One week passed.
No strings.
No puppets.
No whispers from beneath.
Velmont Hollow stood quiet—but not in the haunted way it had before.
Now, the quiet meant relief.
It was Sunday. The church bells rang without blood in their chimes.
I walked Main Street. No shadows moved without wind. No windows blinked with eyes hidden inside.
Just normal life.
Old men drank coffee. Children skipped rope.
A town waking from a dream it had been trapped in for half a century.
And me?
I was awake.
But not free.
Because every town has someone who remembers the show.
Every town needs someone who watched the final act.
Someone to keep the stage from rising again.
And that someone was me.
---
I visited every house that week.
Just to look. Just to listen.
Sometimes I thought I heard things—wood creaking when no one moved. The sound of strings brushing windowpanes.
But it always passed.
Mostly.
One day I walked past the playground.
A little girl sat on a swing.
She was humming.
The melody was familiar.
> "Pull the moon back, Jonah…"
I stopped.
She looked up.
> "Do you like my doll?"
In her lap was a wooden puppet.
It looked nothing like Grin.
It looked like me.
Carved with care.
Mouth open—not grinning, not sewn.
Just open.
Like it was still telling a story.
---
I walked to the field.
The place where the stage once stood.
Nothing there now. Just grass. Wind. And silence.
I sat.
And I waited.
Not because I was afraid.
Because endings deserve witnesses.
After all we survived—after the strings, the smiles, the stolen voices—there had to be someone left to say:
> "The curtain fell. We remembered. We lived."
And as the sun sank below the hills of Velmont, I finally let go.
Not of the story.
But of the fear that I had been nothing but a puppet.
Because I wasn't.
I was the boy who broke the strings.
I was the scream that ended the show.
I was the voice they tried to erase—
And the one that told it true.
So if you're reading this, and you find a puppet in your attic…
Or hear laughter from beneath the floorboards…
If the moon looks like it's smiling a little too wide…
Remember me.
Remember this:
> Not all stories are told aloud.
Some are carved.
And some… wait for their curtain call.