26 Apr The Marionette Hour

Part I

Cal never remembered falling asleep anymore.

Mornings came without warning, abrupt and indifferent, as if someone had flipped a switch in the middle of a dream he couldn’t recall. He’d surface slowly to the sputtering rattle of the window fan grinding in its rusted frame, or the chill of air curling through the gaps in the siding, dragging him up from a depth he didn’t choose to leave.

That morning began like the others—except something felt off. The air carried the usual scent of sawdust, but beneath it lingered a sharper odor, something acrid and faintly metallic. Varnish, maybe. Or oil that had warmed too long in the sun.

He stared at the ceiling, letting the ache in his knees settle before sitting up. When he reached for his glasses, his hand swept a half-empty pill bottle off the nightstand. It clattered to the floor, spinning briefly before toppling over. He slipped the glasses on with a sigh. The world came back into focus, and with it, a quiet nausea rose in his gut.

They had moved again.

Six puppets stood arranged in a semicircle near the workshop sink, their limbs contorted into unnatural poses. They lacked strings, yet each figure had been frozen mid-gesture, as though someone had interrupted a performance and left the cast suspended in silence. One had its jaw extended unnaturally, the head twisted until its chin nearly pointed backward. Another knelt with its legs folded awkwardly, one arm lifted toward the ceiling as if seeking revelation in a room without answers.

Cal stiffened.

He hadn’t touched them since Wednesday. He was sure of it.

He rose carefully, stepping over the marionette that blocked his doorway. It was one of his older models, carved from cypress and dressed in a worn conductor’s cap. Its hands had been repositioned—palms up, resting beside its torso, as though it had been offering something. Or asking for mercy.

He lifted it and set it gently on the hallway bench, brushing off none of the dust clinging to its back. His slippers made no sound as he shuffled to the kitchenette, each motion governed more by muscle memory than purpose. Kettle on. Mug retrieved. Instant coffee. One spoon of sugar. Two, because the day already felt wrong.

By the time he returned to the studio with the chipped mug, he couldn’t avoid looking at them. The puppets. They looked even more lifeless than usual when arranged this way, like mute spectators daring him to remember whether he had placed them there himself. He’d grown used to small lapses—keys in the freezer, lights left on. Age had been whittling away at his short-term memory for years. Still, this felt different. This felt orchestrated.

He turned his back on them and fixed his gaze on the shelf of tools above the bench. He needed something repetitive, something familiar—something to occupy his hands and pull his focus away from the quiet nausea growing beneath his ribs.

That was when the doorbell rang.

The sound jolted him. His grip on the mug tightened, nearly slipping. Visitors had become rare, and the bell hadn’t worked properly in months. It buzzed when pressed, a choking stutter instead of a chime.

He walked slowly to the front door and peered through the peephole.

Janine.

Of course.

He unlatched the locks and opened the door halfway. “You picked a hell of a time.”

Janine raised a brow. “I texted you yesterday. Twice. Still using that brick of a phone?”

“I charged it last week.”

“That explains it.” She brushed past him into the house, carrying a grocery bag in one hand. “You look like hell, by the way.”

Cal closed the door and relocked it, more out of habit than anything else. “Nice to see you, too.”

She didn’t answer right away. She set the bag on the counter, pulled out two cans of soup, a loaf of bread, and a six-pack of something organic that promised better sleep. “You eating anything that doesn’t require a tetanus shot?”

He scratched at the stubble on his chin. “Define expired.”

She gave him a look. “You smell like turpentine and midlife crisis.”

“I’ve been working.”

“That what you call it?” She nodded toward the studio. “I saw the freak show on my way in.”

Cal’s jaw tensed. “They weren’t like that when I went to bed.”

“Oh, great. Haunted puppets now.”

“I’m serious.”

She crossed her arms. “Cal, you need sleep. The kind where you don’t wake up wondering who arranged your dolls for a séance.”

He ran a hand through his graying hair and sighed. “I don’t think it’s just that.”

Janine’s expression shifted. She studied him more closely, her eyes narrowing. “You haven’t had another one of those fugue episodes, have you?”

“No.”

“Because you’re not exactly convincing me otherwise.”

“I’ve been locking the doors. Avoiding the studio at night. I even left myself a note.”

“And?”

“The note was gone the next morning. Replaced with a sketch.”

Janine hesitated. “A sketch of what?”

He crossed the room and opened a drawer near the window. Inside sat a yellowed napkin, torn at one corner. He handed it to her without a word.

She unfolded it and recoiled slightly. “Jesus.”

The drawing looked like something scrawled by a child with a heavy hand. One of his puppets knelt beside a sleeping man. Dangling from the puppet’s wooden fingers was a smaller marionette—its strings held above the man’s chest.

“I didn’t draw that,” Cal said quietly.

Janine folded the napkin again, tighter this time. “You need help.”

“I need answers.”

“From what? A bunch of haunted plywood?”

He didn’t respond. The silence stretched until Janine broke it with a sigh. “Look… maybe it’s stress. Or maybe your meds are messing with your sleep. But I don’t like where this is going.”

“I set up a camera last night,” he said.

“What kind?”

“Old camcorder. Motion-activated. It’s still recording.”

“You haven’t checked it?”

“Not yet. I don’t know if I want to.”

“You’re afraid of your own footage?”

“I’m afraid it’ll make sense.”

She stepped back, placing her hands on her hips. “Okay. I’ve got a shift in an hour. But tomorrow, I’m coming back. We’ll watch it together. Sound good?”

Cal nodded.

“And until then—don’t go carving yourself any new ‘friends,’ alright?”

He managed a faint smile. “No promises.”

She kissed his forehead before heading for the door, and then paused. “One more thing.”

“What?”

“That big one in the glass case… I thought you got rid of him.”

Cal stiffened. “I didn’t.”

“Well, he’s not in the case anymore.”

He turned to the studio. The display that once held Mr. Wiggles now stood open, the glass door hanging slightly ajar.

“I never opened it,” he said.

Janine met his eyes, her voice lower now. “Then you’d better hope you’re sleepwalking. Because if you’re not…”

She didn’t finish the sentence.

The door closed behind her. Cal stood staring at the empty case, unmoving.

Part II

The camera hadn’t moved. Cal had checked it twice already, but each time he returned to the studio, it remained exactly where he had left it—mounted on a rusted tripod in the far corner, aimed toward the workbench and the rows of puppets lined up beneath the shelves.

The LED light blinked steadily. The tape was full.

He hesitated, then reached forward and pressed rewind. The camcorder whirred, its internal gears rasping faintly in the stillness. He sat down in the nearest chair, suddenly hyperaware of every sound the house made in its silence—the faint wheeze of the floorboards beneath him, the mechanical hum of the fridge beyond the doorway, the whisper of tree branches brushing against the boarded-up window.

When the tape reached its beginning, he pressed play.

At first, only static filled the screen, followed by a grayscale image of the studio bathed in the harsh contrast of the infrared lens. The cluttered shelves and workbench glowed in pale shades of white, while deeper shadows pooled in the corners. At 10:03 p.m., he watched himself shuffle into frame, switch off the lights, and retreat toward the bedroom. The room remained perfectly still for hours afterward, motionless and untouched.

Until 2:37 a.m.

The timestamp changed.

Something moved.

At first, it appeared as a flicker near the edge of the frame—just a shadow. But then the figure became clearer: it was him. Or something wearing his face.

Cal watched, unmoving, as the doppelgänger stepped into the frame with a stiff, unnatural gait. Its bare feet dragged slightly on the hardwood. Its head hung at an awkward tilt, jaw loose, arms limp at its sides. When it reached the center of the room, it raised both arms slowly, as if conducting a silent performance.

One by one, the puppets responded.

They didn’t snap upright or spring into motion. Instead, they were guided. Lifted by something unseen, their limbs pulled gently into place. One puppet was dragged across the floor and posed on the bench in a cruciform sprawl. Another was placed in the rafters by the window, suspended by its own cords and left to spin slowly. Throughout it all, the version of Cal on the screen remained silent, his eyes glassy and unfocused, his body swaying in rhythm with some invisible current.

The timestamp flickered again.

3:12 a.m.

Now all the puppets had been positioned. Their stances were expressive but nonsensical—frozen mid-action in some surreal, unknowable drama. Without warning, the figure turned to face the camera.

It smiled.

The screen erupted in static.

Cal lunged forward, paused the tape, and then rewound. He scrubbed backward frame by frame until the moment the intruder entered the studio. Every movement repeated itself in grim silence. The thing drifted across the floor, gently animating the puppets as though born to the role.

The footage offered no explanations—only deeper confusion. The longer he stared, the more distant he felt from the man on the screen.

He stopped the tape and pushed himself up from the chair. His hands trembled. He crossed the hallway in three unstable strides and threw open the bedroom door. His sheets were undisturbed. The pillows sat exactly where he had left them. On the dresser opposite the bed, the second camcorder still blinked red, its light steady.

He approached, rewound the tape, and pressed play.

This footage showed him sleeping—all night.

His body remained still, nestled beneath the covers, unbothered and unmoving. He watched himself lie there with mouth slack and chest rising in slow, rhythmic intervals. The timestamp matched the hours from the first tape.

There had been no sleepwalking. No midnight excursions.

He watched the footage again. Then a third time. He searched the shadows for movement, any subtle twitch of a limb or flicker of light that might suggest he had left the bed, but there was nothing.

And yet, on the other tape—

A chill ran along his arms. He reached for the thermostat and saw it still read sixty-eight degrees, though the air had turned sharply cold. A draft curled under the doorframe.

Then he saw the blood.

A thin, dried trail marked the inside of his forearm, starting just below the elbow and descending in narrow lines toward his wrist. He rolled up his sleeve, revealing three shallow scratches etched into the skin. Each was curved and evenly spaced, as though carved by something small but precise.

He felt no pain.

He stumbled into the kitchen, disoriented. The microwave clock read 9:02 a.m.

He returned to the studio and pressed play on the first camcorder, but the footage had changed. Instead of static, the screen now displayed a frozen image—his own face, pressed close to the lens. His eyes stared half-lidded and dull, the expression vacant.

He pressed the eject button.

Nothing happened.

He powered the camcorder off.

The screen remained lit.

He pulled the plug from the wall.

Still, the image remained.

He took a step back, watching in disbelief as the image began to recede. It zoomed out, not with any mechanical function he recognized, but as if something behind the screen were pulling away from him. The room came back into view—only the puppets were no longer in their previous positions.

Each one had turned.

They were facing him.

With a gasp, he swatted the camcorder off the table. It crashed to the floor and shattered, shards of plastic skittering across the wood. Yet the room remained silent. No sparks. No smoke. Only the crackle of broken plastic in the silence.

Then he heard something shift above him.

He looked up.

Mr. Wiggles perched on the crossbeam overhead.

Cal hadn’t placed him there. He knew that much. The puppet’s limbs hung loosely, bent at unnatural angles that suggested flexibility far beyond what Cal had built. Its porcelain face, cracked along the left side, gazed down at him with wide, unblinking eyes. The button pupils seemed aligned with uncanny precision, as though sight were a possibility.

There were no strings.

Still, it held its place.

Cal backed away, stopping just short of the hallway.

The bedroom door had opened.

He had closed it earlier. He was certain.

Faint static drifted from within.

He nudged the door with his foot. It creaked inward, revealing an emptied space.

Both camcorders were gone.

The tripod had fallen sideways. Drawers were pulled open. The bedspread had been twisted into a grotesque shape resembling a marionette—its limbs formed from pillows, its face crudely stitched with black thread into a mocking caricature.

A square of white paper jutted from the flannel shirt draped over its chest.

He pulled it free.

Another drawing.

The lines were childlike again, drawn with heavy pressure. This one depicted a man suspended by strings, held aloft by four puppets. Each bore Cal’s face. Above them, in the corner of the page, a fifth figure loomed—featureless and tall, with no eyes and only hands.

He dropped the paper and fled the room.

The kitchen light flickered when he entered. He flipped the switch off and then back on. The fridge gave a weak hum before falling silent again.

He checked the clock.

Still 9:02 a.m.

He stopped in place.

Something in his chest tightened—not pain, but a kind of internal bracing, like his body understood something before his mind could process it.

He unlocked the front door and opened it, desperate for daylight.

But the world outside had turned to night.

There were no streetlamps. No porch lights from the neighbors. Not even the sound of crickets or wind. Only a thick, unnatural darkness stretching in every direction.

He slammed the door shut and turned to face the hallway.

A figure stood at the far end.

It was him—or something wearing him. Its posture mirrored his own, but the expression was wrong. The head tilted slightly to one side, as if examining him with detached amusement. The mouth stretched into a grin that felt practiced.

The lights dimmed, and the hallway vanished into shadow.

Part III

Janine returned two days later.

At least, she believed it had been two days. Her phone confirmed the date, but the moment she stepped inside Cal’s house, time no longer felt trustworthy. A film of dust coated every surface. The air inside had grown uncomfortably warm, too much for early October, as if someone had cranked the heat and forgotten to adjust it. The floorboards groaned beneath her feet—not from age alone, but with a kind of protest, as though reluctant to bear weight again.

She called his name once from the kitchen, then again as she moved down the hallway, but got no response.

The studio door stood ajar. That was new.

She pushed it open and stopped.

The puppets had been rearranged.

They now stood unaided, balanced in positions that defied gravity and intention. One sat on the bench with its legs dangling, head tilted slightly downward. Another stood poised on tiptoe near the closet door, its face turned as though eavesdropping. In the center of the room, occupying the brightest circle of light from the overhead lamp, sat Mr. Wiggles.

Janine stared.

The puppet wore its usual dusty red vest and frayed bowtie. Its cracked porcelain face reflected just enough light to exaggerate its expression, which was neither smiling nor neutral, but something else—an intent that was not its own. Though the arms hung limply at its sides, the posture seemed deliberate. As though it had been waiting.

“Cal?” she called again.

From the bedroom came a rasp, rough and low. “Back here.”

She followed the sound and found him on the floor. His eyes were red and bleary, his cheek smeared with ink. He hadn’t shaved. His hands trembled as she helped him sit upright.

“You’ve been sleeping on the floor?”

“I don’t sleep,” he replied.

Janine frowned and looked him over more carefully. “You’re bleeding again.”

He followed her gaze and lifted his left hand. Thin cuts marked the back of it—shallow, parallel lines that looked as though they’d been made by twine or wire.

“I didn’t do it,” he said. “I haven’t even entered the studio. I’ve been locking the door. Hiding the keys.”

“They’re unlocked now.”

Cal nodded, but not in agreement. It was more like a gesture of resignation. “They unlock themselves.”

Janine narrowed her eyes. “That’s not how locks work.”

He met her gaze, and for the first time, she noticed something had changed in his expression. It wasn’t exhaustion, though that lingered in his posture. It wasn’t fear, either. What she saw was something hollowed out. A recognition of something beyond his control.

“I need to show you the tape,” he said.

They returned to the studio. He loaded the footage with fingers that barely responded to his commands. The camcorder still functioned, despite the visible damage to its casing. One side had cracked, and several buttons were unresponsive, but it still recognized power. A tangled mess of flash drives covered the workbench. He sorted through them until he found the most recent.

Janine watched in silence as he inserted it into a USB hub.

The file opened on the laptop. The video began with the same static grayscale framing: the studio at night, pale in infrared. The furniture appeared spectral beneath the lens, and nothing moved for several minutes.

Then the shadows thickened, darkness gathering in the corners until it took shape—and one at a time, the puppets began to lift.

There were no strings.

They rose like bodies in water, as though buoyed by something unseen. Mr. Wiggles moved first. His arms raised slowly in a gesture that resembled invocation. The others followed. A dozen in total. They turned in unison, all facing the closed door to Cal’s bedroom.

Then he entered the frame.

Janine leaned forward. “Is that you?”

Cal remained silent.

The figure resembled him. It wore his clothes and moved like someone mimicking a familiar rhythm. But its proportions were subtly wrong. The neck appeared too long, the limbs too rigid, and the face—though nearly identical—held no spark of recognition. Its expression was flat, like a mask that had forgotten how to animate emotion.

The figure raised both arms.

The puppets danced.

There was no grace in their movement. Their limbs jerked and twisted in sharp, erratic motions, snapping into place like broken clockwork. One puppet’s leg rotated unnaturally, bending backward at the knee until the joint cracked with visible stress.

Janine flinched.

The figure paused. Its head rotated toward the camera.

It smiled.

The smile matched Cal’s in shape, but not in meaning. The eyes were different.

Then the screen went black.

Janine pressed her palms together, trying to still the tremor in her fingers. “That wasn’t a loop.”

“No,” Cal said.

“That wasn’t a dream. Or sleepwalking. Or some kind of episode.”

“I told you.”

She turned to him. “How many of these have you watched?”

“All of them,” he said quietly. “They’re never the same. Every time I play one, something changes. The puppets are arranged differently. Sometimes, a few are missing. Sometimes, I’m not the one in the video.”

Her voice dropped. “What are you saying?”

“I think the tapes are lying.”

Janine stared at him. “Lying how?”

He stood and walked slowly to the closet. Beneath a pile of cloth and broken marionette parts, he pulled out a thick sketchpad and returned to the desk. Every page was filled.

He opened it and flipped through the drawings.

Each one depicted a different layout of the studio.

In some, the puppets gathered around a single chair. In others, they climbed the walls or hung upside down from the rafters. One showed Cal himself suspended from the ceiling by the same strings he had used on them.

“I started sketching what I saw after each tape,” he explained. “Trying to keep track of what was real and what changed. I thought if I documented it, I could prove something. Or at least see a pattern.”

Janine turned to the final page.

It was mostly blank. Only one line had been written near the center, in tight, angular script.

THE SHOW MUST GO ON.

She stepped back from the desk. “You think you’re being made to perform.”

“I know I am.”

“And these changes—what are they, rewrites?”

He let out a short, bitter laugh. “Call it direction.”

She glanced toward the camcorder. Its recording light blinked red.

“You need to leave this house,” she said. “Stay with me for a few days. I can call one of my colleagues—someone who specializes in parasomnias and disassociation. Maybe it’s something neurological. We can rule that out before—”

“I can’t leave,” he said flatly. “It follows me.”

Her expression darkened. “What does that mean?”

“I went out last week. Just to get sleep aids. I thought if I broke the pattern, it might stop. But when I came back, the puppets had moved again. That night, I checked the front-facing camera on my phone.”

“And?”

“I was in the back seat.”

Janine froze. “That isn’t possible.”

“Nothing about this is.”

He moved toward the far corner of the room where Mr. Wiggles still sat beneath the lamp. The puppet remained motionless, its cracked face catching just enough light to reflect a distorted smile.

“Last night,” Cal said, “I dreamed I was him.”

Janine took a step closer. “What do you mean?”

“I was inside his body. Not like a costume. Like I was watching from behind his eyes. I couldn’t move, but I felt him moving me. Like he was the puppeteer, and I was the puppet.”

He turned toward her. His voice had dropped to a whisper, hoarse and dry.

“And I could hear myself screaming.”

She reached for his arm. “Cal, please. You’re not safe here. Come with me. Just for a night or two. We’ll figure this out. Together.”

He hesitated.

Then nodded once.

“All right.”

Janine exhaled. Relief passed over her face.

“But before I go,” he added, “I want to watch one more tape.”

Part IV

Cal insisted on watching the final tape alone.

Janine argued at first. She offered to sit beside him, to keep him grounded in something real, but he refused. He explained, not unkindly, that whatever was happening had already warped the edges of reality. If someone else remained in the room while he watched, he feared the truth might be diluted—reshaped to accommodate the presence of a witness. He needed to see it clearly, even if it meant seeing something he couldn’t unsee.

He waited until the house fell quiet again, until Janine had packed a small bag for him and stepped outside to take a call. Then he returned to the studio, loaded the tape, and pressed play.

The screen remained black for several seconds. There was no timestamp, no static, no grainy flicker to suggest the camera had begun recording. Eventually, a faint glow illuminated the frame—a single overhead bulb, swaying gently on its cord. The studio came into view in fragments, edges emerging from the dark as though remembered rather than recorded.

Then the music began.

It crackled faintly, distorted like a phonograph submerged in water. The melody moved in a key that didn’t belong to any scale Cal recognized. It resembled a lullaby, but its cadence refused resolution. Each note strained against the next, evoking not peace but unease.

The camera began to pan. Not with the halting motion of a faulty tripod or the twitch of mechanical tracking, but with eerie precision—sweeping across the room as if guided by an invisible hand. It turned toward the far wall, where the puppets had assembled themselves in a rigid line.

There were twelve.

They stood with their strings hanging limp, heads slightly bowed, arms at their sides. Mr. Wiggles stood at the center, his frame taller now. Cal noticed the puppet’s limbs had changed. The arms appeared longer than he had carved them, the wrists too narrow, the legs stretched unnaturally. The cracks in the porcelain face had deepened, and something faintly metallic shimmered inside one of them, pulsing in time with the warped lullaby.

The puppets began to move.

At first, only a twitch. Then a fluid, coordinated motion spread through the group. Their arms rose in near-perfect unison. Their heads lifted. Each puppet executed a series of gestures—kneeling, turning, lifting their hands toward the ceiling—as though performing a ritual long rehearsed and never fully understood.

The camera pulled back.

A chair now stood in the middle of the room.

Cal was already in it.

His wrists had been bound with marionette wire. His ankles were secured to the chair’s legs. A crude rig forced his mouth open, mimicking the jaw mechanism he used in his older designs. He didn’t move. He didn’t resist. His body sat slumped beneath the light, as still as the puppets had once been.

The Cal watching from the other side of the screen hardly breathed.

Mr. Wiggles stepped forward.

The puppet’s movements were calculated. It raised one hand, and the others followed. Together, the puppets encircled the chair and reached toward the man bound within it.

Then everything stopped.

The music ended mid-note, cut off as if someone had pinched the sound from the air. The bulb above the chair flickered once. A second passed. Then it burst.

The screen went black.

Cal blinked and found himself sitting on the edge of his bed. He had no memory of leaving the studio. The room around him was undisturbed. The camcorder was gone. The flash drive, too. Only the monitor remained, flickering with the last frozen frame of the footage: his own face, captured just before the bulb had shattered. The image was warped by lens distortion—his mouth forced wide, his eyes glassy and unblinking, reflecting a terror he hadn’t felt until just now.

He stood slowly and turned toward the hallway.

The puppets had gathered.

They lined the corridor, facing inward like mourners at a wake. Their heads were lowered. Their hands hung at their sides. The overhead lights flickered, and each time the brightness dimmed, he felt their positions had shifted—only slightly, just enough to alter the shape of their shadows.

He pushed open the studio door.

The chair stood empty.

But in its place, someone else was waiting.

A full-sized puppet now occupied the center of the room. It wore one of Cal’s flannel shirts, the same paint-stained one he’d worn the day before. The face, though clearly carved from wood, had been modeled after his own features with unsettling precision. The eyes were painted, yet they appeared deeper than they should have been—layered, as if something could look back out through them.

He took a step forward, almost against his will.

The puppet raised a hand.

Cal stopped.

It moved toward him—not with mechanical stiffness, but with a disturbing grace. Each step was purposeful. The limbs bent exactly as they should have. When it reached him, it extended its hand again, this time offering something.

A match.

Cal accepted it.

He looked around the room, only now registering the heavy scent in the air. Varnish. Lamp oil. A bottle lay overturned near the workbench, its contents already soaked into the floorboards.

The puppet stepped back and waited.

Cal struck the match. The flame bloomed in his hand, flickering softly.

He hesitated.

The puppet did not.

It reached toward the fire, pressing its fingers against the flame. The match flared brightly, then dropped to the floor.

The oil ignited instantly.

Flames surged outward, crawling along the grain of the wood and up the curtains. The desk caught quickly. So did the racks of cloth and the crates of finished parts. The heat grew with each breath he took, filling the studio with shifting shadows and orange light.

He backed away from the blaze, but the hallway was no longer clear.

The puppets had closed ranks.

They stood shoulder to shoulder now, blocking the exit. Their heads remained bowed, their presence unwavering.

Cal turned back toward the studio.

The chair had returned.

The puppet now sat in it.

He could see the paint melting across its face, the cracks widening in the porcelain veneer. One eye had already begun to run, black lines dripping like ink across the carved cheek. Still, it smiled.

He opened his mouth.

And screamed.

* * * * * *

Janine returned the next morning.

She knocked twice before trying the handle. The door was unlocked.

Inside, the air carried the scent of char and melted plastic, but no smoke lingered. Nothing had burned. The walls were clean. The curtains were intact. There were no signs of fire at all.

She opened the studio door.

The puppets sat quietly along the walls, each one carefully placed. Nothing moved.

A small card rested on the workbench beside a box of matches and a cracked porcelain button. Janine picked it up.

The card read:

Thank you for attending tonight’s performance.
The Marionette Hour will return… when called.

She turned slowly toward the chair in the center of the room.

A new puppet had taken its place there.

It wore a flannel shirt.

Its face was carved in perfect likeness.

Only the smile was different.

Too wide.

Too knowing.

Mr. Wiggles sat beside it, his porcelain head resting gently on the puppet’s shoulder.

Janine stepped back and closed the door behind her.

She did not return.

But the lights never turned off again.