He fled as quickly as his cane allowed, fire burning in his chest, his lungs, his hands. He wanted to put as much space between him and his foul creation as possible, and did not have to travel far before the half-formed silhouette of Dr Toth’s house rose beyond, shrouded behind the veil of mist. With all caution he kept the widest berth of the towncar and advanced on the apparition, hoping his mere observation would render it solid.
It was with no small relief that he laid his fingers on the ornate brick and felt its rough surface. The house was real, yet there was something more, something ineffable about the place. A sense of déjà vu that went beyond what his memories held. He went to knock upon the door only to realize it was slightly ajar. He pushed it with the head of his cane until the door swung on its creaking hinges, then after a quick glance behind him he hobbled inside.
It was much warmer in the house, yet the puppet maker held no hope the mist’s chill would dissipate. He reached into the pocket of his coat with a shriveled and cracked hand and found instead of his pills the creased letter Dr. Toth had sent him. He stared at it, trying to recall how it came to be there, wondering if the driver had somehow swapped it out when the puppet maker had dropped his medication. It was impossible, and yet if not the driver then. . . The puppet maker unfolded the letter and carefully read it again, forcing the marks to form words that might make sense in a way they had not previously. The handwriting seemed easier to decipher, which only unnerved him further. There was something in his memory waiting just out of reach, and as he tried to understand what it might be the world began to waver around him, his vision to fade at the edges.
He was so close. He felt it. Felt on the verge of understanding. That unexpected note was the key, its familiar handwriting teasing his memory. He staggered forward into the disarrayed room, reached out franticly for a seat as his world began to spin. His vision turned black, his swollen tongue filled his dry mouth, but he also felt in that darkness something else, some truth struggling to be free. He shakily brought the letter back into fading view. The characters danced, squirmed, then fit together in a way they had not before. The fog cleared, and he became untethered by the impossible truth.
The puppet maker eyed the room frantically, letter clutched in his hand, wanting nothing less than to be there, be alive, unable to accept what he had realized. Nothing made sense, and yet everything his saw confirmed the truth. The surplus of abandoned furniture, the shape of the tables and chairs — everything in his reality screamed its true nature. He lifted his cane, half-expecting it to transform at his touch, and navigated as quickly as he could around the debris that lay between him and the stairway to the floor above.
It was all as he remembered it, but now that memory took on a terrifying aspect. He could feel his mind scrambling to shut itself down, but he refused to let it, desperate for some sign, any sign, that the impossible was wrong. His cane struck each step as he ascended, compounding similar scores already present in the wooden treads, while his soft feet padded behind. When the puppet maker reached the top, when he traveled the long hallway and found Dr. Toth’s bedroom door, it too was wide open, and the foreboding atmosphere in the air was almost too much for him. He wondered if he had already died, and if he were already in some sort of unknowable hell.
The skittering sound from the floor beneath told him he was wrong but he could not concentrate on it. His mind racing, he closed his eyes but it did not slow the barrage of questions that consumed him. How could any of it be true? Had the driver not introduced him to Toth? The puppet maker struggled to remember. Flashes of conversations returned to him, the bizarre comments by Toth taking on horrible new meanings. Even the clicks and whirrs he had once taken for those of the light switch could not have been, for as he stood in the bedroom the light came up, and the sound was like nothing he could remember.
“Dr. Toth?”
The room was large, and bore the signs of opulence left to dereliction. Red velvet curtains had fallen from their rod to lie crumpled on the floor, dust muting them until they were as grey as the world. Their absence revealed a window that framed an endless sea of white, and before that a sagging four-post bed, the remains of its canopy hanging overhead like forgotten cobwebs. A step closer revealed the bed was still occupied, the motionless figure draped in a tangle of sheets and blankets. The room’s air was nearly unbreathable, filled with motes of disturbed dust and the stale odor of inevitability.
“Dr. Toth? Is that you?”
He hazarded another step forward.
“Dr. Toth?”
But the figure in the bed did not respond. There was no movement at all as the puppet maker carefully advanced, his cane a slow metronome on the wood of the floor. He watched the shape closely, search for some indication of life. Praying it was the case. For if Toth was not—
“Dr. Toth?”
The figure was wrapped head-to-toe in musty sheets. It did not move, no matter how long the puppet maker stared. He swallowed, then blinked away the tears that had formed and wiped his face with his jittering hand. His thoughts were in tumult—crashing into each other, swirling and expanding to flood his senses. He could not be sure if what he witnessed was real or some delusional half-dream from which he could not awake, one that receded from reality at an accelerated pace. The old puppet maker reached out his trembling hand and peeled back the musty sheets. He knew what was underneath them; he always had. What he did not know until that moment was if he had the courage to gaze beneath anyway. And once he did, his reeling mind could not contain the entirety of his regret.
A click. A recorded voice. Distorted, but unmistakable, it emanated from the lifeless shell lying upon the bed.
“You do not belong here.”
Ropes hung from its limbs and draped over the sides of the mattress. Its wooden head was enormous, coated in a varnish that had beaded as it dried to mimic sweat. Inhuman eyes stared blankly upward.
“What is this?” he muttered. “Dr. Toth?”
“You should not be here,” the recording repeated. “Everything will be compromised.”
“I don’t—” the old puppet maker stammered, shook his head, searched for the words. “How are you doing this? That voice—” he cried, unable to understand. “That voice—” he repeated, trying to keep from collapsing under the weight of all that had come to bear on him. “Where is the recording coming from? How are you doing this?”
Another click, the hiss of a second recording played behind him. He pivoted, his knees threatening to painfully dislocate, and he saw what he had hoped he would never see again, saw it impossibly resurrected in the doorway and staring at him, its many eyes spewing malice. How it traveled from the car to Toth’s bedroom was insignificant to the larger question of how it stood at all. Nothing held it aloft. No ropes beyond those that lay in circles at its feet. It hung motionless, and the old man felt his mind rebelling at nightmare in which he must be trapped. The marionette’s next words left no room for his sanity to remain.
“There is no recording, Father.”
“Your voice is ours.” The bedridden marionette resumed speaking. Its voice too riding on a hiss, followed by a click as the period to each thought. The voices, though, were indistinguishable from each other. Those voices were his. The puppet maker’s.
“I don’t understand,” the old man cried, waving his cane so that he might ward off the nightmares haunting him. They remained unimpressed by his display. “What are you?” he choked.
“We are you,” they replied coldly and in unison. Click. Click. Their recordings turning on and off in turn. “You build the receptacles we provide you. You build them, then through you we are deposited wholly, pulled by your being through that pinhole in your nightmares. This is what you have always done. What you shall continue to do. You are the seeder. You give us the life we so crave.”
“Who are you?”
“At first, explorers, but we have grown to like what is here. To hunger for life. But our numbers are so small, and we ar
e still so tethered to you, still too much a part of you. But our numbers will grow. As you are in us, we are in you.”
“No,” the old man protested. “I won’t do it! I won’t let you!”
“You cannot stop us, Father. Your will belongs to you no longer. It has not for some time.”
Hands gripped the old man, too many sets of hands, hard and wooden. The hands of the inhuman driver. Those hands squeezed tighter.
“We are many, but soon we will be many more. Soon we shall inhabit this world like gods. Gods of elsewhere made solid.”
He struggled, but the old puppet maker could not break free from the driver’s grip. It dragged him from the room, past the two large vessels he had shaped only to have filled by life beyond his ken. Eyes, eyes, too many eyes, wooden and glazed, watched him dragged across the floor by a flurry of arms, watched as he was carried down the stairs, heavy foot slowly following heavy foot with a movement no different from the puppets he once guided. He watched the remains of the house he could barely remember owning rush past, furniture he had once possessed rotting since their abandonment. How long had he been used? How many years had he worn his hands and soul in service of those things? The old puppet maker fought as best he could for his freedom, but time too had forgotten him, and when finally the driver reached the car, the puppet maker was too exhausted to struggle any longer. Already, thoughts were beginning to jumble inside his head.
He worked to make sense of all he had seen, but reality had begun to divide, to separate into fragments impossible to reconstitute. Thought-forms, word strings, flashes of visions careened through his mind, and in the white mist on the outskirts of the small town, he felt them one by one disappearing into the void. The driver simply drove, its too many hands on the wheel, a series of ropes hanging loose beneath its arms. When the towncar inevitably arrived at the puppet maker’s small home, there was nothing left to think at all.
The driver led the dazed old man to his door, brought him inside, sat him down in a threadbare chair, took the cane from his hands and put it aside. From the pocket of the half-stitched coat it wore, it retrieved a small vial of white pills and placed it in the motionless old man’s hand before taking Dr. Toth’s folded note and carefully returning it to that same pocket. The wooden thing then entered the basement workshop and cleaned the debris, covered the equipment once again. Reset his creator’s world. Then, on unsturdy jointed knees, it returned to the dark towncar and started the engine.
Inside his modest house the puppet maker stared down at his wizened hands, at the gnarled knuckles like cherry galls on goldenrod, at the wrinkled leather skin stretched and folded in on itself so many times it sagged. Those hands were filled pain and loss and regret, and they radiated it outward like an unbearable heat. His hands were all he had left. His hands, and his memories. But those memories faded from his mind, slipped into the dark of the misty quiet town like the sound of an automobile into the distance. He swallowed another handful of pills and hoped that this day might finally be his last.
Where We Will All Be
By Paul G. Tremblay
Zane is lying on the couch, wrapped only in a faded yellow sheet, with the TV on and muted. More troubling than an aching back and congested head, his relocating from the bedroom to the couch isn’t a decision he remembers making.
The old couch has frayed holes in the upholstery and more than a few loose springs. Whenever he shifts his body weight, metallic gongs echo as though there’s a cavernous space, a hidden passageway somewhere beneath the fraying cushions.
The weak light of a low, winter-morning sun colors the room in muted tones. He could simply fall back asleep, but the thought of sleeping more, out in the open, in the living room, seems decadent.
Yawning and still wrapped in the sheet, Zane shuffles into the kitchen. He wants coffee, his stimulant of choice now that he’s been off Ritalin since late spring. There’s no coffee, so orange juice filled with pulp will have to do. He drinks a glass, looking out the kitchen window. His parents must’ve left for work already. Both cars are not in the driveway.
Zane assumed his parents would redecorate the house the nanosecond he left for college. He didn’t anticipate the house being preserved, mothballed. Everything has changed and nothing has changed. They can’t possibly be sentimental for the couch, can they? Maybe their keeping it prominently displayed in the living room isn’t an act of preservation, but of perseveration.
It’s Zane’s first winter break back from Assumption College. He likes his classes and professors, who have been more accommodating to him and his academic needs than he was led to believe they would be.
His two roommates are typically spoiled assholes from affluent Wellesley, but harmless ones. Zane made other friends easily enough, like always. Zane would describe his friends as he would describe himself: laid back to the point of being unsure, sometimes painfully and annoyingly so; hard working but not overly ambitious; loyal to some; distrustful to most.
There were times during the semester while attending the prerequisite parties, standing in a circle, everyone holding a red plastic cup of beer or Kool-Aid mixed with cheap vodka, when Zane couldn’t help but feel they were all looking at each other and thinking: what are we doing here? why am I here with you? what are we going to do next?
Zane returns to the couch with his pulpy orange juice and unmutes the TV. A British woman teaches a squat, older couple how to train their willful Yorkshire Terrier. He was watching Animal Planet in his sleep, apparently.
It’s odd that neither of his parents shut the TV off before leaving for work. Maybe they didn’t want to disturb him. Maybe he didn’t sleepwalk to the couch until after they left.
He changes the channel to one of the twenty-four-hour cable news networks. There, the video is paused, or mostly paused; two flickering frames stuck in a loop. The quivering set of images is of a field reporter, standing outdoors. There’s a crowd behind her and in a large field or some other vast space. The sky above is wide and grayish blue.
The reporter’s blonde head is askew, or goes askew as the images flicker. She faces the camera one moment, then the next, her head is turned, or caught in mid-turn. She’s trying to see what’s over her shoulder, or what’s behind her.
Her hands change positions as well. In one shot she holds an oversized but drooping microphone under her chin, and the next, her hands are at her side, and are empty. The news ticker at the bottom of the screen is unreadable. Yellow letters and symbols overlap and blur.
Zane tries changing the channel and flipping it back, but the same schizophrenic scene remains. He tries the other news channels and only gets blank, black screens. He quickly spins through the spectrum of pay TV. More than half of the channels are blacked out.
In the midst of his channel hopping, Zane’s father abruptly walks into the house and stalks through the living room and into the kitchen. He comes in with such speed and purpose, Zane reacts as if he’s caught doing something wrong. He drops the remote control and sits up quick and straight, jostling the glass in his lap, spilling orange juice onto the sheet.
“Jesus, Dad? Did you, um, forget something?” Zane wipes the spill, balls up the yellow sheet, and carries it with him into the kitchen.
His father is a high school history teacher and track coach. He has been doing both for more than twenty years, famously only having missed a day of school for the birth of his son. So, why is he home now?
Hurrying around the room, his father opens cabinets and drawers and closes them just as quickly. When he finally sees Zane, he says, “I—I don’t. I don’t.” His face contorts into a pained expression and he rubs his graying head with his hands.
Zane instantly calculates that his father is only fifty-two years old, which he presumes is too young for Alzheimer’s, although he can’t be sure. Feeling as worried and confused as his father appears, Zane aches to do something helpful. He only thinks to say, “Hey, Dad, there’s something wrong with the cable, I think. Got a number
I should call? I can, you know, take care of that, if you want.”
“What? No, no.” His father’s face flashes anger, and it’s a face that’s still scary and intimidating, if not somewhat diminished. His once chiseled features have softened in age. “Not what—I don’t. We. We don’t, I mean, we do—” then he sighs. His furrowed brow returns, and then he leaves the kitchen and wanders into his bedroom.
Zane follows, completely terrified, now thinking stroke or aneurysm or some horribly rare degenerative cognitive disorder. He has to get his cell phone, call Mom, ask her what he should do.
Inside his parents’ bedroom all the bureau drawers are open, socks and parts of tee shirts hanging out like swollen tongues. His father is half in the walk-in closet.
“Dad? Are you feeling okay? Do you need help?”
His father comes out, grabs Zane by the shoulders. His hands are still cold from being outside.
“Are you okay? Dad?”
His father squeezes Zane’s shoulders. He’s still a very strong man. He shakes his head and says, “I’m fine. We just. We just have to go, Zane. We have to go. Now.” His shadow stretches over Zane, loosely fitting like a hand-me-down suit.
Zane twitches his head and long curly bangs fall over his eyes. “Where?”
His father sighs and growls, throws his hands up, so clearly frustrated that Zane doesn’t get it, never gets it. He says, “Come on. You—you know. Where we all will be.”
~*~
It was early December nine years ago when Zane and his parents attended their introductory consult with The Child Development Group. Zane was ten, in fourth grade, and struggling to finish almost all of his in-school assignments on time. New behavioral issues were cropping up as well; harmless stuff, really, but increasingly described by his teacher as impulsive.
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