Puppet Graveyard

16

The sane thing to do would have been to escape, if escape was even possible by that point.

But Kitty was not leaving.

Despite all the other horrors she had drunk deep of this night, Kitty could only see Gloria. What was left of her. What they had done to her. She would never know the torment Gloria had endured in her final hours and she did not want to know, but she was going to put things right.

Somehow, she had to.

She remembered what Eddie Bose had written:

…burn the McBanes out. Burn that house and let the fire destroy everything inside. It will be a cleansing and a welcome relief for Ronny McBane who has suffered for his sins again and again. A purging. But whatever you do, stay out of the attic. Don’t go up there like I did. Don’t make that fatal mistake.

The attic.

That was the key. That was the beating black heart of this nightmare and this is where she was going to go because this is where the puppeteer was that Bose had mentioned. That was where he must have gone that night that Ronny found him and brought him home. What was up there was the very thing he dared not speak of.

But Kitty had no weapons.

The .32 was empty.

She was going to go up there anyway.

Whatever the attic held, whatever noxious and cancerous spirit brooded in darkness up there like a fatal egg coming to term, she was going to it now. She would face it and she would not fear it. Ronny McBane and Piggy and, yes, even the horrid little Baby Doll were connected to the thing that waited above. Like mittens connected to sleeves by strings, like hands fused to wrists by bones, like souls knitted to flesh by ethereal filaments, they were but appendages of a greater, more colossal and unspeakable horror.

Find it. Run it to ground.

All she had for weapons was her anger, her rage… and her bare hands.

Kitty held her hands out before her, fingers splayed like the tines of divining rods, feeling for those threads and finding them. The puppeteer was near. Hiding and skulking, she could feel him or her or it. Sense their unease. Their fear.

Those drifting strands of webs were everywhere in the moonlight seeping in from high windows. Kitty reached out, knotting them in her fists like reigns and leads, pulling herself along. Following those strands and cords to where they might take her. They were guide-ropes in her hands, skeins of worn yarn leading back to a nightmare quilt that had been knitted so long ago. The quilt that was a puppeteer, a witch and a soul-eater, the sort of thing that suffocated children, a plague-blanket, a winding sheet forever adrift in search of bones and meat and biology.

Where? Where?

Kitty kept going, her eyes lit like green gemstones, a burning core of energy blazing in her belly. She felt the threads, traced them with her fingertips. They jumped and arced like sensitive nerve ganglia as she neared the brain itself. The threads were growing thick as tree roots in her hands now. They felt moist and fleshy and vital. And Kitty followed them, her own moon-struck shadow like a stalking cat moving along the facade of dirty brick and lathing showing through the rotted wallpaper of the McBane house.

The corridor angled to the right and the webs grew thicker here. Just ahead, a door opened momentarily and she saw something distorted, something patchwork, something hideous like a face woven from damp wicker staring out at her.

Then it disappeared and the door slammed shut.

I’ve got you now. You can’t hide.

The door itself was hanging by one hinge and she pushed it aside, tearing through webs strung tighter than cotton candy, clawing through the spun insulation of dead spiders and into the narrow stairwell itself.

She had not dropped the threads.

She still clutched them tightly and now they were agitated, leaping in her fingers like live high-tension wires, snapping and jumping, slithering like the tentacles of something that ate ships in misty, lost seas. Now she dug out her flashlight and exposed the inner viscera of the stairwell. But it was no stairwell as such with dusty joists and warped water-stained ceilings… it was a casket. The walls were made of quilted satin that was badly discolored and bleached, grayed and mildewed. Ropes and nets of spiderwebs dangled overhead, great winding plaits of them set with the mummified bodies of puppets and deadwood vent dolls. The stairs were covered in what seemed millions if not billions of dried insect carapaces heaped like barnacles on a ghost ship.

Kitty’s mouth was dry, her heart was pounding. She started up the steps, dead insects crunching beneath her boots like October leaves. The flashlight shook in her fist.

Keep going, you have to keep going.

She breathed in revulsion and exhaled resilience. Her heart was strong and her soul was rigid. But she was scared. The fear was thick and white, knotted in her belly, spreading out and coiling around her chest in thick bands. She could scarcely draw a breath. But this was to be expected, she knew, for fear and dread and irrational terror was the language of this house and the thing that brooded in the attic. She couldn’t give in to it. Those myriad shrunken, embalmed figures dangling in the webs… their sightless eyes watched her like the eyes in antique paintings in old farmhouses. Their driftwood and winter-dead limbs brushed against the top of her head. Their agonized mouths seemed to scream her name.

Overhead, dangling and swaying from the roof of the stairwell, there were limbs now. Not doll limbs, but dozens and dozens of blue and black corpse limbs… arms and legs, sometimes just hands and feet… all hanging from the webwork above like sausages in a butcher’s window. They were putrescent and bloated, shuddering with the action of pupa and larva within and speckled with millions of buzzing meatflies.

More games. Just games. Hallucinations. Images projected into your mind. Ignore them.

Kitty went up through them, all that cold, crawling beef brushing her face and head, cold fingers trailing across the nape of her neck. They were a forest and as she pushed through their marble masses, they began to swing and slap into each other, casting creeping and morbid shadows all around her. Feet that walked into space and great hands that clutched.

Then Kitty was beyond them and into the attic above which was spun and wreathed and roped together by cobwebs. It was the lair of a funnel web spider decorated with more puppet parts and doll heads which whispered to her. Like the ones downstairs, these were living disembodied things with wiggling fingers and mouths that made mewling, wet sounds.

Right away, the temperature dropped.

Kitty saw her breath and felt ice on her face. The threads in her hand were greasy and coiling, set with pink-mouthed suckers that tickled her palms. Yes, she had arrived. A numbness spread from her fingertips to her elbows and then subsided, leaving a maddening tingling just beneath her skin.

The webs moved around her, brushing her face and slithering over her back and climbing her legs and by the time she realized what was happening, they owned her. A webby mesh covered her face and she clawed it free just in time to see the haunter of the attic in all its multiform madness.

She screamed. Screamed like she had never screamed before, or, maybe had never allowed herself to. It came up from her guts and echoed out of her anguished soul with volume.

An abomination came down the network from its high roost.

It came to embrace her.

It was a carcass riven with worms, then a thousand spiders mating and then something like a man vomiting a green-flecked infant from his mouth that sprouted a dozen bulb-headed, malformed fetuses.

Kitty saw what looked like an immense, bloated fetal spider propelling itself towards her on a dozen wooden puppet legs, its underbelly hung with milk-swollen pink teats. It was hairless and cream-white, bulbous and distorted, great holes eaten through it in which vermiform parasites squirmed and coiled. Rising up from what might have been deemed the forward thorax was the upper body of a woman whose head was hung with draping cobweb locks, the face beneath set with bulging eyes of black glass and a suckering oval mouth. It was not one thing, but many things—animal flesh married to doll parts and human anatomy—stitched up into a common whole and the intricate suturing was like lacework spread out in loops and whorls.

Beyond screaming by that point, Kitty had dropped to her knees with absolutely no memory of doing so. Her heart was pounding so hard that it was like a drum beating at her temples. The level of blood in her body seemed to fall down into her feet and everything above that point went weak and tottering in the presence of the thing that was poised to press its blubbery white lips to her throat and suck away her life.

Oh God, oh dear God, not like this, I don’t want to die like this.

But she was going to die and she knew it. She was going to die shrieking away her mind as Gloria did and she was powerless now to stop it. This horror would pull her apart and hang her cooling remains in its web… if it didn’t decide to add them to its own heaving mass, that was. And the only possible compensation for any of it was that she knew, she knew what this thing was or, and better, who it was.

Dorian McBane.

This was the deranged apex witch that had started the entire ball rolling by abusing her children in the first place which led to the murder of Freddy and Molly which led to Ronny’s dementia and paranoia which led him to finding that awful notebook which led to the resurrection, more or less, of his brother and sister as corpse-puppets possessed of malignant minds from beyond time and space which led to them reanimating their wicked mother as this chimeric, grotesque monstrosity… which, essentially, was her true self externalized.

As that wailing, enraged face came to kiss her life away, Kitty saw that its body was shivering, rolling like jelly, dozens of blisters bulging from the flesh and popping to reveal baby doll faces which were grim caricatures of the children she had murdered. Pale, agonized faces, embryonic yet identifiable. The heads lashed from side to side, mouths opening with a strident mewling like the hungry cries of newborn rats.

With each generated head, the Dorian thing itself squealed with pain.

Up close, Kitty could see that while its face was bone-white and fleshy, it seemed to be composed of bloody filaments of tissue in constant flux, oozing and puffing out, deflating and reconfiguring itself in some vain attempt to be anything but what it was.

I’m sorry, Gloria. I fucked up. I tried, but I fucked up—

That’s when the cannon boomed.

The sound of it in the vault-like attic was so deafening that Kitty cried out and covered her ears.

Dorian’s face imploded like a can crushed in a fist, from jawline to forehead just a wriggling mass of bloody strings sinking into a craterous ruin. Wailing louder than ever, she scurried back up the web.

Kitty saw Danny Paul Regis standing there.

His tough demeanor was shaken, his face strained and his eyes delirious with fear. But he did not hesitate. He carried a twelve-gauge pump loaded with flechette rounds that were essentially razored bits of steel that pulverized their target on contact. He fired four rounds into Dorian and she literally exploded in a wailing mass of tissue and bone, trembling armature, hinges and swivels that filled the web and continued to move and shake.

He dragged Kitty down the stairs and into the corridor and that’s when Piggy attacked.