The Motion of Puppets(48)
“We’ll go to the toy shop after midnight,” Egon said. “We check into our hotel rooms and have a bite. I’m famished.”
The sound of his friend’s voice broke Theo’s reverie, and he tumbled back into the hole of grief. “I shouldn’t have come. I’m not ready to face it.”
“Buck up. I’ll keep you safe.”
The little man patted his thigh, and the spell was broken.
Bellies full with rich food and beer, Theo and Egon waddled over to rue Saint-Paul in a thick fog that had settled in the Basse-Ville. The few people about at such a late hour appeared as shadows in the mist, and the ring of their shoes was muffled by the damp and cold. Looking down the street of lost dreams, Theo shivered in the October air. The quiet ate him and he disappeared into the scene, his mind a blank, barely registering his friend by his side or the closed and darkened shops and cafés they passed. Egon grabbed him by the wrist to stop him from walking right by the Quatre Mains toy shop, the painted letters on the sign cracked and faded.
Theo pressed his face against the window, opaque as a television screen. Nothing to be seen, nothing but faint memories of when Kay had delighted in the toys on display. A phantom hand pressed against his back from the times she had to lean into him, holding herself from leaping through the looking glass.
“This way,” Egon said, motioning for him to follow. “That’s just the surface of things.”
Turning sideways, he crabbed his way along a narrow alley, the passage tight and claustrophobic. When they came to the end, Egon shrugged a messenger’s bag from his shoulder and produced a small flashlight. Theo turned on the app on his smartphone, which cast a beam and threw into relief the rear entrance, a few sticks of broken furniture littered about like bones. Someone had locked the door. With a crudely fashioned pick, Egon forced the lock and they were quickly in the back room. Dead center sat a table, dark and massive as a tomb, and along the walls rows of shelves and cubbies were coated with dust and debris. They sleuthed their way into the showroom and found the staircase, the treads creaking disconcertingly under their weight. Pale light from the streetlamps shone through the front windows, but they headed for the dark side. Egon crossed himself like a lapsed Catholic at the closed door. A thread of light glowed at the jamb.
“Here goes nothing,” he said. “If those puppets come spilling out, make way. My legs may be short, but I’ll knock you over like a bowling pin.”
The room appeared just as Theo had imagined from Egon’s description. A chair lay on its back, two legs in the air, and a tumble of books and boxes were strewn on the floor behind it. A rumpled pillow sat on the unmade bed, and beside it on the night table stood a nearly empty bottle of whiskey. Tacked to the walls were Egon’s circus pinups and Victorian postcards. An aroma of fried onions hung in the air. In the ceiling, a rectangle opened to the attic.
“Up there,” Egon whispered, shutting off his flashlight. “But I’m sure the hatch was closed when I left. It nearly took off my thumb when I was escaping.”
“Well, it is open now, so perhaps your memory is at fault.”
“Or perhaps they opened it again.…”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Just be careful.”
“What do you mean be careful? You don’t suppose I’m crawling up there by myself?”
“Let’s be practical, mon ami. First, I could barely reach the attic on the top of a stack of boxes and books on top of the chair. When it all came tumbling down, I nearly killed myself.”
The fallen chair and the hole in the ceiling made the room look like a crime scene, a botched suicide without the twisted rope, without the body hanging from the beams. Theo listened for a sign from above, a rustle in the attic, but the room was cold and silent. Beside him, the little man bounced on the balls of his feet.
“Okay, okay, though I’m not sure if this isn’t a big mistake.” Theo righted the chair and stood on the seat below the opening, finding his reach too short to hoist himself up. Watching from below, Egon found the thickest book nearby and handed it to him, and after an abortive try, Theo finally pulled through the opening and rolled away from the edge across the dirty floor. The diffused light made it impossible to see more than shapes and shadows, so he called for Egon to throw him the flashlight.
He had expected monsters, but they must have been hiding or fled the scene. Here and there, small footprints and handprints appeared in the dust, but these he guessed were Egon’s. The long string hanging from the ceiling brushed against him like a spider’s silk, and when he tugged on it, the light came on and revealed no puppets, no giraffe with a broken neck, no toys at all.
“There’s nothing up here,” Theo hollered down. “Just a bunch of boxes and some old books.”
“Are you sure? There should be an army of satanic dolls. Heads that can talk. Dummies that can reach out and grab you.”
“You want to come up and check for yourself? All this way for nothing.”
“I swear they were there. Someone must have come got them. Or maybe they ran away. Check in the boxes at least.”
The first carton he opened held scraps of cloth, tiny dresses and miniature coats, a bag of funny small hats, and at the bottom an armory of wooden swords, popguns, and slapsticks. When he cracked the seal on the second box and folded back the lid, he gasped at what was inside—dozens of tiny hands with carved and articulated fingers and thumbs. Another box was filled with eyes, glass and marble and painted ping-pong balls, all staring back at him, the irises gleaming in the light of the bare bulb. A box of wigs, a box of tiny circus props, a wooden hoop, a lion tamer’s whip, a juggler’s balls and clubs and rings.