I woke up last night when I heard a stealthy scraping sound outside my door. It was locked—I always lock it, I have since I was a kid, but that didn’t stop something from trying the knob. From trying to get to me.
I sat in bed, petrified, even after I heard the rustle-shuffle of it moving away dejectedly. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. Just breathing, existing, was enough of an effort right then. So I sat there, staring at the door, waiting for the thing to come back or find another way in. It knew I was in here, and I didn’t believe it would ever really give up.
I knew it too well for that.
I barely remember my mother. She died away from home when I was five years old, and the best explanation I ever got for what happened to her was “an accident. A terrible, terrible accident.” What memories I have of her are faded and strange for the most part, but I do have one specific memory that I suspect is actually some amalgam of different memories and things I’ve added from what I’ve been told and my own imagination.
It’s the image of her sitting in her sewing room working on a dress. My father said she only made dresses as a hobby, but that she was very talented. That may be, but in my memory what I remember the most is how graceful and poised she seems as her hands dart this way and that with a needle. How beautiful her voice is as she sings absently along with the rhythm of her work. And most importantly, how I can’t understand how she can work so close to the manikin and not see the shiny red beetles climbing out of its skin.
If the end of my experiences with my mother resides at the edge of my early childhood memory, it shares the space with my first memories of the manikin. From what I understand, it had once belonged to my grandfather when he was a teacher in a medical school up north. When he died of a heart attack at fifty-two, my mother took it as part of her inheritance—a full-sized, anatomically-correct doll of a woman. At one time, it had likely been a state-of-the-art teaching aid, as it was remarkably lifelike and had panels on the front and back of the torso that could be removed to reveal a fully-realized interior full of metal ribs and leather lungs, rubber arteries and silken folds of intestine. Externally, it had been modeled after a beautiful lady, though with time the painted lips had faded and the smooth skin had become mottled with discoloration.
Many people would have found it creepy or grotesque, but my mother supposedly loved it. It reminded her of her father, but it also served a purpose for her as well. She used it as a perfect, infinitely patient dress model in her sewing room.
At some point soon after my mother died, my father brought the manikin to stay in my room. I don’t ever remember him talking to me about it beforehand, but I do remember waking one morning to see the tall, blank-faced naked woman standing in the corner of my bedroom staring at me. My father had rushed in and then let out a small laugh when he saw what I was yelling about. He apologized for scaring me with it, telling me that it was meant to be a happy thing, not a scary thing. Something to help me remember my mother and keep her with us.
“You should talk to it when you can. I know that sounds silly, but if you get down or lonely or even just bored…well, just talk to the manikin a little. Like you were talking to your mother, okay?”
I looked up at my father—I remember this clearly because it was the first time I ever felt worried about something that he was doing. The first time I ever questioned if my father was wrong. “But it’s creepy. I don’t like it. Please take it out.”
My father just stared at me for a moment before patting my leg. “I understand you feel that way now, sweetness. But that will change with time. Before you know it, you’ll be used to having it around and would miss it if it were gone.”
My father was wrong about that, at least partially. I did get somewhat used to it over the next couple of years, but I never liked it or tried to talk to it, and I certainly wouldn’t have missed it had it disappeared. I just ignored it—treated it like it didn’t exist for the sake of pleasing my father. I know that may sound dumb, but when I was little, I felt like pleasing him, accepting the manikin in my room, and loving my mother were all tied together. That if I didn’t want the manikin around, it would look like I didn’t miss my mother or care about his feelings. So I just kept quiet and ignored it as best I could for the next couple of years.
Then one day, during my first month of second grade, I came home crying. A couple of girls who I’d thought were close friends had been mean to me. Said I was ugly and my family was weird. That my mother had probably run off because I was so weird. It made me so mad and so sad and so guilty and I wanted to tell my father about it, but when I got home, no one was there.
Most days my father would be home by the time I got off the bus, but on Fridays he had to work later. This Friday, I sat alone in my bedroom sniffling, trying to convince myself that those girls were just mean liars and not quite succeeding. Maybe we were weird. Maybe my mother had gotten enough and decided to run away after all.
Just then I noticed the manikin out of the corner of my eye. I kept it covered up with an old coat of my mother’s most of the time, but its head was still bare and I could see the marble gleam of its eyes staring at me from the corner of the room. Out of reflex, I almost turned away and pushed the thing from my mind. But then I didn’t.
Because I needed my mother. I could tell my father about what happened, and he would listen, but he wouldn’t really understand, much as he might try. I needed to talk to her, but since she wasn’t here…
I went and knelt down in front of the manikin.
The details of my seven year-old drama isn’t important. What is important is that over the next two hours I poured my heart out into that thing. At first it felt awkward and dumb, but by the end I was happy and excited, babbling along until I heard the front door open as my father came home. For whatever reason, I didn’t tell him about it, even though I sensed he’d be happy that I was finally talking to the doll like he’d suggested so long ago. Instead I kept the secret deep in my chest, thrilling and warming me with the anticipation of my next conversation with my new friend.
The next few months were some of the strangest and happiest of my life. I would talk to the manikin in the mornings before school and again in the afternoons. Most nights I would talk to it for awhile after I was supposed to be in bed. It was like a switch had been flipped—once I started doing it, I felt like it was something I’d always done. It never felt odd or artificial. I didn’t even mind the way the doll looked any more. Sure its eyes just stared, and its skin had places where…
It was cracking. The skin on its hands and neck were starting to crack.
Seeing this upset me, but at the time I assumed that my father could fix anything, so I just decided I had to find a good time and tell him about me making friends with the manikin. Tell him that he needed to fix her up so she was good as new. The idea of her cleaned and repaired and freshly painted cheered me up some, but I was still worried as I fell asleep that night.
I can’t say what woke me a few hours later. Maybe a sound or a smell, or possibly just the sense that something was happening. An acid current in the air that said change was coming or a storm was near. Sitting up in bed, I looked around in the dark for anything out of place. That’s when I saw the light coming from behind the manikin.
It was a gray, colorless light, so dim that it would be invisible during the day. But in the depths of the night, I could see it pulsing slowly, rhythmically, against the walls like a diseased heartbeat. I should have been afraid, but some combination of my sleepiness and my recent devotion to the manikin made me more curious that fearful. I eased out of bed and crept over to the manikin, and as I got closer and edged around to the rear of the doll, I could see the light was flaring from the back of its neck. From a series of lines there.
At first I worried it was more cracks, but they looked different. Funny. I pulled over a chair and stood on it for a better look. It looked like a weird J with a line run through it and part of a sideways triangle cutting through that at different points. It should have seemed like nonsense lines, but somehow it didn’t. It wasn’t a mistake, it was a plan. It wasn’t a crack, it was a mark. And the light coming from it was tugging at me. At something inside me. I tried to back away, but I couldn’t move, and I could feel it pulling me down…
I woke up in a cold sweat, and after a panicked glance around my room, I realized it must have all been a dream. I was just worried about the manikin and telling my father, and the anxiety had given me a weird dream about it all. I looked back to the doll, studying it more now that I was calmer. The cracks were worse, much much worse. The face, the legs, and what I could see of the torso underneath my mother’s coat were all spiderwebbed with thick, black cracks I could see from my bed.
Forcing myself to not panic again, I got out of bed and eased over to it. For the first time in months, I was a little afraid of it, but I was also afraid for it. It looked like it might break apart at any moment. Reaching out, I parted the coat slightly to gently touch its once-smooth stomach, now a mosaic of cracks like dry, broken desert ground.
As the tip of my finger made contact, I heard and felt a rough skittering coming from inside the doll. It was a raspy, unpleasant noise as though something was struggling to get out of the doll. Struggling to get to me. I recoiled, and as I took a step back, the oblong patch of stomach I’d touched fell in, leaving a ragged dark hole where the manikin’s skin had been. It was as I took another step back that the first red leg crept over the edge of that hole.
My scalp tingled and my ears buzzed as I watched the red beetle crawl out of the opening, first followed by another and then a pair, and then a steady stream. They crawled on the thing’s broken skin, they burrowed into the thick woolen coat, they fell to the floor and started aimlessly crawling toward me. Screaming, I ran downstairs to find my father sitting in the kitchen eating cereal. He smiled at me as I rounded the corner, his eyes raising as he saw how I looked.
“Whoa! What’s the matter, honey?”
I could barely talk. “Bu-bugs! In my room! Bugs!”
He let out a chuckle as he swept me up in a hug. “That’s okay, baby. I’ll take care of it.” I held on to him, telling him not to go, but he just smiled and gently pried me free. “It’s okay, I said. Stay here while I go look. Where in the room did you see the bugs?”
I wanted to say manikin, but I couldn’t somehow. After several tries, I had to settle for “c…corner.” He nodded. “I’ll be right back.”
And he was. Less than five minutes later he came back, his expression serious but slightly amused as he sat me down at the table. “Honey, I checked, and I didn’t see any bugs, but I’ll call the exterminator out today and get everything sprayed real good. It’ll be a bug free house by tonight, I promise.” I tried to argue, to say that he didn’t understand, that something was wrong up there, something was wrong with the doll, but he cut me off with a shake of his head. “No, we have to go now or you’ll be late for school. Go get dressed, baby.”
“Daddy, I don’t want to go back in there.”
He puffed out a breath and looked at the oven clock. “Okay, I’ll get you something out and you can get dressed down here. But no more bug talk, okay? I’ll have everything fixed up before you get home today. Deal?”
I could feel the pressure of his stare as I fought down the urge to try and make him understand again. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to believe me anyway. So I nodded, and after I changed in the bathroom, he took me to school.
I was miserable all day. Worried about the doll, worried about me and my dad being in that house, worried that there was something wrong with me and I was just crazy. I didn’t fully know what crazy meant back then, but I knew it was bad. It could get you sent away from home or make you hurt people, and I didn’t want anyone getting hurt, especially me and my father. My stomach was aching by the time I got back on the bus that afternoon, and it was hard to make myself get up and get off when we reached my stop.
The house looked normal from the outside, but that didn’t count for much. It’s what was inside that mattered, crawling in the dark spaces in-between. Shuddering at the thought, I walked slowly up to the front door as I fished my key out of my pocket. It was Friday again, so I knew that Dad wouldn’t be home y…
The door suddenly opened, and standing inside was a beautiful, smiling woman. She reminded me some of my memory of my mother, but she also reminded me of someone else. Of something else.
The manikin opened the door wider as she stepped aside.
“Well come on in, honey. How was school today?”
---
Credits
Comments