The Puppet Master
Chapter Thirty One - Tacking Into The Wind
Empty. Bereft.
Someone has ripped a piece from him. He searches for it in the dark places, in the shadows, without knowing its form.
He can't label it, though he wants to, because everything has labels, and names. That's how things should be. This did too, but he can't think of it. It has been taken, just like the thing itself.
Finding nothing but his own reflection he turns upwards, other sensations pulling him from the search. Like a pain in his head, and voices in his ear, and twitches and aches through his body.
In his body. He tastes the words for their strangeness, and feels a ripple of fear.
It hasn't been his for the longest of times.
It's unfamiliar. He concentrates on remembering the past, and looks at the mirror, and tries to imagine what it felt like to move his fingers.
At first there is nothing. He sees a puppet on a stage and stares at its hands and concentrates, struggling to grasp at the concept. It is slippery, and falls through the gaps, and there's no change. The puppet doesn't move. Then he changes tactic, and stares at the strings, and follows them up, up, up into the dark of the theatre and its like tacking into the wind, slow and so much of a struggle and –
There. Now he remembers.
His fingers twitch.
He collapses back into the darkness and waits. Nothing happens.
Now he panics, his chest painfully tight. Then he thinks, he might be imagining his chest tightening, since there may be no chest at all, and nothing to tighten. But the pain feels real, he tells himself, and some of the possibly imaginary tightness fades.
Then he thinks, but if my fingers twitch, isn't something supposed to happen? And then he's panicking again, because this has the feel of familiarity to it, and he's terrified, because he doesn't want to go back to that place.
He can't.
Nobody saw him, he thinks, and if nobody saw him then maybe he was imagining it, and it's gone wrong, and the thing he's forgotten has left him and so has something else and now – what if this is it? What if he's broken?
And he sees the puppet with its strings cut, lying in a slumped heap on the floor of the stage with its blue eyes staring at him and suddenly the panic is real, the pain is real, he can feel his chest and his fingers and they're not imaginary, and he's fighting the darkness and the shadows because dear god, someone has to see him, someone has to hear him, and he's screaming, howling, 'please god don't let me be broken, I'll go mad –'
