From nothing, a sudden something—from darkness, a blossoming light, sourceless, unfolding plasmic silvery-blue waves against the void, and even as its undulous edge touched on what might have been a nebulous audience, a mass of faceless and indefinite watchers who may or may not have once resembled the many folk of a town colloquially known as Blackswallow Beach, the light went no further, specified no ends to the stygian space. In the very core of this light rested four disproportionate, slack-limbed figures, four listless and despondent white porcelain piles of strange fabric and horsehair, paint and wire. Strings akin to fishing line—so thin and clear they were almost invisible—rose like fiber-optics from the puppetry, shot straight upward into the dark of the above. Pulled taut, they awaited a nimble hand to manipulate them. These absurd toys were the work of an impressive artisan; their lips and the indications of their bones were so deftly carved, the stitching along their soft cores so neat and tight, their eyebrows and fingernails so delicately painted that no clumsy human hand could have possibly maneuvered the tools necessary for their making. Indeed, they were quite transcendent, those manikins. The eyes, though . . . the eyes . . . something like glass, like the eyes of dolls, and yet more moist, more gleaming, something of affliction in them. They weren't right, the eyes, and yet who was there to witness but that faceless crowd?

A clang of cymbals introduced music, a lolloping, lilting oom-pah-pah oom-pah-pah sort of music, akin to a Germanic waltz with accordions and brass and piping, rising and falling, fading and swelling for a room full of motionless spectators. It must have played for some time before dipping to a tolerable volume.

"Ladies and Gentlemen! Children of all ages!"

The voice boomed from everywhere and yet nowhere visible, bulged above and around and beyond. Everything seemed to vibrate; the eyes of the marionettes rolled wildly, though no other parts of them so much as twitched.

"Presenting the Curry family in tonight's rendition oooooof . . . the X-Ray Show!"

In concert, the four porcelain piles were lifted on their strings, their strange bodies fully displayed, and a lackluster and bizarre cheer rose presumably from the motionless crowd. First was "Ivan the Terrible!" as the voice announced, the very same marionette that had repulsed Oliver and Ramona a day earlier. It trembled on its false limbs, its white pantsuit and cherry-red pompoms gleaming in the diamond-mote-sparking sphere of illumination. On tiptoes, the puppet was more visible, and his porcelain skin softened into a pale fleshy material, something indefinable. The smile splitting the ginger puppet boy's head gleamed shining sharp teeth, hid a snail-shell tongue waiting for the command to unroll in a spongy red carpet and pantomime whatever words another spoke for him. At the opposite end, fourth if one were looking at them that way, was "Oliver Twist!" the voice announced, a pet name the puppet in its stuffed head thought it might have known, had it known anything ever at all. It was dressed similarly to its redheaded counterpart at the far end—white pantaloons and voluminous top, conical white cap upon its tuft of orangish hair—yet its pompoms were apple green instead of red, and rather than the mouth and tongue and teeth, its singular feature was a bizarre nose that propelled a ridiculous distance off its face and eventually pinched into something of a whip. Whenever this Oliver Twist's head was jostled, the whip-of-a-nose would twang about like a thin piece of metal, like a fencing foil.

These twin marionettes were manipulated into dancing about in place, arms and legs forced into jolly moves in time to the resurgence of the music. Their eyes blurred and quivered in their sockets, ran with strange liquid, and swelled as if to burst but did not, and the crowds cheered without mouths, whistled without lungs, clapped without hands.

The two puppets in the center, second and third for those who appreciated order, were motionless for some moments while the bookends did their weird performance, but when they rose to their full height, it became clear how similar and yet different they were in construction.

The only puppet decorated as a female was costumed quite elaborately. Most notable at first, though, were its strange limbs, which were delicate and exaggerated in length, so that its legs were the majority of its body and its arms reached nearly to the ground when left slack. Like those of an insect, the limbs were jointed and clickety, nervous and twitchy. The feet ended in pointed toes with tiny black ballet slippers, the satiny ribbons of which wound all the way up its legs and tied in a large blooming bow where the external sex organs would've been had the puppet been crafted any. The torso was bare of clothing, bore an expertly sculpted grayish-white stomach and ribs and breasts, complete with navel and nipples and lifelike shading. The expert might even have mistaken porcelain for actual skin. The only bit of clothing this puppet wore was a sheer black capelet across its arms, tied with a black satin ribbon about its neck. Its head, which was capable of tipping itself in any direction, was crowned in perfect sable coils, a glittering red bow tying them loosely back from its face, and the face itself, of course, was a stunning work of art: a jaw wired to open and close to mimic speech; the delicate blush of life across lips and cheeks; large, long-lashed eyes that never blinked, instead fluttered coyly. This erotic feminine puppet was nothing short of exquisite in design and execution, and yet, though its true talents were not yet put on display, a close observer might notice the hair-thin lines tracking across its midsection.

"Lilia of the Valley!" the voice introduced her. Another meaningless cheer. More music as she twirled once, twice, on her toes and came to rest, eyes open wide toward the floor, gazing at nothing and everything.

The last of the four marionettes was the most unsettling to look upon. Warped and tangled, it resembled more a tortured animal than a manikin. Appendages sculpted into corkscrew versions of arms and legs, depressions and lumps, tumescent facial features, a bulging gut beneath a black-and-white-striped button leotard sleeveless at the arms and tapering into shorts—this one was comedic as well as depressing. Its head was topped with a crooked golden crown on a pat of orangeish straw hair, which reflected on its chin in a beard, though most beguiling of all was the ever-moving white wooden rat that squeakily wheeled itself across the puppet's body on a carved track. Up the belly, over the shoulder, along the corkscrew arms, now over the opposite shoulder, down the belly, along the corkscrew legs, and so on.

"And King Arthur!"

The music swelled; the crowd went wild. Nothing moved anywhere at all beyond the little rat winding its continuous way along the puppet's figure.

The marionettes were still, standing exposed for all to see, had there been anyone to see them.

"And now, the screen!" the voice sonorously hollered.

From the darkness above, what resembled an enormous wood-framed window began to slowly descend. Whether the material within the frame was glass or plastic or something else, it was not translucent but opaque, black in fact, reflecting the surrounding deepsea lighting in all its ghostly, flickering play. A clunking strain indicated the screen was lowering on metal cords, and indeed by the time the enormous rectangle had dropped enough that it hung suspended about twelve inches from the misting ground, two thick brass chains were revealed at the top, one at either corner.

The dark panel had come to rest in front of the two marionettes in the middle. Their feet were visible beneath the screen, and their heads were visible above, but their bodies were hidden. At the sides, the two boyish puppets jigged in time to the macabre music before their strings angled them sideways, pulled their hands to the frame of the screen, tipped their shoulders downward, and held them still so that it appeared they were responsible for supporting the thing.

"You see what's without, but what is within? What lies beneath all the smiles and skin?"

At once the black screen was illuminated where the female puppet dangled. The unnatural light, a ghostly, luminous blue-white, revealed an outline of its figure yet a view of the thing's interior, an X-ray of insides far more complex than the outside had implied. Who could understand the shaded layers and lines in their intricacy? But the audience was gifted, granted access, drawn inward, in . . . in . . . their sight (had they had any) tunneled and refined and narrowed and vacuum-sucked into that filmy vision. The curtains were drawn back, the gears turned, the obstructions lifted—

and there, in the very core of that thing that had been dubbed Lilia of the Valley, was a shadow-play show of two small children—girls—playing together, their pigtailed curls bouncing. Their flickering silhouettes laughed as they cut paper, crafted, put up their creations before a light and made shapes. Theater. They were performing. Erratically, the two shifted, changed shape, grew the bodies of young women, and while one's paper dolls turned into paint brushes, the other's scissors and confetti remained. What resembled ink began to occlude the inner workings, to surround the forms of those young girls, but the one with the scissors separated itself, began to snip at the safe nest of strings that'd bordered them, clipped and snipped until she was free of it, until she was out slicing her way through more walls and barriers, more webs and weavings. Strange that the black silhouette of the blade-wielding woman within the marionette's puppet body seemed to be seeking a way out of it, using those scissors to carve at what was, presumably, the porcelain cast of the manikin's torso. The breasts, the stomach, the shoulders and pelvis—she hacked and slivered in a jarring strobe-light fashion, until from behind, the second silhouette, which had at last crawled out of the nest as well, crept up behind, took hold of the pair of scissors, and severed the wild shadow diagonally, throat to hip.

The tissue-thin veils within the X-rayed puppet drifted back across its body, hiding the ended performance from the crowd. The music began to lull in anticipation of its second act as lights dimmed on Lilia of the Valley's side of the screen and flared on King Arthur's side.

In the same pale blue and white shades as its X-rayed counterpart, this puppet exposed its insides as helplessly as had the other, though what his gut held was immediately visible: a curled up, head-to-knees, tucked-limb fetus. This gremlinoid figure turned ever so slightly in its sloshy amniotic-ish fluid, and then it moved aside as if it were part of a door which had been swung open. Beyond that fetus was the body of the puppet itself, nothing much to see at first, apparently a dark hollow, not the layers and layers of the previous marionette, and yet as the viewer's eye was once again drawn inward, spiraled deep into that hollow, what it found there was a teensy tiny silhouette of a man, the World's Tiniest Man who, as one watched, peeled into two versions of itself and wept silhouetted tears in a clickety, stop-motion, old-film sort of way. Tick tick tick tick tick tick . . . A clock sounded somewhere within the belly of the puppet, heard even above the still-piping music. Tick tick tick tick tick tick . . .

The stomach swung closed, the fetus floating in its bubbling fluid, and then that side of the X-ray screen, too, blacked out, leaving the entire glossy sheet in reflective darkness.

At the sides of the screen, the two boy puppets appeared to laugh, placed hands over their mouths and tipped back their heads. They pretended to help raise the gleaming black rectangle as its chains were wound and pulled it back up into the impenetrable murk above.

When all four marionettes were left hovering alone on their strings once more, when the piping, galumphing music reached new peaks in its somber eccentricity and pinpricks of bioluminescence began to fizzle around the arena as sparklers in the hands of a hundred children on a balmy summer evening, a figure at long last waltzed into the ring in a show of glitter and bombast fit for the most elaborate of kings; the crowds went wild without moving their nonexistent muscles. The man was taller and thinner than any might have recalled, and he was dressed in white and black and red and green, gold and stripes and poufs and collars, buttons and waistcoats and boots and top hats and gloves—yet for all of his grandiloquence, his face was as repugnant as ever with its crooked nose, its heavy brows, the flesh of its cheeks like the mud of a dried creek bed, and its protruding lips pulled much too far back into its face.

"Four cheers for our family of four!" called Quaxton to his crowds, and they responded in kind.

The marionettes, unable to move without aid, regardless seemed quivering with some terrified energy; their eyes alone were mobile, rolling and flaring, spidering veins and oozing.

"How brave they've been. How willing. But it's time, now, for the grand finale and their final exit. Are you ready, my dears?"

The obvious uproar answered him.

"Our first acquisition, our Terrible Ivan. What a handsome young man!" Quaxton boomed, dancing toward the puppet about which he spoke. "Nothing wrong with being young and excited. Nothing more to see inside than the narcissism and prurient appetite of all such young men, isn't that right, my fine fellow?" Quaxton drew near the puppet's face, whispered, "Going to be just like your father, aren't you?" then stepped away, grinned at his crowds, and lifted an arm as the Ivan puppet's mouth split its head in two and its tongue unrolled several feet to the ground.

Its eye leaked a black tear.

"His brother, our Oliver Twist. Quite the little scamp, as his name would imply." Quaxton moved behind the four puppets to come up alongside the other brother. "Alike in nurture, alike in nature!" To Oliver, he whispered, "A simpleton, aren't you? Making promises without thought of the implications?" With a hop, Quaxton moved aside, and unexpectedly, the puppet's whip-like nose flung out into the audience, roundabout in circles, up and down, whisking through the air with a treacherous thwipping sound yet hitting no one.

Its left ear ran dark juice.

"Now on to our matriarch, the virtuous, noble, loyal core of this enviable family. How true she's been! How caring and motherly! Lilia of the Valley, I call her, for she finds the path through life's sorrows, always, though they rise up on either side. Isn't that right, my trollop?"

Quaxton drew up alongside the female puppet, ran a rough hand along its squat nude torso. When he stepped away, various pieces of the marionette's perfect breasts and stomach and shoulders lifted out and drew aside on little metal arms, as if it were a chest of cabinets being opened, and behind each little door was a lump of something black and spined, prickly and ugly—sea urchins. They were sea urchins. The puppet's body was full of spiny urchins. As one final insult, Quaxton took hold of one end of the black satin ribbon that was tied in a bow at the marionette's pelvis, and he pulled. Unraveling entirely, the ribbon released a torrent of foul-smelling seawater from between the puppet's legs.

A thin trickle of greenish-black ran from its nose.

"And last but most certainly not least," Quaxton predictably shouted, jumping aside to avoid the fishy deluge at his feet, "here's King Arthur, the patriarch. The rock, the stone, the one who likes to pull his sword from things . . . though not always quite in time—am I correct, ladies and gentlemen?"

Cacophonous laughter followed Quaxton's crude joke.

"Poor vision, this one, in all manner of the word. Well, my friends, he's paying for it now, isn't he? Paying . . . for it . . . now."

He put a hand on the puppet's twisted shoulder, looked it square in its porcelain face.

"Poor fool," he quietly commented. "But most flesh men are, aren't they?"

Quaxton patted the marionette's shoulder and then again stepped aside, allowed for full view of that little rat as it continued to move on its track across the puppet's body and appendages, but something more awful began to happen as within seconds, the entire doll began to twitch and convulse on its strings, to thrash so horribly that it seemed its operator might be having an epileptic fit, but then suddenly, a much more grotesque prospect materialized: the marionette was giving birth. The head of the fetus that'd been visible in the x-ray was emerging between the puppet's legs, and after several moments of intense and jarring flailing, the entire mechanical infant had fallen out upon the floor in a whoosh of fluid, trailing its moist umbilical cord with it.

Once the puppet man stilled, a bit of bile trickling from its mouth was all that was left to indicate such a violent act had taken place.

Afterward, all four weary marionettes were driven to perform on their strings, to jest and dance, to interact and bow, to grin and whirl in all their monstrous indecency. They controlled no part of themselves. What little remained of who they were strove from within to push out whatever portion of themselves they could, and yet they found no strength to do so.

The music swelled, ashes began to sprinkle downward, replacing the confetti, mingling with the bioluminescent critters and larger sea life beginning to flit about. The voices of the crowd and of Quaxton garbled as if they cheered through gallons of water, and all was chaos and viscosity and plummeting until at last the lights of the arena were extinguished, the circus itself having sunk too far to any longer be touched by the world above.