I can’t reach to open the nursery door.
I couldn’t say goodbye, anyway — only with my eyes.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Sandor, though sometimes I can hear him down on the first floor running the vacuum, clanging cooking pots and pans in the kitchen; and I fancy I can hear the music boxes tinkling, the doorbell chiming.
I’ve never seen Nina and even if someone let me out of this room, I don’t think I’d have the strength to shove the heavy trap door aside and go up into the attic.
If she’s real, I don’t imagine she’d be my ally.
If she’s alive, perhaps at one time she was a sorceress or puppet maker who lent the dolls power, craft and skill.
Perhaps they coveted what she was or what she had and turned on her. There was a pair of gray glass eyes in the old billiard room that always seemed to look at me with a peculiar sentience whenever I went in.
It’s funny how even early on Paul and Allie and I just fell into the shallow trenches of the dolls’ imaginations. It’s true that all children are partly isolated by their lack of perspective, their inexperience; but the dolls in Spy Glass Hill were at a further remove. The youngest of the bebes was born around 1934 — long before television, cell phones or even video games.
To decorate both their own doll houses and Spy Glass Hill they longed for the very best quality of what was familiar to them, what they knew: velvet fainting couches, claw-foot bath tubs, curlicue grandfather clocks.
I don’t think Allie or Paul or I actually missed or even thought about modern conveniences... what power these dolls wield.
There’s snow flying past the mullioned window today.
I wonder if Catherine will get her puppy for Christmas. I wonder if somehow, Allie and Paul are still alive, joined with the ranks of dolls in the Tapestry Room or Peacock Room or the attic. I wonder if Sandor has lured in any other humans, and if Paul and Allie can hear or see those transformations beginning. I wonder how long it will be before my fingers stiffen; no longer separate. I’m alone and cannot move my mouth or speak. I don’t need nourishment... so I try to calculate how much time I have to think, to feel, to be human.
How much time left to write the last expression of the world I can scarcely hear and must struggle to recall:
The chiggering of insects.
The drone of distant traffic.
A harvest moon — giant yellow buttercup tea saucer—
perched on the very horizon of a farmer’s field that’s
frost-kissed stubble now
Lisa Mannetti’s debut novel, The Gentling Box, garnered a Bram Stoker Award and she has since been nominated three times for the award in both the short and long fiction categories (“1925: A Fall River Halloween” and Dissolution). Her story, “Everybody Wins,” was made into a short film, Bye-Bye Sally, by director Paul Leyden starring Malin Ackerman. Recent short stories include “Corruption” in Nightscapes Volume 1 and “The Hunger Artist” in Zippered Flesh II which is currently nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. She has also authored The New Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, two companion novellas in Deathwatch, a macabre gag book, 51 Fiendish Ways to Leave your Lover, as well as non-fiction books, and numerous articles and short stories in newspapers, magazines and anthologies. Forthcoming works include additional short stories and a novella about Houdini, The Box Jumper. She is currently working on two paranormal novels, tentatively titled Spy Glass Hill and The Everest Hauntings. Lisa lives in New York. Visit her author website, www.lisamannetti.com, and her virtual haunted house, www.thechanceryhouse.com.
Crack O’Doom
by Angel McCoy
The sky grew ominous and cast a gloom on the farm. Jeanie’s mom had told her not to leave the yard. “There’s a storm comin’, kiddo. Stick close.” The smells of imminent rain and eager pine mingled. The leaves on the oak trees turned up, thirsty and ready.
“Storm comin’,” seven-year-old Jeanie told the dogs through the tall fence. She entered their pen, careful to close the gate behind her. Daddy’s labradors, Sissy and Sassy, were excited. Their tails wagged their thick bodies and their chocolate snouts snuffled her all over.
The dogs had run down any grass that might have once grown there. They’d dug around, looking for moles and buried bones. Mangy-furred tennis balls lay strewn amidst chew-toys missing appendages and ears, and there was an old red kickball to one side, half-deflated.
Jeanie set her doll (Dolly) to one side and got down on her hands and knees at the entrance to the doghouse. She pulled out the two woolen blankets, bringing a flow of dirt and dog-hair with them. She stood and shook out the first one. It tossed up a cloud of fur and dust, and the wind blew it at her. She turned her face away, eyes, nose and mouth scrunched together.
She folded the blankets in uneven squares and put them back inside the doghouse, pressing their edges into the corners and smoothing them as flat as they’d go.
The first big blast sounded. Boom!
Jeanie froze in place, and her heartbeat accelerated. “Crack o’doom,” she said. Jeanie’s Daddy had taught her to say that whenever she heard thunder. He said it would keep her safe.
On her hands and knees inside the doghouse, she crawled to the entrance and peered out. The dogs had stopped playing and were watching the main house. Jeanie looked too at the big white farmhouse where she lived with her parents.
Sissy let out a bark, and then a long broken yowl — the sound Mama called singing.
Boom!
“Crack o’doom.”
The thunder was in the house.
Jeanie grabbed Dolly to her and hunkered down inside the doghouse. She called the dogs, and when they came rushing in, she burrowed between their warm, wiggly bodies, letting them push at her with hard noses, clawed paws, and lapping tongues.
A man shouted Jeanie’s name. It was Mr. Conti.
Jeanie went still, head cocked to one side, listening.
“Jeanie! Your mother wants you to come inside!”
“It’s Mr. Conti,” Jeanie said, but she stayed put. “Shh.”
“Jeanie!” The man approached the dog pen. The legs of his one-piece jumpsuit, torn at one thigh and stained at the knees, came into view. He stood just outside the pen, turning in place, with the barrel of his shotgun sticking down and out in front of him.
The dogs poked their heads out. One of them growled.
“Jeanie! Come home, girl! Right now!”
Mr. Conti sighed loudly and Jeanie hugged Dolly tighter. She had never liked Mr. Conti. He watched her. He made her feel shy and unsettled. She did her best to avoid being alone with him and never spoke to him.
Sassy launched herself out of the doghouse and ran straight toward Mr. Conti. She slammed into the fence and barked up a ruckus.
Mr. Conti jumped back. “Damn dog!” He raised the gun and pointed it at Sassy, looking down the barrel at her with his mean face. He pushed the gun at her, as if firing, then lowered it. He huffed and headed off toward the woods, toward his own farm.
Jeanie’s stomach eased. Not hearing any more thunder, she grabbed her doll and crawled out. She opened the gate enough to slide out without the dogs coming with her and crossed the lawn to the front of the house. She went inside, careful to close the door behind her, so the flies wouldn’t get in. Standing in the main foyer, she listened for her parents. Most days, she could hear where they were.
That day, however, the house had stopped — stopped breathing, stopped living. A silence had settled on the rooms, the kind that’s waiting for you when you first come home from vacation, or when you wake up to find yourself all alone. It was the kind of silence that a person would do anything to chase away, like whistling, stomping booted feet on the mat and calling out to anyone who will answer.
“Mama?” Jeanie went to the kitchen, but no one was there. The TV in the living room was switched off. “Daddy?” Nuzzling her face in Dolly’s hair, she crept upstairs.
&
nbsp; She found them. In their bedroom. Mama and Daddy were lying on the floor, eyes open, staring up at the ceiling, forever. And, there was blood.
More than anything else, the smell in the room brought tears to Jeanie’s eyes. It was the smell of blood and dissipating warmth mingled with toilet and something bitter, like firecracker smoke.
“Mama?”
She got no response.
“Mama!”
Nothing.
Her heart pounded in her chest, and her breath became the ragged fluttering of a frightened bird. When she crossed to her dad, she slipped in some blood, but managed not to fall. She crouched at his head.
“Daddy?”
He didn’t move.
She rocked back and forth on her feet, hugging Dolly to her chest and the disrupted silence settled back down upon the house.
Jeanie wanted help, an adult, 911, anyone. Leaving bloody footprints on the wood floor, she went to the bed-side table, picked up the phone, and put it to her ear. She pressed the numbers — 911 — but the phone was silent, too. Dead.
She’d seen blood before, when she’d skinned her knee, and when her mother had cut herself with a kitchen knife, but never had she seen so much blood. It splattered the wall and made a big mess all around her parents. It pooled in the pits of their bellies and drained into cracks between the floorboards around them.
The dogs started barking again. Jeanie went to the window and looked down at them.
Mr. Conti had returned. He no longer had the shotgun, but his mouth had shrunk into a thin line, and his eyes had grown sharp and searching.
Instinct gave Jeanie a harsh push. She grasped Dolly by the hair and ran down the back stairs. She left the house through the kitchen door and stumbled out into the backyard. Her eyeballs were pushing forward, as if trying to escape ahead of her, and her breath came in catches and stops. She ran instinctively, cutting through the woods, along the path her Daddy had made, and on into the kick-ball field. It started to rain, not nicely, but with all the mean intentions of a water balloon dropped from on high.
The squall came out of nowhere and crashed into the coast with a violence that bowed ancient pines and flattened tall grasses. Rain crashed down on Jeanie. It pounded her and drenched her clothes. Hugging Dolly to her, she lowered her head and sprinted to the trees on the far side of the clearing. She took shelter under a Douglas fir.
A bolt of lightning streaked from sky to ground, casting everything in blue-white light and making Jeanie’s hair tingle. The flash burned white treetops onto a black sky behind her eyelids. Thunder came next, a physical blast of sound. She cringed, throwing her hands up to her ears and tucking her elbows in tight against her body.
“Crack o’doom.”
Little rivers of rainwater made their way across pine needle valleys and flooded the ground beneath the tree. Jeanie’s tennis shoes — her first-grade shoes, now play shoes — squished when she shifted her weight.
Dolly’s hair had droplets of water clinging to it. It was scrunched up and messy. Her dungarees were drenched. Her blue, sparkle eyes stared at Jeanie’s chest, and her smile didn’t waver. Jeanie tipped Dolly, and the doll’s eyes rolled closed.
From her foxhole beneath the moisture-laden branches, Jeanie watched the rain. The drops hit the ground so hard they bounced.
The dogs gave great baying cries and deep woofs. Jeanie heard the dogs’ barks in between the rumblings of the clouds.
Something crashed through the trees, and Jeanie looked to see who it was. “Sally!” she cried.
An ogre of a man, named Sally, Mr. Conti’s son, stopped, bent over and blinked with round, uncomprehending eyes at Jeanie. After a moment, he got down and crawled into her sanctuary with her. He sat back on his full rump, ignoring the ground’s wetness, and brushed his hands together to wipe away pine needles and mud.
“There’s thunder in my house,” Jeanie said.
“She has to come home.” Sally tugged on her sleeve.
The Contis had known Jeanie since before she was born. She had many memories, and her parents had even more, of evenings spent with the two families together. The grown-ups had played cards, read books aloud, made recipes in the kitchen or worked in the garden. Sometimes, they just talked about magick and rituals.
Sometimes Mrs. Conti would babysit her, and sometimes Mama would babysit Sally.
Sally — his mom called him Salvatore — was physically much older than Jeanie, but his mind had stopped maturing at around seven years old. He’d been born different, and though Jeanie’s mom had said, “That’s not a bad thing,” it meant he went to a special school, and nobody in the neighborhood wanted to play with him. She was his only friend, mostly because their parents were friends. Lately, she had begun to feel the weight of it. He followed her and wanted to know everything she was doing. Before, when she was little, it hadn’t mattered so much, but she was getting to be a big girl, seven-and-a-half years old, and Sally was still a little boy inside. He wanted to watch kid shows, play kid games and read kid books. Jeanie had started to feel superior to Sally, to feel bothered by his constant presence and non-growing ways, to feel frustrated by his lack of even a single original thought.
Sally was soaked to the bone. He reached out with his big, man hand to stroke Dolly’s wet hair. He had given her the doll for her seventh birthday.
“I didn’t know it was going to rain when I left,” Jeanie said.
“I didn’t know it was going to rain,” Sally said.
“You’re soaked. Go home. Your mom and dad are gonna be mad.”
“I know.” But, he didn’t move. He just sat there, rocking himself, hands clasped and wringing. “She has… to come home.” Sally blinked his large, little-boy eyes against the water on his lashes.
“No, I can’t! Your dad did something to my Mama and Daddy.”
Sally shook his head. He reached down to touch the muddy, socked foot.
The sky flashed, and another blast of thunder split the air.
“Crack o’doom!” Jeanie’s eyes filled with tears. She swiped her arm across them.
Sally hunkered, hands clutching his ears, body rocking, full lips trembling.
Jeanie looked over at him. “Say it, Sally.”
He was confused, eyes bright, rounded head moving without purpose.
Jeanie fisted her hand in the collar of his shirt. “Say it.”
“Say it,” he said.
“No. Say ‘crack o’doom.’ You have to say it every time it thunders, or something bad will happen.”
Sally said, “Crack o’doom.”
“Good. Now, go home. It’ll be okay.”
“I know.” Sally tipped his head to look out and up at the roiling clouds. “It’s worth the sacrifice.”
Lightning struck again. Close. This one lingered, its tail captured by something. It sucked oxygen out of the air and made a resounding crack that left Jeanie’s ears ringing. She cried out, though the thunder swallowed her voice. Her vision swam with electric dots. “Crack o’doom.”
In the void following the lightning bolt, the dogs’ barks called out again. Jeanie jerked her face in their direction. She easily imagined the dogs, racing back and forth at the fence, digging the rut deeper with each pass, kicking muddy splatters onto themselves and each other, eyes and noses searching — searching for her. They would protect her.
She easily imagined herself, safe from the storm, cuddled into their doghouse with them, huddled under their dog-smelling blankets, warm and drying. She could live with them forever.
She steeled herself, clutched Dolly to her chest, and crawled out from under the tree. She took off — full-bore — out into the open field, toward the sound of the dogs.
“The window is closing!” Sally called after her.
Within three steps, Jeanie lost a shoe. She stepped before she realized it was gone, and her socked foot came down in the wet grass. She slid to a stop, lifted her foot and hopped. The sh
oe had remained stuck in mud, somewhere behind her.
“My mom and dad are gonna be mad!” Sally shouted from under the Douglas fir.
Jeanie went back for the shoe, her shoe-less foot on tip-toe. She couldn’t see for the water rushing down her face. With one hand, she wiped her eyes. The rain drenched her wind-breaker. The nylon clung to her arms, and the hem drained low and heavy at her thighs. Rivulets ran into the neck, streamed down her back and soaked her play pants. She tugged at the weighted pants and scanned the ground, looking for her shoe.
“It’s worth the sacrifice!”
Jeanie ignored him.
Another bolt of lightning came to earth. It caught a tree further along, on the ridge overlooking the clearing where Jeanie searched. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the bolt travel down the trunk, splitting it open as it went. Pine needles exploded outward, a firecracker of sparks, quickly dampened by heavy raindrops. After the initial clap, a sizzle lingered.
Jeanie crouched, making herself as small as possible. “Crack o’doom.”
Sally shouted, “My boy will be normal!”
A moment passed, then two, and then Jeanie exploded out of her crouch and ran, shoe abandoned, Sally abandoned. She bolted across the clearing, heading back to the dogs. She raced toward the tree-line.
Jeanie heard pounding footsteps behind her, joining her in flight, and she was Bambi fleeing the fire with all the other animals, intent only on reaching safety.
Sally swept up behind her, clamped both his arms around her waist and lifted her off the ground.
Her equilibrium took an abrupt shift and she flailed. Dolly went flying. Instinctually, Jeanie latched onto Sally’s arm.
He crashed on toward the tree-line. Once there, he stopped and set Jeanie on the ground.
Jeanie looked up into his gasping, crazed face. “Sally! Leave me alone! Go home!” The tree overhead diluted the downpour, and she wiped her soggy hair out of her eyes. She took stock of herself and realized she no longer had Dolly. A flash of panic sent her spinning in place, peering all around her, tugging Sally so she could search behind and around him. “Where’s Dolly?”
Fear of the Dark: An Anthology of Dark Fiction Page 12