The Grimscribe's Puppets (27 page)

A large door with an intricate design stenciled into its face gated the room at the end of the hall. The puppet maker approached it, took hold of the handle and pulled, but the weight proved too much for his suffering, decrepit arms.

“Hello?” he called out, his throat hoarse and dried from his medication. It had been so long since heard his own voice he was momentarily startled; it did not sound as he remembered. “Hello? Dr. Toth? It is T——, the puppet maker. Your driver has brought me. Are you inside? I cannot open the door.”

He waited for the doctor’s response. Part of him hoped there would be none. After a moment passed, he rapped gently. His knuckles buzzed painfully afterward.

What first seemed a creak emitted from beyond the door slowly transformed into a string of near words, and the puppet maker wondered if the doctor might be ill. A sibilant voice crackled like static from some far off distance.

“... in no condition,” the voice continued, whatever spoken before lost to indecipherability. The puppet maker repositioned himself on his cane, hoping to glean more of what the doctor was saying. “Ask Ivan.”

“Who is Ivan?”

“Good,” the doctor followed. “I cannot see you. I cannot leave this bed. I have a job for you that you will be unable to resist.”

“But,” the puppet maker stammered, “I cannot. I’m too old, I’m too—”

The doctor’s rasping voice interrupted. “It is good to finally meet.” And with that, there was a soft click, as though a light switch in the room had been thrown, and when next the puppet maker opened his eyelids, he was standing alone in his basement workshop, disorientated and stripped to his shirtsleeves.

His aching hands were covered in sweat, blood, and sawdust. The dropsheets that once covered the equipment had been thrown aside, blocks of wood and lengths of wire scattered across the every surface. There was a palpable tension, as though someone had been there with him until moments before, someone the puppet maker could no longer recall. He looked at what lay before him—pieces of a disassembled body, a set of glassy eyes, wet and anxious—and could barely control his hands enough to lift a discarded dropsheet and drape it over the irregular thing, debris straight from his nightmares.

And it was to his nightmares that thing returned in the night. He did not sleep more than a handful of minutes; instead, he spun uncontrollably, desperate to rid himself of the image. But it would not go. Bulbous heads, spinning eyes, bodies that hung uselessly and powerlessly. The largest wooden cross floating in the sky. But even with his arms held high in supplication, the wires from the wooden cross would not reach him.

He awoke in the darkest of night, his head throbbing with images, ideas coursing through his thin blood like fire. His body burned, and it forced him from the bed and onto his skeletal legs. He hobbled to his writing desk and scrambled in the swollen drawers for paper and pencil. At the desk he drew that monstrous thing left in his workshop, and kept drawing until the pencil was a nub and he was once again asleep. And then he drew for no small time afterward.

Something was happening to him. Something strange and confusing and frightening. And, yet, invigorating. He forgot to bathe, to eat, to do anything more than swallow his pills and dwell upon the unfinished creation lying on the slab of his basement workshop. Slowly, piece by piece, it advanced toward completion, and as it did he felt something within him start to shift and grow, a withered rose taking on life. His tools came alive in his hands, those extensions of his body that had for so many years been unavailable, cleaved and left like rotting limbs. They were a conduit for the divine, tasked with bringing it forth onto the worldly plane. The voices he had once heard in his youth, those that guided him from obscurity to master of his art and beyond had grown so faint over the intervening years they had become nothing more than an airless whisper in the recesses of his mind. With tools in hand, with his craft laid before him, those voices began to intensify.

Day after day he worked on the marionette beneath the sheet, pouring everything he had into its construction. It was drawn from the hallucigenia of his nightmares, from the dark images swimming within him—a twisted face with mouths folded in on themselves, bulbous mismatched eyes; limbs crooked and thin. It was a black reflection of reality, a figure that could not exist but in the form of a simulacrum, built by saw and plane and vice, by torch and screwdriver and hammer, possessed of everything the puppet maker could grant save life. Life would have to come to the empty shell by medium of wire, hook, and wooden cross.

And yet, its lifelessness was its beauty, its emptiness its perfection. He touched the face of the thing he had crafted until his hands bled, and felt radiating from it the buzz of potential. It invigorated him, as though it were draining the years of his life away, restoring memories long thought forgotten, and for a brief moment his creation endowed him with enervating bliss. But also despair. For his reward for shaping perfection was to sacrifice it to the idle rich hands of the mysterious Dr. Toth.

Darkness receded once more, and Toth’s driver was standing in the puppet maker’s workshop, staring at the multiple-armed thing that hung by wires. He grinned madly and incessantly at the puppet maker’s discomfort—his smile too large, too toothy; the sheer size making the old man’s head swim. Yet to look away was to forget its foulness, the immensity of the horror impossible to contain. All the puppet maker could recall of the driver’s face were flashes—cheeks too red, mouth edged with shadows as though painted on. But it was the eyes that were worst. They were as dark and as dead as a doll’s. The puppet maker could not bear them again, instead diverting his gaze to the marionette hanging before him.

Ropes intermingled with tendrils, disguising its supports. In his waking visions, the puppet maker saw it hover above the ground like a spirit, obeying some law of physics that had no currency on the mortal plane. It had been near impossible to recreate, but the puppet maker had managed it, had carved his dreams from reality, but like a dream once it was fully imagined, he was no longer the master of it. It could no longer be controlled. Had he any other choice, he would not have spoken to the driver, but it was clear in the light of day that alone he was powerless to relocate the marionette to Toth’s towncar. He wondered what he had expected: to simply ask the marionette to stand and follow them out to the car? How could it climb, he wondered, when it had nothing one might mistake for legs?

He summoned his courage and closed his eyes.

“I don’t think I can lift it. I need you to do it.”

The driver said nothing. The smile did not leave his terrifying visage. He simple lifted his hands and clawed at the marionette until he was able to release from its mooring.

Up the stairs, one heavy footstep at a time, the driver carried the marionette, and the puppet maker swayed as he tried follow behind, moving far slower with knotted cane in hand. He reached the top in time to see his creation being led to the trunk of the car.

“No!” he called out, and the driver stopped and looked back. The puppet maker averted his eyes in panic. “I need—I have to sit with it. To make sure nothing happens to it.” Even as the breathless words spilled from his mouth, the puppet maker could not believe he had uttered them. “Please, put it on the backseat.” The driver acquiesced, for when the puppet maker looked up, the thing’s bulbous head was visible in the rear window, and the driver’s hidden behind the windshield visor.

It was not long before the puppet maker became suspicious the driver was taking yet another different route. The mist did not approach quite as early as before, but when it did, it appeared twice as thick. Ever-present, it traveled backward in his memory to perpetually coat the fringes of the town, creeping from the distant river and spreading to claim as much ground as it could. It was intractable, and every day it spread further and further across the landscape. Much like the thing that sat beside him, the puppet maker mused, retrieving the small vial of pills from his pocket. The marionette had sprung from his dreams so swiftly he had not consciously considered it until that moment. It was far more disturbing than he had initially realized, and yet it was not so far from human that one could not recognize the touch of its creator in its form. It was shaped like some sort of future mutation, foretelling where humanity might go; or perhaps like some relic of the far distant past, long before man’s ancestors had settled upon the planet. The puppet maker shivered, and found the vial in his hand shaking as he watched the marionette vacantly stare forward.

They seemed to drive forever, the puppet maker’s medication making it increasingly difficult to maintain a grip on where he was. The drone of the road beneath the wheels was a chitter-fueled grumble that only further intensified his disconnectedness within the empty sea of white beyond the windows. Movement flickered in the corner of the puppet maker’s eyes, but when he turned he found the driver had not moved, and the oversized marionette had not turned his way. His throat felt dry, the sense of confusion and time loss disorientating. Everything began to topple around him, pills spilling from his hand as he struggled to hold onto what was real. He closed his eyelids tight, squeezed them until sparks ignited, and twisted his fingers around his cane. The road was louder, yet everything else more muffled, and the puppet maker wondered how much longer he was for this world.

Something brushed his leg. Startled, he opened his eyelids to find one of the marionette’s many loose hands had crept across the seat towards him. The puppet maker hesitated before reaching to push it away. He then bent over and, as best he could, collected those pills he could reach from the towncar’s floor. When he sat again, short of breath and momentarily dazed, it was clear everything had shifted, though so imperceptibly he could not be sure to what extent. He rubbed his eyes with one free hand, the other on the head of his cane should he need it.

In the mist beyond the windows the faint outline of Dr. Toth’s estate materialized as a vision. The puppet maker wondered if the car had stopped, or if time no longer obeyed any rules. The driver’s wide unknowable face was of no comfort when it turned. The puppet maker could not bear to look at it, not in his condition. Not while his terror was rising.

“How—how long have we been here?” he mumbled. The driver remained silent, smiled that same plastic smile, while the puppet maker shuffled on the seat. “Please—” he whispered. “Help me.” He held his cane tight with arthritic claws.

The driver’s mouths trembled as though to speak. But instead he put a hand on the towncar’s door and pushed it open. It creaked on rusty hinges. The other hands eased him from the car and he stepped out into the mist. Instantly, he was enveloped by the thick pea soup world. The puppet maker waited, hugging his cane, but the driver did not return. It was as though the sky had torn him from the earth.

The marionette beside him shifted on the seat, and the puppet maker recoiled. From the corner of the car he stared, waiting for it to move again, willing it to if only to prove his sanity was intact, and yet it did nothing more than awkwardly collapse. A memory long buried resurfaced, a single image from an indeterminate time. Some frozen and vast wasteland city, its aisles and streets and causeways filled with lumbering shadows, all moving in a single but unfathomable direction. The image lasted an instant, but when it dissipated he found the creature had somehow shifted position again, and appeared closer to the puppet maker than it had been before.

The old man shrank further, uncomfortable that he and it were trapped together in the endless dense fog. Empty plastic eyes stared upward, mechanical mouthparts approximated a sardonic smile. The lifeless marionette born from his dreams unnerved him as it never had during its construction. He tried to push it with his cane to the farthest side of the seat, but its weight was too much for him, and all the old puppet maker managed to do was unbalance it. The great marionette began to slowly sink, leaning sideways as it fell. The old man recoiled, scrambling to the edge of the car, frantically reaching for the handle of the door with his knotted hands. He put what little weight he had against the door and pushed. There was the squeak of hinges as the marionette leered, moving to overtake him, but the old man was able to tumble out of the car before the creature’s insectoid form met his own. The mist muffled the sound of the door as it slammed shut behind him.

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.