*
The puppet theater, fashioned out of an old wooden nail box, stood atop the corncrib. The Queen had to slouch to view the action, but the others were seated comfortably. Resting on his elbows, Nix stretched out on the floor to keep the little dog company. Recruited out of their ennui, Masha and Irina had designed the set, drawing on the back of a silk-screened broadside the ruined mansion and the weeping willows drooping with Spanish moss. Clouds obscured a pale moon, and a bat flew in a fixed spot in the sky.
Hiding as best they could, the three puppeteers crouched behind the box. Olya and the Good Fairy were in charge of two puppets each, and Kay controlled all the others, sometimes two in hand, sometimes four, or even six, pulling the strings wrapped around her fingertips. They had taken the tiny dolls from the ceiling, re-creating them into new characters, and making other puppets besides in the long months that had passed. Filling the winter hours with their craft, attentive to every detail, more elaborate with each new story.
She called her play Bayou Gothick, and the scenario was always the same. In the old house on the outskirts of the Vieux Carré in New Orleans, two faded southern belles were beset by some sort of nightmare visitors—spirits, imps, hobgoblins, zombies, or voodoo witches, as the mood determined. Once they found the dried exoskeletons of No?’s honeybees and fastened strings around their middles and flew them around the mansion, but the show so frightened the others that Kay banished it from their repertoire.
Trapped inside, the two belles fled from room to room, pursued by the monsters and demons, until they reached the attic, where the resident ghost kept watch. Sometimes the ghost would help them, and together the three gallants would fight off the undead intruders. Sometimes one or both of the Sisters managed to escape, but the ghost was always left behind. Alone on the stage. For he could never leave the place he haunted, the muslin ghost with the ink-stained eyes and crooked mouth. “Je me souviens!” he would cry as the Sisters ran to safety, looking back, always looking back at what they left behind. Every night the other puppets watched a different version of the show, and even though they knew how it must end, they were wrapped up in the story and clapped vigorously at the curtain call.
“Next time!” Nix shouted from the floor. “He will get away next time.”
When the cheering ended, Kay would take the strings from her fingers one by one, wind them into coils, and gently put the dolls to rest. At the conclusion of the performance, the Queen rose first and held out her arm for Mr. Firkin to escort her to her usual position. The Old Hag retired with the pup snuggling in her lap. Chastened by his soured relationship with the others, the Devil kept mostly to himself, and Nix, being Nix, whiled away the interval till dawn juggling hoops and balls.
“Listen,” Kay said as the others settled in their places.
“Snowing again.” Olya sighed. “We will be buried alive till spring.”
Her sisters feigned sympathetic looks and flopped onto the railings of the stalls.
“I think it is a beautiful sound,” said the Good Fairy. “Makes everything quieter than usual somehow. Peaceful.”
The old barn groaned under the weight of the accumulating snow. Outside the white world was cold and empty. Kay put her ear against a crack in the wall to listen. The wind picked up from the west, whistling in the gaps, howling now and again. She thought of Theo in the storm, in the woods where the others had discarded the pieces of him. Caught in the branches of the trees, the tattered clothes snapped and rippled like ruined flags when the wind blew, and the paper limbs and hollow head made a kind of music. Kay could hear him singing, always singing for her.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to all of the magical puppet companies that inspired this story: Basil Twist, the Old Trout Puppet Workshop, Pointless Theatre Co., and the Bread and Puppet Theater. Thank you as well to my agent, Peter Steinberg; to my editor, Anna deVries; and to all of the wonderful people at Picador. And, as always, thank you to Melanie, for making a better book.