His thoughts tumbled over one another. What would be the best tactic? Should he simply ask her outright? Try to engage her interest by discussing Daniel’s father’s results with her? But what if she became suspicious, and wanted to know why he was pursuing this so avidly? Would she want a share of the glory for herself? Or, worse, get others involved, others who would take Will’s discovery from him and exploit it for themselves? With so much at stake, how could he trust her? He didn’t know her.
Might he be able to gather a sample of her DNA without her realizing? There was no way of surreptitiously using a mouth swab to collect cells from her, but wasn’t there another way? It didn’t need to be a mouth swab – there was a substance even more useful than saliva. Accidents happen every day. It wouldn’t have to be a serious cut, a small scratch would be sufficient. So long as it bled.
What was he thinking?
Will snapped back to reality, shocked not so much by what he had been contemplating as by the realization that he had been considering it seriously. What the hell was wrong with him? Suddenly, this room was stiflingly hot and he needed to get outside, out into the fading sunlight where the day would be giving up its heat and the air would be cool and thin and free.
He had to take a step back here, get some perspective. First of all, he needed to apologize for bothering this woman, thank her for her time and hopefully arrange to come back to see Daniel in a week or so, when he was feeling better. And if Mrs Sellis couldn’t be persuaded then he could get back in touch with the school and play things that way, as per his earlier plan.
Will reached down to collect his papers, started to sweep them back into their envelope, and the world exploded.
For some reason, the pale green flowers on the walls were sliding past in a smooth arc. From his left, cool pine boards were floating up to meet Will’s head. A year passed as they arrived, and when they were finally there a muffled crack sounded in the distance and the world rolled to a stop. The tan canvas strap of his shoulder bag was in front of his face, very close, an odd place for it to be. Forest sunbeams picked out the strap’s weave in sharp, hard-shadowed relief.
A flash of dazzling light glinted, golden, off heavy, cut crystal that was rushing towards him again. The crystal was smeared with red.
Which faded to black.
* * * *
Will opened his eyes.
His surroundings were different.
The ceiling was above him, slipping past.
The green room was going away too, being replaced by somewhere else.
Beneath him now were sharp angles. Looking down, he could see his feet ahead of him, higher than his head and held by the woman as she pulled him up this jagged slope towards darkness.
His skull thudded against bare wooden steps as she dragged him upwards, although the pain didn’t survive the journey through the confusion smothering him.
Now he was horizontal again and his surroundings had become white tiles. The woman hefted his lanky body as if he were a small child and dropped him into a coolly rounded container. He smelt soap and the cloying floral fug of air freshener, and below that something warm and ripe and unpleasant.
His legs hung over the edge of what he was beginning to understand was a bath, and now the woman was reaching over him. A tap squeaked as she twisted it. Warm water spurted from a shower nozzle, hitting his upper chest and quickly soaking his T-shirt and the seat of his jeans. He felt his pockets grow heavy, numbly registering that the water was tinged red where it sluiced away the blood oozing down his face. Steam rose around him.
‘What happened …?’ He heard himself speaking. ‘Did I ...?’ Putting his weight on his elbows, he tried to raise himself.
Mrs Sellis leaned over the bath, cold fury blazing in her emerald eyes. She reached a hand up to his face. Thin, bone-white claws unsheathed from her fingers, pushing her false nails up and away with the soft cracking of shattered glue. Her hand flicked, and razor-sharp talons sliced through Will’s throat, and his blood was welling, washing away in the cascading water.
‘Why did you have to interfere?’ she said.
Will collapsed back onto slick enamel, uncomprehending and too weak to reach to his opened throat. His head lolled to the left and he noticed for the first time a small shirt lying crumpled in the far corner of the bathroom. The once-white material was crinkled stiff and dyed the colour of coral with the diluted stains of more dried blood. The end of a school tie poked from underneath one sleeve. Will recognized the coloured stripes.
There was no body, but as the stunned fragments of Will’s mind attempted to coalesce into a functioning whole, he realized that Daniel would never finish his class project. With the inexplicable certainty that comes in dreams, Will knew that the boy’s physical remains, and the mysterious revelation encoded within them, had already been destroyed. As his own corpse soon would be.
A thousand miles away, on the landing outside, Mrs Sellis was speaking into a phone. In controlled tones, she was cancelling a mini-cab booking, apologizing that she had been delayed. She was rearranging it for tomorrow morning.
‘That’s right, yes, seven o’clock. The same destination as before. Anywhere near the train station, please.’
Whatever it was, the family secret the young schoolboy had unwittingly betrayed, his mother was determined to protect it. No matter the cost.
Dollface
‘Just dump your suitcase on the floor for now, Dad! You still take sugar?’
‘One please, love!’
Cups and spoons clinked in the kitchen downstairs as Tom eased his suitcase down, taking care that the plastic wheels didn’t damage the hardwood flooring. Personally, he would have liked to see a nice fitted carpet in here. Something to muffle sounds, hold in warmth and generally cosy the place up a touch. Still, he had to say that Lara had done well for herself.
He walked over to the windows, self-conscious of the loud clicking his heels made, and gazed out at the little garden below with its tidy patch of lawn and neat weatherboard shed. Yes, it was a decent little house, this. Not big enough for a family but for a young, single woman it was a fine starter home. He was proud of his girl and glad now he had taken up her offer of staying with her over the bank holiday weekend.
Tom smoothed his hair in the full-length wall mirror, brushed a wrinkle out of his trousers, and ambled out onto the narrow landing. The lavatory was the end door, he noted, right next to ‘his’ room, which was good to know. The other room up here must be Lara’s. He didn’t mean to be nosey but as the door was already ajar and as he had to walk past that room anyway on his way back to the stairs he thought he might as well poke his head in.
It was surprisingly spacious inside, a bit larger than his room (which was fair enough) but far more cluttered with bits and pieces. A vase of fresh flowers, possibly from the garden – where he had noticed the same variety of rose growing – stood on the windowsill, and books and knick-knacks crowded the bedside cabinet. It all combined to create a cheery and feminine atmosphere, and that was before one even got to the dolls.
They were everywhere. They sat on shelves all around the bedroom walls, they huddled together on top of the wardrobe, and they rested in the corners by the skirting boards. A rocking chair beside the window seated a trio of porcelain-faced Victorian girls, while half a dozen others dozed on the pillows on the bed. The handful of expensive ones were of course in the display case mounted on the far wall, which was just as he would have expected of his Lara. He knew she would take good care of her mother’s babies. Jill would have been every bit as proud of their daughter as he was, and she would have been delighted to see that Lara was not only taking care of but also adding to her late mother’s collection.
He sighed and turned to go – and as he did so he spotted something that shattered his pleasant reverie. Crouched on the floor in the shadows behind the bedroom door was a type of doll he knew to be called a ‘Raggedy Ann’. It was hunched on the ground, leaning forward on its pale arms wi
th its legs tucked away in the darkness beneath as if ready to spring. If standing it would probably have been around three feet tall.
Tom forced himself to keep calm and to breathe slowly.
The doll was a creepy looking thing with big, black, blank, button eyes, and Tom couldn’t help imagining a suggestion of cruelty in the way the ends of its crudely stitched mouth turned up in the slightest of smiles. Seeing the doll brought back an unpleasant memory, and he shivered despite the warmth of the late summer evening.
It took a great deal of effort for him to step out of the room and make his way downstairs without yielding to panic.
‘There you are! Come on, sit down and help yourself to a biscuit. I promise I won’t tell the doctor.’
Lara’s grin faltered.
‘You okay, Dad? You look a bit, well, odd.’
‘I’m fine, love.’ Tom lowered himself into the armchair closest to where his cuppa had been placed. ‘Don’t you go worrying about me.’
‘You sure you’re okay?’
Tom assured her it was nothing. Then, with a rueful laugh at himself for being so suggestible, he made his confession.
‘It was only that doll upstairs, creepy thing. It quite spooked me, that did! Oh, it’s silly really but it reminded me of something that happened years ago. You were only a baby then, and it was before your Mum was taken from us. You know, I’d quite forgotten about it until just then, upstairs.’
The memory had come back clearly though, untarnished by age. Tom had had to work late after a tough day at the office, and the bedroom clock had been showing almost nine as he slipped off his tie and hung his jacket in the wardrobe. The rich aroma of beef casserole filled the house, making his stomach rumble hungrily, and he worried the sound might be loud enough to wake Lara who lay nearby, tucked up asleep in her cot.
Moving as quietly as possible he swapped his shoes for slippers, and as he did so he happened to glance up. Jill must have picked up a new doll for her collection while she’d been out shopping that afternoon. It sat on the shelf directly above his side of the bed, its legs dangling over his pillow, although fortunately there was little chance of it falling onto him during the night given how tight it had been squeezed in between Marie Antoinette and Queen Elizabeth the First.
He frowned, wondering what could possibly have attracted Jill to the thing. It would have been about three feet tall, he estimated, and as he looked up at it, so it gazed back down at him with its big black eyes, smiling a smile he found ever so slightly sinister. No, he didn’t like it, and a few minutes later as he and Jill set about eating their delayed meal he mentioned with casual humour that he had spotted her latest acquisition.
‘Where on earth did you find such a spooky looking thing?’ he asked.
Jill looked at him with blank incomprehension. ‘What do you mean?’
‘That new doll, the big floppy one. Hope it doesn’t give the baby nightmares!’
But Jill insisted she didn’t recognize the doll he was talking about, and she stuck to this despite his best efforts to describe the ugly thing. Tiredness and exasperation distilled into anger. Tom might have had a long day at the office but he knew his description of the doll was perfectly adequate and he could not understand why Jill was refusing to admit as much. It wasn’t as if he’d been criticizing her choice. He’d only been joking.
Tempers frayed to the point where Tom slapped down his knife and fork and insisted Jill go upstairs with him right now so that he could point out the damned thing to her.
‘Fine,’ she snapped, dropping her own cutlery onto her plate and prodding him upstairs ahead of her.
‘Go on,’ she hissed. ‘Show me what you’re talking about but keep your bleeding voice down and don’t wake the baby!’
He marched into the bedroom and stabbed a finger towards – an empty space on the shelf directly above his pillow.
There was no black-eyed doll there, just a slim gap between the familiar shapes of Marie Antoinette and Queen Elizabeth the First. And Tom could see now that there would not have been enough space anyway between those two figures for the doll he remembered. Nevertheless, he made a show of checking the bed below the shelf, and the floor too, in case the doll had fallen, and then he stomped around the room, peering into corners and looking under the bed, long after it had become clear to him that he must have been mistaken. Despite the noise, Lara slept on oblivious in her cot.
‘It was my imagination of course,’ he said.
He took another sip of tea. ‘It’s funny, the tricks the mind can play, especially when you’re tired. It wasn’t until years later that I understood what must have happened.’
Lara indicated for him to go on.
‘I caught a bit of some documentary on the telly that said how your brain can make up stuff to fill in gaps when you’re not sure what you’re looking at. A bit like seeing faces in random patterns in clouds, I suppose. I must have looked at those shadows and the way the light happened to fall onto the shelf, and my tired old brain tried to make sense of what was there. It guessed at another doll and so that’s what I saw.’
He chuckled.
‘Not that I realized that back then,’ he said. ‘To tell the truth, we had a right old argument about it all. Silly really.’
Tragic, too. Fighting over something so trivial when he and Jill would have so little time together afterwards. But that’s the thing about accidents; they come from nowhere.
He finished his tea and settled the cup back onto its coaster.
‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘thinking about it now I still don’t get why my brain would pick such an odd object to fill in a space on a shelf. A Raggedy Ann doll! Hideous things.’
He caught Lara’s eye.
‘I’m sorry, love. Each to his own and all that, and I’m sure you like the look of it, but it really is a pretty horrible old thing.’ He chuckled again.
But the expression forming on Lara’s face was one of blank incomprehension. It was a look that Tom had seen before and he suddenly dreaded what she was about to say. The tea gurgled uneasily in his stomach.
‘Which doll do you mean, Dad?’
He did his best to describe the Raggedy Ann with its black eyes and sly smile. Lara shook her head, baffled. She was acting amused but he could see concern starting to crystallize in her mind. He felt as if he were swimming in the unpleasant memory of that evening long ago.
‘Nope. Doesn’t ring any bells with me,’ said Lara.
Tom tried to laugh, hoping she was teasing him.
‘Come on,’ said Lara, standing up quickly and reaching down to take his hand. ‘You show me which one you mean.’
They walked together into the hall, where it had grown darker as the evening closed in. Lara clicked on the light as they started up the stairs.
Tom followed her, an unaccountable terror tightening around him as she led him into her room and snapped on that light switch too. She had a low-energy bulb in there and it came on only gradually, slowly spilling illumination into the shadows. Impatiently, Tom pushed the door closed and checked the floor behind it. Relief surged through him as he saw the doll sitting exactly where he had expected it to be. Well, of course it was there!
Maybe Lara had been joking after all, although if so it had been in questionable taste. No, most likely he hadn’t given her a very good description and she simply hadn’t twigged that this was the doll he had meant.
He turned to his daughter with a grin, and that was when it struck him. The impact of the sight hollowed his stomach with horror.
All around the bedroom walls, the shelves were filled with Raggedy Anns. Identical dolls crouched together on top of the wardrobe and in the corners by the skirting boards. More sat tensed on the rocking chair and on the bed. Over on the far wall, pressed up against the inside glass front of the display case, were still more Raggedy Anns.
Every doll in the room was the same, and every one of them was facing him, staring at him with those big, black, button eyes.
He reeled, his sense of balance stuttering, forcing him to take a step backwards.
‘Dad?’ asked Lara. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
She stepped in front of him, placing a hand on his shoulder. Her voice was full of concern but Tom saw nothing but blankness in her big, black eyes.
And there was an awful suggestion of cruelty playing at the corners of her smile.
The Zoo
(Originally published in ‘Freestyle Magazine’, No. 2, 1996)
Two glassy eyes stared out from inside the jar. Above them a sticky label, neatly lettered in blue ink, read: ‘Billy 1973 – 1996’.
Matthew did his best to return the teddy bear’s accusing gaze, sipping uneasily from his coffee cup as he did so. The sight of Billy’s head resting at a slight angle against the jar, with bits of old foam stuffing bulging from the torn neck, made him feel a little guilty so he sent out a lazy telepathic message. It was important Billy understood it hadn’t been personal.
‘It wasn’t anything you did. Honestly. You just happened to be there at the wrong time, that’s all.’
And that was true. Generally speaking, Matthew wasn’t a bad sort. It was just that, now and again, the pressures of work got to him in the same way they did to everyone else. As a freelance journalist, he was constantly forced to meet tight deadlines, and, most of the time he could cope with that. Occasionally though, it seemed that whenever he sat down to work someone would interrupt him. These disruptions seemed to come in groups, often going on for several hours (or even days), and that was when his temper, an unfortunate inheritance from his father’s side of the family, would get the better of him. That was how the zoo had been started, nearly six years ago now.
Strangers at the Door: Twelve unsettling tales of horror Page 9