It had been so long since the puppet maker’s slow descent from master of his craft to . . . to whatever it was he had become. Ancient, neglected, forgotten, a shell of his former self. A relic of a bygone age where creativity had value, and skill was paramount. The puppet maker had forgotten far more about the art of creation than most had ever known, the slow leak of memories over the course of years. Some days, he no longer recognized himself in the mirror.
No one came for the puppet maker. No one cared for him. The only children he had ever bore hung on the wall of his basement, those ugly vessels for his love, with their large round heads and wrongly numbered wooden arms. He had sacrificed it all for them, sacrificed so he might bring wonderment to a public whose eyes grew increasingly duller the longer he performed for them, and at the end when no one seemed to notice or care about the art of bringing life to the lifeless, those bedeviled creations on his workshop wall did nothing but stare back at him unblinkingly, waiting for him to pass on. Unnoticed and alone.
At first, he did not understand the letter from Dr. Toth. He knew the man’s name, albeit distantly, but could not recall the context. Had they met, he wondered, in some past life, when the puppet maker was greeted warmly by wealthy and poor alike? Time slipped so easily from his recall, faster than the pills could staunch. And the note . . . the words were a jumble, their wavy scrawl like that of a palsied but familiar hand. He removed his glasses in hopes things would become clearer, but the words merely danced on the page, moving in and out of focus—sometimes disappearing altogether like phantoms. Even the paper they were written upon was strange, folded and creased so often it felt like linen. When through sheer force of will the puppet maker managed to fix the words in place, he did not like what emerged.
Mr. L——:
I have need of your services. Please come at once.
—Toth
The puppet maker reread the note, then discarded it in his wastepaper basket. There was nothing for which he could be needed. The only thing he had ever been capable of required use of his hands, his crooked old hands . . . and they could not be trusted to obey. The doctor did not have wealth enough to stymie the encroaching years that freely robbed the puppet maker of everything, left him forgotten and forgetting. Nonetheless, he later found himself in his workshop, unaware of how he arrived there, staring at the equipment concealed beneath dust-covered sheets. Had he descended the stairs? And what had the marionettes hanging on the wall witnessed? For they
had
witnessed something. It was clear from the way their hollow black eyes stared.
Perhaps days or weeks or months passed before a relentless pounding upon his door startled the puppet maker. Awoken from a medicinal haze, he shuffled to the door on a leg full of pins and peered through the window at the long black towncar idling on the street. Its driver had already reached the door of the house, and something about the man’s disquieting features filled the puppet maker with the coldest apprehension. Something that prevented him from opening the door.
“What do you want?”
He spoke loud enough that his words would penetrate the glass. The driver did not respond. His wide eyes merely locked on those of the puppet maker, and his mouth remained twisted in some unnerving attempt at a grin.
“You have the wrong house,” the puppet maker offered, then waited to see what the driver would do. A thick arm was lifted from behind the glass. It bore a square hand that was then laid flat against the window. The driver leaned his wide mercurial face in, the sort of face that looked as though it had been carved in caricature, and the puppet maker felt compelled to retreat, unsure if he were still lodged in a dream. Then that face pulled away, and the driver bent down and out of sight. An envelope slid under the door.
Filthy, crumpled, covered in large thumbprints, the stationery was unmistakable. With trembling hands the puppet maker withdrew the folded letter—wrapped delicately around a small stack of similar textured bills. The driver’s uninterested smile remained ineffable.
Mr. L——:
Please do not delay. The time is nigh. I have sent my driver to fetch you. The included honorarium is only the beginning.
—Toth
The puppet maker looked up from the soft stationery, startled to find the driver was now inside. He overwhelmed the confines of the entranceway, and the afternoon light was warped by the shadow he cast. The puppet maker shrank from his abominable size and nodded in defeated acquiescence. He then reached for his rough, worn cane.
He rode the distance in the backseat of Toth’s towncar, across paved streets devoid of tree or bush. Yet even that pavement was not pristine. It was as cracked and crumbling as the skin around the corners of his eyes, and just like those eyes the streets failed him. They no longer led where his memories expected, Toth’s driver heading in the opposite direction of where he ought, speeding down avenues the puppet maker had never before seen. The old man sat with his cane tightly clenched in his aching hands, worried that he had erred greatly entering the cab. He asked repeatedly if they were indeed travelling the right way, but the disturbing driver remained mute, following a set of unknown bearings. There were few souls along the avenues of the small town, each one more hideous than the last. The puppet maker had no choice but to avert his eyes and trust the driver to take him where he needed to go. Soon the mists at the outskirts grew thicker, and any landmark that might betray their location or provide some anchor within the chaos was swallowed whole.
When Dr. Toth’s home appeared, it did so suddenly, emerging fully revealed in the swirling vapor. It was not as large as might have been expected, and was closer to dilapidation than suspicion would allow, but the outer walls, where black mould had not yet crept across them, were touched with unusual ornate carvings not found on other homes. Certainly not upon the puppet maker’s. At least, as far as he could recall, but as he twisted the handle of his cane he knew he might be mistaken. It had been so long since he viewed his house from beyond its four walls he could be absolutely sure of nothing. Nothing beyond his own encroaching debilitation.
The driver turned and looked at the puppet maker once the towncar had reached its stop outside the formerly opulent house. Over one of the thick forearms stretched across the back of the front seat the puppet maker could barely see the driver’s eyes, but what was there seemed momentarily unmoored, two reptiles struggling to emerge from their ovarian prison. The driver’s silence and the dismaying effect of his visage was enough to send the puppet maker scurrying. With some trepidation, and under the driver’s flickering eyelids, he stepped from the car and into cloudy freedom. Before him loomed Dr. Toth’s house, ensnaring him with invisible strings as though he were one of his own misshapen creations, while around his ankles formless white swirled. White, then nothing else.
He awoke standing at the foot of a once-great staircase, his recollections rushing away like the surf from the shore. But for an instant he glimpsed another place, one vastly at odds with where he found himself. And yet when he tried to chase the memory through the murk of waking it slipped from his grasp again and again before speeding away, leaving him adrift without tether.
The house around him was peculiar, but its design called forth something from the void of his memory, some arcane thought that barely surfaced like a leviathan beneath arctic ice. The place looked uninhabited: its shelves askew and strung with cobwebs; curiously familiar furniture scuffed and scratched; a thin layer of dust covering the pockmarked stairs. The air too had a distinct odor of neglect, and the puppet maker wondered idly if his house would not appear the same to an outsider, if his basement workshop would not emit the same ancient fetor. It had been his own downfall, his own neglect that placed him there, a victim to the whims of chance. Why could it not occur in kind for one such as Dr. Toth?
The puppet maker steeled himself for the ascent of that wide staircase, holding the grip of his cane tightly in his arthritic grasp. He climbed upward, each successive step a triumph, until he arrived at the floor above. There, on the landing, he rested, teetering cane propping him, and swallowed another dose of pills. His vision blurred, images flashed through his mind of large eyes and bulbous heads, and when he finally caught his breath and opened his lids he was amazed at the sight. The main floor at least had appeared to be simply in a state of long disuse; the second was in a state of destruction. Walls revealed sections of once-hidden wooden slats; floorboards peeled upward, stained dark by time and heat. Each step he took let forth a creak that seemed to emanate from deep within the structure, and he knew it was impossible the good doctor was unaware of his arrival. Nevertheless, the puppet maker trod cautiously.
A large door with an intricate design stenciled on its face gated the room at the end of the hall. The puppet maker approached it, took hold of the handle, and pulled, but the weight proved too much for his suffering decrepit arms.
“Hello?” he called out, his throat hoarse and dried from his medication. It had been so long since he heard his own voice he was momentarily startled; it did not sound as he remembered. “Hello? Dr. Toth? It is T——, the puppet maker. Your driver has brought me. Are you inside? I cannot open the door.”
He waited for the doctor’s response. Part of him hoped there would be none. After a moment passed, he rapped gently. His knuckles buzzed painfully afterward.
What first seemed a creak emitted from beyond the door was slowly transformed into a string of near-words, and the puppet maker wondered if the doctor might be ill. A sibilant voice crackled like static from some far-off distance.
“. . . in no condition,” the voice continued, whatever spoken before lost to indecipherability. The puppet maker repositioned himself on his cane, hoping to glean more of what the doctor was saying. “Ask Ivan.”
“Who is Ivan?”
“Good,” the doctor followed. “I cannot see you. I cannot leave this bed. I have a job for you that you will be unable to resist.”
“But,” the puppet maker stammered, “I cannot. I’m too old, I’m too—”
The doctor’s rasping voice interrupted. “It is good to meet at last.” And with that, there was a soft click, as though a light switch in the room had been thrown, and when next the puppet maker opened his eyelids he was standing alone in his basement workshop, disoriented and stripped to his shirtsleeves.
His aching hands were covered in sweat, blood, and sawdust. The dropsheets that once covered the equipment had been thrown aside, blocks of wood and lengths of wire scattered across every surface. There was a palpable tension, as though someone had been there with him until moments before, someone the puppet maker could no longer recall. He looked at what lay before him—pieces of a disassembled body, a set of glassy eyes wet and anxious—and could barely control his hands enough to drape a sheet over that irregular debris from his nightmares.
And it was to his nightmares that the thing returned in the night. He did not sleep more than a handful of minutes; instead, he spun uncontrollably, desperate to rid himself of the image. But it would not go. Bulbous heads, spinning eyes, bodies that hung uselessly and powerlessly. The largest wooden cross floating in the sky. But even with his arms held high in supplication the wires from the wooden cross would not reach him.
He awoke in the darkest of night, his head throbbing with images, ideas coursing through his thin blood like fire. His body burned, and it forced him from the bed and onto his skeletal legs. He hobbled to his writing desk and scrambled in the swollen drawers for paper and pencil. At the desk he drew that monstrous thing left in his workshop, and kept drawing until the pencil was a nub and he was once again asleep. And then he drew for no small time afterward.
Something was happening to him. Something strange and confusing and frightening—and yet, invigorating. He forgot to bathe, to eat, to do anything more than swallow his pills and dwell upon the unfinished creation lying on the slab of his basement workshop. Slowly, piece by piece, it advanced toward completion, and as it did he felt something within him start to shift and grow, a withered rose taking on life. His tools came alive in his hands, those extensions of his body that had for so many years been unavailable, cleaved and left like rotting limbs. They were a conduit for the divine, tasked with bringing it forth onto the worldly plane. The voices he had once heard in his youth, those that guided him from obscurity to master of his art and beyond had grown so faint over the intervening years that they had become nothing more than an airless whisper in the recesses of his mind. With tools in hand, with his craft laid before him, those voices intensified.
Day after day he worked on the marionette beneath the sheet, pouring everything he had into its construction. It was drawn from the hallucinogenea of his nightmares, from the dark images swimming within him—a twisted face with mouths folded in on themselves, bulbous mismatched eyes; limbs crooked and thin. It was a black reflection of reality, a figure that could not exist but in the form of a simulacrum, built by saw and plane and vise, by torch and screwdriver and hammer, possessed with everything the puppet maker could grant save life. Life would have to come to the empty shell by medium of wire, hook, and wooden cross.
And yet, its lifelessness was its beauty, its emptiness its perfection. He touched the face of the thing he had crafted until his hands bled, and felt radiating from it the buzz of potential. It invigorated him, as though it were draining the years of his life away, restoring memories long thought forgotten, and for a brief moment his creation endowed him with enervating bliss. But also despair. For his reward for shaping perfection was to sacrifice it to the idle rich hands of the mysterious Dr. Toth.