Silence is 2spooky4puppet.

The first night was simple enough, if terrifying.

Wind the box, shine the light, watch the cameras. Make sure the creepy robots didn’t come into the room and pull his spine out through his asshole. He’d had a close call or two—but that’s where the mask came in. It was a relief when morning finally came—his hands shook as he fumbled his way out of the office and back to his tiny, run-down apartment.

Jeremy couldn’t sleep. He spent the day smoking and drinking and debating the finer points of unemployment and the resulting homelessness instead of going back. But there wasn’t really much of a choice—with his kind of rap sheet, with all the fuck-ups he’d made, there was no way in hell he was going to get a job anywhere else if he quit. This was it.

So it was with more than a bit of trepidation—and a thermos full of coffee and rotgut—that he put on his uniform, grabbed his wallet and keys, and started getting ready for work. He dressed, he shaved, brushed his teeth, and started toward the door. After some indecision, he went back into his bedroom and grabbed the little snub-nose from underneath his mattress. If it came down to it, he’d probably be better off just blowing his brains out rather than letting them get their hands on him. He tucked it into his belt, zipped up his jacket, and went out.

It was raining when he started toward the pizzeria, and by the time he got there he was just short of soaked and stewing in a combination of terrified and miserable. He walked through the door feeling like he was going to the firing squad.
“Don’t even get a decent last meal,” he grumbled as he stalked his way past the animatronics and made his way to the office.
He took his seat, checked his watch. Waited. Half past eleven. Fifteen ‘til.

Finally, midnight came.

The phone rang again—that obnoxious, mouth-breathing son of a bitch from the night before. He lifted the phone from the receiver and slammed it back down before the guy got past the second hello. Fuck him and everything he loved. “Nothing to worry about my ass,” he muttered, pouring out a cup of liquid courage with shaking hands. He was so scared that he fumbled the thermos, spilling out its contents all over the desk.

“Fucking shit!” he hissed, jumping out of his chair as the scalding liquid poured into his lap. He looked around for something to wipe it up with—anything—the management was gonna have his balls for a mantelpiece if they walked in here and smelled it.
In his panic, he didn’t hear the music box winding down. He didn’t hear the tune getting slower and slower as it counted down, like the heartbeat of a man on his deathbed.

But he did hear the little jingle that came afterward, like the dying man’s final spasms. He heard the thing in the box bash its’ way free.

Pop goes the weasel.

Jeremy froze—listened. Strained his ears to catch any kind of sound. He fumbled his jacket open, pulled out the little pot-metal piece of shit he had stuck in his pants, and pointed it down the dark hallway like a talisman against a demon.

When the licorice-looking son of a bitch leapt out of the shadows at him, he only had time to get the one shot off—a shot that in his drunken panic went way wide, burrowing a hole into the wall instead of the grinning demon that flew over the desk at him and hit him full-on, wrapping inky limbs around his throat and waist and sending him to the ground. The gun clattered away from him when he fell, skidding off into a shadowed corner and far out of reach.

“Oh my god,” he thought as those limbs tightened around his throat. “I’m going to die to a sock puppet. I’m going to get killed by a glorified children’s toy.” The thought woke something up inside him, a primal kind of iron that started in his gut and snaked fingers out into his limbs, giving him the strength to wrench the monster off of him and hold it at arms’ length. The puppet scrabbled at his arms, noodly appendages twining and wrapping uselessly around his outstretched arms and coiling so tight he thought his bones would surely break.

And all of a sudden, against all odds, as the coffee soaking his crotch was reinforced by a far less pleasant fluid, the puppet let go, its’ plush limbs sliding off of him and hanging limp. Jeremy gasped for air, shaking, and finally got a good look at his would-be assassin.

The puppet was shaking, too. Quivering, more like—quaking. The bone-bleached mask hung low, looking toward the ground.
A combination of adrenaline, primal fear, and a blood alcohol level high enough to kill a bull elephant made the man feel a perverse sense of pity for the thing. It almost looked like it was…

Scared?

There’s no way this goddamn monstrosity could be scared. No way.

But it wasn’t trying to kill him, either. It was just hanging there and shaking. And those lines on the mask, with the color and all, sure looked a hell of a lot like tears.

He missed the movement off to the side, but he didn’t miss the high-pitched giggle that came after it. He snapped his head over, eyes straining in the darkness to make out what had just laughed at him. His flashlight was still up on the table—as he was now, he sure as shit wasn’t going to be fighting anything bigger or tougher than a sack full of cotton.

A little boy walked up with something held in its’ hands. Well, not really a boy—more like a cartoon artist’s idea of what a kid looks like. Bright plastic eyes met his, and as it waddled up to him, it placed the thing it had been carrying by his head.
Closer, he could make it out. The music box.

“Hello,” the balloon boy said.


Jeremy was pretty goddamn sure it was some kind of trick—the animatronic trying to give the puppet another chance to crush his windpipe when he reached for the box—but if he stayed like this, the other animatronics were going to come in here for sure and stomp his ass. He could hear them moving around out there, probably woken up early by the struggle and the gunshot.

So he took a chance—since he was dead anyway—and eased the puppet back down. The arms coiled tight back around his neck, and he felt a flicker of fear that he had just made the last mistake he ever would. So when the puppet buried its’ mask against his shoulder, still shaking, relief was a bit too weak a word to describe the feeling that flooded him.

He stumbled his way to a knee, the puppet’s legs wrapping back around his waist—the damn thing was as light as a sack of cotton, despite being almost as big as him. He grabbed the music box, eased himself up against the wall, and gave it a crank. The quiet, tinkling notes had an immediate effect on his unlikely passenger: the puppet’s tight coils quickly relaxed, and the shaking slowed and then stopped altogether.

He heard the sound of movement in the hall, of heavy feet stomping closer, and when he looked up a pair of bright eyes watched him from the darkened hallway. Staring. Judging. That familiar, hysterical fear bubbled up in him as he met those eyes.
He almost pissed himself for the second time of the night when the eyes turned away and the footsteps slowly receded, leaving him alone with the puppet and the little boy. The little boy, for his part, giggled again and then turned and climbed back into the air vent, bumping and thumping as he went along.

Jeremy looked down at the puppet, still wrapped around him, and gave the music box’s crank a quick turn.
He glanced to his watch. A quarter past twelve.

For the rest of the night, all was quiet. Occasionally he would look up to see eyes in the dark, down the hallway or in the vents, but nothing happened.

When morning came, he took the music box and the puppet back to the little prize corner, and put them back in their place. He collected his gun, cleaned up his mess as best as he could, and made the walk home with a head full of questions and not an answer in sight.

They hadn’t killed him.

Why not?

Was he going completely off his rocker?

And the one that nagged at him the most, the one that made him sick to his stomach…

Should he go back?

In the end, he did. He left the gun at home this time, and grabbed a soda from a convenience store on the walk over—this time feeling a good bit less like a dead man walking.

He knew when he opened the door that something was wrong. It was late, and there were no other workers around; they’d all closed up shop and gone home hours ago.

So why did it smell like somebody had been cooking in here?

He got the answer to that question when he came back to his office—and found the entire place scrubbed clean, without a trace of the half-cleared mess he had left the night before. Even the bullet hole in the hallway had been patched over and repainted.

But the most obvious clue that something was very, very out of place was the large pepperoni pizza on his desk.

He put a finger to it. It was still hot.

“What the fuck,” he mouthed as he lifted a slice.

He dropped the slice back onto the platter, looking around for a trap, and a crazy idea wormed its’ way into his head.

Five ‘til. He’d have to move fast.

He headed back out into the pizzeria proper, making a bee line for the puppet’s box. He opened the lid, reached in, and grabbed the puppet under the arms. He felt the soft limbs coiling around his forearms as he lifted it free, and hugging it to his chest with one arm, he grabbed up the music box and made his way back to his desk. The puppet clung to him just like it had the night before, hanging off of him while the music box played and Jeremy ate his pizza.

The animatronics would occasionally come into the office and stare at him, and god damn if it wasn’t weird as hell, but never once did they try to touch him. It seemed less like a threat at this point and more like they were checking up on him, making sure that he was behaving. After a while, they’d always wander back out to go do whatever weird shit giant sentient robotic animal people did whenever they weren’t entertaining children or trying to murder the hired help.

When morning came, he took the puppet back to his box, cleaned up his mess, and walked out with a smile on his face and a spring in his step. Hell, he even whistled on the way back to his apartment. The day just seemed brighter, and although he was tired, he couldn’t bring himself to care. He slept easy for the first time in a long time that day, and when the time came to go back on shift that night, he dug an old, ratty backpack out the closet that he’d kept since his school days, and filled it with the few books that he owned.

He came back that night to the same smell of cooking, and found another pizza on his desk—sausage, this time. He collected the puppet and the box, and made his way back to his chair. With a twist of the music box and the puppet hanging off his neck, he reached into his backpack and pulled out a book. The animatronics were moving around, now—coming to check up, no doubt.
He opened the book to the first page, patted the puppet’s soft head, and went to reading.

“In a hole in the ground,” he began, letting his voice carry, “there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort…”

One by one the animatronics came filing in, attracted by the noise, and stood listening. Soon he had a small crowd—every one in the pizzeria, by his count. He kept reading, and though the music box eventually wound down and stopped entirely, the puppet never even began to shake or fret.

Morning came quicker than he expected and entirely without incident, and though his throat hurt like a son of a bitch as he made his way home—six hours of talking will do that to you—things seemed to be looking up for the first time in a long time.

Yeah. He could get used to this.