“See here: she is a Moulandre and Rasp from Bueurze. Again, bisque. There are so many, David.”
She gestured towards the dolls seated on the chairs.
“Wax over Papier-Mâché. Vuissart and Kuennier: they created the most exquisite automated models.”
He recognized, then, the doll that he had found by his doorstep. It was positioned on a chair next to another doll whose features were obscured by a small white bonnet. It was wearing the same shoes and the same blue dress, but there was an ugly maroon mark across its face that had not been there previously.
“Can I presume that some of these are automated?”
“Oh, no. Not at all.”
“But – the doll—” he said. The room really was very cold indeed, and he felt the prickle of dampness in his armpits, “—it was on my doorstep.”
“Like I said. She is full of mischief.”
She looked at him for a few seconds without moving.
“Marguerite,” she said.
She lifted the doll from the chair and held it towards him, as if indicating that he should take it. He looked at the mark on its face. It ran from the right eye down to the jaw.
“She says she is very grateful to you for helping her find her way home,” Kaaiija said, with an expression of intense seriousness. “She is very grateful to you.”
He did not know how to respond. In truth, he felt utterly ridiculous.
“Very grateful.”
Kaaiija repositioned the doll on the chair. He heard the whisper of the dress fabric against the material on the armrest. She turned towards him, and for one moment her face was full of anguish, as if she were stricken by some deep and private pain.
“We are all so very lonely here, David. Our poor forgotten family.”
“I’m very sorry to hear you say that.”
“It is the same wherever we go.”
She closed her eyes. When she reopened them the expression was gone, and replaced by something akin to hunger. Her eyelids narrowed and she took a step towards him.
“I wish, David, to thank you, as well.”
Although he truly had no intention of doing so, there was something about her manner that made him move towards her.
“You are really very kind,” she said.
He shivered. Her body was in front of him, and he went to her as if controlled by unseen hands. She put her hands on his body and then her lips were against his, inexpressibly cold. The room was full of her perfume. Their lips touched for only the briefest of moments before they parted. But what happened then was so frightening and so utterly unlike anything that he had ever experienced that he wondered if he had not simply imagined what he saw. What happened was this: as she pulled away her face shifted somehow, and in one fleeting moment he gained the impression of that which lay underneath the make-up being completely beetle-black all over. She looked at him sharply, as if she had sensed his unease.
“So kind,” she said.
He took a step away from her, and sensing some obstruction on the ground, looked down to his feet.
His shoes were covered in hair: strands of cobweb-fine hair.
“David,” she said.
“Forgive me, but – it’s quite late,” he replied, though he had in fact lost all sense of time. He was no longer sure what day it was, or if it even mattered.
“It’s quite late,” he repeated.
“It is late,” he heard her say.
He looked at her and saw that her black eyes were glistening greedily. Something in the room moved: a doll seated on the window-sill shifted slightly, and he caught its movement in his peripheral vision. He felt, suddenly, on the edge of something utterly inexplicable. He shifted his feet: the hair sighed lightly around them.
“The dolls’ hair—” he said, “—Madeleine, Marguerite – it is very realistic.”
“The hair is real. It is all my own.”
“But you said they were nineteenth century?”
“It is true,” she replied.
He took a further step back. The hairs had amassed around his feet: a number too great to count. The eyes of the doll in the white bonnet rolled over once, the lashes very long and dark.
“Kaaiija,” he said.
And then he heard it: the same noise he had heard earlier in the living room, only now the location of its source was evident. Something was moving in the room that lay to the other side of the hallway: something that moved as if taking great pains to conceal that very fact. At once, Kaaiija’s expression became utterly vacant.
“My father,” she said. “He is awake.”
“Your father?” he said, with some alarm. “Forgive me but I thought that you lived alone?”
“Alone?” she replied. “No, not alone.”
“In that case I should go. I’m sorry, I had no idea,” he gasped.
She took a step towards him.
“Will you not stay, David? My father would love to meet you. I have told him so much about you.”
He noticed that the area around her lips was very grey and smeary looking. He raised his fingertips to his own lips and they came away covered in some waxy white substance that had got in under the nails.
“I’m sorry,” was all he could say. The thought of meeting the woman’s father was not a concept that he could entertain.
“I am sure the two of you will have much to talk about,” she said.
“Forgive me, Kaaiija,” he replied.
She looked at him very gravely.
“It’s Kaaiija,” she said.
She laid a hand on his, and it was as if there was no movement in her at all: as if she were nothing more than a brittle shop-window dummy. He tried to release his hand from her grip, but he found that he could not. She laughed: a horrid sharp sound.
“David, you look so frightened. You don’t have to look as if I were about to eat you.”
He went to say her name, but then he stopped. Something was moving in the hallway behind him. It was moving very slowly, but its tread was that of something enormous: a person who may have to lower his or her head by a considerable degree in order to enter a room. He realized too, that the room was now filled with movement. The dolls were awake. The doll with the teacup in its hand was standing up from the table, its petticoat caught above its wooden knees. Its head revolved on its axis with a dull creak: a painted smile upon its lips. The doll with the ugly mark on its face – his doll, Marguerite, he thought irrationally – had stretched itself to its full height and was clambering down the side of the armchair in which it had been seated. He watched with mute horror as the doll wearing the white bonnet slowly raised its head and revealed to him the face that lay beneath.
He heard the doll say his name in a voice that was shrill with childlike glee, and then Kaaiija’s mouth was full of laughter: her teeth like shards of glass: her face a mask of cracked porcelain. Something loomed above him, its shadow vast, and he understood, with a sudden clarity, that there would be no remains: no, no remains. Not even his pale white feet or small moulded tongue would be spared. He heard a voice utter a word in a language long dead and silent, and then the thing that called itself Kaaiija fell upon him: her eyes black and glassy: her embrace as dark as deepest winter, and from every side: small pairs of eyes watching him, unblinking.
STEVEN ERIKSON
This Rich Evil Sound
STEVEN ERIKSON IS THE PEN-NAME for Steve Lundin. Although born in Toronto, Canada, he grew up in Winnipeg. Erikson began his career as an archaeologist, and worked in this profession for eighteen years.
His first book was a collection of short stories, A Ruin of Feathers, published under the Lundin byline in 1991. As Erikson he has published the novels Gardens of the Moon, Deadhouse Gates, Memories of Ice, House of Chains, Midnight Tides, The Bonehunters and Reaper’s Gale in a projected ten-book series entitled “The Malazan Book of the Fallen” from Bantam/Transworld in the UK and Tor Books in the US. He has also written a number of novellas, published by PS Publishing
and Night Shade Books.
“When this story went through its workshop at Iowa, it was received the way most of my stuff was received: no one quite knew what to make of it,” admits the author. “Maybe it edged a little too close to genre and made my fellow students uncomfortable. But then, most of my stuff made them uneasy, when even the sniff of genre was not to be found.
“I seem to recall that students started asking questions: ‘Is it true it can get cold enough in Canada so that trees explode?’ (Yes, black spruce, specifically). ‘Can someone actually sleep in a tent when it’s that cold?’ (Yes, but it’s not much fun). ‘So, there were wolves, but what about polar bears?’ (Sure, plenty, and then I described how the polar bears come through my home city of Winnipeg every spring – all right, I was lying, you’d have to travel about eight hundred miles due north to see something like that in Churchill, Manitoba). Lying? Afraid so, with a straight face at that.
“Anyway, some of the central threads to this story were recounted to me by an old man wintering over in Whiteshell Park. Sometimes, the best thing a writer can do is listen.”
I’M NOT AN OLD MAN. Sometimes the tracks old men think along are so deep cut nobody can see where they’re going, maybe not even see the tracks themselves. But then I think that maybe there are different kinds of old. People say I should’ve been born a hundred years ago. Does that make me old in some way? They don’t mean harm when they talk like that. It’s just that they don’t know me. I was in love with this girl, once, back in high school. Her name was Linda, and she was pretty popular, I guess. One day in the lunchroom I got down on one knee and sang for her a love song. One of my buddies had laid a dare on me – they sat at their table laughing and cheering. It was something I wanted to do anyway. No harm in it. The guys thought it was silly, but that’s all right, too.
I know people make fun of me. I just look at things different from others. Before I got big I used to get in fights. There’s always guys who don’t like the way you look at things. They think it makes you weaker than them, maybe, and that’s what they were trying to prove by fighting me. By the time I was fifteen they left me alone. They still figured me weak in my head, probably, but my body didn’t look weak, not any more.
I’m twenty now, so people have been leaving me alone for about five years. I don’t mind. I like being alone. I quit school when I was sixteen, headed out into the bush. I spent the winter in northern Manitoba, nearly froze my feet off. I learned to lay trap lines from this Ojibwa Indian. He didn’t know a word of English, except “nineteen seventy”. I tried to teach him “nineteen eighty” because that was the year, but I don’t think he ever got it. When I got back to Winnipeg I applied for and got a trapping licence and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since, out in Whiteshell Park.
In summers the park is full of people, so I head to Grassy River where it’s quieter. But in the winter the only people in the park are rangers and trappers and old people who don’t like the city and stay in their cabins. I don’t mind running into those people, because we usually look at things the same way, and they don’t make fun of me or anything.
This winter I was working Redrock Lake and the Whiteshell River. I’d heard from one of the rangers that Charlie Clark was wintering for the first time up at his cottage on Jessica Lake, so I decided to pay him a visit. Ever since they’d retired, Charlie and his wife had been spending the summers out here. But his wife died last summer, so he was all alone. I knew he’d be glad for some company.
I use a tent, but most trappers got cabins, because the years just pull at you and pretty soon a tent or quincy’s too cold. It gets hard checking the lines when all your bones ache. Charlie wasn’t a trapper, but I knew he’d understand and put me up for a couple days so I could dry out and get toasty. I’m pretty tough but I don’t mind some luxury when I can get it.
Getting to Jessica Lake was easy. The Whiteshell River connects most of the lakes in the park. I broke camp an hour before dawn and walked the river. Winter’s the quietest season. You’re the only thing moving, the only thing making any sound. You listen to your breath, to the backpack creaking in its straps, to the crunch of your snowshoes. You can sing songs to pass the time and your voice sounds beautiful. And you can think about things, taking all the time you want to, with nobody pushing you for answers. You can think as slow as you like, and the rest of the world, if it cares at all, just waits. No ticking clocks, just shadows all blue and soft and moving slower than you can see.
I reached the park highway by noon. They keep it ploughed for the cross-country skiers who come out from Winnipeg on warm week-ends and for people like Charlie Clark.
I smelled wood smoke long before I saw his cottage. There’d been a cold snap the last couple weeks. No snow, no wind, just that rich silence under a sun-dogged sky. The smoke hung in the air like it had no place to go, smelling bittersweet because it was black spruce. It’s not a good wood to burn, since it goes fast and doesn’t give off much heat. I figured Charlie was getting low on his wood supply. A few minutes later the cottage came into view, its windows lit.
I gave a shout just to warn him, then turned into the driveway. At the porch I unstrapped my snowshoes. Charlie had come to the window and was now trying to open the frozen door. He had to shove it hard a couple times before it swung free of its frame.
“Goddammit, Daniel, it’s good to see you! Get in here!”
“You running low on wood, Charlie?” I asked as I stepped inside and Charlie closed the door behind me.
“Just one pile’s getting down,” Charlie said. “I cleared some black spruce from out back last summer. Just using it up. How the hell have you been?”
“Good.” I took my backpack off, started stripping down some. “Thick pelts this winter.”
Charlie shook his head, rubbing his brow. “Animals. They always know when it’s gonna be a cold one. They always know, don’t they?”
“Sure do,” I said. We went into the den and sat down in front of the fireplace. The ranger had told me that Charlie had taken his wife’s death pretty hard, and I could see that he didn’t look too good. The skin of his face was pasty and yellow. And I saw that a shaking had come to his hands. “How you been, Charlie?” I asked, stretching my feet towards the fire.
“Strange winter, eh?” Charlie looked down, rubbing his forehead again. “I know this sounds funny, but I’m tasting metal these days.” He squinted at me. “Can’t really explain it, Daniel. But ever since the snows hit for real, I might as well be eating lead ten times a day, from the taste I’m tasting.”
I glanced at him, then looked away. He was giving me this real troubled look. I stared at the fire. “Don’t know,” I finally said. “Maybe it’s the lake water.”
“Hell no, it isn’t like that.” He paused. “Had a heart attack last summer, did you know that?”
I shook my head. “Didn’t hear anything about it. How bad was—”
“The doctor in the city – I forget his name, he took over when Bill retired, just a kid, really – he’s been phoning me about once a week, asking me how I’m doing. So I tell him, but he says it’s just psychological. He says there’s no way somebody can taste a pacemaker. I suppose he knows what he’s talking about.” Charlie looked up at me and smiled. “But he was the one making the connection with the wind-up, not me, right? I just said to him, ‘I keep tasting metal, Doc. How about that?’ ”
“And what did he say to that?”
“Psychological, like I told you.”
“Oh yeah. Right.” I studied the flames, listened to the snapping wood. It was burning real fast, that black spruce. For some reason I wanted it to slow down. It was burning too fast, just eating itself up and hardly any warmth reaching my feet. The way the wood spit out sparks bothered me, too, like words coming so quick all you can do is nod, answering everything “yes” no matter what you hear.
“Young people,” Charlie said. “The ones in the city, like that doc.” He looked at me. “The city people – ca
n you figure them, Daniel?”
I laughed. “If I could maybe I wouldn’t be here.”
“You can’t figure them, then?”
I shrugged. “They’re just different, that’s all. Like when things go quiet – they gotta make noise. So when they do something funny everybody laughs real loud, and it’s not quiet anymore, and they get comfortable again. And winter, and the bush – well, they don’t know what winter is, and they don’t like the bush, the way it just swallows their noise. You couldn’t laugh loud enough to keep that from happening, I bet.”
Charlie was nodding. “Always questions, that’s what I notice. Always ‘why?’ They ask ‘why?’ and then they answer themselves right away. ‘Why? Because.’ Just like that. Making everything seem so simple. Know what I mean? And they’re always so suspicious, especially about complicated things, like when I say I’m tasting metal. ‘Why?’ ‘Psychological.’ Just like that. I was a teacher, did you know that, Daniel?”
“Sure.”
“Ten-year-old kids like that question. ‘Why?’ How old are you, Daniel?”
“Twenty,” I said, feeling uncomfortable for some reason, maybe about the way he kept using my name. He made it sound strange, like it wasn’t my own. I thought about what I’d said, about city people, and I wondered at how angry I got saying it.
Charlie was talking. “Me and Mary couldn’t have kids, did you know that? It was a hard thing for her to accept. I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind at all. The Lord just didn’t see fit, that’s all.”
The room should have felt cozy, with the bear rug between us and all the knick-knacks crowding the shelves, the mounted jack and the antlers on the walls, the easy chair deep and comfortable. But it didn’t feel cozy. I put more black spruce on the fire, then pulled my chair closer to it. “Anybody else drop by?” I asked.
Charlie nodded. “Yeah, the strangest winter. And it’s not just the taste in my mouth, either. When it was snowing the ploughs used to come and clear the road a couple times a week. I’d go out and give them a wave, let them know I haven’t run out of batteries or something.” He laughed. “On the really cold days I flagged them down, gave them a thermos of hot chocolate. And you know, no matter if it was a different driver next week, I always got the thermos back. Sometimes we talked a bit. You know, just to keep the jaws greased. I told them about the buck, the one that comes across the lake every morning, right up to the cabin looking for food. And the very next week one of the drivers drops off two bales of hay. How about that?”
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