Smiling figures on strings, porcelain dolls and toys that hold souls. In the outer darkness the same beings are called puppets, marionettes, dolls, mimics, little ones and toys from line to line.
Of the outer darknessch. 20, 23
On Samson's dying vision, they march on playground-colored stairs that defy gravity, “their broken puppet smiles and skin reflecting hell-sweat down plastic and porcelain cheeks, some rosy, some dimpled, some freckled,” shuffling at the behest of godly string pulls and begging for the death they live in (20). In Satan's room a marigold round of marionette heads sings “Row, row, row your boat” with guns to the backs of their smiling heads, freezes and rewinds like a tape, and works at toy hammers in a workshop “like elves busy with nothing.” They sit “impaled on little sticks like toys,” with painted hair, porcelain eyes and treadless dress shoes, and together they force Satan to eat his own teeth. “Leviathan forces this unto every soul trapped within their toys.” “Where Satan lies is just one little room of this infinitude hotel of puppet machines” (23).
As a wordch. 3, 4, 9, 18, 22, 36
“Hollow marionette, I will remember the toll of your lifeless clicks of dissociation” (3). “A puppet of puppets, marionettes of marionettes, mimics of mimics” (4, 36). “I'm a good puppet” (9). “The end is filled with puppets playing with themselves” (18). Kether falls “like a bad puppet” off the strings (22). Yaldabaoth curses Lucifer: “My perfection will only be known onto you as a puppet's place!” (36).
The doll in the bedroomch. 24
A porcelain doll clicks lifelessly at Alice's window, seems to live only in one of her paintings, comes close beside her eye while a tape's tenor-squeal sings “Row, row, row your boat” in the dark, and at last sits straight on her bed under the light: “Why don't we talk about Christopher?” and “Your love, he is free now.” It points to the painting she made of it.
The angel baby dollch. 28, 30, 34, 36
A porcelain baby hangs by a single string, dressed in white wings, crying bloody lamb tears; “the angel toy looks just like her son” (28). A baby doll with angel wings, crying blood, unrolls the circus banner (30). A baby doll in angel wings bleeds tears over the scroll “I am the Antichrist” (34). The flying doll in the form of an angel, its eyes bleeding, is Lucifer in his new form (36). See The Antichrist.
The circus crowdch. 30
Puppets smile from tiered benches in the classical formal attire of the early twentieth century, “all looking like children,” smelling of paint and old varnish, whispering “Alice… Alice…” Musicians in white with thin red stripes mimic horns and drums that sound fake. A dummy in a light-black outfit hands round a sack, and they pelt Alice with beating hearts. Eight small boy puppets drag the bull in on sixteen ropes.
The dolls on the pianoch. 35
In the antique shop: “the antique dolls painted with thin legs and long horn shoes, smiling away. They sit in columns and rows over the old piano in one corner,” beneath the jester painting signed by Alice Love.
The shop's toysch. 35
A miniature train rests on tiny railroads before metal cups of pearl necklaces and marbles; pocket-sized toy soldiers in red coats, “little nutcrackers,” stand at the ends of the table “almost guarding the mounds.”
In the hoardch. 34
“His lies are built by bitty nothing toys he collected, towering around him in his room.” “Wee little puppets go in and out of mouse holes, like doors,” and small woodworkers with tiny hammers crawl across him like a second Earth.
Opi and Noidych. 11, 35
“Opi with Noidy, the two button-eye stuff-stitch friends holding one another,” in yarn hair and crochet clothes: black-haired Opi and red-haired Noidy, among dice, rune books and scribbles. Under Noidy's shirt is a red wax seal, “like a letter, but of a necromantic kind.” In the red house hangs a picture of Noidy; in the box of mirrors a red-yarn doll falls over weeping, and the weeping of Thomas's wife comes from it. At the end, “Noidy, stuck inside without Opi. Cannot leave” (11). In the shop, not named: two button-eyed dolls, one red-haired and one black-haired, sit before a small red house across the piano (35).
The boy in overallsch. 23, 25, 42
A dark-haired, rosy-cheeked porcelain boy in overalls who force-feeds Satan in a voice that mocks Antony (23), swings on a tire swing (25), and returns in Damon's flash (42). See The Boy in Overalls.
The Good Puppetch. 9, 25, 34
A man with a pink television who calls himself a good puppet, later covered in gold. See The Good Puppet · Golden Child.
Note: the puppets and the playground stairs live inside the outer darkness.