The Sick Rose
by Pandarus
3. Marionettes
Faces drawn in the
candlelight, bare eyes raw and bruised from too many sleepless nights
and long hours of angry weeping. Nothing self-consciously mystical
about their clothes, no tinkling earrings or hair shirts for the
spell-casting. Businesslike. Ruthless. Bent on revenge.
At the centre of the circle: a bracelet of uneven amber beads threaded
on a slender braid of smoke-tainted human hair. Tiny specks of dried
blood freckling the limpid stones.
Beneath the bracelet: a battered square of celluloid. A pale remembered
face trapped by light and chemicals, smiling out of the past. Guileless
as sunlight. Guilty as sin.
* * *
It was a flyer pressed into his hand by a bored teenager that gave him
the idea. Puppets. Spike couldn't imagine why it hadn't occurred to him
before, because if ever a gift had 'Drusilla' written all over it in
gilt-edged letters, then this was surely it. There were toy shops
a-plenty in the streets of the Old Town selling puppets of kings and
queens, witches and devils, The Good Soldier Svejk, even Vaclav Havel
and Bill Clinton; but Spike had no intention of getting his girl any
cheap tourist rubbish. Besides, the blurry photograph on the flyer had
shown the very doll for him.
The Marionette Theatre was easy enough to find and easier still to
break into; Spike strode through the corridors backstage with an aura
of such businesslike self assurance that, although the evening's
performance was still a couple of hours away, nobody had the nerve to
question him.
In spite of himself he found the storeroom slightly disconcerting; a
host of miniature manikins suspended from the ceiling by hair-fine
wires, their dead eyes staring blankly at the door. The carving was
very fine, though - far better than the tourist-fodder - with
exaggerated expressions of dumb rapture and comical dismay curving
mouths and brows into parodies of life. He thought about Miss Edith,
and the brittle Easter eggs Dru had arranged snugly on her dressing
table in an improvised nest of silk scarves and reddened feathers torn
from a flailing swan. The puppets would be just her cup of tea.
The dolls for the current production dangled from hooks at the front of
the room; and Spike tangled his fingers in the threads, tearing the
little figures down until he found the ones from the flyer -Snow White
and her dashing Prince. She was ideal - Drusilla in dainty miniature.
The dark hair and Neanderthal brow of the little puppet prince would
never do, though; it reminded Spike of things he didn't much fancy
remembering. He plucked the doll from its strings and enjoyed the
pitiful little snap as he broke each joint in turn: satisfying as the
crackle of brittle human finger bones splintering in his grasp. He
dropped the fragments underfoot and browsed through the racks of
marionettes in search of a more appropriate figure, finally settling on
a roguish little blond pirate king clad in a dapper gold waistcoat over
a billowing white shirt and black satin breeches, a tin cutlass clasped
in one tiny wooden hand. Not bad. He carried his prize back to Snow
White and admired them together.
They made the perfect couple.