The Puppet Maker's Bones (26 page)

Kevin stumbled into the room, held the scalpel in front of him and crept toward the old man who seemed unaware of Kevin’s presence. A booming voice directly behind Kevin bellowed, “How many people have you killed, Kevin?” He lurched around as fast as his present muddled state would allow and standing before him was an enormous puppet of a black man in bright colored robes. When the puppet moved, it made the same sort of rattling, wind-chime noise that Kevin had heard from the skeleton puppet. Kevin lunged at the puppet with his scalpel, and the puppet danced to the side and out of his way.

“Now is that any way to behave?” asked the puppet. “I can’t have you coming in here, trespassing, with the intention of harming my dear friend over there. He has had a rough time of it, you see.” The puppet slid back and away from Kevin, on a track that ran on a grid installed in the high ceiling.

“You’re not real! He is doing all of this!”

Kevin heard Mr. Trusnik speak. “I had so hoped we would not have to meet in person. In the same room. I had hoped it would not get this far. People are so very foolish. Don’t you find them to be foolish, Cheidu?”

The puppet of the black man moved forward again, then switched direction and moved closer to Mr. Trusnik. “Without question, people are foolish,” it seemed to respond.

“Stop doing that!” yelled Kevin as he slashed out with the scalpel but met with dead air.

“Not a lover of theatre, it seems,” said the puppet.

“No. It would seem not,” responded the old man.

“So few of the young people are these days,” said the puppet. “They would rather be at the movies, or in front of a television or computer.”

“I agree. It is a sad state of affairs,” the old man agreed.

Kevin felt like his muscles were starting to fail.

“What did you drug me with?” said Kevin.

“A little something to help you sleep. It was my intention to get you out of here and onto the front lawn of your own home before you could come to any harm.”

Mr. Trusnik let out a sigh.

“What are you talking about?”

“I have been alone for too long, I suppose. Having you here—my unwanted guest—you are still a guest. I admit my emotions are getting the best of me, which is never safe for anyone. In this case it appears that I no longer have to actually touch someone. Perhaps it is the house. Did you touch anything I might touch regularly? Never mind. That is impossible to answer.”

“You’re fucking
rambling
, old man.” Kevin thought back to the electrical shock he felt upon taking hold of the knob of the kitchen drawer when he first entered the house. He had attributed the shock to Santa Ana winds, the electrically charged warm winds that blow through the Los Angeles basin. Could the old man be telling the truth?

The old man paced the room, beyond the reach of Kevin and his scalpel. “Those men. The men across the street at your home. They are there in an attempt to keep me from killing you.”

“
What
?” Kevin’s arm was quite heavy, and he was having trouble holding up his small weapon.

“They are there in an attempt to prevent you from entering my home. You are already here, and they have failed. You are, though it was not your intention upon breaking into my home, already dead and I have already killed you.”

Kevin’s nose began to bleed, and he wiped at it, then noticed the color of his blood which was the same watery violet he’d noticed earlier.

“What is—what did you—that was not something to make me sleep… What are you?”

“My dear, you seem to have difficulty finishing your sentences,” said the large puppet. “Pavel, have you noticed that he seems to have trouble finishing his sentences?”

“My friend there. The large one standing behind you. I call him Cheidu. In his day he was the great stage actor, Robert Lamb. If you studied theatre history or black history in school you might have read a brief paragraph about him. He was also my best friend. And I killed him. It was a tragic accident. He broke so many rules to try to see me and I repaid his kindness and betrayed his friendship by smashing his head open.”

Kevin had felt fear when he had been further back in the house, trapped in the snare, tangled in the netting. He had also been annoyed, angry, and indignant that the tables had been so turned upon his plan for the evening, which helped motivate him to get out of the net. This was different. Kevin now knew what it felt like to be terrified.

“Would you believe that you are the first person to come into this house since the year 1950?”

Kevin did not know how to respond. He began figuring out a way to get out of the room and the house. He would call the police once he managed to get out of there. Wait, he could not call the police. They could not know he had been here. The old man was insane, without question. He would have to overtake the man and leave him there. The old man was a shut-in. If Kevin could take him and get out of the house, no one would know the man was dead for a very long time. Would they? Had someone contacted the old man? How did he know Kevin was coming? And who was searching his house?

“Who is in my house and what do they want?” Kevin asked. Not giving up, his body moving forward by mere centimeters, he moved closer to Mr. Trusnik.

“You have been a very bad person for a very long time now, Kevin, and it is time to put a stop to it.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“I have nothing but time in here to study, to learn, to watch. No, it is not possible for anyone to see in here, but that does not mean that I don’t see out and that I have not been here, under house arrest for
decades
without learning everything there is to know about every
living thing
around me. I say
living thing
because it is in my best interest that those
living things
around me stay
living
until the natural order of things determines otherwise. The consequences to me if those
living things
happen to sicken or expire in a way that upsets the natural order of things are quite… grim.”

“You’re a fucking Peeping Tom, is that what you’re saying, you sick fuck?”

“I prefer to refer to myself as the neighborhood watch. A term introduced into the lexicon in the last decade or so. Tell me, Kevin, that garbage bag you carried over to the Hague’s house and then dumped the contents on their lawn. Was that their cat, by chance?”

“What? You.”

“Yes. I watched you. I saw. You killed your neighbor’s cat. For what? Pleasure? A quick thrill? Who here is the ‘sick fuck’ to use your words?”

Kevin had been moving closer and closer to Trusnik, his hand on the scalpel.

“Is it your intention to attack me with that scalpel you have in your hand?” asked Mr. Trusnik.

Kevin stopped moving. He wiped the blood away from his nose that trickled from one nostril.

“Oh, by all means, keep trying. Don’t let me stop you. I have no intention of making my way out of here alive after all of this. It is much too late for that.”

“Glad you know what is going to happen,” said Kevin.

“Not because of anything brilliant on your part, let me be very clear about that. You are nothing but a psychopath with a limited scope of knowledge and common sense. You’re no better than the shark that glides about the ocean without a plan, waiting for the next edible thing to cross its path that it can tear apart and devour.”

“Kinda cool to be compared to a shark,” said Kevin, trying a different tactic. Maybe if he tried to befriend the man. Maybe agreeing with him. Maybe the old man would let him out.

The old man sighed in exasperation. “Like I said, you’re not very bright. Neither is the shark. Sharks are also quite wasteful and leave far too much evidence behind them of their activities. As do you. Those men across the street will find everything they need. And a few things you never thought of. Then they will come here and find you, then me, and will come to certain conclusions, none of which will be that you are the mental genius you think yourself to be.”

Kevin decided to try challenging him again. “So what is it? You made this huge claim that ‘I’m already dead.’ Very dramatic.” Kevin inched closer to Mr. Trusnik.

“Did you know I was married once?”

“So? I heard she died.”

“Yes. She did.”

“Am I supposed to care about that?”

“Perhaps. I killed her.”

“You murdered your
wife
?” Kevin asked. He had not expected this. There was nothing in the news, nothing in any of his research on the house or its history, nothing about a woman being murdered.

“Did you go to jail?”

Mr. Trusnik shook his head. Kevin stared in disbelief. Could this man be like him?

“I didn’t mean to. It was an avoidable consequence and I should have listened to my advisors. You, on the other hand, are what I refer to as an ‘unavoidable consequence.’ A home invasion falls under that category.”

“How did you kill her?”

“What, you expect something gruesome and sick and twisted? Like something
you
would do?”

“How did you do it?”

Mr. Trusnik walked to the large puppet he referred to as Robert Lamb, reached up and took it down from the mechanism from which it hung. He set it on the bench next to the puppet he had been dancing with when Kevin entered the work room.

“I loved her.”

“Yes, yes you said that. How did you kill her?”

“I told you. I loved her.”

“That doesn’t tell me anything.”

Mr. Trusnik began to gather various items together into a pile. To Kevin’s blurred vision, he thought part of it looked like the net he had been caught in. How did the old man get that? He was in the back room the whole time.

“Tell me, Kevin. If you were born with a defect that did not allow you to have any physical contact with others, what would you do?”

“What?” Kevin had not given up on trying to inch closer to the old man, who seemed oblivious to Kevin’s movement.

“A simple enough question, but then again I must remember that I am speaking to someone with an even simpler mind. What would you do if you knew that this defect of yours would kill people?”

Kevin stopped. “What, you’re some sort of carrier? You have some sort of disease? Is that it? I’m going to catch some disease from you? Don’t you have to have a sign on your house, or be in a quarantined hospital somewhere?”

“No. Things do not work that way. Excuse me, I need to check something.”

Kevin watched as Mr. Trusnik moved to the ladder, and agile as a squirrel, climbed to the top where a narrow window looked out upon the street. Mr. Trusnik focused his gaze on something outside the window for a moment, moved back down the ladder and to his spot facing Kevin.

“There are more people in your house. They appear to have found something useful. What do you suppose that might be?”

Kevin coughed, and a small bit of violet colored phlegm landed on the front of his shirt. He did not move to wipe it off.

“Or they think I have been kidnapped.”

“I take it you watch a lot of television? I assure you, the people across the street are not at your house because they believe you to have been kidnapped.”

“How can you know that?”

Mr. Trusnik pulled over a stool and set it in front of Kevin. He sat down.

“I had a call before your arrival. Something about a family. North of here. Quite disturbing news. To think a person could do something like that to an entire family.”

“
What
?”

“Yes. That poor family. I’m sure there have been many others. Have there been many others, Kevin?”

A siren was heard coming down the street. Mr. Trusnik looked at Kevin, who returned the look, incredulous. There was no way that this man could know about the last house. No way at all. Yet he did, and there were people searching his home. Other people knew. How many? What would his parents be thinking right now? Where had he left the mp3 player? Top of the dresser, where he always left it. Out in the open. Casual. His parents would never think to listen to anything on it, so he left it out. Shit.
His music
. His beautiful music.

“How?” Kevin asked.

Another siren was heard in the distance. Mr. Trusnik gathered more items into the pile on the workbench.

Mr. Trusnik sighed. “I am what might be considered an important man to some, although they have great reservations about me, with good reason I suppose. There is an organization, a business, that attends to all my affairs, my investments, home improvements, grocery deliveries, et cetera. They also notify me of things that might be of interest to me like, say, someone accessing the blueprint records of my home.”

Kevin was surprised. “How long did you know I had the blueprints to your house?”

“Since the day you got them. You were already under a certain amount of scrutiny due to some of your nighttime activities of which I was aware, but you became a subject of extreme interest to quite a large number of people after you took those blueprints. So much for picking a nice old shut-in with no visitors, hmm Kevin?”

Kevin felt that if he could keep talking to the man, he would somehow be okay, that he could escape. “So, why are you so important? What are you, retired CIA or something?”

“You
do
watch a lot of television.
CIA
?”

“Then what are you?”

“Your victims did not deserve what they got from you.”

Kevin reached up and grabbed a cloth from off the workbench and put it up to his bleeding nose. He had grown pale, and a blue vein appeared in his forehead and ran from his temple to his cheek.

“You deserve to go to prison for your crimes for the rest of your natural life. You deserve to be beaten and tortured and made to feel terrified every day that you are in prison. I regret to say that what remains of your natural life will not allow that justice.”

Kevin peered at the cloth, not comprehending what he was seeing. It was the wrong color for blood, but the flow would not stop. A weird mucus, maybe.

“I do not believe that people should be put to death for their crimes, Kevin. I happen to believe in the more barbaric practice of locking you in an environment with others who are like you and leaving you alone to tear each other apart in your own special way. I think that has more of a ring of justice to it. Capital punishment, the way they have done it all these years, so immediate, so final; a swift and often merciful end to the life of one who was neither swift nor merciful in the treatment of their numerous victims. There is one form of execution that I think would be truly horrible.”