Puppet Graveyard

10

Kitty swallowed two Valiums just before eleven that night and washed them down with two double vodkas. Her head wasn’t right and she wondered if it ever would be again. She had come to Chicago to fill a hole in her life, to possibly get some closure on Gloria if that was even possible, but now that hole was bigger than ever before, so big she was afraid now that she would fall into it and never get out. Ronny M. and Piggy. Ronny M. and Piggy. The words kept running through her mind until she thought she would scream. You honestly don’t believe for a moment that Ronny’s dummy is his dead brother, now do you? All that witchcraft business is insane and you know it. No, she didn’t really believe any of that, but what she did believe in was Ronny’s madness which was so complete he might decide to name his dummy after his dead brother and commit crimes in its name.

But what about what Bascomb said?

Could some evil intelligence make a vent dummy that was kept in a coffin filled with black, wormy grave earth sit up and smile, start talking to you in the tormented voices of your mother and father—

No, no, no. That was Bascomb supposedly quoting Eddie Bose who wasn’t in his right mind anyway. She’d already more or less dismissed Bascomb as a nutjob. None of those things he said could be true. The dummy killing Bose, then killing his dog, then murdering his wife. Fantasy. It was only when Kitty linked it with what Regis had been hinting at and the possible spontaneous combustion at the Bamboo Club that she began to get the cold sweats.

You said there was a common thread to all this. You said it right from the first. Are you prepared to follow that thread even if it means looking at something that might tear your mind out like moist roots from soil? Are you willing to do that and accept the fact that even if you walk away from all this you can never be the same person again? Bascomb told you to walk away. Maybe it’s time to do that.

But no.

That would mean walking away from Gloria and her love for her sister could not allow that. If there was a thread, she would follow it. And when she reached the end, she would snip it.

Once again, as the alcohol and booze began to make her limbs slow and her mind slower, she laid all the evidence out and tried to make sense of it. This is what she came up with: Bascomb was crazy, Danny Paul Regis was spouting hearsay and local gossip, and Ronny McBane was very possibly a dangerous lunatic that had killed Gloria.

Kitty thought these things, arranging them carefully, sorting them out in her mind, smoothing out the rough edges. And it was as she did so that a fear of her own began to creep in that she was utterly wrong. That she was over-rationalizing things and that, in this case, could prove to be very dangerous.

All her life she had not shrunk from anything.

She faced all problems and challenges head on. Even though she knew that this was the point in a horror movie where you hoped the heroine would have sense enough to leave well enough alone, she wasn’t about to do that. She didn’t believe in witchcraft or ghosts, but there was definitely a common thread here as she had thought all along. Rational thinking aside, when you laid it all out end to end starting with what happened in Ronny McBane’s childhood and the unnatural dummy with the most disturbing of names and ending with the fire at the Bamboo Lounge, then the evidence was more than a little damning. Possibly circumstantial, but it was there. And the only way to prove or disprove it was to follow the thread to its source.

This is what Kitty thought as she drifted off on that night of revelations.