Them 12: The Wooden Girl

I have a confession to make: I hate puppets. Hand puppets, sock puppets, any kind of puppet. Even before I knew about Them, I hated puppets. Chalk it up to childhood fears or Uncanny Valley or whatever, but puppets haunted my dreams.

And now, of course, I have a great reason for hating them.

The Wooden Girl is a puppet. Sort of. She's a woman made of wood, but not really. Some people say that the wood is only a shell that is the "skin" around a corpse. Which just it creepier.

But that doesn't really matter, because the big thing about the Wooden Girl is this: she can pull your strings. Literally. She has strings (sometimes invisible, sometimes not) that can make you do anything she wants. She can make you dance, she can make you die, she can make you kill.

So, of course, the people she makes do her bidding are called Puppets.

Worse, however, are the ones who don't need her to control their strings. The ones who serve her willingly. They are called Willing Dolls. For some twisted, fucked-up reason, they do what she wants without being completely controlled.

I've also heard some things about some channel called TowerTV, but so far, I've only seen static where it's supposed to be, so I don't really have information about it.

Them 11: The Manufactured Newborn

I know what you're thinking: what the fuck is a Manufactured Newborn? It sounds like a heavy metal band.

Oh, it's heavy metal alright. It's made of metal and wire and clockwork and bone and sinew.

Imagine this: you're cleaning the garage one day and happen to find an old toy. Maybe it's a wind-up toy, maybe it's some weird Japanese thing, it doesn't matter. What matters is, you've never seen it before. Okay, fine, whatever, sell it on eBay. Except after you put it down, you can't find it anymore.

It moves and then finds things and adds them to its body. What kinds of thing? Well, it likes metal. And bone. I've seen one tear apart a cat and use its ribcage. Luckily, all you need to do is stay away from it and you won't get hurt. Except...well, it grows. Once it grows to the size of a car, you pretty much have to get out of there.

The Newborn is pretty self-cleaning, however: after growing to a certain size (certainly bigger than a car, I think, the one I saw looked about the size of a big Volkswagen), it will rip a hole in space and vanish. The one I saw, I was too fucking scared to look into the tear in space. I mean, it was a fucking tear in space, you don't want to look into those.

However, I have recently received a report from a friend who encountered a different version of the Newborn.

I saw this man get hit by a car. The car was totaled, but the man kept walking. He looked very twitchy to me and I thought he might be a Puppet, so I followed him. I watched him go into an alleyway and when he turned around, his face was all cut up from the car crash. Under his skin was...well, part of it was his jaw bone, but part of it was dull metal. And I saw that he was muttering something. I got a bit closer, but this was all I could here was: "Return to the Tower. Tick tock. Tick tock. Towerborn return to the Tower. Tick Tock." His eyes started to glow yellow and I thought he might have seen me, so I ran the other way.

"Towerborn." Well, it was rumored that whatever dimension the Newborn came from and went back to was called the Tower. So fuck, I guess it has proxies now.