I didn’t run, though I don’t know why. Maybe it was because of how
welcoming she was. How beautiful. Or it could be I was too scared to
turn my back, afraid that whatever this woman doll truly was, she would
run me down and tear me apart, filling my mouth and ears and eyes with
hundreds of tiny red legs and questing jaws.
Or maybe it was because of how right it all felt.
Because if I’m honest, I wasn’t confused or scared. I was
overwhelmed with the same sense of relief you have when you wake from a
bad dream and realize that worse version of life has fallen away from
you. I knew the woman standing in front of me with her perfect skin and
her warm, brown eyes wasn’t my mother. I knew she had somehow come
from the manikin, which meant that she was magic somehow, and something
other than human.
But when she bent down and gave me a gentle hug, it still made my
heart hammer with joy. When I smelt the faint aroma of a perfume
that…well, I didn’t know what my mother might have smelled like, but I
imagined it was just like that mingled scent of vanilla and honeysuckle.
And when she laughed and talked to me, really seeing me and listening
as I allowed myself to be led inside, there was one thought that
thrummed deep and resonant in the center of my heart.
I was finally home.
I worried about what my father’s reaction would be to a strange
woman in his house, but Marisol (that was her name, she told me with a
grin) assured me that she would handle it and it would all be okay. It
was strange—we talked a lot in the two hours before he got home, but we
never actually talked about it. Where she had come from, what
she actually was, or anything else related to the strangeness of it all.
It was as though there was an unspoken understanding between us—two
old friends who knew the score and were happy enough with each other’s
company to ignore the questions it raised. Whether my father would be
so laid-back…that might be a different matter entirely.
When Dad came home and saw us sitting in the living room, his first
reaction was surprise. He made an awkward greeting and then asked me
who my friend was. When I told him that it was Marisol and she was
supposed to stay with us, he looked funny for a moment as though
remembering some hard to digest fact or idea. His eyes widened slowly
as he looked at Marisol again and then me.
“Honey, come here for a minute please.”
He took me out into the front hallway and knelt down. “Is this who I think it is?”
I felt relief that he recognized her too. “Yes, Daddy. It’s the
manikin. Or she came from the manikin at least. I haven’t been
upstairs to see if the doll is gone or not.”
He swallowed, glancing back into the living room nervously. “Has she hurt you or done anything bad?”
I frowned and shook my head. “No, Daddy. She’s real sweet. She wants to stay with us and I want her to too.”
Rubbing his lips, he gave a dry laugh. “Yeah, well…we’ll see. I
need to talk to her. Try to understand this more. I’d given up
thinking it would work, and seeing it here…” He met my eyes. “Do you
think she came from the bugs you saw this morning?”
I shrugged, not liking the reminder of what I’d seen. “I don’t
know. I don’t see how. She looks like the doll, not a bug. And she’s
nice.” I paused and then added. “She makes me happy.”
My father’s face softened and he gave a nod. “I…I understand, baby.
I’m not saying she can’t stay. Not yet. But I have to talk to her.
Check her out some. You stay out here for a bit and I’ll take her in
the kitchen. Okay?” I started to nod when he grabbed my arms gently.
“Baby, if you hear anything scary or anything bad happens, you do not
stay here or try to help. You run down the road to the neighbor’s
house, okay? Tell them to call someone. The police, I guess. You
understand?”
I nodded, worry stirring in my stomach—not that she would try to
hurt us, but that my father might get scared and make her leave. “I
promise. But it’ll be okay, Daddy.”
He gave me a weak smile before leaning forward to kiss my forehead. “I hope so. Just sit tight until I get you.”
Standing back up, he went into the living room and asked Marisol to
talk to him in the kitchen. The time waiting for them to come back
seemed to drag on forever, but when they finally did come back, I could
tell they had worked things out. They both seemed happy, and they told
me my father had agreed Marisol could stay with us on a trial basis.
We’d turn my mother’s old sewing room into a guest bedroom, and we’d see
how things went from there. They glanced at each other when he said
this, and even then I had the thought that he liked her too. That just
like me, he was tired of being lonely.
That night we had a big dinner and stayed up late, and when they
finally carried me up to bed, I noticed that the corner of my room was
bare. Smiling at Marisol sleepily, I reached out and touched her hair.
“It really is you, isn’t it?”
She nodded, her eyes twinkling in the dark. “It is, sweetness. Now get some sleep.”
The following morning I woke up in a panic, sure that the day before
had just been a wonderful dream. But then I smelled breakfast cooking
and laughter from downstairs. I rushed down the stairs much as I had
the day before, but when I rounded the corner this time, I saw my father
and Marisol talking and joking around as they cooked breakfast. Even
at seven, there was a part of me that knew it was all very strange—how
could we be comfortable with something like this, particularly so
quickly? The best answer I had was that it was part of the magic of
Marisol being there at all—a wonderful magic that had made us a real
family again overnight.
I know this makes me sound as though I was either very naïve or
willfully blind, and both are probably a bit true. But I wasn’t an
idiot. Over the days and weeks that followed, I always kept a close
watch on Marisol and my father. I could never completely shake my
memories of the manikin glowing or what had come out of it, and it
prevented me from entirely trusting her at first, despite my strong
desire to just give in to our new life entirely.
But she really did seem good and nice. She was always kind and fun,
and just being around her made you feel happy and safe. And it was
good to see my father smile again. Really smile and really laugh, not
just the fake stuff he’d always done for my benefit. I hadn’t known the
difference before, but I did now, and I couldn’t imagine going back to
the way things had been for either of us.
When, after a couple of months, Marisol stopped staying in the guest
room and started staying with my father, I understood on some level
what that meant. They started giving each other odd looks and would
whisper when they thought I didn’t notice. They’d hold hands and sit
close, and it made me happy because I could tell that my father loved
her as much as I did, and that meant Marisol was here to stay.
It’s funny that I have such clear memories of all of this. My
ability to remember, and even my perception of time, has never seemed to
dull. If anything, I might recall things more clearly than I think is
natural. I can look back at almost any point in the last thirty years
and see the day as though I was reliving it—from the day Marisol came to
us up until now as I write this all down. It’s funny because, despite
all that clarity, it took almost two years from that first day with
Marisol for me to realize that after that day, we’d never left the house
again.
I never went to school, my father never left to go to work. No one
ever visited or came to check on us. We had food and water and lights.
We even had the same handful of channels on t.v. But we never, ever
actually left.
That thought, that terrible and strange epiphany, was hard for me to
understand and even harder to hold on to. It was like a slippery fish
or bar of soap—the harder I tried to grasp the idea and keep it, the
more it would squirt through my fingers, sometimes not returning for
days or even weeks. I finally figured out that so long as I didn’t look
at it directly, it would stay around a bit longer. With practice, I
managed to keep it in the corner of my mind’s eye longer and longer, and
after a few months I was able to remember our imprisonment long enough
to ask my father about it.
He was sitting by himself in my mother’s old sewing room, though I
supposed it’s last job had been as Marisol’s room for a short time.
Standing at the door to the room, I was struck by how sad and lost he
looked. It reminded me of all the recent times I’d seen glimpses of
that same forlorn sadness in him when he didn’t think I was looking. I
paused for a second and heard a sound from downstairs. Marisol was
still down there watching a movie, or that’s what it sounded like. My
father looked up as I gently shut the door behind me. He started to put
on a smile when I blurted out my question before I could lose it again.
“Did you know that we’re always here? We never leave the house. Not ever.”
His face paled as the smile fell away. Lowering his eyes, he
nodded. “I know. Some times I know. It’s gotten more and more the
last few months where I can remember.” He looked up, his expression
fearful. “I’ve asked Marisol about it. She just laughs and ask why we
would want to leave? We have everything we could want right here.”
I found myself wanting to nod, to agree with her, but I forced
myself to stop. I didn’t know where I ended and she began any more, and
it frightened me. “We have a good life, Dad. But that’s not right is
it? We should be able to go out, right? See people and be part of the
world like normal? Isn’t that the way it was before?” I left off “Marisol came to live with us”, but it still hung in the air between us like a poison cloud.
He nodded, his eyes glimmering. “I think so, sweetie. I have
trouble thinking about it a lot of the time, but I’m pretty sure this
isn’t right. I…I think I trapped us here, and I don’t know how to get
us out.” He started crying openly then, and I went over to give him a
hug.
“It’s not your fault, Daddy. It’s Marisol. She needs to let us go if we want. At least some times.”
He shook his head against my shoulder. “You don’t understand. I
knew what she was when this started. Or…well, I didn’t know exactly,
but I had some idea. It’s my fault she came to life.”
I never knew your grandfather…not really. His name was Richard
Murphy, and I only met him once right after me and your mom got married.
He was a very intense and intimidating man, though perfectly friendly
and polite that one evening. While most of your mother’s family lives a
couple of hundred miles north of here in a town called Empire—they
practically own the place—your grandfather…he was always off somewhere
either teaching or traveling. Your mother never talked bad about him,
but I could tell she was afraid of him. Afraid of something he was a
part of. It wasn’t until he was declared dead that I found out what
that was.
Your mother didn’t just inherit the manikin from him. She got
money, some property, and his private collection of…well, I know it
sounds weird, but he had a lot of magical-type stuff. Not like a
magician that pulls a rabbit out of a hat. I mean old books, strange
artifacts, bad and creepy stuff. I didn’t see all of it at the time,
but I saw enough to agree with your mother that it had no place in our
house. She rented a storage unit in town and kept it there until she
was gone.
Everything except the doll.
At the time, I thought it was just her being sentimental. Now, I
feel sure it was part of some manipulation either by that thing or your
grandfather. She grew strange after the manikin came to live with us.
She’d have terrible dreams, and there were times where she’d disappear
for hours or even days at a time. The last time she left, she never
came back at all, and it wasn’t until a week later that I got the call
that she’d been found dead outside a bus station in Kansas.
I’m sorry to talk to you about all this so bluntly, honey. I know
you’re still young. But I’ve lied and hidden things for too long, and I
need to be honest if we’re going to have any chance of beating…whatever
all this is.
When I got the call about your mother, I went a little crazy. I
started having strange dreams myself, and I became obsessed with the
idea that maybe she wasn’t really dead. That she was mixed up in some
strangeness with her father, and that my best chance of figuring out
what was going on was in that storage unit.
You may not remember it now, but I didn’t actually tell you that she
had died or start preparing for the funeral until she had already been
gone for nearly three weeks. The last two weeks of that time I spent
poring through the sick filth I found in that storage unit. There were
many times that I wanted to just say it was all made-up silliness—the
fantasies of one or more diseased minds. But something kept driving me,
some understanding that it was real. There was real magic in those
books and drawings, real power in the rituals they described. And the
storage unit, if the writings were to be believed, was full of tools
that could do many wonderful and terrible things.
And one of the greatest of those tools was already sitting in our house.
Looking back now…I don’t remember half of what I did. I’d like to
say I was just under something’s control, and maybe that was some of it,
but I do know I wanted to do it. The rituals to prepare the manikin.
Putting it in your room and encouraging you to talk to it. That was the
final ingredient you see—for it to work, it needed to be believed in
and loved by another. Loved as though it was the dead person you were
trying to bring back. But it wouldn’t work for me to be the one. I
couldn’t do the rituals and be the catalyst for the spell. That left
you.
The way it was supposed to work, the way it was described in the
books, is that if you grew to believe in it and love it, the manikin
could develop a connection to a spirit—in this case, I’d done rituals to
make sure the connection would be with your mother if she was really
dead and nothing else if she wasn’t. But if everything worked out, she
could use the doll to talk and move for brief periods of time. I know
how crazy that sounds, but I believed it at the time. I’d had dreams
that told me things I couldn’t learn from the books, and between that
and the rituals, with every day I moved more from mourning her loss to
anticipating her return.
Still, even though I was half-crazy with grief and so very
short-sighted and selfish, I…I couldn’t make myself push you. I put the
manikin in your room, yes. I told you to talk to it if you wanted, and
initially I intended to remind you about it, encourage it, even force
you if I needed to…justifying all of it with the idea that if it worked,
we could get your mother back, at least after a fashion.
But I couldn’t do it. Every time I went to push you, I felt such
shame and guilt. It felt like I was tricking you. Pulling you into
something…well, something evil or unnatural. I felt dirty from ever
starting down the path, and I certainly didn’t want you following me.
There were a dozen times I almost took the doll out of your room, but
something always held me back. Maybe it was the same thing sending me
those dreams, or maybe it was just me being a selfish coward. I don’t
know.
Either way, as time went on, I gave up on it working. Even when I
noticed that you were starting to talk to it some, I didn’t really
expect anything to come from it. I’d accepted that magic wasn’t real,
and my attempts at it had just been my really bad way of dealing with
how much I missed your Mom.
Then that morning you came down screaming about bugs…I tried to hide
it, but I was really scared when I first went upstairs and wasn’t sure
what I’d find. But nothing seemed out of place. I really did think
you’d just seen a roach or something, and I was relieved.
And when I came home and she was here…well, you know how that turned
out. Now we just have to try to find a way to get free. I won’t have
my little girl trapped here for the rest of her life. I swear to you,
I’ll find a way to get you out of here.
I’d listened quietly as my father poured out his heart in front of
me. I knew he was sorry, and I didn’t doubt what he was saying. I’d
seen enough and knew enough to believe in magic without any convincing.
And a part of me did want to be free. To not have my life controlled
and confined by whatever Marisol actually was, to not have my father
tormented by remembering more and more that our corner of heaven was
actually a prison cell.
But then that was the problem, wasn’t it? It really was heaven in a
lot of ways. I was really happy most of the time. Why did I want to
escape that? So I could have a life where people are mean and die and
are scared all the time? And I knew it was harder on him—maybe because
he was older, or maybe because Marisol liked me better and kept me from
remembering the bad parts most of the time. But this is what he wanted,
wasn’t it? To be a happy family and stay together forever. Why should
he take it away from us now?
So I went downstairs and found Marisol.
And I told her Daddy was trying to get away.
He comes to my door every night now. It’s funny, because for the
last few years I hardly see him at all. He stays away from us. Marisol
moved back out of his room when I was a teenager, and now most of the
time she just stands in her old corner at night watching over me while I
sleep. That’s what I don’t get. He knows she’s in here. He has to.
But he still waits until the middle of the night and tries to get in, or
cries outside the door, begging for me to make it stop.
Every couple of weeks, Marisol makes me remember everything again
for a little while. It’s always hard, but I’ve gotten used to it. It’s
always the same thing—the initial shock and fear, worrying about what
to do, and then realizing that, truth be told, I wouldn’t have it any
other way. Each period of remembering ends the same way too. With her
asking me if I want her to end my father’s time in the house. To
finally answer his pleas and end his suffering, with the understanding
that if I do that, my own memories and suffering will grow worse to make
up for his absence. She strokes my hair and tells me that the
offerings must continue, and if I don’t fully understand what she means,
I still get the general idea. And when she asks the question, I no
longer give an answer.
I just get up and lock my bedroom door.
Aside from television, the only other portal we have to the outside
world are our windows. Marisol says the truth of our home’s interior
cannot be seen by the outside world—that in most ways, the world has
forgotten the house exists at all. But we can still see out. I can
look at the farmland trailing off into the distance or the occasional
car passing on the road. I can wake up early and watch the sunrise or
fall asleep to the sound of owls hooting out in the nighttime field of
stars. Our nearest neighbor is too far to even see and the road is
quiet, so most of the time it’s like the entire world, inside and out,
is just for us.
But then, just a few weeks ago, a man appeared in the yard. He
looked a little younger than me, and he was dressed in a brown suit with
a wide-brimmed brown hat to match. He reminded me a little of a
gangster from one of those old movies Dad used to like. I watched him
for a moment, wondering how he had found the house and what he was doing
there. Was he a salesman or something? I knew Marisol would keep him
out, but I still didn’t like him wandering our property.
Then he looked up at me and waved. Letting out a gasp, I stepped
back, right into Marisol. I turned and looked up at her. “He saw me.
He saw me and waved.” I could hear the raw panic in my voice, but
Marisol just gave a soft laugh and rubbed my back.
“It’s all right, honey. That’s only right. That’s your
grandfather, you see. I know he looks younger and different, but that’s
him all right. He’s come back around, as I knew he would.”
I felt a stir of excitement, but it was still tinged with fear.
“Why is he here? Is he going to change things? Is he going to take you
away?”
Marisol’s skin shifted slightly as something moved underneath her
normally taut cheek. Meeting my eyes, she shook her head slightly. “I
don’t think so, no. I think we’ll stay right here. In fact, I expect
the work your grandfather has won’t involve us directly at all.” She
pointed as he ducked down and opened an access panel that led underneath
the house. “See? He’s got important work down there. We’ll stay up
here where it’s comfortable.”
The man she said was my grandfather came and went several times over
the next few weeks. Always giving a wave and nothing more. I was
starting to grow used to it, to even enjoy the visits slightly, when
they stopped as quickly as they’d began. Things went back to normal
until one day I heard Marisol talking to someone in the kitchen. I went
in, wondering if my father had finally decided to be sociable again.
Instead, she was holding something and talking into it. It took me a
moment to remember what it was, because aside from on the t.v., I hadn’t
seen someone use a telephone in thirty years.
“No, dear, I understand the distinction. I know what I want. The
crawlspace needs to be completely sealed and climate-controlled. I was
given your number as the one for the job. When can you send someone
out?”
The young man they sent from the air conditioner company couldn’t
see us the way the other man could. He came out the first time, and
then he came back today. This time he even made a point of staring in
the windows. Dad did come down for that, pounding on the glass
and screaming half an inch from the boy’s face, but he never saw or
heard anything. Then he went back underneath the house to begin the
work Marisol had asked for.
I’ve written this account over the course of several days, and now
that I think about it, I started it the first time that boy came out.
He’s handsome, and more importantly, he has a kind face. The kind of
face that makes me feel lonely in a way I’m not used to and that I don’t
like at all. I don’t know how many times he’s got to come out here,
and I wonder if I could convince Marisol that we should let him in to
stay.
I hear the crawlspace door opening again. I’ll write more after I get another look at him. Talk to you soon.
THE
PROCEEDING HAS BEEN REPRODUCED HERE FROM HANDWRITTEN PAGES FOUND
REMARKABLY UNBURNED IN THE RUINS OF A HOUSE FIRE THAT OCCURRED ON APRIL
19, 2005. THE AUTHOR OF THE PAGES IS UNKNOWN. THANKFULLY, AT THE TIME
OF THE FIRE, THE HOUSE HAD BEEN UNOCCUPIED FOR YEARS.
---
Credits
