The Transfiguration of Mister Punch (21 page)

“I’d rather die,” Joan said.

From the back of the stage, Rasputin appeared. “You don’t know what you are?” he said.

Rasputin affixed the chains to her ankles (the dogs let go) and to her hands (Sir Neville let go). The key, Rasputin placed in his pocket. Then, he removed a square of paper from his other pocket. He placed it in her hand, didn’t meet her gaze. She dropped the paper, raised her chin and peered at the ceiling. She would swing so hard that she would crash into the roof and break either it or herself. Crack her sanity if nothing else. Best that she was as insane as Sir Neville, the Adams Group players and the vicious dogs that thought of only tearing flesh.

Rasputin picked up the piece of paper. “It’s yours, not mine. I stole it from you.”

Her fingers curled around it. At the snap of Rasputin’s fingers, as if he were their puppeteer as much as hers, all began to disperse. Sir Neville clanged back to the top of the auditorium, the Adams players slumped in their seats and picked up their instruments, and the Toby dogs chased flakes of sawdust back into the dark behind the stage. The place she had never been to. The place where men and women screamed.

Joan danced back, out of sight of the players. Picked a corner of the stage where shadows fell to conceal her from Sir Neville. She smoothed the paper between her fingers, unfolded it. Scrawled in black ink, in what may or may not be her handwriting (she had nothing to compare it with), the words...

Remember, you are not a real girl.

Kerfuffle composed of ham-fisted attempts to play guitar, saxophone and violin, the clang of metal arms and whispered voices seeped from the auditorium. Stijn tried to ignore it. If he ignored it then maybe Punch wouldn’t hear it. Mr. Punch, Stijn corrected, reverting to weasel. Had to be careful or else he’d call the old relic Punch to his face. If he did, he’d have to replace several body parts, assuming Punch (Mr) didn’t squash Stijn’s head between his substantial palms. Stijn offered the monster a thin smile, baring crooked yellow teeth.

Punch looked towards the auditorium. “Is there dissension among your players?”

Before Stijn could brush it off as the usual nonsense, a metallic whine filled the theatre. Sir Neville’s alarm. Stijn jumped about, his lop-sided gait adding humour to the act, before Punch, as if performing a routine, anything to keep Punch from striding back into the auditorium. Whatever had happened was not of Punch’s concern and Stijn didn’t want Punch concerning himself with it. It wouldn’t end well for Stijn. Punch swatted Stijn aside, causing Stijn to fall against the concession stand, to crack his back against its sharp edge. By day’s end there’d be nothing left of him. He should scoot out, leave the theatre to Punch’s whim and collect some thread. He also needed to sharpen his needles. Stijn wanted clean cuts through his skin. He saved the blunt needles and the pain for those he constructed. Better that they fear him.

Punch wiped his hands down his suit jacket. “You are a waste of many men; none of them good.”

Rubbing his lower back, Stijn almost said something suicidal.
I managed to evict you from Hell.
He didn’t though, despite its possible truth. For the moment, Punch believed he needed Stijn and for as long as that continued, Stijn should survive almost intact. Fingers and toes could be replaced. Everything but his brain could be rebuilt.

“We agreed I could continue to run the theatre.”

“Really, little man. You think I would make agreements with you.”

Punch’s cane slapped against his left leg. He looked from Stijn to the auditorium and from the auditorium to Stijn. Even Punch couldn’t deal with two curiosities at once.

Punch said, “Oh wait. I do believe you agreed to supply me with enough body parts until such time as Hell decides to reopen the cavern to us. Then, my dear friend, we will ride the River Styx together and this time we won’t be content with one cavern. We’re taking Hell. That is the only
agreement
I recall and you have come short. I will collect all the parts you have and be done with you. Maybe I’ll allow you to stay in this measly world. I am fit to be done with you.”

Despite the seemingly tempting offer, Stijn didn’t want to give up all he’d built. Why should he?

Punch tapped his cane against the auditorium doors, as if checking to find if there was anything untoward within, things such as fights or fire. Although, Stijn expected Punch to jump into such melees. With a second tap of Punch’s cane, the doors sprung open and curiosity carried Punch into the auditorium. If Hell hadn’t already broken loose, Stijn would expect it to do so now. Limping on mismatched feet, Stijn followed Punch into the auditorium.

On stage, Joan dangled from her chains (nothing unusual about that). The dogs snapped at her ankles. Sir Neville stood and rearranged himself. Now his metallic heart ceased whining. Stijn’s fingernails bit into his palm.

“Curious,” Punch said.

Stijn hoped it looked like a regular, if chaotic, theatre scene. If Stijn remained calm then Punch may think nothing untoward was happening. He wouldn’t know that Sir Neville should never be on the stage, although, Sir Neville was likely to announce that fact in his cock-a-hoop way or by apologising for not being at his ticket collecting spot. Sometimes, you could train staff too well. Of course, Sir Neville was an idiot.

Sir Neville creaked down the stairs, leaving the on stage drama to play without him. Rasputin climbed up a rope ladder to the flies. He would lift Joan out of the dogs biting range.

“May I take your ticket, Sir? May I take your ticket, Sir? May I...?”

Punch’s cane thwacked against the side of Sir Neville’s head. The clang reverberated through the theatre. Joan ceased her struggle, the dogs stopped biting, and someone in the orchestra dropped a fiddle. With the second thwack of the cane, Joan began to rage against her chains. She screamed, offering a hell of a caterwaul that would draw punters from the next town.

“If you hurt him, I won’t dance for you again.”

“And you are?” Punch asked, his voice a whisper that Joan couldn’t possibly hear. He asked Stijn, “Who is she?”

“A puppet.”

Did he really hope to get away with such a simplistic answer? He couldn’t tell Punch that Joan’s head was the one that had clung by its teeth while they exited Hell. He’d determined Punch believe that he alone had survived, had not turned to mush. Monsters had no qualms about replacing their minions. Stijn dug his fingers into the back of a velour seat. He hated to think of himself as a minion.

“She strikes me as a girl made of different people. Plus, her face looks familiar. As for this monstrosity”—Punch kicked Sir Neville—“I would hang his trinket-like parts in my hall of found things. You make weak monsters, Frankie.”

“Stijn.”

Punch sneered. “Really. When you have been making people rather than tearing them apart.”

“Easier to march into Hell with a ready made army.”

“Only because it was my idea, not yours. Remember that, Stijn. Then you may keep your chosen name along with your head.”

Had he the means to tear apart and rebuild
Stijn
, Punch would replace the little man’s backbone with something pliable.

“Play me for a fool and I’ll gain more satisfaction in dismantling you and mounting your head on a pole than in returning to Hell.”

Still, Punch couldn’t deny that an army to command and to take over Hell with, and whoever had dared evict him from it, suited him. If there was a devil, he meant to dethrone him. He twirled his cane, then slammed it against the back of a chair. Dust rose in mushroom-shaped clouds.

The dancing girl intrigued him. If he were to name her, he’d call her Defiance. Although shackled and despite her initial rage, she hung calm, calculating a way to turn a situation to her advantage. She wouldn’t play him. He sauntered towards the stage. In the orchestra pit men and instruments cowered. Pathetic creatures. If he were made up of many different people, Punch would expect to be stronger not weaker, yet these men were diluted somehow.

They were monsters.

The girl on stage twirled her chains, rising out of view. His gaze followed her dance. The metal man stumbled up the steps with a clang-click-clang. Punch ran up the stairs, chasing after the metal man with his cane aloft. The metal man didn’t flinch. At the top of the auditorium, the metal man stopped and held out his hands, the palms wooden, like a schoolboy expecting the cane.

“Ticket, sir?”

What use would such a man be in taking over Hell?

“You’re not even a man,” Punch said.

“Cock-a-hoop if the same can’t be said of you, Sir.”

“Sir Neville is a fool,” Stijn said, interjecting between them.

“You would name someone and give them supposed stations above you. Sir indeed.”

“Each finds their own name,
Mr
Punch. Mostly.”

Chains rattled. The girl began to lower and skip towards the edge of the stage, listening in on their conversation. There was something familiar about the turn of her nose and the glint to her eye. Had they met before? They considered each other.

“Who is she?” Punch asked, again.

“Joan.”

Her name explained nothing. Nor did it suit her.

“And?”

“Her left leg belonged to an octogenarian who fell out of her wheelchair when someone placed a stack of theatre programmes in the way of the chair’s wheels. The right came from a teenager caught in a mantrap when she went snooping in the theatre basement. Her body and arms, original to each other, belonged to a dancer who, thinking this an ordinary theatre, auditioned and lost her footing when Rasputin, our puppeteer, lumbered onto the stage with chains.”

“And her head?”

“I forget.”

On stage, the girl’s arms sagged. Fight deflated and lifted to swirl with disturbed sawdust.

“And you dare to label me a monster?” Punch said.

“I don’t recall using any such word.”

“In my hearing and because you fear I’ll drag you back to Hell and mount your head on the grate which the canal runs through to the River Styx. That I will leave you in a state of permanent drowning,” Punch said, rubbing his palms together.

“That would do it, Sir. Yes, that’s the way to do it.”

On stage, Joan began to sob.

Chains cut her wrists, but Joan no longer cared. Let metal sever her hands. Let it loop around her neck to snap tendons and muscles, to play executioner. What had Stijn said she was made up of?

A teenager. An octogenarian. A dancer.

Remember, you are not a real girl.
How could she have believed she was different to the others in theatre with their patchwork body parts? The true Joan, or whatever her real name, was no more than a brain and a not-so-pretty face. Yet, she had made each new limb and organ hers, and she should respect them, free them from this foolish theatre.

“Who am I?” Joan called across the auditorium.

Stijn and Mr Punch moved towards her, leaving Sir Neville at the back of the auditorium. Did Sir Neville remember what he had done to her? She’d thought them friends. Silly thought to have had when they’d never spoken. They’d shared a bond though. Both of them trapped in this theatre, although by different means. You never truly knew who your friends were. You couldn’t without seeing into their hearts and although Sir Neville’s ticked for all to hear and displayed a variety of cogs, it wasn’t made of glass. If she made men, Joan would give them glass hearts that pulsed and tongues that couldn’t lie.

Stijn and Punch climbed onto the stage. They observed the freak. They watched her. Tears stopped. She wouldn’t show them weakness. She would hang limp until they decided she wasn’t worth the effort and cut her loose. Her body would drip with rotten tomatoes thrown by unsatisfied audiences. The show was over.

“Her face intrigues me,” Mr Punch said.

“My face,” she corrected. Was she murderer or murdered? “It’s all a farce.”

“A farce that I may dissemble tonight or whenever whim takes me.”

“Dismantle me. I refuse to care. I won’t cower from you like he does. And, I’ll never cower from him again.” Joan gathered spit in her mouth and spat its ball onto Stijn’s hooked nose.

Mr Punch clapped. His ovation didn’t move her. She’d heard plenty in her time. The beat of hands and the stomp of feet were not things of pleasure; they meant her captors had won, that they had made her perform their dance. To think she had almost escaped. Damn, Sir Neville.

“Who are you?”

“She is a collection of nobodies,” Stijn said.

Pain stabbed Joan’s chest. Tears pricked. She would not cry in front of these monsters. No cries. No scream. She’d promised them nothing.

“I am someone other than the Joan he calls me. He doesn’t know my real name.”

Mr Punch walked around her, appraising her like meat hanging from a hook. That’s what she was, Joan supposed, a collection of joints to be removed and changed at will.

“May I know your real name?” Punch asked.

Stijn smirked. He should replace his lips. Their fullness didn’t suit his mean personality. “She doesn’t know either.”

In the lobby, the theatre clock chimed seven pm. Sir Neville’s cue to open the doors and allow the hungry to enter.

“Who are the fools?” Joan asked. “Me for performing against my will, Rasputin for making me dance to his captor’s tune, the audience for paying to see a freak dangle from the stage to a disorganised orchestral accompaniment?”

“Rasputin,” Mr Punch said. “Pull down the curtain.”

In the flies, Rasputin jumped from one board to another to reach the curtain pull. Red velvet fell with a crash, its weights slamming against the boards. The orchestra and their instruments jumped and scratched and whined. The auditorium filled with voices.

Punch’s cane swiped the air, a dizzying thwack that caught her leg. Joan kicked out, toes catching Mr Punch’s wrist. His cane spun heavenward. It struck the beam about which her chains were looped, splintering wood, before falling back into Mr Punch’s hand.

The dogs skidded onto the stage, teeth tearing at the curtain, attempting to part it and reveal this farcical play to the audience. Instead of hitting Joan with the cane—after all she was the one who’d kicked him—Mr Punch slapped it against Stijn’s legs. Stijn fell to his knees. Oh, let the curtain rise now. Joan kicked forward, attempted to pull the curtains aside with her toes. For once the audience would clap at something other than her degradation.