Empty Vessels

by Meredith Katz

  He dried his hands off on Hiraeth's towel, hoped Hiraeth wouldn't mind, and made himself draw a deep breath.

  Time to go back out there and deal with the doll.

  She was fully dressed by the time he finally emerged, and sitting stiffly in Hiraeth's desk chair. As expected, they didn't quite fit her, and both the legs of her pants and sleeves of her shirt were rolled to show narrow ball-jointed ankles and wrists.

  Keith examined her properly, looking her over in silence. Her curly black hair sat in tight ringlets, a little too shiny to pass for real. Her eyelids were jointed in the way that in actual dolls meant that they'd be closed while she lay down and open while upright, but she did seem to have control over them, half-lowered as she watched him back. Her chin had the faint lines of a moveable mouth, and she had it a little open. Otherwise, her face was mask-like, calm and immovable.

  She seemed delicate, but he wasn't sure how much of that was her narrow frame, his own awareness that she could be broken, and how much was the uncertainty hovering around her like a cloud.

  "So," he said finally. "Are you ready to explain why you were there?"

  Slender, jointed fingers folded over each other as she clutched her hands together in her lap. "I could answer you," she said. "But I thought you might want to wait until your friend is back. What about you?"

  "I… we said already," Keith said. "A friend was taken there and we were trying to find her."

  "Was she really there?" the doll asked, her crisp voice curious. "It sounded like you were the only ones there."

  Keith chewed on his lower lip. He didn't know what was safe to tell her, hadn't had a proper chance yet to catch up Hiraeth and get his thoughts. "That's why we came, anyway."

  She leaned forward. In the silence, he realized that her movement actually made sound, a faint rattling of limbs. "You woke me up."

  "Were you sleeping…?"

  The doll shifted again, head tilting, and looked down at her hands, turning their palms up as if she were looking at the mirror in them again. "I don't know that I was sleeping," she said. "But you woke me up."

  The entire conversation was starting to get way too creepy. He opened his mouth, trying to find something to say to that, and jolted as his phone rang. "Uh, one second." He dug it out of his pocket with suddenly shaking hands, managed to swipe it on after one failed attempt. "Keith here."

  "Just wanted to let you know I'm on my way back now," Hiraeth said. "You okay?"

  Tears threatened to well up abruptly, a thickness in his throat and an itch behind his eyelids. He tried to breathe shallowly. "Fine," he said, swallowing that lump back out of fear that if he started he wouldn't stop. "See you soon."

  "Keith—"

  He hung up, closing his eyes. For a moment, he thought he was going to break down right there in front of the doll, unable to stop shaking. Hiraeth's voice had been so casual, but there'd been no hiding the genuine concern underneath it.

  What could he have said, though? No? He was exhausted and shaken and Lucas wasn't there, and he had never considered that Lucas would be in danger. Himself, yes, that he might die. Hiraeth, certainly—that was why they'd talked him into staying behind. Others were being hunted, humans could be killed, but a ghost?

  The phone rang again, and he hesitated, staring at it, at Horned Boy written on his screen, before swiping it on again. "Yeah?" he managed thickly.

  "Ask her if she eats, please."

  The concern was worse now, but Keith was glad that even if he could hear it, Hiraeth wasn't asking anything of him anymore. He didn't think he could hold himself together if asked a second time.

  "Yeah," he said, and swallowed, met the doll's eyes again. "My friend wants to know if you eat."

  "If…" she looked up at the ceiling, as if she could find the answer there. "I don't know. I don't think so. I'm not hungry, and I should be by now, I'd think."

  "You hear that?" Keith asked the phone.

  "Yep. Be back soon."

  Hiraeth hung up first this time, and Keith let out a sigh, still clutching the phone in his hand as he walked over to Hiraeth's futon and sank down onto it.

  It smelled like him, that wet, natural scent, and he ran his fingers over the blankets, wishing he could rewind back to this morning and maybe just not get out of bed at all.

  The doll was watching him again, evenly. "Am I a prisoner?" she asked.

  It was so out of left field that he found himself making a face, nose scrunching, upper lip curling up. "What?"

  "We ran away together," she said. "But now what?"

  "Now… now we ask you questions," he said. "And figure out what we can do from here."

  She was sitting very still. "And if you don't like the answers?"

  "Look, this is stupid," he said. "I don't know. Okay? I think we wanted to rescue as many people as we could. I don't think that's going to change just because we fucked up. You obviously helped get me out of there. No, you're not a prisoner."

  Lowering her gaze, she said, quiet, "Okay. I don't want to be a prisoner again."

  Abruptly, he felt guilty for having snapped. But it just mixed in with everything he was feeling guilty about, and he didn't have the energy to apologize. He just put his head in his hands and nodded. "All right. Understood. But stick around so we can talk."

  "I will."

  He didn't look up. "Good. Great."

  This time, when he fell silent, she didn't speak again either. It was uncomfortable, but he couldn't seem to find any more words within the churning mass of thoughts that wouldn't have been questions about what had happened, and he agreed that Hiraeth should be there to listen. He couldn't trust his own mind right now, couldn't expect he'd make sense of it anyway.

  So he just kept his head down, eyes closed, sitting on Hiraeth's mattress and counting his breaths, trying to find a way out of the tight net of anxiety and grief winding around himself, and she didn't move either, just sat at Hiraeth's desk and waited.

  When Hiraeth finally knocked to be let in, Keith thought he might start crying just out of the relief of pressure from the situation, as though Hiraeth was some kind of umbrella against the storm. "Hey," he managed, voice wobbly as they headed up the stairs together.

  "Hey. I got you a sub," Hiraeth said, and tossed a bag on the mattress before sitting and pulling Keith down with him, digging his own wrapped sandwich out of the bag. "You're probably in shock. You should eat. Here's a soda too."

  "I don't want—"

  "Sugar will help," Hiraeth said, and opened the tab on the drink before passing it over.

  The doll finally shifted again, a soft rattle of joints. "The car was put away?"

  "It's in a lot, yeah," Hiraeth said. "And when I came back, I disguised the trail." He didn't say how, and Keith didn't bother asking. It was enough to know that Hiraeth thought it would do the job. "Who are you?"

  "I'm…" The doll hesitated. "Do I need a name?"

  "You don't need one," Hiraeth said. "But I'm interested. Do you have one, or are you just not sharing it?"

  The doll seemed to hesitate again, once more looking at her hands. Keith chewed his sandwich. It contained a weird variety of cold cuts that honestly didn't taste very good together, but since Hiraeth didn't eat meat, it wasn't like he could expect more.

  "Marion," she said.

  "Was that the name you already had," Hiraeth asked quietly, "or one you just made up?"

  "I made it up," she said. "I don't remember a name. I don't remember much."

  Hiraeth looked away from her finally and unpacked his own sandwich, which seemed to be about 90% lettuce, with a few mushrooms and peppers thrown on for variety. It sprayed shredded lettuce onto his mattress as he bit into it, but he didn't seem to care, just picking at bits and tossing them back onto the wrapper as he chewed. "So you picked that because you're a doll?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "There are other types of dolls," Hiraeth said. "Do you feel like your strings are being pulled?"

  Mari
on hesitated at that, but less as though she was cornered and more as if she was trying to hunt down an answer, a sense of longing hanging around her. "No," she said finally. "I don't think so. Marion makes a good name, so it's easy. But I don't know my purpose. I don't know why I'm here. If someone is pulling my strings, I don't know it."

  "Keith," Hiraeth said, his tone still light and pleasant. "Can you tell me what happened in there?"

  Keith swallowed his current bite of his sandwich and felt it moving in a lump down his throat the entire way. "Uh…" He rubbed at his forehead with one slightly greasy palm. "Lucas and I split up to search the rooms. We couldn't go in the basement because I wasn't able to get the lights working there, so we searched the main floor. When we didn't find anything, we went upstairs."

  "And that's where you met Marion?"

  "Yeah—the first room I searched was the bathroom. I found a bunch of those bottles, the bottles I saw in the dreams, but not enchanted or with the ends cut. I brought one home… it's over there." He nodded to it.

  Hiraeth didn't turn to look, still just watching Keith's face. "And then?"

  "We took the last two rooms on the floor. I went into one and it was full of dolls. A tarp was over a chair, and I took it off to check underneath for the used bottles. She was on the chair, staring into a mirror. When I tried to get a better look, she looked up, but Lucas was… Lucas was screaming, so I ran…"

  The sound seemed to be stuck in his head, playing over and over again. Hiraeth put two fingers on the back of Keith's hand. "What happened to Lucas?"

  "I… I went to look. He'd been stabbed with one of those bottles. It was actually sticking in him." His chest was aching, felt hollowed out and blown up. He could still feel that lump of sandwich moving slowly through him. "There was another ghost there. He had no face, but he looked like, felt like a ghost. He'd attacked Lucas with the bottle, and…"

  Keith closed his eyes.

  "Keep going, love," Hiraeth said gently. "Who knows what'll be useful?"

  "The other ghost said something about ghosts," Keith said. It was weird, he could remember the sound of Lucas's voice so clearly, but couldn't remember the exact words the other ghost had said at all. "About ghosts being useful. He was going to try to kill me to see if he could make another ghost. Lucas flung me away and then he was—gone."

  Those tears welled up. He ducked his head, pressed the hand that wasn't holding his sandwich over his eyes and tried to press the tears back in but couldn't. Silent sobs were forcing themselves up, raggedly shaking him, pushing him around with as much pressure as Lucas had used to throw him, as much pressure as he'd impossibly used to throw Marion.

  "That's the man who lives there," Marion said calmly, agreeably. "He's the one who made me."

  "I think you'd better tell us what you do remember, Marion," Hiraeth said. "In just a minute, though, please," and he put his arms around Keith, pulling him over.

  It was embarrassing to cry in front of anyone, but the tears were coming whether he wanted them to or not. He wrapped both arms around Hiraeth, sandwich squeezing out its contents in one tight-knuckled hand, and clung to him as he sobbed.

  chapter ten

  It took him a few minutes to cry himself out, until the seizing pressure of his chest slowly settled to the point where he could breathe again. He felt awful—head throbbing, eyes aching, chest and throat sore, and, of course, embarrassed.

  Crying was humiliating at the best of times, and worse if in front of anyone. It reminded him too much of therapy, of having to deal with having seen Lucas die while Lucas was there with him in the room, watching and also trying to comfort him, guilty.

  But once he was done, he always had to admit that it felt as though the tears had needed to come. No matter how much he regretted doing it, there was a relief, too. He'd cried, he'd gotten it as out as it was going to get, and there was nothing to do but try to figure out where to go from here.

  "Better, sweetheart?" Hiraeth asked, combing his fingers through Keith's hair to push it away from his face.

  "Yeah," Keith said hoarsely. "Sorry."

  Hiraeth shook his head, smiling, the expression sad. "Don't apologize. Drink your soda."

  Keith was pretty sure that he was supposed to drink water after something like that, but picked up the can anyway and sipped it. The fizzing burn of the carbonation at least felt like a sort of relief, as if it was peeling away the thickness in his throat.

  "Now," Hiraeth said gently, turning back to Marion. She was looking incredibly uncomfortable, which Keith thought was pretty reasonable under the circumstances. "Let's hear what you remember. Start at the beginning, and add in as much detail as you can. Okay?"

  Her eyes flicked from Hiraeth to Keith and back, then lowered to her hands. She flexed them slowly, then nodded. "I suppose it will help us both."

  "That's the goal," Hiraeth agreed.

  She drew a breath, the sound audible and tinny. "I woke up in the basement," she said. "He was doing work by candlelight. I think he may have just put my body together, because it was some kind of work room, and there were tools and spools of string nearby. But it would make sense, that I wouldn't remember anything before I was put together…?"

  Marion looked at them both, and if her expression couldn't move, her voice was pleading. Keith wasn't sure how to respond, but Hiraeth was handling things, nodding along. "That sounds reasonable, but you're not sure?"

  "Well," she said. "He was the one who put me together. That ghost. He can manipulate objects still—I don't know what else he can do. But he began to ask me a lot of questions. What my name was and what I remembered. Of course, I told him that I couldn't remember anything. How could I, if I were just made? He didn't like that."

  "So he'd thought you could remember something more?" Hiraeth asked.

  Hesitating, she considered that, then shook her head. "No. I don't think he thought I was lying to him. Rather, I think he felt that I should have been able to remember something, but couldn't. He acted like I was a failure. He said, as I recall, that I was so fresh, it should have been easy to bring out those memories still inside me."

  Keith felt Hiraeth's breath catch next to him. "That's a strange thing to say," Hiraeth said, and, although his tone was neutral, Keith could feel an eagerness in him.

  "I thought so," Marion said. "I didn't ask much. He was… frightening. There was something very scary about him to me. And the monsters were all around, the terrifying masses of… I don't know what they were. Fear."

  "He uses Terrors," Keith said. "They feel like that."

  "They certainly felt like 'Terror'," Marion said. She fiddled with her fingers, listening to them clack, and sank down a little in Hiraeth's chair. She couldn't exactly sag, not with the only places she could bend at the hips and just under the sternum, but seemed to make an attempt at it. "I was terrified."

  Hiraeth made a sympathetic sound, but that sense of anticipation hadn't left him. "It must have been awful," he said. "Can you remember more about what he was saying about memories?"

  "Not entirely," she said slowly. "He was talking to himself a lot, but he mumbled. His voice was vague. It came in and out of hearing. I know that he wanted me to remember something, but I don't know what it was, or if it was even anything specific. It was all blank before I had woken up, and I told him as much. He did tell me that he wasn't about to give up on me yet, and that a secondary experiment might make me remember."

  "A… secondary experiment?" Keith asked.

  She shifted her heavy-lidded gaze to him. "That's what he said. With those monsters around, I didn't dare try to run, but the term stuck with me. I didn't want to be experimented on. He used that ability to move objects to make me walk up the stairs. He talked as we went. He said the memories must still be in me, and there had to be a way to get them out. That he'd had to give up on previous experiments, but he still wanted to see if he could work with me. If it failed, he would have to put me under full control." She looked up at Hiraeth again with
that frozen expression. "It was a terrifying thought, but I couldn't resist him."

  Hiraeth said, terribly gentle, "Nobody's blaming you for not running sooner. You escaped as soon as you could and helped get someone else out. You did great."

  Marion's eyes went wide briefly, then lowered again. "Ah," she said, and she sounded a little unsteady. "Thank you. He took me upstairs to the room that Keith found me in, and it was very… very frightening. It was full of dolls, and I wondered if this was where he put his 'failures'. Whatever those were. He made me sit and put some kind of mirror in my hands. He did something to it, murmured over it, and suddenly it was very… I don't know. It felt really warm."

  "It was enchanted," Keith said. "I'm not sure what the spell was, though. I don't actually know anything about magic."

  "I'd love to have that mirror," Hiraeth said, with audible longing, then shook his head with a smile, dismissing it. "And then?"

  Uncomfortably, watching Hiraeth for a moment as if she was having trouble understanding him, she said, "He told me that the eyes were the mirror to the soul, and that was why he didn't have any anymore. He made me look at myself in the mirror and then I was… stuck. I couldn't look away. My thoughts felt like they were running in circles, hammering back on themselves, against a wall I couldn't get past."

  "And how long was this?" Hiraeth asked, his tone lighter again, gentle.

  She shook her head, curls bobbing. "I don't know," she said. "I couldn't tell time."

  "All right," he said. "That's fine. Don't worry about it. And then you snapped out of it when Keith came?"

  "He changed what was in the mirror, however briefly, and I could move," she said.

  Hiraeth let out a whistle between his teeth and started picking up bits of Keith's sandwich, handing them back to him. A little embarrassed, Keith ate them. "All right," he said. "So, Marion, here's what's been going on."

  "I was hoping you would say."

  "Terrors are normally an instinctive lot," Hiraeth said. "They hunt Others and eat them, but they don't reason. They've recently been acting under something's control, however, and it's been making them behave differently. They've been working together, using enchanted tools, and so on. And what they're doing, as we've managed to determine, is collecting an Other's essence in one of these enchanted bottles. Why, we don't know."