With a small bow of thanks, Egon continued, “Anyhow, one night the wind rattles at the windows like to blow the house down, and it sounds like there is something alive after midnight in the toy shop. I crept down the stairs. Holy cows, there was a storm inside like a tornado blowing across the floor in tight circles sending all the dust and papers and old bits and pieces of broken toys flying. I was tempted to run out, but the wind stopped after a bit, and everything went quiet.”
“You were drunk,” Theo said.
“Maybe I had one drink too many? Maybe I see the truth. I lay in bed, not able to shake the feeling that some sort of enchantment was at play. A spell, a haunting. I don’t know how to say it, but that the room was looking for something alive.”
“The room itself?” Mitchell said. “I’ve often felt that same sensation. The house with a soul.”
“So, next morning, I wake up early as usual, because I like to be about before anyone else, and I creep downstairs to the back room, and there are all these neat little heaps of debris arranged on the floor like a miniature landscape. Like that wind blew in and arranged them just so. I poke around in some of these mountains and there are doll parts, a wooden finger, a curl of hair, and cotton stuffing and sawdust and such. And that’s when I find this.” He reached into the inside pocket of his vest and produced an ordinary matchbook, holding it up like a talisman. “Tell me what you think after you have read it.”
Theo examined the matchbook. On the printed side was a silhouette of an exotic dancer at a Montreal club called Les Déesses. He turned it over and read the inscription on the blank side: “HELP. Get me out of here.” The letters penciled in a faint, unsettled hand, as though the message had been written in a hurry. He handed it to Mitchell, who seemed equally puzzled.
“Don’t you see?” Egon asked. “The message was from someone inside the toy shop, trying to get out.”
Shaking his head in disbelief, Theo took the matchbook from Mitchell and examined the note more carefully.
Egon looked him in the eye. “Some might say this message is a mere coincidence. I say the place is haunted. Or something terrible happened here. And I cannot help but feel that I was led there by the memory of a puppet in the window. The puppet you said your wife adored. I am not a superstitious man, did you ever think so? But I can’t help but feel that I was led there to find the note. I hope I have not upset you, Harper, with all this speculation, but it was a powerful feeling. Down to my bones.”
Like a magician, Theo twirled the matchbook between his fingers.
14
The van stopped and started, rolled forward a car length, and idled again in park. While they were in line, the giants switched off the air conditioning and cracked open the windows, but it was hotter than hell in back. Kay squirmed in the straw. They had been playing the theatrical vagabonds, setting up their shows and staying for a day or two at provincial hamlets, performing cleaned-up variety skits in high school auditoriums and Grange halls for clutches of country people desperate for entertainment, or afternoons with restless children, the worst of all, a crowd of tots expecting Sesame Street and getting an old slapstick Punch and Judy instead. Now they were waiting in the heat and the dark to get to the next place. Soon after the engine had been stopped, the giants began talking English with another person. Muffled by the boxes, their voices were indistinct, but Kay could tell by the rise and fall that a strange man was asking a series of questions to which the giants replied softly and politely. The doors opened and the people moved toward the back. All at once, the cargo space was flooded with light.
“Puppets,” the man said. “Now I’ve heard everything.”
“We are going down to perform a few shows here in Vermont,” the Quatre Mains said, “with our American friends.”
“So you said. Would you mind opening up a box, so’s I can have a look?”
“Any which one?” the Quatre Mains asked.
“As long as it has these puppets you were talking about. Let’s try this one here.” He tapped the edge where Kay lay. The giants removed the box and placed it on the pavement. Opening the lid, the Deux Mains took out the Three Sisters and lifted the separator above Kay and Noë and Nix. It was like looking up from an open grave. Dressed in a green uniform and a wide-brimmed hat, he towered over them and bent for a closer examination. His grip felt strange on her body as he held Kay in the air and poked around in the straw with his free hand.
“So you made all these puppets?” the green man asked.
“Every last one of them,” said the Quatre Mains. “Wood and foam and stuffing and sticks.”
“They seem so lifelike. Ever get scared that they’ll wake up in the middle of the night and come to get you?”
The Deux Mains laughed. “We keep them under lock and key when we’re asleep. No use taking any chances.”
The green man looked over her. “My partner’s giving me the thumbs-up, so your paperwork must be in order.” He handed Kay to the Deux Mains, and she could have sighed with relief over the familiar touch. “Welcome to the United States of America. Enjoy your visit to Vermont.”
The giants repacked the puppets and were about to close up the van when the green man interrupted. “And good luck with your puppet show. No, that’s not right—what are you supposed to say? Break a leg. Or break a string, I guess, since they’re puppets.”
Once they started rolling again, Kay whispered to Noë. “Did he say we’re in Vermont? Back in America?”
“Land of the free,” Noë answered. “The Green Mountains.”
“My mother lives here,” Kay said. “This was home once upon a time.”
Mornings before school, her mother used to fix Kay’s hair, separating and plaiting the strands as she sat behind her. Kay could still feel the gentle tug of her mother’s hands as she worked, the pressure to keep still, and the final gesture when she finished, her palm stroking the braid to make sure it stayed in place. Her mother’s hands. She and Kay would fold the washing together on a summer’s day, taking the sheets from the line stiff from the air, a crisp snap, Kay on one set of corners, her mother on the others, and stepping forward hand to hand to bring the ends together to her mother’s grasp. Her mother’s dusty hands patting a ball of dough, rolling it out with a wooden pin the color of honey, and scooping the thin circle to lay it into a pie pan, and pouring the mountain of Granny Smiths or peaches that glistened like golden crescent moons. Her hands holding knitting needles like two pens converting, through clicking manipulation, a fall of yarn into a scarf, a blanket, a cardigan. Her mother’s hand inside a sock monkey moving along with the funny voice to tell her a bedtime story. Her mother’s hand against Kay’s face on her wedding day, holding there for the first time in years before letting go as if to say good-bye forever.
That she could not remember her mother’s face bothered Kay. Her forgetfulness was more than a character flaw, rather a sign of a deeper disturbance that had beset her ever since she had joined the troupe. Her past had shattered like a mirror and could be apprehended only in shards and slivers. Her mother’s face had been the first she had fixed upon and was the most familiar of her entire life, and Kay knew that something had gone terribly wrong in its utter blankness. She could not recall her husband’s face either, despite their intense intimacy over the past few years. A face she had stared at for hours, days, weeks. Eyes that darted and followed her own when they had been kiss close. A smile that had lingered across a table as they earnestly discussed their future together. And now the picture of his face slipped in and out of memory with disturbing frequency.
* * *
The giants stopped for the night but left them in the back of the van. Cold air seeped into the space; a crisp autumnal chill bore right through the boxes so that even the straw lining was no protection. Not that Kay minded the cold, no more than the close air and claustrophobia of her miniature casket, but still she could feel the changes of the season. And they must have parked in some remote and deserted place, for th
e night was eerily quiet, punctuated only by the quick hooting of an owl. Her mother used to say that’s the song of a speed owl, the hoots strung together like the ringing of a telephone. She missed her mother till dawn.
Frost had formed overnight, and the stiff grass crunched under the weight of the boxes as the humans unloaded the vans. A woodpecker trilled and hammered at a tall tree. The early sunshine warmed the crates till they ticked and creaked, and happy voices filled the air. She could hear Finch and Stern and new people talking and laughing as they moved about, and the aroma of coffee and fresh bread reminded her of hunger and the welcome of breakfast.
A shadow fell across the boxes. “Let’s have a look at them.” The man’s voice was touched by a slight Irish accent.
“Right here and now?” Finch answered.
“Give them a splash of sunshine. Let them see what they’ve been got up to.”
Finch and Stern opened the boxes and laid out the puppets on the dew-damp lawn. A few fat white clouds gathered over a chain of plump mountains in the west. Pines and firs mixed with birch and maple, nearly leafless in the late autumn, and ringed the perimeter of the landscape to the horizon. A yellow farmhouse stood across the road, smoke doodling from a brick chimney. The Quatre Mains and the Deux Mains were approaching with mugs of coffee in their hands. The vans had been parked next to an old red barn, and Kay could just make out the words on a small hand-painted sign: Northeast Kingdom Puppet Museum.
The Irishman walked among the puppets, picking up those who caught his fancy, trying his hands at the sticks and strings to make Irina dance. Smitten by the Good Fairy, he cradled her in his arms, turning her over and peeking beneath her bodice to see how she had been assembled. Nix made him laugh. Noë brought a sadness to his eyes. When he drew close to Kay, he showed a kind smile on his ruddy face as if he already knew her.
“They’re grand,” he said. “Excellent carving and handiwork, but they’ll never do. Too small for our shows.”
“But we’ve come all this way,” Finch said, “on a promise.”
Clapping her on the back in solidarity, the Irishman laughed. “A man’s words is his only honor. We have a few weeks yet to Halloween. Time enough to make, what, ten or twelve out of this lot if the fair weather holds.”
Finch turned to the Quatre Mains, a look of panic in her eyes. “What does he mean? Make them new?”
With a raised eyebrow, the Quatre Mains stopped her. “As long as we keep their essence, that shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Come inside,” said the Irishman. “You’ll love how we’ve converted the barn into a museum. I subdivided the ground floor into a warren of rooms, and upstairs there’s a great big loft that runs the length and breadth of the building. Down below along the backside of the building there’s an old sheepcote that leads out to the pastures. No animals now, of course, only room for all our little friends. We used to get barn swallows in the summers here, but the puppets scared them off.”
The Deux Mains grabbed his arm. “What will we do with our puppets?”
“Ah, bring in them dolls,” the Irishman said. “No use getting soaked in the morning dew.”
The five of them gathered the puppets, and Kay and the Good Fairy ended up in the Irishman’s arms. Through the stippled sunlight they marched off to the faded red barn. At the door into the darkness, a placard read: “Enter at your own risk. Donations welcome.”
* * *
All around him at Grand Central, people made their reunions. Couples met in a kiss. A serviceman in his dark green uniform found his scruffy younger brother. An old man in a porkpie hat and carrying a tattered gym bag searched for a prodigal son. Theo began to wonder if he had made some mistake bringing Egon home with him from the college. Egon had scurried off to the bathroom as soon as they had pulled into the station, and Theo was left alone in the middle of the crowd. Perhaps the whole cockamamie idea was backfiring. Haunted toy shops. Messages on matchbooks.
“When duty calls, Egon answers.” He was suddenly at Theo’s side.
They joined the queue for taxis as the daylight began to fade, neither one broaching the subject at hand, their small talk instead falling to the long trip from Québec and friends from the cirque and the latest chapter of the life of Muybridge. Only after he had been fed at an Indian restaurant uptown and they walked back to Theo’s apartment and poured a dram of bourbon was Egon prepared to share his news. Ensconced upon the living room sofa in his robe and slippers, the clock scrolling toward midnight, when all else had been said and the matter was no longer avoidable, Egon spun out his tale.
“You’ve seen the SOS on the matchbook. Well, that’s only part of the story. I need to tell you about the other strange things that have happened in that little shop of horrors. After the first week or so of my residence, it became clear that I wasn’t going to be found out inside the shop, so I relaxed a bit, kept a light on in the back bedroom facing the alley.”
“You shouldn’t wait so long if things get desperate,” Theo said. “You could always contact me—”
Egon held up a hand to stop him. “Thanks all the same. Look, I’ve been hand to mouth before and I will be again. That’s not what scares me.”
Ice rattling in his drink, Theo leaned forward in the easy chair. “Something worse than a storm inside the house?”
“During the day I am at the library trying to do my research to find you, and at night, I poke around the place. After I found the matchbook, it’s like a treasure hunt, and that’s when I notice a hatch to the attic. In the ceiling right above my bed. Curiosity killed the cat, but not me. I rig up a stack of boxes and books on top of a chair and climb right up there. Wobbled the whole way. The attic was dark as a tomb, and then I feel a spiderweb brushing against my face, which freaks me out. Turns out to be a long string hanging down, and when I pulled it, a lightbulb came on and made a halo. I nearly fell through the hole when I saw what was up there. Dolls staring at me with their glassy eyes and old stuffed bears and rabbits and a giraffe with a broken neck. Worst of all were the puppets.”
“Good grief—”
“Broken marionettes with twisted wires and slumped together like a pile of dead bodies. An old ventriloquist dummy who looked like he would spring to life and murder me if I moved. Puppets missing an arm or a leg. Even one with no head. And imagine all this time, I had been sleeping just below them in an empty and abandoned flat.”
“Gives me the shivers.”
“Nearly gave me the shits in my pants. I tell you it took forever just to move from the spot, but I screwed my courage to the post and began to investigate.”
A siren on the street below punctuated the mood. They both laughed and sipped their drinks.
“You get used to the noise, n’est pas? New York, feh. Like I was saying, it was a morgue for these old toys, the spillover maybe of what could not be fixed in the workshop? And just in the shadows were piles of old newspapers and magazines, the kind of junk in a million attics, but I was curious and poked around some more and found a book.”
He hopped from the sofa and reached into the front pouch of his bag, pulling out a black notebook with a tassel bookmark and a strap to keep the cover closed. With the solemnity of a courier, he handed the journal to Theo. Most of the pages were covered with words in an elegant cursive, and he could see they were scripts, lines of dialogue and sparse instructions for the motions of puppets. It was a performance log, a new title every fifteen or twenty pages.
“Plays,” Theo said. “For puppet shows.”
“Exactly,” Egon said. “So I’m up in the attic, three in the morning and not another soul, I hear a sigh. My heart nearly stopped. Over in the corner are these two heads lying in the dust, one black and one white staring at each other like they’ve just been interrupted having a tête-à-tête. Like they can’t understand what happened to the rest of them, where did their bodies go? Comes another sigh from one of these broken-down puppets, and you don’t have to ask me twice. I scramble, bat outta hel
l, and get to the hatch just as one of them heads moans, so I jump and the whole tower of boxes and books comes tumbling down, and I land on my tailbone nearly dead on the floor.”
“You could have killed yourself.”
“I’m near paralyzed, but I can’t spend another minute there, so I crawl down the steps one by one to the bottom floor and I lock myself in, half convinced I’ll wake up dead in the morning.”
“It’s a wonder you didn’t end up with a broken neck. What do you think made the sound that scared you so?”
“Écoute-moi! It was the friggin’ puppets.”
Theo considered his friend, noting for the first time since they had met just how little he knew of him, his background and history. They had formed a friendship out of duress, and while they had spent many hours together, every day for several weeks, swapping stories and sharing in the grief of losing Kay, Theo was not sure, in this moment, of Egon’s sanity. Perhaps in the fall from the attic, Egon had landed not on his bottom but on his head. Muybridge had been in a stagecoach accident when he was heading out to California as a young man, hit his head, and was never the same. Shot a man. Stopped time.
“You’re skeptical, I don’t blame you,” Egon said. “But I can only tell you what I heard, what I felt in that toy shop, an overwhelming sensation of another world. I was so scared that I nearly flew that night, but all my things were upstairs in the bedroom, just out of reach of those creatures. So I sat up reading, waiting for the dawn, every page in that book. But what stopped me was the final page. Go ahead.”
In his lap, the journal sizzled with sudden menace. The playwright had written his scripts on the right-hand pages, leaving the left side blank for changes, corrections, and small drawings, so Theo came to the end unaware. There were just a few stray lines of dialogue with the word Finis in bold letters. But on the reverse of that final flourish, someone had turned the book upside down and penciled in a column of letters under the title Necromancy. The first two entries had been crossed out with a single line, but the rest were no less enigmatic. OC, MC, IC, NT … Initials? At the bottom of the list, he read aloud: “KH.”