The Grimscribe's Puppets (32 page)

The hunter, when he saw her in the distance, turned and walked into the forest without looking back. He would not watch. He had left Kay exactly where she had said. It wasn’t difficult to do what she did next. The river had ceased to run and sat at a height equal to the edge of the green bank. Gerda sat on the bank and slid into the river which came up to her waist. She then turned and pulled Kay towards her. It was an easy task. And he floated. No blood seeped from his body. The river turned to that colour, anyway—all of it for as far as she could see. Gerda then lay down and gave herself up to the red.

By Jeffrey Thomas

He should be proud of himself, his supervisor had assured Thomas, because he was performing an important service for people.

He was no physician or therapist, and yet he and every other employee of Gale Therapeutic Appliances, no matter their function, was part of a healing process. Other departments than his created prosthetic arms and legs for victims of mishap, and upon his initial interview he had toured the entire plant and viewed these processes. He had seen yet other departments where glass eyes were produced, or portions of faces lost to accident or disease. A nose, a whole upper section of face or perhaps a bottom jaw, these facial appliances held in place with magnets.

The products his own department fashioned were similar, and yet different. His was an especially, perhaps even
more
important function, his immediate supervisor had told him with pride upon that first tour through the plant six months earlier. The healing process they were a part of, in their department, was purely psychological rather than physical—and wasn’t emotional suffering worse, even, than somatic pain?

What their particular customers experienced, Thomas’s supervisor explained in words that no doubt came from promotional literature, was a “phantom pain of the psyche.”

~*~

“Did you hear about Lucinda?” Bao asked him during a lull in activity. She was smiling, which meant it couldn’t be pleasant, as he knew Bao disliked Lucinda. She disliked all her female coworkers, but seemed to like chatting with him. Bao was short and thickset, with a broad ruddy face and long slitted eyes; she had once told him the name of her home country but he’d forgotten it and hadn’t recognized it anyway. Somewhere small and obscure on the border of somewhere big and desolate.

She left a space hanging open for him so he obliged her and asked, “No, what?”

Bao whispered, “She got fired for smuggling out a wee-wee!”

“Oh no,” Thomas said. He was going to ask what Lucinda had needed that for, but stopped himself.

“Isn’t that stupid? She could buy herself a toy for next to nothing—it’s like getting fired for stealing paperclips.” Bao supplied the answer to the question he had nearly asked. “But you know, her husband died in that accident and all, so I guess she’s lonely.” Instead of sounding sympathetic, however, Bao snorted a little laugh.

Having been divorced for a few years now, Thomas experienced an unpleasant, sickly craving for Bao when she was near him. It was an unsolicited kind of desire. She was sufficiently exotic to stir him, with her scissor-cut eyes and long frizzy-black hair—and the fecund pendulous breasts that pushed out the front of her white lab coat—but she smelled of hot plastic when she was close to him. She’d once told him that she had six children, but her husband had recently left her for a younger woman. Her pain, anger and loneliness were as plain as the smell of hot plastic.

At the time Bao had revealed this personal information to him, she had said, “Some people have too many children, and some people don’t have any.” This comment was in regard to the work they performed in their particular department. “Nothing is balanced, is it?”

Knowing that Bao hadn’t liked Lucinda, Thomas didn’t want to sound too concerned for her, but nevertheless he mused, “It’s like when Paul got fired for stealing those two breasts.” Their coworker Paul had been the quality control inspector for the department that created artificial breasts for women who had undergone mastectomies.

“Oh, poor Paul,” Bao said, sympathetic because she had liked flirting with Paul, too, “that was different. You didn’t hear? He lived with his mom and she had cancer.”

“Did she lose her breasts?” Thomas asked, confused.

“No – she died. He lost all of her.”

~*~

The baby was still warm in Thomas’s hands as he used scissors to trim away the irregular fringe along its seams. They called this extra plastic, squeezed out where the two halves of the mold fit together, “flash.” The baby was heavy, solid, though it wasn’t one of the more expensive models with the articulated steel skeletons inside. Its limbs jiggled a little as he handled the doll. But the employees were sternly instructed never to use the word “doll.” It was “prosthetic infants” they produced in their department—for women who had lost their own babies to illness, accident, or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. They were a therapeutic product and many insurance companies covered their expense. They might only be utilized for a short while, after which the mothers might donate their baby to another needy mother, though Thomas had heard of women who had cared for their prosthesis—even walking it in the park in a stroller—for decades.

As he clipped the seam that ran over the top of the infant’s as yet hairless, healthy pink head with its closed eyes and peaceful smile, he heard Bao speaking to the babies at the end of the line where she inspected them. He glanced over at her. She wasn’t cooing baby talk to the infants, however, but grumbling such comments as, “You’re an especially ugly one, aren’t you?” He saw her give the baby she held a good loud smack on its jiggly bottom before she tossed it through the air into a big bin full of babies waiting to be pushed out into the packaging room before they went on to the shipping department or the warehouse.

“Hey, Thomas,” a voice behind him said. He recognized it as belonging to his coworker David, a muscular black man, and turned toward him. He saw that David had acquired a big pink pregnant belly. The black man was grinning.

Thomas smiled, but in a low voice advised, “Be careful Bao doesn’t see you fooling around with that stuff or she might say something to Derek.”

“Do you think Bao was bigger than this when she had her six kids?” David said, setting the plastic belly aside. Women who had suffered miscarriages and had never even had the chance to see their baby come into the world were said to benefit from wearing such a prosthesis—sometimes for a few months. Sometimes for years. David went on, “I think the bitch carried all six babies in one litter.”

“Shh, David,” Thomas warned.

David picked up the next tiny golem Thomas needed to trim and turned it over in his big hands. In a more serious tone he observed, “It must be a horrible thing to go through, losing a baby—I don’t want to even think about what it would be like if I lost my son. He’s my whole life.”

“I know what you mean,” Thomas said. He looked up at David with a worried eye as his friend began trimming the baby he held. David was trying to help him stay caught up but Thomas felt his coworker was a bit careless when he trimmed, leaving too much flash here but snipping into the flesh a little bit there. While observing him, Thomas added almost unconsciously, “I’ve always mourned somebody I never even knew.”

“How’s that?”

“I was supposed to be a twin, but my brother was stillborn.”

David reacted with a pained expression. “Really? Oh wow, man.”

“We were going to be Thomas and Mason. I guess I’m the one who got to be Thomas. But it could just as easily have been him.”

~*~

Thomas walked home every evening from Gale Therapeutic Appliances, the tenement building that housed his flat being only fifteen minutes away on foot.

He carried a thick plastic shopping bag, black with the name of a clothing store in gold lettering. He had done his best not to look over his shoulder nervously while he was still close to his place of employment, but it was out of sight now and he relaxed somewhat. He had made sure to remain in the restroom for a good fifteen minutes after clock-out time, so that when he finally emerged the parking lot was all but empty. Earlier, as always, he had declined offers of a ride home from both David and Bao.

Normally he enjoyed the walk, but as autumn deepened the days were growing more chilly – and on top of that, this evening it was beginning to drizzle. From past experience Thomas was prepared for this eventuality, however, and carried a small plastic flashlight in his coat pocket. He left the sidewalk and approached a deceased brick factory with its arched windows boarded up and covered in menacing black graffiti like hordes of giant insects. Since he had been a boy most of the industries in his hometown of Gosston had closed down—largely for economic reasons, but there had also been chemical spills, gas explosions, fires. Gosston seemed to have more than its share of accidents, and a disproportionate number of citizens with artificial limbs, and that might well have had something to do with the fact that Gale Therapeutic Appliances, at least, continued to thrive.

Thomas had moved out of Gosston over twenty years ago, swearing never to return, but he had moved back to care for his mother after his father had passed away. Last year he’d lost his mother, too, and yet he had stayed on. As much as he had come to despise the town, it was all he had, now. The town and the “phantom pain” it held for him.

Thomas waded through overgrown weeds, wary of debris concealed in the tangles like booby-traps, until he arrived at one side of the derelict factory building—a spot just past its loading docks.

As a boy he had become familiar with the tunnel system that connected a number of the town’s old industrial sites, and one of the openings to this system lay before him now. Thomas ducked through a bulkhead door that had once been boarded up, flicking on his flashlight as he did so.

After descending a short flight of steps thick with fallen leaves, he entered a straight tunnel with an arched ceiling and walls scaled in grimy tiles, rusty train rails laid into its damp cement floor. More graffiti abounded, rubbish and smashed glass scattered everywhere. A bare mattress had turned to a mildewed sponge from water that had trickled down the wall. Thomas walked quietly for fear of alerting any teenagers or homeless people who might currently be partying or sheltering down here, but he heard nothing. Even on the few occasions he had seen people down here they had only watched him as he passed without accosting him. Maybe they had feared he was a ghost, even as he had half-wondered the same about them.

Only once had he had a frightening experience down here, as a youth many years earlier, when some of the plants the tunnels connected had still been operational. He had been alone and exploring out of simple curiosity when a shadowy figure had lunged out of a narrow stairwell that led up to one of the factories. The figure had chased after Thomas, never calling out to him and its intentions unclear. A security guard chasing him from a place he didn’t belong, or a madman with terrible desires? From the figure’s short stature, maybe just a bully of his own age. Whatever the case, a panicky Thomas had glanced back once or twice but the figure remained a silhouette, its features indiscernible. The most he could make out was that it held its arms out in front of it, as if to embrace him.

For years afterward—until he’d moved out of Gosston, in fact—in dreams the figure had continued to pursue him, as if some part of him had never escaped from the tunnels.

~*~

The tenement building he lived in had formerly been a factory building itself, just as other defunct factories in town had been portioned into office space. The tunnel delivered him only a three minutes’ walk from his home. The rain was moderate and he arrived in the tenement building’s vestibule only a little worse for wear. On the brick walls of the vestibule were an old punch clock and empty racks for punch cards. The landlord must have felt they were charming souvenirs of bygone days.

Up squealing wooden steps that sounded like each one trapped a dying animal inside, which Thomas pressed beneath his heels. Up to his apartment on the third and topmost floor. He quickly moved from room to room (which was all there was—two large rooms) pulling shades and drawing curtains, as if to hide from eyes that would emerge with the night. Then, at a more relaxed pace, he put on a kettle of water for instant coffee and changed into comfortable pajamas and his faded flannel bathrobe. When his coffee was in hand, he turned to stare across the combination living room/kitchen at the plastic bag resting on the table. The morning paper,
The Gosston Mirror
, was still spread there as if ready to soak up blood.

Thomas sipped his coffee a few more times, slowly, with long stretches between, before he finally padded barefoot—as if with a need for stealth—over to the table and opened the mouth of the plastic bag to draw out what he had folded double and hidden inside.

It was an adult-sized human arm, minus a hand at its wrist, heavy and solid. The expensive kind, with an articulated steel skeleton inside.

~*~

“Did you hear about that customer the company turned away?” Bao asked Thomas at lunch. She sat across the table from him, making him self-conscious as he slurped up his instant noodles. She left one of her open pauses for him to step into.

“What happened?” he asked after sucking up one particularly errant strand of noodle.

“He contacted GTA directly with a request. He said he’d lost his daughter and he was having a hard time dealing with it. So he showed our order department a photo of a girl of maybe sixteen – and she didn’t look anything like him.” She laughed. “And he never once mentioned that he had a wife, either.”

“Huh,” Thomas said, and then to give her a better reaction, “Wow.”

“He probably thought if we okayed it, he might even get his insurance company to pay for it.”

“Huh,” Thomas said. Poking around in his noodles, he hesitated but then said, “It might not be what you think, though. Maybe she was someone he loved when he was the same age and could never forget. Maybe even someone who died a long time ago.”