The Grimscribe's Puppets

by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  For an instant—less—Smythe was possessed by the absolute, unshakable conviction that the woman he was speaking with was not Dominika Price. She might be Suzanne Kowalczyk—no, she was someone else, altogether. Quickly as it had come, the feeling passed, and Smythe swallowed another (his eighth? ninth?) cup of wine. “Linus Price,” he said, “was a great writer.”

  “So you say,” Dominika said. “Who knows? Maybe he was. But he was not a very good writer, I think.”

  “What is your position, then, on publishing his final work? If,” Smythe added, “it is his final work.”

  “How should I know?”

  “Haven’t you gone through his things?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because you’re his executor—executrix.” Smythe struggled with the word, his tongue suddenly full of the alcohol he’d consumed. “It’s your responsibility.”

  “To whom?” Dominika said. “Linus is dead.”

  “To posterity,” Smythe said, a still-trickier word. “To his readers.”

  “What? Ten people? That was something else he used to say, when he was depressed: ‘I’m lucky if ten people buy my books.’”

  “If you feel this way, then why did you give me his manuscript?”

  “What manuscript?”

  “The book, Linus’s last book. A Grammar of Terror—no, A Grammar of Dread, A Catechism of Terror.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “What do you mean, you didn’t?”

  “What I said. I didn’t give you Linus’s book.”

  “But I found it at my front door this morning.”

  “So?”

  “Did you give it to someone to give to me?”

  “Smythe,” Dominika said, “I haven’t seen the fucking book, okay? Maybe Linus’s wife gave it to you.”

  “His wife?”

  “Her—the woman who killed him. Whatever.”

  “She was hardly his Goddamned wife.”

  “Yes, yes. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you want to do with Linus’s book, you do.”

  Smythe choked down his anger. “Of course, I would ensure you received the proceeds from such a project.”

  “With nothing for you?”

  “I—”

  “It’s okay,” Dominika said. “I don’t need this money. You can have it.”

  “I wouldn’t—”

  Dominika waved her free hand. “Shhh. We’ll drink to it.”

  “All right,” Smythe said. He lifted the bottle from which he’d been serving himself, found it, too, empty. He set it down, chose a third. “To the beginning,” he said over his brimming cup, “of a beautiful friendship.”

  “Don’t get crazy,” Dominika said.

  “It’s—never mind.”

  Another portion of the syrupy wine, and a wave of intoxication rolled over him, as if that last amount had tipped an internal scale, plunging him into a full drunk. His head seemed to rise above his body, which felt simultaneously hot, heavy, and hollow, as if he were no more than the suit and shirt he was wearing, held in place solely by its purpose. Linus’s coffin appeared mere feet away, the cactus at its head large as a bush. Smythe stretched out his right hand and slid his fingers over the coffin’s side. He turned his head to Dominika to remark on this—the room swaying lazily as he did—and saw that her neck had grown, carrying her head a good foot, two, past the edge of her high-necked blouse. Her lids were lowered, her lips parted. She had set her cup down, and was playing with the top button of her blouse with her left hand, while her right flopped in her lap.

  Despite the wine, Smythe was instantly, painfully erect, his cock tenting his trousers, throbbing in time with the pulse pounding at his temples, his throat. His mouth was dry, his hands trembling. When Dominika’s hand made the jump to his lap, the shock it produced did nothing to stop his hands from unbuckling his belt, unbuttoning and unzipping his pants. For Christ’s sake, you’re in a fucking funeral home! It didn’t matter: Dominika’s fingers had made their way under the waistband of his briefs and encircled his cock. His fingers had pushed up her skirt, and found her pantiless, shaved, soaking. He half-fell off his chair, angling towards her. Without losing hold of him, she scooted her ass to the edge of the chair, then pulled him into her. Enclosed in her wet heat, he gasped. He grabbed the edges of her blouse, tore it open. A black, lace bra supported her creamy breasts. His fingers worked underneath the underwire, pulled the bra up and over, revealing her large, rosy nipples. His mouth descended on them. Somewhere above, Dominika groaned and uttered words in a language Smythe didn’t know. Her hips ground against his. He took her nipple between his lips, sucked hard on it. Dominika yelped, pushed him backwards, riding him off the chair into a kind of half-crouch on the floor. She leaned into him, her right hand slapping Linus’s coffin. He thought she was keeping time with his thrusts, but she pressed forward more, threatening to overbalance him. He flung his hands to the sides and braced himself against the coffin. His knees were screaming with pressure, his cock dulling. With her left hand, Dominika caught his collar and pulled him over and to the side. They landed hard, Smythe on top, Dominika already moving under him. His cock stiffened, the pressure at its base returning. Dominika’s words had fallen into a rhythmic pattern. She pushed her right hand between them, around and under Smythe’s balls. Something scraped along the flesh behind them; her fingernails, he thought, his cock close to bursting with the touch. A pinprick, several, tickled his skin, and he remembered the cactus ornamenting Linus’s coffin just as Dominika drove the needles she’d freed from it into him. The pain was astonishing, and seemed to combine with the orgasm that convulsed him. He threw his head back, and from the corner of his eye, saw the model of Linus’s head, its eyes open, yellow fluid streaming from them. He recoiled in horror, striking his head on the coffin. Supernovae flared behind his eyes, and were replaced by darkness.

  IV

  Smythe woke the next morning with a splitting headache, a consequence of the four double-scotches he’d sent following the wine once he’d arrived home. (However that had been; his memory of that particular detail was a blank. Please, Christ, someone at the funeral home had called a cab for him.) The buzz had been wearing off, and he’d justified the additional alcohol as a salute to the man he’d once christened the great hope of horror fiction. Not to mention, as a salve for the pain behind his balls, whose sharpness made him draw his breath in sharply every time he moved. No doubt, Linus would have had a sharp remark to offer his pain. (Not that he would have delivered it to his face, of course: he would have passed it to some mutual acquaintance he could be sure would transmit it to Smythe.) Smythe considered a swallow of the hair of the dog, but opted instead for a trio of aspirin crunched between his teeth, their bitterness welcome after the taste he’d awakened with. The aspirin seemed to help, loosening the vice around his forehead, blunting the pain between his legs. His stomach was too scorched for anything other than a glass of lukewarm tapwater. Nothing would have pleased him more than to return to bed, write this day off as a loss, but a host of deadlines were bearing down on him, and he could not afford another lost day. Well, he’d worked through the aftermaths of worse binges than this one, hadn’t he? He shuffled towards his computer.

  Once he’d (gingerly) seated himself, though, the first e-mails of the day brought news that made his vision blur. One of the writers he’d solicited for a reprint for the latest volume of Fatal Frights had sent a reply declining his offer. Mixed in with the pain, Smythe felt a certain astonishment: had any writer ever refused his invitation to be part of Fatal? He could not recall one. As a rule, writers—horror writers especially—were vain, insecure creatures, only too eager to accept whatever crumbs of approval were doled out to them by whoever set him-or herself up as arbiter of value. It was hard to imagine this fellow could be any different. Smythe wondered if he’d done something to offend the man, some (drunken) display at one convention or another. He couldn’t remember. Well, fuck. This was going to leave a ten-plus-thousand-wor
d hole in his book, which was due in little over a month. It wasn’t as if there was a surplus of other stories from which to choose; he’d only selected this one because the year’s pickings were so slender.

  Of course, there was Linus’s manuscript. Perhaps one of its stories might be carved into a shape that would plug the gap. Leaning on his desk, he pushed himself to his feet. For once, he was glad of his modest apartment: moving from the computer to the work table was an exercise in agony; he shuddered to think what a trip from one room to another in a larger place, let alone a house, would feel like. By the time he reached the table, his groin was singing with pain. Sweat spilled down his face; his breathing was labored. He placed his hands to either side of Linus’s manuscript and leaned over it, waiting for his nerves to cool. When they had, he focused on the top page of Linus’s collection, dotted with his sweat.

  It was blank. Must have set it back upside-down. He turned the sheet over, and found the other side blank, too. As were both sides of the page underneath, and the one under that—as were all the pages of what had been Linus’s manuscript. Sure he was suffering a momentary occlusion of his vision, Smythe flipped through the book a second, then a third time. The pages remained blank. “What the fuck?” he said. “What the fuck? What the FUCK!” He flung the book across the table. It struck the nearer tower of unread stories and sent it toppling into its companion, spilling their collected manuscripts onto the floor in an avalanche of paper. “GodDAMN it!” Before he could stop himself, Smythe had swept the pile of stories from established writers off the table, as well.

  Dominika. That was the answer. During their conversation last night, she had realized the mistake she’d made in giving him Linus’s final collection. Hadn’t he thought she seemed different, everything about her more studied (even her accent, which had verged on a parody of itself)? No doubt, the stress of her act leaking through. So once she was confident that he was sufficiently impaired, she’d driven him home, thus allowing herself entry to his apartment, where she had retrieved the manuscript. To delay his discovering her duplicity, she’d replaced Linus’s book with one of the reams of paper Smythe kept under his printer. No doubt, she already had contacted a number of high-powered agents to discuss what money might be made from the collection. In the meantime, he had lost the opportunity to bring Linus’s last book out in a fashion befitting it, and he was up shit creek, very possibly without a paddle, on the next Fatal Frights. What a perfect fucking disaster.

  Someone spoke. Smythe turned, his injury flaring. There was no one with him—as of course there wouldn’t have been. The voice spoke again, whatever it was saying muffled, diffuse. Was it something on the computer? He checked, but only his e-mail was open. The TV was off, yet the voice continued. His neighbors to either side were elderly, quiet, and anyway, the words didn’t sound as if they were carrying through the walls. They seemed closer.

  Surely it couldn’t be coming from the kitchen, from the freezer. That would be too much, more of a breach of good taste than anyone could tolerate. Yet when he pulled back the freezer door, the ice inside crackling, there was the mannequin head of Linus. Despite himself, Smythe retreated a step. “Fucking…” At least the voice had stopped (some kind of tape recorder, set to a timer?). The eyes, he was oddly relieved to see, were closed. What the hell was he supposed to do with this?

  When the model’s mouth fell open, Smythe assumed it was a consequence of the sudden change in temperature caused by his holding the door open—which he also assumed was responsible for the thick, yellow liquid that dribbled over its lower lip onto the freezer’s floor. Great—probably some kind of toxic chemical. When the tongue spasmed, however, and the lower jaw twitched upward, Smythe stumbled backwards. There’s no way, he thought, and it was true, there wasn’t, this had to be a prank, a hoax. But by Christ, it did look real, the lips trembling madly as they tried to frame a word there was no way they could speak. Even with his heart hammering, Smythe could appreciate the level of craftsmanship that had gone into this thing.

  The sound that uttered from Linus’s mouth was not a word. Nor was it mere noise. Smythe felt himself pressed upon from all directions at once, as if the very air had tightened against his skin. His ears filled with a syllable that rang like a cathedral bell, the way the very first word must have troubled the infinite silence that had preceded it. Phosphorous-white light bleached the room around him. He squinted, but it did no good. It was as if the light was inside him. The sensation of fullness in his ears increased from dull to sharp, stabbing pain. He cupped his hands to his head as something gave first in his left, then his right ear. Crying out, he doubled over. He couldn’t hear himself. His hands were wet. He held the right up in front of him, saw blood streaking his palm.

  Whether the sound was continuing to issue from Linus’s mouth, or Smythe’s brain was stuck replaying the noise that had exceeded it, he didn’t know. But, especially now that that the brilliance was ebbing from the air around him, he was possessed by the urge to flee not just the kitchen, but his apartment, the building that contained it. He didn’t worry about locking the door behind him; he wasn’t sure he’d shut it. He didn’t bother waiting for the elevator; the pain that raged between his legs as he descended the five flights of stairs did not seem too large a price to pay for exiting this place.

  Smythe emerged from the front lobby into a gray day. Already, he was starting to trace a line of reasoning whose starting point was Dominika spiking his wine with some variety of long-lasting hallucinogen. The chalk skidded off the board, however, at the sight across the street that greeted him.

  It was a house, one that had not been there when he left the building to attend Linus’s wake last night, or on any of the roughly five thousand other days he’d walked out the front door. It’s a gingerbread house, he thought, which was not quite accurate but which encapsulated the emotion its appearance evoked in him, mingled wonder and terror at having confronted a dwelling from one of the Grimm brothers’ darker stories. The lines of its roof, its sides broken by ornaments that would have been more appropriate to a Medieval castle—gargoyles resting their pointed chins on taloned hands, faces too-broad, vines that coiled like serpents—the house had been stuffed between its neighbors in a manner that suggested a bundle of papers shoved between two sturdy volumes of an encyclopedia. Open wide, its front door framed a tall, naked woman with long, blond hair who was neither Dominika nor Suzanne Kowalczyk. The knives she held at her sides were large, curved.

  What sent Smythe running across the street, up the front walk, and into her terrible embrace was not some spontaneous liebestod. It was the figure he met as he turned to go back into his building. Small as a young child, it was wearing a heavy winter coat whose hood had been pulled up far enough to obscure its face. Smythe was about to tell it to get out of the way when it raised its gray hands to either side of the hood and drew it back. That couldn’t be—surely, that wasn’t—

  It was. Oh, it was.

  For Fiona

  Oubliette

  By Gemma Files

  Therapy Blog of Thordis Hendricks, July 2, 2012 (4:17 PM):

  Back when I was in hospital, recuperating, I thought a lot about what my life had become over those months—that entire year, almost—before my second suicide attempt finally led to formal diagnosis, a plan of treatment, a potential way out of this ever-narrowing flesh trap. The way my perceptions kept on altering, as though filter were laid on top of filter on top of filter, yet so softly, so irretrievably... until finally, it was as though I woke up one morning to discover the way I saw things had always been inaccurate, horrifyingly so, and the systemic shock alone was enough to make me reach for something sharp.

  Like I’d been born and almost died inside a prison cell, thinking that tiny bit of sky I could see through the window was the wide world, and me outside in it, walking, talking, laughing, living. Until that sky itself became a horror too, blue just a thin lid over black, gravity always in danger of failing before the upwards
rush and airless fall into deep space—and it was that fear, that awful lurch, which wrenched me back in and reframed my understanding. Showed me the grave I’d all this time been trapped by, and began to push its walls in on top of me.

  I feel better these days, of course, though not by much. But this, what we’re doing right now...this is supposed to help.

  Therapy Blog of Thordis Hendricks, July 2, 2012 (7:02 PM):

  All right, Take Two. Start over.

  I moved into Shumate House almost immediately after my last consultation with Dr Corbray, as an alternative to further hospitalization, which had been almost impossible for me to stand once the initial numbness wore off; constant panic attacks, five different drug combos tried and discarded, all clusters of side-effects equally disgusting. Like I’d been dropped head-first into a gluey swamp and left to thrash, studiously observed, but unaided otherwise.

  But being rich counts for a lot, no matter how crazy you may be otherwise. And after Aunt Isa died, the portion of the Hendricks fortune that fell to me—administered, in trust, through my family’s firm—served to buy me into Shumate and pay for the almost-undivided attentions of Dr Corbray. Which brings us here.

  This therapy blog is predicated on the assumption—not completely inaccurate—that because my phobia means I can’t physically leave Apartment Five but my privacy-linked anxiety issues argue against around-the-clock live-in care, I should be required to provide my assigned worker (Yelena) with a between-sessions look at my thought-processes, so she can make sure my psychological baseline isn’t fluctuating wildly: No toxic thought-patterns, no repetition or obsessional looping.