Louise had been a hard woman to live with, but she was the only family Bella had. It had been like razors to her wrists when Louise had proclaimed Bella dead to her, and snapped the ledger shut in her face, never to open it again. Until…
Until Luke insisted that this was the only way. If he hadn’t, I never would have gone to such extremes. I loved Aunt Louise.
“What are we going to do if someone asks where Aunt Louise is?”
Luke scoffed. “She’s, like, a hundred years old, Bel. Everyone will think she’s in bed. Anyway, we can’t control the appetites of murderous ghosts. Just like we can’t control the bears that stalk the borders of the national park.” He winked, and Bella forced a heartsick smile.
“Come on,” Luke said, grabbing Bella’s hand, “let’s dance.”
Bella let Luke pull her into dips and twirls, the blood-stained dress billowing out around her. He’s been pulling me around since I said I do, she thought wearily. No, he’s been pulling me around since the moment I let him treat me as something of a dirty joke instead of like a full human being. I should have listened to Aunt Louise in the first place.
A chill swept through the room, raising the hairs on Bella’s bare arms.
What did I always tell you, Belladonna? The harsh, unearthly voice was unmistakable even in the din of the masquerade. Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power.
Bella smiled a smile more radiant than any captured by her wedding photographer.
It looked like those ghost hunters would have another specter to pursue after all.
SOULS, DARK AND DEEP
The doorbell rang.
Annie skidded to a halt in socked feet and batted her sister’s hand from the knob. “I’ll get it,” she said, her smile smug.
Abigail frowned, but stepped back so Annie could open the door.
The stranger stood, illuminated by the fluorescent glow of the porchlight, rain dripping off the black slicker that hung down past her knees, red rubber boots shining wet on the welcome mat, her face disfigured by shadow.
“Hi,” Abbie chirped.
Annie’s glare had the desired effect; Abigail closed her mouth so fast, her teeth clacked. “Hi.” Annie puffed out her chest. She stepped back to allow the stranger passage into the foyer. “I’m Annie. My parents will be right down. Come in.”
No sooner had the hooded figure crossed the threshold than footsteps sounded on the landing above, and a silvery voice called out, “That must be Belinda!”
Maggie Townsend appeared at the top of the stairs, first as a sleek pair of satin high heels, followed by the swinging hem of a long navy dress. The final few steps saw the picture coalesce, and Annie admired the vintage cameo at her mother’s throat, the perfectly-coiffed French braid draped over one shoulder.
“Come in out of that rain! Girls, give Belinda some room for heaven’s sake.” She held out one freshly-manicured hand for the babysitter’s coat. “Did you find the house okay? I could have kissed Angela for putting me in touch with you this afternoon. You’re a lifesaver. An absolute lifesaver.”
Belinda slipped off the wet coat and handed it to her employer. She turned to the two girls, her expression grave. Then, she smiled a crooked smile, like a marionette whose mouth had been outfitted with only half its strings.
“So,” Belinda said, “if you are Annie…” her eyes flicked left to right, “then you must be Abbie.”
“Right!” Abbie said, thrilled to be addressed directly, insulated from her sister’s reproach. “We have a new movie to watch, just so you know. It came from Amazon this morning. It’s called Moana, and my friend, Tara, said it’s really good, and—”
“All right, Abbie,” their mother said, laughing. “I’m sure Belinda will watch a movie with you, if you ask her nicely.” She turned and called up the stairs. “Come on, Paul! We’re going to be late!”
Annie lagged as her mother led Belinda into the kitchen. She stared at the sleeve of the black rain slicker visible through a crack in the closet. She thought she’d seen something red when her mother had taken the babysitter’s coat, a flash of liner, perhaps, or her eyes playing tricks with the blood-red hue of Belinda’s boots.
“The girls’ dinner is ready,” her mother was saying as Annie entered the kitchen. “Just throw it in the microwave whenever. There’s popcorn in the cupboard for the movie and you can help yourself to whatever you’d like.”
The dark-haired, dark-eyed girl nodded. “Thank you.”
Abigail was staring at Belinda with the unabashed interest of a six year old, her eyes coming to rest on the front of her black smock.
“Your dress has pockets!” she exclaimed. “Neat!”
“Lots of dresses have pockets,” Annie pointed out.
Abigail ignored her and twirled around the kitchen, spinning in wild, lurching circles on the polished tile. “If I had a dress with pockets, I would put my ponies inside!” One arm flailed too wide and she sent a stack of mail spinning over the surface of the desk.
“Do you like ponies?” Belinda asked. Her long-fingered hands skittered over the pockets of her dress like spiders.
Abigail stopped twirling and regarded Belinda solemnly. “You bet. Why, do you have any?”
“Maybe,” Belinda said. Her hands ceased their search of the dark folds. “Or maybe I have something better than ponies.”
Annie rolled her eyes. Before Abigail could pry into Belinda’s cryptic comment any further, the door to the kitchen swung forward and Paul Townsend entered, more dressed up than Annie could ever remember seeing her father look.
“Daddy!” Abbie shouted. “The babysitter has something for us to play with that’s better than ponies!”
“You don’t say?” He lifted Abigail and planted a kiss on her freckled cheek before setting her down and twirling her like a ballroom dancer. He winked at Annie and checked his watch, then glanced in the direction of his impatient wife. “Are you ready, honey? Sheesh, I’ve been waiting on you for twenty minutes now.” Maggie sighed. Abigail giggled.
“Okay, girls, we have to run or we’ll be late for our...”
Annie cocked her head, waiting for her mother to finish, confused by her hesitation.
“Dinner reservation,” Paul supplied helpfully.
“Right, our dinner reservation. And after that, a show. And Lord knows your father won’t sit through even the best off-Broadway production on an empty stomach. Come kiss us goodbye.”
Abigail obliged, but Annie hesitated. Are they really going out to dinner?
“Annie,” her father said, “come say goodbye to your mother.”
Annie trudged across the kitchen and allowed her mother’s lotion-perfumed arms to envelope her. When her father leaned down to kiss her forehead, Annie was struck by the impulse to grab onto him and insist that they didn’t go, that they send the babysitter home, and that she, Annie, and her parents spend the evening together.
But the moment passed, and her father buttoned his coat and followed Maggie to the garage. Annie found herself waving at her parents’ backs while Abigail shouted her goodbyes.
Belinda and Annie stared at the wall until the rumble of the descending garage door ceased. Belinda turned, her face a blank tableau, before the unseen puppeteer pulled the strings and her mouth hitched up on one side.
“Are you hungry now? Do you want me to heat up the macaroni?”
Abigail made a face. “I’m not hungry for macaroni. I’m hungry for popcorn!”
Belinda looked to Annie as if expecting a protest. When none came, Belinda said, “Suit yourself. Popcorn for dinner it is.”
While the foil pocket swelled on the stove, Annie watched Belinda move about the kitchen. She appeared uncomfortable with the implied domesticity of scouring the cabinets for a satisfactory popcorn bowl. When she detected Annie’s voyeurism, she gave her that strange half-smile, part teeth, part taut and bloodless lips.
Belinda ushered them into the living room and sat on one end
of the sectional, her bony frame sinking into the oversized cushions. Abbie climbed up next to her, and Belinda offered her the near-overflowing bowl of popcorn. Reluctantly, Annie settled in beside her sister. She watched as Abbie plucked a fluffy kernel from the mound and popped it into her mouth.
“Aren’t we gonna watch Moana?” Abigail asked.
“Sure,” Belinda replied. “We can watch your movie. But we have all night. What do you say we get to know each other first? I told you I had something better than ponies to play with, remember?”
Abbie was already nodding, her eyes roving the contours of Belinda’s dress, searching for the mysterious offering that was a better prospect than both Moana and her vast collection of My Little Ponies; Annie regarded Belinda with suspicion.
“It’s not some baby game, is it?” Annie asked, eyes narrowing. “Our last sitter tried to get us to play this game she played when she was little, called Pretty Pretty Princess. It was super lame.”
“I liked Pretty Pretty Princess!” Abbie retorted through a mouthful of popcorn. “And I liked Heather too!” Her bow-shaped mouth, shiny with butter, turned down in an exaggerated pout.
“Here,” Belinda said, excavating a black-and-crimson fabric bag from her pocket and holding it out to the girls, “open it and see for yourself.” She held Annie’s eye until Annie looked away. On her left, Abigail had pulled the bag open and was peering inside.
Curious despite herself, Annie leaned closer to her sister. When the light from her mother’s reading lamp proved too dim to penetrate its depths, Annie reached over and tipped the bag’s contents into Abigail’s lap. They marveled at the tiny treasures before them.
Though almost ten, and mature for her age, Annie’s proclivity for dolls persisted. Her assortment of Barbies had grown to such proportions that their mother had installed a series of shelves in the bedroom closet as high as Annie was tall to hold all the dolls and their myriad accessories.
Abigail had dolls she enjoyed playing with too, but Abigail’s dolls were baby dolls. Annie’s dolls were gymnasts practicing for the Olympics, Disney princesses of the more rugged variety, like Pocahontas, and working women with professions like computer engineer and Arctic explorer.
Still, for all her love of tomboys and tough-gals, for the dolls whose clothes could withstand dirt and sand and mud and tears, she harbored a little-girl appreciation for delicate beauty and intricacy of design. And so when the four small dolls had fallen from the drawstring bag and into Abigail’s lap, Annie was rendered mute by their exquisiteness.
The dolls were made entirely of fabric, thus the basis for their uniqueness, for that level of detail should have been impossible to achieve with fabric alone. The Mother-doll, for that was how Annie had immediately come to think of her, was dressed in black taffeta, Victorian in style, with lace detail at the wrists and neck like scalloped shells tossed too long at sea.
The cameo around her neck set off expressive emerald eyes.
The male doll was more muted in dress, his dark suit simple but handsome. The two Girl-dolls were done up in deep crimson with ivory accents; one had light brown hair and amber eyes. The other, strawberry blonde hair and green eyes.
The green-eyed girl had a smattering of freckles across her cheeks and nose.
Annie forced her head up, the effort as laborious as if she’d been submerged in a vat of molasses. “Where did you get these?” she asked.
“I have always had them,” Belinda said.
Abigail, still fingering the dolls lovingly, said without looking up, “They look like us. Like me, and Annie, and Mommy, and Daddy.”
Belinda smiled coldly.
Annie felt the room’s temperature drop.
“They do look like you and your family, don’t they?” Belinda said.
“What are they?” Annie asked.
“Why, they are worry dolls of course. More interesting and well-made worry dolls than most, but still, creatures on which to place your deepest fears and darkest desires all the same.” Belinda watched as Annie returned her gaze to her sister’s lap; Abbie’s had never wavered from there.
“Shall we play with them?”
“Sure,” Abbie said, and though Annie felt her sister’s enthusiasm was wrong, perverse even, she felt the undeniable urge to agree. She watched as Abigail transported the dolls to the surface of the coffee table, carefully, as if handling an injured bird.
When all four dolls were laid out before them, Belinda leaned forward and said, “You know your parents didn’t really go to dinner and to see a show, right Abbie?”
“They didn’t?” Abbie asked, in an eerie, toneless voice that Annie thought didn’t sound much like her sister. Abigail then took the Mother-doll between thumb and forefinger and stood her on the oak table.
“They didn’t,” Belinda said. Contrary to the smile Annie had come to expect, Belinda’s angular face showed real emotion for the first time since coming in from the rain.
“Where did they go?”
“I will show you,” Belinda said.
Annie had not seen Belinda reach back into her pocket; the babysitter produced another drawstring bag with the skill of an illusionist. With a wave of her hand, the new dolls—noticeably dissimilar in appearance from the white-skinned mother doll in traditionally female clothing and the white-skinned father doll in equally traditional masculine garb—rose as if alive, and convened between the walls of a hologram church that materialized with another flick of Belinda’s nimble wrist.
“The Mother-doll and Father-doll have gone to a place where love and acceptance reign. But your parents have come for a different purpose.”
“No,” Annie said hollowly, and felt as though she’d lost some battle she hadn’t realized had been waging.
Belinda turned. “Do the Girl-dolls know the doctrines for which their parents campaign?”
Vocabulary was one of Annie’s stronger subjects in school, and though she didn’t know the exact definition of doctrine, she could interpret the meaning of the babysitter’s question easily enough. She shook her head.
“I didn’t think so.”
Abbie yelped as the Mother-doll was pulled from her hand by an unseen force, and moved to join the Father-doll, where they bobbed above the coffee table like a two-headed snake poised to strike. The sisters watched as the eyes of the two dolls changed, first vacillating between black stitched X’s and black iridescent pearls, then remaining in their black pearl state so that each doll’s face housed a pair of bottomless pits.
Annie felt as if it wouldn’t be impossible to fall into one of those pits. The thought was a terrifying one.
The black-eyed Mother-doll approached the church. The holographic light beams were rainbow-patterned, and this drove the Mother-doll to fury. Her stitched doll mouth tore open in a snarl. From beneath the folds of her skirt, she produced a coil of rope and an old-fashioned torch. The tip of the torch burst instantly into flame.
Before Annie could think to ask why, or how, the Father-doll used the rope to tie the doors of the church closed from the outside. The Mother-doll held the blazing torch to the side of the building. The blues, greens, and purples of the rainbow hologram quickly bled away, leaving toxic yellow and molten lava-orange in their wake.
The church began to burn.
The dolls who’d been but superficially different from the white-skinned Mother-and Father-dolls, who’d not been joined in male-female pairings and yet who’d met in acceptance, and in sister-and brotherhood, were still inside.
This isn’t real, Annie told herself. It couldn’t be. And yet…
Okay, girls, we have to run or we’ll be late for our...
Her parents hadn’t been trying to make it to any dinner reservation. Annie realized that she’d always known this. The hours her mother spent on the phone, whispering whenever Annie came into the room, the time spent away from home for what were supposed to be parent-teacher conferences, when Annie knew no such meetings had been scheduled, her father’s ang
er and disgust whenever he turned on the news.
Annie’s parents had been planning something for some time now. But how could they have orchestrated something such as this?
Annie turned to Abigail and saw that her sister’s face had gone very white. “Make it stop,” Abigail said. She was fixated on the flames, her small hands balled into fists and shaking. “You’re hurting them!”
“You heard her,” Annie said. “Put the fire out.” She was shaking with fear, but anger, too, pinballed from one organ within her body to the next.
“I can’t,” Belinda said, feigning surprise. “But I can keep you two from being part of something similar in the future.” Belinda lifted the Mother- and Father-doll and turned them toward their children.
“Do you think that if the Daughter-dolls had known what was to happen, they’d have tried to stop it?”
“Yes,” Abigail said. She was crying now—almost hyperventilating—and paler still, on the verge of passing out. Annie railed against the evil dolls causing her sister pain; like vampires, they’d drained her tiny form, leaving nothing behind for later. Then she remembered...
The evildoers were not malevolent dolls or supernatural creatures. They were her parents.
“Please,” Annie said, feeling helpless.
“If the Daughter-dolls had a choice, would they allow themselves to become ensnared by the Mother and Father’s beliefs?”
“No,” Annie whispered. Abigail shook her head.
“Then say it,” Belinda said. “Say that the Daughter-dolls renounce the doings of their parents.”
Annie reached out and clasped Abbie’s hand. Silent tears streamed down her own face now.
Abbie’s eyes were still glued to the dolls, but Annie felt her little sister’s fingers twitch within her own. She’ll be strong if I can find it in myself to be, Annie thought.
“We want nothing to do with the terrible things Mother and Father have done,” Annie said, her voice quiet, but clear. “It’s the parents’ job to be good. And if they can’t be...” She faltered, wiped the tears from her cheeks, and pressed on, “then the Daughter-dolls do not have to be their daughters anymore.”
Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked Page 3