Fear of the Dark: An Anthology of Dark Fiction

by Maria Grazia Cavicchioli

  “What,” Allie said.

  “This doll,” I pointed to a doll with mashed brown ringlets and a plaid frock standing in the third or fourth row, “it just turned its head.”

  “You’re shittin’ me!”

  “No... there! It did it again!”

  “You’re sure?”

  I nodded.

  “Paul — get the camera now!”

  Sandy certainly moved faster than he’d moved all morning and he was suddenly interposing his short body between us and the dolls, his arms and hands raised shoulder high as if to block our view. “These are Nina’s, she doesn’t like anyone to...”

  “Did you call us here to investigate paranormal happenings or not, Sandy?” Allie said, giving him a little nudge, then turning. “Where’s that camera, Paul?” she yelled down the stairs.

  “I’m on it, boss. Stat.”

  “Nina isn’t going to like this,” Sandor said.

  If I hadn’t been so focused on scrutinizing the dolls, I might have caught the slyness buried in his tone.

  “Where is she?” Allie said. “I’d like to talk to her about the collection.”

  Sandor gave out a muffled laugh. “Oh these are just a few of her doll-babies, she has lots and lots more. She’s probably minding the others — in her room, or in the third floor nursery, or up in the attic. The attic dolls are her favorites.”

  “Do any of the others move? Are more of them haunted?” I said.

  “It takes a lot of work to tend them.” He ignored my question. “Starching their clothes and ironing them — their little clothes,” he said, fingering the peach skirt of a blonde number sitting in the front row. “So many pleats, so much lace.” He paused. “Then there’s washing their faces, painting the nails of the grown-up dolls, combing their hair. You have to be careful, because you know they all wear wigs that are glued to cardboard or cork pates. Well, I guess a few — especially the wax beauties — have rooted hair... if it falls out, you insert more with special tweezers.”

  He sounded very childlike, and I thought his reverence for the dolls was odd in a man, but I was on fire now to see more of the house. Paul had strung thick yellow cable down the back stairs, he was fixing the camera to a newel post on the landing that led up to another flight. Allie was in the kitchen — our operations base — radioing directions about sightlines and lens angles.

  “I’d like to meet Nina,” I said. There was no percentage in hanging around the window seat — not with Paul right there and the camera nearly ready to record.

  “Well, not just now...no,” Sandy said, glancing at his watch. “It’s going on eleven, and Nina will be getting lunch ready for the nursery brats. She does the attic babies in the early afternoon...” He smiled weakly, showing just the tips of his bottom teeth. “But we’ll go over the rest of the house and the other dolls and...” he checked the time again, “and... yes... yes, I’m sure that will coincide very nicely with her finishing up in the attic.”

  The house couldn’t be that big. You could probably tour most of Windsor Castle in three hours. No doubt about it, this guy’s crackers. I just hope it doesn’t turn out that Nina’s hanging from the rafters in the attic dressed in a tatty princess costume with strings nailed to her hands and feet. Or that she’s actually a life-sized inflatable doll he keeps in his wardrobe.

  “Okay,” I shrugged. If Nina was a real person, she must be nuttier than Sandor — the only other adult I’d ever heard of that lavished so much time and attention on dolls was Patricia Radcliffe Taylor who, when she wasn’t micro-managing her small world, was busy pretending to be a registered nurse and poisoning people.

  “Lead on,” I said, palm open and fingers extended to indicate he could move in front of me.

  I had the sudden overwhelming feeling that the dolls were watching me intently, their eyes glittering more brightly, their faces keener and set with anticipation. At the same time I heard rustling movements from both the third floor stairs and at the end of the hallway. There was a series of sharp clacks from the window seat, the sound of brittle plaster flesh — arms and legs and molded faces — colliding.

  All at once a thought that had been building beneath the level of my consciousness towered upward with the frightening clarity of a glacial serac: If Nina spent her days ministering to the dolls, how come the crowd on the window seat had cracked faces and matted hair?

  I stopped abruptly, but before I could turn to look back, Paul was screaming.

  Allie’s voice boomed over the radio and, even without the benefit of amplification, ricocheted from the kitchen up the back stairs. “His crotch! Oh, Jesus fucking Christ, he’s bleeding! Help him, Emily!”

  I heard a frenzied whisper of crinoline skirts, the rattle of metal sabers, the hurried chink of porcelain feet. I saw wax soldiers and bisque marquises and bowlegged wooden toddlers swarming the hall, fleeing down the stairs.

  A hundred glass eyes flashed, a thousand carved minikin teeth ground and champed inside open, painted lips.

  “You call this clean?”

  Greta — the one who had erupted into something out of an Aryan fantasy complete with metal breast shields and stiff blonde braids — stood, arms akimbo, feet planted in a wide stance and glared at me across the nursery, her sharp blue eyes on the exact level with mine.

  “No ma’am,” I said. I wanted to tell her if I’d left muffin crumbs on the lace tablecloth or an oleo smear or two on the flowered china teapot, it was because I wasn’t used to serving and cleaning up at two in the morning. I didn’t meet her eyes; I stared at her chunky ankles.

  “You’re goddamn right it’s not clean.”

  There was a knock on the lower right panel of the painted double door.

  “Don’t you hear that? Are you deaf, too?”

  I opened it and Allie limped in. She’s having trouble ambulating because the one that’s been at her most often is a 1924 “character” baby doll with a bent limb body — you know, the kind with fixed, curved arms and legs.

  It saddened me that she’d dwindled to about 30 inches tall now; she’d tapped the door because she couldn’t reach the knob. But when she hobbled past me, I saw there’d been other changes: a wide V-shaped section of her skull looked broken out, then half-mended. Close to her forehead where the repair began was a thin overlay of what looked exactly like what doll makers call composition — a slurry of sawdust and wood pulp mixed with glue that can be poured into a mold before it hardens, then later, painted with flesh tones. Tufts of wiry brown hair sprouted erratically from the patch-job out of black pin- prick holes. Allie’s own ash blond hair looked unwashed, lank.

  But it wasn’t the ugly juxtaposition of brown mohair and yellow human keratin that bothered me most...it was the narrow crevice that extended to the crown of her scalp. I only had a glimpse, but that was enough. I saw grayish edges naked of any tint and, lower — much lower — a dark hollowed space that descended to the iris of her right, too-vivid green glass eye.

  For a long time I didn’t understand what was going on, what was happening to the dolls... to us. Instead, my mind was merely packed with impressions — sights and sounds; for there really was no scent or taste or touch in my dealings with the dolls.

  Theirs is a diminished world.

  They might shout and demand one or another of us drop everything and set them up with a tea party or a game of tabletop quoits of the antique stereopticon slides, but it seemed to me that no matter what they did, they were always at a remove. Play-acting, like children do.

  That thought — no, observation — turned out to be the key.

  If you look up poppet in the dictionary you’ll find that one of its derivations is from the Middle English popet, meaning a small child or doll.

  And so, in the end I thought, the dolls in Spy Glass Hill were indistinguishable from ordinary spoiled children who want what they want when they want it — never mind the waffling or the reasons.

  I realized
that it was on account of their fierce desires that they came to be what they are because — like all children — what they wanted most was to grow up.

  “They’re not holding up very well.”

  “Personally, I don’t even like any of them. I don’t think they’ll fit in at all — not even in second-class outposts like the Rose room or the Briarcliffe Suite,” said a red-headed ballerina.

  They. The dolls meant me and Allie and Paul.

  I’d found what used to be called a ‘listening post.’ A hidey-hole where, cramped between narrow wooden uprights and squatting on incredibly dusty floorboards, I could watch for a few minutes at a time.

  I didn’t get the opportunity to spy very often, so I think it was September before I understood that the dolls we saw grouped in the window seat that first day were a sort of elite, secret society. They had a hierarchy: some of them comprised a brigade — the battle-torn warriors that orchestrated the attack on us; some were initiates — dolls who showed promise, drawn from the other doll rooms; but, at the very top of the heap, were the grand pooh-bah types. And they kept everyone — including us — in line. Most of them had achieved superior status because they were in cahoots with magical dolls like Greta, who’d learned certain rituals that tapped into the unseen current of power that flashed and spiked through the house from cellar to attic.

  These two dolls I listened in on were probably strictly mid-rank, but they gave themselves very grand airs.

  “I can’t imagine anyone wanting what’s going to be left of them,” said the first, a raven-haired doll named Catherine. She always carried a four-inch stuffed terrier with a red leather collar and leash, and she petted its wooly head, saying, “I wouldn’t take that tall bitch’s muddy brown eyes even for Bingo, here.”

  The ballerina giggled and leaned forward tilting her cheek near Catherine’s. “And that short girl is no good at all for minding or tending.” She had a china face and arms, but her legs were stitched doe-skin and she kept clumsily crossing and uncrossing them underneath her floor-length pink tutu.

  That short girl. Allie.

  “Puh-lease. If ever there was a live one who was clearly the very worst kind of tomboy...” She rolled her eyes, clicked her tongue against her teeth. “No interest in our sort at all,” Catherine said.

  “Even the old man is better,” Ballerina put in. “But she was a good carpenter for a while there.”

  Inside my hidey-hole, I winced, recalling a squabble I’d had with Catherine a few weeks earlier. Tea parties and miniature books, puppet shows and music boxes apparently weren’t enough entertainment for the dolls in Spy Glass Hill. They wanted a real house.

  What they meant was remodeling their present quarters into a full-scale version of an antique doll house — the equivalent of a Colossus child’s plaything — complete with fasteners and hinges that could swing wide open and halve the structure like the wardrobe trunk of some peripatetic 1910 vaudeville starlet.

  “But that’s impossible,” I’d said to Catherine.

  It was last day of summer just before sunset and we were on the third floor in what might have once been a billiard room with low-hanging lamps, but instead contained shelves and dressers and armoires and tables — all of them stocked with doll parts. There were ball-jointed arms and legs, mounds of flesh-toned heads, piles of hair of every color; cabinets overflowing with feet and ears and hands; pots of paint and glue. There were fabrics and scraps and whole dresses, caps, ribbons, diapers, layettes, hats and shoes and boots. It was a terrible place, but in the waning, orange light that came slanting through the windows, the ranks of lustrous glass eyes that seemed to glow... and fade... and glow again, were the most unnerving of all. They gleamed as if they were waiting; arrowed sharp bright rays of light, rehearsing the time when they’d come to life. Summer was dying, dead; but these fragments were waiting to be born. I swallowed uneasily and turned back toward Catherine.

  She glared at me. “There are four wooden specimens up in the attic right this minute!” she said. “A cottage, a mansion, a bungalow and a villa! And every single one of them opens!” she shouted. “Copy the designs!”

  It seemed like forever before I could make her understand it was simply not possible to transform Spy Glass Hill so that it opened on hinges like the fancy doll houses stored in the attic. “In the first place,” I explained softly, “you want to keep the downstairs intact. In the second, we don’t have — and we can’t make — the machinery that would do that,” I said.

  Her brown eyes gleamed with malice. “Then we’ll get more of you,” she said, “there are always more of you — and we know how to get them when we need them.” She stomped toward the door, then stopped, one buckled shoe midstride. She pivoted to face me. “In the meantime, you and your pals better make yourselves useful and get the second and third floors fixed!”

  Spoiled child. She meant that even if it was beyond us to transform the upper stories mechanically, they still expected us to work on making the rooms on those levels yield a cutaway view with perfectly aligned squares and rectangles. They wanted to stand on the second floor and look up and left and right and see the tiers of rooms — tidily stacked like cells in a hermitage, cubbyholes in a doll house... or cages in a prison.

  When Catherine and I wrangled in the pre-dusk hours of the last day of summer, I told Paul and Allie what she’d said and what I feared.

  After that, the sounds of anxious hammering and sawing became nearly constant every night, all night as the three of us — but especially Paul and Allie — worked feverishly and desperately to reconfigure the upper floors. It was a mad scheme. We had no choice. I suspected that, like our predecessors and those who would follow after us, we could be of use, or we could sink deeper into the transformation. We could descend even further until the bits and parts not yet taken — ears, lips, breasts — were tucked in those awful cabinets or lined up on those dreadful shelves.

  I turned my right cheek to press my ear flat against the rough wood, canted my eye to peer through the tiny spy-hole in the listening post.

  “The young man isn’t half-bad at carpentry — but he would have been much better if Bockie hadn’t lost his head and gotten so greedy and chomped at him straight off,” the ballerina said.

  Catherine tossed her hair. “Boys. Always so worried about their equipment. Do we make a fuss? No. And not one of us — not even Greta — has nipples, much less a hot-box.”

  “I saw one once,” Ballerina said. “It had wispy hair.”

  “No. That’s horrible.”

  “And if we did have those...openings...we’d probably never have babies,” she said cautiously.

  “Even if we could, there aren’t enough boys to go around, anyway,” Catherine laughed.

  “I wonder if that live one misses his... if he’s gotten use to being smooth... um, you know, blank.”

  My breath caught in my throat. I pulled away and leaned against the plank wall, letting my eyelids fall closed. We’d never talked about what happened to Paul. I guess it was the horror. Allie and I, we never asked him about the wound — or its aftermath.

  But I could imagine it now.

  The sudden pain and fright. Torn flesh raggedly incised. The blood bubbling through his tan summertime khakis.

  Then, waking in a fog so thick it seemed not just in your mind but all around you.

  There would have been chanting then, flickering candles, vicious words that ate their way from the circle of dolls surrounding you into your flesh.

  Bockie got greedy, lost his head.

  But really, I knew, it wasn’t just the physical attack that caused the transformation. Allie — limping, skull-cleaved and blind in one eye, was the perfect example of that. It was their intent. The terrible focus. Malignant desire.

  They used humans the same way humans use poppets and effigies and voodoo dolls to cast spells, to achieve their goals, to get what they want.

  On the other side of the rough
gray wall, I heard tinkling laughter.

  The ballerina’s voice broke in on my thoughts. “I think next time we ought to get some live ones who are younger, little girls who still like dolls.” She waggled the tips of her tiny black slippers. “I can’t even remember the last time someone brushed my hair or changed my costume — and look, the net is torn, where I caught it on a nail sticking out of the window seat.”

  Catherine paused briefly, smoothing the pleats of her red wool skirt. “But, some of us want the older live ones... we don’t want to be children forever.”

  “Well,” the ballerina nodded, “then someone like the old man — he doesn’t mind the fuss.”

  “He’s just a servant,” Catherine flapped one hand. “No one wants any part of him.” She squeezed the stuffed terrier. “But I wish that fool would get me a puppy. That would make Bingo much more cheerful. Wouldn’t it, boy?” She nuzzled the dog’s bristly snout. “He promised it for Christmas... but who knows? He takes forever to find any live ones, much less what I want.”

  “How much longer will these three last?”

  “Greta told me that Isolde wants the tall one’s mouth. It would be wonderful to really taste food and drink wine.”

  “I don’t mind pretending,” the ballerina said, “not as long as I can dance.”

  A door slammed inside the room and I heard Greta’s heavy voice.

  “Idiots! She’s behind the walls — get her.”

  Panic seized me. I pushed the concealed panel open, intent on running. Up, down — it didn’t matter. I had to flee. Behind the drapes of the window seat! I thought.

  But I was already surrounded, waist deep in a sea of lace and linen and flailing china arms. A quicksand of crinoline sucked me lower, dragged me down into darkness.

  ○

  When I woke, my mouth was painted stone.

  I learned to tell the season by clambering onto the little white nursery table, the one pushed up against the pale blue wall beneath the mullioned window. Rainy grey November. I never got to say goodbye to Paul or Allie — if they’re gone, that is.