18
SEBASTIANO SLID HIS HAND along the wall at the top of the basement steps until he found a switch that turned on a single, dim yellow bulb that hung in a cage overhead. The bulb crackled a bit and then fell silent as the boy debated whether to leave the door open or pull it shut. Closed, it would arouse no suspicions. But if he left it open he would not feel quite so alone down there.
He left it open just a few inches and started down, taking the first few steps gingerly, and then picking up his pace. The cellar below him was dark; there was nobody to hear him if he made the stairs creak.
But wasn’t there?
No. They’re in the box. They’re sleeping, he told himself, just so he would keep going. And even if the puppets could hear him, they would know he meant them no harm. All he wanted was Pagliaccio.
As he reached the limits of the sickly yellow illumination from that single bulb at the top of the stairs, he paused. His throat felt as if it were closing. His heart began a rapid thudding in his chest that he felt in his head, as if his brain were thumping right along with it, banging around inside his skull. The blackness filled the basement, flowing at his feet like some silent, wine-dark sea.
And where was the light? He reached the bottom step, felt ahead with the toes of his right foot until he found the stone floor. Had he expected some kind of bottomless pit? Of course not, but he could not escape the sensation that the ground—no, the world—beneath him was unreliable and might at any moment give way, tumbling him into a shadow that had no end, a darkness that would swallow any light that might be brought to bear upon it.
Sebastiano couldn’t breathe. He felt very small. Smaller, even, than when he stood beside Father Gaetano. One trembling hand on the railing, he began to turn to run back upstairs, and then he thought of Pagliaccio. The clown had not always reassured him, but he had a way of making things all right, a brusqueness that somehow comforted Sebastiano because it came with an unspoken promise that they would always be friends. Pagliaccio would never abandon him.
He searched for the switch, trying to recall its location, running his hands over the posts at the bottom of the steps but finding nothing. Sebastiano had seen some places where lights were turned on by tugging little metal chains that hung from a fixture, so he took a step forward and waved his hands in the air. Would he be too short to reach, if there were such a chain? He thought the answer would be yes.
Alone in the dark, he froze, unsure how to proceed. The only sounds in the basement were the groaning of the building above him, the hushed roar of the fire burning in the furnace, and the ticking of hot metal. Opening his eyes wide, he tried to let his vision adjust, and was rewarded with a vague gray outline of the boxes and trunks and old furniture stored in the basement. The orange glow around the hatch in the furnace was enough to give him that much at least.
And wasn’t that the shape of the puppet theatre, just there, halfway between him and the furnace, draped once again in its old blanket? Father Gaetano and Sister Veronica must have brought it down as well, and the ornate box of puppets must be nearby. Before he could let fear paralyze him, he started toward the theatre, pushing his feet ahead of him, using his toes to search for anything that might be blocking his way. A little frightened voice in his head wondered if there might be rats in the basement. There was a hole in the sock on his left foot and his baby toe stuck out. The little voice thought a rat might like to bite that toe.
But then he had reached the theatre, and his worries about rats were forgotten. He put a hand on the theatre, reached beneath the blanket, and felt the proscenium and the curtain that hung in the opening. He glanced around in the orange-hued darkness, searching for any sign of the puppet box. It must be nearby.
The furnace clicked several times and its shush became a quiet roar, the fire stoking higher inside. Someone had turned up the heat, and it burned louder. He stared at the furnace, blinking, and thought that something had scurried past in the dark. Rats, or his imagination. Or something worse than either of those.
“Pagliaccio?” he whispered, listening hard for any reply, even the most muffled.
A rustling came from the dark. He stared at it, eyes wide, and a shape resolved itself in the dark—a box, with something leaning against it. Releasing his hold on the theatre, he shuffled two steps nearer the furnace, and saw that it was the puppet box after all. The lid was off, leaning against it.
The furnace clicked again, drawing his eye. It burned brighter, and in the orange glow of fire that seeped around the edges of the hatch, he saw small figures moving toward it. Movement blocked out the light at the right-hand edge of the hatch, a level clacked, and the hatch door swung open, throwing light and heat into the basement as the fire roared with this new freedom.
In the firelight, he saw a procession of puppets moving toward the furnace, witches and musketeers and animals dragging two of their own: Noah and Pagliaccio. The prisoners struggled. Noah’s wife stood by, head hung, and only watched as her own son held a hand over his father’s mouth to keep the puppet silent. Goliath carried Pagliaccio in a murderous embrace, muffling his cries, though the fearful little voice in Sebastiano’s head told him that the clown had only stitching for a mouth and that his voice came from somewhere else. And then all logic, even that tiny bit of reason, was obliterated by the sight that greeted him next.
On the tiny iron ledge beside the furnace door, Lucifer stood with his wings spread. They had been singed black on the edges by his nearness to the fire. As the first line of puppets climbed up to that iron ledge, passing Noah hand over hand, they stopped trying to silence him and the old man’s voice rang out in fear and protest. He screamed for his wife, who turned away, and for his son, who looked on in grim anticipation.
“He will burn for his sins,” Lucifer said. “Put him in.”
The devil puppet looked directly at Sebastiano, and the little boy was sure that it smiled.
“I have been cast out,” Lucifer said. “And now I am the King of Hell.”
Balanced precariously on that iron ledge, the puppets began to feed Noah into the flames. His feet and robes caught first, but the fire spread quickly. As he burned, the puppet cried out to God for salvation.
Something broke inside Sebastiano then. He heard a voice screaming, and somewhere within himself he knew it was his own, but he was barely aware of making the noise as he rushed toward the furnace. He kicked at the puppets carrying Pagliaccio, watching the clown tear himself loose and begin to fight. Then he reached for Noah.
The other puppets attacked him as he grabbed the old-man puppet by the head. Lucifer only laughed as Sebastiano tugged Noah from the furnace, and the little boy realized his mistake in an instant. The puppet was ablaze, burning with a fire now its own, and the flames began to lick at the boy’s hand. Screaming in fright and pain, he flung the burning Noah puppet away and watched it strike the old theatre, igniting the blanket that had been hung over it like a shroud.
The fire seemed hungry. It leaped from blanket to curtain to the wood of the theatre, and then to boxes and crates and old pillows stacked around the theatre, all in a matter of moments. The fire roared.
And Lucifer laughed.
Something sharp stabbed Sebastiano’s ankle. As he flinched away, his foot caught on Goliath, and then he was falling to the stone floor, with the fire spreading and the puppets rushing at him, their inhuman eyes promising all the torments of Hell.
All the while, Sebastiano kept screaming.
* * *
FATHER GAETANO CAME BARRELING DOWN the stairs at such speed that he missed a step, slipped, and fell on his back. He thumped down the last half-dozen steps, but the moment he reached the bottom, he sprang up again. Smoke had begun to fill the basement and he kept his head low as he charged toward the flames.
Somehow the puppets had dragged Sebastiano to the floor, where they crawled all over him. Goliath had found a hammer, and as Father Gaetano rushed toward the fallen boy, the big puppet struck Sebastiano in the face. The boy’s scream cut off instantly, and Goliath raised the hammer for another swing, aiming this time for the boy’s temple.
With the fire roaring in his ears, flames jumping from box to broken rocking chair to stacks of newspaper bound with twine, Father Gaetano descended upon Goliath. He tore the hammer from the puppet’s grasp and flung the tool across the room, into the blaze. Burning wood crackled as the priest grabbed hold of Goliath and tossed him after the hammer, the huge puppet screaming as it burned.
Father Gaetano stepped on a tiger and kicked a musketeer. He reached down, knocked two witches aside, and hauled Sebastiano to his feet. The boy’s left cheek was swollen badly from the hammer blow, and he seemed only half-conscious. The priest propped him up and kicked away a puppet that tried to pull on the leg of his trousers.
He didn’t ask what Sebastiano thought he was doing, there in the basement. He didn’t have to. The boy had come down to retrieve Pagliaccio, perhaps suspecting that he might never have another chance. In the back kitchen, Father Gaetano and Sister Teresa had heard his screams. If Sebastiano had not been screaming so loudly, or if he had closed the basement door all the way instead of leaving it open a few inches, they would not have heard anything until it was too late—both for Sebastiano, and for the orphanage of San Domenico. As it was, the flames were spreading fast, and Father Gaetano blamed himself. He had tried to spare the boy’s feelings and almost gotten him, and perhaps many others, killed in the process.
“Come, boy!” he shouted over the roar of fire. “Walk!”
But Sebastiano dragged his feet so that Father Gaetano had no choice but to throw the boy over his shoulder and carry him toward the stairs.
As he turned away from the fire, he caught sight of two small figures struggling near the furnace. Lucifer, of course. And Pagliaccio. The clown struck the devil, knocking him back toward the furnace’s base, and then Pagliaccio stood above him, looking down. Flames spread behind the clown like wings of fire, as if he were the fallen angel, not Lucifer. But then the Devil rose, his wings charred to black stubs, and laughed so loudly that the insidious noise spread through the smoke and the fire, seeming to whisper in Father Gaetano’s ears.
Several puppets emerged from the smoke and flame, themselves burning, and reached for Pagliaccio.
The priest tried to tell himself it was only a puppet, but he knew better than that now. With Sebastiano moaning, draped over his shoulder, Father Gaetano rushed back in. The hairs on his arms crinkled and burned and he felt his skin searing as he came so close to the flames that he feared the boy’s hair might ignite.
He stomped on the burning puppets, smearing them on the stone floor with a scrape of his shoe, and plucked Pagliaccio from the ground.
Still, Lucifer laughed, and when the priest turned, he saw why. The fire had begun to close in behind him, folded piles of old curtains catching fire, which spread to a small shelf of moldy books.
“Look at you!” Lucifer crowed. “What kind of God cannot even save Himself?”
“I told you!” Father Gaetano shouted, rounding on the devil. “I’m not God! I only held the strings!”
Lucifer glared up at him, the cloth of his body igniting, singeing, and then charring black.
“Perhaps you should have held on to them more tightly,” the devil said as he burned.
Shouts filled the basement. Father Gaetano turned away, crouching low with the boy on his shoulder, and tried to see through the encroaching flames. Something splashed and steam rose, and he saw a line of children and nuns throwing buckets of water onto the flames, making him a path to escape. He dashed through the smoking debris and joined them.
Marcello and Sister Veronica took Sebastiano from him. The little boy had struck his head and inhaled too much smoke, but he was half-conscious when Father Gaetano tucked the scorched clown puppet into his hand. Marcello and Sister Veronica carried Sebastiano upstairs, out of the smoke, and Father Gaetano took his place in the bucket line. They doused the nearest flames, but when he turned to see Sister Teresa about to throw water onto the blazing ruin of the puppet theatre, he shouted for her to wait.
“Let it burn!” he called.
He held up a hand, gesturing for them all to stay back—to keep the water in their buckets. Long seconds passed during which the hungry fire raged, until Sister Teresa and several of the other nuns began to cry out to him in fear that the whole building would be engulfed.
Only when he felt sure that the last of the puppets had been burnt to char did he wave them on, and allow the bucket brigade to continue.
Hours later, the last of the cinders had been doused. Of the puppets, all that remained were ashes.
Still, he wondered.