s keeping it at bay, in other words. They wear the images of people as you and I would a coat, but underneath, they’re like holes or tears in existence itself. Just their presence affects everything around them—light and colors and sounds fail, and shadows lengthen. They are not used to being real, to existing—hence why the one you met thought up such a stupid plot, or why they were fooled by our reflections—but they are still a terrible threat to us. They do not need to be intelligent. They can win by sheer numbers alone.”
“And you call them wolves?”
“That name comes from older times,” said Silenus. “Way back when wolves were what men feared most. They killed and devoured flocks, and terrified villages. These shadow-creatures seemed to do the same, so they named them the same. It was a way of making sense of what was happening.” Silenus snorted and spat carelessly on the theater floor. “When they first appeared, our forebears obstructed them as best as they could, but I suppose it was inevitable—eventually the wolves learned of the First Song. They realized that if they could find it and prevent it from being performed—by killing the performers, essentially—then there would be nothing holding them back. They could finally eat up this remainder of the world, and have peace. And so they have been hounding us ever since. Performing the song normally pushes them back, like fortifying a dike against the tide. That’s how it’s been for… hell, thousands of years. But somehow in the hotel in Parma, it didn’t work. I can’t say why just yet. It is extraordinarily troubling, though.”
“Did you say thousands of years?” asked George.
“Yes,” said Silenus. “This has been going on for quite some time, kid. How old did you think I was?”
“I don’t know,” said George. But he thought he detected some anger in Silenus’s face that suggested the question had a very bitter meaning to him.
“In some form throughout the years, there has always been a traveling band of players,” he said. “They’ve been of different nations, different creeds, different races and languages, and different entertainments. Not all of them performed on the stage. Some did their routine in city squares, or in fields, or in temples or on the backs of wagons. Anywhere they could get a crowd. But they always carried the First Song with them, and sang it in their performance, and passed it on when the time came.”
“Do the others in the troupe know?”
“They’ve all seen the picture show,” said Silenus. “The members have come and gone through the years, but they all drew a crowd. Which was what we needed. If I may say so, this current version of the troupe is the most efficient yet.”
“It is?” said George, and then he realized. “Ah. Because it’s in vaudeville, isn’t it? I suppose the circuits are perfect for you.”
“Can you think of a better method?” said Silenus. “We are allowed to—no, expected to—travel all around the country, going from theater to theater and doing our short act in front of enormous crowds. No other kind of entertainer has ever covered more ground than a vaudevillian.”
Stanley wrote: AND OUR TRAVELS ARE A USEFUL SCREEN FOR OUR SEARCHES, AS WELL.
“What are you searching for?” asked George.
“For other pieces of the song,” said Silenus.
“Other pieces? I’d have thought you’d have it all by now.”
Again, there was that bitter smile. “No,” said Silenus. “We do not. Over time we think we’ve found a lot of it. Not quite all, but most. But we are still missing a few key fragments. As such, when we perform the First Song we are only playing a portion. There are many dimensions to Creation we cannot help, or renew. So we are always searching for those missing pieces, to gather them up and fill in the empty portions.”
George was about to ask how they did this, when he suddenly remembered the two of them trudging through the rain with that enormous steamer trunk held between them. He remembered how angry Silenus had been, as if he’d gone out looking for something and been hugely disappointed. And then there was what the girl in green had said: Silenus always seemed to be carrying something very, very heavy.
“Oh,” said George. “Your trunk!”
Silenus narrowed his eyes. “What?”
“That’s how you collect it. It’s… it’s that trunk you have, with all the locks. You and Stanley have to get it in there, right?”
Silenus was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “The particulars of collecting or singing the song are a very delicate and secret matter, kid. Stanley is my assistant, and only he is allowed to know exactly what I do with the song. I’m telling you a lot of stuff right now, stuff people have gotten killed trying to protect. But right there is where I’m going to stop. Those are our most protected secrets, and I’m not willing to share them with you. Not yet.”
“People have gotten killed?” asked George. “Over a song?”
“Not just a song,” said Silenus. “The song. Do you know what’s at risk? What could be lost if they caught up to us?” He stood up and replaced his hat. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you what would happen.”
“Where are we going now?” asked George.
“I’m not sure yet. But I’ll know it when I see it.”
Silenus led them out back to the street behind the theater. The snow had lessened, but it was still bitterly cold. He took a right and followed a meandering little alleyway that ran behind several shops and homes. He held up a finger as though testing the wind, and changed direction and kept walking until they came to a neighborhood behind an old abandoned mill, next to a dribbling little stream. The buildings appeared to be deserted, and the lots were crisscrossed with cracked wooden fencing. In the weak starlight it was a lonely, disquieting place, snow-decked and littered with old industrial equipment and rusting chains, and splintered wood that sometimes had the look of bones. Every surface was ringed with frost, and armies of cats wove in and out of the machinery and the broken fences, sometimes pausing to observe these intruders before disappearing down a gutter.
George was not sure what Silenus was looking for, but he could not imagine finding anything of worth here; yet then he recalled how both Parma and Rinton had felt when Silenus’s troupe had performed, and realized this place had the same sort of atmosphere: it felt dark and thin, as if one could scratch at the ground or the sky and it would tear away like paper.
“This place doesn’t seem right, does it?” asked Silenus.
George shook his head.
“It’s one of the fading parts. When more people who have heard the song come here it will return to what it once was. We’re helping it now, even as we speak.”
“I thought you caused this feeling,” said George.
“Caused?” said Silenus. “No. I am specifically here to remove this feeling, in a way. Though when the wolves follow us this feeling only increases, at least until the song’s effects take hold.” Then Silenus spied something, and he pointed at the tumbled-down remains of a red-brick building. Nearly all of the structure was gone except for a single lonely corner, and the way the starlight fell across it made dark shadows in its center. “There,” he said. “Do you see it?”
“See what?” asked George.
“That shadow, in between those walls. Is it not much darker than all other shadows? Does it not seem somehow deeper?”
George looked at the broken corner of the building, and admitted that it did seem very black.
“All right,” said Silenus. “Stanley, put down that lamp. And George, take your shoes off.”
“Why would I want to do that?” said George, who was sure there’d be rusty nails and broken glass under all that snow.
Stanley took out his blackboard and wrote: BECAUSE YOU DO NOT WANT THEM TO BE FROZEN TO THE GROUND. Then he set it aside.
George did not know what he meant, but did as Silenus said. Silenus and Stanley removed their own as well. Silenus stuck his hand out and said, “Join hands. Everyone.” Once they had they approached the corner of the building in a human chain with Silenus leading. “You will want to take a deep breath before we enter,” he said, “so that you will not have to take in much of the cold air.”
“The what?” said George, but he heard Stanley breathing deep behind him, and hurriedly did the same.
Silenus slowly led them toward the dark corner, moving forward step by step, until he entered the shadow. It was so dark that Silenus seemed to disappear entirely, though George could still feel the man’s hand in his own. Silenus kept leading them ahead, even when, by George’s estimation, there was not much space left within this corner of the red-brick building. Yet Harry kept pulling him forward, as though there had been a door there George had not seen, and soon he entered the shadow as well and could see nothing.
The shadow seemed impossibly deep, the darkness stretching on and on. The three of them kept walking forward, traversing a space several times longer than the fragment of the building, by George’s reckoning. Then the ground changed beneath them, and they were walking on what felt like icy stone that sucked at the moisture on the soles of George’s feet. Then George saw that there were stars up above them, though they were poor imitations of the ones he’d just seen behind the mill: these seemed more like needle punctures in the darkness above. When his eyes had finally adjusted he looked out at what was before him, and gasped.
It was not a landscape in any conceivable sense of the word. For one thing, it did not obey any of the rules of physics that George was aware of and comfortable with: he was not sure if he was looking out, or down, or possibly even up, or maybe he was stuck to the side of a cliff and was looking along the precipice. But no matter the angle at which he looked, George saw an endless gray wasteland arranged out among the stars, riddled with abysses and canyons whose breadths were so wide it took George minutes (or was it hours?) to look from one side to the other. There was no vegetation of any kind, nor any sign of life: only the barren, starlit stone. Desolate gray peaks stared down (or up, or across) at him, like a volcanic eruption frozen at the height of its violence. There seemed to be far too much sky in places around him, and very little earth, like the horizon was eaten up by the gaps between the stars. It was a frigid, brittle, awful place, hanging in space without any sense of dimension or depth or purpose. The wastes looked terribly cold, and as George had just gasped he had to take in a breath of air, and it was indeed so frozen that it was shocking.
“What is this?” said George.
“This is one of the lost places,” said Silenus. His words made an astounding amount of steam, and George saw their very bodies were steaming as well. “I don’t know what it was originally. I just know it isn’t, anymore. Places like these are accessible through deep shadows in the thin parts of the world, parts that the darkness has rubbed away until they are barely there, with a few holes finally appearing. Our presence has renewed this place a little, since we have heard the song—that’s why your feet don’t freeze off of you, and why you are not frozen solid—so that’s good, but it’s not enough in the face of this. It’s one of the places that the First Song cannot bring back. The wolves have utterly consumed it. And when they triumph over us, even these remains will fade.”
George noticed that Silenus had said “when,” not “if.” He was about to remark on it when he noticed a smattering of small white lights among the shadows of the cliffs. At first he mistook them for more stars, buried among the stones of this strange place, but he saw that they seemed to be holes of some kind, or tunnels, and some led to light and others led to someplace dark…
Silenus said, “There is more than this. Unbelievably more, if distance still functions in such a ruined state. The amount of Creation that was lost in the first days is unthinkable.”
“That can’t be,” said George. “I’ve seen maps of the world, of all the continents. It’s all accounted for. The world has a start and an end. There aren’t any lost pieces.”
“Are you so sure?” said Silenus. “Don’t you sometimes feel like the world is getting smaller, George? Have you never heard any of the ancient stories and felt the world they took place in was far larger than the one we know today? Or haven’t you wondered why there are stories of fabulous places and fantastic beasts, yet we can find no sign of them anywhere anymore?”
“I thought people had made all that up,” said George.
“No,” said Silenus. “They existed, if only for a little while. But they and the places they dwelled in are now… well…” He gestured to the barren wasteland before them. “Consumed. Collapsed into a meaningless little pocket of reality found only in shadow. Now the world balances upon a mere scrap of fundament, floating unevenly in nothing. And what’s left could easily be lost as well, if we allow the wolves to catch up to us and devour what we have spent our whole lives protecting. And if you do not take our purpose seriously, it may just happen. Do you understand?”
George nodded.
“Have you seen enough?”
“Yes,” said George, who wanted to be far away from that terrible place.
“Then we’ll exeunt quickly,” said Silenus. He turned them around and George saw that in the darkness before them was a small, oddly shaped hole that looked out on the fenced-in lots they’d just left. It was not until they were right before it that he realized the hole was in the general shape of the shadow in the red-brick corner, which made him think about the little tunnels of light he’d seen in the cliffs…
They staggered out of the shadow and into the mill lot. Stanley and George gasped for air, since the atmosphere in that horrible landscape had been too cold and thin for them to breathe comfortably. Silenus appeared to be less affected: he coolly watched as they tried to compose themselves, and said, “Come on. Back to my office.”
George sat up to pull his shoes and socks on. As he did he saw the soles of his feet had been burned black, just like Silenus’s and Stanley’s. He poked at the arch of his foot. It did not hurt, but when he licked his finger and rubbed at it the blackness did not come away. It seemed to have been stained by the brief journey in that miserable place.
Stanley gave him a weak smile, and wrote: ONE OF US NOW. LIKE IT OR NOT.