George sat in the front row of the theater’s seats, lashed to the cushioned back. The wolves, being ignorant of how lungs or veins worked, had made the ropes far too tight, and he soon began to black out. He begged them to loosen the bonds a little.
The two wolves paced around him in a circle. “How do we know that you won’t up and run?” said the wolf with the reedy voice, who was extremely tall and thin and had a large hook nose.
“Well… you’re both probably much faster than me,” said George, wheezing. “Y-you could probably run me down before I ever reached the door.”
The two wolves stopped pacing. “That’s true,” said the one with the deep voice, who was very thick and short. “We have, after all, killed much more difficult things than a barefooted child.”
“True, true,” said the reedy-voiced one. “We’ve stalked the nephilim in the plains of Edom, and we toppled them like toy towers.”
“We’ve run thunderbirds until they could fly no further,” said the fat one, “and when they landed we fell upon them with the fury of storms.”
“We’ve swum into the darks of the seas, and devoured selkies and Samebitos and Tritons.”
“We’ve brought down whole mountains.”
“And continents.”
“And stars,” added the fat one. “That was in the old days, the before days. But we don’t think we’ve lost it. It would be no issue to kill a child such as you. Something so thin and scrawny and tired.”
“With hardly a scrap of fat on him.”
“Just tumbling bones and strangled sounds.”
“Little cries, like a sick cat.”
“Almost not worth it,” said the fat one.
“Almost. But not quite,” said the reedy-voiced one, and he made an attempt at a smile. On his blank, awkward face, the effect was deeply disturbing.
George was not sure if it was the most disturbing thing about the wolves, though. Perhaps what was most disturbing was the way their images and faces would suddenly blur and shudder, as if they were forgetting to maintain the illusion. Or perhaps it was the way their bones and teeth would click when they stretched their limbs or twisted their necks, affecting poses usually only attainable by reptiles and owls.
But more than any of this, he decided the most frightening thing about the wolves had to be the way light and space behaved around them. Shadows seemed to stretch to brush over their feet and hands, as if they were being worshipped by the dark. When they came near, the entire theater began to feel both cavernous and claustrophobic all at once, and George got the strange sensation of being dangled over a deep chasm. Their very presence was doing something to reality, he felt, stretching and tearing at dimensions he could not detect with his normal senses. They were violations of the purest kind, anomalies that breached and mocked every rule George had about the way the world should work. Their halfhearted attempts at appearing like men highlighted their Wrongness even further.
He had hoped that they would not know who he was, but the fat one had identified him immediately. He’d swooped George up in his arms and whisked him off to the orchestra pit and held him next to the little dummy seated on the piano bench. “It’s him! It’s him!” the reedy-voiced one had crowed. “We’ve got him, we’ve got him! Stupid thing! Stupid little child! Came walking right in here, didn’t he!”
“Come stumbling from the shadow-lands,” growled the fat one, looking over the marks on George’s hands. “You’ve seen the gray reaches then, haven’t you? But here you are now. Here you are.” And they’d both howled in delight, a high, keening sound that did not echo but seemed to penetrate deep into the mind.
Once they’d loosened George’s bonds, the fat one said, “Now we’ll wait until he gets back. He’ll have questions for you. Lots and lots of questions. And then we get to do as we please.”
“But we can ask some of our own first,” said the reedy-voiced one. “Perhaps he’ll spill his guts to us. Then we’d have all the glory, wouldn’t we?”
“Would you do that?” breathed the fat one. He stared into George’s face, eyes wide. “Would you tell us? Tell us everything?”
George was too terrified to speak. He did not know what they would ask, so he could not tell them if he could answer.
“Have you seen it?” demanded the reedy-voiced one. “Have you seen the Light? That awful Light they carry, like the very eye of the Enemy?”
“How do they carry it?” said the fat one. “Do they carry it in a lantern? We think they must carry it in a lantern… They walk into the dark, don’t they, swinging it back and forth?”
Both of the wolves shuddered. Then the reedy-voiced one snarled in fury.
“Tell us!” he cried. “Tell us about the lantern! How can we destroy it? Is it made of moonish silver?” He rushed up to glare into George’s face, and George thought he could see cracks appearing in the wolf’s façade, threatening to break away to show what was hiding beneath its skin.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” George said. “I… I don’t know anything about a lantern, or… or moonish silver!”
The reedy-voiced wolf growled and whirled away, but the fat one leaned forward, fascinated. “Is it not in a lantern?” he said. “Do not pretend like you would not know, like you are not one of them. We know you are Silenus’s child. Aren’t you?”
George took a breath. He’d never been a very good liar, and he wondered what to say.
But before he could think of anything, the wolf smiled. “Ah, yes. I don’t know much about you and your kind, but I know the shape of truth. And there it was, winking in your eyes. So you must know, don’t you? You must know how it’s carried, how they transport it.”
“We have waited so long…” said the reedy-voiced one. “Tell us what it looks like. Tell us how we can get at it. We’ll make you, if you don’t.”
“Yes,” said the fat one. “We will.” He thought and said, “Do you know why we wear the guises of men?”
George shook his head.
“It’s not to sneak about among you. It’s because we’re being polite.” He extended a finger, and there was a soft cracking noise, like someone dropping an eggshell. Something very black and sharp stabbed out through the white flesh of his fingertip, which crumbled away like it was made of chalk. It was a claw, George saw, black as coal and sharper than a razor, poking through the skin from whatever the wolf really was, underneath.
The wolf watched as George’s eyes followed his clawed finger. “You don’t want to see what we really look like,” he said. Then he lifted his finger and cut a straight line underneath his jaw, like he was slashing his own throat. But no blood poured from the gash; instead it was like he had sliced through paper, and now the skin (was it skin?) on his neck flapped open loosely, and George glimpsed something black and misty underneath.
“If you don’t tell us, we’ll look at you,” said the fat one. “We’ll take off this silly little face and look at you, and then you’ll never look at anything again after that. You won’t be able to. Not after seeing us.”
“Tell us,” said the reedy-voiced one, and there was hyena laughter in his words. “Tell us where he keeps it.”
The image of Silenus’s steamer trunk flashed in George’s mind. He must not ever tell them, he knew. He thought wildly, and glanced at the Silenus dummy up on the stage. He said, “Do you want to know why I took the head off of that?”
The two wolves looked at him, confused, and glanced back at the dummy. “The head?” said the reedy-voiced one.
“Yes,” said George. “I did it for a reason. I… I wanted to keep you from knowing something.”
The reedy-voiced wolf took a quick intake of breath, excited. He grew close, and the silence in George’s ears became so overpowering his eyes began to water. “Tell us,” the wolf whispered. “Tell us what you wanted to hide…”
George swallowed, and said, “You really want to know where he keeps the Light?”
“Yes,” said the fat one. “Yes!”
“It’s… it’s in his hat,” said George. “He keeps it in his hat.”
The two wolves drew back, shocked.
“In his hat?” echoed the reedy-voiced one.
“Yes,” said George.
They both pondered this.
“We’ve never heard that it could be in his hat,” said the fat one. “It’s almost too… dangerous.”
“Obvious,” said the reedy-voiced wolf.
“Exposed,” said the fat wolf.
“But that makes it the best place!” said George. “Doesn’t it? He always has his hat with him. He never loses it. And who would ever think to look in a hat?”
The reedy-voice one nodded, seeing the sense in this, but the fat one shook his head. “Hm. No,” he said.
George’s heart plummeted. “No?”
“No. No, no,” said the fat one. “That doesn’t sound right. It was far too easy, far too quick. We’ve been after this secret for so, so long. It can’t be gotten that easy.” He frowned. “You lied to us, didn’t you, child?”
“N-no!” said George.
“Oh, yes. Yes, you did. Come now. That was a lie. Right?” He did not wait for George’s answer. Instead he turned and lumbered down to the campfire (stopping halfway to shudder and shake, and somewhere there was the sound of thick fur rustling). He picked up one smoldering branch and slowly began walking back. “We can’t have you telling us lies,” he said. “Can’t have you filling our ears up with half-truths, and no-truths. But we can’t show you our face,” he said, gesturing to the open flap underneath his chin. “Because then you’d be useless. See?”
George dimly became aware that he was trembling.
“We think something more mundane is needed,” said the fat one. One hand snapped out so fast George could hardly see it, and the next thing he knew the wolf had grasped his chin and forced his head up.
The wolf’s fingers were colder than ice. He raised the smoldering branch up and waved it below George’s cheek. “Something mundane, but something you won’t forget.”
“No,” said George.
“No,” echoed the wolf, mocking him.
“No, please.”
“No, please,” said the wolf. His empty gray eyes were huge in his face. He smiled as though this was all a fond distraction. The smoking branch grew closer until George could feel its heat on his skin. He shut his eyes and braced himself for its sizzling kiss…
Something slammed up toward the entrance of the theater. Then a high, strong voice called out, “What is going on?”
The wolf released him. George opened his eyes and saw the two of them backing away, abashed. Someone was walking down the rows behind him. George turned to try to get a look at this new arrival, but due to how he was bound he could only see a man in a red coat. He very briefly thought it was his father come to rescue him.
It was not. It was a third wolf. But this one looked very different from all the other ones George had ever seen.
The forms and figures of the wolves all varied—as in the current case, some were fat, and some were thin, and so on—but overall there was little difference among them. They all wore gray suits with black bowler hats, and their eyes and faces all had that same curious emptiness to them that made their very appearances seem like shells or masks.
But not this one. To begin with, he wore a bright red coat and a black porkpie hat with a white feather stuck in the band. This was so startling that George at first thought him a normal person, and feared for the man’s life. But then George noticed the very quiet silence the man carried with him, and realized he was indeed a wolf as well.
“What is this? Are you torturing a child?” asked the wolf in red.
The other two exchanged a glance, as though this question were ridiculous. “Obviously,” said the fat one.
“But why would you do such a thing?” asked the wolf in red. “Have I not told you that my studies here must be uninterrupted? That we must maintain a peaceful, quiet environment for me to work in?”
Again the two wolves looked at each other, and George got the sense that if they’d possessed the humanity to roll their eyes in exasperation, they would have.
“He came here of his own accord,” said the reedy-voiced one. “That’s how we found him.”
“And he is not just any boy,” said the fat one. “He is the pianist.”
“The pianist?” said the wolf in red. His mouth fell open and he stared at George.
“Yes,” said the reedy-voiced wolf. “He is Silenus’s son. You can see it there, in his face.”
The wolf in red was lost for words for a moment. “My goodness, you’re right! I recognize him now. But this is extraordinary!” he cried, delighted. “Why do you have him all tied up?”
“All tied up?” said the reedy-voiced wolf. “Have you forgotten that he is the son of our sworn enemy? That his father carries that hated Light?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” said the wolf in red. “I know all about that. How could I forget? But think of the opportunity!”
“The what?” said the fat wolf, but before he could say more the wolf in red strode over and began untying George.
“What are you doing?” said the reedy-voiced wolf. “Don’t let him go!”
“I’m not letting him go,” said the wolf in red. “But I can’t examine him if he’s all tied up, now can I?”
“Examine?” said the fat wolf. “What do you mean?”
“I mean examine, that’s what I mean. This is a perfect opportunity to… well, explore. And the more I explore and learn, the more I learn about how the Light works.”
“And then you can figure out how to track and destroy it?” asked the reedy-voiced wolf.
“What?” said the wolf in red. “Oh, yes, yes. To destroy it. But I’m beginning to think that we’ve been going about this all wrong… It is not a light, really, but something else. Something more like a sound, I believe…”
“Very good,” said the fat wolf. He looked extremely angry. “But you seem to be forgetting that this boy is a very big coup for us. He is a veritable mine of information. You are letting your curiosities get the better of you, and putting too much at risk. We should simply interrogate him, which is why we restrained him in the first place.”
“My interests and… unique predicament allow me truths you are blind to,” said the wolf in red. “Let me handle this interrogation. Can you imagine anyone better to do it than I? I, the one who knows more about their company and what they do than anyone else?”
The two wolves looked mutinous at this, but reluctantly nodded.
“Then that’s settled. Here,” said the wolf in red to George. “Come on. Stand up. That’s it, there we go.” He looked George up and down. “You seem to be in working order. All your… parts are functioning?”
“Yes?” hazarded George.
“Very good. Very, very good. Then come down with me. Let’s sit in the front row together, and we can talk.” He nodded and said to the two other wolves, “That will be all.”
“What!” said the reedy-voiced wolf. “That will be all? What do you mean, that will be all?”
“I mean that’s all I require from you,” said the wolf in red. “You’re no longer needed.”
“You can’t just order us about!” snarled the fat wolf. “We’re not your underlings!”
“But we took this theater for me, for my researches,” said the wolf in red. “It’s mine. I am the one who knows what this project is about, and I am the one in charge of it. And you are interrupting. Or would you like me to tell—”
The wolf in red then said something that George did not understand. It was not a word, and it was not quite a noise. If George had not had the First Song within him, and been so attuned to the silence of the wolves, he would not have heard it at all. But as he did, he heard the wolf in red say something that was like a burst of pure, cold silence, one so complete and awful it was like George had been slapped on either side of his head. His skin erupted in goose bumps and his bowels turned to water, and a tremor ran through the shadows all around them as if in anticipation. He did not know what the wolf had said; he only knew he did not want to hear it again, and he definitely did not ever, ever want to know what it referred to.
The two other wolves stiffened at its mention. “You wouldn’t,” said the fat one.
“I was given approval,” said the wolf in red. “My works have the blessings, the authorities. I am allowed. And you are not. And today, here, you are no longer needed.”
The two wolves stared at him. Then the reedy-voiced one nodded, and retreated into the shadows, and disappeared. But the fat one lingered, and said, “You should be careful. It is possible that your works are tainting you. And remember: we are all underlings to the one you name. And it is watching you very carefully.” Then he withdrew as well, and was gone.
The wolf in red shook his head once when they were gone. “Silly things,” he said. “They are so eager, but they really don’t understand.”
George felt very confused. While this wolf seemed too unhinged to trust, George was keen to stay in his good graces, since he was the only thing keeping him from horrible abuse. So as politely as possible, George said, “Excuse me, but—”
But the wolf cried, “No, no! No, don’t say anything yet! Please don’t! For now, please, just… look.” He leaped down the aisle steps to the front row before the orchestra pit. He gestured to all six of the dummies, and said, “Just look, and please, tell me what you think. Look carefully, and… oh, dear. It looks like someone has stolen the impresario’s head. But ignore that. Please, ignore that, and just… tell me your thoughts.”
George was not sure what he meant. He looked back over the tilted, distorted figures that were so horribly reminiscent of his friends, leaning this way and that in the dancing ash. “It’s… it’s meant to be the troupe.”
“Well, yes, obviously,” said the wolf. “But how close are the representations? Are they very close? Are they exact? I conducted dozens of interviews, kept hundreds of theater bills… Please tell me where I went right and wrong, please.”
The wolf was earnestly watching him, waiting on his every word. George was reminded of an artist bracing himself for criticism.
“They’re extremely close,” said George.
“But not exact?”
“Well, n-no…”
The wolf tutted and shook his head and began rifling a stack of notes. “What is wrong? What’s different? Please spare no detail, it’s the details that trouble me so.”
George had no idea where to begin. Stanley was not five feet tall, and Kingsley was not four feet, and Colette did not have such formidable biceps. But in the interest of humoring the wolf, George told him only about the incorrect pattern of Harry’s trousers, and also mentioned that Stanley usually wore a tie. The wolf immediately asked about the color of the tie as well as the waist size of Silenus’s pants. “This is good, this is very good!” said the wolf, scribbling quickly as George answered. “You have no idea how useful this is! I’ve been following you all for months, trying to get every bit of information on you I could! I traveled miles to find anyone who’d seen your show, and now to have a genuine member in my company… what are the odds? This will be perfect for my researches!”
“I’m sorry, but… researches?” asked George.
“Oh, yes!” said the wolf brightly. “We wanted to know all about you, so I asked them to take this theater for me, and then I could re-create one of your performances! This is where I collect all my little findings, all my little discoveries about you and your company of actors. This is a theater your company visited, isn’t it? I wanted the re-creation to be exact.”
“Well, I played here, yes,” said George. “But it was just me. Not Silenus.”
The wolf was very crestfallen at this. “Silenus… never came here? You never performed here together?”
George shook his head.
“Oh. Oh, dear,” said the wolf. “I… I must have gotten my information wrong, and chose the wrong place. So all of this… has been wrong from the beginning. How could I have been so stupid!” he howled suddenly, and kicked at one of the seats. Such was his strength that it cleanly broke free of the floor and went flying across the theater. “I’ve wasted so much time here! And now we’ll have to go and take a new theater, and start all over again!”
George was alarmed to hear this. Not only did he want to keep the wolf in good spirits, but taking a theater apparently meant destroying the building and running off the staff and audience. That must have been how poor Irina died… Then George remembered Van Hoever’s grudge, and said, “But Silenus did play here once!”
The wolf halted his tantrum and looked up. “What?”
“He did play here, before I did! The manager hated him! So this is one of his theaters.”
“The manager?” said the wolf.
“Yes! When I worked here he hated Silenus because of his last performance. So this theater is one that both me and Silenus played at. It was just at different times. See?”
“So… I wasn’t wrong to choose this place?”
“No!” said George. He hoped he did not sound as desperate as he felt.
“Oh, good!” said the wolf. He clapped his hands together. “That’s quite a relief! I was very worried there for a moment. Then this is a close re-creation, yes?”
“Y-yes, absolutely,” said George.
“Excellent. Excellent!” He gazed around proudly at the theater and his mock performance, and nodded as though the charred roof and ruined stage were all intended parts of his creation. “I really wanted to feel it, you know, to sit in the audience and just watch. Just to get a sense. I’d love to actually see the performance. Ah, of course! I know. You can simply tell me where Silenus is playing next, right now, can’t you? Maybe there’s a chance I could actually catch his show.”
George stared at the wolf. He was not sure what to think of this guileless ploy. The wolf could not possibly expect him to inform on his friends, could he?
Again, George’s face showed his thinking. “Ah,” said the wolf. “You think me one of them.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You think I am among those who hunt and chase you, who hunger for the Light you bear.”
“Well… aren’t you?”
The wolf looked a little uncomfortable. “Well, y-yes. Yes, I suppose I am doing these researches in order to, well, track you down, and kill you all and so on. But the circumstances are not as you think.”
“They aren’t?” said George. “Then what are they?”
The wolf thought for a moment, and smiled and said, “I will show you.” There was the familiar sound of eggshells breaking again, and a black claw protruded from the index finger of the wolf in red, just as the fat one’s had done. Yet rather than cutting his throat, the wolf in red made a large slash down the front of his chest. The slash flapped open, the coat and shirt stuck together as though they were all part of the same membrane. Then the wolf took the sides of the gash in either hand and said, “Watch.”
“Wait,” said George. “Wait, what are you doing?”
But the wolf ignored him and pulled the slash apart. George, helpless, stared into it.
Below the wolf’s skin was a deep, terrible darkness, not the absence of light as much as the impossibility of it; light was still unthought of, undreamed of, in the deeps where that darkness existed. And yet… there was some small, glittering light in the dark. Some tiny, diamond-bright star that was crawling in little circles in the endless, churning blacks of the wolf’s heart. And George thought he heard that little light singing, somehow…
No, thought George. That’s impossible…
The wolf closed the slash. The two sides knit together and became whole again. “You saw it, did you not?”
George said, “You… you’ve got…”
“Yes,” said the wolf. “I have the Light in me. Just the tiniest, tiniest bit. It took us so much time to even figure out what it was… We could feel it hurting us, burning us, pushing us back, but we could never understand it. It was by sheer chance that we discovered this tiny shard, lost in the deepest arctic ices, where the shadow lies so thickly. We had to understand what it was, what it did. And we engaged with it in the same way we engage with anything—we ate it.
“Or, more specifically, I ate it,” said the wolf mildly. “It is very strange. I used to never say ‘I.’ I always thought in ‘we.’ We always thought in ‘we.’ But ever since I consumed that little bead of Light, things have… changed. As such, it was decided that I would be the one most suited to learning about your troupe, and what it is you do, and I was given this theater for my studies.”
The wolf gave George a slightly demented smile. “It is all a very new sensation, having the Light in me. I’ve begun trying new things, from colors to hats to even… why, even to names. I’ve got so many questions for you, and I am eager to hear your answers. I’ve asked others, but they were mostly confused by my questions… But then, they did not know my circumstances. You do, so perhaps you can help me understand, and further my studies, yes?”
George shrugged. “A-All right?”
“Excellent!” cried the wolf. He ripped out two seats from the front row and set them up in the orchestra pit, facing one another. He grabbed a notepad and sat in one. Then he gestured to the other. George, feeling faintly absurd, sat.
“Now,” said the wolf. “Now, now, now.” He flipped through several pages to find the right starting place. “My first question is—do you have a name?”
“A name? Yes.”
“Ah!” said the wolf. It wrote several extensive notes. “And what is that name?”
“George.”
“I see,” said the wolf. “And how long have you been George?”
“How long? As in, how long have I been alive?”
“Oh, were you here in some way before you were alive?” asked the wolf, interested.
“I… don’t really know,” said George. “I don’t think so.”
“So you don’t know if you were here? Or if you were here before your George-time? Is it possible for you to be here, but not know it?”
“My what time? No, I mean, I was born, and then they just named me George.”
“So you are not George,” said the wolf. “George is just a name. A word. A propulsion of air modified by the flexing of throat-parts.”
“Well, I am George, but… yes. Yes, and… no.”
“Is it possible that you became George at a later time, having been originally named that thing?” asked the wolf. “What if the naming had been different, would you still be George?”
“I… yes?”
“Really?” breathed the wolf in awe. “This is all so confusing.” Yet he seemed very pleased with George’s answers. “I don’t know how you all do it. It seems so marvelously complex to simply… be.”
“I’m… not sure if I would be the best to answer these sorts of questions,” said George.
“Why not?” asked the wolf. “Do you not exist? Trust me, I would be aware if you did not exist. My brothers and I, in a very, very fundamental way, have not existed since before anything could ever exist. Though that’s recently changed for me, of course.” The wolf looked up, thoughtful. “Do you understand what I mean?”
George looked at him. He realized that the way the wolf was dressed and the way he was acting were akin to how children would dress up and pretend to be their parents, mimicking the ephemera of adult life without ever really understanding its meaning. “I think I’m starting to.”
“It is a very troubling and confusing thing,” said the wolf. “But simply from our short discussion, I’ve learned something. Your existence seems to have been gradual. You weren’t, and then you slowly were. But mine was not gradual. I wasn’t, and then I had a bright little core of… of everything dropped inside me. And then I was. And it is shocking, and painful.”
“Really?” asked George.
“Yes,” said the wolf. “It burns me inside, this little flame, this jewel. It is my diametrical opposite, my absolute antithesis. I was lucky—if there’d been any more, it would have killed me. And yet I bear it.”
“Why would you ever want to do that?” asked George.
“Oh, for many reasons. For one, it lends all of my brothers who are close to me a resistance to it. Now, when your father spreads his Light, we are not burned or pained. And also I am more sensitive to that same Light. I can tell when it is near.”
George’s eyes went wide. He strained to mask his thoughts, which were many. To begin with, in one swoop he’d just learned how the wolves were resisting the effects of the song and how they were predicting the troupe’s movements. But more troubling was that if the wolf could tell when the First Song was near, then it could possibly tell that George had a huge piece of it inside of him. “Y-you can?” George asked.
“Yes,” said the wolf. He stared him up and down, eyes thin, and George felt very nervous. “For example, its residue and effects are very strong on you…”
“They are?”
“Yes. I presume this is because you have been in its presence for so long, and have been so close to so many performances?”
Again, George tried to hide his feelings, but this time they were mostly relief. “Y-yes, that’s it. That’s definitely it.”
“I see,” said the wolf. He wrote that down. “Anyway, those are the most obvious reasons for why I carry this bit of the Light in me. But… in another way, I enjoy it, somewhat. There is a pain to it, but it is a bittersweet pain.” An idea seemed to come to him. “Tell me—will I die?”
“Die. Do you think I will? I suppose I must… I exist now, and everything that exists must end, one day. I wonder how I will die, and what it will be like. It will be most interesting, don’t you think?”
George was so astounded with this line of thought that he had no idea what to say.
“Yes. Yes, I think it will,” said the wolf. “I look forward to it. On the whole, I think it a very strange and terrifying thing, to exist. I really don’t understand how you do it. Tell me—how do you deal with the fear?”
“The fear?” asked George.
“Yes. That fear that comes from the feeling that there is you, and then there is… everything else. That you are trapped inside of yourself, a tiny dot insignificant in the face of every everything that could ever be. How do you manage that?”
George considered how to answer. “I… guess we just never think about it.”
“Never think about it!” cried the wolf. “How can you not think about it when it confronts you at every moment? You are lost amid a wide, dark sea, with no shores in sight, and you all so rarely panic! Some days I can barely function, so how on Earth can you never think about it?”
“Well, I… suppose we distract ourselves,” said George.
“But with what?”
“I don’t know. With all kinds of things.”
The wolf furiously wrote all of this down. “Can you give me some examples?”
“Examples?”
“Yes. Are there no elements in your life you feel are great distractions?”
George wondered if he’d just painted himself into a corner, but he supposed he had at least a few. His father, for instance, was a very great distraction to him. Yet George did not want to tell him anything about Silenus, as it could endanger the troupe. But then he thought of another who occupied his mind just as much.
So to his surprise he began telling the wolf about Colette. He did not divulge anything important, but he began talking about “this girl” who was strong and beautiful, and he described the way she could make you feel stupid or smart with a glance, and talked about her questioning, sardonic eyebrows, and the way she laughed when she knew she shouldn’t, which George found enchanting.
“So you love her?” asked the wolf.
“I… suppose so,” said George. “I don’t really know her, not as much as I want to. I don’t think she really knows me.” And then he could not help but talk about how she was distracted herself, forever caught up in the abstract mechanics of show business, and how she had little time and no eyes for him. And he admitted that this hurt him greatly, but there was a little antipathy to his words as well: she was so wrapped up in running the troupe that she spent more time with his father than she ever did with him. They were the same, really: two adults who deemed him a child, and George envied both of them for the attention each one got from the other.
“It sounds as if some distractions are even worse than what you are distracting yourself from,” said the wolf in red. “Are there none that are pleasant for you?”
George was a little miffed to hear this, but said that yes, there were. There was Stanley, for one, though George vaguely described him as “a friend,” and he talked about how this friend was always giving him gifts, and cheering him up, and telling him stories; and once when George had fallen asleep in a hotel lobby Stanley had carried him up to his room and put him to bed, and when George was lying there Stanley had just stood looking down at him, not aware that George was now awake, and he sighed deeply before leaving. He cared so much, it felt.
“I see,” said the wolf. “And this friend is in love with you?”
“What?” said George, startled.
“This friend of yours. He is in love with you?”
“In love? No, he’s not!”
“He isn’t?” said the wolf. He consulted his notes. “It certainly sounds like he is.”
“He isn’t,” said George faintly. “He… he can’t be.”
But now he was not so sure. He had never considered exactly why Stanley was so kind to him; he’d always thought Stanley was simply a very kind person. But now he wondered: could Stanley be in love with him in the same way that George was in love with Colette? Was such a thing possible? Stanley never did seem to show anyone but him such affection. He remembered the night on the rooftop outside Chicago, and the way Stanley had stared at him with his sad eyes, and the way he had felt George’s shoulder, his fingers trailing down his arm…
The thought made George powerfully uncomfortable, but he did not know why. It felt like a betrayal, as if Stanley had been providing such kindness without ever letting George know the intentions behind it.
The wolf tutted unhappily. “I don’t think I understand this,” he said. “It is starting to feel like the more I find out about all this, the less I understand. I’d hoped you would explain it all to me, and then…” He shook his head and tossed his notes down beside the chair. “I don’t know. I’d thought you would at least mention why your troupe has started traveling differently.”
“You mean changing to vaudeville?”
“No,” said the wolf. “It’s something else. Your troupe has stopped performing as often as they used to, in the old days. Previous troupes would spend weeks or months in one little part of the world, walling it off from us, but your troupe is constantly traveling at a breakneck pace.”
“But that’s to cover more ground, isn’t it?” said George.
“If so, it is not accomplishing much. You do not stay and perform until the places you visit are protected against my brothers. You play a handful of times, and then move right along. When this change first took place we could not understand it. We were hesitant to even begin eating at the edges of the world again, fearing some plot. But now that we know about the Light, and how you find and gather it… Are you always looking for the Light now? Rather than performing?”
George was confounded by this. He had never known any other method of performing than the one they were using now. They stayed a week and moved on. But if the wolf was right, then this method was not really achieving anything at all. Why would Silenus be doing this if it directly contradicted their mission?
Suddenly the shadows in the room began to tremble again. The wolf in red turned to look at the front right corner of the stage. The fat and skinny wolves emerged from the shadows there, their empty eyes fixed on George.
“What are you doing?” said the wolf in red. “I’m not finished with my examination.”
“Yes, you are,” said the fat one.
“What? What do you mean?”
The reedy-voiced wolf said, “Well, you said that if we caused you any problems, you’d report us.”
“So?”
“So we decided to be preemptive,” said the fat wolf. “And we went ahead and reported this captive ourselves.”
If wolves could go pale, George thought the one in red certainly would have now. “You what?” he said.
“Yes,” said the fat one. “We reported this discovery. And now there are Suspicions. It is, in fact, suspected that this boy is not ordinary. It is suspected that there is something different about him.”
“Different? And what are we to do about that?” said the wolf in red.
“You are not to do anything,” said the fat wolf slowly. “It wants to see for itself.”
The wolf in red stood up and stared at them both. “W-what? Here?”
“Yes,” said the reedy-voiced wolf. “It is coming. Right now.”
“Put out that damn fire,” growled the fat wolf. He strode forward and leaped down into the orchestra pit and began to stamp out the flames. The wolf in red went to assist, though he was now trembling like a leaf.
George backed away. He was not sure about what was happening, but he had an idea: something, some superior to the wolves, suspected he had the song in him, and it was coming to examine him itself. He could not be here when it came, he knew. But he could not run, as the wolves would certainly catch him. So what could he do?
He looked up at the open ceiling. Was it possible that he could climb up and out? Would the wolves be good climbers? He then realized that the issue was moot: there was hardly enough of the balcony left for him to climb up.
The night sky was visible outside. He saw the wind toying with a few scraps of clouds. And then he had an idea…
I am your patron. You stood up for me when it did you little good… If you ever need me, you can simply call my name. If I am close, I will come to you.
He was not sure how this would work, or if she was close enough to hear him at all. But George had no other option, so he ran over until he was directly below the opening, raised his head, and called one word to the sky: “Zephyrus!”
The wolves spun around and stared at him. “What?” said the fat one.
The reedy-voiced wolf leaped down from the stage and grasped George by the shoulders. “It’s nothing. Probably calling for help. But there’s nothing that can help you, child. Nothing can save you from us.”
George kept watching the sky through the open ceiling. He waited, but nothing seemed to happen. His heart fell. He was alone, and no one could stop what was coming, whatever it was.
The two wolves finally killed the fire. The darkness in the theater seemed magnified in its absence, and were the flakes of ash in the air dancing faster now?
“Bring him over here,” said the fat wolf.
The reedy-voiced wolf picked George up as if he weighed nothing at all and bodily dropped him before the stage. Then he took one of George’s arms and the fat wolf took the other.
“Are you sure it is coming?” said the wolf in red.
The stage began to darken. Shadows at the back began to bleed out, growing to conceal the remaining curtains, the ragged backdrop, the splintered boards. Soon almost nothing on the stage was visible at all.
“We are sure,” said the fat one.
George was shaking in their grasps. He kept turning to look at the entry to the theater and the open ceiling, hoping someone would happen upon them and stop this. But no one came.
He turned back to the stage. It was as dark as the entry to a cave now. And George began to sense that there was something at the back of it, something very big, watching them…
It was then that he remembered something from the moving pictures Silenus had showed him: when the world had first been created and the darkness came alive, there had not been throngs of wolves then, not yet. Originally there’d been only one set of eyes out in the darkness, watching this new creation with utter hate. And George also recalled that short blast of silence that the wolf in red had used as a word, and now he wondered if it had perhaps been a name. But a name for what, he wondered? What could be terrible enough to match the dread inspired by the mention of that strange word?
Then something in the shadows shifted, and suddenly they were at the bottom of the sea.
George did not know this, but the human mind is very good at recontextualizing the world when it stops making sense. When a person encounters an event that goes beyond their normal five senses, the mind filters the information and changes it so that the event is experienced in normal, understandable terms. In essence, it creates a realistic metaphor to relate what’s happening. Sometimes the metaphor can be very different from the normal world, like suddenly switching things so it seems as though you are at the bottom of the sea; but then such changes may be necessary, if the event experienced is great enough.
And what George was witnessing was so great and terrible that merely seeing it threatened to destroy him.
He felt as if they were standing on the ocean floor with miles and miles of cold water above them. Sunlight barely filtered down to this place, trickling through the briny depths to fall upon their shoulders. Before them was what looked like the edge of an enormous continental shelf, and there at the bottom was a gap between the continent floating above and the ocean floor. In that gap the shadows were intensely dark, so dark George’s eyes could not penetrate them, but it seemed as if the gap went on forever. And yet he sensed that something was moving there, down in the darkness underneath the world.
The ground shook below them. There was a pause, and then it shook again. George wondered if chunks of rock were falling off the continental shelf, but when the ground shook for a third time he began to think that whatever was falling was far too rhythmic for that… and he wondered if perhaps what he was hearing was footfalls.
Something was coming. He struggled in the grasp of the two wolves, but they stayed firm. He felt something unraveling in the back of his mind, and he wondered if he was going mad.
He glimpsed something enormous in the dark. Was that a scaly jaw? Two enormous, pointed ears? The flex and ripple of thousands of miles of corded muscle… was that fur covering its vast bulk, or was it scales, or was its skin barren and cracked and leathery? George could not see. But he thought he could make out a pair of eyes in the dark, each as huge as worlds themselves, round and black and empty like the eyes of a shark. They were eyes that had seen the rise and fall of countless civilizations, and did not care.
A single massive forepaw emerged from the dark to fall upon the ocean floor. It had four huge toes, each with jet-black claws the size of buildings. It was scarred and old and had once had fur of some kind, though the countless years had worn that away until there were only graying bunches of skin. The forepaw flexed, digging huge gouges in the earthen floor, and George realized it was trying to drag itself forward, heaving some unimaginably colossal body that surely had to stretch completely under the world itself. Whole nations must teeter on the back of that giant spine, George thought, and the thing must desperately want to throw them off…
It was going to come out from under the world, he realized. It was going to crawl out and look at him. The thought horrified him to the bone.
George thrashed in the grip of the wolves, but they would not let him go. Every part of his body was in revolt. His eyes rolled in his head, his skin crawled, his hair writhed with the brush of the wind…
Wait a minute, he thought. Wind?
He realized that the two wolves holding him were staring about themselves, confused. In the darkness under the world a pair of jaws opened, readying to give a tremendous roar. But before it came something enormous crashed nearby, and the spell broke.
Just as suddenly as he’d left the theater, he returned. The shadows withdrew from the stage, and that horrible vision of the thing under the world vanished with it. George was still in the grip of the two wolves, and he was very wet, but it was not from the ocean deeps: it was raining very, very hard in the theater from a storm above.
The storm was so great that it had knocked in more of the ceiling, which must have been the crash he’d heard. The wind rose so hugely that chunks of charred wood rained down on them, and the wolves let George go to cover their heads.
“Where did this come from?” cried the fat one.
The entire sky was dark. A bright flash of lightning lit everything up, blinding them. Then a rattling boom shook the floor as thunder followed the lightning across the sky. As their vision returned they saw the dilapidated wall of the theater tremble. Several of the topmost bricks began to plummet down to smash upon the seats.
“It’s going to come down!” shouted the wolf in red, and he grabbed his notes in handfuls and sprinted backstage.
George tried to follow him, but the reedy-voiced wolf leaped after him and seized his arm. “Where do you think you’re going?” he snarled at him.
“The building’s going to fall apart!” said George. “Didn’t you hear him?”
“That’s just what you’d like us to think, wouldn’t y—”
But the wolf never got any further, as the wind screamed and pounded against the feeble wall. The bricks seemed to fold inward then, creasing along the middle, and then the entire soggy construction wilted over; but while it fell in a smooth, rather dreamy motion, its collision with the theater seats was devastating. Seats and bricks went flying, churning white clouds of pulverized stone rushed over the aisles, and George and the reedy-voiced wolf were flung across the theater.
George coughed and lifted his head, and he squinted through the clouds at the gaping hole in the wall. There was another flash of lightning, and George thought he saw someone standing outside on the other side of the rubble: a short but lithe young woman with bright blond hair and shining green eyes, wearing a tattered emerald dress. At first George thought she was a stranger, but then he saw something in her face reminiscent of the little girl in green… She could be her big sister, he thought. But then more white clouds piled up in the theater, and the flare of lightning died away, and she was gone.
“Do you see him?” roared the voice of the fat wolf from somewhere near the entrance. “Where has he gone?”
“We can’t see anything in all of this!” cried the reedy-voiced wolf from the stage. “There’s something out there! It’s attacking the theater!”
“Forget about that!” said the fat wolf. “Just find the boy! Nothing matters but him!”
George crouched down behind a nearby pile of rubble. He heard snuffling noises from somewhere out in the seating, and the sounds of brick being crushed underfoot by something very large. He did not think the wolves were politely wearing the images of men anymore.
“We can’t smell anything but dust!” said the reedy-voiced wolf. George was relieved to hear he sounded like he was on the other side of the theater.
“Stop talking, you fool!” said the fat wolf, who turned out to be very close. “He’ll hear you!”
There was another flash of lightning. George lifted his head to see if he could spot the girl in green again, but to his terror he saw someone was standing right in front of him, looking down. Yet in that split second he recognized that weathered face, and that black mustache, and those cold, cold blue eyes…
“Father?” he whispered, but the flare died away. George reached out to feel the space in front of him, but there was no one. Had he imagined him?
“Maybe he died,” suggested the reedy-voiced wolf from the stage. “Perhaps he was crushed under all that stone.”
“Well, you had better hope not.”
“Why not, we could… wait.”
“Wait for what?” asked the fat wolf.
More snuffling. “There’s someone in here with us,” said the reedy-voiced wolf.
“Well, of course there is! There’s the boy!”
“No,” said the reedy-voiced wolf. “It… it isn’t the boy. It’s someone else.”
“Someone else?” said the fat wolf. “Who?”
“Be quiet,” said the reedy-voiced wolf. “We’re not sure. We think it’s—”
But the reedy-voiced wolf never finished his thought. From the stage there was the sound of fabric tearing, and something whipping through the air, and the wolf’s voice was cut off by a horrible choking, or gagging.
“What is it?” said the fat wolf’s voice. “Are you there? Are you all right?”
Another flash of lightning tore through the sky above, and the theater glowed brilliant white for one second. It did not last long, but George glimpsed someone standing on the stage. It was his father, and Silenus was looking up with his arms raised and fingers bent at odd angles, like he was strangling an invisible enemy. Suspended in the air above him was something very strange-looking: it appeared to be a huge knot made of all the remains of the curtains, and they were wrapped around something very tightly and they were trying to make themselves tighter with every second, like a boa constrictor around its prey. George could not quite see what was trapped within the knot, but it looked like a dark, ursine creature, with two long, pointed ears and spindly, sinewy limbs, and many, many claws. It was struggling very hard against the knot of curtains, though its efforts did little good, since the dark green bands just made themselves tighter and tighter.
The light died away again, but the fat wolf must have seen it as well, for there was a roar of “No!” from the entrance, and something extremely large bounded forward. Yet then George heard someone running—running on two legs, and normal human feet—and a noise like two bodies colliding in midair. The voice of the fat wolf cried out in pain, and it shrieked, “What! Who are—” Yet there its words stopped, for then there came a series of hard cracking sounds and the wolf began to howl and scream terribly. To George’s ears they were cries of incredible agony, and when the lightning flashed again he raised his head to see.
His father still stood on the stage, guiding the curtains into strangling the reedy-voiced wolf, but down in the center aisle was Franny, wearing her large, lumpy sweater and her many scarves, and she was wrestling something dark and huge. To George’s amazement, she seemed to be handily winning. Her face remained in an expression of quiet serenity as she took one flailing limb of the enormous, monstrous creature and slowly bent it back with her bare hands until a series of harsh pops sounded from somewhere in the joint, and the voice of the fat wolf loosed a fresh stream of cries. Her hands smoked where she touched it, but she did not seem to care in the least.
The lightning faded again. George kept his head down and listened to the two battles as they raged throughout the theater. One ended with a harsh snap and a sigh; the other, presumably Harry’s fight on the stage, died away with a series of whimpers. There was a thud, and for a moment there was nothing but the rain and the dark.
The campfire suddenly flared to life. Silenus was on the stage next to a heap of smoking green velvet, and George could just barely make out Franny standing motionless in the center aisle. He thought he could see the twisted arms and legs of something huge lying behind her, but then it was gone, as if it had melted into the shadows.
“You,” said Silenus angrily, and he pointed at George. “You have got some big fucking explaining to do.”
George sat up and stared at them. “How… how did you get here? How did you do that? What on Earth is going on?”
“Forget all that,” said Silenus. “Why didn’t you ever tell me you were chummy with a fucking Cardinal?”
“A what?”
Silenus’s finger turned to point at the fallen wall. Someone was walking out of the opening there, and when they came into the light George saw it was the young woman in green. She smiled at him, and said, “Hello, boy.”
He peered at her. Again, he found something in her face he found familiar. “Zephyrus?”
She nodded.
“But… but I thought you were a little girl.”
“Times have changed,” she said. “I’m growing closer to my possession, my zenith, with every day.”
George gaped for a bit, and finally managed, “But how did you all get here?”
“I carried them,” she said. “I heard you call for me, but even though I was near it was like it was coming from a very deep hole. I looked on this building, and saw that something was… happening inside of it. There was an opening inside, and something was coming through. It seemed far beyond my strength, so instead I found your family.”
“And I never want to travel that way again,” said Silenus. “I thought trains were too fucking fast, but I was dead wrong.”
“I liked it,” said Franny softly. “We swooped, and spun, and there was so much water…”
Silenus looked around the theater. His eye fell upon the dummy that had been dressed as him. “What was going on here? These things look like… us. But even more, there’s something wrong with this stage. There are remnants of some passage here. What happened, George?”
The image of the thing in the darkness returned to him in a rush. “It wanted to look at me,” he said softly, and shivered.
“What?” said Silenus. “What did?”
George struggled to recount what he’d seen. He could hardly describe it. He started by saying that the wolves had taken him under the water, but then he backtracked and said that no, they’d actually been under everything, and then there’d been something that’d come out to look at him. And just bearing the sight of that thing in the dark had hurt…
“What are you saying?” said Silenus. “What is it you saw?”
“There was something down there,” said George. “Somewhere, at the bottom of… everything. And it pulled me down, or maybe this entire theater, so that it could look at me.”
For the first time that George could remember, Silenus blanched. “You were down there with it? You really saw it?”
“I didn’t see it,” said George. “Not… not all of it. But I thought I could make it out… Just thinking about it hurts.” He held one hand to his brow. Something at the back of his head throbbed. It was reminiscent of that sense of unraveling he’d experienced earlier during the vision.
He staggered, and saw red drops appearing on the front of his shirt. He thought perhaps he had a nosebleed, but found he was wrong: his eyes were bleeding, as if he were crying bloody tears.
“George?” said Silenus. He leaped down off the stage and ran to him. “George! Stay up, George! Stay awake!”
But he could not, and fell to the ground. He heard Zephyrus shouting his name somewhere nearby, and she cradled his head in her long, cool fingers. His eyes rolled, and the last thing he saw was the blackened stage. Yet just above it he thought he saw two enormous, dark eyes still hanging there, eyes the size of planets, and he imagined they were searching for him.