The Grimscribe's Puppets

by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  Timothy had stared at him, unblinking. “Why not?” he’d said.

  He had no good answer for that.

  ~*~

  Children, Peter realized. That was the cause of their great strain.

  Katy had always wanted children. When they had first started dating, Katy made those feelings known. They’d be out and she’d point to couples with a child, and remark about how happy they seemed. To Peter, those couples didn’t appear any happier than any other people. They seemed regular, shuffling about, trying to get by, trying to make sense of things.

  Before Katy, Peter hadn’t really thought about children. When she broached the subject, he was noncommittal. But she pressed him, and though she never quite came out and said it, he felt she was making him choose. So he acquiesced, said he’d be happy to have children with her.

  But they couldn’t. Oh, they tried. He liked trying. They tried every conceivable method. To no avail.

  So they were tested. And Peter was found lacking. Low sperm count. Peter remembered the disappointment registering on Katy’s face: anger, sadness, regret, defeat. He was a failure.

  Katy wouldn’t be dissuaded, though. She wanted a child. So she needed sperm. But the thought of another man’s sperm inside of Katy was too much for Peter. He knew it was irrational, but he couldn’t get past it. All he could picture was another man fucking his wife, fucking her hard, and Katy enjoying it. He was being childish and petty but he couldn’t reconcile those emotions.

  They’d fought over it. Their first real fight. “We’ll get a dog,” Peter said. And Katy had laughed unpleasantly. “A dog? I want a child, a girl or boy to share our life, not a pet. I don’t want something disposable. I want something permanent.”

  Nothing was permanent, Peter knew.

  He surprised himself, though, by saying “We’ll adopt. We will. It’ll be good. We’ll give someone a chance. A new life.”

  Katy brightened immediately, and warmed to the idea. She wiped tears from her eyes. “Really?” she said. “You sure?”

  In fact, he wasn’t sure, but he said it anyway. “Yes.”

  ~*~

  The boy scared him. He couldn’t exactly explain why. Maybe it was the way he would stare at Peter, blank-faced and unblinking. Maybe it was the sudden short bursts of nervous laughter that would erupt from Timothy’s mouth, and then die just as quickly, as if he’d been switched off. As if he wasn’t a real boy but some automaton.

  Peter stepped into the room, stared at the boy. Timothy was on his bed, a Winnie-the-Pooh book spread open on his lap. Peter glanced at the rows of killing jars on the boy’s dresser. There was a large, fat bullfrog squeezed into one, its throat puffing in and out, eyes unblinking. It’d be dead in a few days, eyes still unblinking.

  He couldn’t bring himself to sit with the boy and read to him, play with him.

  Or be a proper father, he thought.

  Timothy looked up at him, and Peter shuddered and turned away.

  Pain pressed at Peter’s temples. He hadn’t been sleeping well. No pornographic fantasy playing in his head. The hiss of the monitor beside his bed kept him awake at night. Beneath the constant static he thought he heard something else, the terrible childish chortle he’d heard in the hallway. A cruel, mocking laughter that Peter knew all too well.

  Peter left the room and went down the hallway to the bathroom for some Advil. From the tiny window he could see their property. The field, the barn. Peter had many memories of the barn. Memories, he knew, were dangerous things.

  The pain in his head pulsed. Peter closed his eyes seeking comfort in darkness, but black thoughts and distant memories churned in his head like thick mud. Bright pain cascaded across his dark vision. He smelled hay and sawdust; rotted wood and dry earth.

  No!

  Then a noise that made his ears prickle. Quiet laughter.

  Come back.

  Peter sensed something behind him. He opened his eyes and turned around. The boy was in the doorway, laughing mirthlessly. Peter shivered. His stomach flared in agony. He doubled over, retched, spewed dark brown liquid onto the floor. When Peter stood upright, the doorway was empty.

  He stumbled to the sink cabinet, dry-swallowed a handful of Advil, and then staggered to his bedroom. Peter shut the door and closed the blinds. His body convulsed. His stomach heaved and more dark liquid spilled onto the floor. Then something foreign passed through him, a hard knot, and he retched again and a marble-sized object landed on the wet floor, dark and glistening, a piece of blackness.

  The thrum of dark laughter made him reel. Peter covered his ears with trembling hands. His stomach churned, and his head buzzed, and the dark sky roiled, forming its greater blackness.

  ~*~

  Peter was at that strange cusp, that dream-state between sleep and wakefulness, that grey purgatory.

  He rolled over, felt Katy’s body beside him, warm and lithe and smooth. He pressed into her, gentle, but insistent, almost desperate. She pushed back against him, the curve of her ass riding up against his cock. Peter moaned. Maybe he was dreaming. Maybe Katy was dreaming, too. He wondered what she dreamt, what she fantasized. Did she dream of fucking someone else? Two guys at once? A girl?

  These fantasies spurred Peter. He pressed in tight against Katy, cupped a breast. She bucked against him. Someone moaned. The monitor crackled.

  Peter pulled his pyjamas down, then yanked Katy’s underwear aside and pushed into her. He grabbed her breast again, then held on, squeezed.

  “Oh,” Katy moaned.

  Peter thrust and squeezed.

  “Ow.”

  He felt moisture, pulled his hand away.

  “Fuck,” Katy said.

  Peter struggled out of that grey purgatory and came awake. “W-What?” he said.

  Katy sat up, turned on the lamp. Her white-cotton top clung to her breast, where a damp spot could be seen.

  She lifted her top, examined the breast. Peter looked at his wet hand, wiped it on the bed sheet.

  “What’s wrong?” he said. “What is it?”

  Katy looked at him quizzically. “It’s milk,” she said. “Breast milk.”

  ~*~

  The barn was quiet, secluded. Always had been. As a young boy, it was where he sought sanctuary, where he went to indulge in boyhood antics.

  Quiet now. No hissing monitor. No laughing boy. No angry wife.

  “You bastard,” she’d hissed. “I’m not pregnant.” She’d stared at him with something like pity. “I haven’t been sleeping around.” Then she’d cried, really cried, great sobs shaking her. Peter had just stood and stared. There’d been a time when he would have went to her, put his arms around her, comforted her.

  Their doctor admitted that, yes, it was a bit unusual for Katy to be lactating, but he’d heard of similar cases developing when a young child enters a household. The body reacts instinctively to nurture the new arrival.

  Peter was now relegated to the living-room couch. At least he didn’t have to listen to that black noise crackling from the baby monitor. Most days in the house he felt isolated and alone, like a specimen in Timothy’s killing jars gasping for breath.

  He took a long lost draw on his cigarette, then stamped it out and hid the butt in the corner with the others. He rooted around behind a bale of old hay and pulled out the plastic milk crate covered in burlap. He drew a magazine from the crate: Bitches in Bondage. On the cover was a pale redheaded woman of indeterminate age, dressed in latex, on her knees, mouth gagged, and hands bound. Her eyes were wide and staring. At him. Peter thought, perhaps, that behind the gag she was smiling. At him.

  Peter stepped behind the bale with the magazine. He loosened his belt, let his pants drop. He flipped through the pages. There was a buzzing in his head. Something was rising up within him, a black force that was great and alien and transcendent, churning. It would tear him apart.

  ~*~

  The boy scared him.

  ~*~

  Night. Peter shifted on the couch. He though
t he’d heard something; the padding of tiny feet creaking across the upstairs hallway. And something else, as if from a dream or some distant recollection. A moan, laughter, echoing through the house and through his memories.

  Peter stirred, sat up, listened. He thought he could hear the static and the hiss of the monitor, black interference, like the buzzing in his head. He stood. His body was taut and vibrating, like a plucked guitar string.

  Another slow creak from upstairs. The boy was up and wandering again.

  He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and headed for the stairs. It was dark-dark, like patches of blackness placed over other pieces of blackness. Somewhere a child was laughing quietly, he was sure of it. Peter crept slowly up the stairs.

  Peter tottered forward. Black static filled the air. His head thrummed. He put a hand on the door, pushed it open, peered in.

  Katy was on the bed, glassy-eyed, a small smile creasing her face, her shirt pushed up, exposing her breasts. The boy was sitting cradled in her lap, his mouth affixed to a breast, sucking. Katy moaned.

  Peter quivered, let out a strangled sob.

  Katy looked up, cheerlessly, stared at Peter unblinking. The boy suckled greedily.

  “K-Katy,” Peter croaked. He felt apart from reality, but rooted to the floor.

  “It’s okay,” Katy said. “It’s natural.”

  “But ... no ....”

  “He’s just a little boy,” Katy continued. “My little boy.”

  Peter’s stomach knotted. He wanted to rush over, pull the little vampire away from Katy, but the thought of touching the creature sent an icy black wave of repulsion through him. So he stood rooted and helpless. Always helpless.

  The boy had stopped feeding. Both of them were looking at Peter now. Both smiling. The boy squinted, pointed, then laughed quietly. “I know you,” the boy said.

  Peter’s hands flew up, as if he were trying to ward off something. He cried weakly, turned and ran from the room. He scampered down the hallway, down the stairs, through the front door and out into the night.

  He thought he heard a voice, perhaps Katy’s, perhaps his own, perhaps the boy’s, saying Come back come back.

  Electric pain coursed through him. Peter stopped, doubled over, and vomited dark stones and darker memories.

  ~*~

  The boy scared him. Startled, Pete dropped the magazine. He quickly pulled his pants up, turned.

  The boy backed away.

  “No, wait,” Pete said. His heart raced. He held out a hand.

  The boy blinked, took another step back.

  “It’s okay,” Pete pleaded. “Really.” A piece of blackness coiled in his stomach, snaked through him, moved across his forehead, his vision. He moved forward.

  “Petey,” the boy said. “No.”

  Pete rubbed his eyes. It was like long fingers were digging into his brain, probing. He blinked. He thought he recognized the boy from school. He was a grade behind Pete.

  The boy opened his mouth and laughed and laughed, mocking, and Pete’s head burst in sharp black anguish.

  He leaped. The boy gave a little yelp, and Pete pushed him to the ground, hard, and the boy went still. Pete lay on top of the boy for a very long time, holding him, not wanting to hear that horrible, braying laughter. He lay on top of him until the curtain of blackness receded and the world, like the boy beneath him, went quiet, still, and cold. Then Pete cried and shook the boy. “Come back,” he pleaded. “Please come back.”

  ~*~

  Sounds from upstairs. Peter pictured the boy in Katy’s bed, tiny mouth sucking at her pale breast. He closed his eyes tight, as if that would shut out the noises. Moisture leaked from the corner of his eyes. He felt close to bursting.

  Peter stood. An unbearable agony washed through him. He clutched at his stomach, grimaced. He moved to the door, legs unsteady, and out into the night.

  Black stars hanging in a cold black sky. A rippling across the dark firmament. Peter rubbed at his wet eyes.

  In the barn he lit a small lamp, then sat down, propped against a straw bale. He breathed deep. Hay and sawdust; rotted wood, dry earth, and old sorrows.

  Peter blinked. The boy stepped from the shadows into the meagre lamplight. Peter smiled weakly. “You did it,” he said. “You came back.” Then, inside of him, something swelled and burst into thousands of tiny dark shards. There was a small moment of sudden pain as something spilled out of him, then a cool black nothingness.

  He was dimly aware of the boy’s tiny figure coming forward, holding a jar. The boy bent to Peter and scooped up dozens of small black stones, pieces of blackness that lay strewn around Peter. The boy studied the jar, studied Peter, then screwed a lid on the jar, turned and disappeared into the shadows.

  The boy was gone. The barn was gone. Katy was gone.

  There was nothing but the sky; vast and black and unending.

  Then Peter was gone.

  The Blue Star

  By Eddie M. Angerhuber

  I leave the train that brought me into the old city at the edge of the sea and walk through the well-known streets. It is April 30th. This day will pass in a few hours and a new day will start, and with it the beginning of a new month. A new life. That day ten years ago my old life came to an end and a new one began. Looking back, the past seems to me like a shady grey river of nostalgic melancholy. I long for this past as though for an exquisite bottle of wine, emptied a long time ago, which had perhaps been the present of a late friend. Just like that bottle of wine, the past will never return, but it is still as much a part of me as it is of every single person around me in the streets of this city on the edge of the sea.

  The weather is changeable tonight, and people hurry by with their coat collars up to their chins and their hands buried deep in their pockets. Tar-grey suits, water-grey dresses and sky-grey coats crowned by asphalt-grey hats, even the women have pulled their raincaps and scarfs over their foreheads, hiding their faces from the eyes of the passing. Time is on my side. I stroll idly around, looking at passengers and the display windows of the shops, my hands in the pockets of my trousers, feeling the aftermath of my return run through my veins like a gentle electric current. Many years ago this was my hometown. I was born in this place. I know all the houses, the neon signs, the sky by day and night: the candy-blue day sky covered with rushing rags of cloud; the red-violet threatening night sky with its crescent moon that bears visible signs like tooth marks. This night sky contrasts with the multicoloured neon signs—an artificial rainbow of empty promises. These lights attract, twinkle seductively, deceive with their mendacious advertising art-words which sound so much more agreeable and true than our real plain language. Now slowly the day turns into night, the darkness falls like a dirty sheet and covers the rhinestones of the lanes with its smell of smoke and car exhaust. This quarter consists of a multitude of narrow winding lanes like artificial canons between the towering grey mountains of 19th century buildings. This is the place where one’s steps sound hollow on the cracked pavement, causing the waiting ones to shudder in mute hope behind their drawn curtains. But I just walk on by all these houses, I just walk on by. I linger nowhere and no door opens for me, and I would not ask for admission. My fingertips graze the crumbling roughcast by passing these houses, the dusty sheet metals of the windowsills. This is my town, or rather: once it was my town. I have become a stranger to it over the last years, but nevertheless I was never really far from it. These narrow streets and ugly structures are settled in my night dreams until I awake. I know the name of every street, every corner used for secretive meetings, every hiding place in this confusing labyrinth of lightless passages where the contents of dustbins indulge in forbidden growth. Night falls like a dirty sheet, powdering the faces of passengers so pale, as if they were dummies’ faces hidden beneath their human shells. Nobody is looking up as I pass by, but I smile although nobody sees it. This smile is for the flickering neon lights that are rising one by one over the rooftops like gaudy birds.

  Banan
a Split Bar, I read in silent amusement, Calypso Casino. I know these bars and pubs, these amusement arcades and hotels where dull pleasures sit in huge armchairs, waiting for a stranger to enter. North Star Insurance, I read, and I think of the administration building, heavily wainscoted with sandstone, its huge doorways and portals and the rows of lightless windows. A pink palm tree trembles in the distance over the wide surface of the water, seemingly waving its arm-like branches. Now I stand at the harbour, having turned my steps unconsciously to this location. The black waves of lightless waters roll over the concrete banks, carrying an odour of fish and oil. And the flickering cyphers of advertising anodyne and cinemas mingle in its depths, forming a sparkling carpet of light dots like a lost treasure of glittering jewels. There, at the foot of the stairs, in an old drain, lies the rowboat waiting for me as it does every year. I step aboard, I loose the chain from its ring in the wall, I sit down and grab the oars. This boat is narrow and small, capable of gliding through the canals without anyone noticing it, provided one rows cautiously and silently. And I am rowing slowly, with regular movements, in gentle oblivion. My eyes catch sight of the neon advertisements’ reflections like glassy marbles as I watch, head thrown back—reflections of distant lights. In the distance, behind a wall of heavy and huge structures, the sign that I love most is flickering. It lingers for a moment, only to disappear behind chimneys and aerials, playing a provocative hide-and-seek with me.

  The Blue Star. I have never found out what this sign means that glows without letters—only a plain if pretty symbol—on the cloudy cover of the night. It resembles a stylized star with five long, thick prongs and shorter, thinner ones between them, like a starfish, a crinoid, perhaps a sea anemone. Its colour is the same crystalline blue as ever, as if the years had not gone by. I row slowly, I glide over the nightly water; I succumb to the crossing streams of past and presence and to the sensuously intoxicating repetition of every cycle deep inside my innermost heart. Lowering my eyelids, I listen to the voices of the past—how they laughed and joked that night, many years ago, a trifling game of flippant youth. And I remember her name. Yes, I remember her name ... It is April 30th. When this day comes to an end in an hour or two, and the new month begins, perhaps my new life will also begin. I whisper sweet nothings like a gentle fool to the gusts of wind, steering my boat along the mole toward the point where the Blue Star twinkles and baits. Once we saw it the same way too: shining cobalt-blue in the black sky. We thought the sight so beautiful that we decided to drive onto it, no matter where it would lead us. For some reason we were convinced that some wonderful bar or nightclub must hide behind the pretty little star. It could not possibly have been an advertisement for headache anodyne or baby food. We were sitting in a boat, a-rowing just the same as I am now. We were four. The laughter of the girls sparkled like Champagne in the stuffy cup of the towering building around us.