Ben and Terry gave me directions to the room as well as continued assurances that the puppet would definitely be there, since rehearsals were done for the day. There were also assurances that nobody would be in there, as I began to suspect they were having me do something I maybe shouldn't have been doing as a new hire grip. John the employee had a sense of unease, but John the detective was enthusiastic for an excuse to get exactly where I needed to be.
The Creature Room was off the main room that the show was filmed in. The cameras were there, but most of the lights were off and the scenery covered up. I ignored all that and focused on the Creature Room door. It was a heavy office door that gave no clue of all that was behind it. Had this been a tech company, I would have expected this to be a server room or expensive equipment storage closet. None of the offices had a door this thick or a lock this strong. However, using Terry's badge, it unlocked with a beep and a click. It opened with a breath of cold and the hum of air conditioning. It was a heavily climate controlled room, assumedly to protect the puppets. It wasn't a large room, or better said, the space I could walk in wasn't large. There was a circle of space, maybe seven feet in diameter, but the rest of the room was full of puppets, mounts, hangers, extra materials, sets, and more. Due to this, the room felt much smaller than it was. The lighting was dimmer here, I guessed maybe also to protect the puppets. This and the shape of the room gave an interesting impression to me as I stood at the doorway. The room was intimate by its cramped nature, yet also, for lack of a better term, sacred to everyone by the amount of care put into it. It was a cave containing a pagan shrine or a concealed vestibule in a cathedral. But here rested not the bones of a saint, just puppets.
In this room was held every puppet used on the Hornswaggle & Friends show, from stored prototypes to final models. Countless cute and caricatured faces stared sightlessly upon the center of the room. Some were early prototypes or abandoned works in progress, so the faces which populated this place were sometimes one-eyed no-mouthed pieces of fabric and plaster that were early takes of far more completed versions. In at least two cases, the puppets were damaged, showing a broken, ripped twin of the newer puppet that sat before it. Next to each set of puppets, there was an easel with various concept sketches of the character.
The puppets were on stands and shelves, often at high height to fit all the puppets. The lights in the room were along the walls and high up, so as they all flickered into life as I walked into the room, there were strange shadows. Whoever had designed the room did not know the puppet stands would be that high up. T- and cross-shaped shadows fell across the room, some of them changing as the lights went on, as if they were moving in fast motion from the rising or setting of the sun.
Seeing them all for the first time, I realized that while everyone called them puppets, to most people they would be closer to muppets, the marionette-puppet synthesis created by Jim Henson. The show's creations were the same meld of felt and papier-mâché, with sticks for arms and appendages that allowed for multiple people to operate the puppet if needed. While the characters had various basic influences such as animals, objects, flowers, and more, they were all generally anthropomorphic and had fully operable mouths. So despite their strange appearances, echoing their nonhuman natures, they were still a crowd or congress of puppets staring upon me as I walked to the center of the room.
As I stood in the center of the room's circle, I noticed it was definitely much colder, giving me an involuntary shiver. As the door shut behind me, the unease at being somewhere I wasn't supposed to be was increased by the puppets staring at me. I knew that none of them were real. I knew that they were cutesy forms created for a kids show, made to be as calming and inoffensive as possible. But all those eyes, all those fake visages falling upon me made me uncomfortable. They were dead, inanimate faces, not even having the ghost of a human presence, but it was still unnerving. There was no uncanny valley here - none looked remotely human - but still I felt watched, I felt judged.
Maybe I just had a phobia of puppets I hadn't been aware of.
Despite being filled from floor to nearly ceiling with puppets, surrounding me in a nearly full 360 degrees, there was one puppet that stood out. If the room was a parliament, a congress, a judging mob, then this puppet was the speaker of the house or demagogue. There was a presence to this puppet, drawing me to it as I stood in the room. I walked over to it and stared at it, as on its stand it towered above me by at least three feet. It wasn't just being on that stand that made it so high, this was also one of the biggest puppets, if not the biggest. It stared down at me, so for a moment I averted my eyes, seeing the sign below it. HORNSWAGGLE.
Next to the puppet was the biggest of the easels, as there was a lot of concept art. Some were very brief sketches in pencil, others were full color, while many were in between. I noticed at the top corner of the easel was pinned a strange piece of art. It was maybe four inches long, but not a square or rectangular piece. It was the torn piece of some other art, the edges ragged but now smoothed. I wasn't even sure it was paper - if it was, it was some very thick and old stock. It was almost ancient - weathered lines in the material cutting into the image. It was the puppet Hornswaggle in that image, or perhaps his earliest inspiration. The angles were different, the proportions not so exaggerated. Hornswaggle stood in front of a large yellow moon. The art style was very different, almost a stilted Egyptian. Maybe someone had found an old piece of art somewhere and thought it was amusing similar to their creation.
For any who had never seen him, describing the Hornswaggle puppet is difficult. A simple list of traits and a description of the puppet's appearance would lack the immediate experience. Though made of felt and wire, there was some visceral reaction to the appearance. I could see how Hornswaggle could carry a show; the puppet had an appeal to emotion that others might lack. There was something both comforting and almost parental about the figure, which is strange because I was talking about a felt puppet that was perched immobile on a stand. And yet, as I stared up at the form that loomed before me, behind the comfort, behind the parental advice, there was also something else. Cold. Ominous. Old.
Hornswaggle's head was long, almost oblong. He - and the immediate impression was that he was male - had nothing like a human head. Almost like a horse's head, his mouth was at the bottom end, but his eyes were up near the top. His mouth was long with big blocky teeth, white and unblemished. He wore goofy sunglasses and a green knit cap. From under the cap and all down his back were long thick felt strands, almost as if he had puppet dreadlocks. His head and arms were a mellow purple, representing his skin tone, and he wore a bright green shirt, the color a shade or two brighter than his hat. This wasn't a full body puppet; he must have cut off around his waist under his shirt where the puppeteer or operator put their arms in.
It's to the credit of those who designed and constructed this puppet that, even in the absence of operators, I expected Hornswaggle to turn his head and start speaking to me. I could almost imagine his voice, the way he'd peel those lips back and show me a toothy smile, that he would just start talking to tell me -
"What are you doing in here?"
At the sound of the female voice, some strange spell was broken. My attention, so suddenly sucked into a single point, snapped back to reality as if on a rubber band. I was jarred for a second, unsure of what I had been doing or why I had become distracted. I shook my head and then turned to the door, which was now open. At the entry, but not yet stepping into the room was the Producer of this project, Deb. Behind her, shyly and almost deferentially, like a petitioner, was a shorter, younger woman. Her glasses were large and her hair was very curly, so both seemed to hide the small woman behind them, a smoke screen against the world. The woman's eyes were downcast, her expression hard to read. But Deb's expression spoke so much more loudly, a mix of strong emotions. There was a sternness, as if borrowed from Adele. There was something accusatory in the expression, probably because I wasn't supposed to be here. But als
o, there was something else, something hard to define. She looked at me strangely, as if she was confused, unsure, uninformed.
"Uh, hey," I said. "I was told to come in here to get Oily Doily."
"Who told you that?" said Deb sternly, almost snapping at me.
"Uh..." I said. Did I want to get Ben and Terry in trouble already? They could be useful sources of information. Assuming they weren't stoned, I guess.
Deb clutched the bridge of her nose in stress and shook her head. "Let me rephrase. Which one told you that? Ben or Terry?" She waited a moment for an answer which I didn't give, then her face changed, a mask put on. A condescending sweetness. "It doesn't matter. They're having a bit of fun with you, it's not your fault. You still may work out well." She smiled at me. It would have been benevolent, but it felt patronizing, like how people talked to me at a job when I was twenty years old. Maybe I wasn't playing my role well enough and letting myself react too personally. Maybe I was oversensitive - to them, I was a guy on his first day of work.
I smiled back weakly as she walked into the room, the other woman in tow. I decided to stay silent rather than risk something stupid. I decided John Morrison often chose closed-mouth stupidity over back talk.
"First off, grips don't touch the puppets," she said, her tone revealing that she was launching into a oft-repeated speech that she both enjoyed giving but was still weary of going over. "Ever. Puppets are only ever touched and carried by the designers, puppeteers, or other operators. Grips don't touch them due to legal liability and some union issues that are beyond our control. Ben and Terry know this, they have just chosen not to care. Ken would have known that, but unfortunately he's gone. Second, this is Hornswaggle. Oily Doily is over there."
She pointed to a smaller puppet to my left. Forest green in color, Oily Doily was strangely leafy. Besides having a large amount of smaller pieces of green cloth which would likely flutter when it moved, the puppet itself was in the shape of a large tree leaf. There was a remarkably cheerful pink face on that weird leafed puppet, which I was sure would be cute when actually emoting, but right now it just continued the Dead Inside theme of the whole room.
I looked back at Hornswaggle, my neck twisting upward again. It was just a lifeless puppet, its features made in felt. I'm not sure why a few moments ago I thought it was so well made, as if it could actually say something. I felt silly. Still, I knew that these puppets were the blood and sweat of the people who worked here, so I decided to resort to vague flattery. "I knew this wasn't the right one, it's just that it... he is so impressive. This is my first time seeing him and I was struck by it."
Deb took a few steps and stood next to me, slightly invading my personal space, but there was no other way she could have also stood in front of Hornswaggle, so I didn't think much of it. I did notice that as she made her way across the room that her tension dropped from her, as if weight was shrugged off in each step. I hadn't realized how much the tension had defined her body language until it was gone. She smiled, something more honest than before, a wave of relief washing across her face. "Yes, we're very impressed with him. Hornswaggle is our best work. We all really came together to bring him to life." She paused and the tension returned. "But we're also on deadlines that we have to make, so we don't have time to rest on our laurels. There's so much still to be done, no time for dilly-dally."
There was a subtext I missed at that moment, so when she finished talking, I looked back up at the strangely intriguing Hornswaggle puppet. On third glance, I was beginning to see the expressiveness I had seen at first. He was really a quite interesting puppet...
Deb cleared her throat, and I turned to see her looking at me. Her expression was insistent, but there was also a bit of that strange look from before. I blinked at her for a second, then suddenly got it. I was being dismissed. But unlike the other grips, Deb had a fleeting moment of respect for me, so she wasn't saying the dismissal directly. I figured I should acknowledge it before that respect was gone. I might need it later. I excused myself and headed toward the door.
After I left the room, I heard a snippet of a conversation behind me, revealed due to the yawning slowness of the Creature Room door's closing.
"Okay, Susan, we're making some changes with Higgilty Piggilty," said Deb. "Rather than being so mopey, we want her movements to be a little more jaunty."
"But Nick designed her specifically to be mopey," said Susan. "That's her defining characteristic."
"There are just going to be changes," said Deb. "We may not all like them, but Nick is no longer with us and his vision wasn't ironclad..."
The door then closed completely, all sound from the room snuffed out.
Well, that had gone poorly. I had just missed my opportunity to search the Creature Room, which was the whole reason I had gotten this job. Sure, I was interrupted, but before that I still had a solid few minutes in the room, when I could have looked for clues to Nick's disappearance. Why had I wasted that time staring at a puppet?
Ben and Terry were perched on stools in the Grips Lair when I returned. They just were sitting there like frogs on a log, just kind of staring off into space. Their faces lit up with smiles when I walked through the door.
"Did you see it?" said Ben, excitement edging into his voice. "Was it not awesome?"
"Totally awesome," chimed in Terry.
"Tell us about your magnificent, wonderful adventure!" said Ben.
"Well, on my adventure, I learned that grips are not supposed to touch puppets," I said tiredly.
"Oh no!" said Ben with shock, then his demeanor became conspiratorial. "Who caught you? Was it Adele? I hope it wasn't Adele."
"We're going to hear about it if it was Adele," said Terry glumly.
"It was Deb," I said. "She found me in the Creature Room."
"Fucking control freak!" said Ben. "Hot cougar control freak, but she still could use a good smoke to loosen her up. Get her in the mood, you know what I mean, right? Oh yeah, you know what I mean."
"Dude, you can't say that," said Terry. "This is a workplace."
"We're in our inner sanctum," said Ben. "Nobody but us! Nobody cares!"
"I care..." said Terry awkwardly.
There was a long moment of silence.
"Bah!" said Ben, waving off the awkwardness with a vaguely troubled expression. A second later his usual enthusiasm had returned. "So did you see it? Did you see Oily Doily?"
"I did," I said simply. I still didn't know what the big deal was. Why did they care about that puppet?
"You did? Was it not awesome?" said Ben.
"Super awesome," said Terry.
"Awesome? No...?" I said in confusion. "I don't get it."
"No?" said Ben with excitement and surprise.
"You see, Oily Doily is a green leaf," said Terry. "She's -"
"Oily Doily is a walking pot leaf!" broke in Ben. "It's so awesome!"
I thought back to the puppet. It hadn't been my immediate opinion, but... "I guess it sort of could look like that -"
"No, it totally is!" said Ben. "When Nick was making the creatures, I totally dared him to make a pot leaf and put it on kid's television. And then he totally did! That's why he was the Dude!"
"That's not why he did it," said Terry.
"He totally did!" said Ben. "We were buds and in return, he made a character out of my favorite bud!" Ben paused to laugh at his own joke, but neither Terry nor I did. "It's the same way he made Hornswaggle sort of Rasta. Because of me, dude."
Terry rolled his eyes.
"You and Nick were good friends?" I asked.
"Maybe not good friends," said Ben. "But we went to college together. He got me this job and stuff."
"So you were friends," I confirmed.
"Yes and no," said Ben.
"You called him a friend the other day," said Terry.
"Like, we were at some points, and others not really," said Ben. "That dude was mostly awesome. Nick was always good to me in classes. We never hung out much, though, sin
ce he seemed to not dig on smoking or drinking. Not even music, man! But that was Nick - hands off guy in all his relationships, except maybe Meredith. Some would say antisocial, but no, man. That dude was just way into his thing - the Hornswaggle show. Though at the time, it was just an idea, a sort of story in his head."
"So you were kind of friends. I'm still surprised you have no idea why he quit," I said.
Ben shrugged. "I really have no idea. But like I said, it's not normal. I've tried calling him to find out, but nada. I just don't believe he quit. A Dude doesn't bail on his Thing. Something else had to be going on. But fuck me if I knew what, man."
"That's just weird," I said, seeing if I could prompt them to give me any more information. "There's gotta be more, something that was strange before he left."
"Life's weird, man," said Ben. "You just gotta ride it out."
"For sure," said Terry. Then he started talking about the last movie he saw, Ben chiming in excitedly. I guessed the conversation about Nick or Oily Doily was over.
I began to wonder how much these two were going to help my search for Nick. I then realized my nose had been prickling since I had come into the room. I checked their eyes, noticing redness I had missed. The room didn't smell like it, so they must have stepped outside. I sighed. Ben and Terry had used my errand as an excuse to smoke pot. I wondered how anything got done around this place.
The rest of my afternoon with them was disappointing. Being stoned meant they were more talkative, but I found I could just not keep the conversation on anything I needed to know. If I had wanted to know what the latest movies, music, memes, and bars were, this would have been quite an education. They didn't even train me on how be a grip, assuring me they'd get to it another time when there was actual work. I was also encouraged to chill out and groove.
And then they left early for the day. I guess without a real boss, leaving early was just a thing they could do whenever they wanted. They said I could handle any late afternoon requests, but there generally were hardly any, as much of the other staff left by 4pm if the day went well. Ben gave me a pat on the shoulder and an offer for a quick smoke before they left. I declined.
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