The Motion of Puppets (23 page)

“Make our introductions to the others,” said the Queen. “Pay our respects to the Original, if he is out there. Play the diplomat with your smiles and sweet words. But find out what you can. Express our hope and desire to be a full part of the community under this one roof, but make sure you uncover any secrets they might hold. Be a good spy and ambassador. We are counting on you.”

“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?” Noë 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, Noë 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.”

Noë 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. Noë 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.

What would he think if he suddenly saw her in the barn? So changed as to be unrecognizable. He would walk right past her as though she were a stranger. Or a stranger still. There was so much she had not told him, sides to her personality kept secret during the months of dating and even after they had moved in together, after the wedding, too. She had always thought there would be time for the whole story. And he, too, hidden by the past, a stranger in many ways, the life he had away from her, the teaching he would be good at, he was a generous and patient man, and she imagined a gaggle of coeds would fall in love with him every semester. The French seduction. A man of words. Muybridge, she recalled suddenly. White beard, animals in motion. She could picture her husband hunched over the pages, moving Muybridge between languages. At the table, his shirtsleeves rolled up, and a serious frown of concentration that sometimes frightened her. Theo.

“What did you say?” the Good Fairy asked.

She would have blushed had blood run beneath her skin. “Theo,” she said at last. “Theo was his name. It just came back to me again. Sometimes my mind comes and goes about the way things used to be.”

With a creak of wooden bones, the Good Fairy sat beside her and put an arm around her shoulder, a weariness in the motion. A twig snagged on Kay's collar.

“Better you forget all about him,” the Good Fairy said, as they untangled.

“I don't think about him much, except to wonder if he misses me. If he is curious about what happened, or if he has forgotten about me yet.”

The Good Fairy rubbed her back in wide circles, the rough fingers scratching an itch that had not existed before. “I used to be just like you. When I first came into this world, it was passing strange. Imagine my surprise to find I'd been changed into this scarecrow, this bundle of kindling, where before I was a person just like you and the rest. For the longest time, I ached to be who I once was, to see my people—Lord, how I missed them. But I made my peace with it, took the advice of Mr. Firkin and the Queen and just put the past where it belonged. There is no past, only the right now. Much more appealing to think about what is to come.”

“Well, what is to come?” Kay asked. “Are we to be here for long? I heard the Deux Mains say to the people in the village that the next shows will be in the spring. Does that mean we'll be shut inside through the whole winter?”

“You'll learn,” the Good Fairy said. “Don't measure the days as you once did, not as something to be endured but as an opportunity to rest. And savor the moments for what they allow.”

Behind them came a drumming on the floor, starting out slowly and softly and increasing in speed and volume. Noë stomped her feet and growled, the tantrum intensifying till she threw her hands in the air and howled and caterwauled. “All winter, all winter. I can't stand another minute.” Shrieking, she ran across the room and sped around the corner, heading for the barn door. The puppets were too shocked to react immediately, and they stood there, stunned, as her screams bounced off the walls, a spray of curses as she fought the lock.

Nix and Mr. Firkin were the first to move, and the others quickly followed, even the little dog madly barking at the commotion. Kay and the Good Fairy brought up the rear, trailed only by the Queen, who seemed to glide, her robes flowing like a bridal train. They found Noë gnashing her teeth, wailing uncontrollably at the stubborn bar. As soon as she saw them, she banged her skull against the wood. “I'll go mad if I don't get out.”

Reaching over the tops of their heads, the Queen grabbed Noë by the scruff of her neck and silenced her. She lifted her as if no more than a rag doll and wrapped her tightly in her arms. Noë sobbed against the Queen's bosom. Trembling, Noë tried to catch her breath, but the attempts to stop herself only exacerbated the emotions. The others watched, wondering whether the Queen would crush her wire and paper body or offer comfort.

“There, there, child,” the Queen said. “We must have none of this. You know better. You know there is no way out by yourself.”

“I want to go home,” Noë said.

The Queen stroked her face, ran her fingers over the bristly stubble on her bald head. They all waited for the sobbing to subside, reluctant witnesses to her despair.

“I want … I want…” And Noë lost control again and buried herself more deeply in the billowy largeness of the Queen.

Kay could not bear to watch the suffering of her friend. She moved away from the pack, leaned against the wall, and peered through the crack between two boards. Another day approached. In the yellow and lavender light and shadow, she could see the frost coating the grass. In the jagged starlight under the setting moon, the ground sparkled and danced. Theo would have been mesmerized. Gathering her in his arms, he would have stood behind her, holding her until the night gave way. She, too, would go mad if she never saw him again.

*   *   *

Aboard ship on the Atlantic, Muybridge looked back at the United States of America for what would be the last time. Going home at last, back to England, back for good. He was sixty-four, but felt like an old man with a young man's ambition. Turning toward the east, Helios, god of the sun, going back to its rising. The year before, his zoopraxiscope had played motion pictures at the world's fair in Chicago. He had met with Edison and Étienne-Jules Marey, worked in Philadelphia with the painter Thomas Eakins. He had toured the country, gone to and come back from Europe, lecturing to enthusiastic crowds enchanted by his moving images. The foundation had been laid for his two masterworks,
Animal Locomotion
and
The Human Figure in Motion,
but all he could think about on the wild gray sea was his wife and her lover, Harry Larkyns, and the bullet to the heart. And all that might have been.

“Only photography has been able to divide human life into a series of moments, each of them has the value of complete existence,” Muybridge once wrote. Each moment part of a series, yet separate and complete somehow, the motion but an illusion, the way to mark time. He could see his wife twist her neck, the realization of what was to happen clearly marked on her face, the recognition in that split second of all that had passed and all that was to come. That scoundrel's eyes bore a permanent regret. All in the space between the smile and the squeeze of a trigger.

New York harbor receded on the horizon. Muybridge rubbed his great white beard and spat into the ocean. He had stopped time, yes, but it could not be unwound, reversed, replayed. There was only one direction: forward.

Theo added the final page to the manuscript and put down his pen. Finished, but for the last revisions. When Kay first disappeared, he had blamed that man from the circus, that seedy old ringmaster, and Theo would have shot that roué had he a gun. But now he was not so sure. Now he had convinced himself that she had made it to the Quatre Mains puppet shop that night and had vanished from there.

She had disappeared once before.

They had been dating three or four months and had arranged to meet at the Central Park Zoo on a Sunday afternoon. She had wanted to see the penguins. He had wanted to see her. So much so that he arrived an hour early and settled in on one of the benches facing the circular pool where the sea lions cavorted on the rocks, the feeding routine drawing in the young families and children like magic. Theo watched the people come and go, idly speculating about his future with Kay, the prospect of bringing their own children to the zoo, to the park. And on the bench in that hour, he decided that one day soon he would ask her to marry him.

When she did not show up at the appointed hour, he wandered over to the iron fence that separated the zoo from the street, and there she was. At first, the sight of Kay amid the crowds of tourists was an early and welcome surprise. But there was something wrong. From the distance, he could see only her animated motions. She gestured to a man who leaned in closer, his face red with anger. They were arguing, he could tell, and unsure of himself, he froze on the bench and watched the show play out with dismay. When Kay tried to break away, the man grabbed her by the arm and would not let go. Theo sprang to his feet and raced toward the fence. He recognized the man from the rooftop party near the Flatiron. Her old boyfriend.