The Grimscribe's Puppets (15 page)

~*~

The boy scared him.

~*~

The barn was old. It had been on the property for decades. The house, Peter’s boyhood home, had been rebuilt twice during that time. Peter liked the barn. Katy didn’t.

He stood in a far corner of the barn, smoking. Peter came out here to think. He came out here
not
to think. Katy would be displeased if she caught him smoking. So he kept watch on the barn door. She’d made him quit when they brought Timothy home. She didn’t want him to be a bad influence. Peter smirked. Funny, he thought, Katy hadn’t once mentioned Peter’s health.

Peter finished the cigarette, stamped it out and pushed it into the corner. He closed the magazine, put it back in the box, covered it and shoved it behind a hay bale. Then he went back to the house.

Inside, Timothy was at the kitchen table, colouring in his Winnie-the-Pooh book. He loved Winnie-the-Pooh, especially Eeyore. Timothy reminded Peter of Eeyore; lonely, quiet, and sad.

Katy was at the counter chopping carrots, onion, and celery. Neither she nor Timothy had so much as glanced at Peter when he entered the kitchen.

“Where were you?” Katy said, not looking up.

“In the barn.”

Katy stopped chopping. She looked up. “You’re always out there, Peter. What do you get up to in that old place?”

Again, like recent days, guilt pulled at him. “Not much,” he said. “Just checking for loose or rotted boards.” He didn’t know why he couldn’t just tell her that he hadn’t quit smoking. Maybe he didn’t want to disappoint her any more than he already had. Didn’t want her to see him as a failure.

You are a failure
, part of him whispered.

Suddenly, Peter felt on the verge of tears.

“Are you okay,” Katy asked. “You don’t look well.”

Peter swallowed hard, pushed the emotion down. “F-Fine,” he said. “Perfectly.” He tried to lighten the mood. “How’s Timothy?” he said, and went to tousle the boy’s hair, but Timothy shrank away from him.

Katy and Timothy were staring at him. Silent. Peter waved meekly. “I’ll just go wash up,” he said. Then he turned and left.

~*~

Pieces of blackness stirred in him, heavy. He’d been in pain, suffering, for a very long time. Ever since...

~*~

The boy scared him. He collected things in jars, the boy did. Dead things. Bugs, snakes, frogs. Timothy would take a large Mason jar and go out to the marshy area behind the house, hunting. When Peter saw the cricket in that first jar, he’d smiled, remembering his own youth. Days later the cricket was dead. Timothy hadn’t punched any holes in the jar lid. So he’d shown him what to do; put some breathing holes in the lid, added grass and ants for food. Later, Peter noticed another jar on Timothy’s dresser. It contained a dead Monarch butterfly, nothing else. There’d been no attempt to add food or breathing holes. “Timothy,” he’d said. “You can’t do that. You can’t kill things.”

Timothy had stared at him, unblinking. “Why not?” he’d said.

He had no good answer for that.

~*~

Children, Peter realized. That was the cause of their great strain.

Katy had always wanted children. When they had first started dating, Katy made those feelings known. They’d be out and she’d point to couples with a child, and remark about how happy they seemed. To Peter, those couples didn’t appear any happier than any other people. They seemed regular, shuffling about, trying to get by, trying to make sense of things.

Before Katy, Peter hadn’t really thought about children. When she broached the subject, he was noncommittal. But she pressed him, and though she never quite came out and said it, he felt she was making him choose. So he acquiesced, said he’d be happy to have children with her.

But they couldn’t. Oh, they tried. He liked trying. They tried every conceivable method. To no avail.

So they were tested. And Peter was found lacking. Low sperm count. Peter remembered the disappointment registering on Katy’s face: anger, sadness, regret, defeat. He was a failure.

Katy wouldn’t be dissuaded, though. She wanted a child. So she needed sperm. But the thought of another man’s sperm inside of Katy was too much for Peter. He knew it was irrational, but he couldn’t get past it. All he could picture was another man fucking his wife, fucking her hard, and Katy enjoying it. He was being childish and petty but he couldn’t reconcile those emotions.

They’d fought over it. Their first real fight. “We’ll get a dog,” Peter said. And Katy had laughed unpleasantly. “A dog? I want a child, a girl or boy to share our life, not a pet. I don’t want something disposable. I want something permanent.”

Nothing was permanent, Peter knew.

He surprised himself, though, by saying “We’ll adopt. We will. It’ll be good. We’ll give someone a chance. A new life.”

Katy brightened immediately, and warmed to the idea. She wiped tears from her eyes. “Really?” she said. “You sure?”

In fact, he wasn’t sure, but he said it anyway. “Yes.”

~*~

The boy scared him. He couldn’t exactly explain why. Maybe it was the way he would stare at Peter, blank-faced and unblinking. Maybe it was the sudden short bursts of nervous laughter that would erupt from Timothy’s mouth, and then die just as quickly, as if he’d been switched off. As if he wasn’t a real boy but some automaton.

Peter stepped into the room, stared at the boy. Timothy was on his bed, a Winnie-the-Pooh book spread open on his lap. Peter glanced at the rows of killing jars on the boy’s dresser. There was a large, fat bullfrog squeezed into one, its throat puffing in and out, eyes unblinking. It’d be dead in a few days, eyes still unblinking.

He couldn’t bring himself to sit with the boy and read to him, play with him.

Or be a proper father
, he thought.

Timothy looked up at him, and Peter shuddered and turned away.

Pain pressed at Peter’s temples. He hadn’t been sleeping well. No pornographic fantasy playing in his head. The hiss of the monitor beside his bed kept him awake at night. Beneath the constant static he thought he heard something else, the terrible childish chortle he’d heard in the hallway. A cruel, mocking laughter that Peter knew all too well.

Peter left the room and went down the hallway to the bathroom for some Advil. From the tiny window he could see their property. The field, the barn. Peter had many memories of the barn. Memories, he knew, were dangerous things.

The pain in his head pulsed. Peter closed his eyes seeking comfort in darkness, but black thoughts and distant memories churned in his head like thick mud. Bright pain cascaded across his dark vision. He smelled hay and sawdust; rotted wood and dry earth.

No!

Then a noise that made his ears prickle. Quiet laughter.

Come back.

Peter sensed something behind him. He opened his eyes and turned around. The boy was in the doorway, laughing mirthlessly. Peter shivered. His stomach flared in agony. He doubled over, retched, spewed dark brown liquid onto the floor. When Peter stood upright, the doorway was empty.

He stumbled to the sink cabinet, dry-swallowed a handful of Advil, and then staggered to his bedroom. Peter shut the door and closed the blinds. His body convulsed. His stomach heaved and more dark liquid spilled onto the floor. Then something
foreign
passed through him, a hard knot, and he retched again and a marble-sized object landed on the wet floor, dark and glistening, a piece of blackness.

The thrum of dark laughter made him reel. Peter covered his ears with trembling hands. His stomach churned, and his head buzzed, and the dark sky roiled, forming its greater blackness.

~*~

Peter was at that strange cusp, that dream-state between sleep and wakefulness, that grey purgatory.

He rolled over, felt Katy’s body beside him, warm and lithe and smooth. He pressed into her, gentle, but insistent, almost desperate. She pushed back against him, the curve of her ass riding up against his cock. Peter moaned. Maybe he was dreaming. Maybe Katy was dreaming, too. He wondered what she dreamt, what she fantasized. Did she dream of fucking someone else? Two guys at once? A girl?

These fantasies spurred Peter. He pressed in tight against Katy, cupped a breast. She bucked against him. Someone moaned. The monitor crackled.

Peter pulled his pyjamas down, then yanked Katy’s underwear aside and pushed into her. He grabbed her breast again, then held on, squeezed.

“Oh,” Katy moaned.

Peter thrust and squeezed.

“Ow.”

He felt moisture, pulled his hand away.

“Fuck,” Katy said.

Peter struggled out of that grey purgatory and came awake. “W-What?” he said.

Katy sat up, turned on the lamp. Her white-cotton top clung to her breast, where a damp spot could be seen.

She lifted her top, examined the breast. Peter looked at his wet hand, wiped it on the bed sheet.

“What’s wrong?” he said. “What is it?”

Katy looked at him quizzically. “It’s milk,” she said. “Breast milk.”

~*~

The barn was quiet, secluded. Always had been. As a young boy, it was where he sought sanctuary, where he went to indulge in boyhood antics.

Quiet now. No hissing monitor. No laughing boy. No angry wife.

“You bastard,” she’d hissed. “I’m not pregnant.” She’d stared at him with something like pity. “I haven’t been sleeping around.” Then she’d cried, really cried, great sobs shaking her. Peter had just stood and stared. There’d been a time when he would have went to her, put his arms around her, comforted her.

Their doctor admitted that, yes, it was a bit unusual for Katy to be lactating, but he’d heard of similar cases developing when a young child enters a household. The body reacts instinctively to nurture the new arrival.

Peter was now relegated to the living-room couch. At least he didn’t have to listen to that black noise crackling from the baby monitor. Most days in the house he felt isolated and alone, like a specimen in Timothy’s killing jars gasping for breath.

He took a long lost draw on his cigarette, then stamped it out and hid the butt in the corner with the others. He rooted around behind a bale of old hay and pulled out the plastic milk crate covered in burlap. He drew a magazine from the crate:
Bitches in Bondage
. On the cover was a pale redheaded woman of indeterminate age, dressed in latex, on her knees, mouth gagged, and hands bound. Her eyes were wide and staring. At him. Peter thought, perhaps, that behind the gag she was smiling. At him.

Peter stepped behind the bale with the magazine. He loosened his belt, let his pants drop. He flipped through the pages. There was a buzzing in his head. Something was rising up within him, a black force that was great and alien and transcendent, churning. It would tear him apart.

~*~

The boy scared him.

~*~

Night. Peter shifted on the couch. He thought he’d heard something; the padding of tiny feet creaking across the upstairs hallway. And something else, as if from a dream or some distant recollection. A moan, laughter, echoing through the house and through his memories.

Peter stirred, sat up, listened. He thought he could hear the static and the hiss of the monitor, black interference, like the buzzing in his head. He stood. His body was taut and vibrating, like a plucked guitar string.

Another slow creak from upstairs. The boy was up and wandering again.

He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and headed for the stairs. It was dark-dark, like patches of blackness placed over other pieces of blackness. Somewhere a child was laughing quietly, he was sure of it. Peter crept slowly up the stairs.

Peter tottered forward. Black static filled the air. His head thrummed. He put a hand on the door, pushed it open, peered in.

Katy was on the bed, glassy-eyed, a small smile creasing her face, her shirt pushed up, exposing her breasts. The boy was sitting cradled in her lap, his mouth affixed to a breast, sucking. Katy moaned.

Peter quivered, let out a strangled sob.

Katy looked up, cheerlessly, stared at Peter unblinking. The boy suckled greedily.

“K-Katy,” Peter croaked. He felt apart from reality, but rooted to the floor.

“It’s okay,” Katy said. “It’s natural.”

“But ... no ....”

“He’s just a little boy,” Katy continued. “My little boy.”

Peter’s stomach knotted. He wanted to rush over, pull the little vampire away from Katy, but the thought of touching the creature sent an icy black wave of repulsion through him. So he stood rooted and helpless. Always helpless.

The boy had stopped feeding. Both of them were looking at Peter now. Both smiling. The boy squinted, pointed, then laughed quietly. “I know you,” the boy said.

Peter’s hands flew up, as if he were trying to ward off something. He cried weakly, turned and ran from the room. He scampered down the hallway, down the stairs, through the front door and out into the night.

He thought he heard a voice, perhaps Katy’s, perhaps his own, perhaps the boy’s, saying Come back come back.

Electric pain coursed through him. Peter stopped, doubled over, and vomited dark stones and darker memories.

~*~

The boy scared him. Startled, Pete dropped the magazine. He quickly pulled his pants up, turned.

The boy backed away.

“No, wait,” Pete said. His heart raced. He held out a hand.

The boy blinked, took another step back.

“It’s okay,” Pete pleaded. “Really.” A piece of blackness coiled in his stomach, snaked through him, moved across his forehead, his vision. He moved forward.

“Petey,” the boy said. “No.”

Pete rubbed his eyes. It was like long fingers were digging into his brain, probing. He blinked. He thought he recognized the boy from school. He was a grade behind Pete.

The boy opened his mouth and laughed and laughed, mocking, and Pete’s head burst in sharp black anguish.

He leaped. The boy gave a little yelp, and Pete pushed him to the ground, hard, and the boy went still. Pete lay on top of the boy for a very long time, holding him, not wanting to hear that horrible, braying laughter. He lay on top of him until the curtain of blackness receded and the world, like the boy beneath him, went quiet, still, and cold. Then Pete cried and shook the boy. “
Come back
,” he pleaded. “
Please come back
.”