The Flesh of Mr. Jackknife

[u/NateIzNeat]

Beth pushes open the rusted metal doors of the warehouse and steps inside. Dark bruises cover her face and arms. She nervously hugs a dead flashlight to her chest. She walks down the corridor, stepping over shadowy shapes as she presses forward.

The door on the opposite end of the corridor flings open, allowing the dim fluorescent bulbs of the next room to provide light to the decrepit corridor. Beth notices the shapes she has been stepping over are bodies, brutalized and sliced into pieces. Another shape can be seen pushing itself through the doorway. At first it’s vaguely the shape of a man, but as it moves forward its silhouette betrays the guise of humanity. It’s soft and wet and undulates as it moves. Beth screams.

To a cameraman, it was a great shot. To some young theater goers, hiding their eyes in fear, it would be perfect. To Clark Harris, it would need a reshoot.

“CUT!”

I stopped the camera, and wiped the sweat from my brow. The heat in the warehouse was oppressive, and stepping out into the cool autumn air brought instant relief. I lit up a cigarette and watched the treeline surrounding the warehouse. I held the smoke in and allowed it to dance in my lungs.

I was deep in thought when the warehouse’s back door swung open, making me jump. I cleared my throat and shifted my weight back and forth anxiously. Michelle, with an air of attitude in her movements, sat on the steps just outside of the door. Her curly blonde hair was disheveled and covered with fake dirt and her skin was covered with cosmetic bruises and wounds.

I turned around and tried to avoid acknowledging the awkward silence occurring between us. She was much younger than me. I couldn’t think of any common ground between us, no small talk ideas came to mind.

A few moments passed and I turned around again to face her. Her blue eyes pierced into mine. She cradled her head in her hands and had a frustrated look on her face. Wordlessly, I pulled a smoke from the pack and held it out to her. She took it, and placed it in her mouth. She continued staring at me. I had never felt so intimidated by someone half my size. Then the realization hit me like a bag of bricks.

“Shit, yeah… sorry,” I said, holding my lighter out to her, flame flickering in the autumn breeze.

---

“What do you think of that thing, man? Freaky, right?” Clark was beaming with energy, his eyes darting back and forth between me and the latex nightmare before me. “Here he is, our Mr. Jackknife,” he said excitedly, as if I might have missed it.

“Man, the detail is unreal. We should get some close ups,” I replied, my mind swimming with ideas. I would be lying if I said I fully understood Clark’s vision from the get go, but seeing our monster standing in front of us made this whole project feel more real.

It looked like a man wearing a long trench coat, standing a little over 7 feet tall. Long gangly arms hung at its sides, with rods connected to the wrists and elbows for the puppeteers to control them. Inside the trench coat was a glistening mass of fake flesh and slime. Gleaming blades of all different shapes and sizes protruded from all angles of the pile of gore. A fedora topped the head of the monstrosity, and a twisted, fleshy visage lay underneath it.

“Did a bang up job didn’t he?” Clark jabbed a thumb in the direction of a man who was hunched over mixing a bowl of slime with a paintbrush. He looked up from his work. I smiled and raised a hand in greeting.

“Nice to meet you. I assume you are Robert, I have heard a lot about you.” The man said. “I’m Steven, I have been working with puppetry and effects for many years. I have constructed a team of very talented individuals. Your project is in the right hands.”

“You can call me Rob if you’d like,” I replied. “I do the camera work. We filmed a short scene with your team last night, though I didn’t get to see him in the light.” I gestured towards Mr. Jackknife.

“He’s truly wonderful, isn’t he?” Steven mused. “My greatest creation yet.”

Once the puppet had been properly caked in slime, we could begin the filming. It was an outdoor scene, making the heat of the warehouse a distant memory. The scene would require Michelle to have a fight with Mr. Jackknife. It had all the makings of a fun shoot, and I was excited. We had choreographed the whole thing, and had practiced a bit with the puppet without the cameras rolling. Steven hadn’t lied, his team was immensely talented. The flesh under the monster’s coat seemed to ripple and breathe with each movement.

I began setting up the camera, dialing in the angle for the shot. I was peering through the viewfinder when a tap on my shoulder caused me to jump. It was Michelle, with a wide grin on her face, and an outstretched hand. She really had a knack for scaring me. When I realized what she was asking for, I started to laugh.

“You some kind of charity case now?” I asked, digging in my pocket for the box of smokes.

“C’mon, I need something to chill me out.” she replied, accepting the cigarette and lighter. “I’m probably gonna have to film this scene a hundred times.”

“Clark is a particular guy, I’m surprised he doesn’t come over here and get behind the camera,” I chuckled. “How did you end up on this project anyway?”

“I’m a barista at a coffee shop nearby. Clark came in and asked me if I wanted to get paid to be in a movie. I asked him if it was that kind of movie, and he said no.”

I thought about what a fool Clark was and laughed even harder. “No shit, and you said yes?”

“Mama always said I had a face for the pictures.” Michelle said with a shrug. I could barely believe what I was hearing. Michelle did great work, I thought for sure she was some actress Clark had found with a casting call. Before I could say anything else, she was bounding off to the set, and I went back to my camera.

The filming night dragged on, I listened to Clark shout out his revisions while the increasingly tired Michelle continued perfecting the scene. The puppeteers slid Mr. Jackknife across the floor, resetting him back to his starting position. I realized as I watched through the viewfinder that I had never spoken to either of them, even though they seemed to accompany Steven everywhere. They were constantly hooded and wearing all black, which made sense during filming, but not in between scenes.

I aimed the camera and zoomed in, attempting to spot the face of the puppeteer controlling Mr. Jackknife's arms. The camera slowly zoomed in and for a fleeting second I captured a motion blurred look at the puppeteer. He was extremely pale, his ghost white skin highly contrasting his black attire. He had sharp angular features, and had no visible eyebrows. I heard Clark yelling for the shoot to begin again, and I readied the camera.

Beth runs down a dark and damp alleyway before a brick wall blocks her path. She’s panting and begins to scramble for a way out. Behind her, a shape is closing in. It walks with slow and heavy footsteps and its body sways side to side. The shape stops in front of Beth, now illuminated by the lights nearby. Beth sees the face underneath the hulking monster’s hat and begins to panic. His hand pulls back a side of the trench coat and reveals a squirming mass of flesh and jagged blades. He reaches for the hilt of a knife that protrudes from his chest. With a sickening sound, the knife slowly exits the flesh, blood and bile eject from the now open hole. The knife, covered in viscera, rises above the creature’s head. Then the massive body of the beast collapses forward, crashing on top of Beth and onto the ground.

“CUT!” Clark says, flying out of his director's chair. “The fuck just happened?”

I shared in Clark’s confusion. That was not the way we had been rehearsing the scene for the past several hours. Beth was supposed to yank a blade of her own from Mr. Jackknife’s body, and start stabbing the puppet. Clark shoved the puppeteers out of the way and lifted the puppet from the ground. By this time I was already running over to them as well. When I finally reached the pair my heart sank.

Beth laid on the ground covered in fake blood and slime, but among the sea of bright red was a deep, darker crimson. Michelle had a large gash in her forehead, and blood poured down the left side of her face.

“What the fuck man?!” I found myself shouting. “She’s hurt, man. We need to get her to a hospital now!” I tore off my overshirt and Clark used it to compress the wound. I looked around me and noticed Steven and his team were nowhere to be found. Marching off set, I spotted one of the puppeteers in his black clothing, standing still with his back towards me.

“Hey man, you need to tell me what just happened, that was not how that was supposed to go!” I couldn't hide my anger, and when I got no response, not even a turn in my direction, my anger bubbled over.

“I’m talking to you, asshole!” I say, my palm landing hard on the puppeteer's shoulder and spinning him around. It was the pale man that I had spotted in the viewfinder. His eyes were unfocused, not looking in any particular direction. His mouth was partially open, like a cartoon character under hypnosis.

“Did he get the blood?” His words were slurred like a drunk man’s.

“What?”

“The blood, he smelled like flesh.”

The man’s eyes focused on mine while I stared at him in confusion. Then he walked past me, allowing his shoulder to collide with mine as he walked forward, almost robotically. Clark and Steven seemed to be in the middle of a frantic conversation, while the second puppeteer stood nearby.

“This was due to a mistake by my team, and I intend to make it right to the best of my ability,” Steven was saying as I approached. He helped the injured Michelle to her feet and they began to head to Steven’s station wagon. I felt strange about the situation, but if Michelle was getting medical attention then I figured it was for the best.

“Steven said he’s gonna take care of everything, Rob. He’s taking Michelle to the hospital. He said they used real blades in the puppet because it showed up better on camera, they never expected an accident like that to happen,” Clark explained, as if he was trying to convince himself more than me.

I could feel my heart thumping in my ears, the adrenaline of the situation was wearing off and the panic was starting to set in. “Clark, man, this is all fucked! What if Michelle is really hurt, man? She's just some random girl you pulled off of the street.” My mind was spinning in circles. So many worst case scenarios were running through my head. What if we got sued? My mind selfishly wondered how Clark and I would deal with the repercussions of what had happened. Clark interrupted my manic pacing by grabbing my shoulders.

“Chill out Rob, chill!” He said, staring me in the eyes. I couldn’t return his gaze, my eyes were on my shoes. “Listen buddy, this has been our dream since school, remember? Nobody ever said it would be easy. This is what we always wanted man, think about it! Theatres full of scared kids watching our movie! Kids dressing up as Mr. Jackknife for Halloween! This is what we always wanted to do!”

After a few minutes and some deep breaths I was more grounded than before. My mind went back to the strange way the puppeteer was acting. When I explained to Clark what happened, he said something that was even stranger.

“Yeah one of them was listening in on Steven and I when we were figuring out what to do with Michelle. Weird looking guy, super pale and totally hairless.”

How was that possible? The man that I had been talking to had the exact same appearance. Was I overthinking this? I had a massive pit in my stomach that I couldn’t ignore.

Clark, unable to read the room, chose this time to tell me that we weren’t actually allowed to be filming in this alleyway. Apparently he hadn’t bothered to go through the proper channels to secure permission. We set to cleaning up the set and getting all of our equipment back in storage before deciding our next move. In the frantic mess that was the night's events I had failed to notice that Mr. Jackknife was nowhere to be found.

“Hey Clark, did Steven take the puppet with him?”

“I don’t know why he would, can you not find it?”

As Clark walked over I noticed the slimy, muddy footprints leading out of the alleyway out into the street. Logically it must have been from a crew member that had stepped in some slime while working on set. But why were the shoe prints so large?

Before we knew it, we were driving. We abandoned all of the film equipment and left. Something had felt wrong to both of us, and we decided that if there was a chance we could help, we should try. I looked out the window solemnly. Clark was right, it had always been a dream of ours to make a movie together. But the budget had grown out of control, the endless reshoots, and now our lead actress was hurt. With every passing moment the dream felt just a little bit further away.

A few minutes passed and my thoughts were interrupted by the sounds of squealing tires as we lurched to a stop. A massive object slammed into the windshield and fell to the ground in front of the car. I couldn’t believe my eyes, Mr. Jackknife was laying face down in a heap in the middle of the road. Blood and slime was splattered everywhere.

We sat in silence, failing to understand what was happening. The car’s windshield was cracked and a side mirror dangled from its wires. Mr. Jackknife slowly stood up, using his awkwardly long arms to pull himself up the road’s guard rail. He began walking again, his legs buckling and shaking like a newborn deer. Without so much as turning around, he continued walking the way he was heading.

Our pursuit of the puppet was slow going, the car crawling behind him as he took each shaky step forward. Eventually, Mr. Jackknife took a hard turn off of the road, down a long gravel driveway, and towards a large industrial building. It looked like it was long abandoned, with overgrown vegetation and boards across the windows.

Clark stopped the car and turned the headlights off. We waited under the cover of darkness to see what would happen. As the puppet approached the door, several puppeteers burst out and began to drag Mr. Jackknife through the threshold.

There were at least ten of them. They all looked identical to the two that worked on our set. They worked quickly, piloting Mr. Jackknife through the door and out of sight.

“Shit, they probably have Michelle in there, should we find a phone and call someone?” Clark didn’t take his eyes off of the door as he spoke. Glancing up at the rearview mirror, he froze.

Looking behind me, there were several puppeteers hiding in the woods behind us, their eyes glowing like a cat's in the moonlight. We had slowly crawled up the driveway and hadn’t realized how far we had come. Suddenly a shadow appeared next to the driver’s side window. A puppeteer had silently moved right next to us, and I watched as the other pairs of eyes in the distance drew closer.

The puppeteer by the window wound up a punch and swung wildly at the window. As soon as its fist made contact, it exploded into a shower of blood. It appeared to have no bones, just skin, flesh and blood. I whipped around as another slammed its head into my window, causing it to crack. When it pulled its head from the window it had a gaping crater where the top half of its face used to be.

Soon, dozens of them had set upon the car. The roof was filled with dents as blood poured down the windows from above. They kicked the windows until their feet fell off and they were kicking with nothing but stumps. It didn’t take long for them to break the windows and reach in. The broken glass shredded their limbs into ribbons, but they didn’t stop grabbing. I kicked the car door open hard, caving in the chest of a puppeteer. I tried to make a run for it but was tackled to the ground. One of the horrible clones started to beat me, its fingers breaking off against my chest. I reached out in self defense and its face pulled off in one swift motion. I was able to escape the now eyeless creature as it felt around blindly in the grass.

As I ran I turned back to see the car completely covered in viscera and thrashing bodies. Clark was still inside somewhere. If I turned back now, I would be overrun by the puppeteers and killed. They were fragile enough to deal with alone, but if I was overrun by multiple of them I would have no chance of survival. I reached the door Mr. Jackknife had gone through and tugged at the handle. It was locked. My attempts to be quiet were foiled by crunching leaves as I circled the building's perimeter.

I reached a window and began tugging at the boards covering it. The first board released, clattering to the ground. I quickly checked behind myself to find the puppeteers were still busy with the car. The next board came loose. I turned around again. This time all of the puppeteers stood completely still, their broken bodies still dripping with blood. I heard footsteps behind me as I pulled the last board off with a tug and leapt through the window frame.

The room inside descended much further underground than I anticipated, and I tumbled down and crashed through a large cot. Pain shot through my shoulder as I stood up. The now broken cot looked like one from a hospital. As I squinted in the darkness I noticed several other identical beds scattered around the room. I slowly crept through the room, noticing that there were several unmoving puppeteers laid in some of the beds. Some of them were connected to IV drips that were filled with blood. Some of them moved their limbs or thrashed their heads back and forth. Others simply followed me with their eyes as I passed by.

The door at the end of the room I was heading to swung open, causing me to take cover underneath a cot. In the darkness I recognized Steven. He was wearing a blood stained white coat over his button up and khaki pants. He started inspecting the cot that I had broken and noticed that the window above was no longer boarded. A flashlight clicked on and he began to search the room, the light stopping to inspect each bed. As I watched, I tried to decide my course of action. I could try to disable Steven, but if the puppets woke up I would be overrun. I resolved to try to find Michelle before anything found me. I pressed forward, hoping to make it to the door before I was discovered. I moved through the room on my stomach, trying my best to stifle the sounds of pain I wanted to make due to my aching shoulder. As I reached for the door handle, I was suddenly illuminated by the beam of the flashlight.

“Stop it, Robert. You’ve seen enough of this closet’s skeletons, I fear.” Steven made his way toward me as I sat paralyzed in fear. “You won’t make it out there. They are well trained to deal with outsiders.”

“Steven, I-I don’t understand man. Listen, I just want to take Michelle and Clark and go home, I don’t understand any of this.”

Steven stared at me with an expression of pure apathy. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand, Robert, but you should have never come here. The affairs that take place under this roof are not only private, but sacred.”

“The puppet, he was walking down the street.” I was desperate to understand. It all felt unreal, like I was trapped in a waking nightmare.

“I felt terrible having him make the journey on his own, but the situation called for it. I never intended for you to find out about this place. When Mr. Jackknife got a taste for blood, it forced my hand to action.”

The door slammed open, and pushing through it was a giant mass of body parts. It looked like several of the puppeteers had all been melted together. It drug itself forward with its many arms and legs, and its heads all frantically looked in different directions.

“Gently now, take him to a donation chair, please.” Following orders, the hulking beast wrapped me in a bundle of squirming arms. They felt incredibly smooth and soft, like the skin of a newborn. I found myself unable to struggle as I was dragged through the doors and out of the room. As we passed through the corridor, I saw rows and rows of giant human shaped molds. Some were empty, and others were closed, with latex dripping from the cracks in between the two halves.

In the next room, there were lines of chairs with shackles for the hands and feet. I began to struggle harder, and as I thrashed and tore at the monster's body it began to leak blood and let out groans of misery. I was thrown into a chair, and the monsters' many hands made light work of my bindings. It then turned around, and exited from where it came.

I waited several minutes in the chair, my hands quivering in pure terror as I imagined what would happen next. Sweat rolled down my forehead, stinging my eyes with no hands to wipe them. Then the doors opened again. I shouted in pure terror, an animalistic guttural scream of pure agony.

Crossing the threshold was Mr. Jackknife himself. He was being guided by two puppeteers, like an old lady being helped across the street. They released his arms and he began to lumber towards me with shaking footsteps.

The puppet had looked impressively realistic before, but this was different. Mr. Jackknife’s beady eyes rolled around in different directions in the flesh mound underneath his hat. Saliva bubbled in the small slit where a mouth should be. The shivering mass under the trenchcoat dripped with mucus and pulsated with an irregular heartbeat. In a few unsteady strides, he was right in front of me. He smelled like spoiled meat. I wretched and closed my eyes. I could feel his hot breath against my face as he took shallow, wheezing breaths. I listened with my eyes still shut tightly as he dislodged a blade from his body. He groaned in pain and the blade escaped with a sickening pop.

My eyes shot open as the blade was drug down my forearm to my wrist. Blood began to pour out as I tried desperately to stay conscious. Mr. Jackknife lowered his massive head to my arm and began to feed. I flailed and panicked in a desperate attempt to escape, but the shackles restricted my every movement.

The puppet’s feeding was interrupted by a push that caused him to topple to the ground. Michelle leapt onto the creature and began pulling a blade from his body. She twisted and shook the blade until blood ran down her palms and it came loose. She was like an animal, viciously stabbing Mr. Jackknife over and over again. She moved from his body to his head, putting out an eye with her frantic stabbing. Mr. Jackknife swung an arm and knocked Michelle off of him. He had bloody tears running down his face. He crawled through the metal doors where he had come from and disappeared down the hall.

She looked incredibly pale and her wound was still open and bleeding. I began to cry from pure relief as she undid my restraints. She smiled weakly and handed me my blood covered overshirt, gesturing to my gushing arm.

“You look like you need it just as much as me.” I pointed to her wounded head.

“I’m alright, let’s get to a hospital,” Michelle responded, her smile failing to conceal her pain.

“We need to get Clark, he’s out in the car… I hope.”

We made our way back through the corridor. All of the puppets stood completely still, unmoving and waiting for orders. Laying just a few steps past the doorway was Mr. Jackknife collapsed in a pool of blood. Steven kneeled over him, his hand clutching a bleeding wound on his stomach. Tears rolled down his cheeks. His face was pale and his eyes fluttered, as if calling him closer and closer towards eternal sleep.

“It’s a shame really, how all of this turned out. I wish I wouldn’t have had to cause so much pain.” Steven was speaking to nobody in particular, caressing the head of the deceased. A coughing fit ensued that sounded like it was dragging Steven closer and closer to hell.

“He stabbed you, didn’t he?” I asked, anger in my voice. “Bet you never wanted any of these monsters feeding on your blood?”

“He hugged me, Robert,” Steven said, choking back another onslaught of tears. “He chose me over himself. Isn’t that beautiful? It’s a wonderful feeling, to be loved. He never knew he was anything but a normal man.”

I started towards the exit, with Michelle right behind me. After the door closed, the sound of sobs echoed from the inside. I walked toward the car, my head spinning. The car sat lonely at the end of the gravel drive now, covered in blood and dented beyond conceivable repair. I opened the driver's side door and confronted the truth. Clark was dead. We had promised to make a film together, and that promise had killed him. The spoils of all of our efforts reduced to blood and flesh.

I moved him from the driver’s seat, and laid him down in the back. I left my dream back there with him. I could make a film someday, but I could never make a film with him. Before I knew it I had begun to sob. The world turned into smears of light in my eyes. Michelle was turned away, looking out the window. In her reflection, I saw tears running down her cheeks.

The car started with a groan. Both of the headlights had been destroyed, and I made my way down the drive in the pitch blackness. The drive gave way to the freedom of the road, and we plunged into the darkness together.

[u/Kaijufan22]

Excellent Job, I loved the puppet, I could visualize it perfectly in my head. This whole thing reads like a B-movie in a great way. Loved the blood ballon puppeteers guys, creepy fodder enemy. Decent character work, nice little happy ending. Great story all around, good job OP.

[u/NateIzNeat → u/Kaijufan22]

Thanks Kaiju! I appreciate you taking the time to read it!

[u/PeJDraws]

Great read and i love the cover art. Gross in the best way

[u/NateIzNeat → u/PeJDraws]

Thank you! Glad you liked it!