“Kinda cool to be compared to a shark,” said Kevin, trying a different tactic. Maybe if he tried to befriend the man. Maybe agreeing with him. Maybe the old man would let him out.
The old man sighed in exasperation. “Like I said, you’re not very bright. Neither is the shark. Sharks are also quite wasteful and leave far too much evidence behind them of their activities. As do you. Those men across the street will find everything they need. And a few things you never thought of. Then they will come here and find you, then me, and will come to certain conclusions, none of which will be that you are the mental genius you think yourself to be.”
Kevin decided to try challenging him again. “So what is it? You made this huge claim that ‘I’m already dead.’ Very dramatic.” Kevin inched closer to Mr. Trusnik.
“Did you know I was married once?”
“So? I heard she died.”
“Yes. She did.”
“Am I supposed to care about that?”
“Perhaps. I killed her.”
“You murdered your wife?” Kevin asked. He had not expected this. There was nothing in the news, nothing in any of his research on the house or its history, nothing about a woman being murdered.
“Did you go to jail?”
Mr. Trusnik shook his head. Kevin stared in disbelief. Could this man be like him?
“I didn’t mean to. It was an avoidable consequence and I should have listened to my advisors. You, on the other hand, are what I refer to as an ‘unavoidable consequence.’ A home invasion falls under that category.”
“How did you kill her?”
“What, you expect something gruesome and sick and twisted? Like something you would do?”
“How did you do it?”
Mr. Trusnik walked to the large puppet he referred to as Robert Lamb, reached up and took it down from the mechanism from which it hung. He set it on the bench next to the puppet he had been dancing with when Kevin entered the work room.
“I loved her.”
“Yes, yes you said that. How did you kill her?”
“I told you. I loved her.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything.”
Mr. Trusnik began to gather various items together into a pile. To Kevin’s blurred vision, he thought part of it looked like the net he had been caught in. How did the old man get that? He was in the back room the whole time.
“Tell me, Kevin. If you were born with a defect that did not allow you to have any physical contact with others, what would you do?”
“What?” Kevin had not given up on trying to inch closer to the old man, who seemed oblivious to Kevin’s movement.
“A simple enough question, but then again I must remember that I am speaking to someone with an even simpler mind. What would you do if you knew that this defect of yours would kill people?”
Kevin stopped. “What, you’re some sort of carrier? You have some sort of disease? Is that it? I’m going to catch some disease from you? Don’t you have to have a sign on your house, or be in a quarantined hospital somewhere?”
“No. Things do not work that way. Excuse me, I need to check something.”
Kevin watched as Mr. Trusnik moved to the ladder, and agile as a squirrel, climbed to the top where a narrow window looked out upon the street. Mr. Trusnik focused his gaze on something outside the window for a moment, moved back down the ladder and to his spot facing Kevin.
“There are more people in your house. They appear to have found something useful. What do you suppose that might be?”
Kevin coughed, and a small bit of violet colored phlegm landed on the front of his shirt. He did not move to wipe it off.
“Or they think I have been kidnapped.”
“I take it you watch a lot of television? I assure you, the people across the street are not at your house because they believe you to have been kidnapped.”
“How can you know that?”
Mr. Trusnik pulled over a stool and set it in front of Kevin. He sat down.
“I had a call before your arrival. Something about a family. North of here. Quite disturbing news. To think a person could do something like that to an entire family.”
“What?”
“Yes. That poor family. I’m sure there have been many others. Have there been many others, Kevin?”
A siren was heard coming down the street. Mr. Trusnik looked at Kevin, who returned the look, incredulous. There was no way that this man could know about the last house. No way at all. Yet he did, and there were people searching his home. Other people knew. How many? What would his parents be thinking right now? Where had he left the mp3 player? Top of the dresser, where he always left it. Out in the open. Casual. His parents would never think to listen to anything on it, so he left it out. Shit. His music. His beautiful music.
“How?” Kevin asked.
Another siren was heard in the distance. Mr. Trusnik gathered more items into the pile on the workbench.
Mr. Trusnik sighed. “I am what might be considered an important man to some, although they have great reservations about me, with good reason I suppose. There is an organization, a business, that attends to all my affairs, my investments, home improvements, grocery deliveries, et cetera. They also notify me of things that might be of interest to me like, say, someone accessing the blueprint records of my home.”
Kevin was surprised. “How long did you know I had the blueprints to your house?”
“Since the day you got them. You were already under a certain amount of scrutiny due to some of your nighttime activities of which I was aware, but you became a subject of extreme interest to quite a large number of people after you took those blueprints. So much for picking a nice old shut-in with no visitors, hmm Kevin?”
Kevin felt that if he could keep talking to the man, he would somehow be okay, that he could escape. “So, why are you so important? What are you, retired CIA or something?”
“You do watch a lot of television. CIA?”
“Then what are you?”
“Your victims did not deserve what they got from you.”
Kevin reached up and grabbed a cloth from off the workbench and put it up to his bleeding nose. He had grown pale, and a blue vein appeared in his forehead and ran from his temple to his cheek.
“You deserve to go to prison for your crimes for the rest of your natural life. You deserve to be beaten and tortured and made to feel terrified every day that you are in prison. I regret to say that what remains of your natural life will not allow that justice.”
Kevin peered at the cloth, not comprehending what he was seeing. It was the wrong color for blood, but the flow would not stop. A weird mucus, maybe.
“I do not believe that people should be put to death for their crimes, Kevin. I happen to believe in the more barbaric practice of locking you in an environment with others who are like you and leaving you alone to tear each other apart in your own special way. I think that has more of a ring of justice to it. Capital punishment, the way they have done it all these years, so immediate, so final; a swift and often merciful end to the life of one who was neither swift nor merciful in the treatment of their numerous victims. There is one form of execution that I think would be truly horrible.”
“What’s that?”
“Being burned alive.” Mr. Trusnik had no irony in his voice when he spoke.
“They did that with witches,” said Kevin
“And others. Others who were different. Others who, through no fault of their own, were born with something that frightened the majority. An extra finger, a mole, different colored eyes, a pair of wings.” Mr. Trusnik moved away from Kevin and over to the pottery kiln, where he adjusted the controls.
Kevin snorted in laughter. “That never happened. So, if you don’t believe in the death penalty, what is it that you’re doing to me?”
“I don’t know.”
“What is that supposed to mean? You change up the poison?”
“You are making me repeat myself like a broken rec
ord. I told you, you weren’t poisoned. The cut you received was from a knife treated with the sap from a root that was to put you to sleep. But you got too far inside the house and touched things that do not belong to you. You got too near me. Do you think a house can take on the emotion of its inhabitants? There is so much grief here. So much sadness. Such loneliness. I am not so old and lacking self-awareness that I do not know what emotions pour out of me day after day, unchecked, for decades. Alone. People need contact with others. Being in solitary confinement from any of it for decades… well, although you are a despicable human being, you are still a human being and I have not been in close contact with one since well before your parents were born.”
Kevin felt faint. Clutching the scalpel, he leaned on the bench.
“Kevin, you are getting quite pale, and you should sit down. You may try to get close to me to cut me with your scalpel. You will have to slash my throat when that happens, by the way. It is necessary that I completely bleed out if I am to actually die. One deep cut. Ear to ear should do it.”
Even as the old man described the way to kill him, he approached Kevin, reached over and took the scalpel away from him. Kevin was too weak to fight him. He gently carried Kevin to the wall and sat him upon the floor with his back propped against the wall. He then put the scalpel back into Kevin’s hand and backed away.
“What are you saying?” asked Kevin, bewildered and disoriented.
“In 1942 I committed a crime. Not the normal kind of crime that you read about in the newspaper or that is even on the law books. But a crime, nonetheless and many people died because of me.”
“You killed people?”
“Not like you. Never like you, Kevin. For my sentence, I was given a choice between two things. I chose the more difficult of the two, thinking I deserved some grand and enduring penance because my other choice would have been a swift and humane death, which as I said, I am against.”
Mr. Trusnik opened up the pottery kiln and placed objects into the pile he’d collected. The net was one of the things to go in first, followed by the animal snare.
“Did you go to prison?”
“This has been my prison. I have been here since that day. I do not leave, I do not take visitors, though my dear friend visited me once, unannounced, and that did not end well for us. No, I have no contact with the outside world. Everything is delivered. Workmen are dealt with over the phone or Internet. Everything else is handled by the businessmen I told you about.”
“1942. That would make you—”
Mr. Trusnik put one finger to the side of his nose. “Exactly. Three hundred years old. This year.”
Kevin’s eyes followed the old man’s movement as he put Kevin’s digital recorder into the kiln. In Kevin’s weakened state, he chose to listen and did not attempt to respond.
“You are the first human being I have been in close proximity to in seventy years, and I have to say I am feeling quite overwhelmed. My heart is beating rapidly, my pulse is very fast. I am perspiring. I can’t remember the last time I did that. I am experiencing some form of passion—I suppose because I actually have a guest? My affliction has always been that harm comes to people when I experience passion. I did not poison you, Kevin. You are dying by being near me.”
“Are you going to try to tell me you are some sort of vampire?”
The old man placed more items in the kiln. One item was similar to the small knife the puppet used to cut him. He turned back to Kevin.
“No. I am not a vampire. You and I both know that vampires are utter nonsense. They make for good novels and movies, however. No. Perhaps my isolation here in this house has made the house like me. I asked before, how many things did you touch when you came in here? When you touched them, did you feel something? Did anything happen?”
Kevin touched his hand, again remembering the tingling sensation in his hand that he shook off as he crept through the kitchen.
Mr. Trusnik mused. “How many items that may have been touched by me? It used to be that I would have to have some form of physical contact with someone to harm them. But that is not true. The others can do it without touching. I remember a small flu epidemic, not started by me. However, it was started because of me. I had to know the extent of the damage I’d caused. I asked questions. I found answers. Yes, they touched people, but they also touched things, that’s how powerful they are. I imagine they envision that alternate outcome for you. I admit I did not think about what might happen to you if you came in here and placed your hands on anything.”
“Are you human?”
Mr. Trusnik did not answer, but walked over to the female puppet in the silver-blue lace dress and traced her face with his fingers.
“You’ve lost blood and what little you have left is turning to water. I need you to do me one favor before you expire.”
Kevin had never been so helpless, so frightened. He stared at the old man, who stared back with an expression that Kevin thought looked almost sad.
“Good. Slow your breathing if you can. It will help. I told you I was under house arrest, and that I was forbidden to come in contact with anyone for the rest of my natural life, which could very well be another hundred years or so. Can you imagine being completely by yourself for that long a period of time?”
Kevin watched Mr. Trusnik. He did not believe half of what he was saying, but believed the old man was convinced it was true. Kevin had no idea what he had been poisoned with, but it was having an effect. He took another wipe at his nose and peered again at the cloth—it looked like clear mucus with a little blood in it. Good. The bloody nose was stopping.
“As I said, Kevin, your blood is becoming water. Or something similar to water.”
Did the old man read minds? Kevin said nothing.
“I was told that the punishment for breaking the bonds of my house arrest and having any contact with another human would be that I was to be burned alive. That was my choice. My option.”
Kevin’s speech came in halting efforts, his breathing labored. “Burned alive? No one does that.” Kevin eyed the scalpel that lay in his useless hand.
“In my world, they do. As a lesson to others. And I cannot fathom anything more horrible. I admit to having become a coward. I chose this, solitary existence, instead of the sudden death I was offered at my original sentence, because it was not the quick and easy way out that sudden death would bring. I wanted to be punished. And I have been. I don’t know why they chose fire to be my punishment if I was ever to have contact with someone again. I stopped trying to figure them out ages ago. So I must ask you to kill me. You were planning to, anyway. This way will not provide you the music you were hoping for, but you are here and it is what you came to do. I ask that you do it. Consider it an act of mercy in an attempt at contrition over your many other more heinous acts.”
Kevin thought the old man was rambling nonsense, but was in no position from his helpless place on the floor to do anything other than humor him.
“But I broke in. You didn’t mean to have contact with me. Can’t they do anything, these people of yours? It wasn’t your fault.”
“Kevin, are you trying to defend me? Or are you trying to save yourself? You can’t possibly be trying to find a reason not to kill me.”
“I. I don’t know. I—” Kevin made one last effort to get to his feet and collapsed back against the wall.
“No. Kevin, I need you for one last thing. I need you to hold on a while longer.”
“Mr. Trusnik, I—”
“Oh let us not be formal now. That is inappropriate. They will be here soon. The ones that can enter. The ones like me. They will come in here and then they will take me out of my home. They will take me away from my family. They will do this terrible thing. I want to die with my family. At home. You have to hold on.”
“Your. Family.” Oh my God. The old man meant the puppets.
“They will find them. They will know.”
Mr. Trusnik walked over to the wire where the p
uppet of Robert Lamb was attached. He took the puppet down and held him close to his chest, then walked over to the cabinet on the wall and released his close hold on the puppet, placing him inside. “Thank you, Cheidu,” he said.
The old man then went back to the workbench where he had placed the skeleton and the waltzing woman puppets he’d used to taunt Kevin in the hallway. Kevin studied them in the light.
“Those look like real skeletons,” Kevin said.
“They were my parents,” said Mr. Trusnik.
Kevin squinted to see them more clearly. They were indeed skeletons. Kevin could not help but feel a certain fascination for this man.
“When you get to be as old as I am, I don’t think some of the same social mores can apply any longer. There is no rule that I am aware of that when a person dies that they must be buried or cremated or disposed of in some place. Where better for a puppeteer and his family to be other than immortalized in a puppet theatre? My father referred to me as an escaped puppet who found his way home. He called me that until he died. When my parents died I realized that they too, were puppets that needed to escape and find their way home. I helped them come back. That is all.”
Kevin pointed with his head toward the puppet in the dress.
“Then who is the one you were dancing with. Your wife or something?”
“Yes. My beautiful Juliet.”
“Her name was Juliet?”
“Her name was…” Mr. Trusnik seemed to lose his train of thought. “Wednesday’s child is full of woe,” he muttered. “Her name was—”
“You don’t remember your wife’s name? What’s wrong with you? Do you have Alzheimer’s or something?” Kevin held the cloth to his face.
A knocking sound from deep in the house startled them both.
“I expect they have finished with your home and are here to collect you and take me to wherever it is they take someone with my particular crimes.”
The Puppet Maker's Bones Page 20