I Found Puppets Living In My Apartment Walls by Ben Farthing

Author:Ben Farthing [Farthing, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub

16

We walked up the stoop of the second brownstone.

The front door was unlocked. It opened on well-oiled hinges, and we stepped inside.

To our left: the apartment belonging to another human character, Barbara.

To the right: I couldn't remember. “Did they ever show who lived here?”

“No. Barbara was across the hall. King Sing and Mr. Peters were upstairs.”

Out of curiosity, I tried the doorknob. The door opened but only revealed a blank plaster wall.

I tapped on it. It felt solid.

“Let’s go upstairs,” Brittany said.

There was no point in further exploring that strangeness, or even in seeing what was behind Barbara's door.

We headed upstairs where I'd seen those felt eyes watching us.

The upper stairwell was identical to Grandpa's building. The apartment to the left belonged to Mr. Peters, a puppet of a short middle-aged businessman, who was always getting frustrated by King Sing's antics.

I opened the door to King Sing's apartment.

The living room was a musical studio with an electric organ against one wall, guitars hanging above it, and a drum set instead of a coffee table.

The walls were a garish lime green.

I crept in, worried I would spook the puppet.

I didn't know if King Sing would be like Swoomie. I expected him to be walking without the puppeteer, but would he be predatory? In the TV show, Swoomie was a monster—a kind one, but a monster nonetheless.

King Sing was a puppet representation of a person, neither child nor adult. He lived without a guardian, but the other adults on R-City Street did take care of him.

I peered into the kitchen. A box of cereal sat on the counter. Crayon drawings clung to the fridge with magnets.

The largest was done in black and red. It depicted what looked to be a donut or an inner tube made of fabric patches stitched together. Crayon didn’t show the details of fabric, but I knew it nonetheless.

And if I stared long enough at the hole in the middle, I might start to see an endless tunnel of blue fur.

“What is it?” Brittany asked.

I made myself look away. “Nothing.”

Before we could move on down the hallway, I noticed something else through the living room window.

I could see the scattered studio equipment across the pavement. One camera stood on its tripod facing the two brownstones. The other lay on its side, identical to the ones I'd seen above.

That's not what caught my attention.

Down out of the staircase, his bright blue fur impossible to miss against the dirty gray cinderblock on either side of the doorway, Swoomie was on the move again.

Rob had said that Swoomie would leave me alone as long as I kept my nostalgia strong. The puppet must have sensed my distraction.

Swoomie's half-paralyzed gait brought him slowly toward the second brownstone with us inside. His perfectly spherical eyes, which had been lazily pointing in different directions, all at once aimed up at me through the window.

I could already feel his strong, furry hands close on my shoulders.

“Let’s keep moving, Swoomie’s coming.”

We hurried to the end of the hall, to King Sing's bedroom.

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