Pinocchio

I stood outside of my old orphanage, my suitcase packed and ready beside me. Icy needles of cold stabbed through my clothes and into my skin, adding to the growing frost I already felt inside of me. Gusts of wind whipped my wild red curls around my face, but I made no move to push them back.

A rusty red truck lumbered its way up the winding gravel driveway, the tires toiling to navigate through the ice and snow. I took a step back when it finally screeched to a stop in front of me. The door swung open and a small, scrawny boy jumped out into the snow. He had a dopey grin on his face and was quick to throw his arms around me. I hesitated before slowly hugging him back. He smelled oddly of wood, as if he’d spent all day in the forest.

“Hey, Scarlet!” the twelve-year-old boy said excitedly, pulling away from me. Fat snowflakes fell into his tangled dark brown hair, and he brushed them out impatiently. His grin grew persistent when he realized I wasn’t going to return the greeting. “Aren’t you glad you’re finally gonna be able to leave this place? You’re gonna live with us!”

I smiled weakly at him before glancing into the truck at the man sitting in the driver’s seat. He beamed at me and gave a short wave. “Why don’t you help her with her stuff, Kyle?” he called out.

Kyle rushed around me to grab my suitcase and waved off my help as he heaved it into the bed of the truck. I hesitated and took one last look back at the orphanage before climbing into the truck. The drive back to Kyle’s house was long, and the whole time I kept warding off the questions Kyle and his grandfather threw at me. Instead, I listened to the crackling words coming out of the radio. The announcer kept going back to kidnappings that had happened recently, six male children around the age of seven who had gone missing in the woods. It wasn’t the first time it had happened; apparently over twenty boys had vanished into the woods since last month.

“Such a shame,” Kyle’s grandpa, who had told me to call him Gep, muttered to himself. Kyle shrugged.

“I don’t think they should’ve been hanging out around the woods so late,” he said. I ignored both of them and closed my eyes, only opening them when the truck came to a stop in front of a log cabin. The cabin was tiny and obviously decrepit; the tin roof was rusted and spotted in white, and big green splotches of mold painted the sides. Gep ushered me inside while Kyle stopped to get my stuff.

“Who’s there?” A hoarse, crabby voice yelled from inside the cabin after Gep knocked.

“Just us, dear!” Gep called. “And our newcomer, Scarlet!”

A second later the door swung open, and a small, bony thing of a woman tugged us inside. “Hurry, Hurry!” she hissed. “You know how dangerous it is to be out in the open! Them wooden boys could be watching us!”

I stumbled through the threshold and gave her a confused glance. “What are you looking at?” she snapped. Her eyes had a wild kind of glow in them, and when she spoke it sounded as if she needed to cough something up. I looked away from the scowl that sagged her saggy skin and politely removed my shoes.

“I’ll show you to your room, Scarlet,” Gep said, scooting in front of me and leading the way down the hall. Along the way he pointed out the rooms that we passed, stopping at one door in particular and giving me a stern stare. “This is my workroom. No one goes in there, and there’s no exceptions for you, alright?”

I nodded. He led me the rest of the way to my room, then left me to get settled. I collapsed on the bed and kicked off my shoes, relieved to be by myself. Like the way it’d been for the last four years. I didn’t move when the door creaked open and Kyle slid inside with my small suitcase. He positioned it at the end of the bed, then plopped down on the floor, silent.

“What are you doing?” I murmured.

“How’d you get into the orphanage, Scarlet?”

“What?” I turned my head. The smell of wood hit me like a truckload of bricks, and I turned over, coughing. When I was finished I rolled over again and stared up at the cracks in the ceiling, counting my breaths. “How about you tell me why you live with your grandparents. Then I’ll tell you what happened to me.”

Silence. “Okay.” Kyle sat up on his heels and looked at me from across the bed. “Grandpa Gep says that my parents were murdered when I was a baby.”

I stiffened and sat up on the bed. “That must’ve been scary.” Kyle shrugged and blinked at me expectantly. I sighed. “My parents died, too, but I don’t know how. I lived with my grandma until I was eleven, and after she went missing I was taken in by the orphanage.” Kyle opened his mouth, but a scream and a shatter from outside interrupted him. We both looked at each other before rushing out toward the source of the noise.

Kyle’s grandma sprinted into the middle of the living room, her bloody hands clutching a shattered glass hand mirror like it was a baseball bat. She was alone, though it seemed as if she couldn’t realize that. 

“You and your stupid puppets, Geppetto!” she screamed, waving the mirror around wildly. “They've woken up! Is it because of that girl?!” Her savage eyes swung around the room, finally settling when they caught sight of me. “You,” she hissed, taking a step toward me. Kyle shoved me aside.

“Grandma,” he warned, his voice suddenly deadly cool. I froze in shock, watching this transformation overcome this overly bouncy, carefree boy. His grandma ignored him and continued toward me, the broken mirror clutched in her hand so that beads of blood welled up from beneath her cuts. “Grandma, please. You heard Grandpa. He needs her."

Kyle pushed me further aside, causing me to stumble and fall. In the same moment that I hit the ground there was a loud cry, a cry of pain and outrage. And then there was a thud. I lifted my head from the floor, blinking away bright spots. Kyle stood over his grandma, both hands clamped over his mouth in shock. I frowned and looked down at his grandma. She wasn’t moving. “I一" he stammered.

“Kyle,” I whispered. “What have you done?”

Kyle’s eyes snapped over to me. His hands had moved to his nose, and he groaned, clutching it tightly. “I didn’t mean to,” he finished. “I didn’t.”

"Is she?"

 “Oh, God, Scarlet.” Kyle tugged on his nose, hard, as it were going to come off. “I didn’t mean to. They’ll come for me. Help me, Scarlet, oh God.”

I scrambled to sit up and push myself against the wall. “Who’s coming for you?” I breathed, too horror-struck to get up. Kyle collapsed to the floor beside me, yanking at his nose and sobbing.

“The puppets!” He screamed. "I killed Grandma and now they're gonna kill me!" 

“What?”

He rubbed his nose and wailed, "You've brought them to life, and now they're gonna kill me for what I've done!"

The ground beneath us began to rumble, and I grappled the wall for purchase. Kyle was still holding his nose and crying that it hurt, but his voice was just becoming a running background to the roar in my ears. “Kyle, where’s Gep?” I gasped.

A loud clattering sound filled the room, like wooden bullets were raining down onto the floor. The cabin was still shaking, and the crash of a door opening down the hall startled me.

Clatter, rattle, click. Clatter, rattle, click.

It was the sound like that of wooden soldiers marching in a parade, though beyond this cacophony of wood against floorboards I could just make out the high-pitched giggles of little kids.

“Kyle.” I swallowed down the taste of bile in my mouth. “What’s happening?” When there was no answer I turned beside me to ask again, but what I saw made me gasp and scrabble back.

Kyle was slumped unconscious on the floor, his head lolling against his shoulder. Except…from his face emerged a nose the size of a rolling pin, squeezed and deformed. The cartilage on his nose was stretched so far and thin it looked like you could see the nasal bone trying to jut out from underneath the tissue. Before I could turn to the side and heave a great shadow filled the room, and I suddenly noticed that the clattering sounds had stopped. I slowly lifted my great weight of my head, only to be stopped short by the sight of what was before me.

Puppets. Hundreds and hundreds of puppets as tall as the ceiling towered over me like skyscrapers, all with great smiles carved into their wooden faces. Slowly, slowly, their hinged jaws lowered down until I could see straight into their mouths. And then they spoke.

 “Pinocchio,” they said, their voices scraping like saw on wood. I glanced at Kyle, then back to the puppets. They weren’t looking at him. They were drilling their painted blue eyes into me. And, as one, their heads tilted to the side. “Will you turn me back into a real boy?”

"Come now, my little Pinocchios.” 

I gasped and everything spun faster as Gep stepped out from behind the puppets. “We’ll have you turned back to real boys in no time.” He rolled up his sleeve, but where there should’ve been flesh, there was a shiny wooden arm. He stroked it and said, “After all, it’s the death of another that gives life to the wood, isn’t it?”