A Sock Puppet on a String
a manic fairy tale retelling, pt 1
What happens when all the atrocities of the faerie underworld escape, and it’s your fault? Well, that’s what Aubrey Wessen finds out in this story from yours truly, straight from the Underside.
This story originally appeared in Pulp Corner by Aurora Publishing, and can still be purchased on Amazon without all my window dressing.
Content warning: graphic violence
A Sock Puppet on a String
Aubrey Wessen hurried down the corridor. Slow down, slow down. His heart raced unreasonably. What's there to fear? He slowed his steps, sped up again, and stumbled over himself.
He was cold all over. He stopped and planted his hands against the stone wall, took deep breaths.
The sounds of the world returned to his ears, real sounds: the clop-clop of a tile floor underfoot, bats swooshing down in the dusk, the squeal of a child on a playground. They were always there if he listened for them, even in the vacuous hum here in the Castle on the Abyss.
He sighed. He'd done nothing wrong. It was a little riot, some unsettled demons and antsy prisoners, nothing more. He had it under control. He was the gatekeeper, after all, and he showed them why.
He stopped before the door, a great heavy oak thing of an older time, and lifted the latch. It clicked then swung ponderously inward. The hollow sound of the hall resonated in his ears.
They were seated at the table, every one of them, patron line of the Grimm family from the patriarchs of the 1800s to his own father. It was a long, slender table that extended far into the dusty shadows of the lightless hall.
"Come," one of them said, and the echo of it haunted the room. "Stand before us."
He did so, at the foot of the table, and every head turned toward him.
"We have heard things," his many-times-great-uncle said. His eyes were long and weary, the skin stretched and furrowed, the hair hanging white around the frame of his shapeless face. He was one of the patriarchs, a Brother Grimm.
His voice held an unseen power. Deep and castle-dried, the voice of one who has long battled death and wearied of the fight. It vibrated through Aubrey, and he hung his chin.
"It was just—" he began, but his uncle held up his hand.
"Enough," he said. "We do not need tales. Behind you, find a door."
Aubrey turned to face another great door behind him. It was stained black and interlaid with many carvings and etches, all telling some great tale. It was the Door to the Gate.
"Open it," his uncle said.
"But, my Lord." Aubrey turned in fear to his uncle. "We cannot. Have you forgotten—"
"Have you forgotten who we are, and our powers? You are nothing for you are young. A pawn. We, the true power. Open the door."
Aubrey lifted the latch. It was heavy in his hands, and took the strength of both arms to raise it and set it in its groove. The door nudged forward and a dank draft seeped from the crack.
"Enter, and follow the hallway to its end. There you shall wait."
For what, my Lord? he thought, but bit his tongue. The hallway led to the gate, which led to the world above, but he had no need of the gate. As if on cue, the key in his pocket jabbed his leg, the lead weight of it boring into his skin.
He pushed the door the rest of the way open, and a mist escaped the hallway and curled around his legs. "The end of the hall," his uncle repeated.
Aubrey entered the hallway. The darkness crawled about him. He could feel it on his skin and in his bones. A deathly silence settled like a pall.
Behind him, the door creaked closed. He swung around, alarmed, and lunged for it. He wrapped his arms around its edge, braced all his weight against it, but nothing. It continued to close, inexorable in its arc.
Then he saw them, lining the tables, silly grins on their faces, mocking jubilation in their eyes. Some of them had hopped on top of the table and hunched over, watching the Door to the Gate close upon the Gatekeeper.
They were not the men, not the line of Grimm, not the Lords of the Underworld.
They were the demons, and they had tricked him.
Phantoms swirl in my head. All is confusion, a swelling mass of half-formed images prancing around, mocking me. Some of them look familiar, but I cannot focus. They are demons, and they are free.
A knot of pain darts through my skull. Nothing blots out their grinning, devilish faces. A dead dance upon the living. I see people from my youth, my best friends, my parents, my sister.
My girlfriend.
Lana is beautiful. I can see her perfectly. She is tending her garden, massaging the ground and cupping flowers in her hands. Her hair is drawn back and drips sweat from her brow. She wipes it away, leaving a grimy streak on her forehead.
She was so hurt when I left her. I did not explain. I could not. She would not understand. Better for her to love another and live her life without this dread weight hanging over her head.
As I watch, her comely form morphs into that of the gnome Rumpelstiltskin, standing at the head of the table in place of my uncle. He stares at me and laughs. Laughs long, hard, wicked. His head tilts back, and his little cloth hat clings to his scalp, the flaps about the ears bouncing and the horns above them bobbing.
He has stopped the door from closing, and now grabs me by the cuff. For the first time I am afraid of him, really truly afraid.
"Now, for the key," Rumpelstiltskin says.
He propels me against the stone wall in the corner, and I crumple to the floor.
Aubrey awoke between soft sheets. His head throbbed without mercy. He lifted himself and placed his feet on the floor. Light pricked his eyes like splinters as he gradually opened them. Whiteness overwhelmed him.
Objects came into focus slowly, and the white faded. A strange bedroom; a strange view out large bay windows, overlooking the ocean; a strange man’s clothes on his body; and a woman, curled on her side, on the other side of the bed.
Lana.
Aubrey stifled a gasp. How could this be? His head swam. He pulled back the covers on his side, looked down at his shorts—no, another man’s shorts.
This can’t be. No, no, no, it's all wrong.
He stumbled from the room. Everything was strange, nothing right.
He looked out a window. A great storm brewed over the ocean. Lightning, darkness, clouds prancing like dogs beneath a treed prey. Raindrops bounced off the concrete walk, trees vacillated in the ever-changing breeze.
But this was not an ordinary storm. Aubrey saw it for what it was: the coming of the devils.
He backed away from the window. His foot caught on something, and he fell to the floor. Stickiness covered him. Blood. He looked behind him, to the object on the floor that had tripped him. A man's body, handsome, tall, smartly dressed.
Dead from a massive blow to the head.
A sound came from the bedroom. Lana was awake, getting dressed, running water.
He reached down, slung the dead man over his shoulder, and carried him from the house.
Darkness is blotted by specters hovering before me. Sneering faces lunge out in stark detail, contrasted against the hollow, unfocused nothingness surrounding them. The door has shut behind them, and they have gone. Through the gate, to the land of the living.
Hollow voices rise from the depths—familiar voices, one of them my own. They sound distant, faraway, filtered through two cans and a long string. "Keep your senses alert at all times, Aubrey. They are devious and clever beyond all thought. Take naught for granted. Be it hundreds of years, let not your guard down. Do you ken?"
"Yes, Master Everitt. I ken." But I did not. And so I am tormented with vision after vision of my blindness.
It ends with Rumpelstiltskin propelling me against the stone wall in the Castle on the Abyss, a power he had never before possessed against me, the gatekeeper.
But just before his attack, I had my final clue—
The silence. Gone were the sounds of earth, my lifeline to the world. Gone.
I deserved no less than what I got.
I suffered, and still suffer, from the attack. But I am no longer asleep; the veil is lifted from my eyes. Now I am the dragon awakened.
Aubrey snapped to attention. He was in a copse on the far edge of Lana’s garden, shovel in hand. Before him lay a fresh grave, the earth mounded up in the center. He was covered in mud like a dog in heat, and he was soaked. The rain must have only just quit; the air was charged and hung heavy on the land.
He stood and almost collapsed back to the ground. The throb in his head drove all thought away.
Through the branches, he caught a glimpse of Lana, behind the glass of the kitchen window. Her lustrous brown hair, hanging over her ears, framed her soft face. She raised a mug to her lips and drew a sip.
Soon she would see the blood, and her world would turn on end. Aubrey had no intention of being around when that happened.
He ducked through the hedge behind him. A narrow road faced him, leading away from the ocean. He started across quickly, and stopped halfway to stare at the sky. It seemed normal enough, and yet it was wrong. Bland, faded, as if shielded by a thin haze.
He stumbled through the stubby undergrowth and across the rough beach to the waves. The cold, harsh water cleansed the mud from his face, hands, clothes, and bathed his wounds. He gritted his teeth and rinsed the foaming brine down his body. The smell, the taste, the burn of salt invigorated him.
A scream sounded across the waves, and a man-like figure draped in seaweed drifted out of the water, dragging half a boat behind him. "Not now," Aubrey growled. When the demon persisted, Aubrey plucked the seaweed and unraveled the draugen like a toilet roll. It whimpered and sunk into the sea.
Back at the road, the sounds of gulls, waves crashing, sand blowing, gravel crunching underfoot pervaded his ears. The sky may have lost its luster, but the world still lived. As he walked, passing by the home of Lana and her late husband, with only the roof visible over the flora, the aches in his bones returned. The steady upwards trudge wreaked havoc on his limbs. He needed transportation.
A cloud of demons settled in his path like a fog. Muffled laughter and jeers came from their morphing, gaseous forms. He burst through their midst and they parted in slender wisps, reforming behind him. Their laughter turned to growls. He would deal with them later.
Aubrey paused at the base of Lana’s driveway to stare toward their garage, and the Lexus SUV sitting outside. Temptation flooded him, but his willpower held. He had done enough to her already. Too much.
Ahead lay another house. Nestled comfortably amidst non-native trees and shrubbery, man-made fountains and stone walks, was a Mediterranean-style summer home. A car sat at the end of the walk, in the circle drive. A Beamer.
He turned up the driveway, passed the car and proceeded to the side entrance, the servant’s entrance. Halfway up the walk, he leaned down and plucked one of the huge stones from its border and carried it on his shoulder to the window on the little porch. He plunged the stone through the glass with a resounding crash, cleaned away the jagged edges with a smaller stone, and climbed through.
A commotion arose from the kitchen, of clashing metal and hurriedly rummaged drawers. As he rounded the corner, he encountered a woman with a knife, holding it in both hands before her face like a relic. Her eyes were huge balls of terror.
"Stay away from me," she croaked, and backed away slowly.
Aubrey started toward her placidly. Outside the window another cloud of demons swept by, and a wolf, the loup garou, climbed over her fence. The woman’s focus was so intent on Aubrey, she did not see the atrocities.
Aubrey ignored them. He beheld the trembling woman with a mixture of pity and impatience.
"Give me the keys," he said. He spoke with a quiet, unyielding authority. She shook violently, looking on the verge of fainting, but held by the sway of his eyes and tone of his voice. He stepped up to her, within arm’s length, and cornered her gaze.
"Where are your keys?" he repeated.
The knife slipped to the floor with a clatter, and she pointed. Her purse lay on a chair in the adjacent sunroom.
"Get them for me."
She walked hypnotically to the purse, dumped out the contents across the cushion, and extracted the set of keys from the jumble of odds and ends. She held them up to him like a trophy. He smiled at her kindly, and her big puppy dog eyes and tense posture softened. She smiled back.
Aubrey removed the car key from the ring and bid her good day, but not before noting the loup garou peeking in through the sunroom window like a kid at a toy store. The wolf’s eyes caught Aubrey glaring at him with the intensity of a dying star, and the creature stumbled backwards and darted away, tripping over roots and bricks and fumbling back across the fence.
I feel my head clear like a pool of water at the base of a falls. My senses are on full alert. Every bird's whistle, every bee's nectar, every glistening raindrop, every pebble beneath the tires goes fully detected and recorded. I miss nothing. The feel of the steering wheel in my hands as I careen up the gravel road, and now on the highway, is stark, leathery, alive. The engine responds to my slightest touch and roars down the road like a mother lion on the prowl.
For that is what I am. My young is in danger, my ire aroused. The very road, should I bid it, will bend the path I ask of it.
They are everywhere. On the wind and in the trees and even in the street. I strike them and run them down without mercy, leaving their twisted, gory bodies to rot on the stones and tarmac. The fear in their eyes, the utter terror as I bear down upon them like a whale upon plankton, the squeals and squishy thump as they come between the rubber and the road, feeds my desire. But they are nothing.
None of them are. Not the loup garou, not the Schwarze man, not even the Krampus himself. No, only Rumpelstiltskin matters.
I must find him, or the world is lost.
And I shall find him. My instinct grows, like a bamboo shoot in the spring, tall and uncommonly strong. I may not find him in town, but I shall find the way.
And I shall banish him once more. He will nurse his wounds for ages to come.
I afford myself a grim smile at the thought as I crush another fleshy demon beneath my tires.
The BMW charged into town off the highway, slowed down and glided through town once, then back again, slowly, deliberately, a lion before the grass cluster where its prey hunkers down.
It was a ghost town. People had fled or holed themselves up. Some could be seen poking behind ratty curtains or through peepholes in doors. Aubrey’s sight was so keen he could not only see the glitter of the eye, but he could discern the film of the cornea through to the black depths of the pupil all the way to the optic nerves bending and pulling like some vast fibrous machine.
His ears caught the slightest sounds, a drop of water splashing onto the pavement, and he whipped the car down an alleyway. Up ahead lay a dumpster, and beyond it, a door into one of the buildings. Further on the alleyway continued to the parallel street, some blocks away, but the door was Aubrey’s target.
A shriveled, pathetic figure frantically fumbled at the knob, but it would not respond. She turned and ran like an Olympic sprinter, this old decrepit woman, with bow legs and bent back and grotesque warts covering her face like a pumpkin patch.
The baba yaga. At the last second, with the car bearing down on her like a locomotive, she turned around to face it, hateful eyes leaping from her face, and uttered a shrill, jarring hiss to wake the dead.
The car screeched to a halt at her feet, its grate searing her soft pale flesh. Aubrey stepped out. The witch froze with panic and begged for mercy.
"Where is he?" he demanded, with the same authority he had demanded of the woman in the house, but none of the pity.
"Who?" she whimpered.
He was upon her in a flash, grasping her neck and hoisting her three feet off the ground. "No games," he growled, "or I shall kill you in such excruciating pain you will plead for the sun to shine and shrivel your worthless hide. You will crawl back to the underworld broken and shattered, a worthless shell to be devoured by your faithless friends."
She raised one pathetic, bony finger and pointed back the way he had come. "He went to… the woman’s house," she rasped.
"What woman?" A dread arose in the pit of his stomach.
"The… the woman!" she squealed, as well as she could through the constriction of her throat. "Your woman!"
He looked away, as if seeing through the very bricks surrounding them. "Lana," he whispered.
"Yes, yes!" Her head nodded vigorously in his choking grasp.
He turned the burning in his eyes dead upon her, suffocating her beneath the glare. "No, no!" she croaked. "You promised!"
"You shall suffer no pain," he said, and squeezed his hand into a fist until her head popped from her body like a soda cap. The head rolled down the alleyway, settling behind the rear tire, lifeless eyes staring agape, unadulterated terror frozen in their cold, dark depths. The body dropped to the broken concrete and visibly withered like a crop in a heat wave. No blood spilled out, only a thick, grayish ooze.
Aubrey hopped back into the car, roared backwards out the alleyway, and careered into the street.
The witch’s head burst like an egg beneath the tread and splattered across the alley.
Thanks for reading, and come back next time for the conclusion! Until then, remember not to stay too long on the underside, or you might forget how to come back.
Let me know in the comments what you liked, what scared you, and what should never be shown again.
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