With a start, the Quatre Mains rose from a log and motioned for quiet. He glanced at the ancient puppet, his face bright from the flames, and announced that the time had come. The Deux Mains held in her hands a pair of long thin spears with sharp, barbed blades strapped to the ends. With a bow, she handed one of the primitive weapons to the Quatre Mains and kept the other for herself. Holding it at eye level, he regarded the sharpness, tapping the point with the pad of his index finger, drawing a dot of blood.
Striding without hesitation, the Quatre Mains confronted the Queen nailed to her post and thrust the spear into her body at the bottom of her rib cage. A sigh escaped from the puppet’s mouth, a puff somewhere between shock and satisfaction. With a quick clockwise twist, the Quatre Mains pulled back the spear, a clot of red snagged in the barbs, and the puppet slouched limp and lifeless. He pivoted to the new Queen, a giantess sprawled against the side of the barn, and pierced her chest at the same spot and twisted counterclockwise. When he withdrew the point, the red clot had disappeared into her. Taking turns with the Deux Mains, they repeated the process, piercing the Three Sisters, Nix and No?, the Good Fairy, the Old Hag, and the Devil, transferring the substance from the old into the new.
Kay was the last to go. She had witnessed the sober reaction of the humans gathered round the fire and seen the terror in her comrades’ eyes. They were dying, sacrificed in some bizarre ritual, and she wanted to escape her restraints or cry out, but even in such dire circumstances, she knew it was impossible. Her thoughts raced from the slaughter to memories of her mother, old comforter, young and singing sweetly on her walk from the henhouse, a basket of warm eggs swinging against her hip. And then her husband. She suddenly remembered his name again, Theo, Theo, Theo, but the snap of recognition was wiped away at the approach of the spear. She stole one last look at the ancient puppet she had long adored. Instead of malice, the Quatre Mains wore love and generosity on his face, as though he was presenting her with a gift rather than ending her life. He smiled when he stabbed her, and as the spear twisted where her heart had been, she said “oh,” and then the world went dark. Gasping, she regained consciousness in her new body. The hole in her chest closed like a flower.
The Quatre Mains was no longer a giant, but a man of her own size, and at first Kay could not determine whether she had grown or he had shrunk. The others, too, had changed their dimensions, and she felt as if she had gone half mad in dreaming them up. Where had all the giants gone? The Deux Mains was just a woman of ordinary size, no monster. Stern and Finch, the Irishman, the farm girl and the blond boy, they all seemed quite normal to her now, people she would encounter without a second glance. From her spot in the grass, she watched as the puppeteers freed the old lifeless puppets from their fixed places, unpinning the old Queen, untangling the Sisters from the gallows in the maple tree. During the ceremony, the ancient puppet had been spirited away, his tree stump throne now vacant.
One by one, they took the bodies down and threw them in the fire. Old Firkin went first, a whoosh as he hit the blaze, igniting at once, the air in his belly expanding till he burst. Spear in hand, the Quatre Mains left the party and went into the barn, only to emerge moments later with the limp body of the Worm, which he heaved onto the coals. It coiled like a snake and sizzled into black. The Good Fairy lit up like a bundle of kindling. The Devil turned red and then was engulfed by the flames, home at last in his element. They were dead things, miniature creations that burned without a scream or a gasp. Kay watched as Finch unwound the wires holding her old body in place. A look of wistfulness crossed the puppeteer’s face as she threw the doll in the bonfire, the hair and clothes catching first, a river of red lacing across the fabric edges, and then the whole went up and burned blue, the body crackling in the October night. Quickly it was little more than ashes and a charred head, barely discernible from an ordinary piece of wood, from all of her comrades. Curious to see one’s self disappear that way, curiouser still to be intact and anew.
The mood around the dying fire turned somber. The boy yawned mightily, and the girl gathered the empty bottles. The others began to stretch and shake the cobwebs from their bones. The new puppets were so large that they had to be carried one by one into the barn, and the Queen required both Finch and Stern to hoist her into place in an area that had once served as a tack room. When they had put all of the puppets to bed, the puppeteers left, heading back to the farmhouse, weary and pleased with their night’s work. Looking back at the troupe, the Deux Mains paused at the barn door.