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He stood for a moment in the street in front of the bookstore, sweating, breathing heavily, looking up at the long building. He had never noticed that the series of shops here were all housed within a single structure—their facades were all so different—and he never would have figured out on his own that the building contained a second story. Now that he knew, though, he could see the cleverly camouflaged sections of brick that blocked the upstairs windows. He started counting from the bookstore on, to determine which bricked window hid the theater, but gave it up instantly. He didn’t want to know.

Shivering, he hurried around the side of the building to the parking lot where he had left his car.

At home, five minutes later, he went immediately into the bathroom to wash his finger. He scrubbed his skin with Dove, then with Ajax, but the slimy feeling would not go away. He opened the medicine cabinet, took out a box of Band-Aids and used several of them to wrap up his finger, and that felt a little better.

“Putnam!” his mom called from the kitchen. “Is that you? Are you home?”

“Yeah!” he called back. “I’m home!” His voice sounded different to himself, quiet, though he was yelling.

“Get ready for dinner, then!”

He stepped into the hallway. “What are we having?”

His mom peeked her head around the corner of the kitchen. “Chicken and fried zucchini.”

Zucchini
.

He blinked. In his mind, he saw his mother caressing the squash, putting a wig on top of it, carving out eyes, a nose, a mouth. He met her gaze across the hallway. His heart leaped in his chest. Was she looking at him strangely? Was that suspicion he saw behind her smile?

He looked away. This was insanity. This was crazy. Still, as his mom went back into the kitchen, he found that he was afraid to follow her, afraid he would see on the counter next to the sink one of those dolls from the theater.

He took a deep breath, trying to keep his hands from shaking. What was that theater? What were those dolls and why did their existence disturb him so? And why was it that the other figure, the dummy, did not have the same effect on him? Indeed, he found that when he thought of that seated form now, thought of those stuffed clothes in the chair, that wigmaker’s head facing the door, he felt oddly comforted.

“Putnam! Get your sister! It’s time to eat!”

“Okay, Mom!” His voice sounded better now, louder, more normal, and he walked out to the family room where Jenny was seated on the carpet in front of the television.

Next to her on the floor was one of the squash dolls, its vegetative face framed by frizzy black hair, its overlarge mouth fixed permanently in an unnatural smile.

Putnam’s heart lurched in his chest. “What are you doing with that?” he demanded. He grabbed the doll from the floor and picked it up, squeezed it. He felt the warm slimy squishiness in his hands and instinctively dropped the figure again, stomping on it with both feet, crushing it.

Jenny stared up at him in shock, then burst into tears. “You killed her!” she cried.

He looked down at the broken form beneath his foot. It was a plastic baby girl with chubby cheeks and platinum blond hair. A mass-produced toy, nothing more.

Jenny was still crying. “Why did you kill my Dolly?”

He tried to swallow, tried to talk, but his mouth stayed open and no saliva or words would come. He hurried back down the hall and into the bathroom, barely making it to the toilet before he threw up.

He was sick the next day, really sick, not faking it, but when he called Mr. Carr to tell the old man that he wouldn’t be in, there was silence on the other end of the line.

He cleared his throat. “I’ll probably be in tomorrow, though,” he said.

Mr. Carr’s voice was quiet. “You went up there, didn’t you? You saw the theater.”

He thought of lying, thought of saying nothing, but he looked at the Band-Aids on his finger and he found himself whispering, “Yes.”

Silence again. “They can’t get down,” Mr. Carr said finally. “They can never get down.”

Putnam shook his head into the receiver, though the old man couldn’t see it. “I can’t—” he began.

“I told you not to go up there.”

“I’ll send you the keys. I … I can’t go back.”

“You will,” Mr. Carr said sadly.

“No.” Putnam felt tears welling in his eyes.

“Yes you will.”

“No.” He was crying now, the tears coursing down his cheeks. “No.”

“Yes,” Mr. Carr said softly.

Putnam hung up the phone, held the receiver, picked it up again. “Yes,” he whispered to the dial tone.

The bookstore was the only place where he didn’t think about the theater, about the dolls. At home, in the mall, on the streets, he could not get the images out of his head. He kept anticipating appearances by one of the figures or its brethren, appearances which never arrived. He kept expecting to see the small horrid shapes in cars, behind bushes, in bathrooms, on shelves.

But when he came to work each morning, it was as if a switch was shut off inside his head, denying the thoughts and images all access to his brain. The moment he walked through the doorway, he was able to function normally, was like his old self, able to think of the past, the present and the future without the specter of those … things … intruding.

He did not talk to Mr. Carr about what he’d seen, and the old man did not mention the episode.

The thought occurred to him that everything was preplanned, predestined, that things were supposed to work out this way and could not have worked out any other. In this scenario, he was meant to find a job at the bookstore, meant to discover the door, meant to sneak upstairs.

Meant to see the theater.

He forced himself to think of something else. That line of thinking frightened him. To ascribe such power to the theater and its inhabitants, to admit that they had any meaning or resonance at all in the world beyond the stairs, meant that the ideas and beliefs he had held all of his life were nothing more than comforting and reassuring lies.

He told himself that it had all been coincidence. Bad luck.

He tried to believe it.

At home, his mom continued to be interested in politics and her career. His sister continued to be interested in playing and television.

He took to walking through the neighborhood and driving around the city alone. Both activities scared him, and he thought that perhaps that was why he forced himself to go through with them.

He was walking past the liquor store on the corner of Eighth and Center one evening when he was accosted by a hairy bearded man who grabbed his shoulders while looking wildly up and down the street. The man was wearing a dirty mismatched suit jacket and pants, and he smelled of sweat, vomit and old alcohol. His crooked teeth were colored in several gradations of yellow.

“Where’s Bro?” the man demanded.

“Who’s Bro?”

“My dog, man! Bro’s my damn dog! You seen him?”

Putnam shook his head, backed up away from the man. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. W-what’s he look like?”

Something shifted, something in his perception, something in the man’s face, something in the air itself. The man smiled, and the rotted teeth in his mouth looked suddenly

fake
.

“He’s about six inches high,” the man said, and his voice was no longer high and hysterical but calm and low and reasonable. “He’s orange and squishy and he used to be a yam.”

Putnam fell back, caught himself against the liquor store door, and felt the scream rise in his throat.

“Huh?” the man asked, his voice wild again. “A big black sucker? Looks like a damn Doberman?”

“No!” Putnam screamed. “I’ve never seen your dog!”

He ran all the way home.

A week or so later, his mom added two new crops to her garden at the side of the house.

She planted pumpkins and summer squash.

*  *  *

Mr. Carr grew even colder, stiffer and more contemptuous than he had been before, the understanding he had momentarily exhibited on the phone that day gone and apparently forgotten. He seldom talked to Putnam now and when he did it was out of necessity and with a rarefied sort of disgusted disdain. The old man seemed to be deliberately attempting to anger him, and it seemed to Putnam as though Mr. Carr was trying to get him to quit.

He had the unsettling impression that the bookstore owner was, in some strange way, jealous of him.

But he could not quit, as much as he often wanted to. The bookstore was hell to him, and his insides knotted each day when he drove to work and looked up at the hidden second floor of the building, but the store offered the only sanctuary from the twisted tortured thoughts that festered in his brain. It was only within the boundaries of those walls that he was able to think of the dummy in the audience instead of the figures on the stage.

Mr. Carr or no Mr. Carr, he needed to work at the store.

On Sunday, Mr. Carr did not go book hunting. He stayed at the store, unpacking old boxes, shelving, leaving Putnam to run the register. It was at lunchtime that Putnam noticed that the old man was not around, not in any of the aisles, not in the oversized closet that served as a stockroom, not in the bathroom.

That meant there was only one place he could be.

Putnam considered leaving, taking off for lunch, going home or going to McDonald’s. He considered staying at the register, waiting for Mr. Carr to return.

But instead he went upstairs.

He was not sure why he decided to return to the theater. There was no logical reason for it. He knew Mr. Carr was up there, so he would not be learning any new information by going up to the theater. He did not really want to go—the idea of seeing those things again made him feel nauseous.

But he went nonetheless.

He took the flashlight from under the counter. Mr. Carr had left the door in the alcove unlocked, and Putnam closed it behind him as he tiptoed up the steps. In the hallway, he walked quietly, careful not to make a sound, and he passed the rows of identical empty doorways until finally he reached the last one. He was nervous—his heart was pounding, and his palms were so sweaty he could barely hold on to the flashlight—but he took a deep breath, swallowed hard and shone the light into the theater.

Onto Mr. Carr.

The old man was seated in the chair farthest from the dummy, and he was naked. His shoes and shirt and pants lay in the dusty floor at his feet.

On his body, in various positions and poses, were the dolls.

Putnam stared. The old man had to know that the flashlight was shining on him, but he didn’t seem to care. He touched one figure on his lap, then another on his shoulder, shivering as his fingers stroked the slimy cheeks, ran through the horrible coarse hair.

He was smiling.

Putnam still hated the theater, still hated the dolls, was still filled with an irrational anger and intense loathing. But he was also, somehow, envious of Mr. Carr. Some small part of him, he realized, wanted to be naked too, wanted to be sitting in one of the chairs for the audience, wanted to be close to the dolls.

He dropped the flashlight and ran back down the hallway to the stairs.

He ran downstairs and out of the store.

He did not go back, and when the next day his mom told him that Mr. Carr had phoned and had asked him to call him at the bookstore, Putnam told her that, to Mr. Carr, he was never home.

He returned to the bookstore himself, though, two days later. He pretended to be a customer, snuck in while Mr. Carr was busy at the counter, hid from the old man in the aisles, but when he left several hours later, walking on the far side of a departing couple, he saw the bookstore owner smiling at him, shaking his head. The smile was sad, and Putnam hurried out to his car feeling guilty and ashamed.

In the dream he was a farmer, and for miles in every direction, as far as the eye could see, spreading outward from the house, were fields upon fields of squash.

*  *  *

He killed Mr. Carr on a Sunday, after the last customers had left, after the store was closed. He clubbed the bookstore owner to death with an oversized zucchini, bringing down the huge heavy vegetable on the frail old man’s head again and again and again and again until there was no face left, only a pulpy flattened featureless mess, until the zucchini was soft and shapeless.

Putnam stood over the old man’s unmoving form, breathing heavily, his hands and clothes splattered with blood. He felt tired, felt good, but there was also a sense of incompletion, a sensation of unfulfillment, and he wandered up and down the aisles, still clutching the zucchini, unable to focus on the missing piece of the puzzle. Then his gaze landed upon an unopened box of books, on the X-Acto knife atop the cardboard, and everything clicked into place.

He began pulling books from the shelves, opening their covers and tearing out the pages until there was a small mountain of crumpled paper at his feet. He hurried back up the aisle and took off the old man’s shoes and socks, pants and underwear, shirt and T-shirt.

He stuffed the clothes with paper, tied them together with packaging twine.

Using the X-Acto knife, he carved the zucchini into something resembling a human figure. He cut a swath of his own hair and pasted it to the squishy scalp with an adhesive of spit and the bookstore owner’s blood.

Both of his projects were unfinished—half-assed, haphazard attempts at art—but they were the best he could manage at this time, under these circumstances, and he hoped that they were good enough. He grabbed the headless paper-stuffed dummy and the naked crude doll and brought them upstairs.

In the theater, he put Mr. Carr’s stuffed clothes on the chair next to the other dummy and placed the doll on the stage. His hatred was back, but it was not as strong as it had been before, and underneath the loathing was longing. He took off his clothes, folding them neatly and laying them on the floor. He stood there for a moment, feeling the strange cold breeze caress his naked skin, then climbed onto the stage. He picked up the doll he had made, then its brethren. Lying flat on the dusty boards, he placed the small figures on top of his body, in theatrical positions, shivering slightly at the warm sliminess.