Master of Puppets

Trigger warning: This story involves disturbing scenes of violence, supernatural horror and disturbing imagery. Please proceed with caution.

"Io sono il padrone, e tu sei il burattino!/ I am the master, and you are the puppet!

Working in an antique store was hardly where Aislin saw herself five years ago, but beggars couldn’t be choosers in this economy. Her dreams of becoming someone had been crushed by the reality of life and the collapse of her support system after college, and she depended on this job to make ends meet.

Still, something was charming about The Raven’s Wares, even if she did encounter some characters from time to time. Her cousin often asked her if she had ever felt spirits or weird energy working around the real skulls, the old Victorian dolls or the taxidermy of the raven that gave the store its name.

Like everyone in the town, Aislin had heard horror stories about the objects sold from this place—a man bought a doll for his daughter, and they all vanished without a trace a week later; a woman bought a pretty ring and died in a freak accident with the ring on her finger; someone bought an old statue and fell down their stairs.

The truth was, Aislin didn’t believe in those sorts of things – ghosts, ghouls or energies. Sure, the place was creepy if you worked late alone on long winter nights, but it paid the bills. Those horror stories were coincidences, plenty of people had purchased items from The Raven’s Wrath without an issue.

Her cousin believed in that side of things so strongly, people whispered about her behind their hands. If Aislin started believing, what would they say about their family? It was bad enough she worked here...

“The customers you never heard about were outsiders,” a tiny voice in her head would whisper when she had this argument with herself, “you’ve never followed up to check on what happened afterwards.”

She looked up from her phone when Eli barged their way back through the piles of antique junk piled around the place.

“A guy dropped off this painting today. I’m telling you, it’s weird.”

Aislin knew that everything here was weird in one form or another. She once had someone try to offer a jar of real human teeth. That had been on her second day, and regrettably, it had not been her last strange experience.

They jerked their thumb over their shoulder.

“It’s out the back by the rocking horse. I need you to label it up before you leave tonight.”

“Did he give any details?”

“Nah, I’m surprised you didn’t see him. Dark-haired guy, glasses, had some sort of accent.”

She vaguely recalled someone coming in of that description when she’d been restocking some old hardbacks and had directed him towards Eli at the back of the store. She wouldn’t have thought of him again, save for the odd look in his dark eyes.

“I sent him to the back to see you.”

“He had this look in his eyes, like he’d seen things, you know? I offered him a fair price, but he didn’t even want the money. He just said to take it.”

“He didn’t want money?” Aislin repeated slowly, “That’s a bit weird, don’t you think?”

“Maybe it came with bad memories or something,” Eli shrugged, “just make sure to get it catalogued to go out on display. I’ve got to head off, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The afternoon was quickly fading, the air becoming colder and far less welcoming inside. The eyes of the raven on the desk seemed to watch her every move, and the gentle ticking of the antique clocks suddenly felt ominous. Even the shadows of the shelves seemed to be lengthening, reaching out in her direction.

Aislin looked up from her book and paused.

The store had fallen eerily silent.

She felt her heartbeat increase as the hair at the back of her neck stood up.

“Hello?”

Why was she calling out? There was no one there. No one had entered the shop, the bell above the door had been silent for hours.

A faint whisper seemed to be coming from the distance… someone must’ve left the radio on in the storage room.

She walked to the back of the store, trying to ignore the feeling that the eyes of the dolls were watching her. It wasn’t like her to be this paranoid.

She pushed the door open wide and reached in to grab the portable radio the manager insisted on keeping around. Her hand found the handle and lifted it out.

It was switched off.

“Ok...” She muttered, feeling a cold trickle of sweat run down her back.

She set the radio down on an empty stool and worked away around the mountains of antiques to find the latest addition to the collection.

Aislin pulled the sheet off slowly and recoiled.

The painting was of a hanging puppet, clearly based on the original Pinocchio story.

It’s dressed in traditional clothes against a gruesome backdrop of bones and the occasional skull. The entire thing was bordered by a swirling wine red…blood red.

A shudder ran down her spine as she took in all the gruesome details.

The glass on the front was cracked, but that was hardly anything they couldn’t fix. There was something odd about the break, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

She turned the painting over to check the back of the frame and noticed a faded name on the back, too illegible to read, and an unmistakable bloody handprint.

“What the hell?”

The painting clattered to the floor as she reeled back, banging into a cabinet and screaming as the puppet hanging there swung into her face. Its painted smile seemed twisted into a cruel leer as she swatted it away.

Clutching at her chest, she took some calming breaths.

She picked the painting up from the floor with shaking hands and turned it over, aware of her heart racing in her chest.

There’s no bloody handprint, only the faded marks of a name.

“You’re going mad,” she muttered to herself, “you need to get out more.”

She carried the painting to the desk and started cataloguing it, intrigued by the lack of an artist’s mark. Even a quick Google search yielded no results, and after a few minutes, she brought it back to sit at the back by the dolls and puppets.

She took a moment longer to stare at it and turned back to the front.

There was a rocking horse in the middle of the aisle.

No, that wasn’t possible. She hadn’t moved anything.

“Hello?” She called out nervously, “This isn’t funny now. Come out.”

When no one answered, she tried to focus. Maybe it had been there before and she had simply walked past it, not noticing. Eli had said the painting was out the back by the rocking horse…

For a moment, her cousin's voice echoed in her ear. Though she tried to deny it, this was not the first time something like this had happened on her shift. Eli had laughed it off with her at the time, but she hadn't seen a bloody handprint last time...

Eli had moved the horse, that's all there was to it.

Aislin walked back to the front of the store and stared out at the street, across at the ordinary sight of the small local shop and the dress shop beside it.

Maybe she needed a holiday.

The radio started playing a Cure song – had she turned it on? When had she brought it to the front?

Suddenly the dark shop seemed alien to her.

No, now she was being stupid. She didn't believe in any of that stuff.

A sudden tiredness overcame her as she sat back in her chair and started to doze, watching the cuckoo bird on the antique clock swing backwards and forwards, swinging…swinging…

She could hear the distant creaking sound of a rope and sobbing cries, growing louder and louder,

“Oh, how painful, how painful! Why wasn’t I good?”

Something was hovering in the corner of her vision. Every instinct in her body screamed at her not to turn and look, to run away from that shadow…

She turned her head and saw the puppet from the painting.

It raised its head and leered at her,

“Puppets have no soul, but they do a lot of harm.”

Suddenly she was the one battling with the rope as the puppet laughed and screeched over and over,

“I WANT TO BE REAL! I WANT TO BE REAL! I WANT TO BE REAL!”

Aislin leapt up from her sleep, feeling the phantom rope around her throat.

Every item in the shop was facing her. They seemed to be looming towards her, skulls echoing the cries of the horrific voice as it cried out over and over...

Whatever sick joke this was, she wasn’t playing anymore.

She ran to the door and tried to haul it open.

It was locked.

The room seemed to darken, and the sound of the puppet’s voice, distant at first, became unmistakable, growing clearer with each passing second—its whispers now unmistakably directed at her,

“O che male, che male!”

She picked up a metal poker and walked to where the painting sat. The voice was louder now, its desperate cries in both English and Italian piercing her ears.

“What the hell are you?”

The voices paused.

“You should let me out. You're just like me, you're a puppet too..."

Aislin lifted the metal poker above her head.

“What. Are. You?”

“You should let me out, Aislin.”

She tried to move away, but her back smacked into a large cabinet.

“What the HELL ARE YOU?”

“My last puppet didn’t obey. He brought me here. Un burattino che non obbedisce, finisce sempre male…a puppet who does not obey always ends badly. You should let me out. I've always been here, waiting for someone to let me out..."

She realised then what was wrong with the glass.

Someone – something – was trying to break free from the inside.

Her own reflection in the glass warped into a puppet's face and she felt the weight of something choking her.

No, she was not a puppet. She was a human. This wasn't real.

“I am the master of puppets, puppets have no soul, but they do a lot of harm, I tried to take his soul, but he broke free. You will let me out, you are my puppet now. You saw it in the glass...you're like me..."

Aislin watched in horror as the cracks in the glass grew wider.

“It will end badly for you if you do not obey.”

She lifted the poker to swing it and the hands of the puppets on display reached out and grabbed her throat, pulling her backwards.

“A bad puppet is of no use to me. I have been waiting for you. There’s nothing to be done, one must really die good…”

Aislin screamed, trying to throw the puppets off. She twisted in their grip, seeing the cracks grow wider and wider.

“When you’re not real, nothing hurts, Aislin. But the more I try to be real, the more I feel pain. Oh, the pain! How painful this is! Can’t you feel it?”

The creaking of the rope was unbearable, the spiralling voice wailing and wailing as she begged for this to stop, for her to wake up, to let this nightmare end…

Aislin woke in her chair.

The clock read the same time as it had before. But something was different—everything was different.

At some point, the gentle light of the afternoon had faded into a grey gloom bordering on darkness. This day seemed to be lasting an eternity.

“It was all a nightmare, a terrible nightmare…”

She saw it then. Her vision narrowed and her chest tightened as she stared at it.

The painting, mocking her from the back as it always had.

Maybe this was still a nightmare, a nightmare taken new form. Those horrible skulls leering at her, that noise, that endless noise...

She approached it slowly and ran her hands over the cracks in the glass, feeling her skin crawl with revulsion. The glass was cold, unnaturally cold, like it was sucking the little warmth she had left from her fingers.

"I want to be real, Aislin." a voice whispered in her ear, "You should let me out. I have waited so long..."

She grabbed the poker from where it lay on the ground and lifted it, bringing it down to strike the glass.

A gloved hand reached out of the frame and snatched hold of her wrist, forcing her to drop the poker in shock.

"A puppet has no soul, but it can do harm." It cackled, drawing her closer to the frame, "You're my puppet now, your soul is mine."

"No!" She screamed, grabbing at the nearest object, a porcelain bird, and throwing it at the puppet, "You aren't real! None of this is real!"

She felt the world begin to blur and tried to pull away from its grip, but it was too late. This couldn't be it, this couldn't be how this ended for her, this wasn't fair, this wasn't fair....

"You aren't real." She cried as her mind began to break, "You aren't real."

She felt the rancid breath of the puppet as it whispered in her ear,

"And now neither are you."