A Peculiar Peril, page 27
Puppeteer and playwright Alfred Kubin sat in his caravan that same evening, drapes drawn, hand engulfed by a horse-head hand puppet that had proven quite unruly. This affliction had come on the heels of a tepid show and a languid gambol by their little troupe back to their caravans, housed in the woods to avoid housing fees.
Kubin had struggled for some time to get the puppet off his hand, without success. It just would not come free, and the puppet knew he also struggled as to why it would not come free.
Well, Kubin would find out soon enough, although the puppet had nothing but time, having, ironically, given the nature of Kubin’s latest production, put the rest of the cast into a deep sleep in their own caravans.
The head of the puppet, a nightmare more or less, stared up at Kubin with malign intent and the wild staring eyes that made people fear horses, or “horsies,” as, it was rumored, the undead head of Napoleon liked to call them.
This particular puppet had been a silly contrivance for an even sillier phantasmagorical production, but the puppet had made self-improvements recently. The red fangs for example, more appropriate to a shark, the dark jagged mane, the swirling green hypno-eyes.
His opening line to Kubin: “Oh, your hand is so very warm, sir! Mercy!”
The look on Kubin’s face had been priceless. Or, rather, the puppet believed it came at a high price to the man’s dignity.
Even given Kubin’s jaded lifestyle, he’d never seen a hand puppet staring back at him with malign intent after having hijacked his arm. Nor had one talked back before. At least it could be said of Kubin that he eschewed dummy ventriloquism, which was after all humor of the lowest order.
“Unhand me!” Kubin demanded.
And with that demand, the soft velvet neck of the horse had become as hard as a cast for a broken limb, closed around Kubin’s forearm like a lamprey eel. He gasped, flung his arm up and down as if something had attacked him (because it had), smashed into a lantern, came to his senses, righted the lantern before it burned his caravan down, and sat down heavily in his chair, moaning. Chairs and a table had been overturned, along with a shelf or two. Bric-a-brac only, including a sentimental collection of ceramic owls that only served to reinforce the puppet’s low opinion of Kubin’s taste level.
The puppet imagined the lamprey arm holding Kubin’s arm in a vise, up to the elbow, must hurt, but not as much as the necessity that they speak in German, for the puppet’s lines would have been much warmer, mellifluous in French or marmot or chickadee—anything else, really.
“Please! Let me go! What do you want, accursed creature?” Kubin flung the words out despairingly.
“What do I want? Oh, I want your hand out of me, sir! Out of me for good! It is no suitable arrangement for a self-respecting puppet. Better the strings and arrows of manipulation from above. For ’tis better to be controlled from heaven than from hell, as even common beggars know.”
“Please. Tell me what you want and be gone.”
“Oh, puppet master, how do you know I will go so easily? Perhaps I burn with the memory of every indignity, each and every time I have been so animated and made to trundle stupid across the stage, made to give witness to your words and your vision, without any say in the matter. Not even the ability to improvise. In short, what if I plan to feast upon your arm as you have feasted upon my talent to create your puppet show? Perhaps I even mean for your hand to eat your face?”
Kubin trembled, shuddered once, head down, but puppet still at attention, looking at him face-to-face, as he could not lower his arm without consent. The muscles in his forearm in particular must be sore by now, and his hand, so near the hot epicenter of this uncanny occurrence, burning up.
“I beg you, good puppet. Just tell me what you want. I’ll tell you anything.”
“I’m not a good puppet. That should be clear. Call me what I am. Call me a bad puppet.”
Kubin looked confused.
“CALL ME A BAD PUPPET!” the bad puppet roared in a voice like a thousand psychotic bears.
“Bad puppet! Bad puppet! Bad puppet!” Kubin shrieked, for the lamprey teeth had clamped down, drawing blood.
The horse-head puppet sighed. “No, no, no. You can’t even take direction properly. I mean, say the same thing, but say ‘bad puppet’ not ‘good puppet.’ I thought that was clear. Are you not a director of theater?”
Kubin stared at the bad puppet for a moment, disoriented, eyes as wobbly as the shoddily made ones in the face of the monkey-butt puppet that appeared in act three.
“I beg you …,” Kubin managed in a strangled voice, “I beg you, bad puppet, just tell me what you want. I’ll tell you anything.”
“Was that so very hard? But once more—with feeling.”
Kubin managed to say it one more time, the right way, with the right emphasis, which was the puppet’s cue.
“Oh, I don’t want you to tell me anything. I want you to tell me one particular thing, dear Kubin. A very specific thing.” A thing Kubin himself had let slip during the times the puppet had eavesdropped on him.
From menacing, the puppet’s tone had changed to cheerful, even jaunty, as if perhaps they were about to perform a medley of musical comedy.
“But first, I have most excellent news, my good man! I have useful notes about your rather shoddy production that should bring you a larger audience as you continue on your way. Assuming you do continue on your way.”
“Thank you?” Kubin said, taking the twenty-five single-spaced parchment pages in his other trembling hand in much the same manner as one would accept a spitting cobra.
* * *
The Golden Sphere had joined Alfred Kubin’s outrageously dramatic puppet theater show “The Other Side” in the forests around Leipzig and had stuck it out, even though it was mere regional theater, perhaps even dinner theater, for a week, as the troupe traveled closer and closer to Prague. Up until that point, the few times the Golden Sphere had had need to talk to anyone on his travels, he had said he was “on the lam” in a gangster voice he doubted anyone on Aurora had ever heard. But here, as a horse-head puppet in “The Other Side,” he had decided he was “on the ham.” It was that kind of puppet theater.
On the lam or on the ham, straight outta Roma, had meant trekking along roads, through forests, even museums, elevators, dog parks, the back rooms of butchers, and more nefarious places. Various disguises had been available; the sphere was in a sense a veteran of all sorts of stages and the kind of thespian who could disappear into a role, which is why It could mimic a puppet with zealous ease.
All in all, the journey thus far had almost felt like a vacation, but the fun was now over, for the Golden Sphere had, against the odds—well, the odds were pretty good given the ridiculous number of enticing “The Other Side” broadsheets Kubin had his underlings post on every lamppost—found the redoubtable Alfred Kubin, who on various Earths was known for a phantasmagorical novel, The Other Side, and numerous weird paintings that would have made Freud ask in a blink, with a wink: “Tell me again about your mother?”
On Aurora this rough genius had taken a turn to the dark side and put all his energy into puppet theater—a genuine interest, one might call it a passion, on the man’s part, but also as cover for his little-known role as an agent for the Order of the Third Door. This information uncovered by his Speck whilst hiding in Crowley’s own war map, before poor Speck had been caught.
Good little Speck, performing the ultimate role, and perhaps to pay the ultimate cost.
Not like the Golden Sphere’s role in Kubin’s farce, which detailed a mysterious sleeping sickness that brought with it surreal dreams and real manifestations of the same in the streets of a fantastical city located in Central Asia—including of course of course: a strange horse.
A terrible premise for puppet theater, both too ambitious and involving an extraordinary amount of speechifying. More speechifying than many parliaments, of crows or otherwise. But the Golden Sphere had to admit that the spectacle involved was flamboyant enough to fool local yokels in the quarter-horse towns Kubin moved through.
And so long as Kubin’s path incognito as humble-puppet-theater purveyor rather than Order agent had curved toward Prague, the Golden Sphere had been content to showcase its thespian impulses for the benefit of every Tom, Dick, and Hairy along the provincial path.
So long, too, as the Golden Sphere hadn’t known Crowley’s intention to attack Prague.
But now Kubin planned to head north, perhaps to seek refuge with the Fresians, notorious Order sympathizers who controlled the northern coast with a fierce and unwavering intensity. Well, they could have him, once the Golden Sphere was finished with him.
For now the Golden Sphere asked the pivotal question, the answer to which would set certain things in motion before Crowley reached Prague. Most absurd and hilarious that Kubin’s own overheard words had created the opportunity.
“You have an associate, another K. This K., as you know, lives in the great wall surrounding Prague and in the tunnels beneath the wall. This K., shall we say, provides certain security for the city with regard to the wall. I would like you to tell me exactly where he resides within that maze, where he does his work. And the password for the door.”
Thankfully, given the Order’s connection, Crowley didn’t yet know about the other K., or his role in fortifying the great wall around Prague. With luck, he would never find out, or find out only too late.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Or who.”
At which point, the Golden Sphere lost its patience and hit Kubin in the face with his puppet face.
“Ow! I think you broke my nose.”
“Yet I’ve nary a scratch. I’m just a puppet,” the Golden Sphere said. “I can punch and judy you all day and all night.”
A dead chipmunk appeared near Kubin’s face, bounced off his knee, dropped to the floor, and Kubin screamed.
The Golden Sphere ignored the chipmunk. That had been happening a lot lately. The Golden Sphere thought It knew what that might be about, but all in good time. All in the goodest of times.
Kubin had already forgotten the punch and the chipmunk, stared in terror at the message now scrawled across his other arm: DIS ARM IS NOT A BOMB.
“But dis arm could be a bomb, Kubin. Dis arm could blow right off, if you don’t tell me. Right now.”
Kubin was not a brave man. He had not been chosen by the Order to smash in saloon doors, pistols blazing. No, he was an herbivore in the phyla of species: a cud chewer and grass grazer, all minor aggression reserved for whipping his tail to discourage flies. No doubt he had multiple stomachs to digest that grass, which meant he was devious in his way, but not really.
“All right. I’ll tell you.”
“Good man for a bad puppet. Don’t tell me, though—draw it on a map. Precision’s good. Precision’s the best.”
For the truth was, the Order wasn’t just in the business of controlling doors on worlds or between worlds. The Order, those fusty bastards, were really in the business of futzing with or interfering in any sort of magical security or magical system that had a relationship to a door. The Golden Sphere was a little surprised that he hadn’t found Kubin defending a pregnancy ward or a gastrointestinal clinic.
Kubin’s bepuppeted hand found a pencil, and Kubin’s arm held it up to him.
“I’ll need paper, too.”
“Draw it on me!” the bad puppet snarled. “DRAW … IT … ALL OVER … ME!” Then, in an even more sultry tone, conjuring up a different sort of theater: “Draw it all over me, sailor-boy. Pour it on me like honey.”
Change of register again, to show range. Acting was nothing without range. This time as if Meryl Streep in that Margaret Thatcher flick no one had much cared for.
“There’s a good Kubin. Draw all over the bad puppet whilst you’ve got your hand up its arse.”
Soon enough, Kubin had drawn all over the bad puppet and the Golden Sphere had the information It needed and Kubin none of the information he needed, like the fact that the words DIS ARM IS NOT A BOMB would never come off, no matter how hard he scrubbed.
But the Golden Sphere cared not, for It had come to the grand finale.
Its horse-head puppet grew quickly enormous in size, with a great nickering and neighing. Luxuriating at no longer being small, for being small created great strain and anxiety on its bad self. The sproinging result smashed through the roof of the caravan vehicle, escaped out into the night, and dissolved in a slow fade from puppet head into a series of black floating marbles that Kubin with his limited human senses couldn’t see, so that to his view of events the puppet mercifully left his hand, became huge, and then disappeared into the night.
Fluttering down from that night sky like a gentle rain of giant moths upon the head of a bewildered Kubin: another hundred pages of notes about the tepid and turgid dialogue in “The Other Side” along with recommended therapy and the suggestion that if he lived long enough to seek out the counsel of the “feller name of Freud, who can help with all non-theater-related anxieties.”
DIS ARM IS NOT A BOMB.
Good luck getting that off.
Perhaps the fright would push Kubin to become the great writer he was on other Earths. For the Golden Sphere thought of itself as a kind of patron of the arts, pushing human beings to do their utmost. Or die in the attempt. The humans, not It.
No, It had miles to go before It gave up the ghost. Miles and years, It hoped.
DIS SPHERE: PRAGUE OR BUST.
“He who at first does not succeed … must get there first!”
Busta move to Prague. Prague, Prague, Prague.
And on to the next disguise.
Part IV
THE FALL
“Chipmunk punted into nothing.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
A MONSTROUS SCHOOLMARM
The sullen overcast humid morning unfolded like a nightmare to Jonathan.
Danny was gone. Danny was gone.
The blue flowers in that new light looked like some shoddy carnival decoration the day after, spent seeds smudging the sludgy snow beside them a dark dirty blue. Mangy, bedraggled nectar deer with droopy wings huddled around the blossoms in the drizzle of rain.
Danny was gone, Tee-Tee with her, but her pack was still there and her boot prints headed off into the distance, turned to slush-filled tracks and then nothing at all.
Staring at that dirty blank canvas through his binoculars didn’t help. Nothing moved out there.
Poor Rack was beside himself, walking in circles, pacing, and almost slipping in the snow and on patches of ice, cane little help. Mamoud had to caution both Rack and Jonathan to stop shouting out her name, as an avalanche was possible. And so, with a dreadful paltry whispering they had spread out to search, Rack agreeing through gritted teeth to man home base.
But by midmorning, the conditions not ideal, Jonathan and the others had returned to the smoldering campfire to admit defeat.
Or worse. Jonathan had discovered four bewildered-looking black bears on a ledge hundreds of feet below them. But no sign through the binoculars of Danny—or of the bear gun.
“One of you should get the hell down there,” Rack said. “What in the blazes are you waiting for?”
“We don’t have the necessary mountain-climbing equipment,” Mamoud said. “And there’s no guarantee she is there.”
“But we have to try!” Rack said, then a muttered “sorry” for the loud voice.
Jonathan could understand his frustration, even though he knew Mamoud was right. Sarah would’ve said no different.
“I heard a gun discharge at three in the morning,” Alice said. “It was distant. I couldn’t tell where it came from. There was nothing to be done.”
Certainly not now.
Rack couldn’t believe it. “What? You heard gunfire and you didn’t wake us? You didn’t notice Danny was gone?”
“No.” Alice, impassive, with the look Jonathan had grown to hate. The one that said her own problems were much more pressing than theirs, and always would be.
Rack was halfway to apoplectic, glaring at Alice, hardly able to speak, his hands clenching and unclenching, leaving red marks on both his palms. Jonathan wondered if he was about to break up a fight.
“Apologies,” Alice said, in a nonapologetic way. “I was half-asleep. It barely registered. I thought I might have dreamt it.”
“What you mean,” Rack said, pointing his finger at Alice, “is that you don’t care about Danny!”
“Come too close pointing fingers and you’ll find out what I care about,” Alice said.
Mamoud stepped between them, expressing distaste, as if they had both turned out to be bratty children.
“You must stop this. This is of no use to Danny, or to us.”
“Rack, it makes more sense to head for the way station,” Jonathan said, holding on to his friend’s shoulder to steady him. “She knows where we’re going. If she can, she’ll catch up. And there might be help at the way station—to send out a proper search party.”
But in the pit of his stomach was the terrible knowledge that Danny wouldn’t have been at risk if not for him. That he should have found some way to stop her and Rack from coming along. That, in what now seemed the far-distant past, he shouldn’t have allowed them to join him at the mansion in the first place.
Rack stared at Jonathan as if he were mad. “So we just abandon her. Is that seriously what you’re telling me?”
“I know you hate the logic of moving farther away from Danny to save her, but …” He wanted to say it’s what Danny would’ve done if one of them had gone missing, but feared Rack would really lose it then.
Mamoud stepped between them as if this were now his permanent job. “We reach the way station as quickly as possible, and use it as a base. Otherwise, we’re just wandering around in the snow. And we don’t know what made her fire the weapon. If she even did.”
Rack opened his mouth to rebut that point but stopped, squinting down at a lower loop of the trail. “What’s that—down there?”
