The Grimscribe's Puppets

by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  “What do you want?”

  He spoke loud enough that his words would penetrate the glass. The driver did not respond. His wide eyes merely locked on those of the puppet maker, and his mouth remained twisted in some unnerving attempt at a grin.

  “You have the wrong house,” the puppet maker offered, then waited to see what the driver would do. A thick arm was lifted from behind the glass. It bore a square hand that was then laid flat against the window. The driver leaned his wide mercurial face in, the sort of face that looked as though it had been carved in caricature, and the puppet maker felt compelled to retreat, unsure if he were still lodged in a dream. Then, that face pulled away, and the driver bent down and out of sight. An envelope slid under the door.

  Filthy, crumpled, covered in large thumbprints, the stationary was unmistakable. With trembling hands the puppet maker withdrew the folded letter—the texture like linen, wrapped delicately around a small stack of similar textured bills. The driver’s disinterested smile remained ineffable.

  Mr L——; Please do not delay. The time is nigh. I have sent my driver to fetch you. The included honorarium is only the beginning. —Toth

  The puppet maker looked up from the soft stationery, startled to find the driver was now inside. He overwhelmed the confines of the entranceway, and the afternoon light was warped by the shadow he cast. The puppet maker shrank from his abominable size and nodded in defeated acquiescence. He then reached for his rough worn cane.

  He rode the distance in the backseat of Toth’s towncar, across paved streets devoid of tree or bush. Yet even that pavement was not pristine. It was as cracked and crumbling as the skin around the corners of his eyes, and just like those eyes the streets failed him. They no longer led where his memories expected, Toth’s driver heading in the opposite direction of where he ought, speeding down avenues the puppet maker had never before seen. The old man sat with his cane tightly clenched in his aching hands, worried that he had erred greatly entering the cab. He asked repeatedly if they were indeed traveling the right way, but the disturbing driver remained mute, following a set of unknown bearings. There were few souls along the avenues of the small town, each one more hideous than the last. The puppet maker had no choice but to avert his eyes and trust the driver to take him where he needed to go. Soon, the mists at the outskirts grew thicker, and any landmark that might betray their location or provide some anchor within the chaos was swallowed whole.

  When Dr. Toth’s home appeared, it did so suddenly, emerging fully revealed in the swirling vapor. It was not as large as might have been expected, and closer to dilapidation than suspicion would allow, but the outer walls, where black mold had not yet crept across them, were touched with unusual ornate carvings not found on other homes. Certainly not upon the puppet maker’s. At least, as far as he could recall, but as he twisted the handle of his cane he knew he might be mistaken. It had been so long since he viewed his house from beyond its four walls, he could be absolutely sure of nothing. Nothing beyond his own encroaching debilitation.

  The driver turned and looked at the puppet maker once the towncar had reached its stop outside the formerly opulent house. Over one of the thick forearms stretched across the back of the front seat, the puppet maker could barely see the driver’s eyes, but what was there seemed momentarily unmoored, two reptiles struggling to emerge from their ovarian prison. The driver’s silence and the dismaying effect of his visage were enough to send the puppet maker scurrying. With some trepidation, and under the driver’s flickering eyelids, he stepped from the car and into cloudy freedom. Before him loomed Dr. Toth’s house, ensnaring him with invisible strings as though he were one of his own misshapen creations, while around his ankles formless white swirled. White, then nothing else.

  He awoke standing at the foot of a once-great staircase, his recollections rushing away like the surf from the shore. But for an instant he glimpsed another place, one vastly at odds with where he found himself. And yet when he tried to chase the memory through the murk of waking, it slipped from his grasp again and again before speeding away, leaving him adrift without tether.

  The house around him was peculiar. And yet its design called forth something from the void of his memory, some arcane thought that barely surfaced like a leviathan beneath Arctic ice. The place looked uninhabited: its shelves askew and strung with cobwebs; curiously familiar furniture scuffed and scratched; a thin layer of dust covering the pockmarked stairs. The air, too, had a distinct odor of neglect, and the puppet maker wondered idly if his house would not appear the same to an outsider, if his basement workshop would not emit the same ancient fetor. It had been his own downfall, his own neglect that placed him there, a victim to the whims of chance. Why could it not occur in kind for one such as Dr. Toth?

  The puppet maker steeled himself for the assent of that wide staircase, holding the grip of his cane tightly in his arthritic grasp. He climbed upward, each successive step a triumph, until he arrived at the floor above. There, on the landing, he rested, teetering cane propping him, and swallowed another dose of pills. His vision blurred, images flashed through his mind of large eyes and bulbous heads, and when he finally caught his breath and opened his lids, he was amazed at the sight. The main floor at least had appeared to be simply in a state of long disuse; the second was in a state of destruction. Walls revealed sections of once-hidden wooden slats; floorboards peeled upward, stained dark by time and heat. Each step he took let forth a creak that seemed to emanate from deep within the structure, and he knew it was impossible the good doctor was unaware of his arrival. Nevertheless, the puppet maker trod cautiously.

  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 him
self 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.