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The noise the residents had made so far was nothing to the uproar with which they greeted this. “We haven’t had the entertainment yet,” Unity protested, jumping to her feet and looking more than ready to dart the length of the room. “Got to sing for your supper, Tommy Thomson.”

“We don’t want any songs and we don’t want any speeches,” Amelia declared. “We always have the show.”

“The show,” all the diners began to chant, and clapped and stamped in time with it, led by the thumping of Amelia’s stick. “The show. The show.”

The manager leaned across Shone’s table. His eyes were pinker than ever, and blinking several times a second. “Better put it on for them or you’ll get no rest,” he muttered. “You won’t need to be anything special.”

Perhaps it was the way Snell was leaning down to him that let Shone see why he seemed familiar. Could he really have run the hotel where Shone had stayed with his parents nearly fifty years ago? How old would he have to be? Shone had no chance to wonder while the question was “What are you asking me to do?”

“Nothing much. Nothing someone of your age can’t cope with. Come on and I’ll show you before they start wanting to play their games.”

It wasn’t clear how much of a threat this was meant to be. Just now Shone was mostly grateful to be ushered away from the stamping and the chant. Retreating upstairs had ceased to tempt him, and fleeing to his car made no sense when he could hardly shuffle across the carpet for trying to keep his feet in the slippers. Instead he shambled after the manager to the doorway of the television lounge. “Go in there,” Snell urged, and gave him a wincing smile. “Just stand in it. Here they come.”

The room had been more than rearranged. The number of seats had been increased to eighteen by the addition of several folding chairs. All the seats faced the television, in front of which a small portable theater not unlike the site of a Punch and Judy show had been erected. Above the deserted ledge of a stage rose a tall pointed roof that reminded Shone of the clown’s hat. Whatever words had been inscribed across the base of the gable were as faded as the many colors of the frontage. He’d managed to decipher only ENTER HERE when he found himself hobbling towards the theater, driven by the chanting that had emerged into the hall.

The rear of the theater was a heavy velvet curtain, black where it wasn’t greenish. A slit had been cut in it up to a height of about four feet. As he ducked underneath, the moldy velvet clung to the nape of his neck. A smell of damp and staleness enclosed him when he straightened up. His elbows knocked against the sides of the box, disturbing the two figures that lay on a shelf under the stage, their empty bodies sprawling, their faces nestling together upside down as though they had dragged themselves close for companionship. He turned the faces upwards and saw that the figures, whose fixed grins and eyes were almost too wide for amusement, were supposed to be a man and a woman, although only a few tufts of gray hair clung to each dusty skull. He was nerving himself to insert his hands in the gloves of the bodies when the residents stamped chanting into the room.

Unity ran to a chair and then, restless with excitement, to another. Amelia dumped herself in the middle of a sofa and inched groaning to one end. Several of the jumbo residents lowered themselves onto folding chairs that looked immediately endangered. At least the seating of the audience put an end to the chant, but everyone’s gaze fastened on Shone until he seemed to feel it clinging to the nerves of his face. Beyond the residents, Snell mouthed, “Just slip them on.”

Shone pulled the open ends of the puppets towards him and poked them gingerly wider, dreading the emergence of some denizen from inside one or both. They appeared to be uninhabited, however, and so he thrust his hands in, trying to think which of his kindergarten stories he might adapt for the occasion.