The Motion of Puppets(81)

Breathless, Nix ran over and planted himself in the middle of Theo’s story. “Join the fun. Have a go. The Devil wants to know why you aren’t dancing.”

No? tried to shoo him away. “Some of us prefer not to make spectacles of ourselves. Go to the Devil and tell him leave us be.”

Bouncing like a restless child, Nix would not be so easily deterred. “And he wants to know who you are, Ghostie. He says he never set eyes on you around here before. Where’d you come from?”

“He’s the ghost in the attic,” Kay said. “Ordinarily invisible, but he makes himself known when there’s a-haunting to be done. Go tell him that, Nix, and stop pestering us so.”

Nix pulled at the sheet. “You don’t scare me. Can you pass through walls, Ghost?”

Fearful that he would be unmasked, Theo stepped away, but the clown kept coming for him until No? stepped to his rescue. “We can’t have you misbehaving, Nix. It’s not polite to ask so many questions. How about I take you to the dance, and if I promise to take a turn with you, we can leave these poor folks alone for a moment.” She took the juggler by the hand and led him off, glancing back at Kay. “You owe me one.”

*

Theo and Kay watched till they were safely out of earshot, and he risked taking her hand in his. The paper crinkled slightly under pressure, and it did not warm to his touch. She was two things at once, her true self and simulacrum. To reconcile the conflict in his mind, he stared at her, trying to scrape away the facade and see whether she existed apart from her form. Or whether form mattered at all. He was thrilled to be so close at last.

“What has happened to you? How did they change you into this?”

“I do not know how I changed.”

“I missed you, Kay. And nearly went mad when you disappeared. I searched for you, looked every day, and saw you everywhere. The police thought you had drowned, but that was another woman. Dead, she came to me in my dreams. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t work. I was so lonesome for you.”

Kay leaned her shoulder against him. “I wondered where you had gone. Do you remember the old toy shop on the rue Saint-Paul? I was afraid someone was after me, and I went inside. When I woke up, I was in the Back Room with the puppets. I had become one myself.”

The passage out of the labyrinth of her story became clear to him. “The Queen, she said that there is only one chance to have you back as you were. We must escape this place tonight, before dawn.”

“As I was? Not a puppet?” The possibility seemed to momentarily disconcert her. She lifted her hand to eye level and considered its shape and substance, and then she looked at the rows of dancing friends, Nix and No? making their procession down the center aisle. “I don’t remember how I was.”

“You were real. A person, alive just like me.”

Her shoulders drooped, like a marionette whose strings have been unbound.

“We need a plan,” he said. “We could try to sneak away downstairs, but we would have to make it through the crowd unnoticed. And if we were not caught, we could try the front door which was—”

“Unlocked,” she said. “We heard voices outside earlier. I didn’t know it was you who was coming, but we left it unlocked.”

“Or if someone is guarding the door, we could slip out through the cellar. My friend Egon is waiting for us, and there is a third man, Mitchell, with a car out on the road.”

“Dangerous. They might see us try to leave.”

“That’s why I think it better to go through the hole in the wall up there.” He pointed to the spot a few feet off the ground where the silo joined the barn. A few boards were missing, and the opening looked wide enough to squeeze through. He stared at the spot, wondering how to sneak by the puppets and make their escape. “We’ll need a diversion. Perhaps your friend could help us? The one with the straw hair.”

He looked for her in the crowd. The puppets strolled down the line, their movements out of rhythm with the music, and he realized that their timing was off. In other respects, they seemed quite human, their size, the sophistication of their forms and features, but they could not fully disguise the time signature of their motions. Like a film played at the wrong speed, they could not quite trick the eye. Theo felt like Muybridge at his spinning-wheel camera. If he could just turn the crank with the correct rotation, he could make them appear more lifelike.

“I had not thought of No?,” said Kay. “She has helped me before. And when we were in the Back Room, she was punished for trying to escape. But she is going crazy in this place.”

“Perhaps there is someone else you could ask. That fellow she is dancing with. Or that creature made out of branches—”

Kay laughed. “The Good Fairy? I suppose I could, but what do we do about No?? Can we take her with us, Theo?”

The music stopped abruptly, and the lines dissolved, the puppets laughing and clapping and nearly falling over with fatigue. The Cat played a melancholy air on the fiddle, the strain reflecting the change of energy in the room. Quiet conversations took over. Romeo wrapped his arms around a sleepy Juliet. The ningyō monkey pulled its tail and in a slow whirr of gears curled up into a ball the size of a melon. Even the little Children of the Shoe were tired and one by one nestled against their old mother for their naps. An interlude in which to rest and find a second wind.