The Puppet Carver

by Scott Cawthon

All around, her classmates were opening their pizza kits, oohing and aahing over them as if they were presents on Christmas morning. Their comments all blurred together in Payton’s confused, frightened brain.

  “Hey, this looks pretty good!”

  “Looks way better than the mystery nuggets the cafeteria is serving for lunch today.”

  “Sausage and mushroom with extra cheese—my favorite! They weren’t stingy with the extra cheese either.”

  With shaking hands, Payton opened her own pizza kit.

  She looked down at the box’s contents. Something about it didn’t feel right.

  Red liquid pooled in the bottom of the box. The crust was not the usual pale color of dough but closer to the color of a bandage’s approximation of Caucasian skin. With one trembling finger, she reached out and touched one of the pepperoni slices. It was soft and smooth. That wasn’t how pepperoni usually felt, was it?

  She thought of the game played in the dark at Halloween parties where you passed around the peeled grapes and said These are the dead man’s eyes, then the cold spaghetti noodles: These are the dead man’s guts …

  Payton felt her stomach roil with nausea and her mouth fill with saliva. She couldn’t be sick. If she got sick, it would call attention to her and make people think she knew more than she was saying. She swallowed hard, fighting her body’s strong urge to vomit.

  She would not be sick. She would not call attention to herself. She would bake her pizza and eat it just like everybody else. The thought of eating the pizza filled her with a disgust more intense than any feeling she had ever known in her life. But she was going to do it. She had to do it.

  In the kitchen area, she took the soggy, dripping pizza from the box and slid it into the oven next to the other girls’ pizzas.

  Drops of red liquid fell from her pizza and splattered on the clean white floor.

  “Whoa, Payton, you went a little heavy on the red sauce, didn’t you?” Hannah said.

  Payton forced a smile and shrugged. “What can I say? It’s my favorite part.” She grabbed a paper towel and wiped up the mess.

  The other girls waited happily for their pizzas, talking about how they were starving and couldn’t wait to eat them. Payton waited with a growing sense of dread. She hoped desperately that someone would pull a fire alarm, and by the time they returned to the classroom, the pizzas would be burnt and inedible. Or maybe she could drop hers on the floor so she wouldn’t have to eat it.

  No. Dropping it would make everybody look closely at her and closely at the pizza. They would know there was something wrong with her and something wrong with it.

  When the bell on the oven timer rang, Payton jumped like a bomb had exploded.

  There was no avoiding it. It was pizza time. As Mrs. Crutchfield had said, Bon appétit.

  With shaking hands, Payton took her pizza out of the oven. She took out the pizza cutter and held it over the hot pie, feeling like she was wielding a deadly weapon. The sound of the sharp metal wheel slicing through the cheese and sauce and separating the crust into quarters was like a machete slicing through flesh.

  All around her, girls exclaimed over their pizzas:

  “It smells so good!”

  “I want to take a bite right now, but I don’t want to burn my mouth!”

  “The cheese is so gooey and stretchy!”

  Payton picked up her pizza and carried it to her table. She sat down and stared at it. The sauce was bloodred. She poked the dough with her finger. It was soft and somehow fleshy. The pepperoni reminded her of a tongue.

  The girls at the other tables were gobbling their pizza slices, laughing and having a great time.

  Payton stared down at the unappetizing pizza. The pizza was evidence of how she had abandoned Marley. Abandoned her and then lied about it.

  Payton had no choice. She had to destroy the evidence.

  She had to eat it.

  She swallowed hard to force down the lump that had formed in her throat. She picked up the first slice and took a tiny nibble from the tip of the triangle. It tasted salty and greasy and metallic and wrong somehow.

  The texture of the dough was different than any pizza she had ever eaten before. Fatty. Gristly. How could dough be gristly?

  She chewed and chewed, but somehow the food didn’t seem to be breaking down the way it should. It almost seemed like it was growing bigger in her mouth instead of smaller. With great effort, she forced herself to swallow and felt the solid doughy ball work its way with difficulty down her esophagus toward her stomach. She was reminded of a nature documentary she saw once that showed a large boa constrictor eating a rat whole: You could see the shape of the unfortunate rodent as the snake’s muscles forced it through its throat and into its belly.

  The difference was that the snake appeared to be enjoying the rat way more than she was enjoying this pizza.

  But there was no choice. She had to take another bite. And another. Each one was worse than the one before. Now that it was cooked, the pepperoni had the texture of peeling sunburned skin, and the sauce had a coppery tang like once when Payton had cut her finger and stuck it in her mouth.

  She couldn’t let thoughts like this flood her mind. Not if she was going to finish this pizza. She tried to take bigger bites to make it go faster, but it soon became apparent that this wasn’t a good idea. The big chunks landed in her stomach as heavy as rocks, and when she looked at the pizza on her plate, it didn’t look significantly smaller.

  One slice. Most of the other girls had finished their pizzas and were washing their plates at the kitchen station, chatting and laughing. Payton had only made it through one slice. Eating this pizza was like swallowing stones.

  “Are you all right, Payton?”

  Payton looked up to see Mrs. Crutchfield standing beside her table, looking at her with a concerned expression.

  “I beg your pardon?” Payton said. It was hard to talk. The last bite she took of the pizza still hung in her throat.

  “I was asking if you’re all right,” Mrs. Crutchfield said. “You look pale.”

  “I’m fine,” Payton said, though of course she wasn’t.

  Mrs. Crutchfield looked down at Payton’s mostly uneaten pizza. “Do you not like what you made?”

  “Oh, I like it. It’s just very … filling.”

  Mrs. Crutchfield looked at her for a moment. “I know it must be hard on you with Marley missing. But I’m sure she’ll turn up soon.”

  She’s right here, Payton thought. Right here on my plate.

  For a second, she thought she might actually laugh. She feared she was losing her mind.

  But she nodded and said, “Thank you, ma’am. I hope so.”

  Payton was forcing down the last bite of pizza when the bell rang to change classes. She felt ill and bloated, as if the dough were expanding in her stomach, as if it might keep on expanding and expanding until she burst like a blood-filled tick.

  She suffered through the last class of the day, her stomach churning, and then suffered even more on the bus ride home, as every bump and pothole the bus drove over made the unstable contents of her stomach threaten to evacuate the premises.

  She stumbled through the front door of the house. “Hey, hon,” her mom called from the kitchen. “Any word on Marley?”

  Payton could barely get out the word no.

  Her mom appeared in the living room and looked at her with a knitted brow. “Are you okay, sweetie? You don’t look so good.”

  “Sick,” Payton managed to get out with great effort. “Something I ate.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” Mom said. “And I’m sure worrying about Marley isn’t helping any. I hope you feel better by dinnertime. I’m making pot roast. Your favorite.”

  Her mom’s pot roast usually was her favorite, but now the thought of it sickened her. The stringy meat, stewed in its own fat and juices. Even the carrots and onions and potatoes were saturated in the juices of dead cow. First came death, then the butchering, then the cooking a
nd eating of the flesh. Payton feared that the Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza Kit had been her last experience eating the meat of another creature. From now on, assuming she could ever bring herself to eat anything again, she would be a vegetarian.

  Payton remembered a vegetarian kid in middle school who used to wear a T-shirt with pictures of animals on it that said DON’T EAT YOUR FRIENDS. After today, these words had taken on a new meaning.

  “Maybe you should take an antacid and go lie down,” her mom said.

  Payton nodded and dragged herself up the stairs to her room. She didn’t take an antacid because she didn’t think she could swallow anything and keep it down, not even medicine. She curled up on her bed and moaned softly in misery, drifting in and out of consciousness.

  Payton’s stomach churned. She had experienced indigestion and stomach viruses in the past, but never had her digestive system made this much noise. It rumbled, then sloshed, then gurgled so loudly that if anyone had been in the room with her, they would’ve heard it and asked what was wrong.

  Maybe lying curled up on her side wasn’t the best choice, she thought. Maybe it would be better to stretch out so her stomach wouldn’t be so smooshed. She lay on her back. A wave of nausea washed over her, followed by sharp, almost unbearable pangs. Without really meaning to, she put her hands on her stomach. Something from inside her body bumped up against her palms like it was trying to push its way out.

  What was it? It was horrible.

  Payton lifted her shirt so she could see her belly. Usually flat, now it was expanding and contracting in a way she wasn’t controlling. It felt like something was beating her up from the inside, punching her stomach so hard it was going to leave bruises.

  This was not a normal stomachache. There was something inside her, something other than the disgusting pizza she had barely choked down in home ec class.

  Payton had once watched a gross TV show about people infested with parasites. There had been a woman on the show who had had a giant tapeworm living in her stomach. The woman ate and ate but kept getting thinner because the tapeworm devoured everything she consumed. Finally, the woman learned that sometimes if you left a piece of food on your tongue, the tapeworm would crawl up to get it and then could be pulled out of your body. The woman had set a piece of raw steak on her tongue, and the tapeworm had crawled out of her stomach, up her esophagus, and into her mouth. When she pulled it out, it was eight feet long. Payton remembered that the woman had kept the deceased tapeworm in a jar on her mantel, which did not strike Payton as a sound decorating choice.

  When she was thinking clearly, it really made no sense for her to believe that the pizza she had eaten had contained pieces of Marley. However, wasn’t it possible that she had swallowed a worm? People ingested parasites all the time. If they didn’t, why would there be a TV show about it? Maybe that was what had made her so sick. She wondered, if she put a piece of food on her tongue, would whatever was inside her crawl up to get it?

  Her stomach churned harder and faster. Her belly expanded, swelling like a balloon. She could feel her skin stretch to its limit. Her body was definitely trying to expel something. It was time to take action.

  Payton tiptoed downstairs. The TV was blaring one of her parents’ crime shows, so she figured she could sneak into the kitchen undetected. She opened the refrigerator door and tried to decide on the best bait for luring a worm. There was no raw steak, but there was raw hamburger. She liked her burgers well done, so her stomach churned even harder as she thought of holding the cold, bloody beef on her tongue. Still, if doing so got rid of whatever was causing her such misery, it was worth the “ick” factor. It was amazing what a person was willing to do if they were desperate.

  She pinched off a piece of the meat, rolled it into a small ball, palmed it, and headed back upstairs.

  “Are you okay, Payton?” her mom called from the living room.

  “Yeah, just got some ginger ale to settle my stomach,” she called back, trying to sound as normal as possible.

  “Good idea!” her mom said. “Let me know if you need anything, okay?”

  Payton didn’t know if what she was about to do was really a good idea. But she had to do something.

  She sat down on the bed and placed the ball of raw ground beef on her tongue. It was clammy, with the metallic taste of blood. As her body temperature warmed the clump of meat, it started to secrete its juices, the blood and grease running down her throat. She didn’t want to swallow it, but she didn’t want it back in her mouth either. She gagged violently, and bitter saliva combined with the meat juices in her mouth, filling it with a sickening mixture of fluids.

  She jumped up and ran to the bathroom, knowing that at the very least she was going to throw up. But maybe that was all she needed to do, she told herself. Throwing up was awful, but sometimes when something made you sick and you threw it up, you felt better afterward. Maybe that’s all that would happen, she told herself.

  But she knew she was telling herself a lie.

  She winced at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She was pale and sweaty. Her skin had a strange grayish cast, and there were dark half-moons under her eyes. She could never remember looking this bad. Maybe this illness was too serious to take care of at home. Maybe she should tell her mom she needed to go to the hospital to have her stomach pumped.

  But if she told her mom about the pizza kit, would she also have to tell her she knew what happened to Marley? Would she have to admit that she had lied to a police officer? She was afraid that if she started talking, she wouldn’t be able to stop, and all her secrets would spill out. She couldn’t take the risk of getting into that much trouble.

  So she waited. She opened her mouth wide, looking in the mirror, waiting for whatever it was to appear. She could see past her tongue to her uvula and into the dark tunnel of her throat. Holding her mouth open made the urge to gag stronger, especially as the now tepid raw meat continued to ooze. The meat’s greasy fluids pooled underneath her tongue. It was repulsive. She couldn’t stop thinking that what she was holding in her mouth was a chunk of mutilated dead cow. If she made it through this experience, she was definitely becoming a vegetarian.

  The wait was excruciating. How long had it been? Minutes? Hours? It felt like it had been years and years.

  There was a slight movement in her abdomen. Was it the worm—or whatever it was—sensing the ground beef, sniffing it (if worms could smell), and starting to make its way toward it? But then it was still again. Had she only imagined it?

  She waited some more, sickly saliva pooling in her mouth. She desperately wanted to spit the meat into the sink, but she knew it was her best chance at solving this problem on her own.

  And then she felt it.

  Something was moving in her stomach. It felt like it was uncoiling like a snake. She could feel the worm—if that’s what it was—pushing itself out of her stomach and up her esophagus, but it was a different sensation than throwing up. The thing making its way up her torso was solid and slow.

  And then she was choking. Coughing and retching, she looked in the mirror. Her throat was visibly pulsing as the thing inside her moved up the length of her neck. The words better out than in popped into her head, but in this case, she couldn’t be sure they were true. She didn’t want the thing to stay inside her, but she was also afraid to see it.

  Her mouth popped open extra wide, like when the dentist pried it apart to fit in his tools. She looked at her gaping mouth in the mirror. She felt something wiggly against her palate. She leaned closer to the mirror to see better, then blinked and shook her head because she couldn’t believe what she saw.

  Fingers. Moving fingers with petal-pink polish—Marley’s color—on the nails. The fingers were attached to a hand that she could see emerging from her stretched-out throat.

  No no no no no. She couldn’t let whatever that hand was attached to come out where she could see it. She reached in her mouth, grabbed the hand, and tried to shove it back into her esophagu
s. She swallowed as she shoved, trying to force it down. But the hand was too large, and it kept moving, kept pushing her hand away, like it was fighting her.

  Payton gagged. Her body was trying to force out the very thing she was trying to force back in. She doubled over, heaving and sputtering. When she stood back up, her mouth stretched open so wide that her lips cracked and bled. The hand shot out of her mouth, its fingers blindly reaching and grabbing. In the mirror, Payton saw herself, her jaws wrenched open like a snake swallowing a whole rat, except it was a girl’s hand and wrist, not a rat’s tail, that protruded from her face.

  Her airway blocked by the emerging arm, Payton wanted to breathe. She wanted to scream.

  Certain she was going to suffocate if she didn’t get help, she took a shaky step toward the bathroom door. So fast that she couldn’t even process it, the hand retreated back into her mouth and down her throat, into her body cavity. Payton sucked in huge gasps of air and sank into a sitting position on the bathroom floor, too drained to make it back to her bedroom. She leaned against the white tile wall and spat the raw meat ball into a wad of toilet paper. She used a bath towel to wipe the cold sweat from her face.

  She tried to process what had just happened. It definitely wasn’t a worm that was inside her. There was no doubt in her mind that the hand that had shot out of her mouth was Marley’s. She and Marley had done each other’s nails at sleepovers. She knew her best friend’s hand when she saw it.

  Her best friend. Marley was her best friend, and she hadn’t told anyone about her accident because she was afraid of getting in trouble. Maybe if she had told someone—Mrs. Crutchfield, one of the factory workers—they could have found Marley in time to save her. And even if it had been too late, at least that way Marley’s parents would have known what happened to her. They wouldn’t still be waiting and worrying.

  But was Marley still alive? It had been her hand, and it was moving. But she couldn’t be alive and inside Payton, could she?

  Payton shook her head hard, as if doing so might reset her scrambled brain. Maybe she was having some kind of emotional breakdown. Maybe everything that had seemed so real was just in her imagination. Maybe the guilt of betraying Marley had destroyed her emotional health.