Scary Stories and Urban Legends

The Puppet

The puppet has always haunted
me.

It had a big head and its face was
made of wrinkled, flesh-colored
rubber. The eyes were gigantic,
bulging white orbs and its black
hair was made of some hard
substance that didn't quite mesh
with the rubbery head. The teeth
were gigantic, pure white and
capable of moving up and down.
The body and limbs were wooden,
painted to resemble clothes, but
the paint was faded, you could see
the wood's natural brown in some
places. Each arm and leg was a
different length, but the hands
and feet were pretty detailed. It
made a loud clattering sound
whenever it moved.

The puppet has always followed
me.

I don't mean it got up and chased
me around the room or anything.
I mean it kept showing up in my
life. My earliest memory of it is
from my first birthday. Although I
obviously can't recall much of that
day, I do remember that horrible
puppet. I have no idea why it was
there, I just remember it scared
me to death and I couldn't stop
crying. A few years later, when I
was finally able to talk, I asked my
parents about it, and they flatly
denied anything like that had ever
happened on my first birthday.
They must have thought lying
about it would make things easier
for me.

The next time I saw it, was when I
was three years of age. I was
exploring a room filled with old
stuff my parents had stored away
and I found a calendar. I don't
remember the year. There was a
photo for each month, but the
only one I remember was
October; that puppet was the
image for it. I got scared and ran
out of the room. I told my mom
and tried to show her the
calendar so that she'd know the
puppet was real, but I couldn't
find it. The room had been very
messy, and I ran out of it so
quickly that I knocked over piles
of stuff. I guess the calendar just
got buried.

It happened again when i was six
years old. In the middle of the
night, I woke up from a
nightmare. I was too scared to go
back to sleep, so I went down to
the living room and turned on the
TV. An old black and white TV
show was just ending and when
the commercials started, the
puppet came on the screen. It was
dancing while loud music played
in the background. I screamed
and started crying uncontrollably,
but by the time my parents got
downstairs, the puppet was gone.

I didn't see the puppet again for
quite a while after that, but I kept
having nightmares about it. When
I was 15, I decided to try to track
it down, using the internet to try
to find information about the
calendar, the commercial,
anything. No one had ever heard
of it, but one day I got an instant
message from someone I had
never talked to before. The
person's screen name was a
random mash-up of numbers and
letters, but their avatar was a
picture of the puppet. "Glad that
you still remember me," they said,
then immediately signed off. They
never contacted me or came back
online again.

When I was 20 years old, I was
walking past a store that sold old
toys and dolls, and in the front
window, I saw the puppet. I went
inside, and asked the clerk if he
knew anything about the puppet's
history, when it was made, where
it was from, anything. The only
thing he could tell me was that
the puppet had just been sold to
the store a few days before. He
told me I could have it for $6.00. I
wasn't sure what to do. It still
scared me, but having proof that
it really existed seemed like a
good idea.

So, I bought the puppet and took
it home.

For a while, I felt better. I
regarded the puppet as an
irrational childhood fear that, as
an adult, I had managed
overcome. I even started to
believe the explanations my
parents had tried to give me. They
said I must have seen it
somewhere as a baby and the
image just became lodged in my
subconcious. I must have
imagined it in the calendar, they
said. Perhaps I was dreaming
when I saw it on the TV
commercial. Maybe the person
who contacted me online had just
been playing a practical joke.

I kept the puppet, but as I moved
on in my life, I pretty much forgot
about it. I finished college, settled
down and got married. My wife
will be giving birth in a few weeks.
I was cleaning up the spare room
and preparing it for when the
baby comes, when I found the
puppetin the back of the
wardrobe, dusty and abandoned. I
didn't want to leave it in my
child's bedroom, so I picked it up
and moved it to another place.

As I was dusting it off, I noticed a
faded inscription on the back.

It read: "This is what he will look
like."

Before I could figure out what this
meant, I heard my wife crying
downstairs. I rushed to her side
and she looked more upset than I
had ever seen her before.
Sobbing, she told me that the
doctor had just called.

There was a problem with the
baby...