Free Puppet Graveyard by Tim Curran Page B

rotten tooth. It was too tall and too narrow, a leaning oblong rectangle cut from night. There were windows up there, shadow-riven cavities that refused moonlight and starlight and anything bright or revealing. A house of mystery and dank secret and no light dared reveal the dark glory of this high standing tomb.
    In one pocket of her leather jacket was a flashlight, in the other her little .32 automatic. She knew how to use it. She’d been through a defensive firearms course and she had complete conviction that she would not hesitate pulling the trigger if it came down to it.
    The door finally opened a crack…and just when Kitty was thinking—gratefully—that maybe nobody was home. The door opened an inch, two, no more than that and she saw a sliver of Ronny McBane’s face, one wide, unblinking eye.
    “You,” he said, as if she were some ancestor that had wandered from its crypt to stand threadbare at the threshold. “What do you want here…you can’t be here. Just go away…you don’t belong here.”
    And she knew that, but she said, “We need to talk, Mr. McBane. It won’t take long.”
    He looked behind him. “Just go away…please just go away.”
    “I’m not going anywhere,” she said, her steadfast resolve still holding even though her guts were beginning to feel warm and soft.
    “Go away!” he snarled in a whisper. “Just go away from here!”
    And then there was another voice in there, something splintered and creaking and eldritch: Piggy. “Let the lady in, Ronny. She’s come for something, can’t you see that? Don’t be disrespectful now. Do you hear me, Ronny? Be a good boy.”
    “No, please…”
    “Let her in, Ronny. She’s come for something and we must see that she gets it.”
    And for one unstrung moment, Kitty thought that the voice had something of a feminine caliber to it. The way a mother might speak to her son.
    The door opened and she walked in, right past Ronny who glared at her with unmasked hatred. But did he hate her or did he just hate the indomitable will of modern women in general? Because sometimes, such qualities could be an attribute, but other times the keys to doors best left bolted.
    That’s not hate, Kitty thought then. Can’t you see it around his eyes? In the pale line of his mouth? That’s fear. Ronny is terrified. And not for himself, but for you.
    Inside, it was chill and damp as she imagined such houses must be. For regardless of the romanticism of such places, the real truth was that they were drafty and dank. Kitty could almost smell time here, the slow parade of decades the old house had seen. She could smell, too, the wormy woodwork and mildewed wainscoting, the dirty carpets and yellowed wallpaper. But there was something else…a brooding, pervasive sense of contamination, of spiritual rottenness. There was no getting around it and no denying it. What this house was and what it contained made her flesh creep.
    But forward-thinking and liberated as she was, Kitty kept moving through the foyer and into a high-windowed sitting room.
    Piggy was in there.
    His trunk was leaning up against the wall, lid open, like a mummy sarcophagus. He himself was sitting on the end of a flowery, dirty green sofa that might have been a fashion statement in its day, but was now just an eyesore. He was dressed in the same velvet cranberry suit coat as the last time she’d seen him, spidery hands curled in his lap like the claws of a raptor.
    Kitty looked from him to the night pressing up against the windows. “Hello, Piggy,” she said, trying to sound amused.
    He said nothing, playing the perfect inanimate little dummy.
    She smiled thinly. “I said, hello , Piggy.”
    She had only seen him beneath the stage lights and the dim dressing room bulbs, never in full electric light before. His face was painted very white, like that of a circus clown. The eyes were huge and abnormally round, shining like newly-minted nickels. Kitty could see where his jaw was hinged, how the