Paper Dolls

by Anya Allyn

  JESSAMINE

  1920

  34. ANOTHER EXISTENCE

  When I wake, I am completely in darkness. I no longer burn or hurt. I feel strange, different. Like I can’t feel anything at all. Numb.

  The shadow. The shadow will be coming for me.

  When I crawl over the hessian bags, the hardness of the gold and diamonds doesn’t hurt my knees as before. Something blocks the way out, something that covers the entire entrance to the cave. Panic courses through me. I try to push against the hard surface but nothing happens. I’m trapped in this terrible place.

  There’s a tear in one of the bags and I can see something inside that isn’t gold and diamonds. It’s an arm. A human arm.

  In terror, I squirm my body around and crawl the other way. I keep moving. The tunnel goes forever—up and down and on and on. But I don’t tire and the rock walls don’t scratch my limbs. It’s as though I am in a waking dream.

  I hear wind and know I must be close to the end. My feet drop into a pool of water. Before I realize what is happening, I am over my head in water. Drowning. I cannot swim. Desperately I strike out. I’ve been under the water now for minutes, but my lungs don’t strain. I feel nothing. I crawl from the water onto rocks.

  I sit and survey the enormous cave around me. There seems no way out at this end either. Then I spot a small patch of sky above, dotted with stars. Grasping a network of tree roots, I climb to the top. I look out into a world where everything is wrong. The trees are gone. Everything is blanketed with ice. Screams echo and bounce dully on hard surfaces that gleam under a purplish moon—a moon that is obscenely large. And something is coming, something that knows I am here. A silver eye flashes.

  I flee back through the tunnel, crawl away, away, away. I must be deep within some kind of feverish dream. I am back with the diamonds and the dead body. My feet kick at the obstacle that blocks the way. I fall through. On my back I stare up at the statue of Saint Jerome. Someone has concreted him against the rock. How did I fall through him? The fever is making me delirious, so delirious I am seeing things, going crazy.

  I stumble through the carousel of the dollhouse and out to the world. It is not night out there. It is day. A day so bright it blinds me.

  A vehicle roars in from the dirt road and parks a distance away from the house. Men in suits jump out with rifles, leaving the doors open as they rush towards the house.

  I don’t care about Audette and don’t know if I should care about Henry either. But I run after the men into the house. The men’s guns are raised to their chests. Henry and Audette sleep on the sofas, dressed in formal clothes—but not the clothes they wore last night. Whiskey bottles and glasses litter the table. The gramophone record is stuck in a groove, playing the same scratchy piece of Chopin over and over. Audette’s hair is different—cut in a new, short style.

  Has more than one day passed since I hid in the tunnel? Was I in there for days and they just left me there?

  The men see them from the foyer and nod at each other. One of them deliberately knocks the ballerina statue that grandfather bought for grandmother to the floor. It shatters with a loud crash.

  In the ballroom, Henry and Audette stagger to their feet. I hide behind the velvet curtains, watching….

  Audette’s eyes are open in a frightened but hazy stare. “Who the hell are you two?”

  The man in the pin-stripe suit tips his chin up. “We’re Baldcott’s men. His brother’s no longer accepting your story that Allan left your little party that night and you don’t know what happened to him.”

  “Listen here.” Henry advances towards the men. “We’ve sworn blue in the face that it’s true. My fourteen-year-old cousin disappeared the same night. We don’t know what happened to either of them.”

  “Oh yeah? Well it’s been four days without answers,” says the man. “Don’t take this personally… but….” He shrugs. A lazy smile edges across one side of his face. He raises his gun and readies it to shoot.

  Audette makes a strangled cry and holds her hands out as though to protect herself.

  The men begin shooting. They shoot and shoot and shoot—the sounds richocheting in my head like stones. Audette and Henry remain standing for a few moments, then slump to the floor—Henry across Audette. A look of surprise is still stamped on Henry’s face. Bright blood streaks across Audette's pale green dress and drips onto the floorboards. Her knee is shattered from the bullets and her leg juts out at an odd angle.

  Shaking, I back into the wall.

  The men stomp away up the stairs.

  Strange, transparent bodies pull free from Henry and Audette’s bodies. The faces of the transparent beings are frozen with fear. They investigate their chests and see the bullet wounds and blood.

  "Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!" yells Henry over and over. He hits the floorboards with his fist. Audette stares at him with her mouth hanging open and her bottom lip quavering. I step out from the curtains and go to them.

  “You… died…” My mind is numb, caught in some horrific nightmare from which I cannot wake.

  Audette gasps at this. She crawls away with jerky motions and huddles on the floor in a corner of the room.

  Henry laughs like a crazy man, his voice high-pitched and breaking. "So now we're all dead...."

  "I'm not dead,” I say quickly.

  "Wake up sweetheart. You're dead as a doornail.” He makes a dismissive gesture in the air with his hand. “I looked for you for two days before I found you in the wall behind that statue. Found the old man’s secret treasure stash too. Sorry for leaving you there, but well, you were dead. I cemented the hole up with the statue of Saint ‘Rome as a mark of respect.”

  “Please stop talking…” My voice crushes into itself.

  The body… the body I crawled over in the tunnel. That was me? My back slides down the wall. Henry stares over at his body then turns his head sharply away, his eyes squeezing shut. Audette stays in her corner, like a captured pawn on a chess board.

  The two men return downstairs with sheets they have pulled from the beds. They wrap Henry and Audette’s bodies in the sheets and carry them out to their car, cursing and swearing at the weight of them. The wheels of the car squeal on the gravel as the car tears away.

  Nausea rises in my stomach. I can’t stay here any longer with the ghosts of Henry and Audette. My feet make no sound as I walk up the stairs and to my room. Everything is as I left it. Grandfather’s note flutters on the mirror, but my image does not show in the mirror’s glass. The breeze coming through the window has more substance than me. I sink to the floor before the dollhouse, before the perfect family in their perfect house. The metronome of the grandfather clock ticks through my chest. Time has stopped for me. I feel no heartbeat.

  The world hangs in grayish streaks of light, streaks that become lighter. Something calls me. Am I about to slip inside another existence? I want to go. Everything within me wants to go.

  But I cannot go. I don’t know where it will take me. Grandfather made me promise patience. I must wait.

  Anguish crawls along my spine, sharper than the shadow’s barbs. I kneel here, before the perfect existence of the dollhouse, looking out over the river, until night closes over me.

  Days and nights flit past—I am barely aware of their passing.

  On the day I return downstairs, Henry is sitting on the blood-spattered sofa and Audette is pacing the floor. Both of them appear to be drifting rather than sitting or walking and I know that I must appear to be drifting as well. I sense that it is the last vestiges of my human consciousness that keep me from falling through the floor into the miles of dirt and rock beneath me. I could fall and fall and fall—perhaps even fall from the earth itself and haunt the empty darkness of space.

  Henry nods a greeting but Audette ignores me, just as much as she ever did. She walks unsteadily to the front door with her busted knee. She shrieks as her hand passes through the handle. She tries again and again to no effect.

  Henry ey
es her with interest. “You have to believe, Audette.”

  “What?” she snaps.

  “You have to make yourself believe you’re solid. I mean, how else did Jessamine manage to get out of the underground? She would have had to push a button for the elevator, right Jess?”

  “Yes.” I stare coldly at Audette.

  “That’s because she didn’t know she was dead.” Henry raises an eyebrow. “We can all do this.”

  “How?” says Audette impatiently.

  “The book,” he tells her. “The first book of the Speculum Nemus—the Mirrored Tree—talks about what to do if you were to get left… between worlds.”

  Her mouth turns down. “So now we’re relying on that musty old book to help us. It didn’t show us the way to the other worlds before.”

  “That’s because we needed the second book, dearest.”

  Audette gives a noisy sigh and flounces off to another room.

  “What are you talking about?” I ask Henry. “What book?”

  Henry shrugs. “The book your grandfather went chasing halfway around the globe to collect.”

  “Grandfather? That’s why he left me? A book?” My voice falters.

  “Not just any book. Dear old gramps was involved in some pretty dark stuff.”

  “You mean… the stuff about going to other worlds?”

  “Exactly. So he did tell you some things.” His eyes sharpen. “What did he tell you?”

  I struggle to remember. “Just that… he needed the final pieces of the puzzle. But he’s coming back for me soon. He promised.”

  He snorts. “He was obsessed with going back to a particular time. And obsessions are not healthy. Don’t be surprised if little Jessamine got overlooked….”

  “You can say what you like, Henry, but you’re not close to grandfather like I am.”

  “Don’t you mean, like you were? You’re dead and he’s still alive. Unless someone knocked him off, which is entirely possible. Anyway, yeah we all know Miss Perfect was the apple of her grandfather’s eye. I, on the other hand, am barely blood. Just the son of an unmarried cousin.”

  “Grandfather still treated you like his own grandson. Paid for your expensive boarding school and then took you onboard the circus.”

  "Yes, yes, yes and I’m eternally grateful and all that blather. I’ve learned more from that old coyote than I ever expected to.” A grin spreads across Henry’s face. “I read his precious book. The first of the Mirrored Tree books. Well, more to the point, I paid for others to interpret the book for me. Very interesting stuff.”

  “Whatever the book said, I don’t want to know. All I know is, grandfather would never do the despicable things you and Audette did….”

  A gleam fades in Henry’s eyes. “What are you talking about?”

  “I saw what you did that night. I saw what really happened to Thomas.”

  His mouth falls open. “How?”

  “I went down there, to the dollhouse one night, to see where everyone was. And I found them. And I saw you and Audette… and Thomas.”

  “Well you weren’t supposed to see any of that. You don’t understand what we were trying to do, kid. That Thomas character just wouldn’t stop snooping. He thought we were up to no good and he was determined to expose us.” He shrugs with his palms open to me.

  “I saw what the shadow did to Thomas.” My tone is flat.

  Henry drops his hands down, stops trying to explain himself away.

  “What on earth was that thing?” I ask him.

  He makes an exasperated sound, like the one Conrado used to make when he was trying to teach me how to get my timing right on my trapeze performance. “That thing was nothing on earth. Nothing from earth. We tried to open a crack, a door onto another level. But I inadvertently opened a world where great serpents are real. Almost drove me insane the first time I laid eyes on one of those things. But there’s more than her out there—much, much more. Anything you can think of, anything you can imagine—is real… somewhere. We dream of such things, here on earth, never realizing in our dream-state our minds are peering into other worlds.”

  “No….”

  “I’m afraid it’s true. We thought that the worlds just consisted of us, of humans, with infinite copies of us living on infinite earths in infinite universes. And there is. But there are other universes, other beings—infinite universes filled with them. The place where we encountered the serpent is just one speck of sand on an endless beach.”

  He smirks at my horrified expression. “Look, you saw that your grandfather’s efforts were weak and ineffective. He drove himself looney trying to reach the other worlds. He spent every cent he had on obtaining the books that would teach him how to get to these worlds. But the second book proved so elusive, he bankrupted the circus. I was trying to find a shortcut. You can’t blame me for that.”

  “Grandfather told me… about the other worlds. He said… he said I could see daddy again.”

  Henry nods slowly. “Life exists on many levels, Jessamine. You’re dead of course on this plane of existence, but you’re living a billion different lives… out there.”

  I turn to stare at him.

  “And yes, you have your precious daddy on other worlds.”

  “That’s what grandfather was trying to do…,” I whisper.

  “Yeah. Trying to go to a world where your father wasn’t dead yet and stop it from happening—never buy that cursed Wheel of Death for the circus. Live in that house he was building in Florida for part of the year and travel the rest of the year.”

  “How do you know… all of this?”

  “I was part of the group that were helping him… in his endeavors. The group was called the Nemus—Latin for tree. Most of the others were people who had lost loved ones, people who desperately wanted to go back in time. People who had the money to fund your grandfather as he tried to get the books and the knowledge.”

  I remembered the people in grandfather’s tent that night, remembered Zeke—the man who had lost his children in a fire, remembered the woman with the heavy jewelry pleading for a guarantee.

  “But the whole thing went on for years,” Henry continued. “I tried looking into other… avenues. Ways of making it happen quicker.”

  “I know you, Henry. I don’t believe you would have ever have put all that effort in simply to go to… a place… where we could have daddy again. You and daddy didn’t get along very well.”

  He scowls. “Simon never tried to get along with me, either.”

  Audette sweeps into the room. “Who cares about that old stuff? I’m tired of being here, cooped up in this miserable house. Henry, you need to find a way to get us out of this mess. And don’t bring up that stupid book again. If we can’t open a bloody door, how are we supposed to turn the pages of a book?”

  He slumps back in the sofa. “Where there’s a will….”

  “We’re ghosts, sweetie.” Audette flung her arms up. “Wisps of air. Memories.”

  “It’s a bloody wonder you even had the brain power to be a magician’s assistant, Audette.”

  Her face crumples. “I hate you.” She sinks into the sofa opposite Henry, staring into space.

  I cross my arms across my body, but there is no comfort to be found. I cannot feel. There is no touch or warmth.

  “Henry…” I turn to gaze out of the window, into the bright day where people everywhere were living their lives, unaware they were living those lives over and over. “Why did you have to bring the serpent here? It doesn’t belong here. Grandfather wouldn’t have done such a thing.”

  He sighs. “The serpent isn’t here. These creatures are able to separate themselves, so to speak—they’re able to cast their shadows out. What you saw is not the serpent itself. Just its shadow.”

  “But the shadow… is able to kill. I saw it kill people within seconds.”

  “Yeah, they’re lethal beings.” He tilted his head. “Hang on—did you say people? Who else did you see the shadow take?” Reali
zation dawned across his face. “Ah, Mr. Allan Baldcott. It got him, didn’t it? Now I know what the hell happened to him. Anyway, no loss.”

  “He chased me. That’s why I ended up in that cave in the wall. I was hiding in grandfather’s car when he found me.”

  A brief look of regret steals into Henry’s eyes. “I didn’t know you were there. I wouldn’t have left you… with that bastard.”

  If I’d jumped from the car that night, when Henry was still there, I would still be alive. And Henry and Audette would still be alive. The line between life and death was so thin that any small event—something you did or didn’t do—could snap that line.

  Audette makes a fake yawn. “Well all that is over with now. Done and dusted.”

  I glare pointedly at her. She’d sent me to the monster that had been Mr. Balcott. She evaded my gaze, looking anywhere but at me.

  “What happens now…?” I speak my words to the air, to the rustling wind outside, to the reaches of space with the infinite worlds, to the infinite emptiness inside me.

  Henry leant his head back. “The Speculum Nemus said that if you are caught between worlds, you must remain where you are and grow strong. The first thing is to rest, sleep. It claimed the terror of finding yourself what people call dead strips all your energies away. When you have built up enough energy, you can begin to train your mind.”

  “How long does it take… to build up this energy?”

  His eyes grow cold. “It didn’t say.”

  “So that’s it?

  “It’s all we’ve got. For now, we’re in limbo….”

  “Grandfather will be back soon. He’ll know what to do.”

  He makes a derisive sound. “He won’t be able to so much as see you. He’ll come back here and see everyone gone and the blood stains on the floor. He’ll leave and never come back, and you’ll have no way of stopping him.”

  Henry is right. And I can’t let that happen. I must do what I can to become strong while I wait for grandfather’s return.