The Motion of Puppets(78)
Theo shook his great ghostly head. “I am looking for Kay.”
Silenus scratched his head, dislodging the laurel garland from his head, but he took no notice that it had slid to cover one eye. “They are all above in Elysium. I had to take my leave of their giddy-paced shindig. Too much for me. But ask the Original, he knows everyone. Before you go, take a holiday, Old Haunt. I have no one else to talk to but this little ass.”
The donkey brayed its complaints.
“I must go,” Theo said. “I have an appointment to keep before dawn.”
“Yonder love awaits,” the old drunk said. “Chase her if you must, but remember you must keep what you catch.” He flopped back suddenly and was asleep again before his head hit the pillow. The little donkey shifted till they were side by side like spooning lovers.
Rising carefully, Theo straightened his costume and rehearsed how to appear to be floating as he headed for the stairway. The music swelled as he climbed each step, the conversations rising and falling in symphony and dissonance. Through the small holes in his mask, Theo saw flashes of light and color till all at once he reached the top and the room exploded into cacophony. A mad attic full of nightmares. Puppets everywhere, so many that he was frightened enough to consider retreating to the peace and quiet of the bower. Wait for Egon—where the hell was he? But Theo pressed on, lifting himself across the threshold, and stepping away from the opening, finding a shadow near the wall to soak it all in.
Small and tall, little fairies twirling on wires and giants walking as if on stilts. Fat and bone thin, a tree person, flat shadows propelled by sticks, effigies, dogs and cats and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse on cardboard horses dark as molasses. Three little pigs and nine little babies. Huge heads bouncing along on their jaws. A carnival on acid, a mad costume party with the empty costumes walking, talking, dancing, singing. A couple of marionettes locked in an embrace. A juggler spinning a bird on the end of a string in an infinite loop.
Hot in his overstuffed head, Theo breathed in the aroma of paper and paste, balsa and coiled wire. His mouth tasted of sawdust and ink. With no holes for his ears, Theo could not easily make out the directions of the sounds which seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at all.
A little dog, no bigger than a toy, found him out at once. It sniffed around the hem of his costume and whimpered at the alien scent, and Theo tried to nudge it away with his toe. A beautiful Japanese woman in a luminous kimono rushed to his rescue, but she stopped short when she apprehended his costume.
“A g-g-g-ghost!” she screeched, and her eyes rolled back to an awful yellow, and red horns stuck out of her forehead, and her smile became a rictus of horrible pointed teeth. Theo blanched and thought this must be the devil the others had warned him about, but just as he started to speak to her, a samurai crept up behind her and with one swift stroke chopped off her head. It rolled across the floor, laughing. Yapping and snarling, the little dog chased after her noggin in a macabre game of fetch. Arms extended, the headless body took off blindly to try to find it first.
“Do not worry,” the samurai said. “She will trip over it soon enough, and we will patch her up before dawn.”
Theo floated away from the racket to find a quiet vantage to pick through the crowd, trying to distinguish the familiar from the strange. Looking for those from the Halloween parade, he spotted the Three Sisters at once. In a line with men in Russian costumes, the tallest sister had hitched up her skirts to dance the kazotsky, her hinged legs kicking out like a Cossack’s, a broad smile striping her face. Two children were climbing on the shoulders of the puppet made from twigs and branches, and he saw as well the old woman asleep in a rocking chair, oblivious to the chaos all around her. The Devil was in hiding.
His first glimpse was fleeting and from behind her, a flash of hair, the curve of a bare arm. The woman with the straw hair was facing him, directly opposite, deep in a corner of the room. Even from a distance, she looked bereft, and another woman reached out to offer what seemed to be a gesture of consolation. Half-hidden by the crowd, she turned toward him slowly, a series of still images that coalesced into a whole motion. He saw her face again. Kay. Alive. In the form of a puppet, but Kay at last. He broke and crumbled. At last, at last, at last.
*
The Original could not rein in his anger. While all around him the maenads and satyrs cavorted, he paced creaky and stiff legged, muttering to himself. “Beware of me? The Queen said to beware of me. Of the so-called others. That’s a fine irony, coming from her. Beware the Queen is more like it. She is a monster, a tyrant, the very bitch of power and duplicity.”
Kay cowered in front of the little wooden doll, uncertain what to say to cool his temper.
“I make the overture,” he said. “I extend the olive branch and what answer has she? I cannot come to your party. She warns you and all my friends from the Quatre Mains of me? I ask you, who is in the wrong here? That minx, that trollop, that petty husk of paper and glue.” He scratched the scar line that bisected his chest, and his eyeholes glowed with ire.
“To be fair, sir, she gave us permission to attend, and we were concerned that you had taken our friend, that you may have unmade the Devil.”
“Murdered the Devil, is that what she’d have you believe? And I suppose her fat friend is in on this, too. Firkin, hah. Why would we want to get rid of the Devil? Why would we want to lose anyone at all? The Queen is under a misguided impression if that’s the story she bruits about. I am all for harmony among the toys. Every puppet in his place, follow the rules, and you will find happiness. And peace, order, freedom.”