Free Puppet Graveyard by Tim Curran

it, too, and I don’t blame you. Then again, I don’t care and why should I? You haven’t seen what I’ve seen and you haven’t felt what I’ve felt. Your mind, your soul has not been defiled by these malignant intellects. My number is almost up and I welcome death, it’s better than what I live with day in and day out, this madness. You are not haunted by a dummy possessed of infinite diabolic darkness. You do not wake to find that it has chewed the flesh from your numb leg. You do not feel it biting you in the dead of night. You do not see that grotesque, macabre corpse-puppet drifting outside your fourth story window, tapping at the glass, scratching it with those bony fingers. You don’t have to hear it creeping beneath your bed or calling your name from the closet. And you don’t know what it’s like when it comes, not alone, but with another…a cackling, squeaking pestilent thing with sharp teeth and a lurid baby-doll face.
    I hope you never have to find out.
    But if you do, if you are named as I have been named by that horrible dummy, then do what I should have done right from the first: 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 letter ended there.
    It was enough. What more did Kitty really need now for her charter membership in the Lunatics of the Month Club? It was all there. A perfect and oddly seamless madness like a glittering garment tossed aside, just waiting to be picked up and worn.
    The temptation to feel it against her skin, leeching her mind of life and light, was almost too much. And still, that slightly mangled and mutilated voice called reason was calling out to her from some dung heap at the bottom of her psyche and it was telling her to go slow, for other than a few very impressive parlor tricks with a ventriloquist dummy, she had utterly no evidence to go on here. Nothing but hearsay, wild tales, unconfirmed facts gathered by a somewhat shady private detective, and a letter from a madman.
    And was that enough?
    I have one more thing, she thought in her desperation. I have a dream I had last night that I feel was not a dream at all but something else. Maybe not an actual physical rape, but definitely a psychic and spiritual rape. I have that. And I can’t dismiss it or get past it.
    Still, she wasn’t 100% convinced, but she was so close to that yawning ebon gulf of overwhelming, irresistible superstitious acceptance that a good breeze could have knocked her ass over the brink.
    I think, she thought then, I think that, yes, I believe. It’s crazy, but I really do.
    And maybe it wasn’t the evidence she had, but something indefinable. Some esoteric, almost mystical sense of acceptance. Some race memory perhaps that recognized the signs, the smells, the sights, and recalled them, told her in no uncertain terms that, yes, this is real, and you’d better watch your step, girl, for here be dragons. Here be things you cannot fathom nor hold in the palm of your hand, but things that can hold you, crush you, kill you quicker than a knife across the jugular. For there was certainly an undercurrent here and whatever it was, it had already made up her mind for her.
    Ronny McBane was not just a ventriloquist.
    And Piggy? He was a dummy like an Egyptian mummy is a hand-puppet.
    So, with all that in mind, there really was no way to avoid what came next.

13
     
     
     
     
     
     
    She had barely finished reading the letter and absorbing all it had to say when her cell phone rang. She answered it, almost hesitantly, grateful to be able to talk with another sane, reasonable person, but terrified that she might hear the sound of teeth chattering when she answered it.
    But it was Danny Paul Regis. “Charlie Bascomb’s dead,” he