The Puppeteer King

by Chris Ward

  Who could be behind something like that? And why on earth would he be trying to scare them off of Las Ramblas?

  Sweat broke out on Peter’s neck, and he wished he hadn’t finished all his wine.

  #

  Jun didn’t really feel the cold anymore. He had Akane’s love wrapped around him like a big, thick blanket, and when you were down on your luck love was all you needed.

  It had taken him a long time to walk across town, because Akane told him that subways couldn’t be trusted. The only things you could rely on to get you from A to B were your own two solid feet.

  She had given him a couple of simple tasks which he had carried out without any problems. All he’d had to do was break into a couple of abandoned buildings and set a couple of fires. Easy stuff. He hadn’t even been required to stick around to see what happened, just set the fires and leave, disappearing back into the dark, moving on to the next place long before distant sirens began to wail.

  After his tasks were completed, he had expected to be allowed to go home, or preferably back into Akane’s waiting arms, but as he finished setting the last fire, he heard her voice in his head, calling for him.

  He didn’t know how her voice was in his head, only that it was.

  And it needed one more favour before he could rest.

  The street up ahead of him was wide and tree-lined, barred from any traffic. At this time of night it was eerily quiet away from the few bars that were still open. A cool wind whistled through the city and there were few people still standing outside; most had retreated back into the bars.

  ‘Turn right here. You see the trees up ahead of you? Just before them on your right, there’s an alleyway.’

  The voice sounded sweet and soothing in his ear, like a lullaby. With every step he wanted to sit down and sleep, where he could dream sweet dreams about Akane.

  ‘Go around to the back of his building and climb the stairs.’

  How weary he felt with each metal step, each thud of his tired feet as he climbed higher and higher … the stairs seemed endless as the clang of metal echoed around him, but he wasn’t doing this for himself and so the aches and pains that soaked through the cloud that Akane’s love had created around him were immaterial. The path back to her arms couldn’t possibly be an easy one, but with each step he took….

  ‘Just one more….’

  The roof opened out in front of him. Jun paused for a second, leaning against a low wall around some kind of ventilation system to catch his breath.

  ‘Well done, Jun. Nearly there. Keep going forward to the wall. You’ll find something buried in old netting. Don’t touch it, not just yet.’

  Jun smiled as he looked up at the sky, the stars mostly obscured by the hazy glow of the city’s lights. Somewhere in the distance he heard sirens over the constant roar of traffic. Barcelona wasn’t exactly musical, but it was vibrant in a way he had never known. Oppressively so, sometimes.

  The pile of netting lay in shadows near the edge of the roof. A human leg was poking out, pale, bloodless skin illuminated like a grounded moon by the lights of the city.

  ‘Do you see it?’

  ‘I see it. What is it?’

  ‘Something that’s in the wrong place. I need you to move it. Can you do that for me, Jun?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Take it back down the stairs, Jun. Leave it for the birds in the middle of the street. They’ll be thankful for it. It’s getting colder and there’s not much food about.’

  ‘Sure.’

  He squatted down by the pile of netting and took hold of the human leg. It was icy cold to the touch, the skin hard and inflexible beneath his fingers. He stood up and dragged it back towards the door. At first it resisted, as if it had been fixed to the rooftop with glue, then it began to slide easily. Within a couple of minutes he had dragged it bumping and jumping down the stairs to the alleyway below.

  ‘Right out into the middle of the street, Jun. Right under those trees.’

  There was no one around when he pulled the heavy thing out of the alleyway and across to the central island of the street. He dropped the load down next to some shuttered trinket stands. The sound of roosting birds came from the trees above him, and he knew they would surely feast in the morning. They would be so pleased, and so would the voice in his head.

  ‘Brilliant job, Jun. Well done. Now I’d just like you to do one more thing. This might take a few minutes, but then you can rest.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I want you to untangle pieces of the net where it has been cut and use them to write letters beside the thing you just brought down. Can you do that?’

  Jun nodded. The net still lay over the thing with the human leg, but it had been cut and damaged in dozens of places. Several pieces of the net had left a trail heading back into the alleyway behind him.

  Under the voice’s instructions he got to work. It only took a couple of minutes to finish which was just as well because he could hear voices approaching from further down the street. In a moment or two they would see him.

  ‘Great work, Jun. You can head back to your hotel now.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You really should pat yourself on the back. You’ve done a wonderful job. You really don’t know how much I appreciate it.’

  Jun gave a slow, vacant smile. He heard a sound like the voice switching off in his mind, leaving him alone.

  If Akane was pleased, Jun was pleased. It wouldn’t be long now before he was with her again.

  Some things were just meant to be.

  #

  Jennie awoke to the sound of the door handle rattling. As she fought off a lingering dream she felt for a moment that she was back in Japan and that an earthquake was shaking the building. Then a groan came from the other side of the door. Jennie pushed away the covers and climbed out of bed.

  ‘Jun!’

  He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. His eyes were bloodshot and wild and his clothes and hair were messy and dishevelled. Jennie had good reason to believe in the living dead, and Jun would have fitted in well.

  ‘Tired….’

  ‘Where have you been? Jun, I’ve been so worried.’

  Even as the words came out she wondered if she really had, and the guilt of a peaceful day hanging out with Jorge while her friend had been missing came rushing back. Jorge, despite her protests, had refused the offer of a rented room in the hotel and had gone off to wherever he called home. Jennie had fallen asleep almost before her head had hit the pillow, banishing the guilt to a corner to wait until morning.

  Jun turned to look at her, and for a moment the glaze in his eyes cleared. ‘I don’t … know,’ he stuttered. ‘I feel like I’ve been walking for a long time, but where … I don’t know.’

  ‘Jun….’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, and she was tempted to slap him. His bottom lip trembled as if he were about to confess all of his sins to her. ‘I don’t know what’s happening to me.’

  She pushed the door shut and pulled him forward, intending to pick something out of his hair, but she found his arms encircling her, his face pressing into her shoulder. She clutched him to her, holding on like a wife trying to stop her husband heading off to war, and she felt his arms encircle her, his fingers pressing into her back.

  ‘Jennie,’ he whispered. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Hearing her name instead of another made her gasp with happiness. She wanted Jun more than ever, but as his body trembled with exhaustion in her arms she knew he was a broken man held together by fraying string. Wherever he had been and whatever had happened to him, more than anything now he needed rest, so she guided him back towards the shabby old bed by the room’s only window.

  In the dim glow cast by the street lamps through the gaps on either side of the curtains he was just a silhouette as Jennie pulled his dirty clothes off him and helped him under the covers. At first she wasn’t sure what might happen, but then she heard him crying softly. She climbed int
o the bed beside him and pulled him close, their faces touching, their bodies entwined. Not moving, they lay together, Jennie feasting off his closeness, his warmth. From the first moment Jun Matsumoto had walked into her life, saving her from one of Crow’s hideous creatures, she had thought of no one else. Jun was her one, regardless of whether she was his, and it had broken her heart to watch him drift away in the institution. The day he had showed up outside her shop had been a miracle, yet it looked like he wasn’t cured at all.

  Professor Crow was supposedly here in Barcelona. Could Crow possibly be what was behind Jun’s wild mood swings, the way some people were affected by the changing seasons? Could just being near to the man who had destroyed everything Jun held close be destroying Jun’s mind too?

  ‘Help me, Jennie,’ he suddenly whispered. ‘Help me, please. Whatever this is, whatever is happening … it’s killing me.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ she whispered back. She wanted to say something more, but no more words would come.

  They lay there together, not saying anything, as the unrelenting sound of traffic on Avenida Diagonal came faintly from the far end of the alley. Jun’s breathing began to slow, but Jennie lay awake, staring up at the ceiling, wishing that the happiness she felt at his return was enough to cover the horror of smelling gasoline in Jun’s hair and blood on Jun’s fingers.

  24

  The secret room

  Nozomi figured there would be no better time to start her attempts to escape than the dead of night. Somewhere a clock had struck midnight, and the old theatre was closed down and dark. As she crept out of her room in the basement and stole her way up the stairs step by careful step, the darkness around her inky black, she wasn’t sure quite what she had planned—whether it was to kill her master or merely to find some way out that he had left unlocked—but sitting in her room every night was driving her crazy. Feeling at last a sense of purpose, her hands felt along the wall, looking for familiar groves and scrapes in the old plaster. Even though she knew these corridors well, it still came as a surprise when she bumped her head against the door at the top of the stairs.

  The dull thud seemed impossibly loud in the silence of the lower levels, and she held her breath for a few seconds, listening for sounds of disturbance from up ahead. Her master would probably be sleeping by now—he had to sleep just like everybody else—but he might have left one of his once-humans to guard her.

  She wished now that she had shown more interest in his work. It might prove life or death if she tried to escape. Some of his creations were remote-controlled—she assumed by her master himself—mere toys, complex robots that without someone working the strings were as dangerous as a parked car. Others were biotechnological, complex hybrids of machines fused with humans or animals, living things embedded with metal skeletons and computer systems or encased in metallic frames. Of these, she didn’t know how much self-awareness they had, or how much was controlled by a remote server. Kurou was the puppet master, of course, but how much free thought did his creations have? Perfect artificial intelligence was his ultimate goal, she knew; artificial intelligence that could be programmed with orders and then left to make its own decisions on how to carry them out. But how close had he got?

  She eased the door open and crept along the next corridor. At one point she froze as her foot touched something, and she thought it was a once-human sleeping in her path. As she squatted down to reach out for it though, she found it to be just an old mop handle, lying across the floor.

  At the end of the corridor, another door led her through into the theatre’s old lobby, where the faintest glimmer of light through the boarded up main entrance was a welcome change to the darkness. As her eyes adjusted, Nozomi could just make out faded posters on the walls of long forgotten performances, standing ten feet tall on either side of an empty souvenir shop.

  Behind her, steps led up to the stalls entrance, where her master now had his macabre production line of misery.

  Something shifted at the top of the stairs. Nozomi ducked out of sight behind an old concierge desk as a shadow rose off the floor and then lay flat again.

  So, he had the place guarded.

  Nozomi was under his protection; the things wouldn’t touch her surely? During the day, when her master allowed some lights to be switched on and Nozomi had the free run of the old theatre, maybe not, but now, at night, with her master worried about the murder here in Barcelona, then the creature, if it had been set as a guard for the experimentation room, might not differentiate her from an intruder. The risk was too great.

  She crawled away behind the concierge desk, then darted across the lobby and ducked down in the doorway of the old restaurant. If the main doors were guarded she would have no choice but to take the long way to her master’s room.

  The old theatre was circular in structure, with the lobby area stretching around three quarters of the building. The rest was cordoned off as backstage areas for the actors and staff who had once been involved in the productions. There were four doors into the theatre hall itself from the customer lobby, although two had been bricked off. There was just the one entrance by the main doors and another through the backstage area.

  The backstage area was exclusively her master’s territory. His living quarters were back there, while Nozomi had been installed on the bottommost of three basement levels, in a room once used for storing old stage props.

  If she was going to strike at her master, she needed to get near him while he was asleep, before he had a chance to detonate the safety nets in her hands and feet. With the guard on the doors it was impossible to get through to the backstage area through the usual way, but in the days after they first set up here, Nozomi had killed many hours doing what twelve-year-olds did best: exploring, squeezing into tight nooks and crannies, finding every last secret space that the builders of the theatre had instilled so many years ago.

  She opened the door of a cleaning closet to the left of the toilets and slipped inside. Nozomi closed the door behind her and pulled back an old plastic mat to reveal a little trapdoor built into the floor. Its metal handle was crusty to the touch, and flakes of rust came away on her fingers as she pulled it up.

  She lowered herself down into a cramped world of water pipes and electrical cables, and finally dared to switch on the little torch she used to read in her room at night.

  The basement levels were beneath half of the theatre. The other half was built at street level, and beneath her knees was stony soil. Nozomi winced as stone after stone bit into her skin, stabbing at her through the jeans she wore.

  Getting through the tangle of pipes was like negotiating a military assault course, but at least the pipes that would have once held scalding water were now cold. After what felt like hours of crawling, wriggling and squeezing through the gloom while pipes cracked against her shoulders and stones bruised her legs, she saw the trapdoor she was looking for up ahead. It opened out on to a similar cleaning closet as the one she had entered by, but this one was behind the stage area, not far from where her master had his rooms.

  She was just a few feet away when she heard voices coming from above her, and the gentle crunch of feet on the floorboards over her head.

  Something was strange about the voice and the movements. Nozomi lay still in the dark and listened for a few minutes as the soft thuds continued, and the lilting sound of the voice drifted down to her. She guessed she was beneath one of the backstage changing rooms, rooms that her master always kept locked. He was a man of many secrets, and Nozomi had long ago stopped having more than a passing interest in what monstrosities he kept hidden away. He wore his vileness on his sleeve and after a walk across his experimentation room it was difficult to imagine anything worse, but this was something unexpected.

  He wasn’t speaking, he was singing. And he wasn’t pacing back and forth, he was moving his feet in a tight rhythm.

  Her master was dancing.

  Nozomi didn’t recognise the song, but between verses he would
interject with little compliments like ‘You dance well, my dear,’ or ‘Your grace embarrasses this old man,’ or ‘I’m so glad you decided to take up my offer. It was most courteous of you.’

  He was speaking in a language she recognised rather than his native Chinese. Nozomi could only assume that his unseen, unspeaking partner had to be Japanese also.

  Nozomi felt a desperate urge to see who her master was dancing with. None of his other once-human experiments were remotely the ballroom dancing type, yet here he was, spinning across the floor like some long dead actor resurrected for one last performance.

  Nozomi switched off her flashlight and found herself illuminated by shards of light piercing down through floorboards that had shrunk with age. She tried to look up through the cracks, but all she could see was a blur of colour that could have been feet and clothes. Instead she started crawling again towards the trapdoor a few feet away.

  The sound of her master’s nasal singing became quieter as she pushed the trapdoor up a few inches and climbed up into the old cleaning closet. She lowered the trapdoor again and covered it over, then crawled over to the door.

  The handle had long ago broken off and the lock had been broken through. Nozomi eased it open and found that it faced two closed doors on the other side of the corridor. A thin sliver of light stretched under the door of one, and from behind it came the sound of scraping feet.

  For a few minutes she waited, wondering whether she should sneak across the corridor and open the door a crack, then suddenly her master’s singing stopped. Nozomi shrank back and pulled the door three quarters closed just as the door across from her opened and her master stepped out. Nozomi caught a glimpse of what looked like a woman sitting on a chair facing a grimy mirror with her back turned, then her master switched off the light, closed the door and walked away down the corridor, back towards the experimentation room.