Wildcards

STRINGS

by Stephen Leigh

The death of Andrea Whitman was entirely Puppetman 's doing. Without his powers, the sullen lust that a retarded boy of fourteen felt for a younger neighbor girl would never have been fired into a molten white fury. By himself, Roger Pellman would never have lured Andrea into the woods behind Sacred Heart School in the suburbs of Cincinnati, and there ripped the clothing from the terrified girl. He would never have thrust that strange hardness into Andrea until he felt a sagging, powerful release. He would never have looked down at the child and the trickle of dark blood between her thighs and felt a compelling disgust that made him grasp the large flat rock alongside them. He would never have used that stone to bludgeon Andrea's blond head into an unrecognizable pulp of torn flesh and splintered bone. He would never have gone home with her gore splattered over his naked body.

Roger Pellman would have done none of that if Puppetman had not been hiding in the recesses of poor Roger's damaged mind, feeding on the emotions he found there, manipulating the boy and amplifying the adolescent fever that wracked the body. Roger's mind was weak and malleable and open; Puppetman's rape of it was no less brutal than what Roger did to Andrea.

Puppetman was eleven. He hated Andrea, hated her with the horrible anger of a spoiled child, hated her for having betrayed and humiliated him. Puppetman was the revenge fantasy of a boy infected with the wild card virus, a boy who'd made the mistake of confessing to Andrea his affection for her. Perhaps, he'd told the older girl, they might one day marry. Andrea's eyes had gone wide at that and she'd run away from him giggling. He'd begun to hear the mocking whispers the very next day at school, and he knew even as the flush burned in his cheeks that she'd told all her friends. Told everyone.

When Roger Pellman tore away Andrea's virginity, Puppetman had felt the faint stirring of that heat himself. He'd shuddered with Roger's orgasm; when the boy slammed the rock into the girl's weeping face, when he'd heard the dull crack of bone, Puppetman had gasped. He staggered with the pleasure that coursed through him.

Safe in his own room, a quarter-mile away.

His overwhelming response to that first murder frightened him at the same time that it drew him. For months afterward, he was slow to utilize that power, afraid to be so rapturously out of control again. But like all forbidden things, the urge coerced him. In the next five years, for various reasons, Puppetman would emerge and kill seven times more.

He thought of that power as an entity apart from himself. Hidden, he was Puppetman-a lacing of strings dangling from his invisible fingers, his collection of grotesque dolls capering at the ends.