Puppet Graveyard

17

He hit Regis with incredible force, the shotgun flying from his hands and tumbling down the stairs as he himself was slammed into the wall, right next to the gutshot body of his brother. Piggy’s jaws clamped around his ankle and bit down with a moist snapping of bone.

Kitty saw it happen.

She fell, panting and staring and oddly numb. She did not think anything or feel anything. All that was gone. Fear was a memory and now she was insane, too, so the playing field was leveled. Snakes do not fear other snakes.

Piggy.

Fucking Piggy.

No more pretense of a dummy, he came walking down the hallway toward her. And what a walk: stiff-legged, shaking, clownish. Kitty lay there, hearing the dummy coming, click-clack, click-clack. He brought the black stink of rifled coffins and open graves, a miasmic stench of buried things roiling with worms. When he was close, very close, so close she could see that the face was not painted on, but maybe rubber or leathery flesh or both, Piggy smiled, lips pulling away from yellowed teeth. Biting teeth.

“Kitty, Kitty, Kitty,” he called out in a dust-dry, cracking voice. “You made my plans go all shitty. So now I’m going to rape you just a little bitty. I’m going to bite your titties and then I’ll chew on your slitty. That’s what I’m going to do to my pretty little Kitty.”

The dummy reached down for her with those skeletonized fingers, the eyes blazing with a cold intelligence that was bitter and noxious. “You killed little Baby Doll. You killed little Baby Doll and she’d waited so long, long, long to be born… just as we all waited so long…”

And then Kitty came up with a scream, flattening the dummy, feeling it under her, writhing and flopping, clawing and snapping its jaws. But she was too smart for it, far too smart and that evil voice did everything it could to terrify her. It became the voice of her dead mother and then Gloria, then a sniffling baby and a slithering thing and a cackling witch and a slobbering rabid dog. Its face became the faces of corpses, of child-eating things and breathing things from closets, it took on a goatish visage and then it was just Piggy. Piggy, eyes yellow and baleful, fighting and screeching and trying to bite her, but she was too strong.

Taking the dummy by the ankles, Kitty swung it into the wall.

And then again and again and again.

Most of its face was shattered by then, its hinged lower jaw hanging by a thread of wire. Kitty dragged it down the steps and into the sitting room. And this is when the thing that occupied the corpse-dummy began to roar and thrash. And that’s how Kitty knew it was afraid.

Really afraid.

Because there was one thing it feared more than anything else and that was being expelled back into the formless, drifting blackness it had come from. That’s why she dumped it in the trunk and snapped the lid shut, set the locks.

It was trapped and it knew it.

Kitty dragged the trunk out the door, thinking of the darkest, deepest, coldest place she could deposit it. She helped Regis out to his car and put the dummy’s trunk in the back. Before she left, she made sure the house was burning bright.

In the backseat, the dummy shrieked and clawed inside the trunk.

“What’re you going to do with it?” Regis asked, pulling out a cigarette, each bump the car went over making him grimace.

“I want to put it somewhere very dark. Where that thing can be alone with itself for an eternity,” Kitty said.

Regis smiled. “I know of a flooded quarry out in the middle of nowhere. About two-hundred feet deep if it’s an inch.”

“Your leg?”

“Can wait. First things first.”

Kitty drove out of the city. She did not think she would smile again for some time to come, but inside, where it mattered, she was grinning with immense satisfaction. Gloria was at peace now.