“Tell me about him,” Kitty said. “You might be the only one who can.”
You could see Bascomb didn’t like the idea at all. There was something there, bad blood maybe. “Okay… I mean, shit, I suppose it’s time to tell somebody. Answer me something first… have you seen McBane? Have you talked to him?”
It was Kitty’s turn to look frightened. “Yes, I have.”
“And?”
She chewed her lower lip, picking her words carefully. “Honestly? He and that dummy scared the hell out of me. There’s something wrong there, something real wrong.”
“Oh, you’re damn right, sister, there sure as hell is something wrong there.” Bascomb paused, lit another cigarette off the butt of the last. “What I tell you… it stays between you and me, understand?”
Kitty promised him it would.
“Okay, all right then. Now, like you probably already know, I handled ventriloquist acts for years. Dozens of ’em. Some good and, well, some not so good. My uncle could throw his voice and my old man made dummies and puppets, that sort of thing… so I know the business backwards and forwards. Ain’t a lot I don’t know about ventriloquism. Now, most people think vent artists are nuts and some of them definitely are. But for most it’s just a gag, a neat trick they can pull off. End of the day, they put their dummy in a trunk and that’s that. Then there are the other kind…”
Bascomb said that some ventriloquists were natural introverts, quiet as mice, but when they had dummies on their laps they channeled all their repressed thoughts and secret desires through the things. Made those dummies do and say things they would never dream of saying or doing in a million years. Those were the dangerous ones, the ones that developed a personality so strong for their dummy that often it overpowered their own. It became sort of a symbiotic relationship, one feeding off the other. Without the ventriloquist, the dummy was just a piece of wood… but without the dummy, the ventriloquist was trapped by his own inhibitions.
“Codependency is what I’m saying here, Miss Seevers,” Bascomb told her. “And like a codependency in the real world, sometimes it’s beneficial and other times… well, destructive. I knew a vent artist who slit his wrists when somebody stole his dummy. Can you imagine what it must have been like for that guy? Like somebody had stolen half of his mind, half of his soul.”
Bascomb let that sink in for a moment, then went on to explain the mechanics of dummies themselves. “Vent dolls are an art form. These days, most guys buy ’em straight off the rack same way they would a suit. There’s companies that mass produce ’em. But in the old days, vent artists would make their own to start with until they could afford a guy like my old man who was a craftsman. Every dummy my old man made was a custom job, handmade of the best materials—hardwood joints, brass mechanisms, aluminum return springs, oak headsticks, glass eyes and shell winkers. The vent told my old man exactly what he wanted and got his money’s worth. One-of-a-kind vent dummies we’re talking here. Priceless in their own way.
“Yeah, my old man was one of the great figure artists, right up there with Frank Marshall and the McElroy brothers. All of his figures would have at least thirteen or more animations… so, you get the picture, I know dummies. I know a good one and I know a bad one… and Ronny McBane’s dummy, Piggy? That one’s in a class all by itself. I’ve never seen such articulation in my life.”
Sure, Bascomb told Kitty, Piggy seemed almost human at times and very often, Ronny seemed less than that. There was a symbiosis there, too, but a bad one. Maybe something more along the lines of parasitism. Bascomb managed Ronny’s act for two years and it almost cost him his sanity. He had heard of performers arguing with their dummies, had seen it once or twice, but never anything like this business with Ronny and Piggy. The arguments often got very ugly with Piggy running down Ronny to the point of being vicious. It was unpleasant to imagine, but positively unsettling to actually witness. Bascomb said it got to the point where you were thinking that Piggy was the master and Ronny was the puppet.
“I’ve seen some screwed up ventriloquist / dummy relationships in my time—knew a guy once who slept with his dummy, kept it there in bed with him when he was doing it with a woman—but the Ronny/Piggy thing was far worse, I tell you.” Bascomb paused, dragged off his cigarette. “If you talked with McBane, then I’m betting Piggy was there. Ronny doesn’t go anywhere without him and maybe it’s the other way around, who can say? But if you did, then you might have noticed some… funny things about that dummy, maybe how it moves when Ronny’s nowhere near it.”
Kitty told him she’d seen that, all right. “It was weird… it gave me the creeps. How can he do that?”
Bascomb shrugged. “You tell me. I’ve seen some good gags in my time, but this is something else entirely. I had a guy, a good vent artist, tell me it wasn’t possible. That the only way Ronny could do that was by using his mind, telekinesis or one of them Stephen King things. I don’t know. But I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you in all honesty… there’s something unnatural about Piggy.”
But Kitty didn’t need to be told that.
She’d never forget what she saw in that dressing room. The look in the dummy’s eyes, wicked and sadistic and completely evil. That was crazy thinking, sure, but it was exactly what she had thought at the time: Piggy was not just a wooden figure, but something sentient… and not altogether sane.
Bascomb said that Ronny was real strange about it all. Not just the fighting, either, there was more. Lots more. He mothered Piggy and Piggy could barely tolerate Ronny’s presence. You couldn’t have imagined a more clear cut case of split personality.
“One time, oh shit, one time McBane had a bad show. I don’t know what happened exactly, but things just never got off the ground. He couldn’t get the chemistry going between himself and Piggy… I mean, you know, between those personalities of his. Things got nasty out there and it was not funny, I’ll tell you that much. Piggy was running him down, telling the fucking audience—excuse my French here—the worse things you could imagine about Ronny… that he was a mama’s boy, that he had some kind of mannequin that he masturbated over. Shit, it was bad. Real bad. Embarrassing, downright spooky. Because, you know, the people out in the audience, they figured Ronny had snapped, using the dummy to sort of mentally castrate himself… but me? I wasn’t so sure by that point. I wasn’t so sure of anything.
“So the show ended, thank God. The management was crawling up my ass and it was hard all around. But Ronny still had another show to do in an hour or so… two shows a night, that’s how it worked. Well, the owners told me that if Ronny pulled that shit again, they were calling for the guys in the white suits. It was that goddamn bad. So, I went to the dressing room to check on my boy…” Bascomb paused here and it wasn’t for effect. His complexion had a yellowish tint to it, his eyes filled with pain. “I… well, I went into the dressing room, right? I mean, I walked right in there and Ronny’s on the couch, eyes closed, breathing deep and even. Looks like he’s asleep. I would have sworn he was asleep. There was blood all over his hand and arm… I looked closer and, Jesus, I could see teeth marks embedded into his wrist. Some of them had broken the skin and I thought, oh Christ, Ronny has really slipped the old peg now, he’s biting himself. And that’s when I noticed Piggy was sitting up in a chair in the corner, in the shadows. His… his eyes were open and shining and he started talking. He said to me, he said, You better get the fuck out of here before you piss me off… before I start telling you things about yourself you don’t wanna hear…”