Aggie

To Gramma's house.

Note: forgive mistakes etc. I’ve been stuck for four(!) days—apart from some micros— so I’m reading and taking some time to get to a good place again. This is an older story that burned out on me. All’s I can say: stick with me. I’m working on it.

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A week after Gramma Aggie’s funeral, they went to clear out her place. Flynn dragged his feet about it, because it was Saturday and there were literally a thousand things he could be doing. None of which mattered, of course.

It was just as he remembered it, only more of a mess. The old shag carpet that looked like dirty sheep’s wool and smelled old and burnt when he rolled around on it while he played. The table with the plastic guard, now hidden beneath boxes and piles of old newspapers. And in the corner, the battered leather easy chair, pulled close to the ancient television set, where she used to watch her soaps, using a magnifying glass to read the subtitles. She always adjusted the colors so that all the faces became orange and pink screams that hurt his eyes, and whenever he changed them, she’d get mad and try to swat at him.

“Man, she really let this place go to the dogs,” Dad said when Mom returned from the kitchen, looking green.

Touching the tips of her fingers to her throat, she said, in a weak voice: “You don’t want to look in there.”

Dad shook his head. “We should’ve stepped in sooner.”

“What could I do? She wanted to stay here.”

“Uh-huh. And you see what you get,” he said, spreading his hands.

“Don’t. Start.”

There was a bit of silence before Dad let out a breath through his nose. “Fine. So, what are we doing?”

“I think— that maybe we start in the bedrooms, work our way back.”

“Fine with me. Let’s go, bud.”

The back of the apartment was a tangled half-lit maze of hallways, and overstuffed rooms with the curtains perpetually drawn. Half of what was back there was a secret to Flynn to this day because Gramma Aggie didn’t like him snooping around. In fact, most the time he’d been forced to stay in the living room, listening to her whisper along with the  soap operas. And even when he got up to go to the bathroom, it usually didn’t take her long to haul her massive frame out of the easy chair to come check up on him.

What are you doing back there? she’d call in her thin, wavering voice. What are you up to?

Like he wanted to go snooping around back there. In the bedroom she had a fox pelt placed across the duvet cover, its empty eyes staring at Flynn from the doorway, teeth and claws digging into the plush fabric, as if it was clinging to the side of some huge animal. There was something weird about the way its mouth curved, like it was grinning. It used to scare him, like it was trying to lure him in by smiling like that. 

Then again, a lot of things about Gramma Aggie used to scare him. 

Like the middle room leading to the back of the apartment. A long space where the gloom lay thick, only a faint light filtering in through the twins pebbled glass doors. It was made darker still because of the wallpaper, a crowded motif of fern leaves and flowers that should have made the room feel close but it didn’t. Instead it seemed to create more space and twisting shadows, like a clearing in the middle of a dark jungle. 

The only furniture was an old three-seater and two fauteuils, arranged on the carpet in the middle of the  Mom said it had been a sitting room, once. And Flynn supposed it still was. But no one ever sat there.

Except the puppets.

There were five of them, great thin-limbed monstrosities, sitting in their seats like normal people. They were taller than Flynn, almost as big as a full-grown man, with flat round faces that made them look like giant sunflowers. They all had creepy, clown-like smiles and oval eyes, fashioned out of dense loops of thread and their hair was fashioned out of yarn, yellow and brown and orange. Three men and two women, sitting amidst the shadows in silence, their faces shining in the room’s eternal twilight like pale moons.

The door to the middle room was never closed, only the one on the far end, leading to the other bedrooms. So every time he’d had to use the bathroom, he had to step into the hallway, where the heat and noise of the living room evaporated and the silence seemed to press down almost like a physical presence and he’d feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up before he even passed the door. He’d tell himself not to look, but his eyes had a mind of their own and they’d flicked into the room and he’d see three sunflower faces staring up at him from the gloom, each one cocked not quite the same. And they’d be smiling but the shadows did something to their eyes, turned the smiles into harsh, malicious grins. Long, cold fingers would curl around his heart and give a painful squeeze and he’d bolt for the bathroom, every hair on his body standing up. 

It was even worse at night, when the orange glare of the streetlight outside pushed up against the rough surface of the glass and sketched only the outlines of the two sitting in the easy chairs and the other three had been swallowed by darkness and he became convinced they’d drifted into one of the other rooms, moving in a halting, uncertain gait on their stuffed, linked-sausage legs. On those nights, he’d sit on the toilet watching the door, humming a tune and waiting for the knob to be turned between two blunt white hands, opening just wide enough for a flat, circular face to slip through and fix him with a wide and frozen stare.

Those were the times he’d welcome the loose, metallic rattle and thump of Gramma Aggie’s cane as she struggled her way into the hallway to ask him what he was doing. To make sure he hadn’t gotten somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.

Following his father into the hallway, these memories came back to him but they no longer corresponded with the physical reality. The house seemed to have shrunk in his absence, the corridor little more than a junction now, and although the light in the hall was subdued, it was no longer the nest of shadows it had once been. Glancing into the bathroom, Flynn thought it looked almost cramped. 

Even the sitting room, grown to a vast, cavernous space through numberless nightmares, had now returned to almost disappointing dimensions. The room was still large and chocked with gloom. And it still had the same ugly wallpaper, a chaos of leaves and flowers that almost overwhelmed the senses. But it was just a room. If not for the puppets, he would have laughed about his own fright.

Still in their accustomed place, they watched him, red thread lips stretched in wide, welcoming smiles. There was a puppet folded in half in one of the easy chairs and the one on the left side of the three-seater, made to look like a girl with blonde pigtails, had slipped to the side, sunflower face cocked at a quizzical angle as if to say: Lookie here, Flynn’s back! But otherwise they were just as disturbing as ever. As his eyes crawled over their unnatural, gleeful faces, he felt a tingle that started in his groin and worked its way up his body in waves.

When Dad pushed on, he lingered. Because he wasn’t allowed to go in there. The room, and the ones locked away at the other end, were forever off limits. Not that he’d ever want to. Only Gramma Aggie and Mom could go in, and even then without shoes, like entering some weird temple. Which it kind of was. Buried in shadows and silence, it was almost like a church. 

Or a tomb.

The thought had come unbidden, sent gooseflesh rippling up his arms. He’d always been afraid of the puppets because they almost—but not quite—resembled normal people, but looking at them now, slumped in their seats at drunken angles, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine them as actual dead bodies, arranged to spend eternity at after-dinner conversation. For an instant, he could see it, flat smiling faces exchanged for ones of bluish wax, gone soft with death. Blind eyes staring at their swollen hands or turned up at the ceiling, mouths open in mindless wonder.  

Then Dad opened the door at the far end, allowing a fan of light into the room that chased away the murk and dispelled the illusion. 

“Coming?”

Now that the shadows had released their grip, it was easier to step across the threshold. In the cold light of day, some of the menace had leeched from the puppets. Looking at them in disarray, a reluctant sadness outweighed his repulsion, the truth of Gramma Aggie’s passing hitting him in a way that seeing her in the little room in the hospital’s basement hadn’t managed. If she’d been alive, Gramma would’ve spent time fussing over the puppets, making sure they were positioned just right. He remembered watching her ministrations from the safety of the hallway, her touches gentle and careful as she adjusted limbs and faces. The expression on her face and the tender manner in which she handled them spoke of a care and attention that was almost loving. Something she’d never shown her grandson.  

He’d told Mom that once, on one of the weekends he had to sleep over. Told her Gramma didn’t care about him. All she cared about were her stupid, creepy puppets. He couldn’t understand why she kept them around.

“Because Gramma is lonely,” Mom would say. “The puppets make her feel like she has company.”

“Creepy company,” Flynn would mutter, rolling his eyes. And Mom would look at him and she’d frown in reproach, but there’d be something in her eyes. Something unfocused and troubled. And it made him wonder if maybe Mom was afraid of the puppets, too.

Beyond was Gramma’s old bedroom, a space he’d glimpsed every now and then. It turned out to be a cold, uninviting room where condensation clung to the inside of the window. The bed and the rest of the furnishings were still there but the bed was buried under suitcases and clothes, and cardboard boxes and piles of boxes left only a small pathway that led to the next room. Over the last few years, it had become increasingly difficult for her to move around the apartment and Gramma had started to sleep in the guest room where Flynn used to spend the night. Most of the boxes contained books that came from the bookcases that had to be dismantled when the hospital bed was put in.

“Look at all this junk,” Dad said. “This is going to take forever.” he thrust his open hands at the mess. “Seriously, who lives like this?” He sighed. “Well, best get to it, I guess.”

Flynn bent to one of the boxes but Dad stopped him.

“Wait. We’ll start in the next room. It’s better if we get everything boxed up first. That way we can clear everything out at once.”

Flynn shrugged and followed his father into the next room. It was hard to say what the original purpose of the space had been; it was filled with mismatched cabinets, an old desk, and a cheap-looking dresser covered with stickers. Stacks of household supplies were piled up against the furniture.

Dad passed a hand across his face. “Alright. We’re going to take some boxes, start sorting.”

After Dad explained the sorting categories, he began to stack boxes in the bedroom and Flynn bent to the task at hand. As he began to clear out the big cabinets, he discovered some interesting stuff, like stacks of old comics and an old lighter shaped like a copper coin. Under different circumstances, going through the room would have been a fun afternoon. But the moist cold and the lingering presence of Gramma Aggie sucked the joy out of it. He could smell her, even in the rooms she had abandoned, her old perfume still hanging in the air. It was easy to imagine her as a ghost, watching his labours with displeasure. 

What are you up to now?

He shivered, tossing old dolls into the appropriate box— Mom’s. It was strange, coming upon these at Gramma’s. Like most, he had a hard time picturing his parents as children, but trying to imagine his mother growing up in the dank, forbidding apartment was impossible. Gramma Aggie didn’t like children. All she cared about was her soap opera’s and quiet.

The drawer emptied, Flynn switched to the next. Some old tin boxes, some odds and ends… and a leather-bound book. Bored, he wriggled his fingers underneath to lift it from the drawer but when he lifted it out, something slipped from between the pages and fluttered to the ground. Bending to pick it up, Flynn saw it was an old, black-and-white photograph, showing a little girl posing against some trees. She had long blonde hair, and she was dressed in a white short-sleeved blouse, a dark skirt and knee-high socks. Her face was screwed up as she stared into the camera.

Flynn stared at the picture, wondering if he was looking at his own mother. Most of the pictures she’d shown him had colors but he supposed it was possible. He flipped open the book, meaning to slip the photograph back in but then he saw a picture of a man standing by an antique car and he lingered with interest. Below it was another one of the same man in a suit with his arm around a young woman and when he held up the photograph, he saw the similarities. Both people were smiling and while he didn’t recognise the woman from the picture, he knew who the man was. The strange color of the man’s incisor was a dead give-away. He was looking at a picture of Gramma Aggie and her husband George. Flynn had never met him; he’d gone away when Mom had been his age, but Mom still carried his picture in her wallet. He’d been a painter, or something.  

Even once he realised the truth, he couldn’t find the unpleasant grandmother he’d known in this smiling young woman. He could see the light dancing in her eyes, even in the two-tone photograph. But all he’d every gotten were dull, dismissive stares. Flynn had been a nuisance. Gramma Aggie had devoted her attention to the dark middle room, and its mute inhabitants.

And yet here she was, enjoying life in picture after picture. Laughing at a carnival, dancing with Grampa George at some party. Smiling up at the camera with one hand draped across the bump of her belly. A happy, carefree stranger.

But from one photograph to the next, he could see the first lines of his Gramma begin to emerge in the young woman’s face. Standing next to her smiling husband, she held onto her massive belly and her own smile was weak and begrudging. 

What followed were mostly pictures of what he assumed was mom, growing up as he flipped the pages. Here and there, Grampa George emerged, always laughing or grinning, his gold tooth gleaming. The few photographs of Gramma Aggie showed a woman with a smile that no longer reached her eyes.

Even so, a lot of the pictures were pretty neat. But then he turned the page and found one that wasn’t.

The photograph showed the sitting room. He recognised the room, even though the awful wallpaper was blocked by one of the cabinets that was now stored in the space he was in the process of clearing out. In the shot, Mom was sitting next to Gramma Aggie on the three-seater, looking up at the camera with a faint smile. Draped across both their laps was the limp body of one of the puppets, and Gramma was bent over it, in the process of attaching its flat, round head. Even from this angle, Flynn could tell that it was one of the male puppets, the one with the awful orange hair. The one that lay jack-knifed in one of the easy chairs right now.

Staring at the photograph gave him a sick feeling, not just because this was the start of Gramma’s terrifying house of puppets but because looking at his mother in the picture, she didn’t look much older than he was now. He tried to imagine what it must’ve been like for her here and couldn’t. Spending even twenty-four hours here used to be torture and he was glad when Gramma Aggie health no longer allowed it. The idea of living here, actually living here had his mind reeling.

And sure, in the picture it was only the one dummy. But still, no thanks.

He flipped to the next page. More photos of Mom. School portraits and blurry photos of her playing hockey and candids of her out and about. A few pages later, there was another one of the sitting room, now with three puppets smiling back instead of one. Gramma Aggie sat in one of the easy chairs, bent over her disturbing handiwork.

He’d gone another four pages or so when he began to notice Grampa George’s absence. Frowning, he flipped back to look at the last one. It was a candid of him in one of the sitting room’s easy chairs, reading the newspaper and smoking a pipe. Immersed in his reading, Flynn thought he’d been unaware the picture was being taken. Flipping the page, he found Gramma sewing her first puppet. The one that would end up filling the chair that Grampa George had sat reading in.

Flynn eyebrows drew together as a shadow began to loom up out of the fog of his thoughts and he jumped as a voice behind him said: “Taking a break?”

Heart hammering in his chest, he whirled around to find his father standing in the doorway. 

“What’ve you got there?”

Flynn swallowed. “Old pictures.”

“Yeah?” Dad smiled. “Let me see.”

Flynn handed the album over and Dad began to flip through it, pages creaking and cracking. Every now and then, he came upon one that made him let out a breath of laughter. He assumed they were Mom’s, because of the way Dad leaned in and lingered over them.

A minute or so passed before Flynn said: “Hey Dad?”

“Hmm.”

“When did Grampa George leave?”

Dad gave a half-shrug, flipping through the pages. “I don’t know. When Mom was about your age.”

Flynn chewed on this. “Did he say something to Mom about why he left?”

“Hm?” Dad looked up from the pages, blinking the distraction out of his eyes. “No. You know Mom and Gramma Aggie never saw him again.” He frowned. “Why?”

Flynn shrugged. “Just wondering. So he just… took off?”

“Pretty much, yeah. But he left a letter for your Mom, to read when she was older.”

“A letter?” Flynn frowned. “What did it say?”

Dad sighed. “A lot of things that sound nice but aren’t.”

“I don’t get it.”

Dad made a difficult face. “Look, what Grampa George told Mom is between the two of them. You can ask Mom about it, just… not today, okay buddy?” He tussled his son’s hair. “She’s had a rough couple days already and I don’t think she’s up for talking about it, you can understand that, can’t you?”

Flynn nodded.

“Good.” Drawing in a breath, he said:  “Now come on, let’s get started on some boxes.” He lowered his voice. “Or do you want to spend the night here?” Dad floated his hands in the air like a ghost’s and Flynn punched him.

“Stop it,” he said, smirking despite himself. 

“Then get back to work,” Dad said with a grin of his own. “I’ll take care of some of these boxes.” He put the photo album on the cabinet as he left.

Flynn went back to work, clearing out the rest of the cabinets. Little by little the room began to clear and the boxes began to pile up behind him, and every few times, he had to help Dad bring some of the boxes downstairs. Passing through the sitting room, his eyes flitted to the puppets and he picked up the pace. Even with the light streaming into the room he didn’t care for them, watching his passage with those unchanging smiles— like they had a secret they couldn’t tell him. 

And he knew it was impossible, he knew it, but every time he came up or returned from the back room, a little fright spiked out from his heart because he felt sure they’d shifted in some subtle way, like one of the pale moon faces had turned just enough to be different or one of the limbs had crept a quarter of an inch to the side. Moving when he wasn’t looking, like a game of red light, green light.

On one of the trips back up, he pulled himself back on the threshold, finding the double door at the far end of the room closed. His heart thudded in his chest, until one of them swung back and Dad stepped out. Seeing his son’s face, he grinned. 

“Still not a big fan of those, are you?” Dad said, nodding at the puppets. His smile wilted a little. “Can’t say I blame you. Those are some creepy ole things.”

“It’s fine,” Flynn said in a low voice, pushing past his father.

“Is it?” Dad said, teasing.

Flynn stepped back into the back room. “I just don’t see why Mom can’t carry some of the boxes down.”

“She doesn’t like being in that room.”

“Who does?” Flynn grumbled.

“Hey,” Dad said, a gentle edge to his voice. “Mom was the one who found Gramma. Can you imagine what that’s like?”

Flynn dropped a double handful of shoes into one of the clothing boxes. “You mean, she found Gramma… in there?” 

Dad nodded. “She was lying right there, on the rug by the couch. You remember, Mom called me right over.”

Flynn nodded. That was the night he spent at Kyle’s. 

Dad gave a little head shake. “She didn’t look pretty.”

“Wha—“ Flynn had to swallow something. It didn’t go down easy. “What happened?”

Dad reached out, squeezed his shoulder. “You know what happened. Don’t you remember? We talked about it.”

“Her heart stopped beating,” Flynn mumbled.

“That’s right. Maybe it happened before she fell or maybe it happened after, but in the end it doesn’t matter. Gramma Aggie was old and sick and sometimes—“ he sighed “sometimes people just refuse to take care of themselves and then bad things happen.”

Flynn nodded. He’d heard all this before: Gramma Aggie had been a recurring topic at the dinner table, especially after she almost burned down the kitchen when Flynn had stayed over. She’d put the meatloaf in the oven, then gone into the living room to watch her stories, and then there’d been a fire. Afterwards, Dad had said she wasn’t fit to live on her own anymore and Mom had told him that she would never leave. She would die in her apartment. Which she had. 

He also remembered something else.

“Does that mean we have to keep this place?”

Dad raised an eyebrow at him. “You hear a lot, don’t you?” He paused. “I don’t think so, buddy. Gramma Aggie had a lot of bills that still have to be paid so I think we’ll have to sell the apartment.”

“Good,” Flynn said, unable to hide his relief.

“You really don’t like this place, do you?” Dad said, with a crooked smile.

“I like our house better.”

Dad leaned close. “So do I,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. “So let’s hurry up so we can get out of here. Clear the rest of the cabinets. Then I think we’re done back here.”

Flynn nodded, the thought of getting out of here bringing another wave of relief. But as he turned back to clearing the dresser, the pertinent part of the conversation kept coming back to him, and when he heard his father walked across the sitting room to bring another box downstairs, unease settled in the pit of his stomach. His ears listened to the deep silence that followed, phantom fingers stirring the hairs on the back of his neck. Unwanted thoughts whirled through his mind like the autumn leaves drifting from the branches outside.

Found her in there.

His heart began to beat hard and slow.

It wasn’t pretty.

“Stop it,” he hissed, and the sound of his own voice made his skin rough with gooseflesh, made it so he almost bolted from the room. But instead, he pulled out another drawer. More old tin boxes. He started checking the contents, even though every sound he made gave another tug at his nerves.  Some old jewelry and pins. Those went in keepers. Another containing old coins. He put those in there too. The next drawer was filled with ties and an old pair of shoes. An easy one. Scooping the whole thing up in a bundle, he dropped it in the box for old clothes, pushed the drawer closed and opened the next one. This one, too, was filled with clothes. Old pairs of socks folded together so they looked like bunny ears. 

Again he made to scoop the drawer empty, but the fingers of his right hand struck something buried beneath the pile. After clearing away the pairs of socks, he saw that it was a small cardboard box. Flynn lifted it out and removed the lid. 

At first glance, the box was filled with old toys: hollow steel miniature cars and a doll in a cowboy hat. But when he took out the toys, he also found a small pair of gilded shoes, small enough to hold in his hand. Tucked in one of the shoes was a lock of hair. Beneath all this was a folded piece of fabric, and when he removed it from the box and unfolded it, he saw it was an old onesie, just before  a drift of old photographs folded up inside spilled free and rained down on the floor.

Raking them back together, Flynn thought they were just more pictures of Mom as a child, but then his eyes lit on one in particular. Frowning, he picked it up and held it close. 

In the photograph, he saw a young and smiling Gramma Aggie sitting with a child on her lap. Only, the child wasn’t Mom. It was a young boy of maybe five or six, dressed in a checkered shirt, his blonde hair combed to the side. In his hand, he was holding the cowboy doll from the box. 

Flynn began to look through the rest of the photographs. All of them showed the boy, either alone, with Gramma Aggie or Grampa George, or all three of them together. Here he found the smiling, happy pictures of Gramma that had been missing from the pages of the album— a happy mother with her child. 

When Dad came back up, he was still clearing away the troubling photographs and when Flynn showed them to him, Dad sighed, crouching beside him and staring down into the scattered pile.

“That’s your Mom’s older brother, John.”

“Mom has a brother?”

Dad shook his head. “No. No, she doesn’t. Something happened to him when he was very young.”

“He died?”

Dad picked up one of the photographs. “No one knows. One day he was just… gone.”

Flynn’s eyes widened. “Gone? Gone how?”

Dad shrugged. “I don’t know. Gramma Aggie never really talked about it. I don’t even think Mom knows. It all happened long before she was born."

“So he was just… gone?” Flynn said, thoughts gathering like storm clouds. “Like Grampa George?” 

“Grampa George didn’t disappear. He left.”

“Because he left a note,” Flynn muttered, staring down at the jumbled pictures. 

“That’s right,” Dad said, distracted. “Hey, see here. That’s the sitting room without that godawful wallpaper.”

Dad showed him the picture. If not for the furniture Flynn wouldn’t’ve recognised the room. The walls, covered with a lighter wallpaper chased the shadows away and it looked like any other place. It looked… normal.

But then he looked at the boy playing with the toy car on the carpet, and his eyes clouded with thought. 

Dad withdrew the picture. “Look how light that room is.” 

But Flynn was no longer listening. He’d been going through the pile, putting the photographs back in the box when he locked on another one, and now all he heard was the sound of his own heartbeat as he lifted it in front of his eyes.

It was another one of Gramma Aggie. In the picture she was sitting at the living room table but she wasn’t looking into the camera. Instead she was bent over another sewing project—a puppet. It lay before her on the table. Only, this one was much smaller than the others. Its moon-shape face rested against the sewing box at an angle, waiting to be attached. Smiling at Flynn with glee, it was indistinguishable from the others, except for its size. And the hair, a mop of yellow yarn, styled into a neat right-sided part. 

Just like Mom’s brother John in most of the pictures he’d come across. 

He couldn’t remember a small puppet like that ever having been there. And yet, when he stared at it, smiling up at him with unblinking eyes, he thought it kind of resembled the one sitting on the right side of the three-seater. Wasn’t that one dressed in dark blue, too? He thought so, yes. It was almost as if it— almost as if—

It grew.

Terror crept up his body and squirmed along his scalp, as the dark tumblers in his mind turned over. Mom’s brother going missing. Grampa George leaving. And every time there was Gramma Aggie making the dolls. But what if they never left? 

Grampa George left a note.

Yeah. But anyone could write a note. Kyle had forged his Mom’s signature once, when he’d gotten a note for causing trouble in class. He never got caught either. And Gramma Aggie had been grown. Grown people get away with everything. Even really bad things. 

He looked at the puppet’s broad, unchanging smile and remembered all the times he’d thought they were keeping secrets. Only the secret was that at least two of them had been more than just fabric and stuffing and thread before Gramma Aggie made it so they turned into horrors with sunflower faces.

But there’s five of them.

Five of them, yes. Two women and three men. And the answer came to him with shocking suddenness. Puppets for the five of them: Gramma, Grampa, Uncle John, Mom, and Dad. The entire family, nothing but frozen, happy faces.

His heart hammered in his chest. It all made sense. The fussing, the way she was always checking up on him. She didn’t want him finding out. It even explained why she was always so mean to him. She had no room for Flynn. Otherwise she would’ve made a sixth puppet, smaller than the others. One that would grow up in darkness and silence, until it was as tall and thin as the rest of them. 

Thinking of himself seated between the rest of them, a cold finger brushed his spine, made him shiver.

He wondered why she hadn’t done it; turned Mom and Dad into puppets. Maybe she’d been holding off, waiting for the right time. He remembered what Mom said about Gramma being lonely. Perhaps having the puppets wasn’t enough just yet. Maybe she’d gotten too old or sick to do it. Or maybe— maybe she’d gotten scared. 

Remembering where Mom and Dad had found her, Flynn thought back to all the times he’d been convinced the puppets had moved in his absence. Perhaps she’d started to notice that, too. Maybe that’s why she’d started to sleep in the guest room, because she’d seen the subtle changes when she went back and forth through the room. Only, it hadn’t stopped there, had it? No, because at least two of the puppets had a real reason to be mad at Gramma. He wondered what happened that night. Did one of the pale moon faces snap in her direction as she passed, giving her a heart attack? Or was it something else, like two tall, thin figures looming up out of the dark, bobbing and nodding as they fell upon her with bright smiles and—

He almost screamed when Dad nudged him.

“Jeez, buddy. Everything okay? You look as white as a sheet.”

All Flynn could do was stare at him with wide, staring eyes.

But when Dad stood, Flynn was up in a flash. And when he followed him into the bedroom, his father gave him a puzzled look. “We still need to clear the rest out.”

“Can I go down with you first?”

Dad studied him. “Why?”

“Please.”

Dad frowned. “Is this the puppets again?”

“No,” Flynn said in a small voice, cutting his eyes to the side.

“Oh my god,” Dad said, walking through the door into the sitting room.

“No—“ Flynn clutched at his father but it was too late. Dad strode up to the middle of the room and looked back at his son with an expression strangely similar to that of the puppets as he grabbed the puppet bent at the waist in the easy chair. Flynn wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen but it rose with ease, its noodle limbs dangling. Dad moved further down and pulled up the one in the other chair, its head dipping in defeat. 

Panicked, Flynn sped across the room to join his father. The three still seated watched this development with identical expressions. As they left the room, he could feel the weight of their judgemental eyes on his back. 

Mom stood in the living room, loading up her own set of boxes. When they came through, she looked up. As her eyes drifted to the puppets in her husband’s arms, Flynn saw the sadness return, like a curtain of rain pulling closed.

“She wanted them to stay in there,” Mom said in soft, dreamlike tones. 

“I know, honey.”

“She even put it in her will,” she said and a little shiver went through her voice at the end but when Dad hugged her, she said she was fine, her voice muffled against his shoulder. “It’s fine,” she said again as he stepped back, but when she blinked, two tears spilled down. She knuckled them away.

“I have to take them out at some point,” Dad said. 

“I know,” Mom said, nodding. “I know. It’s just— they meant so much to her.” She sniffled. “Maybe we can find a place for them at the house.”

Flynn heart dropped.

“I don’t know,” Dad said, glancing at his son. “I think someone might have sleepless nights.”

Mom looked at him, offered him a weak smile. “You shouldn’t be so afraid of them. Gramma always said they were like members of the family. Like they were watching over us.”

Flynn veins turned to ice water, thinking how true the statement was. 

“All I know is they smell funny,” Dad said. “Here, smell this,” he said, holding out an arm to Flynn, who jumped back in fright.

He looked at his son with a flat stare, shaking his head. Then he lifted the arm to his own nose, breathed a few times. He pulled back and made a face. 

“What is that? Did she stuff these with garbage?”

“Maybe the moisture got in them,” Mom said.

Dad shrugged. “I hope not. You’ll have to toss them if it has.”

“Just— put them in storage. I’ll deal with it later.”

“Fine. Let’s go.”

Flynn followed his father down to put the puppets down in the basement— where all creepy things belong. Then they went back up for the others. As Dad went in, Mom drifted to the doorway.

“The room will look so empty without them.”

Dad put his hands on his hips, glanced around. “Yeah, I know. But they have to go anyway if we want to paint in here.” He started towards the far wall. “Or do you want to put up other wallpa-“ He’d been sliding his hand across the wall. Now he broke off. “Wait a minute. Is this all one piece?”

“No,” Mom said. “Daddy painted it on. He was an artist, remember?” Her hand curled up into a fist against her chest when she smiled. “Mom used to say he could paint the stars out of the sky.”

Dad whistled, leaned in to see the detail. “You can say that again.” He ran his hand across the wall again. “It’s gonna be a bitch to paint, though.” He withdrew his hand. “What did he use? Grease?”

“We could always leave it this way,” she said, a slight edge to her words. “It’s been there since before I was born. He painted it for John. He was going to add animals but then—“ She trailed off. 

“We might have to leave it.” Dad withdrew his hand, wiped it on the front of his shirt with a grimace. “I think the paint will just bead up and roll off, to be honest.”

He went to the three-seater, glanced back at Flynn. “You wanna help me out here, bud?”

Flynn shook his head, skin crawling with the thought of touching one of those them.

Dad sighed. “Some help you are.” He grabbed one of the puppets, threw it over his shoulder. Then he picked up the other two. “Here we go. Pray I don’t break my neck going down the stairs.”

Flynn jumped aside as he moved past, one round face flashing him a last parting smile in passing. He watched as his father moved down the hall, buried beneath long dangling limbs and waving threads of unnatural hair. 

And then they were gone.

Flynn stepped past his mother into the sitting room. Mom was right; it did look empty without them. Taking a few steps, he looked around. Now that the puppets had gone, he was free to take in the rest of the surroundings for the first time. But even with them gone, Flynn found he still didn’t like it very much. The mural of leaves and flowers still filled the space with shadows and the illusion of movement. Something about the tangled shapes kept his eyes from finding a resting place; they kept flitting hither and tither, never finding what they were looking for.

His ears pricked up and he glanced back at the doorway. Mom was still leaning against the jamb, her face a pale oval in the persistent gloom. She’d been looking around the room, same as him. Now that she caught him staring, she met his eyes.

“What’s wrong?”

After a brief hesitation, Flynn started shaking his head. “I don’t know. I thought I heard s— Wait, there it is again!”

They both fell silent, listening. It was a soft sound, barely audible. 

“I don’t hear anything,” Mom said, stepping into the room and Flynn shushed her. She froze, cocking her head to listen. 

It came again, louder this time. It was a strange noise but oddly familiar. It pulled at skin, making his nerves twitch.

“There,” he said. “Do you hear it?”

Mom frowned. “Yes. What is that?” She made a face of repulsion and Flynn couldn’t blame her. It was a disgusting noise, deep and somehow sticky.

It was still getting louder and Flynn began to look around the room, trying to determine where it was coming from. He took a few wandering steps, about to turn around, when he saw a blemish in the mural up ahead; a pale oblong sliver, where the paint had been scratched off to reveal the plaster beneath. In the shadow-filled cave of the room, it almost shone, like the puppets’ face had. 

But as he moved closer, he saw that it wasn’t a gouge. It was something protruding a couple inches from the wall at eye level. A mottled white, it rose from the wall at a slight curve, tapering off to a knifepoint. In the room’s half-light, it glistened, almost like an icicle sweating beneath the winter sun.

Flynn reached out, his hand hovering just above the spot where it sprouted from the wall, when the sound resumed. His hand froze. Eyes bulging, he watched as the curved blade in front of him slid further from the wall. That’s what was making the wet sliding sound.

“Mom?” he said, stepping back without taking his eyes off the pale shape. 

“What?”

“There’s— there’s something… over there.” He licked his lips. “In the wall.”

“What?” she said again and Flynn opened his mouth to answer, but then the sound came again, only from a different direction. His eyes flitted about the room until he spied another pale sliver just below the ceiling behind the couches.

Still others went up as Mom pushed past him and now the air was filled with nerve-tugging noises and he turned, trying to see every which way, when a loud tearing sound from behind made him jump and whirl, just in time to see the shadow tumble halfway from the wall. All the blood fell from his face as he saw that it was a skeleton, dressed in tattered rags. He watched in horror as it shook and flailed, trying to free itself the rest of the way. His bladder let go in a flood of warm urine.

From somewhere far away, Mom screamed. But his own scream was buried somewhere deep inside. He couldn’t get it out. He couldn’t even move. Not even when the skeleton was forced further through the wall by a dozen white blades slipping forth and it hit the floor in a hollow rattle. The skull detached and did a drunken roll, landing in the fan of light streaming in through the bedroom doors. Flynn looked at it, the spotted bone covered in deep scratches and gouges, until he saw the gleam of its golden incisor.

So that’s what happened to Grampa George.

Mom screamed again and he peeled his eyes away from the skull’s grin to see Mom’s hair had gotten caught on one of the spikes and she was trying to get unstuck. Only— Only the spike was moving along with her, whipping from side to side. But then it split down the middle and he saw that it wasn’t a spike at all but a maw, a bone-white maw filled with tiny, razor-sharp teeth. It snapped shut with a sharp clack as Mom fell to her knees. It wriggled and pushed, and a heartbeat later, its blood-bubble eye was free, glowing with a baleful light in the shadows of the room. And when the curve of another shape began to emerge, Flynn realised the truth.

Gazing about the room, he saw them struggling from the walls, pale sharp needles pushing up through the mural like the spikes of a some medieval torture chamber. Already strange, featherless wings the color of bloodied white sheets beat against the wall in a furious desire to be free. Undeterred now that Gramma’s puppets were no longer around to keep them contained to the walls. Serrated beaks clapped and snapped, loosing cries that pulled the strength from his legs.  

“Scarecrows,” he whispered, as the first nightmare bird pulled itself free, falling on his mother, the sharp knife of its beak beginning its tactless work. “They were scarecrows.”

The street lay quiet and peaceful. As the sun slipped beneath the houses, a gust of wind stirred the trees and took a few handfuls of leaves to scatter along the street. A young man on an E-step zipped by, listening to music on his headphones. The silence returned. 

Two minutes later, the first window shattered. 

It wouldn’t be the last one.