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But instead he went upstairs.

He was not sure why he decided to return to the theater. There was no logical reason for it. He knew Mr. Carr was up there, so he would not be learning any new information by going up to the theater. He did not really want to go—the idea of seeing those things again made him feel nauseous.

But he went nonetheless.

He took the flashlight from under the counter. Mr. Carr had left the door in the alcove unlocked, and Putnam closed it behind him as he tiptoed up the steps. In the hallway, he walked quietly, careful not to make a sound, and he passed the rows of identical empty doorways until finally he reached the last one. He was nervous—his heart was pounding, and his palms were so sweaty he could barely hold on to the flashlight—but he took a deep breath, swallowed hard and shone the light into the theater.

Onto Mr. Carr.

The old man was seated in the chair farthest from the dummy, and he was naked. His shoes and shirt and pants lay in the dusty floor at his feet.

On his body, in various positions and poses, were the dolls.

Putnam stared. The old man had to know that the flashlight was shining on him, but he didn’t seem to care. He touched one figure on his lap, then another on his shoulder, shivering as his fingers stroked the slimy cheeks, ran through the horrible coarse hair.

He was smiling.

Putnam still hated the theater, still hated the dolls, was still filled with an irrational anger and intense loathing. But he was also, somehow, envious of Mr. Carr. Some small part of him, he realized, wanted to be naked too, wanted to be sitting in one of the chairs for the audience, wanted to be close to the dolls.

He dropped the flashlight and ran back down the hallway to the stairs.

He ran downstairs and out of the store.

He did not go back, and when the next day his mom told him that Mr. Carr had phoned and had asked him to call him at the bookstore, Putnam told her that, to Mr. Carr, he was never home.

He returned to the bookstore himself, though, two days later. He pretended to be a customer, snuck in while Mr. Carr was busy at the counter, hid from the old man in the aisles, but when he left several hours later, walking on the far side of a departing couple, he saw the bookstore owner smiling at him, shaking his head. The smile was sad, and Putnam hurried out to his car feeling guilty and ashamed.

In the dream he was a farmer, and for miles in every direction, as far as the eye could see, spreading outward from the house, were fields upon fields of squash.

* * *

He killed Mr. Carr on a Sunday, after the last customers had left, after the store was closed. He clubbed the bookstore owner to death with an oversized zucchini, bringing down the huge heavy vegetable on the frail old man’s head again and again and again and again until there was no face left, only a pulpy flattened featureless mess, until the zucchini was soft and shapeless.

Putnam stood over the old man’s unmoving form, breathing heavily, his hands and clothes splattered with blood. He felt tired, felt good, but there was also a sense of incompletion, a sensation of unfulfillment, and he wandered up and down the aisles, still clutching the zucchini, unable to focus on the missing piece of the puzzle. Then his gaze landed upon an unopened box of books, on the X-Acto knife atop the cardboard, and everything clicked into place.

He began pulling books from the shelves, opening their covers and tearing out the pages until there was a small mountain of crumpled paper at his feet. He hurried back up the aisle and took off the old man’s shoes and socks, pants and underwear, shirt and T-shirt.

He stuffed the clothes with paper, tied them together with packaging twine.

Using the X-Acto knife, he carved the zucchini into something resembling a human figure. He cut a swath of his own hair and pasted it to the squishy scalp with an adhesive of spit and the bookstore owner’s blood.

Both of his projects were unfinished