The Puppeteer King

by Chris Ward

  ‘I can’t see….’

  ‘There,’ Merlin said, and Peter felt a tingle of fear as the wizard stabbed a finger at the gloomy shadows above the shop doors. ‘He’s hanging from the wall.’

  ‘O … oh.’

  Peter looked up at the closed shops in front of them, at the dark windows above the shuttered doors, then back down at the photograph. Something was definitely in the picture, covering the windows with a mass of angles and points, but the quality was too bad to make out any detail.

  ‘I told you, didn’t I?’

  Peter nodded. ‘I’m sorry, you were right.’

  ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

  Peter shrugged. Despite the sudden unease that he felt, he still didn’t know what he could do. The thing—a man, it’s a man in a costume, don’t forget that—was no longer here. If he’d been upsetting the tourists then there was nothing Peter could do now he was gone. He had to catch him in the act.

  ‘Can’t you check the council lists and find out his address? Send him a letter or something?’

  Peter shrugged. ‘Maybe. I’ll see.’

  As elected leader of the union of Barcelona’s street performers, Peter had been given special access to the city council’s records that no other street performer had. All registered performers had to provide a name and address, as well as details of their act and the costumes involved. If he was official it would be easy to track the renegade down, Peter just doubted that he was.

  ‘Right, well I have to get back,’ Merlin said. ‘This skin cream is killing me. I only called you because Hans had a dinner date with some German tourist he picked up.’

  ‘Well, thanks. I wasn’t busy.’

  ‘I didn’t think you would be,’ Merlin replied, missing Peter’s sarcasm entirely. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Merlin stomped off, the staff clacking on the ground. Peter stood for a few moments staring at the little crossroads where the apparent street performer had been a couple of hours before. There was so little to go on, just a grainy picture which showed nothing other than a presence, really. It was barely worth his time.

  Yet still something was disturbing him. He found himself looking back over his shoulder into the dimly lit streets, wondering why they seemed so quiet. A couple of the bigger alleys were packed with pubs and late-night food shops, but Merlin had led him into a quieter area where tourists rarely came. It was the worst possible spot for a street performer, so why had this guy been here?

  Feeling a nervous sweat breaking out on his back, he went up to the closed cake shop, and looked up into the shadows over his head.

  It was difficult to see anything because an arch spanned the street about twenty feet above him, linking the buildings on either side. This area was pedestrian-only, although during the day it wasn’t uncommon for kids on mopeds to use the tight streets as a shortcut from Placa de Catalunya down to Barceloneta.

  Something was hanging from beneath the arch, just out of reach. Peter pulled a phone from his pocket and switched on the flashlight function, illuminating what looked like a rope. That would explain how the guy had appeared to be hanging there. Peter made a mental note of the safety rules the man had been breaking, just in case he did have an official record. The requirements were surprisingly strict, and any kind of suspension required specially sanctioned harnesses.

  It looked like an ordinary piece of rope. As it swayed back and forth in the light breeze though, something glinted and flickered. Peter wished Merlin was still here with his staff, but outside the door of the adjacent building he spotted a broom leaning against a wall.

  He put the phone back into his pocket and reached up with the broom, knocking the rope, trying to loosen it or pull it lower. He reached up with his other hand, but it was still just out of reach.

  Then a sliding sound came from the archway above and the rope dropped down a couple of feet, close enough for him to reach.

  He dropped the broom and reached up for it. As his fingers closed over the end, he grimaced and let go, his palms coming away covered in a kind of slime. Hoping it was just grease, he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and reached up again, this time getting a firm grip on the rope.

  ‘Come on,’ he muttered. ‘Let’s see what you’re made of.’

  Something shifted in the gloom above him, a scrabble of black limbs leaning over the side of the arch and reaching down to take hold of the rope a few feet above Peter’s hands, jerking it upwards. Peter stared in stunned fascination then cried out as his feet left the ground. Hypnotised by the monster above him, it took him a moment to make his hands let go.

  As Peter crashed to the floor, a grunt of what might have been laughter came from above him. When he looked up, however, the shadowy shifting thing had gone.

  With his heart racing, Peter started to push himself up, but his hand landed in something wet and sticky beneath him. He gasped and wiped the slime away on his trousers, leaving a brownish stain. He scrambled aside to see what he had landed in.

  Blood.

  That wicked laughter danced about in his mind as Peter got up and backed away, wanting to look at the puddle of darkness—blood blood blood—but instead finding his eyes drawn to the archway above him. It was empty now, the thing he had seen and the rope gone, but the blood on the ground and now on his clothes made whatever frustrations Merlin and Hans felt pale in comparison.

  Peter had been performing on the streets of various cities for more than ten years. He’d reprised numerous roles, and he’d met literally hundreds of other performers. Some of them were so good it blew your mind, creating human optical illusions that were impossible to understand. But they were human, and there was only so much a human could do.

  What he had seen on the bridge above him had been something else. A spider, Hans had told Merlin, but there had been very little to suggest that hideous shape was nothing but an elaborate costume.

  There had been nothing to suggest it was human either.

  3

  Jun visits Ken

  Jun hadn’t eaten anything in two days, and his stomach was starting to growl and cramp. Neither had he slept indoors, preferring the quiet loneliness of the underside of a bridge arch, tucked up on a ledge between the sun-charred faces of two long-term homeless, who neither offered nor asked for conversation. On the third morning he woke to find that the two tramps had moved on, and decided it was time for him to do the same.

  The box of personal effects still sat beside him, unopened. The time would come, but right now he couldn’t face whatever might be in there. He didn’t want to think about the past. He had to keep looking forward.

  In his case he found his old wallet with his old bank cards. His credit cards had all expired but his cash card still worked, and he found to his surprise that while he had been in the institution his royalties from his days as the singer in Plastic Black Butterfly had added up to a useful amount. He had lived off the state for five years, and his royalties had left enough to get him through several months before he would need to find work.

  Work.

  It was an alien concept that had no appeal to Jun, mostly because it would mean interacting with other people. He had been shut away with his thoughts for so long that he felt leaden and awkward whenever he had to talk to someone, fumbling over his words as though his mouth were full of rocks.

  And then there were the looks. He saw accusation and suspicion in every face, even in the eyes behind the smiles, the laughter. They all knew what had happened, and they all blamed him.

  #

  He took a local train up the coast from Kanazawa, boarding it at midday when it would be quietest. He stared out at rugged beaches not dissimilar to the one he had seen from the window of his room at the institution, watching the white crests of breakers far out to sea, the wheeling birds dipping and rising, the occasional cargo ship as it drifted along the horizon.

  He liked to imagine there was nothing out there, that the sea
went on forever. He often thought about getting off the train and taking a swim, never looking back.

  #

  He got off a few stops after Niigata, found a quiet Japanese-style Inn by the beach and booked a room for a few days. In the quiet days of early autumn there were few other guests, so Jun sat in his room with a sea view, dressed in a yukata, and drank beer while watching television. He took his meals in his room, and ventured out only to visit the hot spring on the ground floor.

  On the fourth day he opened the box.

  #

  He had got the impression for some time that the box he was carrying around was empty, the sum of his worldly possessions reduced to mere air as he wasted away, forgotten and alone in the mental health institution.

  Beneath a layer of crumpled newspaper he found something though. It was not wholly unexpected, but was still the last thing he wanted to see, something that dragged him back to the world like a bull hauling a dead matador out of an arena.

  A single crow’s feather.

  Jun could run away forever, but the Professor would be waiting for him at the end. It was better to turn and face his nemesis, get the final battle out of the way.

  Wasn’t it?

  There was a computer in the lobby of the inn and Jun was able to find the current address for Ken Okamoto without much difficulty. Their old band, Plastic Black Butterfly, still had an active website and it amused Jun to see that they were listed as merely “on hiatus”. Jun, of course, had been the singer in the second incarnation of the band, with Ken the only surviving member of the original quartet after the events at British Heights more than a decade ago. Jun could only wonder how screwed up a TV documentary about the band’s history might be.

  Unlike his own address at the institution, Ken’s was public, although it pained Jun to see that it was a convalescence home in Gunma prefecture. He remembered little about what had happened to Ken, but had hoped his friend and former bandmate had come through it better than the rest of the survivors. It seemed not.

  #

  He stayed on at the inn until the end of his reservation, then he ventured back down to the train station and caught the next train heading north, wanting to leave his troubles behind him. Ken was south, but so was the past.

  All day he continued up the coast of Japan until the train reached its terminus at Aomori, the northernmost city on Honshu, Japan’s largest island. Jun got off because he had to, then went to the travel office in the station and booked a ferry ticket for Hokkaido. A shuttle bus would pick him up in half an hour and take him to the port, so he sat down to wait.

  Beside him, an old man was reading a newspaper. Jun found himself glancing over the man’s shoulder, wondering what was going on in the world. He saw articles about foreign wars and new presidents and economic scandals.

  And then the man turned a page and Jun saw a picture of himself staring out of the creased paper.

  The headline read: JUN MATSUMOTO RELEASED, followed by a subtitle—“Rock star released from mental hospital but questions remain.”

  There were two pictures of him, one of him looking weary and tired that had probably been taken by one of the institution’s staff and sold, and another of him as a much younger man, on stage with Plastic Black Butterfly. Ken stood beside him, fingers a blur on his Gibson Flying V.

  Jun knew he could avoid the past no longer.

  He tossed his ferry ticket into the trash and headed for the entrance to the bullet train station.

  Four hours later he was in Gunma.

  #

  He arrived in the city of Takasaki just before midnight, so he checked into a nondescript business hotel near the train station. He knocked back a couple of beers to help him sleep, and in the morning he headed for the convalescence home where Ken now lived.

  The bland two-storey prefab building was behind a high wall topped with a polite curl of barbed wire and surrounded by a couple of acres of well-tended gardens. Jun signed a form at the gate and was led up to the main building by a guard. Inside, the lower floor was made up of staff quarters, waiting rooms and kitchens, while the second floor looked like a corridor in a regular apartment building.

  ‘Mr. Okamoto has been notified of your visit and is expecting you,’ the guard said. ‘Be sure to sign out when you leave.’

  The guard headed back down the corridor, leaving Jun standing outside a blank door emblazoned with the number 6-67. He smiled. The doors either side were numbered 14 and 16.

  ‘We’re one better than the devil,’ Ken had often quipped.

  Despite everything, it seemed he hadn’t lost his sense of humour.

  Jun knocked, waited a few seconds, and then entered.

  The door opened on to a suite of three open-planned rooms with Western-style wooden floors but sliding Japanese screens. It looked little different to any other middle-aged person’s home that Jun had ever been into: there was a TV in one corner surrounded by framed photographs, a sofa, a Japanese heated table on a rug in front of it, a dining table in another room in front of a small, neat kitchen. The only difference was the bars that were attached to everything as if the resident were a hundred years old.

  Ken might as well have been. He was sitting in an armchair on a balcony which looked out over a sea of suburb houses towards some hazy green hills in the distance. At the foot of the chair was a metal box that hummed like a transformer, with a wire attached to the chair’s frame. Ken smiled as he turned to look at Jun, and Jun started at how old he looked. His face was lined and gaunt, his eyes lustreless, his lips thin and grey.

  ‘The drugs make me look like a cancer patient, eh,’ he said, his voice at least containing some of the old Ken. ‘Hello, Jun. It’s been a while.’

  Jun forced a smile, although he’d never felt more miserable. He put the box down on the dining table and carried a chair over to the balcony. Close up, he saw that the lines on Ken’s face weren’t all through age; many of them were scars from what looked like dozens of mini surgeries.

  ‘The guy was a fucking magician,’ Ken said. ‘He did to me in a night what the best doctors in the land have spent the last five years trying to undo.’ He pointed at his right leg, which was heavily encased in a metal and plastic brace. ‘They haven’t got them all out yet, either.’ He laughed. ‘If I stub my toe it hurts like all hell is climbing up through my leg. I actually tried to record the sound it made once, thought it might make an interesting concept for a new album. I haven’t given up the idea of one day getting back on stage, you know.’ He shook his head. ‘But the frequency was so low it kept breaking my equipment.’

  Jun smiled. ‘Too doom even for us, right?’

  Ken shrugged. ‘You got it. Plus I don’t have a band anymore. The only member other than me who’s not dead is in a mental hospital.’

  ‘They let me out,’ Jun said.

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘I think they think I’m sane now. They have no idea. I’m not considered dangerous at any rate. Only to myself, but I don’t think anyone would care about that.’

  Ken shook his head. ‘I would,’ he said. ‘You didn’t kill Karin, whatever anyone else thinks. You were no more to blame for what happened than I was for what happened to O-Remo, Bee, and Dai.’

  ‘I was. It was my fault. None of you would have been near that castle if you hadn’t been looking out for me.’

  Ken shook his head again. ‘And that’s what it was, Jun. We were looking out for you. We’re family. That’s what families do.’

  Jun gritted his teeth. ‘Families don’t lead each other to their deaths.’

  ‘Sometimes shit happens. That bastard has ruined a lot more lives than just ours. The funny thing is, it could have been even worse.’

  ‘Could it?’

  Ken nodded. ‘I don’t mean for me and you. I mean for others.’

  Jun rubbed his chin. ‘I’ll find her, Ken. I have nothing else … but if I can do one decent thing I’ll find your daughter for you.’

  Ken frowne
d. ‘Nozomi?’

  ‘He took her. I saw him. I know she’s alive out there somewhere, and he’s got her. He won’t have killed her because he’ll know how valuable she is. If there’s one last thing I do … I’ll find Nozomi for you.’

  Ken gave a slight shake of his head, and then grimaced as if a sudden pain had struck him. ‘There’s no need, Jun. I know where she is.’

  Jun stared. ‘What? There was an international manhunt, but they never found her.’

  Ken gave a wistful sigh and turned away from Jun, looking out at the distant hills. ‘She writes to me, Jun. Every couple of months I get a letter from some corner of the world where she’s currently living. There’s never a return address or any details, but I know it’s her. I taught her to write. I’d recognise the way she writes kanji anywhere, and I can—’ he began to sob, ‘—smell her fingers on the paper.’

  ‘Ken….’

  ‘I know it’s her. There’s no doubt in my mind. They said she must have died down in the woods after the fall and been dragged off by wolves, but that never rang true. Crow took her and he’s keeping her captive somehow. He’s letting her write to me to taunt me. He’s playing me, Jun, like a master puppeteer.’

  ‘Did you go to the police?’

  ‘The first couple of times, but after a short investigation they brushed it off as a prank. After that I kept the letters to myself.’

  ‘What do they say?’

  Ken shrugged. ‘Trivial things. They talk about the weather, describe beaches and mountains and city streets. She always says she misses me, but there’s never anything more. At times she sounds … happy.’

  ‘He’s toying with us. He’s playing a game.’ Jun lifted the box he had put down by his feet. ‘He’s playing with me too, Ken. They gave me a box of personal items when I left. Inside was just this.’

  Jun opened the box for Ken to see. At the sight of the feather Ken flinched. ‘Put it away, Jun. Please.’