I unbutton the devil puppet’s coat. If there’s a radio control mechanism or something inside him, the natural balance of my mind will be restored. If not, who knows?
Under the coat I find a wire armature. No, not an armature. It’s…a birdcage. The puppet’s body is a small birdcage, and where his heart would be there is a tiny yellow canary on a bird swing, rocking gently to and fro. I wouldn’t be surprised if it chirped, or flew. It doesn’t, though, and I feel through the rest of the puppet’s clothes for some hidden mechanism that might account for that tap tap of his leg at the glass, but there’s nothing. He’s wood and wire, just a puppet, and that tapping leg just hangs from the bottom of the birdcage, no internal control device at all. Only the puppet strings could have moved it.
And the strings were slack.
Curious. (You know, if curious means ‘impossible’ or ‘freaky’ or…‘indelibly awesome.’)
And now my head feels all full of moonlight or starlight or something. Or snow. My head feels like a snow globe that’s been shaken, and glitter is swirling around in it like unmoored stars.
I unfold the butterfly. On the white underside of the origami paper I find a rhyme and a small schematic.
Near the Devil’s Stream
and using poison as bait,
my counterpart impatiently waits.
Okay. I’m good at riddles. The Devil’s Stream is the canal where the Vltava flows around the Kampa, the island on the Malá Strana side of the river. As for ‘my counterpart,’ it could mean Zuzana’s counterpart, but I don’t know who that would be. If it’s the devil’s counterpart, though, it would be an angel, so I search my mind for some famous angel in that area but come up empty. As for ‘using poison as bait,’ I come up really, really empty.
So maybe I’m not good at riddles after all. Fortunately, there’s the schematic, which shows a street, a tiny red X inscribed on it. A new destination, right back the way I just came.
Cradling the devil in the crook of my arm like a baby, I set off.
Whistling.
Her
8
Thank God for Murdered Monks
He came.
He came to find me.
When Mik rounds the corner out of sight, I sag against the wall of my hiding place – behind a lace curtain in the foyer of the building across the street – feeling as spent as if I’ve actually been conjuring spells and not just holding colored beads between my fingers. I let out a long breath.
Mik came to find me.
Did I think he wouldn’t? I don’t know. I don’t know. I get too flustered around him to attempt anything like sustained eye contact, and without that, it’s kind of hard to gauge interest. But watching him from hiding like a creepy serial killer, I could actually focus on his face long enough to believe that…he looked interested. Didn’t he? Well, he always looks interested, he’s that kind of alien, but just now he looked…dazzled.
‘Don’t you think he looked dazzled?’ I ask the black cat that’s rubbing against my legs. It slipped in here right when Mik showed up, like it was bloody well trying to lead him to me, and when it started purring as loud as a farm truck, I thought for sure Mik would hear. I may have shushed it. Shushed a cat. And what do you think it did? It purred louder.
‘I will do just as you wish,’ said no cat ever.
In the safety of aftermath, though, my concern seems a little foolish. What did I think, that Mik would thrust open the door and demand, ‘Why purrest thou, feline?’
The cat continues its purr-fest, which I take to mean: Yes, Mik was definitely dazzled. How could he not be? I ensorcelled him. For which, thank you, scuppies. Two down. One for the tapping, one to lift the butterfly into the air. Poof! Poof! They go fast. I wish I had Karou’s whole necklace. Karou. I text her: Phase One a success. The Puppet That Bites would be proud.
Because, yeah, using scuppies to animate a puppet, where on earth did I come up with that idea?
It’s not copying, though. It’s an homage. Of course, that’s what artists always say when they steal from other artists. In this case, though, it really is an homage, to my own magical awakening two years ago. It seems right that Mik should be awakened in the same way. That we should lose our magic virginity the same way. To creepy puppets, during snowstorms.
(Okay. That sounds so wrong. But you know what I mean.)
The butterfly was my idea, though, and I think it was really the cherry on the cake, the thing that said, Oh, you think this is a trick? So how am I doing this, smart guy? I try to imagine what I’d think if it happened to me, but I can’t. Once you know magic is real, it’s really hard to remember what it was like not to know. It’s kind of like trying to see how you look with your eyes closed.
(I did that once. I was a kid. It occurred to me out of nowhere to wonder what I looked like with my eyes closed, so I…um, went to the mirror and…closed my eyes.)
(Yeah. I looked exactly like the inside of a pair of eyelids.)
(I’ve never claimed to be a genius.)
I wait, giving the black cat a good scratch and letting Mik put some distance between us before I emerge from hiding. It’s cold. I’m exhilarated. My heartbeat feels like a jaunty tune and my lips might as well be a parade float, and the rest of me just the little people on the ground holding the tethers.
Also, I’m starving, and I crazy have to pee.
I kind of wish I was just meeting Mik at Poison Kitchen. I mean, I could. I could just walk in behind him and say, ‘Well played, handsome man. Now let us eat strudel and then kiss. Just as soon as I get back from the bathroom.’
But I’m not done dazzling him yet. I have more scuppies to spend before we reach the talking portion of the evening. I’m hoping the talking portion is just a thin layer between the dazzling portion and the kissing portion, like the frosting between layers of a cake.
(Mmm. Cake.)
Not that I’m not keen to talk to him. I am – in the fantasy version of tonight, anyway, in which I actually manage to string words into sentences, and not just random magnetic-poetry sentences, but sentences that don’t lead to the logical conclusion that I have brain damage. It’s just…I can’t begin to account for the intensity of my urgency to get kissing. The most likely explanation, after long thought, is that I’m a clone preprogrammed to perform this activity now or self-destruct.
Or else it’s just Mik’s velvety sweetness. Like a cupcake, in boy form.
I start walking, pausing to peer around the corner and make sure he’s gone. I proceed toward the Malá Strana, stopping in a cafe on the way to alleviate the more pressing of my physical urges (neither lips nor stomach, no; nothing trumps the bladder), and then continue on, hurrying, but careful to scan the way ahead and make sure I don’t overtake my stalkee. I don’t see any sign of him, though, and amuse myself by wondering which set of footprints through the snow on the Charles Bridge might be his.
Those? Maybe.
When I feel a surge of fondness for Mik’s maybe-footprints, I know I’m in serious trouble. The fact that I can’t even muster any true self-disgust tells me how deep this goes. I’m doomed.