A Streetlight Requiem
It had lived in them for years.
It was in their dreams, fantasies, and nightmares. It followed them during the day, night, and everywhere else. It watched from rooftops, sewers, roads, and alleys. When it truly learned about them, long before the Drum woke, the world was different. There was less technology, fewer people, and less complexity. Their society was splintered by conflict and economic instability. Sometimes, the Puppeteer wished it could have studied different eras and times, but it did not possess that level of individuality when the Drum existed. It simply listened to the voices in the dark. It had no direction other than them.
The monster was sent out before the Drum had fully awakened. Something in the currents of shadow and reality stirred it. A disturbance from another time and place. The humans who survived, and who later learned of the future’s interference in their world, understood that the Unnamed were present before the Drum played its demon song. They did not know exactly when the Unnamed began to monitor them, but by their understanding of time it would have been around the nineteen fifties. It was through that familiar stretch of americana that the Puppeteer learned about their culture. Those images imprinted themselves into its phantom arms and through the various wires linked to the plants that would overtake the world when the Drum arrived.
The Puppeteer’s role in the apocalypse was to be the flame to the moths.
It was the dream weaver, the illusion maker, the painter of the old world the Unnamed had so violently destroyed. The Puppeteer knew that humans would eventually learn to avoid the monsters once they recognized their patterns. It needed to draw them back out into shadows and blades. So it forged the images. Cars, people, laughter, music, planes, entire cities gleaming with phantom energy became its nightly tapestry.
Out of all the spectral stories it told through its long arms, gray body, and hidden wires threaded through the unchecked bloom of vine and flower, it loved the streetlights the most. There was something about their glow. Their amber sheen bled through time and memory. That luminescence seemed unchanged no matter what else shifted or collapsed. The Puppeteer spent countless days and nights hidden in the apocalyptic underbrush and in plain sight. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years passed after its activation. Yet the streetlights were always the same.
Until now.
The Drum was gone. It vanished silently one evening after turquoise thunder lit the northern sky. The moment it disappeared, the Puppeteer felt no urge to create illusions or lure humans and Reanimated to their grisly fate at the edge of its family’s claws. It was free, a sensation entirely new to it. At first, the Puppeteer did not know what to do with the excess of time.
It wandered the city, walking between houses and treetops. Though faceless, the Puppeteer was more humanoid than most of the other Unnamed. It had gray, leathery skin, broad shoulders, and long, gangly arms. Its height and face were what made it truly monstrous. The Puppeteer stood nearly thirty feet tall, and its face lacked any real features except for a black hole that seemed to fold inward if stared at for too long. It once hid constantly, camouflaging itself day and night among rubble using mirages and spells. Its massive body was flexible enough to twist into impossible positions, allowing it to vanish into the ruined landscape.
Hiding was no longer necessary.
Now it roamed freely through rubble and green growth in the open daylight. Occasionally, human survivors fled at the sight of it, or fired their weapons in panic. More often than not, nothing interacted with the Puppeteer at all.
At night, the monster found itself unable to do anything but feel nostalgic.
It would settle somewhere in the wasteland, blending into the darkness as its skin adapted to its surroundings, like a cuttlefish drifting across a deepwater reef. From there, it would connect the green threads beneath its wrists into the surrounding vegetation. Long, wormlike strands crept outward, weaving through soil, asphalt, and ruin. Once they reached their chosen points, they ignited the darkness with illusions of the old world.
The Puppeteer was focused on only one image now.
Streetlights.
Dozens of them lining empty roads. The Drum no longer demanded lures for the living. Those days ended beneath the teal lightning that destroyed it. These visions were not meant to hunt. They were made purely for entertainment. The Puppeteer did not care if humans were drawn to them, though most survivors no longer trusted the glow of streetlights. It only wanted to see the old world again, the warmth and simplicity of amber rings stretching across quiet streets.
There was something calm and beautiful about them. The monster did not know why.
It only knew that it needed to see them.
If you haven’t encountered a Puppeteer from the mainline series of the Greenland Diaries, you might be a little confused. You can read about that right here. The Puppeteer is responsible for the various illusions and mirages that appear once the Drum takes hold in this apocalyptic environment. They’re sort of like the angler fish of this wasteland. Thank you for reading my flash fiction from this series.
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Patrick W. Marsh
Patrick W. Marsh
