A Rag Doll's Guide to Here and There

by Richard Roberts

  He was beautiful. And if he could be, then maybe I could be, patches and mismatched eyes and all.

  Was he even a boy? I’d been told to name him, and I wanted him to be a boy, so… I suppose he was not. Holding my hand out nervously, I stammered, “Oh, my. Oh, my. It’s nice to meet you properly. My name is Heartfelt, and your name is Just Right.”

  He grinned, the blur of his mouth turned up sharply on one side in delight. “It is, isn’t it?” He took my hand and gave it a squeeze, then dropped it with the same kind of nervousness I felt.

  Pincushion poked me in the side, and I broke free from the trance of… surprise. Yes. Definitely surprise. I tried to avoid looking at her knowing smirk, but I couldn’t avoid the satisfaction in her voice. “This is our picnic, and we don’t need a china doll. We’ll run it together. What you do need, and you can’t be truly happy without, is a boy to fawn over.”

  “Oh, my.” I had no other words. This was too big.

  Pincushion rolled her eyes, and gave a snort. “Not that I ever understand your taste, but your happiness is my happiness.” She patted her chest.

  “Oh, my,” I repeated, looking around at the smiling faces, the food, the grass and blue sky.

  “Now, I’ll have to go away a lot to help Princess Charity, but I’ll spend as much time here as I can, and come on. It’s a picnic. Even a fluff-head can run a picnic.” Grinning affectionately, she wrapped her arms around mine and squeezed.

  The dam broke. My eyes burned. My new heart clenched in my chest. I sobbed, and tears leaked down my cheeks, more slowly from my button eye than my cracked, original eye. Grumpy Gus had never been good at crying.

  Pincushion squeezed closer, then when that didn’t work wrapped her arms entirely around me. I could feel pinheads and sharp pin points poking at my fabric, and feel the squeezing push them more painfully tight through her. Encouragement touched the sly confidence of her usual tone. “Come on, you can do this. Yes, you’ll get some things wrong, but if there’s trouble I’ll always know, and I’ll always come back to save you from yourself.”

  With trembling hands, I reached up and took hers. Gently, I pulled them from my shoulders, and clasped them together between us instead. Looking down into Pincushion’s shiny black eyes, my voice ragged from tears, I said, “You were right. Charity and I are the only things in your heart. You love me. You do.”

  The shaking spread to the rest of my body, but I gathered all my strength and shoved her down onto the picnic blanket. Pincushion started to shout a spell, but I held her in place with one hand, and used the other to shove a cookie into her mouth.

  The problem with having an actual mouth was that someone could fill it and shut you up.

  Her heart clenched like a stone in my chest, heavy and painfully cold. I could see my tears dripping onto her face as I whispered, “But you’ll never stop hurting me.”

  I yanked out a couple of her pins, pushing them through her crumb-filled mouth and bending the metal to force her mouth shut. As she squirmed and flailed at me, I held out my free hand and declared, “Give me the sharp knife.”

  There had to be at least one, for cutting bread. Sure enough, without a word, Just Right laid a wooden handle in my hand. No one said anything.

  I turned the blade down, the point hovering over the face of the doll who had spent all our lives making fun of me. The agonizing weight of her heart didn’t matter, but as I watched her pleading eyes and shaking head, the truth did.

  I didn’t want revenge. I didn’t want to hurt Pincushion back, the way she’d hurt me.

  I just wanted to be free.

  Awkward but determined, I turned the point of the knife to my own chest. The tip caught the stitches laid in by magic, holding the heart-shaped circle of blue fabric in place. I stabbed, then sawed. The pain was nothing compared to the spiky cold of the heart in my chest, anyway.

  Shoving a hand into the gap, I grabbed that heart and yanked it out.

  This felt even worse. My body felt heavy, dull. The tears kept coming, and stuffing protruded from the gap in my chest.

  I threw the heart as far away from me as I could, picked up the knife again, and cut the threads that held my Sandy’s golden witch hat on Pincushion’s head. She thrashed the whole time, but really, she wasn’t very big. Her power over me had always been taking advantage of my kindness, not strength.

  When the hat came loose, I dragged the fully laden tea tray over top of her, pinning her down. She could keep my heart. She could love me or hate me however she wanted. She was no part of me anymore.

  Magic would have pinned her down more securely, but aching and sad like this, I couldn’t possibly have cast a spell. I picked up the witch hat, left the knife, and walked away. The other dolls watched, and said nothing.

  The road was in front of me. I turned left and headed for the temple.

  Sandy would be there, and Sandy deserved my love.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Someone awaited me on the road. If it had been Jack, that would make perfect sense, but this person was smaller, or at least more horizontal. My eyes hadn’t quite adjusted to the new glasses at long range, and it took a minute of trudging closer to identify them.

  Sandy’s rocking horse was parked on the grass, watching me. He still had the brown bundle of Charity’s clothes tucked under his saddle.

  He still had Charity’s clothes!

  I hadn’t failed Sandy! At least, I hoped I hadn’t. Maybe her confrontation with Charity had already happened?

  No. Pincushion would have gotten a message. There was still time. There had to be!

  Pushing a handful of fluff back into the wound in my chest, I ran toward my unexpected savior. The effort brought some energy back, pushing away the grey sadness Pincushion left me with.

  “Did I make it?” he asked when I got close enough.

  I scrambled up and grabbed a stirrup, hauling myself hand over hand to his saddle. “Yes! I think. We have to get to the Temple in the Mist! It’s that—oh, my. Are you going to be able to make it?”

  He looked terrible. His leather surfacing was absolutely covered in dust. Sweat hung his mane flat from his neck. I’d never even seen a rocking horse sweat. Really, how often did anyone sweat at all?

  Even his voice sounded, um, hoarse. “For Sandy, yes. She sent us to get these clothes, and since they took you I ran day and night to bring them to her.”

  Leaning forward in the saddle, I rubbed his neck with one hand. I was getting pretty dirty just touching him, but who cared at a time like this? “It’s not far. You’re a hero for getting this far. Be a hero just a little longer, and then we can let Sandy be our hero again.”

  He wheezed, and leaped forward onto the road. As astonishingly fast as he’d carried Sandy, this was faster. I had to lay myself against him not to get blown off by the wind. At this rate, I could sincerely believe he’d almost kept pace with Charity’s coach.

  The temple really was close. We could see it from here. Admittedly, I couldn’t see it well, but the nameless horse’s incredible speed rapidly fixed that problem, and very soon we skidded to a halt in front of the visible section of the temple.

  Stairs. Simple blocks of crude grey stone arranged as steps leading up to a tunnel in the Mist.

  The blocks didn’t connect to anything, including each other. They featured no guard rail of any kind. They were also human sized, each about half as tall as me. Ugh. The Mist was almost as bad as the Rifts. Anyone who went in never came out.

  At least the steps were wide.

  Not that any of that mattered. I definitely could hear shouts from up that stairway. The final battle was taking place right now!

  I jumped off of the horse’s back, hitting the road with a thump. Charity’s clothes wouldn’t do Sandy any good on his back. How…?

  I had the hat, still clenched in my hand, in fact. Tucking it over my head, I wrapped the point around my neck like Pincushion did the first time we’d met. I was empty, dry of magic, but that didn
’t matter because Sandy needed me.

  Waving an arm in rapidly tightening circles, I chanted, “Wrappity wrappity bibbity boo!”

  The horse’s saddle fell off, and so did the pile of clothes. Not randomly, however. The clothes folded, and the strap that used to hold the saddle on tied them into a neat bundle with one stirrup as a handle.

  A quick pull revealed it wasn’t exactly light, but as long as I could drag it, that was enough.

  With the bundle trailing behind me, held in one hand, I climbed up onto the first step, then the second, then the third.

  “I… I can’t…!” wheezed the horse desperately. Not from fear, but helplessness.

  “Then your turn is over, and you’ve earned your rest,” I answered without even looking back.

  Up. Up. Up. Step after step. Each one individually wasn’t difficult and didn’t take long, but there were quite a few. Soon curling white mist surrounded the steps on all side, but I stayed carefully in the center of the stairway and kept climbing. There was the last step and the entrance to the Temple above me. Just a few more steps. Just one more step!

  I climbed over that last ledge into a battlefield, with the battle almost over.

  The Temple in the Mist itself was barely a building, and not much more than a cave. A round shell of knobbly grey rock, only the floor had been smoothed, with the rest rising like a dome studded with stars. Why stars? Crystals, as pure and transparent as ice, stuck randomly out of that dome toward the floor, providing a strange feeling of being inside something that had a bigger, other purpose, and had never been meant to hold people. More crystal lay scattered around the floor, the irregular roundness of many of the pieces declaring they had been carved. A statue. Yes, they’d been part of a statue of a human. Definitely a human. Look at the clenched fingers on that hand!

  Except there were other, more important things to look at. The battle had been ugly, and taken its toll. Bits of royal guard lay everywhere, although the upper halves were mostly intact and flopped weakly. The one next to me turned its head, trying to see who had walked up next to it.

  Not all the guards were broken. Some were merely tied up in Lemon Drop, whose elongated body was tied in a knot on this side of the room. In the wriggling mass it was hard to tell how many, but three of Charity’s massive, shiny elite guards were easy to count, each struggling helplessly with its arms bound to its body.

  Sandy and Charity faced each other in front of a rift, each holding a halberd with the sharp end pointed at the other. The rift itself was small compared to the others I’d seen, merely a terrifying gap in the world about the size of a human, hovering over a nick in the otherwise even floor.

  Come to think of it, the broken guard next to me lay on top of a thick disk of paler stone bigger than he would be intact. He obscured the symbols engraved in the surface, but this would be the seal Charity brought to seal that rift.

  I had no idea where Sandy’s needle was. Her only visible weapon was the halberd.

  The fight had come down to human against human. Even Lemon Drop wasn’t just tied up. Gashes in his particolored fabric leaked stuffing much worse than me. Oh, my, was that stuff an odd grey-white. Had the bundlish filled them with clouds?

  I didn’t even have time to interrupt my own purposeless speculation. Charity swung her halberd, not at Sandy, but at the writhing knot of fighters. The blade hit one of her oversized guards, knocking off its head, one shoulder, and a big chunk of the front plate of its body. Another swing shattered a second guard. Sandy lurched forward, her own halberd raised to block the third swing, but didn’t get anywhere close. Her foot paused, because irregular shards of mirror-bright metal now littered the floor.

  Charity broke the third guard, scattering even more. Reflective as they were, the guards hadn’t been made of glass. Most of the bits were large, and a human could fall through them easily.

  They all reflected a dank room of bricks and pipes, not the Temple.

  With less to hold onto, Lemon Drop shook their tail free and slapped at Charity. She swiped it with her halberd and tore open a new gash, only to get smacked in the face so hard she staggered back to the rift.

  Cold and calm in her irritation, Charity said, “You are surprisingly hard to kill.” Unlike the space between herself and Sandy, no mirrors blocked her from Lemon Drop. Stepping closer, she stabbed the blade of her halberd through the tail, shoving the monster back. Their body rolled onto the cleft stump of the crystal statue’s base, and she rammed that point down into the crack, pinning Lemon Drop in place.

  That wasn’t close to enough to kill the monster, but it did take them out of the fight. Meanwhile, Sandy stared at this, and at the crystal chunks on the floor. In horrified realization, she exclaimed, “You broke that statue!”

  Dismissing Lemon Drop, Charity stalked toward Sandy. Exasperated, she snarled back, “So?! It’s bad enough you think these puppets are alive, but it’s a statue. There’s nothing evil about breaking it. It wouldn’t give me both hats.”

  Halberd leveled, Sandy watched Charity approach. “The first thing you did in an enchanted world was break the magic statue so you could steal my hat.”

  Charity smirked, not even slightly ashamed. “I didn’t know you were behind me. You’ve read the same books I have. Heroines always get stuck with choices that make their life hard. I wasn’t letting myself be railroaded.”

  She gave the flowing skirt of her blue royal gown a pull, flourishing them around her legs. “And now I just have to push you into a mirror, and it won’t matter.”

  Which was my cue. I unbuckled the bundle of Charity’s clothes and laid them on the nearest mirror.

  Doing so required me to take a couple of steps, which brought me into the broken guard’s range of vision. Urgent and delirious both, he mumbled, “Hello. Aren’t you the nice one? Get out of here, love, it’s not safe.”

  Oh, my. Really? Charity’s foot was inches from setting down on a mirror when she and Sandy both stopped and looked at us. Charity jumped back into the empty space by Lemon Drop as if the mirror was on fire.

  Breathing hard, looking around the room with suddenly greater caution, the evil princess addressed Sandy. “Okay, I applaud your deviousness. Now we’re even.”

  Sandy shot me a smile filled with so many emotions I couldn’t untangle them. A very brief smile, since she had to watch Charity.

  Charity took advantage of even that moment, sidestepping a mirror, jumping between two, and leaping over a third to grab Sandy’s halberd. They grunted, twisted, and jerked.

  I had the hat, and still felt completely helpless. The physical power being thrown around was beyond my understanding, and would be nothing compared to the invisible magic clashing in this rough stone chamber.

  What would I do with it anyway?

  The halberd dropped, jangling, to the ground. Charity and Sandy, puffing for breath, stared at each other.

  Sweeping her golden hair back, Sandy said, “I’m surprised you’re willing to risk everything.”

  Charity rubbed her hands together, kneading them as if they were as fluffy and bendable as mine. “I’m going to win. I care more than you do.”

  Instead of grabbing each other again, they separated, dancing between the irregularly shaped and placed mirrors. Charity chased Sandy around behind the rift, where I could only see their feet, until they looped about in front again. Here the mirrors were much thicker, with barely room to place their feet.

  Right in the center of that, Sandy stopped running and tackled Charity, sending them both toppling toward the biggest mirror. It made all too much sense. If they both went Elsewhere, Sandy won.

  Charity rolled with the impact, and they fell to the side instead, into the rift.

  Not directly in. Their shoulders hit the lower edge, but that left Sandy flailing, slipping gradually into its shimmering emptiness.

  Spell. Please thing of a spell, Heartfelt.

  Charity yelled in squeaky panic, “Sandy!” and grabbed my heroine’s shou
lders. Leaning into the hole, she heaved Sandy out into the room.

  That would have been fine, if the rift had been a window. Charity clearly didn’t know about Nowhere’s pull. She fell into the rift as if she were diving into a pool.

  Sandy grabbed Charity’s hand with both of hers, digging her feet into the floor, where there wasn’t any real purchase. Her waist hooked against the lower edge of the rift itself, and she leaned way back, pulling until her whole body shook.

  Charity’s fingers grabbed at that same edge, but couldn’t get a hold. “Sandyyyyy!” she screeched and pleaded.

  Sandy’s grip slipped a visible inch. “No! Not this way! This isn’t what I want!”

  I had an idea. I ran, and I didn’t have to avoid the mirrors except to make sure they didn’t cut my feet. Wrapping both arms around Sandy’s discarded halberd, I heaved it up and dragged it to Lemon Drop’s tail. “Help them!”

  They did. Tearing their rips a little wider, they took hold of the sharp end, and stretched enough to stick the handle into the rift, where to us Charity looked like she was hanging sideways. The evil princess took hold of it desperately with one hand, and Sandy dragged the other to the handle. Then she and Lemon Drop pulled, drawing Charity out until the villain collapsed onto the stone floor, curled up and shaking and panting for breath. One trembling hand picked her crown up off the floor and put it back on her head.

  Our monster’s tail went limp, more stuffing bulging out of it than still inside. Sandy gave it a compassionate, admiring pat. “You’d better be glad Lemon Drop is hard to kill.”

  The doll head giggled. “Push them in, pull them out. Fun!” I couldn’t see either head in the knotted mass.

  Personally, I wanted to be nowhere near Charity, and retreated toward the stairs.

  The princess hugged and puffed and climbed to her feet, looking only at Sandy. “We should close this before we go any further.”

  Sandy nodded, also breathing hard and flexing her hands. “Yes. That was too close. At least this one will be easy.” Carefully, she picked her way through the mirror field, and picked up a little piece of stone next to the wall. Bringing it back, she tucked it into the nick taken out of the floor.