Puppet Graveyard

by Tim Curran

  “Go away!” he snarled in a whisper. “Just go away from here!”

  And then there was another voice in there, something splintered and creaking and eldritch: Piggy. “Let the lady in, Ronny. She’s come for something, can’t you see that? Don’t be disrespectful now. Do you hear me, Ronny? Be a good boy.”

  “No, please…”

  “Let her in, Ronny. She’s come for something and we must see that she gets it.”

  And for one unstrung moment, Kitty thought that the voice had something of a feminine caliber to it. The way a mother might speak to her son.

  The door opened and she walked in, right past Ronny who glared at her with unmasked hatred. But did he hate her or did he just hate the indomitable will of modern women in general? Because sometimes, such qualities could be an attribute, but other times the keys to doors best left bolted.

  That’s not hate, Kitty thought then. Can’t you see it around his eyes? In the pale line of his mouth? That’s fear. Ronny is terrified. And not for himself, but for you.

  Inside, it was chill and damp as she imagined such houses must be. For regardless of the romanticism of such places, the real truth was that they were drafty and dank. Kitty could almost smell time here, the slow parade of decades the old house had seen. She could smell, too, the wormy woodwork and mildewed wainscoting, the dirty carpets and yellowed wallpaper. But there was something else…a brooding, pervasive sense of contamination, of spiritual rottenness. There was no getting around it and no denying it. What this house was and what it contained made her flesh creep.

  But forward-thinking and liberated as she was, Kitty kept moving through the foyer and into a high-windowed sitting room.

  Piggy was in there.

  His trunk was leaning up against the wall, lid open, like a mummy sarcophagus. He himself was sitting on the end of a flowery, dirty green sofa that might have been a fashion statement in its day, but was now just an eyesore. He was dressed in the same velvet cranberry suit coat as the last time she’d seen him, spidery hands curled in his lap like the claws of a raptor.

  Kitty looked from him to the night pressing up against the windows. “Hello, Piggy,” she said, trying to sound amused.

  He said nothing, playing the perfect inanimate little dummy.

  She smiled thinly. “I said, hello, Piggy.”

  She had only seen him beneath the stage lights and the dim dressing room bulbs, never in full electric light before. His face was painted very white, like that of a circus clown. The eyes were huge and abnormally round, shining like newly-minted nickels. Kitty could see where his jaw was hinged, how the paint was flaking to gray at his throat.

  Then the jaw dropped open with the sound of dry lips parting, the eyes blinked and blinked again. “Pretty, pretty Kitty, come to pay us a call. Did you bring your pretty pussy with you?”

  Kitty tensed. She felt her hand grip the .32 in the pocket of her leather jacket. It was no dream last night…at least, no dream in the ordinary sense. She calmed herself. First she would find out about Gloria, then she’d destroy that grinning imp, she’d chop it into pieces and shove it in the fireplace, watch it burn.

  “I’m glad you’ve come here,” Piggy said. “I knew you would sooner or later. Your curiosity would get the best of you and lead you shivering and helpless into my lair.”

  “I’m hardly helpless.”

  The dummy cackled. “Innocent as a babe, as a squealing piglet put to the knife. That’s what I like about you.”

  Kitty did her best to remain unfazed even though being in close physical proximity with this little horror was making the flesh at her belly crawl in waves. “I’m waiting for a dirty joke, Piggy. Have you run out of them?”

  “I’m contemplating the dirtiest joke of all, pretty pussy, with you as the punchline.”

  “I can’t wait to hear it. Does it have anything to do with men jumping out of windows?” Kitty said, feeling the anger rising in her.

  “Oh, we’re beyond all that, Ronny and I,” Piggy said, his eyes impossibly black and wet like drowning pools. There was something behind those eyes or, and maybe better, a lack of something. “We’re contemplating new heights since our performance a few days ago…aren’t we, old chum?”

  Ronny looked confused, then nodded, then laughed. If it was meant to be a reassuring laugh, it missed the mark completely. The sound that came out was forced and shrill like somebody on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  He passed by Piggy and sat in a recliner. “What do you want here, Miss Seavers?”

  Kitty looked at him, showing no fear. “I think you probably know. I think you probably know why I came around the first time, too.”

  “No,” Ronny said. “You’re mistaken, so why don’t you—”

  Piggy started cackling. “C’mon, Ronny. She wants to know about her sister…she wants to know about Gloria. You remember Gloria, don’t you? Pretty Gloria? You better confess, tell Kitty all about her…don’t you think? After all, Pretty Kitty has a gun in her pocket.”

  “That’ll do, Piggy,” Ronny said, still thinking, even after all that had happened, that he could make this all sound like part of the act. “Yes, I remember Gloria. She worked with us…but just for a short time. We couldn’t pay her what she wanted, so she left.”

  Piggy started cackling again and it was hard to imagine a more unpleasant sound. It was high and fragmented that laugh, echoing and perverse. The laughter of a child molester. And he did not laugh as men laughed. His hinged jaws snapped open and shut in rapid succession, the laughter billowing up darkly from somewhere deep inside of him. If Kitty had ever suspected that Ronny was actually throwing his voice, she knew better now.

  “Shut up!” Ronny shouted at him and meant it.

  And the dummy did. Its head was thrown back, its jaws hanging open, eyes staring at the ceiling. One moment it was filled with something dire and malevolent, and the next it was simply a wooden dummy, vapid and vacuous.

  “I just want to know about my sister,” Kitty maintained, trying to tell herself she was not frightened, not held together inside with spit and frayed wire. That the invasive madness of this place was not possessing her. “That’s all I really want, the rest of it I don’t care about.”

  “I already told you what I knew,” Ronny said, an edge to his voice now, his breath coming hard.

  “Hee, hee. I told you that lock of hair would bring the pretty pussy running into our arms,” Piggy said. “And was I not right? Did I not prophesy it as I now prophesy the unpleasant end of pretty, pretty pussy?”

  “Stop it!” Ronny cried. He turned to Kitty. “I don’t know anything about your sister! I don’t! I don’t!”

  Kitty felt cold from the balls of her feet to the top of her head. It was all planned, all arranged. She had been manipulated from the first. The bait was thrown out and she had taken it and now she was firmly hooked. Piggy had foreseen it all. Now he would count on her fear, on mental degeneration settling in. But this, she decided, is where his plans would go to hell.

  Piggy’s head swiveled in their direction, mouth still gaping. “I think it’s too late for that, Ronny. Our dear, pretty Kitty has been talking to people, hearing the things they had to say and believing them…careful now, Ronny, no sudden moves…she has her hand on the gun.”

  And it was true. Her hands were in the pockets of her leather coat and the right one was gripping the little .32 automatic tightly now. Piggy seemed to know it.

  “If she wants to kill me,” Ronny said, completely indifferent, “then let her kill me.”

  “Oh!” Piggy laughed. “You silly, silly boy! You’ll ruin all the fun!”

  But Ronny wasn’t having fun. “Go ahead. Shoot me.”

  “Well, you heard the boy, Kitty, better just do it…then we can be alone. And you do want to be alone with me…don’t you?”

  “Stop it,” Ronny said.

  “Tsk, tsk, old boy,” Piggy said in a patronizing tone. “You see, Kitty. He doesn’t want to talk about gi
rls. Boys and girls and the things they like to do in the sweet, heady darkness. Hee, hee, hee. Girls make him uneasy. They make him so uneasy that sometimes he—”

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Ronny cried, on his feet now, hands balled at his sides, then up against the sides of his head, pressing and pressing. “I don’t want to hear it! I don’t want to hear any of it! So just shut up!”

  “Shut up? Sure, kid, I’ll shut up. I’m good at shutting up. I’ve been shut up in a lot of bad places. Kind of like I was shut up in the family vault until you—”

  “Stop it!” Ronny shouted at him, his eyes welling with tears now. “Just stop it! I want it all to stop!”

  “Oh, but I won’t stop it. Remember how it was? Did they tell you how it was, Kitty? Ronny can…he was there. Why don’t you tell the girl, Ronny, tell her all about it. How you used to come and see your brother in the vault, talking to him and missing him…and wasn’t it all so sad? Boo-hoo, said the Jew.”

  “Stop…it…”

  The cackling again, eerie and discordant. “No, no, no, Ronny, I won’t. I won’t stop any more than mother would stop when she suffocated little Holly with the pillow or when she wound that light cord around my chubby little neck. I’ll never forget that…and neither will you…”

  Kitty was losing her mind now; it was just too much. She brought out the gun and leveled it at Ronny, said in a trembling voice, “Where is my sister? Where is my goddamn sister?”

  Ronny turned on her, hair hanging in his face, lips pulled in a snarl. He was mad, completely unhinged. “Get the fuck out of my house!”

  Kitty brought the gun up. “I’ll use it,” she said.

  “She will, Ronny,” Piggy said. “What are bad girls made of? Ha, ha, sugar and spice and plenty of lice! You’d better take her to her sister…”

  But Ronny just put his hands to his head, sobbing and whimpering…and then he froze, stood up straight, began walking in a tight circle like a toy soldier, finally dancing in a sprawling, loose-limbed shuffle like a marionette controlled by strings from above.

  “He’ll take you now,” Piggy said. “And when you get back, then we’ll discuss your future, pretty pussy. Or the lack of the same.”

  15

  Silently, Ronny turned away and Kitty followed at a discreet distance, the gun still up and ready. Ronny led her to the stairs and moved up them almost mechanically, each foot placed carefully before the next came down. He waited for her up there, his back to her. Not threatening, not anything really. Just lifeless and dull, an automaton being worked by the unseen hands of Piggy.

  She came up behind him slowly, feeling the maleficent blood of the house seeping into her now like a plague, feeding into bone and marrow, nerve ending and muscle fiber…infesting her with its toxins which were positively black and rancid. She could almost feel her soul putrefying.

  Upstairs, it was even worse.

  It was a puppet graveyard. There was some sort of fine threads like cobweb plaiting the walls. It drooped from the ceiling in filaments and fibers and loose nets. There were things tangled in them, objects that she first thought were the mummified remains of children but they were dolls…no, not just dolls but puppets and vent dummies, some whole and others represented only by stray limbs and dangling baby doll heads, cleaved torsos. They were everywhere in the corridor. It was a jungle of cocooned doll parts. Gray, flaking faces webbed by spiders. Chubby hands speckled with mold. Legs furry with accumulated dust. Heads fixed to the walls in blind, eyeless rows, torsos hanging in clusters. And all of it woven and threaded together like beads sharing a common string by that network of gossamer material, shrouded in fine plaits of the stuff like the bodies of insects in a spider’s lair.

  “What? What is all this?” Kitty said, her entire body trembling now.

  There had been a barely-suppressed terror right from the first, of course. Just coming to the house was frightening enough…but the longer she had been in there and the deeper she penetrated its nameless mysteries, the more the house gripped her and held her, getting its hands around her throat and its fingers along her spine. And when she saw all those puppet and doll parts hanging in that web—if a web it was—the terror no longer circled her heart like hungry wolves in the darkness, it leaped on her. It rode her and embraced her and flooded her with fright. She could feel it making her belly weak and her limbs numb, the fine hairs at the back of her neck rising like hot wires.

  “I said,” she breathed, “what is this?”

  But Ronny did not answer and it was almost as if he were incapable of the same. He just stood there like some blind, mindless mannequin as Kitty made little shrieking sounds as she ducked under the reaching marionette hands and bumped into a clown puppet whose face had been gouged with a knife. Turning, she stumbled into a collection of doll heads and let out her first real scream. Some lacked eyes, others were cracked open, still others were near-melted, their flesh bubbly as if they had been in a fire. The heads swung back and forth around her like Japanese lanterns in a wind. A huge white moth abandoned a doll’s empty eye socket and six or seven leggy black beetles dropped from the straw-dry locks of another into her hair.

  She stumbled into Ronny who was no more alive than the things hanging around her, tearing the beetles from her hair and stumbling into the wall, her fingers brushing the numerous slack-jawed puppet heads and she screamed again. For their faces did not feel like thermoformed plastic or carved wood but like warm, living flesh.

  Gathering herself, trying to tell herself that she was not lost in the expressionistic tangles of a fever dream, she said, “Show me. Goddammit, show me.”

  Ronny paused before a door and backed slowly away into the shadows of the hallway. Strands of web broke against his face, drooping figures and doll anatomy swaying around him. He found a corner and faced into it like a child waiting for a dunce cap.

  The door.

  It was warped in its frame, the knob dirty and tarnished. Kitty did not know exactly what was behind it, yet she seemed to know very well. There was a hot panic in her belly slowly chewing up her insides, eating her from the inside out and she had all she could do not to scream.

  The door opened.

  There were no electric lights on in the room, just a candle flickering at a bedside table, throwing greasy shadows along the walls. Kitty looked back to Ronny. He had not moved. He didn’t seem capable of movement. She went into the room and saw that there was a shape on the bed, a shape beneath a graying linen sheet. She watched it, tense inside, watched it some more, her heart hammering painfully.

  She stepped over there, taking her time.

  Her movement in the room made the candle sputter, its flame leaping and shrinking. The shadows were coiling around her like worms. For not the first time, she sensed what might have been very subtle movement under the sheet…practically nonexistent. Maybe a drawn breath…an arched finger.

  Kitty reached out, grasped the edge of the sheet, felt something almost electrical feeding up through her fingertips and gathering in her guts in a buzzing knot. Sucking in a sharp breath, she yanked the sheet free.

  And something screamed.

  Something jumped.

  Something writhed and shuddered and hissed.

  Kitty fell back, fear punching into her, but did not go down. Her eyes were showing her things and her lips were mouthing, no, no, no, and her mind seemed to close up like a hothouse flower. Because what she saw…it was far worse than anything she could have imagined.

  There was not a body under the sheet, there were only parts of a body.

  A left leg, a right arm, a head. Placed in sequence as if they were awaiting to be sewn to the torso whenever it arrived. The limbs were corpse-limbs, not doll or dummy parts. They were covered in a seamed gray flesh that had torn open in spots, revealing bones and metal armatures. The elbow was fitted with a plastic swivel, as was the knee.

  And they should have been dead, but like the head, they were alive.

  The leg was jumping a
nd kicking, the arm thrashing and the hand slapping the filthy mattress beneath. The head was whipping from side to side on the pillow. It was Gloria’s head…or had been. Her wheat-colored locks were splayed over the sheets, her jaw hinged, her left eye missing and her right fitted with a glass ball onto which a tiny pinprick pupil had been painted. Part dummy and part corpse and all lunacy.

  Kitty saw it all, felt a scream empty itself from her mouth, but it was not a scream, not really. More of a wracked, broken sobbing that rattled up the chimney of her throat, taking everything with it but the instinct to survive.

  The head rolled and fixed her with that one lurid ping-pong ball eye. The waxen, lumpy face grinned at her. “Look upon me, sister,” the voice said that was not a voice really, but an airless whistling noise, wind blown through a pipe. “Look upon me, look upon me, look upon me…”

  And then those hinged jaws fell wide open and a piercing shriek came out that scraped up Kitty’s spine like a knife blade.

  She turned and the door slammed shut.

  The .32 was in her hand. She jerked the trigger, bullets punching straight through the cheap-paneled door and Ronny cried out. She thought she heard him fall out there. The door was not locked and she went right through it, tripping over his collapsed form and scrambling free.

  All of the doll and puppet parts and bodies were in motion on their strings, swinging and shuddering. The jaws of puppet and vent dolls were opening and closing, glass eyes rolling in sockets.

  Kitty heard a sliding, dragging sound.

  Something was coming down the hallway: slap, drag, slap, drag.

  She tensed, her hand shaking as it gripped the .32. The inside of her mouth felt like it had been oiled with cooking spray and maybe that was the taste and texture of overwhelming horror.

  Something came out of the darkness and it looked like a swollen gray sack inching its way toward her. But it was no sack. It was Gloria’s torso. Its remaining hand would slap the floor, pulling it forward and then repeating the process, the right leg dragging behind it like a vestigial limb.