The Puppet

I used to think that sleep paralysis was the worst thing I could have ever possibly experienced in my life.

You know what that is, don’t you?

That feeling when you wake up suddenly out of nowhere but even though your mind’s awake you can’t control your body at all. That feeling when you’re trapped in your bed, mind awake and frantic but the rest of you still and unmoving because you just can’t get anything to move no matter how hard you try. Like you’re being pinned down by cold iron-bindings on every limb but you can’t see them and can’t even begin to struggle to free yourself from them.

And sometimes I would feel something else in the room with me, when I woke up unable to shift even the tiniest muscle in my finger, something watching me just outside of where I could see. I wouldn’t be able to turn to look, to see what was watching me if anything at all, because I couldn’t turn my eyes, couldn’t turn my head, to look and see.

I get it from time to time; something will just wake me up from the middle of a deep sleep and I just…

I just won’t be able to move.

And it’s the worst thing in the world.

Or… at least it used to be.

I’d give anything if things could go back to being that easy.

It started about two months ago.

Henry, an old friend of mine that is, works at this little antique store in town. It was a tiny thing; barely made enough to keep the few employees it did have paid and I swear anytime I went in there I thought the place was going to collapse in on itself, but Henry loved working there. He loved the work, loved the owners of the place, and the one other co-worker they were able to keep employed, and most of all he loved all the odd and old things that would be brought in.

He was always so eager to share anything that came in that he thought was particularly neat or interesting, though we have completely different ideas of what that means exactly, and he was always sending me pictures and messages about the newest thing to be sold or donated to the antique store was brought in.

Two months ago, Henry sent me a picture of this little, wooden puppet.

He’d said it’d just been left outside of the store’s door something during the night and no one had seen who had left it or why.

I thought the weird little thing was a bit cool, to say the least; it had looked hand-carved and when I asked he’d said all the joints and limbs moved as they were supposed to, which is rare to see in hand-crafted things like that. Unless they were made by someone that actually knew what they were doing, hand-crafted puppets were stiff and clunky and never moved right.

Henry said he could make sure no one else brought the puppet if I wanted to come down and take a closer look at it and… and I said I’d be there as soon as my shift ended.

I… really should have just left the puppet alone.

But I didn’t know any better then, so after my shift finished I made my way down to that little antique store and I let Henry show me that hand-crafted wooden puppet.

It was just as plain as it had been in the photo he’d sent me earlier. It’s limbs, joints, and body parts unpainted and showing off the wood that had been used to make it.

It was a dark reddish colour, Cedarwood I think, and it was detailed only with the lines and imperfections of the wood.

It had felt rough in my hands when I held it, like it hadn’t been sanded down and it still held all of the wood grain’s usual roughness to it, though the controls where you were supposed to hold and manipulate the thing were smooth and easy to handle, looking like they were worn down a bit from someone else using it in the past.

Even with its rough texture, it was clear to see the amount of care that had gone into making the puppet, certainly too much to warrant just leaving it outside of an antique store in the middle of the night.

But I decided not to think about it too much and simply named a price that I thought was fair and Henry, after a few minutes of haggling and pointing out that I’d need to sand and varnish it myself anyways, accepted it.

I was planning on working on it later on that week, during my next day off of work, but when the day came I had a different friend call me up for lunch and didn’t get to get around to it after all.

That seemed to happen every time I planned to work on fixing up the puppet; either a friend would call and I’d go and spend the day with them or, or the puppet would just… disappear from where I’d put it last.

Usually, I would have it on the coffee table in the living room, where I could see it and where I’d always be able to tell where it was and...

I didn’t move it.

I never moved it and I don’t live with anyone else that could have moved it.

But somehow the puppet would shift around my apartment without me knowing how or why just showing up in random places that I don’t remember putting it.

At first, I assumed that I was just moving it around and forgetting about it with how busy I was, that I was putting in on the kitchen counter, or the pantry cupboard, or my wardrobe or even the bathroom but then it started…

It started moving while I was asleep.

I’ve never been prone to sleepwalking or anything like that so when the puppet moved from the kitchen where I’d left it the night before to my bedside table in the morning, I was really starting to freak out.

I had no idea what to think of it.

Was there really someone just breaking into my apartment to move around a single wooden puppet? I haven’t noticed anything else being moved or anything missing, just the puppet moving from room to room and I had no idea what kind of sicko could do something like that.

And then things started to get… things started to go wrong.

Remember that sleep paralysis I told you about earlier? Well, it was a bit like that but… while I was awake.

It was about three weeks ago. I was at home, preparing dinner and my hands…

My hands just went stiff. I couldn’t do anything to move them, no matter what I did or how hard I tried to move them it was like they’d just been plucked out of my control and frozen in place by something that wanted to see what it could do to me but then they were released and back in my control and I tried to dismiss it, tried to logic it away as anything I could.

Muscle spasms I decided on, forcefully ignoring the fact that it’d been both my arms and I hadn’t felt anything like spasms were supposed to feel.

It happened again a week later.

That time I was making myself a cup of tea, I like a cup when I read in the evenings, and my arms were suddenly not my own anymore. I struggled again but then my arms started to move without my wanting them to and one of them started to inch with a jerking slowness, like whatever it was that had taken hold of me was fighting me each step of the way, towards the just-boiled kettle.

I felt my fingers grip it but it was like I was feeling it through a film, you know when your hand falls asleep and you get that pins and needles sensation but you still have to move and do things to get the blood back into them even though it hurts?

Like that.

I watched trying to force my hand to let go of the kettle or my other arm to move but I couldn’t do anything to stop what was happening to me.

I could feel the tears leaking out of my eyes as the kettle came to a stop above my other arm and my hand started to stiffly tip it.

I managed to jerk my arm back towards my chest. The kettle was dropped heavily onto the counter and I had to jump away from the burning hot water that spilled everywhere, almost weeping in relief.

The puppet was sitting on the table behind me when I eventually composed myself enough from the terror of the experience and turned around.

I tried to return it to Henry the next day. The puppet that was.

It showed back up in my apartment the next morning, sitting on my couch like a welcome guest and it terrified me.

I tried to throw it out with the trash, watched it be loaded up into the garbage truck the next morning, and tried to find comfort in the fact that it was gone and destroyed and there was nothing else I needed to worry about anymore.

I came home the next afternoon and found the puppet sitting in my bed against the pillows, smelling of nothing to suggest it had been buried amongst trash and garbage and looking untouched, the same dark reddish wood it had started as.

It became my new routine for the next fortnight.

I would try to get rid of the puppet only for it to return within the next day, and my limbs would be stolen from me out of nowhere, sometimes with the intent to try to hurt me and others just to guide me into meaningless, empty motions. A few days ago whatever it was had stolen my legs and walked me all the way home from work, ignoring the bus I usually took and leaving the bottom of my feet an aching, bloody mess.

And then yesterday… yesterday…

I’d come back from work, expecting to see the puppet I’d thrown out earlier that day somewhere in my apartment and indeed I saw just that. And more.

There were new puppets, each hand-carved and just as plain as the one I had gotten at the antique store but each one in a different wood.

Birch.

Oak.

Maple.

Mahogany.

With my Cedar that made 5 little wooden puppets sitting at my kitchen table like I’d just walked in on a particularly important meeting and that was…

Someone had broken into my apartment while I’d been at work to not only bring back a puppet I had thrown out but bring in four others and arrange them in that sickeningly display like they were toying with me and…

I got out of there, just turned and left and stayed the night at a friend’s.

But that night.

Last night.

I woke up in the middle of the night and could have cried to feel that familiar safe feeling of sleep paralysis, to know it was something normal and not my body being stolen from me by some unknown thing.

And then I felt the eyes on me.

I thought it was the usual sleep paralysis thing and I forced my eyes open, expecting to see the roof of the room and nothing else until I was able to move my head.

Her eyes were a dull, glassy orange. Empty and void of anything like personality or emotion as she stared down at me from a dark face thrown into deep shadows by the hair falling around it, a sharp shape jutting out from the center of her head that looked like it could impale me.

She watched me, standing over my frozen sleeping form and seeming to be inspecting me, judging me.

A hand lifted and I felt one of my arms do the same, connected to hers by ghostly, orange strings.

She lowered her arm, mine following, and repeated the motions with her other hand, revealing that she had my limbs firmly under her control with her strings and I could do nothing to stop her.

She continued to stare at me and I stared back, terrified eyes meeting the dead, impassive ones of a doll until she tilted her head, the movement stiff and unnatural like the puppet she had made me into and she said,

“Pine. But not yet.”

The four words, dull and emotionless as they were, filled me with a dread I had never known. What did ‘not yet’ mean? What did she want from me?

I couldn’t ask because my mouth was stiff, held in place on invisible hinges and I could do nothing but stare in frozen terror as she stepped away from me, footsteps louder than any human’s could have been, on the floorboards of my friend’s spare bedroom.

I didn’t get control of my body back until the morning sun started to creep into the room, hours after she’d left.

I know she’s coming back for me. That she’s not going to leave me alone until I’ve reached whatever qualification I hadn’t yet.

I know that she’s not going to leave me alone because when I eventually was able to move I found the little Cedarwood puppet sitting on the bedside, watching me struggle uselessly to move.

She’s not going to leave me alone.