Puppet Graveyard by Tim Curran Page B

came down. He waited for her up there, his back to her. Not threatening, not anything really. Just lifeless and dull, an automaton being worked by the unseen hands of Piggy.
    She came up behind him slowly, feeling the maleficent blood of the house seeping into her now like a plague, feeding into bone and marrow, nerve ending and muscle fiber…infesting her with its toxins which were positively black and rancid. She could almost feel her soul putrefying.
    Upstairs, it was even worse.
    It was a puppet graveyard. There was some sort of fine threads like cobweb plaiting the walls. It drooped from the ceiling in filaments and fibers and loose nets. There were things tangled in them, objects that she first thought were the mummified remains of children but they were dolls…no, not just dolls but puppets and vent dummies, some whole and others represented only by stray limbs and dangling baby doll heads, cleaved torsos. They were everywhere in the corridor. It was a jungle of cocooned doll parts. Gray, flaking faces webbed by spiders. Chubby hands speckled with mold. Legs furry with accumulated dust. Heads fixed to the walls in blind, eyeless rows, torsos hanging in clusters. And all of it woven and threaded together like beads sharing a common string by that network of gossamer material, shrouded in fine plaits of the stuff like the bodies of insects in a spider’s lair.
    “What? What is all this?” Kitty said, her entire body trembling now.
    There had been a barely-suppressed terror right from the first, of course. Just coming to the house was frightening enough…but the longer she had been in there and the deeper she penetrated its nameless mysteries, the more the house gripped her and held her, getting its hands around her throat and its fingers along her spine. And when she saw all those puppet and doll parts hanging in that web—if a web it was—the terror no longer circled her heart like hungry wolves in the darkness, it leaped on her. It rode her and embraced her and flooded her with fright. She could feel it making her belly weak and her limbs numb, the fine hairs at the back of her neck rising like hot wires.
    “I said,” she breathed, “what is this?”
    But Ronny did not answer and it was almost as if he were incapable of the same. He just stood there like some blind, mindless mannequin as Kitty made little shrieking sounds as she ducked under the reaching marionette hands and bumped into a clown puppet whose face had been gouged with a knife. Turning, she stumbled into a collection of doll heads and let out her first real scream. Some lacked eyes, others were cracked open, still others were near-melted, their flesh bubbly as if they had been in a fire. The heads swung back and forth around her like Japanese lanterns in a wind. A huge white moth abandoned a doll’s empty eye socket and six or seven leggy black beetles dropped from the straw-dry locks of another into her hair.
    She stumbled into Ronny who was no more alive than the things hanging around her, tearing the beetles from her hair and stumbling into the wall, her fingers brushing the numerous slack-jawed puppet heads and she screamed again. For their faces did not feel like thermoformed plastic or carved wood but like warm, living flesh.
    Gathering herself, trying to tell herself that she was not lost in the expressionistic tangles of a fever dream, she said, “Show me. Goddammit, show me.”
    Ronny paused before a door and backed slowly away into the shadows of the hallway. Strands of web broke against his face, drooping figures and doll anatomy swaying around him. He found a corner and faced into it like a child waiting for a dunce cap.
    The door.
    It was warped in its frame, the knob dirty and tarnished. Kitty did not know exactly what was behind it, yet she seemed to know very well. There was a hot panic in her belly slowly chewing up her insides, eating her from the inside out and she had all she could do not to scream.
    The door opened.
    There