The Puppet Maker's Bones (2 page)

Present Day

A
landscaping company came once a week to trim the yard. Sprinklers set with timers made hand watering the plants and flowers a thing of the past. Maintaining the garden had been easy when the house was new, but time and circumstance had complicated things. Pavel was grateful for the modern conveniences available to him, by either telephone or computer. He missed walking among the carefully selected plants in the front yard. Each had been picked to invite and celebrate as much life as the garden could accommodate—butterfly bushes, citrus, lavender, fuchsia, rue and rosemary, thyme and sage—all attracted a variety of bees, butterflies, birds, and a great many insects to Pavel’s delight, season after season. A similar creation existed in the house’s enclosed back yard. He’d not ventured outside for many years during the daylight hours to enjoy his creation, but he saved that pleasure for the hours when it was dark and the neighborhood asleep. Then, he could enjoy walking among the plants.

A house painting company had a standing appointment every five years to touch up the exterior of the Victorian so that Pavel’s home would remain tidy and protected from the weather and would avoid any appearance of neglect. He opined that a poorly maintained home would draw far more attention than one that was treated with care. A well-established roofing company had a similar appointment to replace the roof every decade. One day, the Historical Preservation Society came by and embedded a plaque in the sidewalk in front of the house, designating the Victorian a historical landmark of the City of Pasadena.

“How nice,” he thought, until he received a letter one day which stated that any alteration or addition that might compromise the historically protected landmark was forbidden under the guidelines set by the Historical Preservation Society. The letter also requested his consent to allow tours of the interior of the house as well as the back garden. He balked at that and sent a polite, but firm, refusal. The Society was quite persistent, and Pavel found it necessary to engage Mr. Trope. Mr. Trope was a weasel of a man with whom Pavel had been reluctantly obligated to form a business alliance many, many years prior. Mr. Trope, currently his attorney in addition to many other functions, was responsible for attending to the matter of his privacy and the rules of his isolation. Like the painters and roofers, Mr. Trope handled all of his affairs on retainer. He paid Pavel’s bills, made investments on his behalf and protected his overall interests. Mr. Trope was also responsible for ensuring that Mr. Trusnik adhered to the terms of his present arrangement regarding visitors or any ventures outside his home.

Pavel had carved out a regular routine that shunned all outside activity during the daylight hours. No one knocked on the door to ask to use the facilities or for a glass of water. If they did, Pavel stood on the other side of the door and stared through the peephole while the door remained unanswered. No neighbors came by to borrow the proverbial cup of sugar. Sales people and religious solicitors respected the sign out front that read “No solicitors please.” Time and consistency on his part had made him, as well as the house, a cipher to be ignored. In the years preceding his present arrangement with Mr. Trope, Pavel made small trips out of doors to work in the front garden or to take short walks in his neighborhood. Certain visitors came, and he had lived a less solitary life. That changed the day the boys broke the window.

Wednesday’s Child is full of woe
. Pavel’s memory had become like one of those round puzzle-ball toys used for teaching shapes to children—the kind that contained many different geometrically-shaped holes cut into the ball and into which identically shaped blocks could be inserted. Every now and then a shape would fall into place in his memory. At other times the empty places in his memory remained like the holes in the toy. The others had been worried about his memory. Should he be?

If his waning memory served, he was certain the baseball, propelled by the force of youthful strength and reckless exuberance, had crashed through the window on a Wednesday, shattering the leaded glass. He could not remember how many of the children he had come in contact with that day or how many arms he’d grabbed in his hurt and anger.

***

1942

“Throw it here, throw it here!” yelled the boy, his voice somewhat muffled by the leaded glass windows. Inside, Pavel could make out the voices at play outside in the street.

“Hey batter, batter, batter, what’s the matter, batter, batter, batter…”

“Shut up!”

Crack.

“Oh no!” several voices cried at once.

The ball crashed through the glass of one of Pavel’s front windows that faced the living room. The “parlor,” She had called it. The window’s shattering was followed by the breaking of glass in a framed daguerreotype photograph hung upon the wall, directly opposite the window. The photograph was the only one Pavel possessed of Her. The frame shattered and the daguerreotype along with it, as age had made the silvered, copper plate unstable and brittle.

“What have you done?” Pavel cried, running outside to confront the terrified boys in his front yard.

He thought about the one boy. The leader. Stuart had been his name. Why did he remember
that
?

The boys were all dead now, of course.

Kevin: Present Day, Pasadena

K
evin sped along Marengo Avenue on his skateboard. The sight of a youth on a skateboard was commonplace in Pasadena, or about anywhere, for that matter. The skateboard provided the seventeen-year-old boy a useful means of getting around unobserved while he made it a point to observe
everything
. Especially the houses. Kevin adjusted the ear buds from his mp3 player and turned up the volume. What he heard made him smile.

“
No, please don’t… I’m begging you. Why are you doing this?
”

“
Because I can
.”

Bloodcurdling screams filled his ears, and Kevin almost turned down the volume but decided to keep it loud. No one was around to hear what he listened to, and if anyone asked, Kevin had an easy explanation. The smell of copper and fear filled his memory, causing him to smile.

Kevin navigated the streets up to Fillmore, then Magnolia, and arrived at his house, a typically pricey Pasadena Craftsman on a street lined with other traditional Craftsman, Italianate, and Queen Anne Victorians for which Pasadena was known, along with the occasional condominium complex, more prevalent now, as the economy deteriorated. He kicked the skateboard into his arms, bounded up the front stairs and through the front door. He ran up the steps to his room where he deposited the skateboard, then moved down the hall to more stairs which led to the attic. Once in the attic, Kevin sat and stared out the window at the big Victorian across the street. Kevin made a point to stare at the Victorian across the street at a different hour every day, to see if the old man who lived there would come outside. Kevin had never seen anyone go in or come out of the house. He watched plenty of delivery trucks pull up in front and take packages or boxes into what appeared to be some sort of anteroom at the side of the house. Kevin figured that room led to another door that would connect to the interior. Kevin had never seen so much as a silhouette behind a moving drapery to indicate that a person might inhabit the house. The house might indeed be empty; however, everyone in the neighborhood seemed to know that an old man lived there. People claimed he had lived there as long as anyone could remember. Everyone said that, but no one could claim to have ever seen him. Kevin watched the myriad of delivery people, but did not see anyone who was not in some way connected with a company that was providing a service. They certainly did not appear to be friends or family. No one stayed longer than the time it would take to drop off the mail. The longest anyone stayed were the yard people who came to do the “mow, blow and go” type of gardening service common to the area. Their comings and goings, however did prove to Kevin that there was indeed someone inside to receive the numerous packages and boxes and food items, but in all his vigilance, Kevin never once saw the old man. Very little interested the teen, yet the curiosity Kevin felt toward the unseen resident across the street was overwhelming, similar to what an overzealous anthropologist might experience when discovering a completely new culture that had been hidden from modern society for years.

Kevin had watched the Victorian from the attic window every day for the past year, and he felt ready. The “music” on his mp3 player was beginning to bore him.

Kevin backed away from the attic window and moved to the floor and the roll of architectural blueprints. He’d acquired them at the local historical society after telling the nice lady at the counter he needed them for a school project on Pasadena Victorians.

“I absolutely
have
to have
that
Vic-
tor
-ian,” he’d whined.

Kevin chuckled as he reflected on his power to annoy people into giving him what he wanted. Eventually, they all did. Their screams were a bonus.

Kevin was a Cage Rattler, one of those types of people at the zoo, or the aquarium or school who derive satisfaction from taunting the animals by pounding on the cage bars or the aquarium glass, or by tormenting fellow students too insecure or frightened to protect themselves. Some were plain lonely and thought they had made a new friend. The difference between Kevin and other Cage Rattlers was that Kevin had an insatiable curiosity to see how animals or people would behave under the most extreme of circumstances, usually violent, so tapping on the glass at the aquarium or pounding the cage bars was, to Kevin, a relatively benign experiment. He liked to take things apart to see how they worked, though taking apart games or electronics or machines held no interest for him. Kevin thought he would make a brilliant doctor. He liked his research. Sometimes the objects of his cruelty would inexplicably disappear, or in some instances, show up in an empty parking lot, dismembered. The animals’ deaths were usually credited to either coyotes or practitioners of Santería, depending on when or where they were finally discovered. The shy students he chose from schools other than his own simply went “missing.” Usually.

The first time Kevin ventured beyond the various neighborhood cats, dogs, and chinchillas even, often given to children as a fashionable alternative to rabbits——and once a tortoise that he later discovered was quite valuable—he focused his attention upon a child at one of the neighborhood grade schools; a small boy, playing off by himself. No friends, a little weird, a little off, thought Kevin.

“Hey kid. Do you like sour gummies?”

The child seemed to be so surprised that anyone noticed him, let alone spoke to him, that he was willing to go with Kevin, who handed the boy a sour gummy. The boy, eager for the candy, put it in his mouth and grinned. Kevin grinned back. The boy was small in build, with large brown eyes and close cropped hair—a buzz cut, some would call it. He was dressed in clothing inappropriate for any type of outdoor play. His clothes were so clean and neat; they appeared to have come straight from the dry cleaners, pressed and pristine.

“Do you like to climb trees? I know where there are a lot of good climbing trees. At the dog park.”

“That park is closed. My mom said. Too much poop.”

Kevin laughed. “That’s right. Too much poop.” The city had closed the dog park to do the annual seeding of the lawn, and the entire circumference of the grounds was enclosed in yellow warning tape. Kevin led the child as far as the entrance with the promise of the sour gummies.

“We’re not supposed to be in here. I’ll get dirty. Mom says I’m not supposed to get dirty.”

“Well we can’t very well get more sour gummies, then, can we? The tree elves hide them in the tops of the trees!”

The boy gawked at Kevin in wonder. Kevin grinned. “That’s right. There are more sour gummies at the top of the tree.”

Kevin put his hand around the boy’s waist and hoisted him up to the crotch of the oak tree and jumped up after him.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got you. We’ll go to the top together.”

“I’m not supposed to get dirty.”

“You’ll be fine. Have you ever seen a tree elf?”

The boy shook his head and continued to climb with Kevin, though he was unsteady, clumsy, almost falling at one point, but his new friend Kevin held onto him and helped him in his effort to make it all the way to the top of the tree.

Kevin’s science class was covering Sir Isaac Newton that week and rather than read the assigned chapters on the discovery of gravity, he decided to take a more active approach to his homework. As he pushed the boy from the top of the tree, he recorded the sound the boy made while he was falling—the animalistic wail accompanied by the crashing of branches, the scrape of leaves and twigs tearing at the bare skin of the boy’s face and arms—crows cawing in the air overhead and the grunt and exhalation of air as the boy landed on the ground and died from his injuries.

That was the first “music” Kevin recorded for his mp3 player.