The Motion of Puppets (19 page)

“Good grief—”

“Broken marionettes with twisted wires and slumped together like a pile of dead bodies. An old ventriloquist dummy who looked like he would spring to life and murder me if I moved. Puppets missing an arm or a leg. Even one with no head. And imagine all this time, I had been sleeping just below them in an empty and abandoned flat.”

“Gives me the shivers.”

“Nearly gave me the shits in my pants. I tell you it took forever just to move from the spot, but I screwed my courage to the post and began to investigate.”

A siren on the street below punctuated the mood. They both laughed and sipped their drinks.

“You get used to the noise,
n'est pas
? New York, feh. Like I was saying, it was a morgue for these old toys, the spillover maybe of what could not be fixed in the workshop? And just in the shadows were piles of old newspapers and magazines, the kind of junk in a million attics, but I was curious and poked around some more and found a book.”

He hopped from the sofa and reached into the front pouch of his bag, pulling out a black notebook with a tassel bookmark and a strap to keep the cover closed. With the solemnity of a courier, he handed the journal to Theo. Most of the pages were covered with words in an elegant cursive, and he could see they were scripts, lines of dialogue and sparse instructions for the motions of puppets. It was a performance log, a new title every fifteen or twenty pages.

“Plays,” Theo said. “For puppet shows.”

“Exactly,” Egon said. “So I'm up in the attic, three in the morning and not another soul, I hear a sigh. My heart nearly stopped. Over in the corner are these two heads lying in the dust, one black and one white staring at each other like they've just been interrupted having a
tête
-
à
-
tête
. Like they can't understand what happened to the rest of them, where did their bodies go? Comes another sigh from one of these broken-down puppets, and you don't have to ask me twice. I scramble, bat outta hell, and get to the hatch just as one of them heads moans, so I jump and the whole tower of boxes and books comes tumbling down, and I land on my tailbone nearly dead on the floor.”

“You could have killed yourself.”

“I'm near paralyzed, but I can't spend another minute there, so I crawl down the steps one by one to the bottom floor and I lock myself in, half convinced I'll wake up dead in the morning.”

“It's a wonder you didn't end up with a broken neck. What do you think made the sound that scared you so?”

“
Écoute-moi!
It was the friggin' puppets.”

Theo considered his friend, noting for the first time since they had met just how little he knew of him, his background and history. They had formed a friendship out of duress, and while they had spent many hours together, every day for several weeks, swapping stories and sharing in the grief of losing Kay, Theo was not sure, in this moment, of Egon's sanity. Perhaps in the fall from the attic, Egon had landed not on his bottom but on his head. Muybridge had been in a stagecoach accident when he was heading out to California as a young man, hit his head, and was never the same. Shot a man. Stopped time.

“You're skeptical, I don't blame you,” Egon said. “But I can only tell you what I heard, what I felt in that toy shop, an overwhelming sensation of another world. I was so scared that I nearly flew that night, but all my things were upstairs in the bedroom, just out of reach of those creatures. So I sat up reading, waiting for the dawn, every page in that book. But what stopped me was the final page. Go ahead.”

In his lap, the journal sizzled with sudden menace. The playwright had written his scripts on the right-hand pages, leaving the left side blank for changes, corrections, and small drawings, so Theo came to the end unaware. There were just a few stray lines of dialogue with the word
Finis
in bold letters. But on the reverse of that final flourish, someone had turned the book upside down and penciled in a column of letters under the title
Necromancy.
The first two entries had been crossed out with a single line, but the rest were no less enigmatic.
OC, MC, IC, NT
 … Initials? At the bottom of the list, he read aloud: “
KH.
”

“You see?” Egon asked. “Kay Harper.”

A sharp pain spread like a spar of lightning in his brain. There she was. The little man across from him had a manic look in his eyes, daring him to doubt.

“I think the bastards got her. The puppets.”

 

15

She died a second time.

The Quatre Mains brought out the puppet from the bell jar and stood him on a tree stump to oversee the metamorphoses.

First, they deposed the Queen. The Irishman drove a wooden stake through her chest and fastened her to a post. Two farmhands—a lanky teenage girl and a towheaded boy with earnest blue eyes—bent a section of chicken wire into a form about twice the size of a human trunk. Then they began laying down sheets of paper that had been moistened in a thick slurry of paste. As they worked on the new larger-than-life queen, they would often consult the doll pinned like a butterfly, checking to make sure they were creating a facsimile of the original.

The rest of the puppets were similarly fixed to a spot. The Three Sisters hung by their wires on the low branch of a chokecherry tree, and Finch and Stern fashioned copies of each in papier-mâché. The remnants of a lightweight barrel provided the base for a new Mr. Firkin. Striplings and branches were collected to create the full-size Good Fairy. All the others had been lashed or secured into stationary positions while the puppeteers crafted new versions, tall as people with jointed legs and arms. At dusk, the humans quit for the day, heading off to the comfort of the farmhouse, joshing as the cool air settled in, the smell of fresh bread and a bubbling pot of stew filling the air.

Scattered in front of the barn doors, the puppets were left alone, each next to its replica. Unable to move and wary of being heard, they spoke with one another in hushed whispers.

“Is everyone okay?” Mr. Firkin asked.

“I don't like this place,” said Noë. “Everything is too big and scary.”

“Not to mention this infernal stake straight through my heart,” said the Queen. “If I had a heart.”

“Ugh,” said Nix. “What is happening to us?”

Swinging from the branch like a Salem witch, Olya spoke with a world-weariness. “We are being transformed. Made over to fit in with all the others here. A change will do you good, Nixie.”

“These are our bodies,” said the Devil. He ogled the shapes on the ground. “Getting ready for our souls. It is not every day that you get to see the next step on life's journey.”

Kay stole a peek at the unfinished papier-mâché torso not four feet from where she hung, bound to a fence post with a lash of baling wire. A river of melancholy threaded its way from puppet to puppet. She remembered her first days in the Back Room in Québec and the freedom they enjoyed there during the long, dark nights. “What do you mean about our souls? Are they to inhabit these new forms?”

The Devil's wooden joints creaked in the soft breeze. He was more hideous than usual, captured and trussed like some wild thing ready for the slaughter. “My guess is that they will destroy the old in order to create the new. Not the first time this has happened to me. Once upon a time, I was little more than a horned totem, and over the decades, I cannot begin to tell you how many lives I've led. One more will do no harm. The Original decides, the Quatre Mains does his bidding. Are we not puppets after all, bound to the master's whims?”

“Is there no end to this?” Noë said. “I will go mad.”

From the bare limb of the maple, Olya cleared her throat. “There's always the possibility of an ending. How soon you have forgotten our friends, the Judges. The end is always the same for each of us. One ending, and not a heppy one.” On each side, her sisters grinned in the starlight.

“Count your blessings,” said the Devil.

Over the next four days, the bodies took shape layer by layer, new skin, new limbs, hands and feet, and the heads attached at the end. The Irishman and his two young artisans worked longest on the faces, crafting the features in meticulous detail, the last strokes of the brush articulating the eyes. Some puppets had hinged jaws to give the illusion of speech, while other faces were frozen in a single aspect. Olya, Masha, and Irina wore masks in three shades of melancholia. The Queen's visage was majestic and disdainful. A nearly mad look was plastered on Nix, and the Old Hag had reverted from her time as Marmee into her familiar hundred-years' gaze. From the Québec troupe only the Dog retained his original form, a toy that roamed the barn while the others were bound to their spots. And the Worm had gone missing. Whispers at night intimated that it had been consigned to the old animal pens in the abandoned barn basement. Strange lowings emanated from the bowels of the building in the cramped stalls that led out to a grassy hillside.

On the fourth night, after all the new forms had been completed, the puppeteers were in a festive mood. They built a fire in a ring of stones, the bark from the birch logs popping and hissing and filling the air with thick smoke. Bottles of stout were passed around, and the Irishman regaled the others with stories and songs. Stern and Finch took turns telling long and complicated jokes that ended in dreadful puns and groans and claps of appreciation for the skill of the telling. Even the tall farm girl overcame her shyness and sang a tragic air, and the towheaded boy sat wide-eyed, soaking in the camaraderie of the evening. A million stars filled the cold sky, the constellations slowly spinning away the hours of anticipation.

With a start, the Quatre Mains rose from a log and motioned for quiet. He glanced at the ancient puppet, his face bright from the flames, and announced that the time had come. The Deux Mains held in her hands a pair of long thin spears with sharp, barbed blades strapped to the ends. With a bow, she handed one of the primitive weapons to the Quatre Mains and kept the other for herself. Holding it at eye level, he regarded the sharpness, tapping the point with the pad of his index finger, drawing a dot of blood.

Striding without hesitation, the Quatre Mains confronted the Queen nailed to her post and thrust the spear into her body at the bottom of her rib cage. A sigh escaped from the puppet's mouth, a puff somewhere between shock and satisfaction. With a quick clockwise twist, the Quatre Mains pulled back the spear, a clot of red snagged in the barbs, and the puppet slouched limp and lifeless. He pivoted to the new Queen, a giantess sprawled against the side of the barn, and pierced her chest at the same spot and twisted counterclockwise. When he withdrew the point, the red clot had disappeared into her. Taking turns with the Deux Mains, they repeated the process, piercing the Three Sisters, Nix and Noë, the Good Fairy, the Old Hag, and the Devil, transferring the substance from the old into the new.

Kay was the last to go. She had witnessed the sober reaction of the humans gathered round the fire and seen the terror in her comrades' eyes. They were dying, sacrificed in some bizarre ritual, and she wanted to escape her restraints or cry out, but even in such dire circumstances, she knew it was impossible. Her thoughts raced from the slaughter to memories of her mother, old comforter, young and singing sweetly on her walk from the henhouse, a basket of warm eggs swinging against her hip. And then her husband. She suddenly remembered his name again, Theo, Theo, Theo, but the snap of recognition was wiped away at the approach of the spear. She stole one last look at the ancient puppet she had long adored. Instead of malice, the Quatre Mains wore love and generosity on his face, as though he was presenting her with a gift rather than ending her life. He smiled when he stabbed her, and as the spear twisted where her heart had been, she said “oh,” and then the world went dark. Gasping, she regained consciousness in her new body. The hole in her chest closed like a flower.

The Quatre Mains was no longer a giant, but a man of her own size, and at first Kay could not determine whether she had grown or he had shrunk. The others, too, had changed their dimensions, and she felt as if she had gone half mad in dreaming them up. Where had all the giants gone? The Deux Mains was just a woman of ordinary size, no monster. Stern and Finch, the Irishman, the farm girl and the blond boy, they all seemed quite normal to her now, people she would encounter without a second glance. From her spot in the grass, she watched as the puppeteers freed the old lifeless puppets from their fixed places, unpinning the old Queen, untangling the Sisters from the gallows in the maple tree. During the ceremony, the ancient puppet had been spirited away, his tree stump throne now vacant.

One by one, they took the bodies down and threw them in the fire. Old Firkin went first, a whoosh as he hit the blaze, igniting at once, the air in his belly expanding till he burst. Spear in hand, the Quatre Mains left the party and went into the barn, only to emerge moments later with the limp body of the Worm, which he heaved onto the coals. It coiled like a snake and sizzled into black. The Good Fairy lit up like a bundle of kindling. The Devil turned red and then was engulfed by the flames, home at last in his element. They were dead things, miniature creations that burned without a scream or a gasp. Kay watched as Finch unwound the wires holding her old body in place. A look of wistfulness crossed the puppeteer's face as she threw the doll in the bonfire, the hair and clothes catching first, a river of red lacing across the fabric edges, and then the whole went up and burned blue, the body crackling in the October night. Quickly it was little more than ashes and a charred head, barely discernible from an ordinary piece of wood, from all of her comrades. Curious to see one's self disappear that way, curiouser still to be intact and anew.

The mood around the dying fire turned somber. The boy yawned mightily, and the girl gathered the empty bottles. The others began to stretch and shake the cobwebs from their bones. The new puppets were so large that they had to be carried one by one into the barn, and the Queen required both Finch and Stern to hoist her into place in an area that had once served as a tack room. When they had put all of the puppets to bed, the puppeteers left, heading back to the farmhouse, weary and pleased with their night's work. Looking back at the troupe, the Deux Mains paused at the barn door.