The Motion of Puppets(55)
“The Devil knows how to flatter,” he said, and he backed away into the darkness of the hall.
The puppets listened in nervous silence after he left. The Good Fairy thought she heard the click of his cloven feet on the floor above them. Irina claimed she heard him moving below, but then they all realized the noise came from the Worm wriggling in the tightness of the cellar. Bored, Nix picked up three balls and juggled to pass the time, and subdued conversations gave way to general chatter.
“I wonder what is taking him so long,” Kay said.
“Dahlink, you mustn’t worry,” Olya said. “He is a big boy, perfectly capable of taking care of himself in any circumstance—”
A loud scream echoed from faraway. An almost human scream like the wail of a rabbit caught in a snare. A second tortured gargle sifted through the halls. All talk ceased, and the puppets cast worried looks at one another, and nobody spoke. A sudden flurry ensued, crashing and tumbling from the loft, and just as quickly it stopped, and the quiet returned, an emptiness filled with unspeakable dread and malice.
“The dear thing,” the Good Fairy said.
They waited until dawn, the light slipping in through the cracks and gaps in the barn walls, the signal for them to return to their places. The light thinned over the course of the morning, and then rain began to fall and continued through the afternoon, a cold rain that spread gloom in the stalls and dampness along the wooden boards, a foretaste of winter. No human entered the barn, and the only sound save the constant patter of the rain was a single moan from the Worm in the dismal cellar. An endless day with nothing to do but wait and think.
At midnight, Mr. Firkin lit a small lamp and announced the amnesty had commenced. Some expected the imminent return of the Devil, freed again from the constraints of the moon. Others pondered the meaning behind the commotion of that night.
“Do you think they got him?” No? asked, and Kay put a finger to her lips.
The Old Hag twisted a handkerchief into knots. “He should be back home by now. What could be keeping him?” The little dog curled at her feet and whimpered at the melancholic tone of her question.
“Should I go look for him?” Nix asked at last, and the rest rebuked him at once.
“Do you think the Original is with the others?” The Old Hag shuddered. “What a horrible thought. Who knows what he might decide?”
“We will hope a while longer,” said the Queen. “There is no sense sending out a search party.”
“Or all of us disappearing, one by one,” Masha said. She had expressed the unthinkable and cast a pall over the general unease in the room that lasted the whole night. Toward dawn, from the bowels of the building, a strange voice called out and was met with a round of hearty laughter. The puppets took it as a sign that the Devil would not be back.
“He’s gone,” Mr. Firkin said as he turned off the lamp. “But we must keep the protocols. Places, please, everyone.”
The storm had ended. The last of the raindrops dripped from the eaves, the music like a dirge. The Queen sighed and retired from her throne. With a clap and a whistle, the Old Hag called the little dog, who jumped into her arms and fell fast asleep. In the trough, the Three Sisters laid their bodies down, and the jester put away his juggling and bound together the loose twigs and sticks at the Good Fairy’s hands and feet.
Disobeying the curfew, No? spoke to Kay. “Do you think they have killed him? Has he been unmade?”
“Shh. We don’t know what happened to the Devil. We don’t even know what’s out there.”
No? snapped a straw from her head and worried it with her fingers. “Do you think they will come for us? They will kill us, too.”
“Nobody’s dead. Nobody’s killed. Nobody knows.”
Mr. Firkin hissed from his spot. “Quiet. Not a word after dawn. Not a word.”
18
Nobody came and nobody went. During the daytime, the barn was calm and hushed. Mice scurried along the walls, and in the rafters a mourning dove, reluctant to make the fall migration, cooed and waited for a reply that would never come. From sunrise to sundown, the old boards ticked and moaned as the cold and warmth alternately played off the wood. The people had departed or perhaps stayed inside the farmhouse, nobody could tell, but the familiar sounds of car engines or wheels along the gravel had all but ceased. Nights were quieter still; the bark of a fox, the cough of a deer would startle a soul. And after midnight, when ordinarily they would have had the run of the place, the puppets were too scared to move.
The disappearance of the Devil made them question their faith. Not in the Quatre Mains—they had long ago learned to mistrust him and his seemingly random capacity to dispatch one of their number into the void. But now they feared the others, the unknown lurking just beyond the cramped chamber into which they had been stuffed. Some accepted the close quarters with stoic forbearance. “Make the best of your situation is my motto,” Mr. Firkin said more than once. Others could not tolerate the claustrophobia. No? had pulled out nearly every straw on her head. The sisters looked terrible, too, draping themselves like pashas in the trough. Masha covered her eyes with one mitt and complained of a migraine. Olya wore a path in the sawdust, desperate for a cup of tea. Irina spoke only in sighs.
Kay did not like her new body. She felt like Alice grown ten feet tall, too big to fit into such a small room after tasting from the bottle labeled DRINK ME. “Which would you have liked best,” she remembered from her nursery Wonderland. “To be a tiny Alice, no larger than a kitten, or a great tall Alice, with your head knocking against the ceiling?” Kay had been small as a kitten, and under the circumstances, given a choice, she preferred that size. She was taller than she had been when she lived in the real world. She was bigger than her husband.