The night went on as other nights had, though with a lingering bittersweetness. There aren’t too many occasions when a new role comes your way, but on the other hand, she expected to see everything in its proper place—the Judges exchanging pawns and bottle caps, the Old Hag cupping her ear to catch the latest mischief. But they had vanished.
With no companion of her own, No? seemed particularly forlorn. Kay found her in a far corner, whittling with a nail file at the stub of a pencil, intent on her task. Dark circles ringed her button eyes, and here and there, pieces of straw had fallen—or had been pulled—from her head. She jangled her right foot rapidly over the edge of the box on which she sat, and she hummed a song to herself under her breath.
“What are you making?” Kay asked.
“A point.” Her voice had an odd rasping sound, like a duck with a cold. No? glared at her, but Kay did not take the hint.
“A pencil point, I get it. What do you want a pencil for?”
“In case I ever find a paper, so I can write a note. You don’t happen to have a paper?” She whittled more furiously, the shavings popping from the wood.
Kay shook her head, and then suddenly remembered where she had seen paper of a sort. On tiptoe, she stole over to the abandoned chess set that the Judges had contrived from a few real chessmen and the odd flotsam and jetsam of the Back Room—a few bottle caps, an eraser, the lid to a tube of glue. Among these treasures was a spent matchbook, the outside printed with a picture of a dancing woman and the advertisement for a club called Les Déesses and an address in Montreal. But the inside was gloriously blank. She tucked the matchbook under her jumper and wound her way back to the corner. Making sure nobody was watching her, she sat next to No?, her bottom resting on the cold bare floor, and handed over the piece of cardboard.
“There,” she said triumphantly. “Write to your heart’s content.”
“Are you sure nobody saw you? There are spies everywhere.”
Using her body as a shield, Kay made the corner secluded from the rest of the room. The straw-haired girl printed in block letters: HELP. Get me out of here. When she finished, No? folded the cover to hide the note and concealed it under her blouse. “We need to get a message to the outside world to come rescue me.”
“But you can never leave. Besides, why would you want to leave the Back Room? Is it because the Old Hag was chosen to be in the show? Don’t worry, the Queen said that she will return.”
“Maybe she will, maybe she won’t. I’ve seen them come, and I’ve seen them go, and I’ve rarely seen them back in here, no matter what she might say.” Her eyes danced in her skull. “Depends on what the puppeteers decide, or what the man in the bell jar tells them to do. Listen, kid, you haven’t been here so long, but it is a hell of a way to live. I don’t want to end up on a shelf. Or worse. We gotta figure out how to get this note under the locked door. We gotta find some way to let the people outside know that we are trapped in here.”
Kay studied her friend’s sad face. “I will help you,” she said.
They hatched a plan in the corner. When Mr. Firkin rang the bell for the end of the day, No? would run across the room as though to part the curtain and escape into the toy shop. She would never make it, of course, but in the diversion as the others ran to trap her, Kay could slide the flattened matchbook under the back door, for no one would suspect her of such a thing. Heads together, they conspired in whispers, and she felt an almost human intimacy in how their voices mingled, how the secret bound them together in the moment.
Had it not been for the Worm, they might have carried off the plot. The moment Mr. Firkin called for time, No? let out a banshee cry and raced for the exit, her wooden feet clattering against the floor. The Devil chased her, wailing and gnashing his jaws. Nix dropped his juggling, sending the balls bouncing wildly, and stepped in her path, and the rest of the puppets moved forward in the rush, the Dog barking at the sport, the Queen aflutter, even old Firkin gasping to intercept her mad dash for freedom. Seeing her chance, Kay slipped away to the back door, the matchbook clutched in her hands, looking for a blank space to slide it through, when the Worm threw its body across the bottom draft, its crazed eyes spinning, and hissed at her to stop.
8