He took a deep breath and stole himself against his anxiety. An anxiety that he realized was both overwhelming and irrational. Hank noticed that his palms where sweating and his brow was furrowed. He had become tense and was hunching a bit, even that he could tell. He turned the knob, half expecting to walk into a nightmare from one of his shock horror films; the ones Amy loathed so much, but was kind enough to watch with him. Instead he was met with a plain, empty stairway, dusty and moldy smelling. It was well lit by a skylight that he had failed to notice when looking at the roof from the road and the yard. He ascended the stairs and rounded a waist high rail at the top and found a room full of mostly shelving, a few trunks and chests which were highly dust covered, and not much else. Not much at all for how much space there was, but what was there was quite odd and he made a note of it as he remembered Bernie telling him that they were all belongings of the previous tenants. There was an old oil lamp, a compound bow, a square cardboard box that had German writing on it and an image of a black eagle clutching a swastika. Hank was astounded. There was also a world war two U.S. Army officer’s long coat, a tie dyed tapestry hung on the wall and lastly in the corner there was a chair covered with a dust cloth. Hank got an uneasy feeling as he observed that the chair didn’t have feet sticking out from under the cloth but wheels. It was an antique wheelchair and he had the feeling right away that it had been used at an asylum. For when he began to peel back the thickly caked dust cloth, that he could neither identify as gray nor brown, he saw deep gouges in the wood of the arm wrests, which had bindings on them for securing the patient’s arms. He gulped in shock as if seeing the moment of a struggle to free himself from that very chair. The thing of his nightmares, made real before him. Hank imagined a frail skeleton underneath the shroud as he slowly pulled on it. He thought that he had never been more creeped out in his life, but he thought this too soon. Hank pulled the dust cloth fully off of the chair, kicking up a thick cloud of noxious, antique dust. “The very curse of the mummy’s tomb,” he thought and after the cloud settled he was met with the blood chilling visage of a doll so foul he almost vomited at the sight of it.
What pleasure or delight any child had ever gotten from the wretched thing Hank could not imagine. It looked as if more than a century of neglect had taken its toll on the doll, then it was buried under shit and walked through hell back to the mortal and physical restrictions of our regular every day reality. It was something from a nightmare yet Hank could not tear his eyes away. Patches of straw like hair barely clung to the charred looking scalp, whose paint had all but worn off. If the head had once been porcelain, or wood, Hank could not even say. The doll was caked with grime and filth some of which he thought might be blood or feces stains. It was missing the right arm and the left was half covered in tattered, rotting fabric. The dress was missing, except for other tattered shreds and Hank could not identify the cloth’s material it was so dilapidated. The body appeared to be stuffed with straw, which was falling out of it in clumps. The lips were brownish black and seemed as though they had once been painted a nice crimson. The nose was missing, somehow Hank’s perception was that it had been somewhere between smashed and gnawed off. But it was the eyes he could not peel his gaze from. They seemed as though they had once been beautiful enamels yet they had no shine, nor sparkle to them. Whatever had been inlayed in them had fallen out. Hank assumed glass for the pupils and irises and ivory for the whites, yet all that remained were two black pits, peeling at whatever wretched and abominable material she was constructed of.
Hank awoke on the floor just as he usually did when recovering from a seizure when alone. He could see that he had covered the doll back up with the cloth as it was back in place on the wheelchair. Good. He didn’t want to see that thing again. He knew she would definitely be giving him nightmares tonight. He tried to drive the image of her out of his head, yet could not do it. “How old is she?” he wondered. Older than the house he was sure of that, but just how old?
He gathered his composure and went back down stairs. He staggered into the kitchen and fumbled to a cabinet where he kept his medications. He took a valium and his seizure medication and went into the living room where he found Amy napping on the couch. He packed a bud of his signature marijuana into the bowl of his favorite pipe and began to mellow out a bit after inhaling deeply, holding the smoke until he coughed. He shook Amy until she awoke groggily.
“I have something I really need you to see. Seriously Amy. Go upstairs, up through the door on the right, into the attic. Go look at what is under the cloth on the chair. Seriously, just go…look. Tell me I’m not crazy Amy. Oh, yeah. I had a seizure while I was up there. Don’t know how long I was out,” he tried to convey a sense of urgency with his words that she was simply not responsive to.
Amy rubbed her eyes as she replied, “Fuck you Hank. You wake me up for this shit. I’ll go, but this is bullshit. I did need to wake up though. But you know you’d be pissed if I did that to you sweetie.” She winked at him to let him know she was joking with him, at least halfway.
“I know. That’s why I’m being so serious. This is some crazy shit. You just have to see it for yourself. Take a picture or two while you are up there. Plus I got the hydro tables set up while you were napping,” he said with self pride.
He handed her his pipe to take with her and her digital camera to take pictures with. She took a deep toke off of the pipe and headed to the back of the house, toward the stairs. A couple of minutes later and Hank heard a loud thud, followed by Amy’s high pitched scream. She came tearing down the stairs a few moments later. Waving her camera frantically at Hank.
“Baby, you gotta see this! That fuckin’ thing is alive or something,” she was shaking and could barely get the words out. Her skin had gone pale and she seemed dizzy and trying to steady herself by waving her camera at Hank. She walked over to him and showed him the display screen. He felt a sense of panic and shock at what he saw. It made the doll a thousand times creepier to him. It appeared exactly the same except where the hollow black pits it had for eyes had been there was a blue, fiery glow. Emanating from that foul thing some strange and unnamable energy was casting blue light throughout the picture. She showed him eight such pictures just the same. Every one with glowing blue eyes.
“I want that thing out of this house immediately!” she demanded.
“I do too baby,” Hank said as he headed back up stairs to get the doll.
He returned a moment later with the doll, gripping in about the waist forcefully in order to keep all of its stuffing inside it where he felt it belonged. Hank walked to the front door and put the doll on top of a heap of rubbish and odds and ends that he was throwing out with the next garbage day.
That night neither of them could sleep. They both lay in bed, playing o’possum and trying not to disturb the other. Just after they had gotten up and eaten breakfast they heard a loud knock at the front door.Hank answered to find Bernice standing there with her back to the door, gasping in joy. She turned slowly, as if she didn’t put it together that he had actually answered the door at first and was embarrassed by it. When she met his gaze he saw that she was holding the doll close to her chest and cradling it like a young girl with her favorite dolly.
“You found my doll Hank!” she exclaimed with more enthusiasm than he had ever in his life seen from a woman in her thirties. “It’s been missing for ‘bout twenty years…my god! You found her. Matilda is her name. She was my three times great granny’s doll. Made during the civil war by hand, right here in Marion county.”
He was flabbergasted at how fast she spoke. It was obvious that she was very passionate about the doll. As she talked on and on about how “gorgeous Matilda was and still is,” Hank realized he had not even yet spoken a word.
He interrupted her, but not rudely, to ask, “would you like to come in for some coffee and smoke a joint before I get working today Bernie?”
“No. Thanks though,” she shook her head. “I gotta be gettin’ ba
ck to mom ’n dad, just dropped by to get Matilda. I heard you’d found her and was just tickled to death. See you later Hank, tell Amy I said hi.” And with that she turned on her heel, walked down the porch steps, across the yard and got in her truck. He went inside as she backed down the driveway, blaring Willy Nelson’s Still is Still Movin’ on her stereo too loud for such an early hour, even out in the middle of nowhere.
As Hank recounted the events to Amy over morning coffee they both had to wonder just how it was that Bernie had heard they found her doll. Why she would even want such a creepy, rotting old piece of history had as a question, for the most part, fallen to the wayside of the road of their collective thinking. They both let their paranoia get the best of them and Hank began to suffer from anxiety. Eventually he had a severe seizure and was unable to get any work done that day. He felt weak all day and took two long naps on the couch. When he awoke from the second nap he found Amy was gone and had taken their car. She had left a bowl packed in their pipe in front of him on the coffee table and he lit it and smoked until he was truly stoned. Then and only then did he bother to read the note she left him.
Hank,
I went to get some answers
about that crazy fucking doll.
Somebody around here knows something.
I think I know where to start looking.
There’s some KFC chicken in the fridge
I might be home late, but will let you know as
Soon as I know something.
Love,
Amy
“Well fuck,” he said to no one but himself.
3
The Historian and the Plea
Amy drove through the morning fog with a grim determination to get to the bottom of things. She was used to weirdness, for sure, being a hippie and having taken her fair share of psychedelic drugs. Their first night in Gravel Switch she had taken two tabs of MDMA, as had Hank, though she had not been high like that since. What was going on in her home, with her landlord and with that god-forsaken doll she could not say. However a month ago she had met a queer old woman at the Sunday farmer’s market. She was strange and worldly beyond even the most eccentric folks in the area. Phyllis was her name. Phyllis Jenkins the county historian.
“Or she used to be…” Amy said out loud as she rounded a tight corner and lit a cigarette. Her blonde hair was dirty and greasy from not showering. She slept very little the night before. Something in the energy of that doll. She just couldn’t shake it. Whatever the phenomenon was she captured on film it was unwanted and unwelcome. Where she came from dolls did not have glowing blue eyes. Nor did they rot for a hundred years in some forgotten attic, sitting like a little person in a creepy old wheelchair. She knew she was being unreasonable to be so freaked out by a doll, but she also knew there was no way in hell Bernie could have known they found her in the attic. Matilda. The thing had a name. Yeah, that was creepy too.
Amy arrived just after eight o’clock that morning at the address Phyllis had provided. It was less than five miles from Amy’s house as the crow flies, but it was a fifteen minute drive for Amy who did not know the extremely curvy roads. She drove down the very short driveway of a decrepit old surf green trailer that had not seen good days since the nineteen seventies. There were several chickens in the yard and a goat with black and white spots chewing hay in a pen beside the trailer. Phyllis had no vehicle of her own on the property but Amy could see the front door was open. “I hope she’s home. Maybe she doesn’t have a car,” Amy thought out loud.
As soon as she turned off the ignition and opened her door to get out of the car Phyllis appeared in the doorway and stepped out onto the front porch. Her hair was in curlers and she was wearing a beat up old maroon nightgown that appeared to have once been quite expensive but, like the trailer, had seen much better days. She had a coffee mug in her hand and didn’t seem to notice, or perhaps she just didn’t mind, when she spilled some coffee on one of her pink bunny slippers.
“Welcome Amy. Good to see ya again sugar,” Phyllis said with the kind smile that only a woman over seventy could give. Motherly and wise, tender and nurturing all at once. Amy immediately felt a draw to Phyllis. In fact she felt as drawn to Phyllis as she felt repulsed by Matilda. She admitted to herself that she was indeed a bit uneasy about that aspect of her arrival.
“Good to see you Phyllis. Thanks for having me over. I really appreciate it, especially so early and on such short notice. You won’t believe what happened…I mean, I don’t believe what happened and I am a bit scared,” Amy immediately began to stammer, as if she had too much to say and was afraid of missing any single minute detail of the situation.
“Let’s get you inside dear. How do you take your coffee?” Phyllis asked, continuing to be nurturing, which calmed Amy down a bit.
As Amy entered the trailer it was not anything at all like she thought it would be on the inside. She had assumed that it would be filled with hundreds of ceramic figures, the kind that were ubiquitous in the homes of elderly single ladies. Instead she found sparse furnishings and paintings everywhere. Paintings that Phyllis had obviously done herself and they were quite psychedelic. Splashes of color washing across strange angles describing otherworldly, non-euclidian architecture on some paintings. Occult themes and arcane symbols dominated other paintings, wards against the unholy…or were they intended to summon something? Amy could not tell, but she knew that Phyllis was on an entirely different level than herself. There were strange herbs tied in bundles and drying all through the living room, hanging from the ceiling and giving the house a strong, unfamiliar smell. As Amy curiously sniffed the air she felt Phyllis’s eyes on her.
“Wolfs bane,” the old woman stated plainly, leaving Amy wondering if Phyllis could somehow read her mind.
“I was wondering what that was,” Amy admitted, sheepishly.
“Sit dear. We obviously have much to discuss,” Phyllis gestured for Amy to take a seat around her dining room table. The only table that Amy could actually see in the trailer. It was empty other than a large, black, leather bound book. It seemed to be as old as Matilda. A relic from a bygone age. Amy knew that much of what she wanted to know may be included in that tome. As she settled into her seat Phyllis put a hot cup of coffee in front of her.
“It has half ’n half and two spoons of sugar, just like you take it dear.”
“Wow…uh, thanks. But, how did you know how I take my coffee? We’ve only just met,” Amy said before she took a long, much needed sip off of the cup.
“I’m psychic dear. I just know things. It’s part of my gift. Been runnin’ in my family for as long as we know of…well the women folk at least. All the way back to my four times great granny. I don’t know if you believe in that sorta thing, but that’s all I know,” Phyllis laid it all out. “Now what has happened that’s got you all shook up?”
“We moved into town a few months back. Me and my husband Hank. He has bad seizures, so we wanted to move out to the country and be in peace. We found a place that hadn’t been rented for twenty years and have been living there…”
“You moved into the Hickman place. The old farm house, not the new place…no, their daughter Bernice would be living there then,” Phyllis muttered in a low voice. “I had hoped this wasn’t the case.”
“Yes. Exactly. The Hickman place. Before you tell me what is going on with it let me finish. It’s weird,” Amy said. The city girl in her was not offended by being interrupted. Yet somehow she was offended, just a bit, so realized that the country was already rubbing off on her.
“Go on dear,” Phyllis let Amy continue.
“We have had a few weird things happen. I keep hearing voices, but when nobody else is home. Some are women, some are men. Some are children though and it’s getting really frightening. The longer I live there the more often I hear them and the clearer they get. I used to not be able to tell what they were saying but now it’s as plain as day. God…I haven’t even told Hank about that part. Geez….maybe I
should, but then we found this doll in the attic. I mean it is fucking weird. Like at least a hundred years old and pretty much rotting to pieces. The weird thing is I took pictures of it and in the pictures a blue light was pouring out of the eyes,” Amy said as she pulled her digital camera out of her purse and showed the pictures to Phyllis who just nodded. Not in disbelief but as if the images were reaffirming what she already knew.
“Amy dear, you are in grave danger.”
“I sorta get that feeling Phyllis, that’s why I’m here. I want to know what to do. Oh, yeah…I almost forgot. Bernice came by the morning after we found the doll. We had thrown it in a rubbish heap on the front porch. Mostly debris from around the house that we couldn’t fit in the trash can this week. She knocked on the door all excited and told Hank she was so happy we found her dolly, said it was named Matilda. We have no idea at all how she knew. We didn’t even talk to anybody. I’m freaking out over it. She was so weird about it,” Amy exclaimed, almost in a panic. She was obviously afraid and feeling anxiety.
“Matilda. Yes, that would make sense,” Phyllis muttered half to herself. “Amy my dear, that house is a wound on the very fabric of creation. Sure, that weird old doll is scary I’m sure. As well as some of the other things I’ve heard were in that attic. But the house itself, it is evil. You couldn’t pay me a million dollars to set foot in it, even for a minute.
Gravel Switch: the black goat chronicles book 1: a Weird Tale of Extreme Horror Page 3