“A g-g-g-ghost!” she screeched, and her eyes rolled back to an awful yellow, and red horns stuck out of her forehead, and her smile became a rictus of horrible pointed teeth. Theo blanched and thought this must be the devil the others had warned him about, but just as he started to speak to her, a samurai crept up behind her and with one swift stroke chopped off her head. It rolled across the floor, laughing. Yapping and snarling, the little dog chased after her noggin in a macabre game of fetch. Arms extended, the headless body took off blindly to try to find it first.
“Do not worry,” the samurai said. “She will trip over it soon enough, and we will patch her up before dawn.”
Theo floated away from the racket to find a quiet vantage to pick through the crowd, trying to distinguish the familiar from the strange. Looking for those from the Halloween parade, he spotted the Three Sisters at once. In a line with men in Russian costumes, the tallest sister had hitched up her skirts to dance the kazotsky, her hinged legs kicking out like a Cossack’s, a broad smile striping her face. Two children were climbing on the shoulders of the puppet made from twigs and branches, and he saw as well the old woman asleep in a rocking chair, oblivious to the chaos all around her. The Devil was in hiding.
His first glimpse was fleeting and from behind her, a flash of hair, the curve of a bare arm. The woman with the straw hair was facing him, directly opposite, deep in a corner of the room. Even from a distance, she looked bereft, and another woman reached out to offer what seemed to be a gesture of consolation. Half-hidden by the crowd, she turned toward him slowly, a series of still images that coalesced into a whole motion. He saw her face again. Kay. Alive. In the form of a puppet, but Kay at last. He broke and crumbled. At last, at last, at last.
*
The Original could not rein in his anger. While all around him the maenads and satyrs cavorted, he paced creaky and stiff legged, muttering to himself. “Beware of me? The Queen said to beware of me. Of the so-called others. That’s a fine irony, coming from her. Beware the Queen is more like it. She is a monster, a tyrant, the very bitch of power and duplicity.”
Kay cowered in front of the little wooden doll, uncertain what to say to cool his temper.
“I make the overture,” he said. “I extend the olive branch and what answer has she? I cannot come to your party. She warns you and all my friends from the Quatre Mains of me? I ask you, who is in the wrong here? That minx, that trollop, that petty husk of paper and glue.” He scratched the scar line that bisected his chest, and his eyeholes glowed with ire.
“To be fair, sir, she gave us permission to attend, and we were concerned that you had taken our friend, that you may have unmade the Devil.”
“Murdered the Devil, is that what she’d have you believe? And I suppose her fat friend is in on this, too. Firkin, hah. Why would we want to get rid of the Devil? Why would we want to lose anyone at all? The Queen is under a misguided impression if that’s the story she bruits about. I am all for harmony among the toys. Every puppet in his place, follow the rules, and you will find happiness. And peace, order, freedom.”
“Freedom, is it?” Kay asked. Through the whirl of the dancers, she looked for No? and saw her standing alone and anxious despite the jolliness around her. “So we are free?”
Stopped by her question, the Original slowly turned to face her. She saw just how old and worn he was. Cracks along the poplar grain had deepened, and the holes on his arms and notch atop his skull where ropes had gone were dark with the grime of centuries. “We are all free,” the old doll said. “Free as destiny allows.”
“Then you will hear out my friend No??” She pointed to the forlorn figure on the other side of the room. “She is slowly going mad from this puppet life and wants her old self back. Can you grant her that freedom?”
A shadow of disappointment crossed his face, and the hinges at his neck groaned as he bowed his heavy wooden head. “Child, you mistake me for something I am not. Long ago the shamans made me who I am, just as I had the Quatre Mains make you into what you have become. You ask for a free will beyond my power to grant. The puppeteers can take her away if they please, as has been done before at times. Though I do not know what fate awaits those who are cast out. But, we are free in the night hours, free within this space—”
“That’s no freedom at all.”
Livid, she turned away and pushed aside a scowling maenad in her path, deaf to the entreaties of the ancient doll calling her back. She stormed away in long strides till the Devil caught up with her. Grabbing her by the arm, he spun her around with brute force. “What in the hell are you doing? What did you say to him? Have you lost your senses?”
“Once upon a time, I thought he was a god,” she said. “But he is nothing more than one of us. Grown old and tired by the centuries.”
“You must have respect for your elders. He’s seen things and done things that you and I can only dream of.”