Hello, Sam.
You probably don't remember me. In fact, you're probably realizing there's a lot of things you don't remember. As it turns out, I owe you a favor, so here's a story that might help you fill in some gaps.
No idea how much you still know, so I'll start from the beginning. I'm not human. Not the way people usually mean when they say that word, anyway.
My first memory is of waking up in a hospital room. I was eleven years old. They told me I'd just gotten out of surgery. There was a tall play structure with slides and swings a few blocks down from my house, and apparently I'd fallen from the highest point and cracked my skull on the way down. They did their best to patch me up, but there was significant brain damage. Memory issues were to be expected. I was lucky to be alive, they told me. I remember sitting up in bed as the words washed over me, staring at the creases and veins of my hands as if I'd never seen them before. Something about them made me uneasy.
A few days later, I stood in the bathroom with my PJs discarded on the floor, staring at my reflection. I was finally home, and this was my first good opportunity too look myself over. I looked all wrong. My fingers were too long, my wrists and elbows bent at odd angles, and bones that aren't found in any model skeleton poked through my wiry flesh to distort my pallid, almost blue-ish skin.
None of that was what bothered me. It was something else, something I didn't have words for at the time. Later the doctor told me it was a side effect of the brain damage, nothing serious, it would pass in time. And if it didn't, I should let him know.
I'm getting ahead of myself. The next part of this story is about me going to school. So, despite what I said earlier about waking up being my first memory, I wasn't actually an amnesiac. I knew all the appropriate names and faces, like I'd skimmed the script of my own life but hadn't actually seen the movie. There were no problems with not recognizing people, or with falling behind in class — my grades actually improved quite a bit. I only need to sleep for an hour or two each night, so I had lots of extra time for homework. The teachers weren't sure what to make of it. Wasn't I supposed to have a brain injury?
On the social end of things, I managed to alienate everyone within a couple of weeks. Before the fall I was an outgoing, likeable boy, apparently, and they resented the unnerving creature I'd become for taking him away. Interacting with people was tiring, so at the time I thought this was a blessing. In retrospect, I think it got to me more than I realized.
The doctor comes into the story a few months after I woke up. For some reason I was convinced as soon as he saw me he'd realize there was some kind of mistake, and I'd get locked up, or dissected, or whatever it is they do to people who turn out to not really be people. Instead, he was quite nice. He looked at me without my shirt on and only flinched a tiny bit at how my arms moved. My joints, he explained, got messed up in the accident. He showed me all these tiny scars from where they went in to fix them. I wasn't quite like the other kids, but I was perfectly healthy and there was nothing to worry about.
That's when I told him about the sense of wrongness. He reassured me it was just from the head injury. My social issues, he said, were understandable, given the physical changes and memory problems. The adults all decided it'd be best if I moved to a different area for middle school, where nobody would know me, and I could get a fresh start.
I didn't tell him about my sleep habits. They weren't causing me any distress, and I hadn't fully grasped how different they were from a normal person's yet, so there was no reason to bring it up.
I also didn't tell him about the nights when I'd leap from my second story window and race silently through the darkness on all fours, letting my arms and legs stretch to their full range of movement. I didn't tell him about the time I chased down a stray cat, caught it in my bare hands and held it captive between my long, gaunt fingers. I didn't tell him how I froze, staring at the frightened animal in panicked confusion, like a dancer who'd forgotten their steps in front of a packed audience. What happens next? I couldn't remember what happens next. I don't eat it, it's something else. I felt awful, like I'd forgotten something important. I let the cat go and slunk back to my room, deflated. I didn't go out at night much, after that.
Mom saw me that night, I think. That's probably why she left. Usually I make sure nobody's watching, but it was an awful day and I got sloppy. She saw how I moved up the wall toward my window, contorting my body to fit the contours of the bricks, more slithering than climbing. She saw me lose heart halfway up and collapse back to the earth, sprawled out in a pile of limbs bent the wrong ways in the wrong places. I heard how she cried out when I fell, and again when I started moving again. I'm sure it was upsetting. I was upset too. I don't blame her for leaving. I should have been more careful.
Dad took it kinda hard, started staying out late most nights. Trash piled up around the house and food got a bit scarce. Well, it would have been scarce, except I can eat … a lot of things that people can't normally eat. Insects, fallen pine needles, certain kinds of plastic. I could have pitched in, pretty easily, to support Dad and keep the place in better condition, but at the time it didn't even occur to me. It was just human stuff. Who cares.
It turns out I care, actually. Immediately after this I entered the "caring about human stuff" phase of my existence. The inciting incident was when I realized I'm not supposed to be a boy.
The doctor was very supportive. It tied everything up in a neat little pink bow, you see. The sense of wrongness, the social difficulties, the dissociation. Trans people deal with all of that stuff, right? I told him for the first time about other things I could do, things I'd done on my nighttime runs, but he explained that these were just particularly vivid dreams. A common symptom of my particular kind of brain injury, apparently. As far as he was concerned, I was a somewhat damaged but perfectly human transgender girl.
My transition happened midway through my first year of middle school. It helped. There was still a sense of wrongness, but it took the edge off, and suddenly interacting with humans wasn't so unbearable. I made basic social connections. I started helping with chores at home. I made a serious effort to be a real human — I really wanted it to be true, for a while there.
It couldn't be true, of course. Vivid dreams? I barely sleep and my dreams are always the same — I'm in free-fall, surrounding by a soft red light, waiting for something that never actually happens. Still, at that point, I was starting to think living the lie might not be so bad.
That's when you showed up to save me from that terrible fate. You snuck up behind me and whispered "I know what you are" right under my ear, I believe? It was a little dramatic. I twisted my head around almost ninety degrees and found myself staring into those eyes of yours. Yawning pits of darkness that pull at you, that you could fall into and nobody would ever find the body. You didn't flinch, I think you actually giggled? And that's when I realized the eyes watching me were attached to a eleven-year-old girl.
A human girl, no less. I could tell from your scent. There was the sickly sweet scent of something else clinging to you even then, but you yourself were just a normal girl. So why were you looking at me the way a coyote looks at a rabbit? It didn't make sense. I turned my body to face you, allowing joints to twist and click, and tilted my head to one side.
"I know what you are," you repeated. You looked so smug. I seriously considered strangling you. I didn't ask for clarification, but you started talking anyway. You told me this story, and I guess now I'm telling it back to you:
When you were a bit younger, seven or eight years old, there was a playground near your house. It had a tall play structure, old and made mostly of wood, with three plastic slides. There was a green slide that was partly closed and wiggled from side to side, a yellow slide that was wide open and wiggled up and down, and a red slide that was entirely closed and went straight. Your favorite was the red slide. You liked to start going down it and then stop yourself inside so you wouldn't come out the bottom and it would look like you'd disappeared. You'd hide in there, basking in the pure red of bright sunlight filtered through plastic, until another kid wanted to come down.
One day, you saw another kid go into the top of the red slide and not come out the bottom. You ran over eagerly, expecting to meet a kindred spirit stopped halfway down the tube, but he was nowhere to be seen. Without hesitation, you threw yourself down the red slide in pursuit — only to come out the bottom as usual. There was magic at work here, you were certain, and you were going to get to the bottom of it. You went down the slide a bunch of times, forward and backward and sideways. You tried a bunch of different magic words you'd heard in different stories as passwords. You went over the play structure for clues. Nothing worked.
It was well past when you were meant to be home for dinner when, by chance, you put your hand on the red slide to go down yet again and it came away wet. Your palm was marked with just a tiny bit of red liquid. It smelled like pennies. Blood. Just a little, probably from a skinned knee or something that the kid hadn't even noticed. You stopped to consider, then opened your backpack. Your school agenda had some particularly sharp pages. You carefully gave yourself a small paper-cut on your pinky finger, then dabbed the little drop of blood that welled up on the red plastic.
You looked down the slide and realized, with exhilaration, that you could no longer see the light coming up from the bottom opening. It was only the red glow, going down far further than should have been possible. A sensible person would have have thought about how the other kid had vanished completely, and hesitated for at least a moment. You did not hesitate.
After several minutes of quietly sliding through the red tube, basking in the red glow that could no longer possibly be sunlight, the top of the slide opened and you saw the playground. I will not describe it to you here in any detail. If you have forgotten, that is for the best — people are not meant to see it and return unchanged. I will say that there were many children, some more human and some less. There were many red slides by which children enter and leave the playground. Near the slides, there were hooks where clothing and skin could be left to hang while the children are playing.
Your slide levelled off and you slowed to a near halt as you approached one of the many entrances. The children waved to you as they played, and you laughed and waved back. You felt an inexorable draw toward the playground, as all children do. You got to your feet and took one step toward the nearest hook, where a less human child was waiting to help you hang up your overalls and skin.
At that moment, you heard a familiar voice calling you from very far away. "Sammy," it said, "Sammy, your mom says it's dinner time! You're in the slide again, right? Hurry up!"
You tried to take another step toward the hook. Your body would not obey you. The hook attendant tilted their head and made noises of concern.
"Sammy!" the voice insisted, "I know you're in there!" Your legs moved jerkily, turning your body and taking one step after another back to the slide. The hook attendant watched in growing alarm. You tried to cry for help, but your mouth would not move. Moving entirely without your input, your body sat down and your arms began to propel you forward on the slide.
The attendant finally realized something was wrong and rushed forward to assist, but was too late. An instant before it could scoop you up and bring you safely to the playground to join the fun, something reached into the slide, grabbed hold of you and dragged you out.
You found yourself lying on the ground, staring up at a girl about your own age with wavy blonde hair. You got to your feet and returned her smile, even though you wanted to stay where you were and cry. You followed her home and got back just in time for dinner, even though you should have been over an hour late. You told me her name and I have forgotten it, even though I remember every other detail of the story clearly. She's the one you're looking for now, your so-called puppeteer.
It was a fascinating and enlightening story you told me. After that, we worked together to dig up details on my missing past. I'm not fond of you, but even I have to admit you've got a knack for snooping. Here's the story as far as we could determine.
At least a month before my supposed accident, a boy entered the playground through a slide near my house and did not leave. Not long after, I took the skin he left and ventured out into the outside world, probably for the first time. Whoever my doctor reports to — I believe you used to call them 'whitecoats' — must have figured something out about the red slide, because they showed up with unmarked vans to take it down.
I probably attacked them while they were doing this, which I now know was the worst thing I could have done. They captured me in and spent a couple of months trying to … rehabilitate me, into the boy whose skin I borrowed. I still don't know exactly what they did to me, but afterward they returned me to his family under minimal surveillance. They don't seem to know about the playground or how the slide actually works, only that children occasionally vanish and come back wrong. It was, and is, absolutely vital that they never learn any more than that.
Fortunately, they weren't bothering to surveil me outside of the doctor's appointments, so I could finally return to the playground. It was … hard. As soon as I saw the other kids, I was hit by this flood of shame over what I looked like and what had been done to me. It's not the borrowed skin, exactly, borrowing skin is natural for us. It's what's underneath. Parts of me have been chopped off, other parts twisted and fused together, all in the name of producing something "human." I don't even know what I'm supposed to look like, or how many limbs I'm supposed to have.
I did come to terms with it, eventually. I'll never forgive the whitecoats, but there were benefits to my upbringing. I'm glad I learned to read; I read stories to my siblings in the playground often. Also, it is useful for our family to have members who are able to blend in among humans. I've been teaching it to a few of my more ordinary-looking siblings.
While I was getting reacquainted with my less-human family members, you were falling deeper into the puppeteer's web. You were so convinced you'd be able to get through to her, or suppress her, or something, if you could just come up with the right plan. I warned my siblings not to approach you, or your blonde friend who smells like freshly baked cupcakes, under any circumstances. Unfortunately, I think I overdid it. Too much danger and it becomes intriguing for adventurous little ones.
One of my less human younger brothers, a boy with many limbs who loves to hide on the ceiling and drop down to frighten younger children, heard how you were under the spell of this sweet-smelling monster and thought it was some kind of fairy tale. He got it in his head that you needed rescuing. I told him, of course, that it doesn't work like that. I told him you wouldn't want to be rescued like that in the first place. He didn't listen, and even though I was older, I couldn't stop him from going — that's not how things work in the playground.
I could follow him, though. I watched him put on an old, worn-out skin and crawl out of the slide nearest your house. I watched him stalk you for days, and listened to his whispered plans of creeping in through your window at midnight to steal you away. A fly, plotting to steal silk from a spider's web. It was difficult to watch.
I was there when he put that plan into action. It was not midnight. It seemed to be midnight when he crawled out from the slide, yet when he arrived at that house with its big lawn and white picket fence, it was three o'clock on a lovely Sunday afternoon. He did not creep in through the window. He walked right up to the front door and rang the doorbell. I remember the panic and confusion in his eyes, the awkwardness of his steps as he staggered uncomfortably on two limbs. A braver girl than me would have tried to pull him out, I think. It might even have worked if I'd gone for it at the earliest possible moment, but I hesitated and then it was too late.
The puppeteer opened the door. Her smile was blisteringly bright, like the sun at noon on a hot summer day. My brother asked if you were home and she said no, he'd just missed you, but it was just about tea-time and he was welcome to come in for some cake.
As soon as that door opened, he stood up straighter than should have been possible. I could hear cracks and pops as his extra limbs folded themselves away, his joints pulled straight and stiffened, and his face jerked into alignment with the mask of skin he wore. As long as that girl's eyes were on him, he moved and spoke precisely like an ordinary ten-year-old boy. I watched through the window as the two of them sat together and drank tea and ate pastry, talking like old friends about something I couldn't quite make out.
It was still three PM on a Sunday afternoon two hours later, when she bid him farewell. He made it about half way down the block from her house, moving with pained, jerky, bipedal steps, before collapsing on the ground. Moonlight glinted off the growing puddle of dark ichor leaking from his ears and nose. My other siblings and I stole a stretcher from a nearby hospital to carry him back home. He survived, of course — we can survive most things — but he's never been quite the same.
I only saw you once more, after that. It was two weeks later. You showed up after dark at my human family's house, wearing a badly torn dress instead of your trademark overalls. Your dark eyes were wild and glassy. You'd figured out something, you said, and you needed my help. Then, with an energy born of desperation, you started explaining how to make tiramisu.
You just stood there on my porch talking for several minutes, like you were on loop. First the desperate plea for help, then the insistence that you had some sort of plan, then the cake recipe, growing more panicky with each iteration. You were explaining how to add the coffee for the fifth time when you finally just broke down crying.
I should have shut the door on you, but I didn't. I brought you inside, gave you water and porridge, and laid my long fingers on your shoulder in a clumsy attempt at reassurance. You spent a few hours just lying on my couch, sobbing, then left without a word. I'd never seen you look so defeated.
Five months later, you and the puppeteer both vanished into thin air. You turned up not long after with an extremely specific case of amnesia. Originally I'd planned to leave you be, but, well, it's obvious you're searching for the puppeteer, and at this rate I'm getting concerned you might actually find her. So I thought you should know what you're getting into.
I know what it's like to be bent out of shape to fit someone else's version of you, okay? It's not fun. Your clever plans and contingencies mean nothing here — they'll melt away into smiles and tea parties as soon as you get close. Everything always goes exactly how she expects it to go. That's not something you can overcome by being clever.
The whitecoats must have a way of dealing with this kind of thing. If you really want to do this, figure that part out first. I don't want to see you turned into a puppet again. Be careful.
And Sam? If you do anything to bring the whitecoats down on my family, I swear I will hunt you down like I did that little stray cat on that awful night and give you a first-hand demonstration of what happens next.
Do not attempt to contact me.