The Puppet Maker's Bones

by Alisa Tangredi

  “What the f—”

  “How many people have you killed, Kevin?” asked the voice. The lights went out on the rattling skeleton.

  “You don’t frighten me, you old freak,” said Kevin.

  “Who is in whose house right now, uninvited?” asked the voice which came from a corner off to Kevin’s right. “You have the blueprints.” A follow spot faded up to light the end of the hallway, but the spot was focused on an empty floor. “Were the blueprints informative?” The voice was right behind Kevin. He whipped around again as the dog barked, ran in front of Kevin and tripped him in the dark. Kevin fell to the floor and screamed in pain. In the dim light, he brought his hand to his face. His hand was caught in an animal snare with pieces of razor wire wound through the snare. The wire bit into the flesh of his hand.

  “I’ll fucking kill you!” Kevin screamed.

  “Oh, I don’t think so, Kevin. You see, people who get near me are the ones who end up dead. How many people have you killed, Kevin?” The spotlight lit up the skeleton yet again, which danced in front of him. The skeleton held up its hand, this time revealing a small digital recorder. The light went out and the skeleton disappeared, making a rattling sound like that of a gigantic wind chime. Kevin reached down with his good hand to feel his pocket. His recorder was no longer there. How did he…?

  “How many people have you killed?” The voice seemed to be directly over Kevin’s head this time.

  “What? You’re going to get me to confess to something and then what?” Kevin listened in the dark, but there was no response from the voice.

  “Who would you give it to, old man? You never leave here, I know that.”

  The voice piped up behind him. “Have you heard of the Internet?”

  Kevin tried to move his head in the direction of the voice, but was constricted by his awkward position on the floor. He was going to have to find a way to get up.

  The disembodied voice spoke again, and this time it seemed to come from the end of the hallway, beckoning. “How often do you think they will replay this video on the evening news?” In the dark, Kevin saw a small red light, like that on a video camera, but he was having difficulty deciding the precise location where it was in front of him. The pain in his hand distracted him, and the lights kept changing, messing with his field of vision.

  “How do you know my name?” Kevin asked.

  “You seem to know mine. We’re all old friends here. And you have met my father, yes?” The skeleton plopped down next to Kevin as if in a squatting position and reached out for the snare on Kevin’s hand. Kevin batted at the skeleton but never made contact with it, for it immediately rose up and out of his field of vision. Kevin felt very strange. His adrenalin should have been pumping through his body, causing his pulse to quicken, his peripheral vision to expand. Instead, things seemed to be slowing down for him. He could feel his heart thudding in his chest like a metronome set at a very slow rhythm.

  “Did you poison me? When you cut me?”

  “Oh, heavens no. I don’t have to do that. I can’t speak for the escaped puppets, however. They do enjoy experimenting with herbs. Did you know my father was an escaped puppet? They tried to lock him in a tomb,” said the voice.

  “You’re insane!” said Kevin as he felt his heartbeat quickening, followed by a flush to his cheeks and ears. He was experiencing that rush of adrenalin, though the feeling was not what he was accustomed to having during one of his experiments with a subject. The fight-or-flight phenomena urged him to run but simultaneously paralyzed him. He was unable to scream, to move. He took a deep breath and tried to suppress this new experience, which would not serve his purpose today. Is this what fear feels like? he thought.

  “Oh heck. I’m an old man, a shut-in who could not possibly defend himself against a boy like you. How old were you when you killed your first human?”

  “You poisoned me!” Kevin tried to struggle.

  “I’ll tell you how old I was. I was a newborn child. That birth caused the death of over ten thousand people. I win.” That last was delivered sing-song, taunting. The words “I win” seemed to come from all around Kevin and reverberated off the walls.

  “I’m going to the cops about you. I’m injured. I need help. You drugged me.”

  “How many people have you killed, Kevin. I’ll make it easier. How many this year?”

  “Shut up!” Kevin yelled.

  “Okay, too difficult? Too many to remember?”

  “The thing is,” the voice said to Kevin, this time coming from his right, as if someone was seated next to him on the floor, “when those people died I did not wish them harm. I took no pleasure in it.”

  Kevin started to crawl forward. He made it ten more feet, closer to what appeared to be a door at the end of the corridor. A net dropped over him, tangling him into an immobilized heap on the floor.

  “You fucking fuck! You cocksucker, I will fucking kill you!” Kevin yelled as he writhed and further tangled himself in the netting.

  The voice chuckled. “My father liked to swear. It always made me laugh.” Music started from somewhere deep in the house. Chopin’s Minute Waltz. If Kevin squinted through the netting, he could make out what appeared to be the skeleton dancing with a marionette of a woman, waltzing in time to the music, both controlled by an unseen puppeteer. They seemed to be at the end of a corridor but then, in the next instant, appeared quite close to him. Kevin’s vision was playing tricks on him. He stopped struggling. He had to figure out a way to get out of the net.

  “Meet Máma, another escaped puppet,” said the voice. “My parents loved me very much. Do your parents love you, Kevin?”

  Kevin felt with his good hand to see if his scalpel was still in his pocket. It was. He fished it out, and brought it to his mouth, using his teeth to release it from its square of leather. Kevin started slashing at the net to escape.

  “Oh, tsk,” said the woman marionette, who was somehow suddenly next to him on the floor. “I think you had better answer my son’s question, Kevin. How many people have you killed?” The marionette leaned over him, her hands on her hips, accusing, eyes unblinking.

  “My mother does not want me to hurt you,” said the voice. “None of them do.”

  “None of who? Your stupid puppets, Mr. Trusnik?” asked Kevin.

  “Oh, I assure you they are much more than that. No, I mean the others. The men at your house who are searching your room right now.”

  “What?”

  “And the attic. Attics in old houses are always such good places for hiding things, don’t you think?”

  “Who are you?” asked Kevin.

  “They don’t want me to kill you. That is what they are attempting to prevent. They are trying to stop an event from occurring. Can you give me a reason why I should not kill you?”

  “Fuck you.” Kevin was quite frightened. The cocky confidence he had when he broke in and his intentions against Mr. Trusnik were gone. All he wanted was to get out of there.

  “Let’s start with why you are here.”

  “Let me see you!” yelled Kevin, forgetting his resolve to remain calm. He struggled again with the netting.

  “What was it that you planned on doing to me when you got into my house? Assuming I was the defenseless shut-in you were expecting.”

  “Come out of the dark, old man. Enough with the puppet show. Who is searching my house?”

  “One of my associates. Accompanied by the police, I should expect.”

  The police. Kevin had not counted on any of this. Everything had been so perfect, so planned.

  “They won’t find anything.”

  “I told them to check your mp3 player first.”

  “You son of a cocksucking bitch. That is mine!” Kevin was furious. He could not believe his ears. How had the old man known about his music?

  “Ah. Struck a chord. People don’t like having their personal space and privacy violated. End of first lesson. How does it feel?”

  “Get me out
of this net and I won’t kill you.” Kevin’s speech was slurred. He heard a chuckle which seemed to come from multiple directions.

  “Oh. You won’t kill me. But how many have you killed?”

  “Stop saying that!”

  The lights blinked on and off from different locations, as the music faded from one location to get louder in another, repeating in a maddening loop that disoriented Kevin further. He felt as if he’d happened upon a haunted house and at any moment something would jump out at him from anywhere. His vision was blurred and his muscles were not reacting. He felt defenseless. Was this how they felt? His experiments?

  The poodle ran by, barking while a voice repeated, “Meet my parents. They are escaped puppets. Meet my parents. They are escaped puppets. Meet my parents. They are escaped puppets.” The skeleton and female puppet twirled and danced in the hall. Kevin thought he was going mad.

  As a light blinked overhead, Kevin glimpsed a metal track in the ceiling, over where the puppets were waltzing.

  “I know how you’re doing your stupid tricks. I can see the track, you fucker!”

  “Tsk. You see? No matter how sophisticated the design, it is always possible to spot the mechanics if one looks hard enough. To see the magician’s hand, so to speak. So what will they hear on your mp3 player, Kevin?”

  Kevin’s efforts paid off. He burst through the netting and used his foot as leverage to pry apart the animal snare that held his hand. Kevin screamed when he opened the snare, and his hand throbbed in pain. His blood that seeped from the puncture wounds seemed to be an odd color, a sort of pale violet. Watery. His head felt heavy, and he wondered if his neck could support the weight of it. Kevin got to his feet and stumbled down the hall, deeper into the house. He used the wall for support as he went, but sections of the wall seemed spongy, as if they were made of fabric. His hand sank into the wall until it stopped at something hard and cold. He kept going, holding his good hand with the scalpel out in front of him.

  Kevin, half crawling, half stumbling, worked his way toward the end of the hall and then turned in the direction of the music. His breath came in short bursts. He remembered a vacation to New Mexico with his family once, and the altitude had made him breathe this way for a short time until he got used to it. Why did he think about that vacation now? The music became louder as he approached a doorway at the end of another short hall built at a right angle to the one he was navigating at present. He approached the door and opened it.

  The door opened upon a huge workroom, filled with tables and tools. Are those puppets? Kevin asked himself, seeing marionettes hanging from hooks on the walls and dangling from the ceiling like some sort of creepy slaughterhouse hung with hundreds of dolls. Inside the huge room was an old man, wearing a cardigan, dancing with a marionette of a woman in a silver-blue gown. The old man did not stop dancing upon Kevin’s entrance. The music grew louder, and the lights changed to a random display of locations and levels of illumination, some bright, some a dull glow, some glaring into his eyes, which gave Kevin spots in his line of vision.

  Kevin stumbled into the room, held the scalpel in front of him and crept toward the old man who seemed unaware of Kevin’s presence. A booming voice directly behind Kevin bellowed, “How many people have you killed, Kevin?” He lurched around as fast as his present muddled state would allow and standing before him was an enormous puppet of a black man in bright colored robes. When the puppet moved, it made the same sort of rattling, wind-chime noise that Kevin had heard from the skeleton puppet. Kevin lunged at the puppet with his scalpel, and the puppet danced to the side and out of his way.

  “Now is that any way to behave?” asked the puppet. “I can’t have you coming in here, trespassing, with the intention of harming my dear friend over there. He has had a rough time of it, you see.” The puppet slid back and away from Kevin, on a track that ran on a grid installed in the high ceiling.

  “You’re not real! He is doing all of this!”

  Kevin heard Mr. Trusnik speak. “I had so hoped we would not have to meet in person. In the same room. I had hoped it would not get this far. People are so very foolish. Don’t you find them to be foolish, Cheidu?”

  The puppet of the black man moved forward again, then switched direction and moved closer to Mr. Trusnik. “Without question, people are foolish,” it seemed to respond.

  “Stop doing that!” yelled Kevin as he slashed out with the scalpel but met with dead air.

  “Not a lover of theatre, it seems,” said the puppet.

  “No. It would seem not,” responded the old man.

  “So few of the young people are these days,” said the puppet. “They would rather be at the movies, or in front of a television or computer.”

  “I agree. It is a sad state of affairs,” the old man agreed.

  Kevin felt like his muscles were starting to fail.

  “What did you drug me with?” said Kevin.

  “A little something to help you sleep. It was my intention to get you out of here and onto the front lawn of your own home before you could come to any harm.”

  Mr. Trusnik let out a sigh.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I have been alone for too long, I suppose. Having you here—my unwanted guest—you are still a guest. I admit my emotions are getting the best of me, which is never safe for anyone. In this case it appears that I no longer have to actually touch someone. Perhaps it is the house. Did you touch anything I might touch regularly? Never mind. That is impossible to answer.”

  “You’re fucking rambling, old man.” Kevin thought back to the electrical shock he felt upon taking hold of the knob of the kitchen drawer when he first entered the house. He had attributed the shock to Santa Ana winds, the electrically charged warm winds that blow through the Los Angeles basin. Could the old man be telling the truth?

  The old man paced the room, beyond the reach of Kevin and his scalpel. “Those men. The men across the street at your home. They are there in an attempt to keep me from killing you.”

  “What?” Kevin’s arm was quite heavy, and he was having trouble holding up his small weapon.

  “They are there in an attempt to prevent you from entering my home. You are already here, and they have failed. You are, though it was not your intention upon breaking into my home, already dead and I have already killed you.”

  Kevin’s nose began to bleed, and he wiped at it, then noticed the color of his blood which was the same watery violet he’d noticed earlier.

  “What is—what did you—that was not something to make me sleep… What are you?”

  “My dear, you seem to have difficulty finishing your sentences,” said the large puppet. “Pavel, have you noticed that he seems to have trouble finishing his sentences?”

  “My friend there. The large one standing behind you. I call him Cheidu. In his day he was the great stage actor, Robert Lamb. If you studied theatre history or black history in school you might have read a brief paragraph about him. He was also my best friend. And I killed him. It was a tragic accident. He broke so many rules to try to see me and I repaid his kindness and betrayed his friendship by smashing his head open.”

  Kevin had felt fear when he had been further back in the house, trapped in the snare, tangled in the netting. He had also been annoyed, angry, and indignant that the tables had been so turned upon his plan for the evening, which helped motivate him to get out of the net. This was different. Kevin now knew what it felt like to be terrified.

  “Would you believe that you are the first person to come into this house since the year 1950?”

  Kevin did not know how to respond. He began figuring out a way to get out of the room and the house. He would call the police once he managed to get out of there. Wait, he could not call the police. They could not know he had been here. The old man was insane, without question. He would have to overtake the man and leave him there. The old man was a shut-in. If Kevin could take him and get out of the house, no one would know the man was
dead for a very long time. Would they? Had someone contacted the old man? How did he know Kevin was coming? And who was searching his house?

  “Who is in my house and what do they want?” Kevin asked. Not giving up, his body moving forward by mere centimeters, he moved closer to Mr. Trusnik.

  “You have been a very bad person for a very long time now, Kevin, and it is time to put a stop to it.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  “I have nothing but time in here to study, to learn, to watch. No, it is not possible for anyone to see in here, but that does not mean that I don’t see out and that I have not been here, under house arrest for decades without learning everything there is to know about every living thing around me. I say living thing because it is in my best interest that those living things around me stay living until the natural order of things determines otherwise. The consequences to me if those living things happen to sicken or expire in a way that upsets the natural order of things are quite… grim.”

  “You’re a fucking Peeping Tom, is that what you’re saying, you sick fuck?”

  “I prefer to refer to myself as the neighborhood watch. A term introduced into the lexicon in the last decade or so. Tell me, Kevin, that garbage bag you carried over to the Hague’s house and then dumped the contents on their lawn. Was that their cat, by chance?”

  “What? You.”

  “Yes. I watched you. I saw. You killed your neighbor’s cat. For what? Pleasure? A quick thrill? Who here is the ‘sick fuck’ to use your words?”

  Kevin had been moving closer and closer to Trusnik, his hand on the scalpel.

  “Is it your intention to attack me with that scalpel you have in your hand?” asked Mr. Trusnik.

  Kevin stopped moving. He wiped the blood away from his nose that trickled from one nostril.

  “Oh, by all means, keep trying. Don’t let me stop you. I have no intention of making my way out of here alive after all of this. It is much too late for that.”

  “Glad you know what is going to happen,” said Kevin.

  “Not because of anything brilliant on your part, let me be very clear about that. You are nothing but a psychopath with a limited scope of knowledge and common sense. You’re no better than the shark that glides about the ocean without a plan, waiting for the next edible thing to cross its path that it can tear apart and devour.”