Puppet Graveyard

4

“I don’t have much time,” Ronny said when Kitty was brought in, the door shut behind her. “That was my last show and I have a late dinner date.”

“Sure he does,” Piggy said from his trunk by the vanity, the lid open and one arm thrown over the side like he was taking a bath in there. “Ronny’s got a date with his right hand. I keep telling him it’s not really sex if you’re by yourself, but he don’t listen.”

Kitty laughed.

Ronny McBane smiled thinly. “That’ll be enough from you, Piggy.”

Kitty sat down and explained briefly what she wanted while Ronny listened intently. He was a tall man, narrow and reedy, but handsome in a sort of undernourished way like certain rock stars that had been hitting the needle. His hands were large, the fingers fine and delicate. The hands of a magician… or a ventriloquist. He liked to express himself with them freely.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I can, Miss Seevers.”

“Call me Kitty.”

“Meooooowwww,” Piggy said. “Come here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty…”

Ronny went over to him, picking him up. “I’m afraid he’ll be impossible until you greet him properly.”

Laughing, Kitty went over and extended her hand to Piggy. She was amazed how good Ronny was. Piggy’s hand gripped her own. It was a cold grip, but oddly firm for a doll. Piggy bowed his head and kissed her fingers. When he was done, he made a big show of raising his eyebrows and opening and closing his mouth, making smacking sounds. “You have fish for dinner or did you just have a little itch?”

“Oh!” Kitty gasped. “You’re terrible.”

“Ain’t it the truth,” Piggy said. “Ain’t it just the truth.”

Ronny set Piggy back in the box and they got down to business.

“Well, Kitty,” he said, that thin smile touching his lips again. “Where should I begin? I have no formal training in theater or ventriloquism. I’m entirely self-taught. I made Piggy myself and took some years doing it…”

Kitty listened while he prattled on, making a show of keeping notes, nodding with enthusiasm at the right moments. But the notes were mostly doodling and what she was really doing was studying Ronny McBane’s pale, dour face which was so tense and rigid it looked like it had been airbrushed onto the skull beneath. As he talked, the corners of his lips attempted that smile he emoted so well on stage. And it worked out there, but up close like this it was an upturned frown, rubbery and artificial. It never touched his eyes and their haunted depths.

It was hard to say who was more wooden… Ronny or Piggy.

“What made you get into the business?” Kitty asked.

Ronny McBane opened his mouth, but it was the dummy that did the talking. “Well, look at him, baby. He’s a fucking wreck. A nervous wreck… aren’t you a nervous wreck, Ronny? Afraid of his own shadow. If it wasn’t for me holding his dick, he’d piss down his own leg.”

Ronny tittered uneasily. The grin he offered Kitty was like an ax wound on a skull. “You keep quiet, Piggy.”

Kitty swallowed dryly, felt something fluttering in her belly. “How… how can you make him talk like that? I mean, you’re over here… but I saw his mouth move.”

“Come a little closer, sweet meat, and I’ll show you how it really moves,” Piggy said.

The sexual innuendo went right over Kitty’s head. What she was seeing… it could not be. She looked from Ronny McBane to his dummy, back again. It was a trick and she knew it was a trick, yet a gnawing chill expanded in her chest. Piggy sat there in his trunk, grinning like a death’s-head, lewd and unpleasant. He had teeth, she saw, long yellow teeth, crooked and decayed.

Since when did dummies have teeth?

“How…” Kitty mumbled.

“A trick of the trade,” Ronny said, looking almost frightened himself. But it was really hard to tell. There was so much barely-concealed torment slathered onto that face, maybe it was all her imagination.

She decided it was.

“You really had me going for a moment there,” she said to Ronny, not Piggy, trying to sound relieved, but failing.

“You want to get going?” Piggy said. “Come over here, I’ll get you going.”

“Okay, Piggy,” Ronny said. “We’ve had our laugh.”

Kitty looked from her notes to Ronny’s face, avoiding his eyes which were like windows looking into a crypt. “Is… um… is it generally just the two of you? Do you ever have another dummy involved in the act?”

“She’s talking threesome here, Ronny.”

Kitty feigned a laugh. “Oh, stop it. I’m serious.”

“So am I, lady,” the dummy said. “So am I.”

“Never. No other dummies. Just the two of us,” Ronny said.

“How about assistants? I heard you had an assistant.”

Ronny’s eyes went dark and stormy. “Once, yes. We had a… a woman working with us, but it didn’t pan out.”

Kitty could feel Piggy’s eyes burning holes into her back, but of course they weren’t really eyes, just marbles. Dead, inert marbles. Still… she could feel them, that vile gaze creeping over her skin. She turned and looked and, yes, Piggy was staring, mouth sprung open. But he was not moving.

Not at all.

When she looked back at Ronny, however, the dummy started talking again: “Maybe you ought to interview me, baby. Women make Ronny nervous, but I like ’em just fine… if you know what I mean.”

Kitty laughed, not finding any of it funny now. She supposed all ventriloquists had unusual relationships with their dummies, used them to say things they were incapable of. But enough was enough. “Okay already, Mr. McBane. Why don’t we let Piggy rest, put him in his box or something.”

And again, that strident, unnerving voice from behind her: “Only box I want to get into is yours, baby.”

“Okay. C’mon, now. This is all getting a little crude.”

“The lady is right, Piggy.”

Piggy cackled low and dusty, but kept his mouth shut.

And that was good, because the very sound of his voice was beginning to make Kitty’s flesh crawl in slow waves. Maybe it was her, but the room seemed suddenly too close, too claustrophobic, too something. Like a coffin, narrow and moldering and airless.

“I can’t help thinking I’ve met you before,” Ronny said to her, fixing her with those eyes, that twisted mind behind them that could make dummies move from across the room.

“You’ve probably seen me in the audience,” she said. “I rarely miss a show. Particularly since this assignment began.”

“Yes, that must be it.”

Piggy started laughing. “Oh, I don’t think that’s it at all. She looks like someone, Ronny… haven’t you guessed who?”

Kitty slapped her notebook shut.

She had to get out of there, out of that damn confining room. It was like being trapped in the mind of a lunatic.

“Well, I want to thank you,” she said. “Ha, both of you.”

“Oh, the pleasure’s been ours.”

“It has,” Piggy said. “And don’t look so grim, chippy. You’ll be seeing us again, maybe sooner than you think. Keep your window open, I might come into your bedroom some night. Then I’ll show you some real tricks. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

But Kitty was certain she would not have liked that at all.

There was something positively obscene about that dummy. The idea of it creeping into her room by moonlight was enough to make her teeth chatter.

She let herself out, Ronny staring intently at the floor.

After the door closed, she could hear the dummy laughing in there.