you want!”
Sweet William squeaked and clappered at him in the night. “Yes, you can! Think!” he insisted. “Think of a way. You can do it. Put me aside, lock me up. Start all over.”
“Start all over?”
“Yes,” whispered Sweet William, and darkness moved within darkness. “Yes. Buy wood, Buy fine new wood. Buy hardgrained wood. Buy beautiful fresh new wood. And carve. Carve slowly and carve carefully. Whittle away. Cut delicately. Make the little nostrils so. And cut her thin black brows round and high, so, and make her cheeks in small hollows. Carve, carve”
“No! It’s foolish. I could never do it!”
“Yes you could. Yes you could, could, could, could… “
The voice faded, a ripple of water in an underground stream. The stream rose up and swallowed him. His head fell forward. Sweet William sighed. And then the two of them lay like stones buried under a waterfall.
The next morning, John Fabian bought the hardest, finest grained piece of wood that he could find and brought it home and laid it on the table, but could not touch it. He sat for hours staring at it.
It was impossible to think that out of this cold chunk of material he expected his hands and his memory to re-create something warm and pliable and familiar. There was no way even faintly to approximate that quality of rain and summer and the first powderings of snow upon a clear pane of glass in the middle of a December night. No way, no way at all to catch the snowflake without having it melt swiftly in your clumsy fingers.
And yet Sweet William spoke out, sighing and whispering, after midnight, “You can do it. Oh, yes, yes, you can do it.” And so he began. It took him an entire month to carve her hands into things as natural and beautiful as shells lying in the sun.
Another month and the skeleton, like a fossil imprint he was searching out, stamped and hidden in the wood, was revealed, all febrile and so infinitely delicate as to suggest the veins in the white flesh of an apple.
And all the while Sweet William lay mantled in dust in his box that was fast becoming a very real coffin. Sweet William croaking and wheezing some feeble sarcasm, some sour criticism, some hint, some help but dying all the time, fading, soon to be untouched, soon to be like a heath molted in summer and left behind to blow in the wind.
As the weeks passed and Fabian molded and scraped and polished the new wood, Sweet William lay longer and longer in stricken silence, and one day as Fabian held the puppet in his hand Sweet William seemed to look at him a moment with puzzled eyes and then there was a death rattle in his throat.
And Sweet William was gone. Now as he worked, a fluttering, a faint motion of speech began far back in his throat, echoing and re-echoing, speaking silently like a breeze among dry leaves.
And then for the first time he held the doll in a certain way in his hands and memory moved down his arms and into his fingers and from his lingers into the hollowed wood and the tiny hands flickered and the body became suddenly soft and pliable and her eyes opened and looked up at him.
And the small mouth opened the merest fraction of an inch and she was ready to speak and he knew all of the things that she must say to him, he knew the first and the second and the third things he would have her say. There was a whisper, a whisper, a whisper.
The tiny head turned this way gently, that way gently. The mouth half opened again and began to speak. And as it spoke he bent his head and he could feel the warm breath-of course it was there!-coming from her mouth, and when he listened very carefully, holding her to his head, his eyes shut, wasn’t it there, too, softly, gently-the beating of her
heart?
Krovitch sat in a chair for a full minute after Fabian stopped talking. Finally he said, “I see. And your wife?”
“Alyce? She was my second assistant, of course. She worked very hard and, God help her, she loved me. It’s hard now to know why I ever married her. It was unfair of me.”
“What about the dead man–Ockham?”
“I never saw him before you showed me his body in the theater basement yesterday.”
“Fabian,” said the detective.
“It’s the truth!”
“Fabian.”
“The truth, the truth, damn it, I swear it’s the truth!”
“The truth.” There was a whisper like the sea coming in on the gray shore at early morning. The water was ebbing in a fine lace on the sand. The sky was cold and empty. There were no people on the shore. The sun was gone. And the whisper said again, “The truth.”
Fabian sat up straight and took hold of his knees with his thin hands. His face was rigid. Krovitch found himself making the same motion he had made the day before-looking at the gray ceiling as if it were a November sky and a lonely bird going over and away, gray within the cold grayness. “The truth.” Fading. “The truth.”
Krovitch lifted himself and moved as carefully as he could to the far side of the dressing room where the golden box lay open and inside the box the thing that whispered and talked and could laugh sometimes and could sometimes sing.
He carried the golden box over and set it down in front of Fabian and waited for him to put his living hand within the gloved delicate hollowness, waited for-the fine small mouth to quiver and the eyes to focus. He did not have to wait long. “The first letter came a month ago.”
“No.”
“The first letter came a month ago.”
“No, no!”
“The letter said, “Riabouchinska, born 1914, died 1934. Born again in 1935.” Mr. Ockham was a juggler. He’d been on the same bill with John and Sweet William years before. He remembered that once there had been a woman, before there was a puppet.”
“No, that’s not true!”
“Yes,” said the voice.
Snow was falling in silences and even deeper silences through the dressing room. Fabian’s mouth trembled. He stared at the blank walls as if seeking some new door by which to escape. He half rose from his chair. “Please…”
“Ockham threatened to tell about us to everyone in the world.”
Krovitch saw the doll quiver, saw the fluttering of the lips, saw Fabian’s eyes widen and fix and his throat convulse and tighten as if to stop the whispering. “I-I was in the room when Mr. Ockham came. I lay in the box and I listened and heard, and I know.”
The voice blurred then recovered and went on. “Mr. Ockham threatened tear me up, burn me into ashes if John didn’t pay him thousand dollars. Then suddenly there was a falling sound. Cry.. Mr. Ockham’s head must have struck the floor. I heard John cry out and I heard him swearing, I heard him sobbing, I heard a gasping and a choking sound.”
“You heard nothing! You’re deaf, you’re blind! You! Wood!” cried Fabian.
“But I heard,” she said, and stopped as if someone had put hand to her mouth.
Fabian had leaped to his feet now and stood with the doll in his hand.
The mouth clapped twice, three times, then finally made words. “The choking sound stopped. I heard John drag Mr. Ockham down the stairs under the theater the old dressing rooms that haven’t been used in years. Down, down, down I heard them going away and away-down…”
Krovitch stepped back as if he were watching a motion picture that had suddenly grown monstrously tall. The figuring terrified and frightened him, they were immense, they threatened to inundate him with size. Someone had turned up the sound so that it screamed.
He saw Fabian’s teeth, a grimace, a whisper, a clench. He saw the man’s eyes squeeze shut.
Now the soft voice was so high and faint it trembled toward nothingness. “I’m not made to live this way. This way. There’s nothing for us now. Everyone will know, everyone will. Even when you killed him and I lay asleep last night, I dreamed.
I knew I realized. We both knew, we both realized that these would be our last days, our last hours. Because while I’ve lived with your weakness and I’ve lived with your lies, I can’t live with something that kills and hurts in killing. There’s no way to go on from here. How can I live alongside such knowledge?..”
Fabian held her into the sunlight which shone dimly though the small dressing-room window. She looked at him and there was nothing in her eyes. His hand shook and shaking made the marionette tremble, too.
Her mouth close and opened, closed and opened, closed and opened, again and again and again.
Silence.
Fabian moved his fingers unbelievingly to his own mouth. A film slid across his eyes. He looked like a man lost in the street, trying to remember the number of a certain house, trying to find a certain window with a certain light He swayed about, staring at the walls, at Krovitch, at the doll, at his free hand, turning the fingers over, touching his throat, opening his mouth. He listened.
Miles away in a cave, a single wave came in from the sea and whispered down in foam. A gull moved soundlessly, not beating its wings — a shadow. “She’s gone. She’s gone. I can’t find her. She’s run off.
I can’t find her. I can’t find her. I try, I try, but she’s run away off far. Will you help
