Among Prey

by Alan Ryker

  “The whole scalp comes off. You can see the line if you hold the hair back. It’s a feature they added only a couple of years ago.”

  Bobby reached out and took his doll from the cutting chair. He didn’t smile or speak, but he seemed satisfied, so Amber led them to the front desk and the register.

  Amber pulled the store’s digital camera from beneath the counter. “Do you mind if I take your picture? We like to put photos of our customers and their dolls up on the wall, to show off how creative you all are.” She gestured to a huge corkboard filled from top to bottom with photos of smiling little girls and their dolls.

  “You don’t mind, do you, Bobby?” Carol asked, placing a hand on one of Bobby’s huge arms.

  Bobby held his doll cupped in both hands. He did not react to either woman’s question, but continued to stare at the little plastic girl.

  “He doesn’t mind,” Carol said. “How would you like him to pose?”

  “If he could just hold his doll up and give me a smile, that’d be great.”

  “Go ahead, Bobby,” Carol said, patting his arm.

  Bobby tilted his cupped hands toward Amber. The doll sat comfortably in the fleshy cradle. He looked up, not at the camera, but past it.

  “Smile!” Amber said. Bobby didn’t, but Amber snapped the shot anyway. She docked the camera on the photo printer and set it printing while she rang them up.

  When the printer finished its work, she held the warm photo out to them. “Isn’t that nice?” And it really was nice. Amber couldn’t get over how flipping cute this giant and his little doll were. She pushed a clipboard forward. “If you’d like to be sent a digital copy, just provide us with your email address. We’ll also let you know about new products and upcoming specials.”

  “No, thanks. He doesn’t have an email address, and I doubt his parents would be interested.”

  Amber nodded. “Well, let me just hang this up over here.” She walked around the desk to the wall of photos. As she prepared to unpin the oldest photo and replace it, darkness fell over her. She hadn’t heard or felt Bobby approach. Beneath the Berber, the floors were solid concrete. She turned her head slightly and saw with her peripheral vision that he stood only two feet behind her. She was trapped by the counter on one side and the poster-covered front window on the other. A 400-pound man loomed over her, and she could feel the pressure of his weight the way a fly can sense a swatter. The air itself became heavier.

  Amber didn’t suffer from claustrophobia. In fact, a mild case of agoraphobia kept her from driving downtown or on busy highways. Yet even with the Xanax, a spike of panic smashed through her heart. She began to sip at the air, and soon felt the world turning black at the edges. She wanted to jump over the counter. She wanted to throw elbows. Instead, she hyperventilated and flicked her eyes back and forth, looking for escape, but not moving or speaking. She was a rabbit hunkered down on a grass lawn after being caught grazing too far away from cover, and the lumbering dog might or might not have noticed her, but it certainly would if she moved, if she whispered for help, if she breathed too—

  “Bobby, step back here! You know about personal space.” Carol would save her. Carol, her new best friend. Carol knew how to deal with Bobby.

  Then the pressure increased, and Amber’s consciousness was filled by the arm passing over her shoulder. She threw herself in the opposite direction, against the counter.

  “Bobby!”

  Bobby paid neither Carol nor Amber any attention. He touched a photo hanging on the wall, then pinched it between his index finger and thumb and pulled it from the corkboard.

  “Bobby, put that back. That isn’t yours.” As Amber’s breathing slowed and her vision returned, she watched Carol try to take the photo from Bobby. He simply twisted the photo between finger and thumb, then crushed it in his palm. Carol put both of her hands on his fist—a fist literally as big as her head—but she didn’t try to pry his fingers open. “Now Bobby, that belongs to the store. You know about getting too close to people and you know about taking things that don’t belong to you. Please open your hand.”

  Bobby turned his attention to his doll, and staring at it, walked for the exit. Amber thought maybe he’d leave and Carol would go running after, but he stopped by the door and waited for his nurse’s instruction.

  “I’m so sorry,” Carol said to Amber. “I hope he didn’t scare you too badly. The only thing we can’t keep straight is that when he wants something, he can’t just take it.”

  “I’m fine. It’s okay. I was going to have to take a photo down to put his up, anyway.”

  Carol smiled, apparently relieved. “You were great with him today, and you did an excellent haircut. I think you’re better than my hairstylist.”

  Amber returned her smile. She was more embarrassed than anything, blamed herself for reacting in such a ridiculous fashion more than she blamed either Bobby or Carol. “Thank you. It was no problem. Bobby can come back anytime.”

  “I don’t think I gave you enough of a tip.” Carol opened her handbag and Amber moved her hand and mouthed “No” a few times, but took the twenty when offered it. “His parents would want you to have it.”

  “Well, thank you very much. You two have a great day.”

  Carol left first, and Bobby lingered for a moment. He still held his doll in one hand, and a crushed photo in the other, and he met Amber’s eyes for the briefest instant before he turned and squeezed through the open doorway. Something passed between them. Amber didn’t know what it was, but knew it mattered.

  She found that she still held the photo of Bobby and his doll. Looking at it for a clue as to what had just happened, she walked to the corkboard wall. The empty square of cork begged to be covered by someone with a bit of OCD, and Amber was just that woman. But first, she stared at the space, and then turned her eyes inward, trying to remember what photo had been there before. She’d been so preoccupied with the thought of having the life crushed out of her by an enormous man-child that she hadn’t noticed which photo he’d taken.

  Unable to remember, Amber hung the picture of Bobby in its place with shaking hands.

  She needed another Xanax, and probably a Klonopin too, for the long haul.

  * * *

  Amber went to beauty school right after graduation. She hadn’t enjoyed her academic experience, and didn’t want to extend it by going to college. She also didn’t want to work in a warehouse or factory. She had some interest in fashion, enjoyed the magazines at least, so cosmetology seemed a natural choice of trade. And the beauty school in town was cheap.

  After she passed her certification test, she found that the turnover at the more expensive salons was very low. She didn’t want to move away from her family and friends, so she figured she’d get a holdover job at Good Snips and wait to see how things went. Once in the industry, Amber learned the town had a strange hair culture, in that the cheap places like Good Snips were almost minor leagues for developing talent for the three expensive salons. So she settled in and tried to make a name for herself.

  She didn’t expect it to take years. And she didn’t think she’d eventually hate doing hair.

  That wasn’t exactly correct. She enjoyed doing hair, and thought she was pretty good at it. What she hated were the customers. You’d think that people paying ten dollars for a haircut would adjust their expectations. At that price, in order to make any money Amber had to cram too many haircuts into an hour, but she tried to give her clients better than the bare minimum.

  Yet the customers were still horrible. Not all of them. Many sat in her chair, flipped through a magazine until their cut was done, then paid up front without ever making eye contact with her. She liked that fine. But the rest complained incessantly and tried to tell her how to do her job. They talked about what their old stylists did, or brought in pictures of celebrities with $500 haircuts that just happened to complement their perfect facial features.

  Give a dog a Jennifer Aniston cut and it still looks like a dog.


  Amber hated Jennifer Aniston so much. Jennifer Aniston was almost single-handedly responsible for her mental breakdown. The daily battle with ugly, neckless toad women requesting the “Rachel cut” began to wear her down. She fought with them beforehand, trying to get them to choose something more flattering to their “unique” features. Then she fought with them afterward when they wanted their hair fixed.

  Somehow, despite hundreds of repetitions of this series of events, Amber managed to never tell a single woman what needed fixing was her hideous face, not her haircut. But she noticed her resting heart rate at work never fell below a hundred. She found taking a deep breath an almost unmanageable task. She found whenever the front desk woman pointed a customer toward her chair, she felt a sudden urge to fall and hit her head on the concrete floor. And with that thought, and the thought of being rolled past the client on a stretcher, came an overwhelming feeling of relief and joy.

  So Amber went to a shrink and got prescribed various benzodiazepines for her panic attacks and an SSRI for her generalized anxiety disorder. She stopped taking the SSRI when she noticed it prevented her from getting the warm fuzzies when drinking or popping pills, which she learned was the feeling of the brain dumping a big dose of dopamine. Instead she began combining the pills and the booze for even better results. The SSRI had taken only the sharpest edge off a day, but the benzo/alcohol combo left her floating in a warm haze.

  Amber wasn’t an idiot—she knew this drug combo was a temporary fix. Yet, she thought she might be an idiot, because she didn’t see any way out. She could only try to halt her downward spiral by not increasing the dose as often as she’d like. Luckily, a way out found her.

  She walked into the back room at Good Snips one day and found everyone laughing over a help-wanted ad. LYLAS Dolls was opening a new in-store doll salon, and though cutting doll hair didn’t require a license, they preferred someone with cutting experience. Amber’s coworkers swore they’d never cut dolls’ hair under the direction of bratty, little children. For all their laughter, though, several of them had been looking in the help-wanted ads or they wouldn’t have noticed it. Nobody liked working at Good Snips.

  Amber turned in an application that very evening.

  She went to the interview under the influence of only one milligram of Klonopin—which for her was the equivalent of stone sober—and gave the miniature haircut of her life. After they offered her an hourly rate several dollars higher than what she made at Good Snips, the nib of her pen nearly set the paperwork alight she signed so quickly.

  The situation wasn’t ideal, but the only ideal she could think of was lying in bed all day every day with a mountain of blankets pulled over her head and only a slight gap left for peeking out at the television. LYLAS Dolls was a lot better than Good Snips. Yeah, she dealt with some spoiled brats and some even more spoiled mothers, but the big difference was most of the customers enjoyed the experience. Amber liked making them happy, and liked the way happy people tended to treat her with a bit more respect than her Good Snips clientele. Yeah, it was just a tad bit completely humiliating cutting doll hair, and pretending to talk to the dolls while she did it, but when it got too bad, she just said, “Xanax, take me away.”

  * * *

  Amber hadn’t expected Bobby to return, but he darkened the LYLAS Dolls doorway only a week later. Amber always worked Wednesdays by herself, and she learned that Bobby had a standing Wednesday appointment with a shrink in the office across the street. It had long been tradition for Carol to take him for ice cream at the parlor a couple of shops down in the strip mall, but he began to occasionally turn into LYLAS Dolls.

  Before long, Amber knew his idiosyncrasies well enough that she’d tell Carol to do what the other parents did: sit back and enjoy someone else occupying her charge for an hour. It didn’t take many visits before Carol would walk in and plop herself into one of the comfortable pleather-upholstered seats that lined one wall and do crossword puzzles or read a paperback while Amber and Bobby built a new friend.

  It always surprised Amber how specific Bobby was in his concept. She’d suggest parts, clothes, haircuts, and Bobby would look right through them, then back to what he was doing. He didn’t seem to be working toward any specific pattern. His dolls were usually white, but not always. They could be blonde or brunette. Most were built from the parts representing grade-school children, but he made one from the toddler-proportioned parts, and one from the teen. Usually, once a customer had been in a few times, Amber would get a sense of their style, but not with Bobby.

  The situation could have been very disturbing. Amber realized that most women would be uncomfortable helping a hulking man choose clothing for his naked dolls. But Bobby showed no sexual interest in the dolls whatsoever. That fact, along with his childish features and demeanor (and a few benzos washed down with schnapps) helped calm Amber’s nerves, and she actually found it more fun to help Bobby than most of the little girls who came into the store.

  One thing that nagged at her, though, was that he continued the odd ritual that had begun on his first visit, in which he painstakingly created and decorated his doll, then half ruined it with markers. Neither she nor Carol could dissuade him from this odd behavior.

  Also, on more than one occasion, he snatched a photo from the wall, refusing to let it go or to let either of them see it. Carol told Amber she’d get the photo once he went to sleep and return it, but Amber always said it didn’t matter, that a new photo going up required an old one to come down.

  One Saturday a few months after Bobby’s first visit, Nora, the store manager, went back to the LYLAS Salon, where Amber was stationed on busy days, doing cut after tiny cut.

  “Amber, can I talk to you when you’re done?”

  Amber snipped her shears a few more times, brushed the doll clean and handed it over. Kids didn’t know when a haircut was done. “What’s up?”

  Nora held out a handful of photos. “What are these? I checked the camera and they were all taken when you were the only employee working.”

  Amber took the photos and flipped through them. They were all of Bobby and his dolls.

  “That’s Bobby. What?”

  “Does that grown man make dolls here?”

  “Yes. And…?” Amber began to bridle. She knew what Nora was getting at.

  “Were there other customers here?”

  “There haven’t been, because, as I’m sure you could tell from the files, he always comes in early Wednesday afternoons when it’s dead. But so what if there were?”

  “He would scare them.”

  “How is that his problem?”

  “It’s our problem, because I don’t want to lose customers over some giant creepy pervert. Next time, turn him away. We can deny service to anyone.”

  “So you want to deny service to a mentally disabled man who has never caused a bit of trouble? Who has probably bought a thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise and never spoken a single word? How would you like me to phrase that?”

  “He’s disabled?”

  “Yes, if that matters. That woman is his nurse.”

  Nora opened and shut her mouth several times, staring at the pictures and obviously trying to figure out how to keep the weirdo out of her store without seeming like an ass. After a few moments her shoulders slumped slightly. “He only comes in when it’s dead?”

  “Yeah, so far. He has a weekly appointment across the street.”

  “Okay, fine. But you can’t hang these photos up. They’re just—bizarre.” With that, Nora tossed the photos in the trash and walked back up to the front.

  Amber took the photos out of the trash and brushed away the clinging hair clippings. In each photo, Bobby stood round-shouldered and expressionless, delicately presenting his doll in his cupped hands for the camera. Yeah, they were a bit odd, but they were adorable, and Amber wouldn’t just toss them out. She put them in her back pocket before gesturing to the next girl in line. But she didn’t speak to the girl. She crouc
hed and spoke to the doll.

  “What can we do for you today, miss?”

  * * *

  Amber sat a rum and Coke on the coffee table before flopping down onto her couch, ready to lose herself in a few drinks and a few hours of mindless television. She noticed a crunchy sound as she sat, though, and remembered the photos crammed into her back pocket. She leaned sideways and nearly suffocated herself in a throw pillow as she attempted to extricate the stiff photo paper from her denim pocket. When she finally pried them out, she spread the photos on the coffee table, being careful not to get them in the water sweating from her glass.

  Looking at them all at once brought back the strange feeling she had when each photo was taken, as if she and Bobby shared some secret of which she wasn’t aware, as if she was supposed to know something, but didn’t.

  Then she noticed that day’s newspaper upon which a couple of the photos were spread. The big headline was another missing little girl, the latest of seven. The small community was in an uproar. She didn’t think she’d ever seen the girl before. What jolted her to attention was the row of smaller pictures of the other six missing girls.

  As her vision began to blacken around the edges, Amber fought to control her breathing. The adrenaline was taking over, making her sip at the air, causing her body to go rigid and the finger on her right hand to do that weird claw pincer thing that had become a tick when she worked at Good Snips, probably related to the way she worked her shears. She breathed as deeply as she could, filling her lungs all the way down into her stomach, holding it for a count, then slowly letting it out. Her vision returned, and she squared the newspaper on the table.

  Beneath each newsprint picture of a girl she placed a photo of Bobby holding a doll. LYLAS Dolls made so many different parts to allow little girls to make a doll that looked just like themselves, or just like a sister. Each of Bobby’s dolls closely resembled one of the missing girls, right down to their haircuts. Haircuts she’d given them.