I Found Puppets Living In My Apartment Walls

Johnny awakes. A puppet looms over his bed.

He recognizes the furry monster: Grandpa was its puppeteer on the children’s television show R-City Street. But Grandpa went missing a year ago. He disappeared from this very apartment building, which was converted from the old R-City Street studio.

Desperate to see Grandpa again, Johnny follows the puppet inside the building’s walls, ever deeper into a puppet-infested labyrinth...

Chapter 1

The first night I slept in my missing grandpa’s apartment, a puppet came out of the wall and stood over my bed.
I woke to a sound like cardboard ripping.
Grandpa’s old box fan buzzed white noise, drowning out the city traffic outside.
I lay perfectly still in bed, judging whether the ripping noise had been a remnant of a dream.
My cat couldn’t take the blame because she was curled up between my ankles, wheezily snoring.
A streetlamp outside the window slipped its urban glow past the curtains, providing an uncomfortable level of visibility.
I’d closed the door before bed. The hallway window didn’t have curtains, so even more light from the city street glowed under the old door.
Grandpa’s apartment had creeped me out ever since he’d moved into it when I was a teenager. It was a familiar but weird building: renovated from an old kid’s TV studio into apartments. But they gave the apartment to Grandpa as a thank-you for decades of puppeteering service. How could he not move into a free apartment in New York City?
Still, it was strange to think that in the same space where I lay frightened right now, I’d once watched puppets teach me the alphabet.
I wished I was watching them right now, four years old, early morning TV glowing in my parents’ basement.
Anything other than wondering what had woken me up in this creepy apartment.
Next to the door sat Grandpa’s old desk, where he used to pay his bills and study his Bible. A large wardrobe blocked three-quarters of my view of the closet doorway. I say “doorway” because Grandpa had for some reason removed the closet door itself.
Waking up in a dark, unfamiliar room had my animal brain on high alert.
And my inner child told my animal brain that the worst threats came from the closet.
I strained my eyes to decipher the shadows beyond the wardrobe.
My cat let out a wet sigh.
I could see a dark mass in the edge of the closet that had to be Grandpa’s shirts still hanging up. Above them, dark smudges must have been stacked on a shelf.
Down below, where it was too dark to make out his religiously polished leather shoes, I thought I saw the depth of shadow deepen, as if something had shrunk away from my gaze.
My heart raced.