“Hershel, I think enough of your intelligence to assume that you know that’s not going to happen. My niece is staying with me and is under my protection. She’s not going to blab your precious secrets, because she’s intelligent and not suicidal. So are we good?”
I heard a chuff of what sounded like irritated disbelief from the other man. “No, Ted. We’re not ‘good’. You need to remember your place. You are only important because we find you useful. You have no power on your own. Now step aside.”
Uncle Teddy’s voice was lower but icy when he spoke next. “You know, I could tell you to go to Hell, but coming from me, it’d be less of an insult and more of a sentence, wouldn’t it? Because trust me when I tell you that if you or any of the rest of the Circle decide to start trying to treat me as a pet instead of a partner, your safety net will be revoked permanently. And maybe they’ll find someone to replace me in another fifty or sixty years—that is how long ya’ll looked the last time, right?”
“But how long do you think your old, stinking asses have before your hoodoo can’t keep you going any longer? Before something gets you that you didn’t see coming? A brain aneurysm, a car accident, or shit, a high-powered round through your fat head from 200 yards away? Because the magic only works on things you or your minions can see and anticipate, right? Right.”
“Now me, I don’t have any fancy magic like that. I’m just a simple dollmaker, and like you said, I have to remember my place. It seems to me, if I had any sense, any sense at all, I’d take some of the millions of dollars ya’ll have kindly paid me over the years to put out contingency contracts on all of my associates in case someone decided to try to step on my neck one day. Take me down from a simple dollmaker to somebody’s cur dog. Why, if I had a brain in my head, I’d tell them that if they hear I’m dead and don’t get a correction from me personally within a week, they should take revenge on whoever did it. And since those fellas—and ladies, I would assume—are assassins, not detectives, and because I’m just a simple dollmaker not sure of who would ever want to do me harm, I’d tell them to just complete all the contracts to make sure they got the right one.”
When Myers spoke next, his voice was shaking and pleading. “We would never hurt you…you’re our friend and we do need you, of course. But she has to go! This isn’t coming from me. It’s from the top.”
My uncle gave a short laugh. “See, the problem with that is I just updated my contracts twenty minutes ago. Cost a bit extra, but that’s okay. Worth it to see my family safe. If anything happens to my niece or her family, same rules apply. You’re right about one thing though, Hershel. You are my friend. You all are. And so I’m just going to forget this happened at all. You just came by to visit tonight, right? To say hey.”
There was a stretch of silence and Ted’s voice was as hard and cold as river rocks when he spoke next. “I said, isn’t that right, Hershel.”
“Um, yeah. That’s right.” The other man sounded utterly defeated now.
“Good. I’d love to hang around and chat, but I still have some preparations to finish for the big party on Saturday. So while I won’t tell you to go to Hell, I will tell you to fuck off.” I heard the door slam and then Uncle Teddy was coming back in, a grim smile on his face.
“That bought us some time at least. We’ll see how much.”
I went cold. “Time? As in, you think they’re still going to try and get me?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Oh yeah. Definitely. Aside from being crazy and evil, they’re also used to getting their way. They are scared to go against me directly too hard, and while they might decide to just try and enslave me, they would much rather placate or scare me into submission. But that won’t stop them from wanting to get rid of you, both to silence you and to show me that I’m their dog after all. Tonight will set them back though, and they’ll likely waste a day or two debating and arguing over what to do next.”
I glanced at the dark windows in the room nervously. “What’s to stop them from just killing me with a spell or sending a monster in after me if they have all this power?”
He nodded. “A good thought, but it wouldn’t work. Over the years I’ve made more than one doll in exchange for services. There are layers of wards protecting this house that are beyond what could be stripped away in a month, much less a few days. Nothing magical gets in or out of this house unless I invite it to enter or leave personally.”
“Okay. Well, that’s good. But what’re we going to do?”
“We aren’t going to do anything. You’re going to go cut me off an inch of your hair and then go to bed in one of the guest rooms. Do not leave this house under any circumstances until I tell you to, okay?”
I frowned. “Okay…but why my hair?” I tried to smile. “Planning on making me a doll too?”
He didn’t return the smile. “Well, yes. Of course. For a variety of reasons, but the most salient to you being that most likely if you die any time in the next few weeks you’re going to Hell.”
I felt the dull roar of panic building in my ears. “What are you talking about? Why would I go to Hell? I’m not a bad person.”
Teddy sighed. “You have to stop looking at it as black and white or right and wrong. There are rules for how you get sent to Hell and how you get out. Because you can get out without using a cheat like the dolls, but it usually takes several hundred or thousands of years. But I digress. The point is that you did an infernal ritual tonight and violated the rules of Hell in the process. You didn’t know what you were doing, so that helps a bit, but you’ll still carry a…stain around for awhile. The good news is that something isolated like that fades after a bit. If you died a few months from now, all would likely be fine. If you got hit by a bus tomorrow…well, I’d lay odds that you’re going to Hell.”
“So you’re going to make me a doll for in case I get sent to Hell.”
He smiled thinly. “Yep. There are scissors in the bathroom. Underlayers are fine, not trying to make you look like a mental patient.”
For most of the next day, Uncle Teddy was holed up in his workshop working on my doll and other “preparations.” He said my doll was going to be extra special, so he had to take more time than usual to get everything just right. Apparently the other preparations were for a party he was throwing on Saturday.
Teddy told me that he had sent out invitations to everyone he made dolls for months ago. The group he knew locally called themselves the Circle, but there were Circles all over the world, and over the years he had dealt with many of them. He had billed the party as largely a get-together, where people from different Circles could come together and socialize for an evening without any ceremony or ritual to be performed. But the real draw was that he was giving every guest in attendance an updated version of their doll.
He said that in the early years since making that first doll, he had made it a priority to learn Latin and French—as well as a few other languages that came up in texts he ran across. The pursuit of more knowledge about the memoriam dolls was partially out of curiosity and a desire to keep improving at his craft through greater understanding. But it was also out of a strong sense of self-preservation. He wanted to know where all the emergency exits were. So he surreptitiously became one of the foremost experts in the world on the hellbound effigies he was making.
One thing that he learned was that the dolls had a shelf life. They were like a snapshot of the person at the time they were created, and the longer the time between the doll’s creation and the person dying and being sent to Hell, the longer it would take for the ritual to bring them back. Time was much faster in Hell and out-of-sync with our reality, so an old doll could turn a week into a month or a year or a decade.
This worked out well for him, as he had frequent repeat customers. But it also meant that a gift like he was offering was especially prized. He expected the party to be pretty packed, and when I asked him why he was still having it considering everything that was going on, he looked at me incredulously.
“People have already RSVP’d.”
I don’t trust my Uncle Teddy, in part because I don’t really know him, and in part because I’m starting to believe what he’s telling me is actually true. I have to admit though, he is a talented artist. When he showed me my doll, I was amazed by it. It was slightly different than the others, with a larger head than the ones he had lining a back room in preparation for the party. Still, it was unmistakably me. Touching the doll’s face, I felt a stirring of disquiet. By being around him, by having my own doll made, wasn’t I just further securing a place in Hell?
Still, I felt like I needed the insurance policy. And whatever my misgivings, I did believe that Teddy was looking out for me.
“Why did you give me that children’s book with the poem about Hell in it when I was little? It freaked me out.”
We were sitting in a large, oak-paneled dining room eating frozen pizza. He looked weary from his non-stop work of the last few hours, but he seemed cheerful as well, and when I asked the question, his laughter was genuine.
“Shit, yeah, sorry about that. I…I’ve had some dark, lonely times doing this for them. I distanced myself from all of you because I didn’t want them touching your lives. But then I realized that they didn’t want me having any friends here either. Their precious fucking secrecy.”
“Now, they never told me what to do, you understand. They didn’t want to piss me off. But if I made a friend, dated someone, fuck, even hired a prostitute, they would suddenly drop off the face of the earth. After a couple of years of that I gave up.”
He stared down at his pizza, his face sagging with the weight of his past and his pain. When he looked back up, his lips carried a sad smile. “I was there when you were born. Did you know that? You were a beautiful baby.” He pushed the plate away from himself and sat back. “When I realized I would never be around ya’ll, and that I’d never be allowed to have a family of my own, I got very down. They kept close watch on me to make sure I didn’t become suicidal, but there were still a couple of times when I considered it.”
“What got me through it was thinking about you. About you growing up, living a good and full life, having a family of your own maybe. You almost became like a surrogate daughter to me in my daydreams.”
He sighed, looking slightly embarrassed. “I found that poem in my research on the dolls. It was in a journal kept by a Germanic occultist in the late 17th century. In one of my more maudlin moments, I bought you that book and wrote the poem in it. Why? I couldn’t really say, to be honest. Maybe as a warning or a cry for help. I felt like I knew you in my own pathetic way, and that poem was the closest I’ve ever come to telling anyone about what is going on.” He frowned, his face growing dark. “About the fucking trap I’ve put myself in.”
I reached forward and awkwardly patted his hand. “We’ll figure something out.”
He looked a little like I had punched him in the stomach as he drew his hand away. “I’m sorry, but I told you, it’s not we. And I’ve already got it figured out.”
His voice was starting to sound strange and far away, and I realized with a surge of panic that my vision was warped and fading as well. Had he drugged me? Had the fucker actually drugged me?
I tried to stand, but it was like trying to walk on marbles. Every movement sent me into a staggering slow-motion dance of overcorrections until I plopped back into the chair again. On my third try I managed to stay on my feet, and I looked over at my uncle. He was watching me silently, his eyes sad and glimmering. Somehow his emotion made it more real and terrifying. I had to get out of here now before it was
The overhead lights glared down at me like half a dozen angry small suns, every one of them intent on boring through my eyelids and into my aching brain. Wincing, I eased my eyes open and tried to look around. I was in a large cinderblock room of some sort, possibly some kind of workshop, as I saw a variety of tools and saws hanging on one wall.
As I came back to myself a little more, I realized with growing panic that I was strapped down to a table or bench of some kind. I could move my head, but that was all. I started to scream, but a voice to my right quickly silenced me.
“There, there,” Dilly said, her dry cooing sounding like the rustle of a snake shedding its skin, “Quit making such a fuss.” The old woman came into my field of view and I saw she looked much the same as she had at the wake, though she was now wearing casual clothes underneath a long, black rubber apron. “Milly over there thinks we should keep you alive. Amputate your limbs, of course, but keep you alive in case we need to bring back that Uncle of yours again. She’s afraid that the blood won’t work if you aren’t still breathing.”
She smiled, her yellow, crooked teeth peeking out behind her lips like decaying gravestones. “Now for my part, I’ve looked at a great many of the old texts and I don’t think it’s required. I think we can drain you, store the blood, and not have to worry about you eating and shitting between now and the Breach.”
She shook her head with mock sorrow. “But that Milly, she’s as stubborn a lady as I’ve ever known. I’d about given up on convincing her to slit you like a hog and drain you dry. But,” she leaned closer to me conspiratorially, “you keep making a racket like that…well, she might be persuaded yet. So go ahead if you want. Go ahead and scream.”
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Credits
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