The Puppet Maker by Archie Frankham

Funniest Kids Story Winner

The flickering street lamp barely shon through the thick fog, casting shadows of ominous things. As a tree swayed, so did the shadow as if it was waving to me... Then out of nowhere a hooded figure ran out from a graffitied alleyway, joseled me to the ground and knocked me out.

I woke up sitting in an awkward position in an old fashioned elevator. As music played, the elevator ascended. It climbed faster and faster. It rocketed up at incredible speed, it clanged and rattled then, ding! It stopped. I flew up, the G-force snatched me up in the air.

The door opened.

Three people stood before me. A teenage boy with red hair, ripped jeans and a Rolling Stones T-shirt. There was another boy that had messy brass-blond hair, green sneakers and toffee-brown eyes. The third person was an Asian girl with black fingerless gloves, a red bandana and a crossbow strapped to her back.

“Hello” the girl said. “My name is Juliet. This is Knives,” she pointed to the red head. “Aaaaand.. My name is Squirrel” said the blondie.

“I have so many questions...” I said.

“You may be asking where we are,” Juliet said. “We call this place ‘The Puppet Place’ .”

“What she's trying to say is that monsters exist and you're trapped in a haunted manor stuffed to the brim with them” Squirrel told me.

“WHAT?” I said.

“Those monsters are puppets,” Squirrel explained. “You see, there is this person living inside the manor that we call the Puppetmaker. He searches the manor for dead bodies then sews them into puppets. It's not fully human, there's always a twist. Knives reckons he saw one with a giant crab pincer as a hand once.”

“Every now and then people come up the elevator, ” Juliet explained, “ and after a while we made a small community.”

We walked through a pergola with vine fruit and Wisteria. We saw a medical centre, and a machine engineering room where giant cogs spun and a plume of sparks came out.

District four: Hunters. “What hunters?” I asked.

“The hunters,” said Juliet, “are the people who protect.”

She swung open the vast spruce doors. Swords and shields lined the walls. There was a bar on the left stuffed with beer bottles.

Knives walked up to the bar. “Hey Wolf” he said “can I get an... umm, I'll have Gryphons-blood”. Then he turned to me. “Well, do you want one? Umm... did you even tell us your name?!”

“My name is Ja-...”

“Not your real name,” interrupted Knives. “You have to choose a code name to forget about your life before.”

“Ok” I said. I tried thinking of my favourite things - drawing, animals... “It should be Frog, that’s my favourite animal.”

“Ok Frog. You are now a hunter. Choose your weapon,” Juliet said in an arcade gaming voice.” I laughed then walked up to the wall of weapons and chose the double scythe.

“Time for training,” said Juliet. I flicked the scythe quickly around my hand twice, then in one move I flicked it up in the air, grabbed the handle and fell into my battle-stance.

“I don’t think I need training,” I said.

“Okaaay. On to your first mission” she said. “There have been lots of puppets in the wardrobe recently.”

Off we went, down the hallway, into the bedroom. I heard rustling under the bed. Knives opened the door of the wardrobe but nothing was there. He stepped in, so did we.

Then, around the corner, a puppet climbed out of the clothes and grabbed Juliet’s crossbow. Juliet attacked back, she grabbed a hanger and swung it around his head. With a short twist, his head fell onto the floor.

Another puppet came out, I dodged. This one was particularly tall - it tried to grasp my head from above but I sliced both his hands off. I stumbled out of the wardrobe with the hands chasing after me leaving a trail of blood. One grabbed my hand. I shook it off. Knives lined it up perfectly and threw his knife through both of the hands pinning them to the wall. Then he got two more knives, threw them and they went through the back of the puppet’s skull. I could see the tips of the knives poking through its eyeballs.

We got them all. Or at least we thought.... Another puppet sliced his way through the bed. He had a thousand daggers jabbed into him. He walked up to me, grabbed a dagger from his head, and was about to stab me, when Juliet shot an arrow that went straight into the bridge of his nose. He collapsed. Suddenly, the bed moved, revealing an ominous staircase.

“This must be the Puppetmaker’s lair!” said Knives. “We must go down.”

“Fine” Juliet agreed. “But where’s Squirrel?”

“He aborted this mission,” Knives said. “I guess it’s just the three of us then.”

We walked down the cold, stone steps and into a room, just with a desk, a chair and an old fashioned sewing machine.

“Oh, so you found my lair,” a hooded figure came out of the shadows. It was Squirrel!

“You’re the Puppetmaker?!”exclaimed Juliet.

“Silence.” he said, lifting her up in the air. “You see the spindle wheel? It gives me powers” said the Puppetmaker.

“Then I will destroy it!” I yelled. I spun my scythe through the air and it obliterated the sewing machine into smithereens.

“It gives me all my powers, but it never stops the puppets” he cackled. Then an army of puppets arose, all with identical glinting white eyes. They strangled Knives and Juliet. I was left.

“You will have to join me, or die,” Squirrel said.

“I would rather die ”

“You’re choice”.

Claws, scissors and teeth ripped me apart. And the last thing I can remember is his cackling, white eyes and a needle sewing me and my friends into horrible puppets.

The end.