Pulling Strings

If Willow’s grin got any wider, it would capsize her face. Archie watched her jigging on the stool like a child made to wait before opening presents. He had about as much chance of getting out of this as he’d had persuading her to take one bag on their honeymoon. 

“Come on, you know you’ll love it once we’re there,” she said from behind the laptop.

“I never, ever said I loved any of them. I’d rather be hiking to a beautiful waterfall, relaxing in a pool, or visiting, I don’t know, a proper museum.”

“Nonsense. You made me go to that snooze fest in London. I told you, once you’ve seen Jurassic Park, everything else is just another dinosaur. There’s nothing left to learn.”

“And the collection of human fingernails was educational?” The memory made him push his marmalade smothered toast away, the peel resembling cuticles.

“I’ll admit that was too special interest for after lunch. But we haven’t forgotten it, have we? We’ve got an experience that will live on until we’re dodging coffins in a nursing home together,” she said, reaching for his rejected breakfast.

“Like the time you said everyone eats sushi from street vendors in New York and we spent two days camping in our hotel bathroom.”

After a brief snort, her attention went back to food. Palm cupped a few inches from her chin, Willow nibbled the triangle of wholegrain, orangey bread, crusts first. A habit, her mother had informed him, she’d developed around aged six and persisted with against all parental advice. A reluctant rolling over was his inevitable future.

“Fine, lay it on me, but you are coming to one culturally enriching event with me. You can think of it as penance.”

Willow brushed a hand across her jeans and extended it across the breakfast bar. Archie shook, trying hard to ignore the sticky substance she’d transferred and not think about the House of Ear Wax they’d visited in Antwerp.

“You’re in for a treat,” she said, tapping the keyboard, “we have two unlimited access tickets to the amazing, the incredible clown puppet exhibition in the rural Cotswolds’ village of Naunton.”

#

The sat nav said their route was correct, no matter how many times he checked it. Willow was singing along with the radio, seemingly unphased by sporadic whirring tyres and dunks into muddy troughs he could only label as off road. Their small hatchback was designed more for multi-storey car parks. Hand clammily gripping the plastic handle, he cleared his throat louder than the drum and bass mix.

“Yes, this is the right way. No, we will not get stuck. Little Percy here has handled worse.” She tapped Percy’s steering wheel.

‘In five-hundred yards, take a sharp left onto Old Rectory Lane and in 1.3 miles you’ll have reached your destination on the right.’

“Then how is it saying there are fifteen minutes left?”

“A mystery for us to solve my little sad-faced harlequin.”

There were times when their personality differences really jarred and this was one of them, Archie thought, taking deep breaths.

For puzzles, it was both short-lived and anti-climactic. They’d left the car on a grassed area outside the huge fence, obeying the stern hand-painted sign. Clambering over the stile, his corduroy trousers caught on the splintered wood. Willow had sailed over and was already making light work of the hill ahead. Stones rolled and tumbled under his trainers. Slotting her arm inside his, she chatted as they reached the peak of the incline.

“It’s alright, they’ll move,” she said, stroking his arm and referring to the dozen or so tatty, filthy sheep staring at him with their freaky rectangular pupils. They’d stolen his attention away from the manor house itself until they were almost upon it.

Still imposing, the structure had four floors of weathered, grey stone, not the honey-coloured Cotswolds’ namesake and none of its original grandeur. Much like the bleating evil Sunday roasts milling around them, it looked exhausted and flogged. Depressed into the ground under the burden of its own mass. The building had compelled dark clouds to surround it; long grass, moss and weeds sprouting from the dirt to clamber over its foundations. Every window was bleak, the cracked panes of glass displaying thick, drab curtains closed to the world.

“Where did you hear about this place?” Archie had no idea why he was whispering.

“It has a website,” Willow said, as if that was sufficient explanation for marching them towards what could be a hell portal.

“So do sexual deviants and international criminal gangs, doesn’t mean I want to go to theirs for tea and biscuits. I vote we turn around.”

Too late. The big black door swung open. He was expecting a tall, crinkly gentleman carrying a lamp and a thorny disposition. Maybe a limp.

“Oh my gosh, I do not have words. Aren’t you two adorable? Listen to me, sputtering on, you’ll be excited to come inside. I’m Alice.”

Alice was a human cupcake. White hair scooped up and twirling around the top of her head like piped buttercream, makeup imagined by a toddler with crayons, plump and squishy form bedazzled by a rainbow onesie and frothing with fruit-shaped jewellery.

“Alice, we are deeply excited. I’m Willow and this handsome chap is my recently acquired husband, Archie. His actual name is Archibold, but we don’t mention that; it upsets him.”

Locking a non-existent padlock on her mouth, Alice moved aside. Like his first impression of the exterior being hijacked by sheep, the technicolour of Alice must have stupefied his brain, hiding what was behind her.

The entrance hall was vast; this was discernible from looking at the expanse of cobwebbed, corniced ceiling. It was also rammed with stuff. Piles, heaps, stacks of things covered the floor except for a channel of emptiness that led, single file, to a door. Elbows tucked in, Archie stopped fully inhaling, as dust tickled his nostrils and he smelt dog, mould, and stagnant pond water.

“Take as many photos as you like. But stick to the pathways. They are your treasure map. And everything is priceless, irreplaceable, so we use peepers, not creepers. It’s why children are forbidden, they can’t resist and parents nowadays can’t be trusted to make them.” Her tone unfaltering, one of certitude.

Hinges would permit another fifty percent, but the door had halted. Alice turned sideways, her rainbow tummy brushing the frame. Unable to stop his own impulses, Archie peeked at the cause of the obstruction.

“Don’t give her any attention. Angelica has been naughty and is sitting this one out,” Alice said over her shoulder.

Faded and dirtied, the puppet’s face and dress, once white, had yellowed with age. Hands tiny in proportion to her plastic legs and bulbous head with its mane of knotted red curls. In a toss-up for most unsettling, were the oddly human black eyes and the large transparent plastic box placed upside down over her like trapping a spider with a glass.

Archie tried shooting his best ‘what the hell’ face at Willow, who was watching a TV stood on a stool. Plugged into an overcrowded extension lead, Archie couldn’t tell what all the other wires led to or where. If he needed any more evidence this place wasn’t fit for visitation, an imminent electrical fire was it. And everything else in the room, including them, would go up like kindling. Posters, pamphlets and flyers, all manner of paper-based propaganda for everything intersecting clown with puppet, piled high.

A nudge to her elbow did nothing. Willow remained staring at what he could now see was a combined video-player and TV, probably older than she was. Three white-gloved puppeteers dancing an oversized puppet dog dressed as a jester with jangling bell sounds, back and forth across a stage. No audience, no speech, just a floating, gyrating clown hound transfixing his wife.

Another upturned plastic box caught his attention. His toes were close to straying from the end of the cleared pathway and into a stack of newspaper cuttings as he bent over. Crusty, whitish crystals that he thought were rock salt made a circle around the box. The scratched plastic, thick with dust, resisted as he tried peering through it.

“Angelica’s personal journal, where she captured all her darkest thoughts.”

A snake straight out of an ice bath, rippled up the length of his spine or at least that’s what he felt as Alice’s breath groped the side of his face. Aware he might jump out of his skin; Archie returned his body to safer ground. “Do you mean the puppeteer’s journal?”

“No. I mean exactly what I said. It’s why it needs to be protected and we need protecting from it. Angelica’s capacity for mischief is unparalleled and reacquainted with that, it spawns misadventure. These same proclivities are likely what landed her in a travelling circus. No mother abandons her child lightly.”  

This woman is batshit, he thought, edging away from her.

#

Alice marched them through a succession of rooms. It felt like they were sinking, going deeper into the manor house’s bowels; the ceilings lowering, the walls and puppet jesters compressing and trapping Archie. He pulled the neck of his polo-shirt above his sweater, undoing a button. How much more could there be?

Escorted through what had once been a ballroom, it brimmed with marionette clowns. Not just sat on furniture and floors but spreadeagled on walls and dangled from the ceiling. Skinny legs forced into giant shoes, lacy costumes and broken strings brushing against his head despite his evasive ducking. He watched Willow spinning with them, resting their dusty limbs on her shoulders, laughing, and chatting crazy with the cupcake.  

The marionettes loomed at the back of his eyes like cataracts, only to be replaced by worse images. Every wall had built-in, floor to ceiling bookshelves, and every shelf was infested with clockwork moving clowns. Most were the size of a rodent, some writhing inside glass jars. The ones covering the floors were toddler sized, whirring, and creaking as they pulled coloured handkerchiefs through their rigid fingers, jiggled their hands in the motion of juggling or dragged striped empty trousers around a unicycle wheel. Archie didn’t want to move any closer, content in its doorway.

“I’ve saved my favourite until last,” said Alice, leading them up narrow stairs. The windows covered, wallpaper dark and peeling; Archie struggled to see the edges of the steps the higher they climbed. He’d read about amputees who could still feel pain from their severed limbs and, for some reason, couldn’t stop thinking about it. Something, somewhere inside him, was holding a distal repressed memory. It was itching, clawing, and scampering beneath his flesh, working its way to the surface.

They’d climbed to the top floor of the manor. As Alice pushed the doors open, he saw daylight for the first time since they’d entered. It was cloudy, grey, but it still counted, shifting some of the phantom weight pressing him down.  

“People dismiss hand puppets as child’s play. They’re anything but. A puppeteer is at his most visible; he must truly create and embody the puppet for the audience to believe. It is here where the line between puppet and master is at its thinnest. I shall leave you two to explore whilst I prepare your gift bags.”

Gift bags, Willow mouthed at him, her face borrowed from a ten-year-old promised their body weight in ice cream. He’d rather take away syphilis than anything from that woman or her hoarder’s asylum.

“I told you this place would be awesome. She’s so eccentric, I’m getting a photo with her before we leave.” Willow was bouncing from table to table. “Oh my god, look conjoined twin clowns, that’s niche.”

“Our definitions of awesome differ widely,” Archie said, watching clouds pass the filthy window. A glint in his peripheral vision flirted for his awareness. There was that salt again. It encircled what appeared to be an ornately carved stone bird bath, about waist height. Bathing in particles of grime was a red, blue, and yellow jester hand puppet.

“That’s proper old. I bet it’s an antique. It looks like you, bright blue eyes, curly blond hair, and rosy cheeks. Aw, it’s smiling at you, Archie. Put it on; I want a picture.” She’d already got her mobile out of her pocket.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. Peepers, not creepers, remember?” He wiggled his fingers in front of her for illustrative purposes. An image intruded into his thoughts. The green carpet from his grandma’s bedroom, he was sitting on it cross-legged, holding an old doll dressed in black. He knew he wasn’t supposed to touch it, to even be in her bedroom, but there was nothing to play with and his grandma was old and mean and boring.

“Put it on, then we’ll go. Two minutes, she’ll never know, come on. I’ll love you forever.”

The quickest way out is through, he thought, resigning himself to his fate. He stuffed his hand inside the felt red costume with its yellow silk pom-poms and lifted the painted face close to his. Matching the lopsided smile, he posed for Willow.

“Ouch.” Pressure enveloped his hand and wrist, like someone squeezed it. Flinging the puppet back towards its stand, Archie shook his arm hard, but it didn’t budge. “It’s stuck, Willow, it won’t come off, I’m serious.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “How can it be stuck? It’s a bit of cloth.” Taking its ruffled neck in her hand, Willow pulled at the toy. “I feel like I’m going to snap its head off.”

Buttons stared into him from inside the painted eye shapes. Had it turned its head? Stop it, that’s ridiculous. “Shit, what the hell are we going to do?”

“Well, I guess now we’re a throuple. My parents will never understand.”

“How can you make jokes? This isn’t funny. I can see the gap between it and my wrist, Willow, yet it’s literally fixed to me. This is weird as all hell.” Trapped, airless, crouched in the dark, he could only see out through the keyhole in his grandma’s wooden chest. He’d sobbed, adding tears to the woodworm, the musty smell making him feel sick. It was hours, afternoon becoming evening, before she’d released him. “Get it off me, get it off me now. I don’t give a flying fuck if you snap it into a million pieces.”

They both pulled and yanked at the puppet. A box full of handmade sock puppets shook, moving a couple of inches onto the pathway. It made them freeze. The puppets rolled over each other. Scratching, shuffling noises came from inside the box. He moved backward, away from it, and Willow followed. A giant muddy brown rat with a long, thick tail leapt from the box; it charged towards them.

Archie freaked in the direction of the bird bath. Leaving the path, he crashed into it. The pillar smashed to the floor, sending salt and dust bunnies everywhere. Getting out of its way, Archie’s foot got stuck in a box of disembodied puppet heads and he screeched. Willow had manoeuvred herself to a free chair and stood on it, eyeballing the rat’s disappearance into a clump of costumes.

“I am very disappointed in you two,” Alice said, shaking her head.

Foot still immersed in decapitations; Archie thrust his offending hand behind his back.

“There was a rat,” said Willow, at ten percent of her usual personality.

“I think we both know this wasn’t the rat’s doing. No. And I can’t say I blame Archibold either. I mean, he’s not the one pulling the strings, is he, my dear? Do get down, a chair is for sitting.”

Removing his foot from the box, Archie’s arm released itself from the pretence and dropped to his side. Clown still attached.

“Had any nasty thoughts yet? Hmmmm, don’t worry, they’ll soon arrive.” Her doughy fingers held his forearm. “Tracking him down took thirty years. Made in 1922, Germany, by a witch that stitched her own hair into its seams, used her own blood in the vibrant red dye.” Alice paused, stroking the blond curls peeping out from under its pointed hat. “It was Angelica who told me about him. A scriptwriter sought help from the circus psychic. He couldn’t sleep, rewriting his script until his fingers bled. And all day it whispered to him, telling him to slit his own throat. Obviously, psychics can’t break curses. Angelica watched the man hack off his own hand with a blockhead’s axe. At least, she said, she simply watched.”

“I’m not cutting my hand off.”

“No, Archibold, that won’t do. Can’t have you staining him. Plus, you misunderstand. Such an inelegant solution won’t work, not entirely. You’d keep your life, but you’d also keep the nightmares and the whispers, driving you to terrible violence.”

“Bullshit. Come on Archie, we’re leaving. We’ll work out how to get that thing off and send it back to you.”

The smile filled Alice’s cheeks, white veneers glinting like polished bone. “Angelica will not allow your Archie to leave, silly. He’s her puppet now.”