The Motion of Puppets

by Keith Donohue

  “You see?” Egon asked. “Kay Harper.”

  A sharp pain spread like a spar of lightning in his brain. There she was. The little man across from him had a manic look in his eyes, daring him to doubt.

  “I think the bastards got her. The puppets.”

  15

  She died a second time.

  The Quatre Mains brought out the puppet from the bell jar and stood him on a tree stump to oversee the metamorphoses.

  First, they deposed the Queen. The Irishman drove a wooden stake through her chest and fastened her to a post. Two farmhands—a lanky teenage girl and a towheaded boy with earnest blue eyes—bent a section of chicken wire into a form about twice the size of a human trunk. Then they began laying down sheets of paper that had been moistened in a thick slurry of paste. As they worked on the new larger-than-life queen, they would often consult the doll pinned like a butterfly, checking to make sure they were creating a facsimile of the original.

  The rest of the puppets were similarly fixed to a spot. The Three Sisters hung by their wires on the low branch of a chokecherry tree, and Finch and Stern fashioned copies of each in papier-mâché. The remnants of a lightweight barrel provided the base for a new Mr. Firkin. Striplings and branches were collected to create the full-size Good Fairy. All the others had been lashed or secured into stationary positions while the puppeteers crafted new versions, tall as people with jointed legs and arms. At dusk, the humans quit for the day, heading off to the comfort of the farmhouse, joshing as the cool air settled in, the smell of fresh bread and a bubbling pot of stew filling the air.

  Scattered in front of the barn doors, the puppets were left alone, each next to its replica. Unable to move and wary of being heard, they spoke with one another in hushed whispers.

  “Is everyone okay?” Mr. Firkin asked.

  “I don’t like this place,” said Noë. “Everything is too big and scary.”

  “Not to mention this infernal stake straight through my heart,” said the Queen. “If I had a heart.”

  “Ugh,” said Nix. “What is happening to us?”

  Swinging from the branch like a Salem witch, Olya spoke with a world-weariness. “We are being transformed. Made over to fit in with all the others here. A change will do you good, Nixie.”

  “These are our bodies,” said the Devil. He ogled the shapes on the ground. “Getting ready for our souls. It is not every day that you get to see the next step on life’s journey.”

  Kay stole a peek at the unfinished papier-mâché torso not four feet from where she hung, bound to a fence post with a lash of baling wire. A river of melancholy threaded its way from puppet to puppet. She remembered her first days in the Back Room in Québec and the freedom they enjoyed there during the long, dark nights. “What do you mean about our souls? Are they to inhabit these new forms?”

  The Devil’s wooden joints creaked in the soft breeze. He was more hideous than usual, captured and trussed like some wild thing ready for the slaughter. “My guess is that they will destroy the old in order to create the new. Not the first time this has happened to me. Once upon a time, I was little more than a horned totem, and over the decades, I cannot begin to tell you how many lives I’ve led. One more will do no harm. The Original decides, the Quatre Mains does his bidding. Are we not puppets after all, bound to the master’s whims?”

  “Is there no end to this?” Noë said. “I will go mad.”

  From the bare limb of the maple, Olya cleared her throat. “There’s always the possibility of an ending. How soon you have forgotten our friends, the Judges. The end is always the same for each of us. One ending, and not a heppy one.” On each side, her sisters grinned in the starlight.

  “Count your blessings,” said the Devil.

  Over the next four days, the bodies took shape layer by layer, new skin, new limbs, hands and feet, and the heads attached at the end. The Irishman and his two young artisans worked longest on the faces, crafting the features in meticulous detail, the last strokes of the brush articulating the eyes. Some puppets had hinged jaws to give the illusion of speech, while other faces were frozen in a single aspect. Olya, Masha, and Irina wore masks in three shades of melancholia. The Queen’s visage was majestic and disdainful. A nearly mad look was plastered on Nix, and the Old Hag had reverted from her time as Marmee into her familiar hundred-years’ gaze. From the Québec troupe only the Dog retained his original form, a toy that roamed the barn while the others were bound to their spots. And the Worm had gone missing. Whispers at night intimated that it had been consigned to the old animal pens in the abandoned barn basement. Strange lowings emanated from the bowels of the building in the cramped stalls that led out to a grassy hillside.

  On the fourth night, after all the new forms had been completed, the puppeteers were in a festive mood. They built a fire in a ring of stones, the bark from the birch logs popping and hissing and filling the air with thick smoke. Bottles of stout were passed around, and the Irishman regaled the others with stories and songs. Stern and Finch took turns telling long and complicated jokes that ended in dreadful puns and groans and claps of appreciation for the skill of the telling. Even the tall farm girl overcame her shyness and sang a tragic air, and the towheaded boy sat wide-eyed, soaking in the camaraderie of the evening. A million stars filled the cold sky, the constellations slowly spinning away the hours of anticipation.

  With a start, the Quatre Mains rose from a log and motioned for quiet. He glanced at the ancient puppet, his face bright from the flames, and announced that the time had come. The Deux Mains held in her hands a pair of long thin spears with sharp, barbed blades strapped to the ends. With a bow, she handed one of the primitive weapons to the Quatre Mains and kept the other for herself. Holding it at eye level, he regarded the sharpness, tapping the point with the pad of his index finger, drawing a dot of blood.

  Striding without hesitation, the Quatre Mains confronted the Queen nailed to her post and thrust the spear into her body at the bottom of her rib cage. A sigh escaped from the puppet’s mouth, a puff somewhere between shock and satisfaction. With a quick clockwise twist, the Quatre Mains pulled back the spear, a clot of red snagged in the barbs, and the puppet slouched limp and lifeless. He pivoted to the new Queen, a giantess sprawled against the side of the barn, and pierced her chest at the same spot and twisted counterclockwise. When he withdrew the point, the red clot had disappeared into her. Taking turns with the Deux Mains, they repeated the process, piercing the Three Sisters, Nix and Noë, the Good Fairy, the Old Hag, and the Devil, transferring the substance from the old into the new.

  Kay was the last to go. She had witnessed the sober reaction of the humans gathered round the fire and seen the terror in her comrades’ eyes. They were dying, sacrificed in some bizarre ritual, and she wanted to escape her restraints or cry out, but even in such dire circumstances, she knew it was impossible. Her thoughts raced from the slaughter to memories of her mother, old comforter, young and singing sweetly on her walk from the henhouse, a basket of warm eggs swinging against her hip. And then her husband. She suddenly remembered his name again, Theo, Theo, Theo, but the snap of recognition was wiped away at the approach of the spear. She stole one last look at the ancient puppet she had long adored. Instead of malice, the Quatre Mains wore love and generosity on his face, as though he was presenting her with a gift rather than ending her life. He smiled when he stabbed her, and as the spear twisted where her heart had been, she said “oh,” and then the world went dark. Gasping, she regained consciousness in her new body. The hole in her chest closed like a flower.

  The Quatre Mains was no longer a giant, but a man of her own size, and at first Kay could not determine whether she had grown or he had shrunk. The others, too, had changed their dimensions, and she felt as if she had gone half mad in dreaming them up. Where had all the giants gone? The Deux Mains was just a woman of ordinary size, no monster. Stern and Finch, the Irishman, the farm girl and the blond boy, they all seemed quite normal to her now, people s
he would encounter without a second glance. From her spot in the grass, she watched as the puppeteers freed the old lifeless puppets from their fixed places, unpinning the old Queen, untangling the Sisters from the gallows in the maple tree. During the ceremony, the ancient puppet had been spirited away, his tree stump throne now vacant.

  One by one, they took the bodies down and threw them in the fire. Old Firkin went first, a whoosh as he hit the blaze, igniting at once, the air in his belly expanding till he burst. Spear in hand, the Quatre Mains left the party and went into the barn, only to emerge moments later with the limp body of the Worm, which he heaved onto the coals. It coiled like a snake and sizzled into black. The Good Fairy lit up like a bundle of kindling. The Devil turned red and then was engulfed by the flames, home at last in his element. They were dead things, miniature creations that burned without a scream or a gasp. Kay watched as Finch unwound the wires holding her old body in place. A look of wistfulness crossed the puppeteer’s face as she threw the doll in the bonfire, the hair and clothes catching first, a river of red lacing across the fabric edges, and then the whole went up and burned blue, the body crackling in the October night. Quickly it was little more than ashes and a charred head, barely discernible from an ordinary piece of wood, from all of her comrades. Curious to see one’s self disappear that way, curiouser still to be intact and anew.

  The mood around the dying fire turned somber. The boy yawned mightily, and the girl gathered the empty bottles. The others began to stretch and shake the cobwebs from their bones. The new puppets were so large that they had to be carried one by one into the barn, and the Queen required both Finch and Stern to hoist her into place in an area that had once served as a tack room. When they had put all of the puppets to bed, the puppeteers left, heading back to the farmhouse, weary and pleased with their night’s work. Looking back at the troupe, the Deux Mains paused at the barn door.

  “Good night, my lovelies,” she said. “Welcome to your new home.”

  The last lights went out in the house; the puppeteers retired to bed. Exhausted by the ordeal, the puppets stirred briefly, whispering carefully among themselves, making sure they were all present. From the floor below came a great snuffling, the sound of the new Worm readying for sleep. The Dog, who had not undergone the transformation, bounded into the tack room like a windup toy, a miniature pet that went from soul to soul, sniffing and whimpering, puzzled by old friends in new forms. Sometime before dawn, the little toy settled at the Old Hag’s feet. He kicked his paws in his sleep, at chase in his dreams.

  * * *

  “They are all naked,” Egon said. “Naked as jaybirds, every man and woman. What sort of voyeur was this? What sort of game was afoot?” He flipped through Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion, holding up a spread of images for Theo to see. In the seats across the aisle, a pair of teenage boys glanced his way every time Egon flashed another page. They had been watching with prurient interest ever since the train had crossed the border into Canada.

  “They’re not naked, they’re nude,” Theo said. “He was an artist, interested in the body in motion, the way the muscles moved, the shape of the limbs.”

  Egon was not impressed with the explanation and held up another sequence of two nude men dueling with swords. “Zounds. A fellow could be seriously hurt. So they didn’t care—way back when—that this old roué was asking these nubile men and women to strip to their birthday suits so he could take pictures of them throwing a ball or playing leapfrog without a stitch or some chick doing the dance of the seven veils?”

  “In the name of science, in the name of art.”

  Behind his back, the boys whispered to each other and leaned in to take a closer look. The train rocked along the tracks, holding them in its constant rhythm.

  In Montreal, Theo and Egon switched from the railway to the road, catching the bus to Québec City in the fading light of late afternoon. For the better part of the week, Egon had been pestering him to make the trip, to see for himself the strange attic in the abandoned toy store, working incessantly his theory of the puppets. Not that he was convinced—Theo went along to shut him up and to put his face in front of the police, remind Thompson and Foucault that he was still hoping.

  As soon as the iconic hotel Frontenac appeared like a great birthday cake atop the hill, Theo realized his mistake. Images of Kay flooded his mind. Happy days when they had first arrived in June, her radiant smile, the color of her skin against her dress. Ducking in the passages under the ramparts into Vieux-Québec, she had grabbed his arm with both hands and looked into his eyes. “It’s like a fairy tale.” And the excitement bubbling as they raced with their suitcases into the sublet apartment, twirled at the spaciousness of it, bounced from room to room, and threw open the shutters to let in the view of the Saint Lawrence, the cool air taking her breath. And then straight into the bedroom, barely pausing to shed their clothes. “Baise-moi,” she said, surprising him with her remembered French, and he was dumbstruck happy, mad with the marvel of her body, the way she hooked her legs behind his back, my acrobat. Wild with gymnastics that left him exhausted and panting, he laid his head against the slick of her chest and felt the cannon of her heart in his ear, thought he could die in the moment without another wish. He could picture her moving like a Muybridge sequence, a series of images, the woman as she rocks. And again, she ravished him later that same evening and first thing in the morning as though the novelty of this old place had unleashed a new Kay, abandoning all restraint, and he was helplessly in love.

  “We’ll go to the toy shop after midnight,” Egon said. “We check into our hotel rooms and have a bite. I’m famished.”

  The sound of his friend’s voice broke Theo’s reverie, and he tumbled back into the hole of grief. “I shouldn’t have come. I’m not ready to face it.”

  “Buck up. I’ll keep you safe.”

  The little man patted his thigh, and the spell was broken.

  Bellies full with rich food and beer, Theo and Egon waddled over to rue Saint-Paul in a thick fog that had settled in the Basse-Ville. The few people about at such a late hour appeared as shadows in the mist, and the ring of their shoes was muffled by the damp and cold. Looking down the street of lost dreams, Theo shivered in the October air. The quiet ate him and he disappeared into the scene, his mind a blank, barely registering his friend by his side or the closed and darkened shops and cafés they passed. Egon grabbed him by the wrist to stop him from walking right by the Quatre Mains toy shop, the painted letters on the sign cracked and faded.

  Theo pressed his face against the window, opaque as a television screen. Nothing to be seen, nothing but faint memories of when Kay had delighted in the toys on display. A phantom hand pressed against his back from the times she had to lean into him, holding herself from leaping through the looking glass.

  “This way,” Egon said, motioning for him to follow. “That’s just the surface of things.”

  Turning sideways, he crabbed his way along a narrow alley, the passage tight and claustrophobic. When they came to the end, Egon shrugged a messenger’s bag from his shoulder and produced a small flashlight. Theo turned on the app on his smartphone, which cast a beam and threw into relief the rear entrance, a few sticks of broken furniture littered about like bones. Someone had locked the door. With a crudely fashioned pick, Egon forced the lock and they were quickly in the back room. Dead center sat a table, dark and massive as a tomb, and along the walls rows of shelves and cubbies were coated with dust and debris. They sleuthed their way into the showroom and found the staircase, the treads creaking disconcertingly under their weight. Pale light from the streetlamps shone through the front windows, but they headed for the dark side. Egon crossed himself like a lapsed Catholic at the closed door. A thread of light glowed at the jamb.

  “Here goes nothing,” he said. “If those puppets come spilling out, make way. My legs may be short, but I’ll knock you over like a bowling pin.”

  The room appeared just as Theo had imagine
d from Egon’s description. A chair lay on its back, two legs in the air, and a tumble of books and boxes were strewn on the floor behind it. A rumpled pillow sat on the unmade bed, and beside it on the night table stood a nearly empty bottle of whiskey. Tacked to the walls were Egon’s circus pinups and Victorian postcards. An aroma of fried onions hung in the air. In the ceiling, a rectangle opened to the attic.

  “Up there,” Egon whispered, shutting off his flashlight. “But I’m sure the hatch was closed when I left. It nearly took off my thumb when I was escaping.”

  “Well, it is open now, so perhaps your memory is at fault.”

  “Or perhaps they opened it again.…”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “Just be careful.”

  “What do you mean be careful? You don’t suppose I’m crawling up there by myself?”

  “Let’s be practical, mon ami. First, I could barely reach the attic on the top of a stack of boxes and books on top of the chair. When it all came tumbling down, I nearly killed myself.”

  The fallen chair and the hole in the ceiling made the room look like a crime scene, a botched suicide without the twisted rope, without the body hanging from the beams. Theo listened for a sign from above, a rustle in the attic, but the room was cold and silent. Beside him, the little man bounced on the balls of his feet.

  “Okay, okay, though I’m not sure if this isn’t a big mistake.” Theo righted the chair and stood on the seat below the opening, finding his reach too short to hoist himself up. Watching from below, Egon found the thickest book nearby and handed it to him, and after an abortive try, Theo finally pulled through the opening and rolled away from the edge across the dirty floor. The diffused light made it impossible to see more than shapes and shadows, so he called for Egon to throw him the flashlight.