The Grimscribe's Puppets (33 page)

“Oh Thomas,” Bao chuckled, wagging her head. “You’re so sweet and naïve.”

He had just finished his meal when the time came for them to return to work. He excused himself to go to the men’s room, and Bao went on ahead without him. All the rest had already returned to their respective work areas and he knew his supervisor Derek would chastise him when he was late to his post, but he could deal with that.

He had come into the men’s room earlier with the object hidden inside a roll of used bubble wrap Derek had given him permission to bring home. He had seen someone’s shoes under the door to one of the stalls, however, so he had been afraid to go through with his plan all the way. He had quickly dug the object out of the bubble wrap, then pushed it down deep into the trash container – knowing the people who came to empty the trash and clean the floors wouldn’t do so until closer to the end of the shift.

There was no one in here now—only his own furtive-eyed face staring back at him from the big mirror over the row of sinks.

He knew there were cameras focused on the front doors, making him apprehensive about smuggling out anything that way. Furthermore, there was that stooped gnome of a security guard, Bill, sitting up front at his reception desk, lost in his baggy uniform like a child dressed for Halloween—holstered pistol and all—even if he did frequently doze off in front of his monitors. Likewise, Thomas suspected there were cameras in the coed locker room because no one actually changed their clothes there, only stored their coats, pocketbooks or phones in the lockers. But surely there were no security cameras in the restrooms.

With one more glance over his shoulder to be assured he was alone, he thrust his hand down into the trash and felt around until he retrieved his prize.

There was one small, hinged window at the back wall, and it was already cracked a little bit open. He went to it, pushed it open more, and reached out the hand that held the object. He let it go, and heard a soft thud and a crackle of leaves below.

As he had last evening, he waited until all his coworkers had eagerly left for home before he emerged from the building and walked around to its rear. Here, where the company property bordered a strip of gray woods, drifts of fallen leaves drained of their bright colors had washed up against the back wall of the building. Thomas knelt before one such heap, directly below a small, hinged window, and sifted through until he once again uncovered his prize. From the pocket of his coat he produced the same balled up black plastic bag with gold lettering, and he dropped the adult-sized human hand inside it.

~*~

“What happened to your hand?” David asked Thomas in the cafeteria, pointing at a nasty red burn across the back of his wrist. It looked like his hand had been severed and reattached there.

“Oh…I did that today with a sealer wand. One of the hip joints on a baby popped out of its socket—it mustn’t have been connected securely—so I had to cut the leg off, reconnect the joint then seal the leg back on. And when I did, the wand slipped and…” He made a hissing sound like sizzling flesh. The electric-powered wands melted the pliable plastic to an almost liquid state so that pieces could be joined together, and if skillfully smoothed out the place of joining was virtually undetectable.

It was true that he had had to repair one of the infant prostheses in this way, today, but the heated wand hadn’t slipped. The accident had actually occurred last night in his apartment, with a sealer wand he had smuggled home from work.

A shrill cry behind Thomas caused him to spin around with jolted heart. Bao had opened one of the refrigerators to retrieve her lunch, to be greeted with the sight of a human head resting on one of the shelves.

She whirled to glare at all the workers seated at their various tables. Some were trying to repress their smiles but others were laughing outright. “You think that’s funny? If I find out who did that I’ll be reporting you to Mr. Gale himself! I’ll ask security to play back the tape!”

“I don’t think there are any security cameras in the caf,” Thomas said, subtly glancing around at the ceiling tiles.

“I sure hope not,” David muttered.

Thomas gave his coworker a look.

But only a minute later, the old security guard Bill shuffled into the room, his fissured face one big grimace. “I saw that,” he grumbled. “Where’s the head now?”

“Damn,” David whispered, “so there are cameras in here. Why did the old geezer have to be awake for once?”

Bao handed Bill the adult-sized head. It was a male with realistic looking hair punched into its scalp. Its eyes were closed as if in sleep. Not many were produced at GTA, but occasionally an accident victim who had suffered decapitation was able to be kept alive indefinitely with life support. A lifelike prosthetic head, fashioned in the likeness of the victim, made the family’s visits more bearable. Other times, though, such heads were merely created so a family could view and bury an intact representation of a truncated loved one.

Bill cradled the head in both hands and held its face against his chest protectively. Rather than retreat with it to his desk in the foyer, though, he addressed the assembled workers. “You people need to take your work more seriously! You don’t know by now what these things mean to the people who buy them? You still think they’re only so much plastic? They have a magic to them, a magic to heal. They have soul in them…the soul of the lost loved one and the soul of the person who grieves for them.”

“Listen to him,” Thomas heard a worker murmur behind him, “the senile old fart is going to cry.”

Another worker replied in a lowered voice, “Watch out or he’ll start shooting us.”

Thomas could hear it now…either later today or tomorrow, once the camera’s tape had been reviewed, Bao saying to him triumphantly, “Did you hear what happened to David?”

David’s termination was inevitable, and Thomas felt sorry for him, but in a way he was grateful. If any of his own thefts had been noticed, there was now a person to take the blame.

Of course, now it might prove more difficult to steal one of the prosthetic heads for himself, and his work was not yet finished.

~*~

It happened sometimes in autumn—an early snow—but it was only a light snow and Thomas was one who enjoyed walking even in driving blizzards. It was almost just an excuse for him to take the underground path home from work. Surely it wouldn’t be much warmer down there.

But of course, he had to be honest with himself that he was nervous his theft might already have been detected, and people were just waiting to catch him walking home with his heavier than usual shopping bag.

He dug out his flashlight and slipped through the bulkhead opening as always. As he descended the snow-dusted stairs his breath steamed, looking like ectoplasm churning before his face in the beam of his flashlight. He moved forward along the rails of the old trains that had once unloaded cargo down here, barely glancing about at the familiar refuse: a stack of rotting cardboard boxes filled with ceiling tiles for a repair job that never came, several metal trash cans filled to the brim with little pieces of coal intended for some long disused furnace, a chaotic pile of rusting dismantled machine parts. No teenagers partying, no homeless sheltering—just the one figure that stepped into view at the far end of this stretch of tunnel.

Startled, Thomas stopped in his tracks. His beam had begun waning recently, the flashlight overdue for fresh batteries, and so he only made out the barest outline of the figure in the murk. But it was standing directly in the path he was taking—neither advancing nor retreating, and not stepping to one side—in a stance that appeared challenging.

Thomas didn’t want to appear nervous to this person or to himself. He thought to ask, “Can I help you?” or something of that nature, but instead he found himself blurting, “Who are you?”

His voice echoed back to him: “
Who are you?
”

As if these words prompted the shadowy figure into action, it suddenly lunged forward and came running straight at him down the center of the rails, arms extended as if to seize him in an embrace. It loped along with an uneven, awkward gait.

“Hey! Hey!” Thomas said, trying to sound authoritative. But the figure kept rushing toward him, and every dream he had dreamed about his boyhood encounter in these tunnels crashed upon him like bricks in a collapsing wall.

Thomas lunged forward himself, but bolted in a new direction—at an angle toward the left-hand wall, where he recalled there was another set of stairs leading up to an old textile mill. He prayed he could reach those cement steps and pound up them into the open air before the running figure intercepted him.

His flashlight beam danced ahead of him wildly as he ran, so he couldn’t see the stranger advancing – just heard its frenzied limping approach—but only a few more feet remained before he reached the stairwell. He knew he would make it just a bit ahead of the stranger.

And he did, shining his light up at the bulkhead doors.

He had never used this bulkhead entrance in his adulthood, and maybe the situation had been different when he was a boy, but now he saw that this particular bulkhead still had its original metal doors—and that they were padlocked shut.

Terror passed through him like a cloud of liquid nitrogen. Thomas spun around as if he might still escape the dead end of the stairwell, but of course it was too late. His pursuer stood at the bottom step, blocking his escape. Crowding his back up against the locked metal doors, Thomas pointed his light directly at the stranger—now close enough to sufficiently illuminate.

Now Thomas understood the cause for the figure’s extreme limp: its left leg ended in a stump rather than a foot. But more than that, his confronter was lacking a head.

It wasn’t that Thomas’ fear faded away then, but other emotions pressed in alongside it. Tears rose to his eyes. A smile quivered on his lips. And this time he didn’t think of escape, as the headless stranger held out its arms to him.

~*~

He lifted his head with a start from the kitchen table, across which was spread a copy of the
Gosston Mirror
, and looked around his kitchen area with frantic eyes. Slowly he calmed himself, but found that he was gripping the table edge. Was it that odd smell in the air that had roused him from his doze, a smell like something burning? Maybe an electrical fire?

He vaguely recalled pulling his comfortable flannel bathrobe around his cold, shivering body. Seemed to recall scrabbling noises outside his apartment door, its knob rattling. He believed he had staggered to the door and called warily, “Who is it?” without a response, finally opening the door only to find the morning paper bound with elastic and hanging from his doorknob in a plastic bag.

He might have dismissed these blurred memories and lapses of unconsciousness – dismissed that before donning his robe he had awakened naked on the floor of his apartment – had he had too much to drink the night before. But he wasn’t a drinking man.

What time was it? Should he be at work now? The thought that he might be late to work sobered and sharpened his mind. He realized he didn’t even know what day it was, and located the front page of the disordered paper before him.

It seemed that his place of employment, Gale Therapeutic Appliances, had in fact made the front page of the
Gosston Mirror
.

The company’s security guard, sixty-four year old William Crampton, had caught an employee attempting to steal one of the plastic prosthetic appliances the company produced – in this case an adult model left foot. This employee had at first vehemently denied that he had possession of this article, at which time Mr. Crampton seized hold of the bag in which the appliance was concealed. A struggle ensued and the younger, larger employee was able to wrest his bag free and dart for the exit.

It was at this point that Mr. Crampton pulled his licensed handgun and fired twice, striking the employee in the back. The employee, forty-three year old Thomas Capgras, was pronounced dead at the scene.

“Killed a man for stealing a plastic foot,” he mumbled aloud, wagging his head. That crazy old fool; they had him in custody for it, too. And the other, the victim; he again said out loud, “Got himself killed over a plastic foot.”

His brow furrowed, then, and he scanned through the article again. He might have expected the thief to be David, joking around again, not this other man…this Thomas…

Mason involuntarily crushed the paper, wadded its inked words in his hands as if to unmake them. For a few moments he stared across his combination livingroom/kitchen, but focusing on nothing in particular. Vaguely he noted that smell in the air again—a smell like melted plastic.

Then, reluctantly, hesitantly, he pushed his chair back from the table a bit. Just enough that he could look beneath it.

And Mason saw that his left leg ended in a stump instead of a foot.

By John Langan

I

The morning after the police found the final piece of Linus Price, Wrighton Smythe, his frequent editor and occasional friend, opened the front door of his apartment and saw a manila folder lying on his doormat. With a sigh, Smythe bent to pick it up. It appeared his morning paper and cruller were going to have to be delayed. He made no effort to conceal his address, and it was not unheard of for aspiring writers to locate it and mail him their efforts; although a good few years had passed since anyone had gone so far as to hand-deliver their work. This manuscript was novel-thick, the folder bound to it with a pair of heavy pink rubber bands. There was no writing on either the front of the folder or the back. Smythe carried the delivery into his apartment, to the round table in his undersized living room upon which he placed the manuscripts awaiting his review. A modest pile of stories from writers well-established rose on the right side of the table; a pair of considerably-taller stacks from writers unknown loomed on the left. In between was a space, temporarily empty, where Smythe set whatever work was currently under his review. A pair of Pilot Precise V7 pens—blue ink—and a pad of yellow Post-It notes marked the top of what Smythe referred to as the operating theater. He dropped the new manuscript onto the table. Was it worth unwrapping? The odds were against it; though it was in exactly this way that Smythe had encountered Linus Price’s first collection of stories, in a rectangular box wound about with packing tape. A spasm of grief and nostalgia pushed his fingers under the rubber bands, which he attempted to slide up and off the folder, but which resisted his efforts as if clinging to it. He had to pull the manuscript one way and the rubber bands the other before they slithered off, snapping his fingers as they released. “Shit!” Smythe waved his hand, dropping the rubber bands, which twisted on the carpet. He opened the folder, and on the top sheet of paper, read