“Dangerous. They might see us try to leave.”
“That’s why I think it better to go through the hole in the wall up there.” He pointed to the spot a few feet off the ground where the silo joined the barn. A few boards were missing, and the opening looked wide enough to squeeze through. He stared at the spot, wondering how to sneak by the puppets and make their escape. “We’ll need a diversion. Perhaps your friend could help us? The one with the straw hair.”
He looked for her in the crowd. The puppets strolled down the line, their movements out of rhythm with the music, and he realized that their timing was off. In other respects, they seemed quite human, their size, the sophistication of their forms and features, but they could not fully disguise the time signature of their motions. Like a film played at the wrong speed, they could not quite trick the eye. Theo felt like Muybridge at his spinning-wheel camera. If he could just turn the crank with the correct rotation, he could make them appear more lifelike.
“I had not thought of Noë,” said Kay. “She has helped me before. And when we were in the Back Room, she was punished for trying to escape. But she is going crazy in this place.”
“Perhaps there is someone else you could ask. That fellow she is dancing with. Or that creature made out of branches—”
Kay laughed. “The Good Fairy? I suppose I could, but what do we do about Noë? Can we take her with us, Theo?”
The music stopped abruptly, and the lines dissolved, the puppets laughing and clapping and nearly falling over with fatigue. The Cat played a melancholy air on the fiddle, the strain reflecting the change of energy in the room. Quiet conversations took over. Romeo wrapped his arms around a sleepy Juliet. The ningyō monkey pulled its tail and in a slow whirr of gears curled up into a ball the size of a melon. Even the little Children of the Shoe were tired and one by one nestled against their old mother for their naps. An interlude in which to rest and find a second wind.
The perfect moment for their getaway, Theo thought, but the tap of a sharp nail on his shoulder pinned him to the spot. The Devil had materialized in the silence, and his other hand held Nix by one ear.
“Mr. Ghost,” he said, “my minions have been watching you, and I have been told that you have been here in the barn all along. Hiding in the attic. Can you imagine such a thing? There is no attic to a loft, so dear Nix must be mistaken.”
“I’m afraid that’s all my fault,” said Kay. “I said attic when I meant to say … the silo. Isn’t that right?”
Theo nodded.
The Devil let go of Nix with a snap of his fingers. “You must listen more carefully, Nix. But tell me, does Mr. Ghost not speak for himself?”
“He is a creature of few words,” said Kay.
“I’m hoarse,” Theo said in his best falsetto. “From talking philosophy with Silenus.”
“Silenus? You know Silenus? I’ve been wondering where he has gotten to.”
“Down below,” Theo said, pointing through the cloth.
“I’m obliged to you, old spook,” the Devil said. “The Original has been looking for Silenus this past hour to settle a conundrum. You and I shall have to continue our discourse later.” His tail wagged like a dog’s as he hurried to the stairs.
Checking to make sure they were alone, Theo whispered to Kay, “We must go.”
“Not without Noë.”
“There’s too much risk.”
“I cannot leave without her.”
He blew out a long breath, settling the matter. “Fetch her, but be quick, while the Devil is away. And see if the Good Fairy would be willing to create some distraction.”
* * *
“You are out of your mind,” the Good Fairy said. “You will never make it. And, besides, what proof do you have that he is who he says he is? Have you even seen his face?”
All around them the others rested, sleeping on the bare floor, bodies twined around bodies or slouching against the walls. A stupor had befallen the party, too much wine and song. Kay glanced across the room at the Ghost, trying to remain inconspicuous near the hole by the silo. “I don’t need to see his face to know my own Theo. He’s been to see the Queen, and she granted him permission to try, but we need you to cause a commotion when we go through. Something that will capture their attention.”
Jittery as a hummingbird, Noë bounced on her toes. “Please, please, please. We would ask you to come with us, but your head would never fit through the hole.”
The Good Fairy felt the broad crown of sticks jutting from her head, ruefully gauging the circumference. “I suppose you’re right. Big-headedness is the curse of a broad intelligence and wide learning. Are you sure you want to leave us? Could you not instead ask the man if he would stay? I’m sure it could be arranged if broached delicately.”
“I will lose my mind if I don’t get out of here,” Noë said.
“And you, Kay? Much to gain, but much to lose as well.”
For a moment, she considered her life among the puppets. She thought back to the week of shows in Montreal with the Quatre Mains, the thrill of being out of the chorus and made the storyteller to perform in front of cheering audiences. And she thought of the friendships she had made, and how sad she would be to leave the Good Fairy, the Sisters, and all the others. “He is not suited to this life. And I love him. Surely you understand.”
With a sharp yap, the little dog made himself known at their feet, looking anxious for a game. Noë shook her finger and told him to be quiet or go away.
“I do not understand,” the Good Fairy said. “I am afraid I will never understand love, or how you allow emotion to better reason. But you are my friend, and I will help you. You’ll need to be quick when the time comes. Don’t delay, fast as you can.”
The Dog whimpered at Kay’s feet, and she bent to pet it one last time. “What will you do to keep everyone’s eyes away from us?”
The Good Fairy picked up the little dog and held it close and quiet. “Leave that to me, best you don’t know. Now, go, tell your man to get in position. As soon as you hear me shout, be on your way. Good-bye and good luck.”
“Thank you, thank you,” Noë said.
“You are the best of us,” said Kay. She rested her hand on the tangled branches of the Good Fairy’s face, and with that good-bye, she led Noë through the drowsy puppets to Theo at the silo’s edge. The passageway was just wide enough for them to squeeze through one by one.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“Everything is set. We are to go when we hear the Good Fairy shout and everyone is distracted.”
“You’ll go first,” Theo said. “And then Noë, and I’ll bring up the rear.”
“Noë goes first,” Kay said. “We have to take care of her, make sure she gets away. Then you go, so you can pull me up.”
“I’ll push you next, after her.”
“No, Theo. I’ll take your hand, I’ll follow. Trust me.” She hugged him so hard, her chin left an impression on his forehead. “We’ll need that rope from around your neck. In case there is a drop on the other side, we don’t know how high up we are from the ground. If she changes into a girl again, she could get hurt.”
He loosened the noose around his neck and pulled it over his head to hand to Noë. She unraveled its full length and tied a knot around an iron hook screwed into the floorboard.
Kay looked into his eyes. “I want to see your face before we go.”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“The Good Fairy wants to be sure you are who you say you are. It’s the least we can do.”
The three of them turned as one and signaled to the Good Fairy. Grabbing the hem of his muslin head, Theo lifted gently. The rag stuffing spilled to the floor. Gasping for air, like breaking the surface from under water, he pulled off the disguise completely. She saw his disheveled hair and bright eyes. She kissed him and remembered. Noë grabbed the rope, ready to climb.
Across the room, the Good Fairy snapped a stick from the lattice of her forearm and tos
sed it toward the spot where the Original lay surrounded by his entourage. The little dog jumped to chase the stick, and the Good Fairy shouted, “My arm, my arm, the Dog has stolen my arm.” Barking and snarling, the Dog charged around and over the sleeping bodies, heedless of where it stepped, surprising them from their slumber. The stick landed with a clatter at the Original’s feet. The Good Fairy saw the others were distracted and signaled to the escapees.
“Here we go,” Theo said, and taking her by the hips, he hoisted Noë up to the slit in the wall. Teetering on the ragged boards, she turned sideways, framed by the black night, and tossed the length of the rope through the exit, testing it once to see if the knot would hold. Quickly shinnying up the side, Noë pulled herself through and disappeared over the edge.
“You go,” Kay said. “I’m right behind you.”
In the loft, the clamor rose, shouts of dismay over the intrusion of the little dog, the puppets stirring, waking. Barking, laughing, a sudden scream. Theo lifted himself to the threshold. Outside, the night sky glistened with stars, and six feet below, he could see Noë let go of the rope and land on firm ground. “Are you there, Kay?” he shouted over his shoulder, but he heard no reply. He forced himself to keep facing the darkness. The puppets were shouting for him to stop.
The Original hollered, “No!”
He looked back to see if she had followed.
Her face was beautiful. Wide-eyed, startled. He could imagine her whole again, real and alive. She was mouthing something he could not hear, only see the movements of her lips, “I love you” or “All I knew” or … and they were right upon her, the satyrs pulling her away from the wall, as if she were drowning and swept out to sea. A great tide of puppets swelled forward, holding her back, and Theo knew at once his mistake.
The point of the spear pierced a spot just below his sternum and took his breath away. The metamorphosis began at once. His hands went first, turning from flesh to paper, his head emptied into a husk, and he felt the transformation jolt through his body, as he lost all sense of himself. He became instead a hollow man, a puppet.
The awful puppets were crowding around him now, their language indecipherable, a primitive guttural chanting, and the little wooden man, the one she had loved through the shop window, withdrew the spear, and Theo collapsed to the wooden floor.
Like a little tyrant god, the ancient doll held up the spear to show to the assembly. The devil was there. The sisters forlorn. A fairy made of sticks. He tried to find Kay in the crowd, to tell her that he was sorry, but he could not speak, could not remember how to raise himself from the ground, lift his head, or move at all. He had a vague recollection of his life, a series of images in stop time. The Original sought a response from the crowd. He was asking a question, looking for their affirmation of his judgment, and the mob roared in reply.
The maenads leapt upon Theo at once and tore him to pieces. They were at him in a fury, rending cloth and cardboard and twisted wire, unmaking the puppet body. A woman in a leopard skin severed his head with a single blow, others split apart his limbs at the seams, and where his heart once had been they left nothing but paper tatters.
27
Muybridge intuited that in order to record motion, one must break it into components.
A single second of film requires 24 images to make the motion seem fluid, natural, lifelike.
Persistence of vision depends upon our physiological ability to see both the image and the afterimage at the same time. Try spinning a sparkler in the dark.
A puppet cannot fully replicate human movement because it cannot move at the proper and constant time signature.
Do I love her, or the after her?
Mitchell closed the notebook and settled back in Theo’s chair. Random notes in the margins of his translation, the vagrant thoughts of a troubled mind. Outside his office window, snow was falling, a February snow thick and heavy. The weather report showed the storm’s path wide and long, snow in Québec, snow in Vermont.
The doctor advised him to go slow and easy, not to try to do everything at once when he came back to work, and of course, the college understood fully, granting Mitchell a semester’s sabbatical, considering. If only they knew the whole story. But whom could he tell now? They might think he was still mad.
Love or, as he saw it now, infatuation had made him say and do things out of character. The night nurse, a pretty young woman with whom he was hopelessly smitten, would sit with him after the nightmares those first few weeks. Mitchell would sit up with a start, drenched with sweat, and the nurse would answer his terrors, calm him, while she held his hand as he told bits and pieces of the story.
“I should have gone in right away. Maybe I could have saved him. One or the other.”
“Not your fault,” the nurse said. “You mustn’t blame yourself.”
“They had taken so long, you see. I fell asleep in the car, we’d been driving around all day, and it was two in the morning. They said to wait two hours, but I couldn’t stay awake. I should have knocked on the farmhouse and fetched those two kids. Demanded that they unlock the doors. Or gone into the barn myself.”
“You were tired. The hour was late. What finally woke you up?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. My memory is shot. It could be that I saw her, I think so. There was a light on in the barn streaming out through a hole in the wall by the silo, and a rope hanging down nearly to the ground. That’s when the puppet appeared.”
The nurse did not judge him but squeezed his hand and brushed the hair out of his eyes.
“A silhouette, really, but it could have been, I think it was one of them. But then I must have been dreaming. I closed my eyes and fell back asleep until the fist beat against the car window.”
“That’s when you first saw the girl?”
“Unless she and the puppet are one and the same. But how can that be? She was a real girl, as real as you are.”
“You need to rest,” the nurse said. “I’ll get you something to help you sleep.”
“No, wait. There was no puppet. They’re not alive. She was a runaway.…”
The girl banged on the glass, pleading for his help. Straw-colored hair, a simple dress but no shoes, no coat on that frozen night. Instinct took over, the chance to be a hero. He rolled down the window and saw the panic in her eyes, the clouds of condensation with every word. “Help me,” she said. “They’re after me. We’ve got to run.”
“Who is after you?”
“The Original must have found them out. Help me.”
“Who is the Original?”
“He will not let me go.”
“Get in the car,” Mitchell had said, and she walked stiff legged to the other side and bent awkwardly into the passenger seat.
She looked over her shoulder at the barn, light streaming through a hole in the wall near the silo. And then she turned to face him, terror in her eyes. “They will kill us. Go, go now.”
He started the engine, turned on the lights, and drove away recklessly down that lonesome road. The girl was hysterical at first, alternating between tears and laughter, at then she started to shiver, her teeth chattering, so he turned on the heat and she was fascinated by the blowing air. Intensely curious about the car, as if she was seeing one for the first time. She seemed to regard him with that same disbelief. Mitchell asked her name, but she said she did not remember, only that she had to get away, far away.
“They will kill him,” she said. “And then come to unmake us.”
Mitchell sobbed and looked into the nurse’s accepting eyes. “I should have stopped the car right then, turned around, seen to my friends. But the only thing that seemed to matter was that poor woman’s safety.”
“She was scared and traumatized. You did the right thing in bringing her to the hospital.” The nurse laid a hand against his chest until he fell asleep.
On that snowy afternoon in Theo’s office, he felt the remembered weight of that hand over his heart and wondered anew what lead
s some to love and others to miss it altogether. The runaway girl snuck out of the hospital before dawn without a trace, her name an alias, her destination unknown.
One of the policemen told him so. It had taken hours to convince them that his friends had gone missing in the night, but they finally agreed to accompany him back to the farm the following morning to take a look around, ask a few questions.
An older man answered the door, and one of the policemen introduced himself and Dr. Mitchell and explained the reason for their visit. When they shook hands, Mitchell felt the tensile strength in his grip, the rough calluses in his palm. The fellow spoke with a Quebecois accent and seemed put out by the intrusion on his privacy. “You mean to say that your friends actually broke into the barn to see the puppets? Whatever for? You can come by anytime and have a look around for yourself.”
“Did you notice anything unusual last night?” the policeman asked. “Any signs of disturbance?”
A booming bark came from the back of the house. “Tais-toi! Quiet! That dog, he sees and hears everything,” the Québec man said. “If your friends were here, he would have howled his fool head off.”
The policeman looked anxiously around the edge of the door for the dog. “And you were here all alone last night?”
“My wife, just the two of us. She is out shopping at the moment.”
Mitchell asked, “Not a blond-haired boy and a tall redheaded girl?”
“Ah, we have some help in the summer, but we are closed for the season. I can show you around if you like, but it is dead as can be.”
The man fetched his coat, and they walked toward the puppet museum. He asked Mitchell, “So, you are a doctor?”
“A Ph.D. in the classics. I teach Latin and Greek.”
“The great myths,” the Quebecois said. “I have a treat in store for you.”
They went into the barn and turned left, past the stalls, and went room by room with the quiet and uncanny dolls, neat and undiminished. Some looked as if they had been positioned and forgotten about for years. Dust covered their paper heads and gathered in the seams and wrinkles of their painted faces and hands. He led them past exhibits from children’s shows, Japanese bunraku, and fairy tales to a short flight of stairs into the barn’s great loft. Puppets crowded every available space, standing shoulder to shoulder and arranged to the rafters, great giant effigies intermixed with tiny marionettes. The puppeteer led Mitchell to the wall adjoining the silo where two new boards had been nailed in place next to the weathered gray wood.