The Motion of Puppets(85)
“Ah, here is what I wanted to show you, Dr. Mitchell.” With a showman’s flourish, he pulled back a purple scrim. Stacked in two rows were a half-dozen goat-footed men and six women girded for battle.
“Satyrs and maenads,” Mitchell said.
“We used to do a spring bacchanal in my younger days. Not so often anymore. Sic transit gloria mundi.”
“And that must be old Silenus.” Mitchell pointed to the fat philosopher, silent as a stoic. A little black donkey looked like it was sleeping at his feet.
A worn and ancient puppet stood beneath a bell jar on a pedestal. The puppeteer lifted the glass. “I call him the Original. He taught me everything I know.”
Mitchell stared at the primitive puppet, wondering how the girl could be afraid of a mere toy, a little god whose time had long since passed.
From the loft, they traveled down two flights to the sheepcote at the back of the barn to see the beautiful Chinese dragon ready for the New Year, and they finished their tour by walking through the stalls. They found no trace of a break-in, no sign at all that anyone had been there the night before. “Everything in order, gentlemen?” the puppeteer asked.
Mitchell recognized the Quatre Mains puppets from the video, the giant queen, the roly-poly man with the walrus mustache. He asked the policeman to take a photograph on his phone of the puppet who looked like Kay. The one who had reminded Theo and Egon and Dolores of the missing woman. He dared to touch her once, lightly, on her cheek, but she was only paper. She was as beautiful as Theo had described.
The terrors began that night for Mitchell, the twisted nightmares and delirium. Just before he checked himself into the hospital, he received an e-mail from an Inspector Thompson from Québec. “Thank you for the photograph of the puppet. Sgt. Foucault says he cannot see the resemblance, but I find it looks very much like Kay Harper, and I have included it in her file. There was another puppet in the background. A juggler? Reminded me of my brother. Funny how our sorrows play such tricks on our memories.”
Files and forms. Mitchell put Theo’s notebook on top of the manuscript in the box. The department had long ago closed the files from his classes, the materials related to his employment. All that remained fit in a simple cardboard box, a few personal effects, a dog-eared manuscript of his Muybridge translation, a photograph from their wedding day, and from Québec, a fleur-de-lis paperweight etched with the motto Je me souviens. He thought of the woman who had nursed him through the worst nightmares. When they discharged him from long-term care, Mitchell was too distraught to tell her how he felt. Perhaps he could try to find her. How difficult would it be? Maybe she could tell him what happened to Theo and Egon. Outside the snow covered the grounds, gathered in the branches of the trees, making everything new again. “I am better,” Mitchell told himself. “I will forget all this in time and start again.”
*
The puppet theater, fashioned out of an old wooden nail box, stood atop the corncrib. The Queen had to slouch to view the action, but the others were seated comfortably. Resting on his elbows, Nix stretched out on the floor to keep the little dog company. Recruited out of their ennui, Masha and Irina had designed the set, drawing on the back of a silk-screened broadside the ruined mansion and the weeping willows drooping with Spanish moss. Clouds obscured a pale moon, and a bat flew in a fixed spot in the sky.
Hiding as best they could, the three puppeteers crouched behind the box. Olya and the Good Fairy were in charge of two puppets each, and Kay controlled all the others, sometimes two in hand, sometimes four, or even six, pulling the strings wrapped around her fingertips. They had taken the tiny dolls from the ceiling, re-creating them into new characters, and making other puppets besides in the long months that had passed. Filling the winter hours with their craft, attentive to every detail, more elaborate with each new story.
She called her play Bayou Gothick, and the scenario was always the same. In the old house on the outskirts of the Vieux Carré in New Orleans, two faded southern belles were beset by some sort of nightmare visitors—spirits, imps, hobgoblins, zombies, or voodoo witches, as the mood determined. Once they found the dried exoskeletons of No?’s honeybees and fastened strings around their middles and flew them around the mansion, but the show so frightened the others that Kay banished it from their repertoire.
Trapped inside, the two belles fled from room to room, pursued by the monsters and demons, until they reached the attic, where the resident ghost kept watch. Sometimes the ghost would help them, and together the three gallants would fight off the undead intruders. Sometimes one or both of the Sisters managed to escape, but the ghost was always left behind. Alone on the stage. For he could never leave the place he haunted, the muslin ghost with the ink-stained eyes and crooked mouth. “Je me souviens!” he would cry as the Sisters ran to safety, looking back, always looking back at what they left behind. Every night the other puppets watched a different version of the show, and even though they knew how it must end, they were wrapped up in the story and clapped vigorously at the curtain call.
“Next time!” Nix shouted from the floor. “He will get away next time.”
When the cheering ended, Kay would take the strings from her fingers one by one, wind them into coils, and gently put the dolls to rest. At the conclusion of the performance, the Queen rose first and held out her arm for Mr. Firkin to escort her to her usual position. The Old Hag retired with the pup snuggling in her lap. Chastened by his soured relationship with the others, the Devil kept mostly to himself, and Nix, being Nix, whiled away the interval till dawn juggling hoops and balls.