Chapter 5: The Rhythm of the Puppet

Chapter 5: The Rhythm of the Puppet

Knowing the truth about Arthur Miller didn't bring relief. It was like learning the name of the disease that was killing you; the knowledge itself was just another symptom of the horror. The mimic wasn't a ghost. It was a parasite that fed on the echoes of terror, and it had latched onto the Manor's one true, tragic scare. It wasn't re-enacting the memory of a man; it was re-enacting the memory of his fear. And now, it seemed, it wanted a new vessel for its performance.

I threw myself into the noise and chaos of a Saturday night shift, hoping to drown out the dread. The boardwalk was a roaring sea of humanity, and the line for The Black Tide Manor snaked all the way to the churro stand. The cacophony was a comfort. Here, surrounded by hundreds of people, by the routine of tearing tickets and answering stupid questions, I could almost pretend I was normal. I could almost ignore the constant, maddening flutter of my left eyelid. Right. Left. Open. Open. A broken rhythm that was now the permanent backbeat to my life.

"You look a little less like a zombie today," Maya said, popping her head into my booth to drop off a bottle of water. "More like a ghost with a caffeine addiction."

"Thanks," I said, my voice flatter than I intended. "I'm the picture of health."

I was lying. The truth was, the invasion had escalated. It had moved beyond the physical tic in my eye. It had found its way into sound.

It started with my fingers. As I sat there, tearing tickets, I became aware of a quiet, persistent rhythm my fingertips were tapping against the worn wooden counter. Tap-t-tap. Tap. Tap-t-tap. A syncopated beat that was infuriatingly familiar. I forced my hand flat on the counter, willing it to be still. The moment my attention shifted, the tapping started again, a subconscious drumming that wasn't mine.

Then came the humming. It was quiet, just a low vibration in my chest as I guided a bachelorette party toward the entrance. A tune without a name, a catchy, melodic fragment that looped over and over. I clamped my mouth shut, but the song simply continued its relentless march inside my skull. It was one of his. I didn't know the title, didn't even know the words, but I knew, with a bone-deep certainty, that it belonged to Michael Jackson. The mimic was installing its own soundtrack in my head.

Inside the Manor, the staged horror was in full swing. Strobe lights flashed, revealing actors in gory makeup who lunged from the shadows. A guy we called 'Chainsaw Chad' was getting genuine, blood-curdling screams with his prop chainsaw, its teeth filed down but its two-stroke engine roaring with authentic menace. Fog machines pumped clouds of cloying, sweet-smelling smoke down the hallways. It was our controlled chaos, a perfectly calibrated machine of fear. But for me, the true horror was a silent, internal war.

I felt like I was piloting my own body from a great distance. I'd walk down a corridor and my legs would feel strangely light, disconnected. My hands would move to adjust a prop, and for a split second, I wouldn't recognize them as my own. My physical self was becoming a stranger, a puppet whose strings were being slowly, inexorably pulled by an unseen master.

"Alex, can you go check the reset on the swamp monster?" Liam's voice crackled through my radio, jolting me from my fugue. "He's stuck in the 'up' position again and he's just scaring the staff."

"On it," I mumbled, grateful for the task, for a concrete problem to solve.

The path to the swamp monster led through a section we called the 'Catacomb Crouch,' a narrow, low-ceilinged hallway lined with faux stone walls and rubber skeletons reaching out from alcoves. It was a transition zone, usually empty of customers between scares. For a few moments, I was alone, cocooned in the darkness between the flashing strobes ahead and the screaming crowds behind.

I leaned against a cool, plaster wall, closing my eyes. Right. Left. Open. Open. The blink was there, my constant companion. The humming started in my chest again, the insipid, looping melody. The beat my fingers had been tapping now seemed to resonate in my feet, a strange, restless energy in the soles of my shoes. I felt an impulse, a bizarre physical urge to move. To shift my weight in a way that was fluid and unnatural.

Stop it, I told myself, pushing off the wall. You're just tired. You're freaking yourself out.

"There you are. Thought you got eaten by a ghoul."

I jumped, spinning around to see Maya standing at the entrance to the hall, a sly grin on her face. Her grin faltered as she got a better look at me under the pulsing blacklight.

"Seriously, though. You okay?" she asked, her voice softening with real concern. "You've been… I don't know. Jumpy. More than usual."

"Long week," I said, the excuse sounding feeble even to me. "The swamp monster's acting up again."

"Yeah, I know." She took a step closer, tilting her head. She had a strange look on her face, a mixture of confusion and something that looked suspiciously like amusement. "Hey, weird question. Did you take dance lessons as a kid or something?"

The question was so random it felt like a slap. "What? No. I have the coordination of a newborn fawn. Why?"

She pointed a finger, still looking at my feet. "Because you were just doing this… thing. When I walked up. You were kind of lost in thought, and you were gliding. Backwards."

The air in my lungs turned to ice. The sound of the prop chainsaw, the distant screams, the humming in my own head—it all faded into a roaring silence.

"Gliding?" I repeated, my voice a hollow echo in the narrow hall.

"Yeah," she said, demonstrating with an awkward shuffle of her own combat boots. "Like, you slid one foot back, smooth as hell, then the other. It was subtle, but it was… you know." She stopped, a flicker of uneasy recognition crossing her face as she made the connection. "It was like a moonwalk."

The word hung in the air between us, monstrous and obscene. A moonwalk. The signature move of the man he was mimicking. The jerky, broken shuffle I had seen on the boardwalk was a crude imitation, a puppet's clumsy attempt. But now… now he had a better puppet. One with working joints and pliable muscles. He wasn't just influencing me, leaving glitches in my system. He was practicing. He was rehearsing.

I couldn't speak. I looked past Maya, down the dark hallway, and caught my reflection in a grimy sheet of plexiglass covering a prop display. I saw a pale, terrified stranger staring back. The face was mine, the tired eyes were mine, but the body it was attached to was no longer my own private property. It was a stage. It was a vessel. The mimic's influence wasn't a whisper on the static anymore. It was a rhythm taking over my nerves and my muscles, and it was teaching me how to dance to its silent, terrible song.