Symbiotic Puppets

by S. Kilroy

part 2 of 3

He heard it again. This time, though, he knew he was awake. He sat up in bed. There it was again. A muffled whack-whack sound. He felt edgy. Perhaps it was just being awakened in the middle of night by a strange sound, but he had been feeling an odd nervousness for some days now. Whack, whack, whack. It was outside somewhere. It had an unnatural quality to it.

He kicked the sheet off and stumbled over to the window. The moon was bright enough to sprinkle a dim gray light into the surrounding forest. Whack, whack. The sound and a movement forty yards out from the house in the tall, bushy rhododendron drew Eric’s attention.

It was a white, ghostly figure swinging something. It thrashed about in fits. Sometimes looking like it was off in a rage followed by periods of standing completely motionless. Then flailing about again. Eric realized it was holding a long stick and banging it on anything near at hand.

Minutes passed and Eric stood watching the figure, mesmerized. The light was too weak to make out any real features. He couldn’t even say definitively whether it was a human or not. At times, the figure was hunched over and other times it seemed to stand erect. Suddenly, it bounded off further into the forest.

Eric stood at the window listening and scanning the gray- and black-dappled forest for any sign of it. After twenty minutes of nothing he slowly made his way back over to the bed. He laid down and stared up at the ceiling still listening and trying to grasp what he had just witnessed. At some point later, he drifted off to sleep.

* * *

Eric shuffled into the kitchen. He had slept, but it was a fitful sleep after watching... whatever it was he had seen. In his current sleepy state of mind he could almost bring himself to believe that it had been just a dream.

The coffee pot was half-full, and he poured himself a cup. A sound behind him brought him slowly around. It was Jenny. She was in the adjoining den, just off the kitchen. She was on her hands and knees doing something.

Eric walked to the arched doorway between the rooms and stood watching her. She seemed to be clawing at the carpeting. He noticed a small rag in one hand.

“Is something wrong, Jenny?”

She made a faint sound that, to Eric, seemed like a growl.

“Jenny?”

She lifted her head and looked over at Eric. For a moment, she didn’t seem to recognize him and her expression was odd. Then she seemed to focus and her expression softened.

“What?”

“Is... everything alright?”

“Oh. Yes. Just a stain. A spot. I have to get it out.”

Eric stared at the carpet. He didn’t see anything different about that part of the carpeting from any other area. He shrugged. “I haven’t seen Billy in a couple of days. Has he gone somewhere?”

Jenny had gone back to working on the invisible spot. She stopped, though she still stared at the floor. “Billy?” she said. “Oh, he’s around here somewhere.” She resumed her scrubbing.

“Oh. Okay.” Eric said. He turned around and suddenly there was Danny standing in the middle of the kitchen.

“Ah. Good morning.” Eric said.

Danny looked at Eric, but he seemed to be looking right through him.

“Are you alright?” Eric asked.

Danny eyes focused. “Oh. Yeah. Fine. Just fine.”

Eric nodded. “Hey, you didn’t happen to hear anything last night did you?”

“Hear anything? Like what?” Danny spotted the coffee pot and poured himself a cup. He gulped down nearly half the cup in one drink.

“A whacking noise. It woke me up and when I looked out the window I saw something.”

“Something?” Danny gulped down the rest of his coffee. “Like what?”

Eric shook his head. “Don’t know.”

Danny poured himself another cup. “You were probably just dreaming. You wouldn’t believe the dreams I have.”

“Really?” Eric said, not inclined to write off what he saw as a dream. He knew he had been awake.

“Oh, yeah. Sometimes, I wake up more exhausted than when I went to bed. You’d think I’d run a marathon in my sleep. Anyway, need to get to work.”

Eric looked at him. Danny was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved flannel shirt. “You don’t look like you’re dressed to go to work today.”

Danny glanced down at himself. When he lifted his gaze up again it seemed as though he had drifted off into a distant place again. “I... I’m going to work in the forest today. In the forest.”

“Oh.” Eric said. “Taking the day off, then?”

Danny seemed to come back again. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got some stuff I need to get done around here.”

“It’s kind of warm out for flannel isn’t it?”

“Not for me. Besides,” Danny pointed at his red hair, “I’m Irish, remember. As pale as my skin is, if I don’t cover up, the sun will burn me to a crisp. I always stay covered up. Underneath these clothes I’m as white as a ghost.” He laughed.

“A ghost, huh?” Eric said.

* * *

“You seem a little out of it today,” Sara said, sitting on a mossy rock and nibbling at her sandwich.

“Huh?” Eric pulled himself back from somewhere else, but as he looked at Sara with a puzzled expression, he couldn’t remember where that somewhere else was.

“You seem distracted.”

Eric nodded with a wearied look. “I feel distracted, but I can’t seem to put my finger on what it is.”

“So, you’re distracted by the vastness of nothing,” she said with smile.

Eric shrugged. He knew she was just trying to be funny, but he was having a hard time focusing. “I guess.”

“Well, it could just be the heat. Are you drinking enough water?” she asked.

Eric nodded and lifted his water bottle to show her it was half empty. He filled it each morning before leaving his cousin’s house and packed a few ice cubes into it to help keep it cool through the day. “I’m a little tired too. I didn’t sleep well again last night.”

“More weird stuff?”

Eric nodded. He had been telling her of some of the odd things he had been noticing at Danny’s house. “More odd noises.”

“You should go out see if you can find out what’s making the noise,” Sara said.

Eric glanced over at her as if she had just told him to go jump off a cliff. “Outside? In the forest? At night?”

Sara laughed. “Yes, how else are you going to figure what’s making the noise?”

“Well, I don’t know what I might run into out there.”

Again Sara laughed. “What do you think is out in the forest at night?”

“I have no idea. That’s the point.”

Sara shook her head with a smile. “There isn’t anything out in the forest at night that’s not in the forest in the daytime. Besides, your stumbling about in the forest in the dark would, by far, be the scariest thing out there.”

Eric thought of the ghostly white figure he’d seen now on a couple of occasions in the forest at night. “I’m not so sure about that. Don’t forget about Jenny’s large urns in the backyard I found smashed to pieces.”

Sara shook her head. She clearly found Eric’s apprehension amusing. “Animals, particularly hungry bears, can be very destructive when they are searching for food. I don’t think there’s any great mystery in that.”

“Maybe.”

“Actually, I’ve noticed some of the others here” — she waved back over her shoulder towards the other volunteers up the trail — “acting a little funny at times too. I think it’s the heat. It’s definitely hotter than usual.”

Eric gave a quick nod.

Sara smiled again. “Or maybe it’s something in the water today.”

Eric gave another quick nod. A moment passed and he slowly lifted his water bottle up and stared at it. “Maybe so...”

* * *

“That is not sterile.”

“Excuse me?” Eric asked.

The woman pointed at his water bottle. It still had a little dirt stuck on the outside of it from sitting on the forest floor. “That is not a sterile container. You must use a sterile container to collect water before testing. Otherwise you could have any number of contaminates that aren’t from the water at all. Here,” she said as she reached under the counter for a small plastic bottle, “take this and—”

“No, no, no,” Eric said hastily. “You don’t understand. I don’t care about the usual contaminates. Whatever they might be.”

The woman stared at him across the counter. “Then I’m not sure what it is you want us to do.”

“I want you to test the water, but not for the usual... ‘whatevers’. The water has already been tested and nothing showed up, but I think there might be something else, something that doesn’t show up in the usual tests.”

The woman studied him for a moment. She seemed to be trying to decide if he was utterly crazy or something else. “Well,” she said, “we are able to perform a wide range of tests, but you would have to narrow down what you want us to look for. You realize that the range of possibilities is quite large. Are you looking for some type of chemical or a bacterium of some kind, or what?”

“Uhhh...” Good question, Eric thought. What am I looking for? The more he thought about it, the more possibilities seemed to rear their respective heads. Maybe this was just a crazy idea. Like Sara’s microbial theory? Hmm.

“Bacteria.” It was a guess, but as good a guess as anything else.

The woman stared at him again. “There are categories of bacteria. Could you be a bit more specific?”

Eric shook his head. “No, but I could be more vague.”

The woman’s expression didn’t change. She didn’t think he was funny. She sighed. “Look, I’ll tell you what. We have students here from the University. They are here to do co-op work. Typically, we don’t always have a lot for them to do. Why don’t I let them play around with your ‘sample’ and see what they can grow out of it?”

Eric smiled. “That would be great. I would really appreciate it.”

The woman gave him a short, curt nod. “Think nothing of it. It is our sacred duty.” Her voice was completely monotone.

“Here.” She said, held out the small plastic sample bottle again.

Eric stared at the sample bottle dumbly.

The woman pointed at his dirty water bottle. “Well, I don’t want that.”

“Oh, right.” Eric said and began transferring the water.

* * *

Proceed to part 3...