I lift her up in my arms and walk along the shoreline. I approach the city by the wharf; the area is full of empty wooden boxes abandoned by the fishmongers, overflowing trash cans left behind by the sunbathers, garbage bags deposited on the streets, and hungry stray cats circling the refuse.
Hurry this area marked.
“All right, let’s find more information somewhere.”
People stagger along the streets but they all walk by me, ignoring both the cat and me. I wipe the sweat from my brow and drift to the door of a small café; without noticing it, I’m inside. A man with a black moustache is wiping a table with a piece of cloth and spits on it before he lifts the ashtray up and wipes the surface once more. I sit at the corner table by the toilets. Somebody has forgotten a newspaper and a cup of cocoa on the table. I put the cat down on the opposite chair; she licks her paw and stops for a while to stare ahead.
I stir the drink with the spoon and sip the first mouthful. It’s hot and burns my mouth but that eases quickly. I’m hungry and I snatch a croissant from the neighboring table.
No time for play must find.
“Yes, yes,” I say aloud.
I pick up the afternoon paper and flip through its pages until I find the announcements. Wanted. For sale. To be given away. There they are: several pets. I quickly check on who wants to give away mongrel cats. All the names feel equally unfamiliar. No intuition to help me on.
Search trust us.
“Alright.”
I lift my eyes to the opposite wall and punch my finger randomly at the newspaper. Then I peek at what my forefinger has covered: an announcement from a lady who wants to give up her cat because of allergy. No mention of the cat’s age, but perhaps the kitten is just the right age. The place is close to the Tibidado amusement park, where that little boy was saved when he was run over by a car.
The cat jumps into my arms, pushes at my face, and rubs her mouth on my cheeks so hard that her chin hits mine, sharply. I startle. Now and then the cat seems deaf; I think that’s because she’s muffling all the sounds around herself—she likes to enjoy peace and quiet.
I step out onto the street. Imperceptibly, night has turned to morning. I walk to the bus stop by the park and bus number 435 comes, well-timed. I enter from the back door and entrench myself in the rear corner. The early birds load themselves in, but the bus fills from the front. I’m left to sit alone.
They must already be feverishly searching for me, but they cannot find me yet. I jump off the bus, walk up a steep street, and everything becomes crystal clear. A little blue tram is creaking down the street, its maw filled with tourists peeking out from the windows. It’s exotic, the city’s only working tram.
The cat stretches, fretful. She doesn’t want to crash, either, because she knows how miserable it feels to crash. She just wants to be home and safe as I do. But there’s simply no time for moodiness now. Must find kittens.
The kittens were born in the spring. The cat was recuperating from her wounds, and no one in the clinic had noticed either from X-rays or heart-films that she was pregnant. I’d been on night duty when the cat started to drop them, five altogether, five little eyeless balls.
“We are very close now,” I tell the cat, and now I’m actually running. I smile, because now everything is so easy and simple. I know why I’m like this; I know what I want.
Time is against us, but we have to keep fighting, time after time until we overcome. Fortunately, I’m now quicker than anybody else; in my multiple state I’m able to choose any probability, pick out the alternatives I like, and combine them to a reality favorable to myself. But there are so many observers around that I feel their perceptions and eyes battering at my body. The cat protects us both; she has created a space around me where all beings observing us become part of her world. Every time someone notices me, the cat has to support the weight of one more factor. She knows her business, but she is not indefatigable.
Then my way stops. There’s a barricade on the street to Tibidado, and the workmen have drilled the asphalt open. The crossfire of eyes is too much; it’s impossible to pass unnoticed. If I want to get on the hill, the only way will be to take a car somewhere or go to the metro station and ride one stop sideways. Underground.
Mireia
I rang the doorbell, a little nervous. A white-haired woman, perhaps in her seventies, opened the door. I shook hands with Senõra Sanchez and she asked me in to sit at her kitchen table.
Little espresso cups had already been laid on the table and the senõra went to turn on the gas stove.
“So nice for him to find a home,” the woman said. “I got him from the house for lost and found animals; I’d have liked to keep him, but it seems I’m allergic. I get short of breath and the doctor recommended that I ought to give up my animals.”
The water was boiling and the woman prepared the espresso with a pressure cooker. We drank the coffee and chatted on this and that. Finally, the senõra went to the rear room and brought a little furry ball to me in her arms. The cat was charming. His eyes were still greenish and he had a black spot on his nose. He was rather small, perhaps four months old. I held him in my arms and he immediately rolled himself into a ball and started purring.
“He’s so sociable. And he only approves of canned food.”
“I can afford to buy him whatever he needs.”
“Fine, fine,” the woman mumbled and poured more coffee in the cups. “I think such a fine cat deserves a proper home.”
The woman started to talk about why she found the cat unusually intelligent: how he seemed to understand every word, and look so attentively out the window.
“He warned me of the accident that happened to that boy,” she said.
“Of what?”
“When that boy was run over by a car,” she continued. “He pushed me up here to the window and we both saw how the boy flew. It was me who phoned the ambulance there . . . ”
I looked carefully at the cat, but outwardly there seemed to be nothing special about him. I offered money, but the woman wouldn’t accept any. She even gave me a basket to carry the kitten home.
Getting a cat had been a sudden fancy of mine. When I was staying awake through the night, looking out the window at the lightning-streaked sky, I realized there was no need for me to be completely alone. I could always get a pet, and why not a cat. They were independent and easy to care for; a kitten could manage even a long shift in my apartment.
I said goodbye to the woman, and was soon standing in a crowd at the metro station. The kitten kept mewing and turning restlessly round in the basket. I thrust my finger to him through a slit in the basket, but he drew back to the other side. He would soon get used to me.
The station controller announced that the train would unexpectedly arrive on another track. I started walking along with the crowd. I glanced behind my shoulder and bumped into someone. We both fell down. I stammered a quick excuse and stooped to help the woman up. It was Helena.
Helena’s gaze turned inwards and her look became distant and absent.
“This can’t be happening,” I said and snatched at her hand.
A stranger stopped by my side and asked whether we needed help.
“She’s my mother,” I answered quickly. “She has a problem with her memory.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.
I led Helena aside from the crowd and seated her on the station bench. She held my hand, her eyes half shut; she hardly understood where she was, in fact. I asked her how she was, but she only babbled something. Helena had even forgotten how to form intelligible words.
“Why in the world do you wish to get away? Why don’t you stay close to the restrictor where you can be yourself, at least for a while?”
But Helena did not answer; she just stared ahead with unseeing eyes.
What must it feel like to crash? In a way she died every time it happened. When suddenly the greatness she must have felt changed back to ordinary life. Perhaps the amne
sia was lucky in a way, ignorance of all that she had lost.
I’d now have an excellent opportunity to change the progress of events. I could push her into the first train to arrive at the station, push her towards the unknown and let fate lead her. Or I could hide her in my own home; care for her where other eyes would not see her. If she indeed had dementia, it would eventually weaken her health until she’d no longer even be able to breathe by herself, and she would mercifully perish from suffocation.
“What do you actually want?” I asked Helena. “Oh, how I wish you could tell me what you want out of life, yourself.”
But Helena did not answer; she just kept swaying where she sat. The passersby were looking at us and I affected a smile at them. It was only then I remembered the kitten I’d acquired. The basket lay by the bench, but the hatch was open and the kitten had disappeared. I didn’t even want to think or to feel guilty; the kitten had run away. He had either been trampled by people, or he would join the mass of the city’s stray cats.
I fished up my phone and punched the familiar number. After three rings, Manuel answered.
“You can’t guess where I found Helena this time.”
I told him the place and Manuel promised to come and fetch us. He advised us to stay where we were so that there’d be no surprises.
Helena was still in a state of disorientation; she would not recover before she returned to the shelter of the Institute and the restrictor. The restrictor prevented an observer from crashing the wave function. Its field destabilized our one and only reality to a state where an observation had not yet made the event real. The apparatus made it possible for me to observe Helena with my gaze without her crashing. But we had not yet been able to make the field strong enough to protect our patients outside the building, and every time Helena escaped outside, she had to protect herself alone. She had, however, grown more and more skilled with her escapades.
Manuel arrived in half an hour. I pushed Helena into the back compartment of the van and went to sit by Manuel. He tried to pump me for information about how I’d happened to surprise Helena in action, but I cut my answers short.
We received a cheerful welcome and I had to tell how I’d collided with Helena. Salvatore had already run through all the videotapes, and once again the recording had broken down before her escape. The method of escape was still a mystery. Perhaps it was one of those questions that would never be solved.
“We might try a new kind of test on Helena,” Salvatore said.
Salvatore was excited, the research had taken a huge leap forward, he said. He thought the restrictor functioned more stably. I smiled at him politely, said a few trite sentences and went back outside for air. It was siesta time, the screens were drawn shut in front of the shops, and only a few canteens were keeping their doors open. A market vendor had left a pair of unused sandals on the street. I tried them on and they seemed to fit perfectly. I left my old pair lying on the street.
I wandered into a nearby café and ordered a pint. I leaned on the counter and sipped the froth. A shiver went down my spine. The presence of other people felt disconcerting and I withdrew to the corner table, to a place where I’d be in shadow.
Next to me, a man in black was playing the slot machine. He tapped angrily at the levers, finally punching the machine, and then marched out. I walked to the contraption and pushed at the start—the man had forgotten a twenty-cent coin in the machine. With the first spin I got three oranges and the machine gave a cheerful tinkle. I was delighted: since the machine wanted to give me money I’d take whatever I could get, of course!
When the pot reached twenty euros, I took the winnings out and crammed the coins into my pocket. At that very moment something brushed my calf. I startled and turned to look. It was my own kitten, and I didn’t even have time to feel surprised before I stooped down to pick the kitten up. Cats seemed to bring good luck!
Want safety where mother? Safety, yes. In a daze I walked back to the Institute, with the cat in my arms. As soon as I got to the coolness of the lobby, the cat jumped out of my arms and vanished in the middle of his flight, and only then did I understand what I had actually found at the old lady’s house.
Helena
I close the window shades so that the scorching afternoon sun will not blind my eyes. The cat purrs in my lap and I caress her head, softly.
“I am Helena. Helena García Luna,” I tell the cat, and she stares me directly in the eyes. She understands me; at least that’s how I feel.
We need each other.
I hear a meow from the floor and a kitten pushes himself up in my lap, too. Where did he appear from? The door to my room is closed. There is a corridor behind the door, and after that, doors and a lift and alarms and the stairs out. And people one must beware of.
I make an effort, and remember that there are yet more kittens left. They did all survive. The veterinarian said it was a miracle, there were signs of torture on their mother; her fur had been shaved from the crown of her head and her abdomen, just as they do with experimental animals.
But the kittens are all right. Somehow I just knew that whatever happened, those cats would survive. And they dream cat dreams.
Seek next hurry hurry.
“Yes, let’s go seek,” I say, and at the same moment I see in front of me a bundle of threads with black strands and a few white ones. I choose a thread that has the door to my room open at its end.
The Laughing Doll
Marko Hautala
Translated by Jyri Luoma & edited by James Wheatley
Marko Hautala is the author of five novels that focus on the darker aspects of the human mind. In 2010 he received the Kalevi Jäntti Literary Prize for Young Authors for his novel Shrouds (Käärinliinat, 2009), a modern gothic tale set in a mental institution, drawing on the author’s own past experience working as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital. His first novel, The Self-Illuminated Ones (Itsevalaisevat, 2008) received the Tiiliskivi Prize. In “The Laughing Doll,” a friendly gathering of two couples takes an unexpected and grisly turn . . .
“But hey, does anyone remember the Laughing Doll?”
Milla looked dramatically around the dining table, her drunk eyes wide in the thrill of recollection. On the other side, Alisa lifted her hands to her mouth to cover a sigh. In fact, it was one high note ending in a minor vibrato.
“It was dreadful,” Alisa uttered to the hollow space between her palms.
“What are you talking about?” Sami asked.
“Just dreadful,” Milla and Alisa said together in a girlish conspiracy. Sami mumbled something and looked at Karri. Why can’t they behave, his eyes said.
Grown-up bitches.
“Is it some sort of urban legend?” Karri said, to escape Sami’s glare.
“Abominable . . . ” The women were laughing and weeping simultaneously. Sami sighed and wiped at a wine stain on the linen with a napkin.
“I’m sure the girls can tell more about it,” Karri said, hoping to gain with his eyes a mutual understanding.
“You’ve never heard of the Laughing Doll?” Alisa stared at each of the men. Karri shook his head and looked to Sami for support. He was preoccupied with the wine stain.
“The Laughing Doll,” Milla started, “is probably my worst childhood trauma. Really. The worst.”
“You have a few others beside that,” Sami mumbled.
Milla did not even blink at Sami, and she continued: “The Laughing Doll was . . . a murderer or something. A ghoul. It stalked the kids walking these paths through the local woods. And I remember . . . ”
Milla burst into a giggly moan. She shook her head the way she did when she talked about how tastelessly a man had approached her in the work place or at a restaurant.
“I remember walking home too late at night one autumn by that beach. The electricity was out; it was when that was still possible. The whole road was dark, and suddenly I had the feeling that there was someone walking by me.”
“Oh no,” Alisa
said with her hands on her rosy cheeks. “Did you hear it—”
“I didn’t hear laughter, but I didn’t have to. I already knew. Based on those stories I already knew the sound of it . . . ”
“Ha-ha-ha,” Alisa helped with a machine-like, monotonous voice, and Milla shook her head and flailed her arms about.
“You know, I ran like I had never run before. My God, I was sure it was the . . . ”
“Laughing Doll,” Sami snorted to his wine glass.
“I think I even saw, amidst the trees, the shape of a creature walking like . . . ”
Alisa interrupted Milla by standing up from the table so that all the glasses spilled a little. She started walking in a bizarre, jerky fashion to and fro at the head of the table. It was like a clockwork toy with a damaged mechanism.
“That’s it,” howled Milla, and Alisa’s pantomime ended in a fit of laughter. “That night I couldn’t sleep at all, because I was afraid that if I looked at the window, it would be there and would start that . . . ”
“Ha-ha-ha.”
“Stop it, Alisa. Or I won’t sleep tonight either.” Alisa sat down, laughing, and put her hands down on Milla’s hand.
“You’ll sleep alright,” Sami said and smiled joylessly.
Milla wiped the tears from her eyes. Suddenly it was easy to imagine the same gesture in this same space, when there were no guests.
“Why did it walk like that?” asked Karri.
“How should I know?” said Milla. “It was somehow . . . like . . . ”
“Disabled or . . . a jack-in-the-box,” said Alisa. “A jack-in-the-box that was not turned off.”
”Awful.”
Milla smiled and gave one more lazy laugh. Disappointed, that the joy did not last longer.
“They said a madman used to live in those derelict cottages, missing a whole knee joint. All bone. A deformity of some sort.”
Milla lowered her hand under the table, and it was obvious that she was feeling her knee.
“Whatever,” she said. “Kids’ lore.”
“That’s right,” said Alisa. “Our Ines was also afraid of Karri’s furry gloves when she was little. She even had nightmares about them.”
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