The Motion of Puppets(45)
“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-maché. 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.