She grabbed one end of the bar and pulled while the Good Fairy pushed from the other end, and it slipped away easily. A beam of moonlight shone through the slim space between the double doors, and the handles were cold to the touch. With all their might, they pulled and the doors swung free.
The night air crackled. The open yard stood before them, the frost glistening on the grass, the farmhouse dark and silent. Mere steps away, they hesitated on the threshold, listening and watching, studying the suddenness and impossibility of the world that looked as false as a painting on a curtain. Like her first time at the circus, holding on to one of each parent’s hands, and all at once burst forth the spectacle, the color, the sound, the motion hadn’t seemed real. Just as the world outside the barn challenged her sense of what was artificial and impenetrable. Yet there was no denying the chill breeze rushing into the barn, the stars fanning out into the endless sky. An owl hooted from a faraway tree, and they found themselves laughing at the staging. Kay wanted to leap through the surface but was afraid. She closed her eyes and watched a film of images flash by from a thousand different memories, each moment distinct but combining to make a whole picture of all that she had held dear and left behind. Her father, mother. Theo. Just out there, just beyond reach.
“You cannot leave,” the Good Fairy said, laying a hand upon her shoulder. “You can only be rescued from this place by someone from the other side. Someone who will agree to lead you away.”
“But they were here,” Kay said. “I know it. I can feel it.”
Out in the yard, the cat mewed, the strange yellow light reflected in its eyes as it walked toward the barn. The cat stepped closer, growing bigger, until it was nearly at the edge, and then it penetrated the landscape as though stepping out of a two-dimensional picture of the night. It headed straight for the darkened alcove that held the cellar door. A light went on in the farmhouse, and a window flew open, the farm girl crying out in the night for her cat.
A voice came from behind them.
“You better shut those doors.”
Startled, they spun around together, and there in a weak circle of light, grinning despite his best efforts, was the Devil himself.
22
The Devil bowed his head slightly, introducing himself again to his friends who thought him dead and gone. Kay and the Good Fairy rushed over and mashed their arms around him with joy. Had he the power to blush, he would have colored from scarlet to crimson. With an awkward shrug, he freed himself and picked up the cat nuzzling at his cloven feet and petted its fur with his sharp-nailed hands. Setting it gingerly on the floor, he whispered “scat” and the cat pranced through the doorway, holding its tail in the air like a question mark before running back to the yellow house.
“The doors, my friends, shut the doors before we are caught.”
Kay and the Good Fairy rushed to the doors and swung them shut, careful not to put the locking bar back into place. From the corner by the cellar, the Devil produced a kerosene lantern and, striking a match on his thigh, lit it, and the Good Fairy gasped at the flame.
“Please, don’t worry,” the Devil said, with a diabolical smile. “If I cannot manage a little bit of fire, who can?”
“We thought you were unmade,” said Kay. “We thought you were dead.”
“What happened to you?” the Good Fairy asked.
“Dead? Not dead. Come with me and I will show you what happened, but you must not be afraid.”
His hooves clopped on the wooden floor like a billy goat crossing a bridge, and they followed his horns into the adjoining room. A dozen puppets stood frozen in a line. Blue from head to toe, they were dressed in tattered rags and wore rough beards and wild hair of tangled curled paper. Each man had an arm on the shoulder of the man in front of him save the leader of the gang, who bent forward as they trudged grimly toward a primitive cell with real iron bars, and around their broken shoes an excelsior snow had fallen. They looked cold and miserable and forlorn.
“I don’t think I’ve seen a sadder bunch of creatures,” the Good Fairy said.
The Devil held the lantern close to the leader’s face. He bore a frozen expression of utter despair in his eyes. “These comrades are headed for the gulag. Some Russian play—the Three Sisters might know the name.Perhaps one day soon we can arrange a rendezvous between these lonesome souls and those charming young ladies.”
The first prisoner cracked a smile, and a chuckle ran the length of the chain, intensifying man to man until the final prisoner burst into a hearty laugh.
“The Devil puts a spoon of honey into another man’s wife,” the leader said. “We have been waiting for you for ages.”
The line broke apart as the puppets roared to life, laughing and clapping one another on the back. A pair of the prisoners broke into a chorus of a drinking song, and the leader embraced the Devil and pumped his hand in congratulations. One of the men winked at the Good Fairy and mimed his appreciation for the cleverness of her unusual wooden construction.