by Cat Rambo
The eyelids clicked open and it looked at me.
I was so startled I dropped it. It fell to the dusty shag with a clunk then landed on its side, a few feet away, staring at the wall. It didn’t speak, but its gaze shifted from side to side, assessing its surroundings.
I went over to it from behind and picked it up, still facing away from me. I put it down on the plate on the dresser, which now made sense to me.
“Persephone,” the head said.
A chill ran down my spine. I knew that voice from somewhere, somewhere distant, only half-remembered.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Why are you here?” It spoke in English, but it did have a faint German accent.
“To take back the pieces of you that Mother stole.” I stared at him. “Looks like I found a bonus too.”
He was silent for a moment as though calculating. “You will reunite me with my body?”
“Does that make it okay, if I’m going to?” I was curious—clearly this thing had little sense of loyalty.
“Perhaps,” it said.
My phone rang.
I answered with a sense of ease. Even if Mom sped back, I’d have plenty of time. But Eterno’s voice was urgent. “She left some time ago, but my phone died. You’ve got maybe five minutes.”
Adrenaline jolted me. “Well,” I told the head as I gathered it and the limbs up. “If you keep quiet, perhaps I’ll reunite you with your body. Shout or cry out, and I’ll do nothing of the sort.”
“I will cooperate,” the head said, and it kept its word as I left the hotel through a back stairway, the limbs and head in a bundle beneath my left arm. I heard my mother entering even as I was exiting, and so I kept moving until I was well away.
Once we were in the car, the head kept trying to talk to me as we drove along. I turned the air conditioner up but still felt flushed. Feverish and panicked.
“Why do I recognize your voice?” I asked it.
“This isn’t the first time we’ve spoken,” it said. “When you were a child, we talked more than once.”
“While you were still with my grandmother or after my mother had stolen you from her?”
It was silent, as though it lacked the words. Finally, it said, “Both. But your mother forbade me to make myself known to you once you were old enough to talk.”
“Why?” What had my mother feared would happen if the head and I conversed?
It pursed its lips and rolled its eyes in the equivalent of a shrug. “I don’t remember,” it said, voice bland as unbuttered toast.
“Bullshit,” I said, and we didn’t speak again, all the way home. Even there, I refrained from putting it in the same house as the limbs. I didn’t know if it could control them, but I thought there must have been a reason why my grandmother had scattered them so thoroughly.
I went back up to the parlor. Again, I opened the mason jar. Again the lights dove and splashed.
“You know you can only do this three times, right?” the doll asked me.
“Nope. That would have been a good thing to mention that first time though.”
The doll’s silence was as eloquent as a shrug.
“What happens the third time?” I asked.
“I will answer questions for a third time.”
There was a pause. I had that maddening I’m-missing-something feeling that usually only occurred during encounters with my mother or grandmother.
“What about the fourth time?” I said cautiously.
“After the third time, I will vanish into the afterlife.”
“Got it. Three times only. So let’s get answering. What about Heinrich? Can he reassemble himself?”
“If the pieces are close enough together, yes.”
“How would she have disassembled him?”
“There is a failsafe mechanism.”
“What does it look like? Can you find it the way you did him?”
“I cannot. It looks like nine small beans made of purple metal. They snap together. Squeeze once to disassemble him.” She hesitated. “Squeeze twice to wipe his personality and memories.”
“Why didn’t you do that?”
“I told you. He begged me. He said he’d been condemned to a life of torment and asked me to give him a respite.”
My mind raced over what I’d seen. I thought of the odd purple succulents. “I might know where those are.” I hesitated but I couldn’t think of anything else to ask Susan Day.
“I’m sorry my grandmother killed you and put your ghost in a jar,” I blurted.
“Are you sure you’re Gloria’s granddaughter?”
“I think I am, but,” I admitted, “by now nothing would surprise me.”
My grandmother’s face appeared in reproachful memory, and I thought of all she’d done for me over the years. “No. That’s not fair. I know she was my grandmother. I loved her. And you must have liked—maybe even loved—her once, mustn’t you have? After all, she was your protégé.”
“She was.” The doll’s glassy eyes were fixed on some point in the middle distance. “I did. But your grandmother’s façade was much more loveable than what lay underneath. Underneath she was cold steel, couldn’t be trusted to work to anyone’s advantage but her own. Perhaps as her own flesh and blood you occupied a special place in her heart, but I could claim no similar advantage. I thought I could—she let me think so—for a long time. It wasn’t until she pressed the pillow over my face that I realized I’d been deluding myself all that time.”
I could believe every word of it. Grandmother had been ruthless beyond anyone else I knew, with the exception of my mother.
But was it really true? I thought of the crates of Day’s belongings arriving, with the word that she’d willed them to my grandmother. Object after object, the beginning of the hoarding; the beginning of her guilt eroding the glitter.
“I’ll make this right,” I said.
“How will you recompense me for the years she snatched away?” the doll demanded.
“I don’t know,” I said, “But I will.”
***
My mother had left a voicemail screaming vituperation at me on my phone.
I listened to it, shaken, and did not erase it. I’d save it for any time I was tempted to give in to her again.
I was right about the purple planters. Not about how easy it would be to get to them. The courtyard plants grew together in tangled clumps and plants had unexpected thorns, wickedly long, that stung like wasps. One by one, I wrestled the pots free from their entanglement. Each was too overgrown to come out of the pot easily, and so I smashed them, picking through the clumps of dirty roots to find, each time, the metal bean that Susan Day had described, tangled in the long tendrils. I couldn’t bear to leave the plants there, outside their pots on the concrete, so I replanted them in the narrow strip of soil near the central fountain.
My mother followed the phone call with an appearance within the hour.
“I’ll call the police and tell them you stole from me,” she threatened from the other side of the door.
“Oh please,” I said. “You can’t prove that anything here is yours.”
“Not true. I have a certificate of ownership for a valuable antique automaton, a valuation signed by Christie’s in London. It describes it all in detail.”
“Well, good luck finding it in here, that’s all I can say.”
“I’ll keep this place so tied up that you will never be able to dispose of a single thing. You’ll be saddled with inheritance taxes for the value of the dolls, with no way to pay it.”
This was more convincing than any of her other threats. I wouldn’t be able to sell anything, according to the terms of the will, until I’d finished doing a complete evaluation of the houses and the estate holdings. I wondered again what my grandmother had been thinking.
Surely there had been more rationale behind it than to complicate my life as much as possible? You might have thought a true magician would have had some clue that her death would coincide with the tail end of a time on my own calendar when I was decidedly short on funds.
“Do whatever you need to do,” I told her, “but in fifteen minutes I’m calling the cops and having you tossed out of here.”
It was a good thing I went upstairs after that. While Susan Day had been right that the pieces kept in different houses couldn’t reassemble into each other, she’d forgotten to tell me that pieces in the same house could—and would—combine. An arm was pulling the chest across the floor, the hand exploring everything. It had pulled the coverlet off the bed and torn it into strips that littered the floor.
Apart from each other, the limbs had been lifeless. Just odd toys. But combined, they’d taken on a menacing aspect that made me use the metal beads to force them apart, then lock one in a trunk, the other in a closet on the other side of the house.
My mother shouted for a while outside, then went away.
Meanwhile I did some experimenting with the metal beads. They’d snapped together into a strange, hollow little ball, which could be compressed in the hand but with difficulty. Doing so did make the pieces fly apart from each other, with enough force that several inches separated them.
I went through and rearranged the configuration of pieces as best I could, and when I had finished, I realized why my grandmother had hidden them the way she did, in order to keep the limbs as far apart from each other as possible.
With the addition of the head, it was almost impossible to rearrange. I called Agent Forest. I said, “I don’t know where that memorabilia is yet that you’re looking for, but I do have a suspicion. My mother showed me a certificate of authenticity for something described as a “valuable antique automaton.” Might that be the sort of thing you’re looking for?”
“Indeed,” he breathed out. “You’ve done us a valuable service, Ms. Aim.”
It wouldn’t buy me much time, but a little.
Was there any way to just turn the thing off? I went to where I’d hidden the head in the basement, wrapped in blankets in a trunk so it wouldn’t be able to call out to anyone. I took the beads with me, held them in one hand as I unwrapped it with the other.
“Why shouldn’t I just erase you?” I asked it.
“Why shouldn’t you just give me back to your mother?”
“You’re a war machine. You have no ethics. You’re made to destroy.”
“I was made for many reasons. My creator, Doktor Eisenmacher, made me in his dead son’s image, and taught me how to do all the things young Otto Eisenmacher had been adept in, such as conversation and being able to play the pianoforte. But yes, I am also made to create and execute military strategies.”
“How did Susan Day come to steal you?”
It laughed. “Steal? Eisenmacher gave me to her. He said he didn’t want to see me used for war and that she’d keep me safe. He didn’t know she was a spy, but it made no difference. She told her superiors I’d been destroyed and kept me for herself.”
I fingered the construction of beads uneasily. Part of me felt that this thing had controlled my mother all my life, and that if it were gone, maybe we’d have a chance to heal our relationship.
“I’m valuable,” the head said. “I have the knowledge of a thousand libraries accumulated in my brain.”
“Did he include psychological theories in the programming?” I said bitterly. “Is that how you learned to manipulate my mother so well?”
I meant it as a joke, but it took me seriously. “All the mental theories. And the data our scientists gathered.”
“Data?” I said softly.
“They had thousands of subjects. They learned so much.”
I couldn’t help it. My fingers spasmed on the device once. But the second time it was by choice.
Something clicked and whirred inside the head and it fell silent. I didn’t bother putting it back in the trunk but, instead, took it back to my bedroom.
A knock at the door. When I opened it, Eterno stood there. I blinked at him. He said, “For Heaven’s sake, child, invite me in.”
“Is it like vampires, where you can’t come in unless I invite you?” I said with interest, but he shook his head.
“It’s because I believe in courtesy,” he said wryly. He looked around with fondness as he entered.
“What were you and Grandmother to each other?” I demanded.
“The truth—I am your grandfather, but only partly,” he admitted. “That—machine helped influence your mother in the womb as well. At least, she absorbed some of his energies. She knew it, too, somehow. Even as a baby, if he was there in the room, anywhere, even when she couldn’t see or hear him, her head would be turned his way.”
“Why did she keep him?”
“Your grandmother? I don’t think you understand what the thing is like when it’s whole. It’s charming. Handsome. Powerful.”
“You said its vocabulary was limited last time.”
“At first it was, but the thing was self-adjusting. Self-teaching.”
“You don’t need to worry about it anymore,” I said.
Another knock at the door, just as the teakettle went off.
“You get it,” I said. “It’s the agents, I suspect.”
Eterno frowned but did not demur. I went to make tea.
When I came back, it was not the agents there with Eterno, but my mother. She stood there, oddly enough, with the missing metal hand pointed into his side. Apparently Eterno knew more than I did about its capabilities; he was keeping very still.
She said to me, “Where is he? Where’s Heinrich?”
“Not here,” I said.
She jabbed the finger into Eterno’s ribs. “Bring him here or I kill the old man.”
“He’s your father.”
“No. Heinrich’s my father. Bring him to me.”
What could I do?
“He’s upstairs,” I said. “I can go get him.”
Her eyes glittered at me. How had I never guessed the depths of her lunacy?
“All right,” she said, “but if you try some trickery, you should know I will kill him.” She pulled back her hand and pointed downward. With a crack! and smell of electricity, a projectile whizzed from the barrel, shooting Eterno in the leg. He cried out and went to his knees, then dropped forward onto his hands. She stood there with the hand aimed anew at the back of his head and nodded in challenge at me.
“All right,” I said hastily. “All right.” I went upstairs.
What to do? But a plan glimmered in my head.
I might have removed Heinrich’s personality, but I still had his body.
What can you do with a ghost? You can put them in things, Eterno said in my head. And I hadn’t restored Day to her jar yet.
***
When my mother saw the automaton descending the stairway, she rushed forward, pushing me out of the way. I went to Eterno, who lay in a spreading pool of blood.
“Stay with me, old man,” I said to him.
He gripped my hand. His lips were gray beneath the snowy beard. “I’ll try,” he rasped.
I looked at the blue dazzle in the automaton’s eyes.
“Now,” I said.
I expected the ghost to disarm her. Or something, anything. Not reach out, disregarding the flash bang of the shots, to take her by the neck and snap it. Not to drop her to the floor.
Susan Day turned to me. She might have said some word of explanation. Or recrimination. Some lengthy thing about justice served. But she spared me that.
Eterno squeezed my hand. I pulled my stare from the automaton and fumbled for my cell phone.
***
The police had plenty of questions, but in the end no pro
of, only suspicions. I took the United States up on its offer to inventory and appraise Grandmother’s belongings, which saved me some amount of money, a whole lot of time, and an incalculable amount of sweat and stink. While they worked, I had my mother cremated and arranged a small, tasteful memorial service.
I asked people instead of sending flowers to make a donation to the same museum of stage magic that took so many of Grandmother’s things as donations.
A company suggested by Agent Forrest packed up other stuff and sent it off for online auctions. He and his fellow agent were disappointed that they’d found no trace of the war relics they were seeking but, between the two of us, Eterno and I had been able to cook up enough false leads to keep them busy for a while.
Eterno showed up to oversee my final move out with the last items from my grandmother’s house, including the dolls and even three mannequins wearing costumes she’d worn in the early seventies, swathed in clear plastic but still seeping trickles of glitter.
“Careful,” I called to the movers. “Those are valuable.”
“Selling it all?” Eterno asked. He’d brought me coffee, black, from a nearby shop, and we stood there watching the movers and sipping from the cups.
“Most of it,” I said. “But I’m buying my own place, over on Devore, so I’m keeping a few things.”
“Staying in the area, eh? Good, good.” His lip quirked up.
I watched the movers seal up the truck. Two of the mannequins were going to the museum of magic. The third was sticking with me, because under the sequined dress and some carefully arranged paper-mache was the automaton, with Susan’s ghost still in it.
She’d agreed that some time inhabiting that shell might be a reasonable recompense for the time my grandmother had stolen from her. And she’d even indicated that she was looking forward to sharing quarters with me and investigating this strange new world, seizing the glitter, as my grandmother might have said.