If I remain still, Theo thought, he will think he is dreaming and fall back asleep.
The fat man burped and chuckled to himself. “Will you not speak, ghost, and tell me why you are here? Have you come at last for me? Have my wanton ways finally bested me? One hopes. Ah, well, he lives with the least worry who knows not his misfortune. Come and sit with me awhile and tell me what it is like to be dead. Whether or no it is wiser to have never been born at all.”
Theo put on a false voice, deeper than his own, his cadence slowed by half. “Had you not been born, you would not know what it is like to be alive, and without life, death is impossible to understand.”
Raising a fist to his forehead, the fat man appeared to be in pain. “You are a strange spirit with a strange philosophy, and you are giving me a headache. I am called Silenus, friend. What name did they give you while you were upon this earth? Or are the names we keep but hollow things? Come have a drink, whoever you are, and we shall celebrate your escape from melancholy reason.” Silenus gently slapped the donkey on the rump, and it hawed once and rolled over to sleep on the next pillow.
Theo shuffled up the mountain of cushions, and folding his legs to keep his shoes hidden, he sat next to the drowsy old drunk. When offered a tipple from the jug, he politely demurred.
“What need of wine has a ghost, eh? When one is dead, the crass appetites disappear, but if one is immortal, appetite is all, I am sad to say.” Silenus patted his enormous belly. “Tell me who you have come for, friend, so I may drink to your good fortune.”
“I came for my beloved—”
“Ha! ’Tis an old story. The oldest. Love.”
“Do you know a puppet named Kay?”
“Again with the names. I am lucky to remember my own. Or my brother’s name, Bottom, is it? Are you looking for Bottom?”
Theo shook his great ghostly head. “I am looking for Kay.”
Silenus scratched his head, dislodging the laurel garland from his head, but he took no notice that it had slid to cover one eye. “They are all above in Elysium. I had to take my leave of their giddy-paced shindig. Too much for me. But ask the Original, he knows everyone. Before you go, take a holiday, Old Haunt. I have no one else to talk to but this little ass.”
The donkey brayed its complaints.
“I must go,” Theo said. “I have an appointment to keep before dawn.”
“Yonder love awaits,” the old drunk said. “Chase her if you must, but remember you must keep what you catch.” He flopped back suddenly and was asleep again before his head hit the pillow. The little donkey shifted till they were side by side like spooning lovers.
Rising carefully, Theo straightened his costume and rehearsed how to appear to be floating as he headed for the stairway. The music swelled as he climbed each step, the conversations rising and falling in symphony and dissonance. Through the small holes in his mask, Theo saw flashes of light and color till all at once he reached the top and the room exploded into cacophony. A mad attic full of nightmares. Puppets everywhere, so many that he was frightened enough to consider retreating to the peace and quiet of the bower. Wait for Egon—where the hell was he? But Theo pressed on, lifting himself across the threshold, and stepping away from the opening, finding a shadow near the wall to soak it all in.
Small and tall, little fairies twirling on wires and giants walking as if on stilts. Fat and bone thin, a tree person, flat shadows propelled by sticks, effigies, dogs and cats and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse on cardboard horses dark as molasses. Three little pigs and nine little babies. Huge heads bouncing along on their jaws. A carnival on acid, a mad costume party with the empty costumes walking, talking, dancing, singing. A couple of marionettes locked in an embrace. A juggler spinning a bird on the end of a string in an infinite loop.
Hot in his overstuffed head, Theo breathed in the aroma of paper and paste, balsa and coiled wire. His mouth tasted of sawdust and ink. With no holes for his ears, Theo could not easily make out the directions of the sounds which seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at all.
A little dog, no bigger than a toy, found him out at once. It sniffed around the hem of his costume and whimpered at the alien scent, and Theo tried to nudge it away with his toe. A beautiful Japanese woman in a luminous kimono rushed to his rescue, but she stopped short when she apprehended his costume.