by Неизвестный
“Not much. Michelle, my sister-in-law, was the expert. She knew the provenance of each doll.”
“How did she die?”
“Uterine cancer. It was sudden. Virulent. It had metastasized to her brain before they discovered it.”
Alondra didn’t remember seeing any photographs in the apartment, only the mobs of surrogate children.
* * *
They returned to the apartment at noon, when Koichi Hiroshige came home on his lunch hour. Alondra saw the resemblance between Hiroshi and his older brother, who had also been handsome, before grief wore him down. He brightened when Alondra asked about selling the dolls. It was clear he had considered doing just that, but didn’t know how to begin.
She asked to see the rarest of the modern dolls. He showed her the only Katan doll in his wife’s collection, a doll so unique that she lived alone in a vitrine like a specimen in the zoo.
It had hard to listen to the words Koichi said, follow along with Hiroshi’s translation, and keep up her end of the conversation, all the while listening for the little girl’s voice. Finally Alondra said, “I don’t see what I’m looking for here. Do you have anything more precious?”
“There is one,” he said in heavily inflected English. “Sumimasen.” He dipped into a bow and retreated to the bedroom. He returned, carrying a footlocker that he set on the sofa.
Nestled inside a shroud of bubble wrap lay the most exquisite china doll Alondra had ever seen. A floppy organza bow tied her silken black hair back from her face. Over her closed eyes, her lashes looked very human. Her full pink lips parted as if in childish sleep.
The collector’s husband pointed out that the doll’s dainty nails extended past her fingertips. Lines crossed the palms of her hands. The doll-maker had inscribed his signature at the base of her skull.
Koichi undressed the doll, stripping off its white lace gown and translucent bloomers. Her pubescent breasts were tipped with pointed raspberry-colored nipples. Alondra noticed that the doll’s buttocks and the sharp curves of her shoulder blades—where they protruded beyond her sunken spine—were rouged. It looked as if she’d been lying on her back, as if her blood had started to pool.
The doll was shockingly anatomical. A blush crept up Alondra’s face.
Yes, the child’s voice said. You’ve found me. Now save me.
Alondra forced herself past her discomfort and looked at Koichi Hiroshige. An alien expression crawled across his face, lustful and cruel.
“How much?” Alondra asked.
Koichi flinched. He stared at Alondra, stricken. Lust drained from his face to be replaced by horror, then shame.
“Gomennasai. I cannot sell her,” Koichi said in Japanese. Alondra understood that much. Before she could respond, he shoved the doll back into the footlocker and hustled it into the bedroom.
Koichi said something from the other room. Alondra understood some of it, but Hiroshi translated anyway. “He’s not feeling well. He apologizes.”
“Thank him for showing me the dolls.” Alondra moved toward the entry, all too ready to escape the gazes of so many inanimate eyes.
Hiroshi went to check on his brother. Alondra slipped on her shoes and let herself out into the hall.
The doll’s voice echoed in her head. Save me. Save me. The tone wasn’t as innocent as Alondra had first thought. The intensity of its demand frightened her. She was fairly certain that Hiroshi’s brother was the one in need of rescue.
Neither brother came out to check on her. Alondra decided to look up the Kiyomizu Kannondo, to see if she could find the doll-immolating monks. Perhaps they could assist her in freeing the Hiroshiges from the dead woman’s dolls.
* * *
When she got off the subway, Alondra found herself on the edge of Ueno Park, where she’d met Hiroshi Hiroshige by accident last September. The park was much less creepy in the daylight, so she wandered its paths, enjoying the cherry blossom petals as they flickered down from the trees.
Alondra understood that the Japanese considered female beauty to be like a cherry blossom: fragile, ephemeral. Though it was early afternoon, the park was filled with people who had left behind their cramped offices and tiny apartments to glory in the momentary beauty of spring.
On a low rise, she saw an old-fashioned building painted vermillion. She climbed the stone steps to it, slipped out of her shoes, and followed the worn wooden stairs into the temple.
She found it jammed with dolls. Some were still shrouded in cellophane. Others stared out of bright pink cardboard boxes. The vast majority of the dolls were Japanese in features and straight black hair. Some wore kimono and geta. Others were dressed as brides or fashion models.
After she’d thrown some coins into the box and bowed before the golden Buddha behind the altar, a shaven-headed monk said to her in English, “We collect dolls. They are offering to Kannon to ask for children. To bless children. Or to thank for children.”
“What do you do with them?” Alondra asked.
“In autumn, we burn them. Very beautiful ceremony.”
Autumn seemed a long time away. Alondra didn’t believe Koichi Hiroshige would survive until then. “If someone brought you a doll now,” she asked the monk, “an evil doll, what would you do?”
He smiled at her, apparently amused that a gaijin would find any doll evil. “We pray over all dolls,” he said simply.
Alondra wondered if that would be enough.
An older man approached them. His shoulders were stooped inside his burgundy robe. His voice was harsh and Alondra couldn’t understand his Japanese.
“The abbot invites you for tea,” the younger monk translated.
“I would be honored,” Alondra answered in Japanese. The abbot nodded sharply and led her to a door at the side of the shrine that opened into cramped living quarters. The younger monk dutifully began to make tea on a single-burner stove.
The abbot barked something. Alondra watched his face, marveling at its peacefulness even as his voice growled and snapped. Apparently that was just the way he spoke, not the way he felt.
“The abbot says you are a creature of power,” the young monk translated. “Why do you come here?”
She told them about the doll collector and the dolls, especially about the final doll. She shivered once more as she described it undressed.
“Did it speak?” the younger monk translated.
“It asked me to save it.”
“From what? Did the owner want to harm it?”
“The owner is dead,” Alondra said.
“No, the owner is the person who owns it now.”
“No,” Alondra disagreed. “The owner is whoever filled her with such hatred.”
The young monk placed cups before Alondra and the abbot, plain gray pottery cups glazed with a silvery sheen. He set the cast-iron pot within easy reach and served a dish of wasabi peas. Alondra was amused by the juxtaposition.
“Did the doll’s owner ask for your help?”
“No,” Alondra had to admit. “His brother is worried about him.”
“Why did he turn to a foreigner?”
“I don’t know.” She suspected that Hiroshi Hiroshige was afraid of being judged within Japanese norms. Perhaps he felt he had to protect his career at the New York Times by denying his paranormal suspicions. Whatever the case, Hiroshi had not volunteered any reason that he’d asked Alondra to come. She wondered over it now, since the doll shrine was easily accessible in Tokyo. Surely Hiroshi—and, for that matter, Koichi—knew about it.
“Do you understand karma?” the abbot asked her in grating but understandable English.
Alondra nodded.
He switched back to Japanese and she had to wait for his words to be translated. “Perhaps it is the brother’s karma to bear the burden of this doll. What makes you believe she is evil?”
Alondra struggled to pick apart her feelings. Something about the doll’s anatomy—that she was child-sized, but that her genitals had been sculpted in such e
xcruciatingly realistic detail—upset Alondra on a level deeper than coherent thought. She wasn’t squeamish about her own or other female bodies. The unnecessary realism triggered memories of the abuse she’d suffered as a girl. It touched on her understanding, however buried, that she’d used her own anatomy and its power over her brother to protect herself from worse things. She sensed the doll was doing exactly the same thing with Hiroshi’s brother. And she believed the brothers knew it, too.
Alondra sipped the tea to buy herself time to think. What was she going to do? Hiroshi was an acquaintance, someone she thought handsome enough to fancy, but really, beyond the cost of a plane ticket, she owed him nothing. Maybe she ought to do what the monk suggested and leave well enough alone.
Except that she had been asked for her help and that, to Alondra, was as good as a contract. She had been vaguely considering stealing the doll, if Koichi could not be persuaded to sell it, but now she understood she could not bring it to the shrine and expect the monks to solve her problem.
“You are right,” she said at last. “If the doll is evil, that is unfortunate. If she caused the death of her owner and is killing the owner’s husband that is just bad luck.”
The abbot nodded, but the younger monk frowned behind his master’s shoulder.
Alondra continued. “I am sorry to have meddled in a Japanese matter,” she said. “May I encourage my friend to bring you the doll after his brother dies?”
The abbot’s nod was sharp.
Alondra finished her tea and stood to go. “You have been kind to talk to me. Thank you for your hospitality.”
“I’ll show you out,” the younger monk said.
He walked Alondra back out to the front of the temple. When he turned to go, she asked, “Have you heard of dolls like this before? Anatomically correct dolls?”
“Yes.” His hands were behind his back, but she could see them fidgeting.
“Do you know the name of the doll-maker?”
“It was a scandal,” he said, “perhaps ten years ago. The doll-maker molested schoolgirls. He hung himself in prison. The dolls are very expensive now.”
* * *
Eventually Alondra realized that she’d gotten herself completely turned around. It wasn’t difficult to do in Tokyo. Most of the stations had signs in kanji and English, but the subway map on the train car was labeled only in kanji. And while her spoken Japanese was good enough to ask directions, she couldn’t read very much.
It had grown dark when she finally found her way back to her hotel. Hiroshi had left a message on her hotel room’s phone. “I’m staying with my brother tonight,” he said. “Things are very bad. Call me.”
She scrambled to write down the number. When she returned the call, the phone rang three times. “Help,” a voice said. Then the line disconnected.
Alondra stared at the receiver. She wasn’t sure if she’d heard Hiroshi’s voice, or the voice of the doll. Whether a plea or a demand, the word had been in English.
She took a moment to brush her long red hair and re-braid it, to splash cold water on her face. She stocked her messenger bag with her incenses and candles, matches, and took the pad of paper and pen from the nightstand.
The night had grown cold while she’d been in her room. She made her way back to the subway with confidence, located the right platform and awaited the train. Getting off at the other end would be problematic, though. She remembered the station. She thought she remembered the correct exit. Once she got into the maze of Tokyo’s streets, though, she’d have to trust her memory for landmarks. She had no idea the name or number of Koichi Hiroshige’s apartment building.
She tried not to think ahead, dreading what she might find.
* * *
Hiroshi Hiroshige sat in the hallway, eyes red from crying, his back against the wall opposite his brother’s apartment. He stood to open the door for her, a bottle of sake clenched in his free hand. “In the bedroom.”
Alondra stepped out of her shoes in the entryway and fumbled her way to where she remembered the light switch to be. It didn’t work. She took a white candle from her bag and lit it.
In the bedroom, Koichi’s body hung from the closet rod. His feet dragged on the floor. Alondra stared at the noose around his neck. It appeared to be a hank of long black hair. Maybe a wig?
Across the dirty sheet lay shards of the anatomical doll. Black hair splayed across a buckwheat pillow with a rip in its cover. A small pile of grain spilled out. The doll’s undamaged limbs sprawled, unstrung from its shattered torso. One leg turned backward, toe inward. An arm was missing.
Alondra shuddered with a deep childhood horror of the violence done the child-sized doll. She turned away to see Hiroshi lurking in the doorway, out of sight of the corpse. “Have you called the police?” she asked.
“The phone stopped working after I called you.”
So it hadn’t been his voice when she’d called. Alondra pulled things from her bag: sea salt, cedarwood chips, matches. She handed the pad of paper to Hiroshi and said, “Write your brother’s name and his wife’s maiden name for me.”
While he did so, she set up the incense burner and got the charcoal smoldering, then poured a ring of salt around Koichi’s feet. One of his toes poked through a sagging black sock.
“You should go for the police,” Alondra said. “I’ll be okay.”
Hiroshi hit the sake bottle hard, set it carefully on the dresser, and ran his fingers through his hair to slick it back on his way to put on his shoes.
Alondra added cedarwood to the incense burner and tipped her face forward over the smoke. Then she encircled the futon with salt, careful that the ring remained unbroken.
The room filled with whispers, a roaring wave of sound like the susurrus of the sea. Alondra ignored it, lighting a few more candles, which she placed with the help of a compass. Shadows grew in the corners of the room, blacker than the Tokyo night. The cedar burned with a clean scent that cleared the space inside her circle. She rubbed her clammy hands against her jeans and knelt on the futon to pick up a fragment of the doll’s porcelain face.
The doll’s alert deep brown pupil rolled toward her.
“Can you speak?” Alondra asked. “Can you speak to me in English?”
From behind her back, the doll’s voice demanded, “How can you help us?” Her voice braided together several voices, speaking in unison. “The death of our flesh did not free us. The destruction of this doll did not free us. Our tormentors are dead and we are trapped.”
The shadows outside the circle dove at Alondra. Sheet lightning flared as they smashed into the boundary of her circle of salt. The electricity resolved itself into a single kanji, but Alondra could not read it. It burned out before she could copy it for Hiroshi.
“Do you have a name?”
“He called us Sakura.” The words stumbled over their own echoes.
Alondra wasn’t sure if ‘he’ was the doll-maker or Koichi Hiroshige. She collected up shards of porcelain, puzzling the pieces of the face into a shattered mask.
“Sakura-chan,” Alondra asked gently, “who are you here to punish?”
The voices moaned, unable to find a target for their hatred.
“Your owner is dead.” Alondra smoothed a lock of black hair back from a fragment of forehead. “Do you carry a reflection of her soul?”
“Yes,” a woman said clearly. Alondra copied Michelle Hiroshige’s name on a scrap of paper, touched it to a candle flame, and held it until the fire menaced her fingers. Then she tossed the ember into the air and said, “You are released.”
Shadows raced around the room, knocking Hiroshi’s bottle of sake from the dresser.
“Hiroshige Koichi is dead,” Alondra said as she fit half of the rose petal lips into place. “Do you carry a reflection of his soul?”
“Can’t you see what he’s done to us?” the shadows howled.
“Yes,” Alondra hissed, cutting them off. “I see that he’s paid for it.”
I
n the closet, the corpse’s eyes opened, fixing her in a fish-eyed stare. Its tongue thrust out lasciviously. Its feet struggled to find purchase, but it couldn’t pull itself free from the noose around its neck.
Despite the hammering of her heart, Alondra copied the kanji for Koichi Hiroshige’s name, then set the second scrap of paper afire. The corpse grabbed for her silently, its toes scrabbling on the closet floor. Watching to make sure it came no closer, Alondra blew on the note to make it burn a little faster. The heat kissed her fingers before she tossed the ember upward. “You are released.”
The corpse slumped abruptly. The clothing rod protested its weight.
The remaining shadows snarled and snapped, unable to get to Alondra inside the circle. She crawled over the futon, collecting the last few shards of the doll’s head. She turned each one over, tilted it toward the candle flames, searching for the doll-maker’s signature. Finally, she found a piece of scalp, a lock of hair still attached, scratched with a pair of kanji.
“Your creator is dead,” Alondra said, holding the signed piece of porcelain in her palm. “Do you carry a reflection of his soul?”
The maelstrom fell silent. A single voice spoke, a man’s voice. He sounded older than she expected. She didn’t have enough Japanese to understand him, but his honeyed wheedling spread gooseflesh up her torso. She recalled how her brother spoke to her, the courtly compliments that told her how special, how beautiful, how crucial she was. Once more, she was a frightened girl, well aware how quickly the sweet words dissolved into violence when she didn’t do exactly as commanded.
She picked up the doll’s unbroken leg and hammered it down on the porcelain shard in her hand. Sharp splinters sliced into her palm.
Shadows swarmed through the room. Clothing was shredded, toiletries smashed from the dresser, photographs torn into confetti. It took the wanton destruction for Alondra to recognize there were no other dolls in this room.
She continued to smash the fragment of porcelain in her palm until it was reduced to dust. Every time the hammer fell, she felt as if she stabbed the memory of her brother and what he’d done to her. Finally, she blew across the porcelain dust, dispersing shimmering powder into the air. “You are released.”