Burnt Black Suns: A Collection of Weird Tales (12 page)

Darkness receded once more, and Toth’s driver was standing in the puppet maker’s workshop, staring at the multiple-armed thing that hung by wires. He grinned madly and incessantly at the puppet maker’s discomfort—his smile too large, too toothy; the sheer size making the old man’s head swim. Yet to look away was to forget its foulness, the immensity of the horror impossible to contain. All the puppet maker could recall of the driver’s face were flashes—cheeks too red, mouth edged with shadows as though painted on. But it was the eyes that were worst. They were as dark and as dead as a doll’s. The puppet maker could not bear them again, instead diverting his gaze to the marionette hanging before him.

Ropes intermingled with tendrils, disguising its supports. In his waking visions, the puppet maker saw it hover above the ground like a spirit, obeying some law of physics that had no currency on the mortal plane. It had been near-impossible to recreate, but the puppet maker had managed it, had carved his dreams from reality; but, like a dream, once it was fully imagined he was no longer the master of it. It could no longer be controlled. Had he any other choice, he would not have spoken to the driver, but it was clear in the light of day that alone he was powerless to relocate the marionette to Toth’s towncar. He wondered what he had expected: simply to
ask
the marionette to stand and follow them out to the car? How could it climb, he wondered, when it had nothing one might mistake for legs?

He summoned his courage and closed his eyes.

“I don’t think I can lift it. I need you to do it.”

The driver said nothing. The smile did not leave his terrifying visage. He simply raised his hands and clawed at the marionette until he was able to release it from its mooring.

Up the stairs, one heavy footstep at a time, the driver carried the marionette, and the puppet maker swayed as he tried to follow behind, moving far slower with knotted cane in hand. He reached the top in time to see his creation being led to the trunk of the car.

“No!” he called out, and the driver stopped and looked back. The puppet maker averted his eyes in panic. “I need—I have to sit with it. To make sure nothing happens to it.” Even as the breathless words spilled from his mouth, the puppet maker could not believe he had uttered them. “Please, put it on the backseat.” The driver acquiesced, for when the puppet maker looked up the thing’s bulbous head was visible in the rear window, and the driver’s hidden behind the windshield visor.

It was not long before the puppet maker became suspicious the driver was taking yet another different route. The mist did not approach quite as early as before, but when it did it appeared twice as thick. Ever-present, it travelled backward in his memory to perpetually coat the fringes of the town, creeping from the distant river and spreading to claim as much ground as it could. It was intractable, and every day it spread further and further across the landscape. Much like the thing that sat beside him, the puppet maker mused, retrieving the small vial of pills from his pocket. The marionette had sprung from his dreams so swiftly he had not consciously considered it until that moment. It was far more disturbing than he had initially realized, and yet it was not so far from human that one could not recognize the touch of its creator in its form. It was shaped like some sort of future mutation, foretelling where humanity might go; or perhaps like some relic of the far distant past, long before man’s ancestors had settled upon the planet. The puppet maker shivered, and found the vial in his hand shaking as he watched the marionette vacantly stare forward.

They seemed to drive forever, the puppet maker’s medication making it increasingly difficult to maintain a grip on where he was. The drone of the road beneath the wheels was a chitter-fueled grumble that only further intensified his disconnectedness within the empty sea of white beyond the windows. Movement flickered in the corner of the puppet maker’s eyes, but when he turned he found the driver had not moved, and the oversized marionette had not turned his way. His throat felt dry, the sense of confusion and time loss disorienting. Everything toppled around him, pills spilling from his hand as he struggled to hold onto what was real. He closed his eyelids tight, squeezed them until sparks ignited, and twisted his fingers around his cane. The road was louder, yet everything else more muffled, and the puppet maker wondered how much longer he was for this world.

Something brushed his leg. Startled, he opened his eyelids to find that one of the marionette’s many loose hands had crept across the seat toward him. The puppet maker hesitated before reaching to push it away. He then bent over and, as best he could, collected those pills he could reach from the towncar’s floor. When he sat again, short of breath and momentarily dazed, it was clear everything had shifted, though so imperceptibly he could not be sure to what extent. He rubbed his eyes with one free hand, the other on the head of his cane should he need it.

In the mist beyond the windows the faint outline of Dr. Toth’s estate materialized as a vision. The puppet maker wondered if the car had stopped, or if time no longer obeyed any rules. The driver’s wide, unknowable face was of no comfort when it turned. The puppet maker could not bear to look at it, not in his condition. Not while his terror was rising.

“How—how long have we been here?” he mumbled. The driver remained silent, smiled that same plastic smile, while the puppet maker shuffled on the seat. “Please—” he whispered. “Help me.” He held his cane tight with arthritic claws.

The driver’s mouths trembled as though to speak. But instead he put a hand on the towncar’s door and pushed it open. It creaked on rusty hinges. The other hands eased him from the car and he stepped out into the mist. Instantly, he was enveloped by the thick pea-soup world. The puppet maker waited, hugging his cane, but the driver did not return. It was as if the sky had torn him from the earth.

The marionette beside him shifted on the seat, and the puppet maker recoiled. From the corner of the car he stared, waiting for it to move again, willing it to if only to prove his sanity was intact, and yet it did nothing more than awkwardly collapse. A memory long buried resurfaced, a single image from an indeterminate time. Some frozen and vast wasteland city, its aisles and streets and causeways filled with lumbering shadows, all moving in a single but unfathomable direction. The image lasted an instant, but when it dissipated he found the creature had somehow shifted position again and appeared closer to the puppet maker than it had been before.

The old man shrank further, uncomfortable that he and it were trapped together in the endless dense fog. Empty plastic eyes stared upward, mechanical mouthparts approximated a sardonic smile. The lifeless marionette born from his dreams unnerved him as it never had during its construction. He tried to push it with his cane to the farthest side of the seat, but its weight was too much for him, and all the old puppet maker managed to do was unbalance it. The great marionette slowly sank, leaning sideways as it fell. The old man recoiled, scrambling to the edge of the car, frantically reaching for the handle of the door with his knotted hands. He put what little weight he had against the door and pushed. There was the squeak of hinges as the marionette leered, moving to overtake him, but the old man was able to tumble out of the car before the creature’s insectan form met his own. The mist muffled the sound of the door as it slammed shut behind him.

He fled as quickly as his cane allowed, fire burning in his chest, his lungs, his hands. He wanted to put as much space between him and his foul creation as possible, and did not have to travel far before the half-formed silhouette of Dr. Toth’s house rose beyond, shrouded behind the veil of mist. With caution he kept the widest berth of the towncar and advanced on the apparition, hoping his mere observation would render it solid.

It was with no small relief that he laid his fingers on the ornate brick and felt its rough surface. The house was real, yet there was something more, something ineffable about the place—a sense of
déjà vu
that went beyond what his memories held. He went to knock upon the door, only to realize it was slightly ajar. He pushed it with the head of his cane until the door swung on its creaking hinges, then after a quick glance behind him he hobbled inside.

It was much warmer in the house, yet the puppet maker held no hope the mist’s chill would dissipate. He reached into the pocket of his coat with a shriveled and cracked hand and found instead of his pills the creased letter Dr. Toth had sent him. He stared at it, trying to recall how it had come to be there, wondering if the driver had somehow swapped it out when the puppet maker had dropped his medication. It was impossible, and yet if not the driver then who? The puppet maker unfolded the letter and carefully read it again, forcing the marks to form words that might make sense in a way they had not previously. The handwriting seemed easier to decipher, which only unnerved him further. There was something in his memory waiting just out of reach, and as he tried to understand what it might be the world wavered around him, his vision fading at the edges.

He was so close. He felt it. Felt on the verge of understanding. That unexpected note was the key, its familiar handwriting teasing his memory. He staggered forward into the disarrayed room, reached out spasmodically for a seat as his world spun. His vision turned black, his swollen tongue filled his dry mouth, but he also felt in that darkness something else, some truth struggling to be free. He shakily brought the letter back into fading view. The characters danced, squirmed, then fit together in a way they had not before. The fog cleared, and he became untethered by the impossible truth.

The puppet maker eyed the room frantically, letter clutched in his hand, wanting nothing less than to be there, be alive, unable to accept what he had realized. Nothing made sense, and yet everything he saw confirmed the truth. The surplus of abandoned furniture, the shape of the tables and chairs—everything in his reality screamed its true nature. He lifted his cane, half expecting it to transform at his touch, and navigated as quickly as he could around the debris that lay between him and the stairway to the floor above.

It was all as he remembered it, but now that memory took on a terrifying aspect. He could feel his mind scrambling to shut itself down, but he refused to let it, desperate for some sign, any sign, that the impossible was wrong. His cane struck each step as he ascended, compounding similar scores already present in the wooden treads, while his soft feet padded behind. When the puppet maker reached the top, when he travelled the long hallway and found Dr. Toth’s bedroom door, it too was wide open, and the foreboding atmosphere in the air was almost too much for him. He wondered if he had already died, and if he were already in some sort of unknowable hell.

The skittering sound from the floor beneath told him he was wrong, but he could not concentrate on it. His mind racing, he closed his eyes, but it did not slow the barrage of questions that consumed him. How could any of it be true? Had the driver not introduced him to Toth? The puppet maker struggled to remember. Flashes of conversations returned to him, the bizarre comments by Toth taking on horrible new meanings. Even the clicks and whirrs he had once taken for the sound of the light switch could not have been that, for as he stood in the bedroom the light came up, and the sound was like nothing he could remember.

“Dr. Toth?”

The room was large and bore the signs of opulence left to dereliction. Red velvet curtains had fallen from their rod to lay crumpled on the floor, dust muting them until they were as grey as the world. Their absence revealed a window that framed an endless sea of white, and before that a sagging four-poster bed, the remains of its canopy hanging overhead like forgotten cobwebs. A step closer revealed the bed was still occupied, the motionless figure draped in a tangle of sheets and blankets. The room’s air was nearly unbreathable, filled with motes of disturbed dust and the stale odor of inevitability.

“Dr. Toth? Is that you?”

He hazarded another step forward.

“Dr. Toth?”

But the figure in the bed did not respond. There was no movement at all as the puppet maker carefully advanced, his cane a slow metronome on the wood of the floor. He watched the shape closely, searching for some indication of life, praying it was the case. For if Toth was not—

“Dr. Toth?”

The figure was wrapped head-to-toe in musty sheets. It did not move, no matter how long the puppet maker stared. He swallowed, then blinked away the tears that had formed and wiped his face with his jittering hand. His thoughts were in tumult—crashing into one another, swirling and expanding to flood his senses. He could not be sure if what he witnessed was real or some delusional half-dream from which he could not awake, one that receded from reality at an accelerated pace. The old puppet maker reached out his trembling hand and peeled back the musty sheets. He knew what was underneath them; he always had. What he did not know until that moment was whether he had the courage to gaze beneath anyway. And once he did, his reeling mind could not contain the entirety of his regret.

A click. A recorded voice. Distorted but unmistakable, it emanated from the lifeless shell lying upon the bed.

“You do not belong here.”

Ropes hung from its limbs and draped over the sides of the mattress. Its wooden head was enormous, coated in a varnish that had beaded as it dried to mimic sweat. Inhuman eyes stared blankly upward.

“What is this?” he muttered. “Dr. Toth?”

“You should not be here,” the recording repeated. “Everything will be compromised.”

“I don’t—” the old puppet maker stammered, shook his head, searched for the words. “How are you doing this? That voice—” he cried, unable to understand. “That voice—” he repeated, trying to keep from collapsing under the weight of all that had come to bear on him. “Where is the recording coming from? How are you doing this?”