Edited by, p.29
Edited By, page 29
Except, on the back of the toilet was a mason jar, one of those kinds with the lids that have wire cages on them, to trap all the air. Behind the thick glass was what I assumed to be potpourri, or some sort of collection of dried moss strands. I picked it up gingerly, turned it to the side.
It was hair. Long winds of dry hair.
I rolled the jar in my hand, studying it. The hair was in sedimentary layers. Like a curio from a gift shop.
I shook the jar timidly. All the hair stayed the same. And it really was hair. I set it down, zipped up, and was going to leave it there, had told myself it was the only sensible thing to do. It wasn’t sensible to interrogate stranger’s decorations. And that’s what my brother was, by now, a stranger.
Still. I came back to the jar, tried to twist the top off to smell—this had to be something decorative, something all other single men knew about as a matter of course—but the lever had rusted shut, from the steam of a thousand showers.
“Good,” I said out loud. This wasn’t my business anyway. This wasn’t my life.
When I saw the metallic red hair a few layers up from the bottom, though, my fingers opened of their own accord.
The jar shattered on the side of the toilet, the hair unwinding on the tile floor, taking up the space of a human head, and still writhing, looking for its eventual shape.
I could still hear that red head’s dart sucking into the dartboard. Could still see her standing at the line painted onto the floor of that bar. But I couldn’t see the rest of her life.
She hadn’t been the first, and she hadn’t been the last.
The way I made it make sense was that Daniel had become a hair stylist instead of an electrical engineer. That, when he’d hit thirty, he’d changed professions, gone with his heart instead of a paycheck. He got more interested in the people in the crosswalk than in the traffic cueing up at the lights.
Daniel who was just as indifferent with his wardrobe and appearance as I’d always been. He’d be no better a hair stylist than I would.
Still, this couldn’t be what it seemed.
I felt my way out of the bathroom, made myself walk not into his bedroom—smelling where he slept would be too intimate—and not back down the stairs like I’d promised myself, but to the only other door on this floor I hadn’t been through. The only door that was closed.
I told myself I was just going to reach in, turn the light on in there long enough to catalog it as storage or living space—I might need to stay here one night someday, brother—but then, the door open just enough for my forearm, my hand patting the wall for a light switch, something scurried behind me.
I turned, didn’t catch it.
The sense the sound left in my head, though, it was an armadillo, somehow.
No: a possum.
I clutched the door frame, my heart slapping the inside walls of my chest, a sweet, grainy smell assaulted the inside of my head, and looked into what was neither living space nor storage, exactly.
This was an operating room.
On the table, tied down at all four corners, was the latest woman.
All Daniel’s attention had been focused on her stomach.
He’d been looking for something, I could tell.
Above the table, on the ceiling, was a large mirror. Meaning the girl had been alive when this started.
I shivered, hugged my arms to my side, and felt my chin about to tremble.
On one of the flaps of skin that had been folded back from her middle, there was still a black line.
Daniel was drawing that baby shape on the body before he cut in. And he was cutting in to free the doll, the doll he knew had to be there, the doll Mom and Dad had practically promised was going to be there.
Janine was still whispering to him.
I shook my head no, no, please, and when I turned to leave, there they were on the wall. All the dolls he’d—not found, that was impossible, that was wrong.
The dolls he’d bought and salvaged and sneaked home. The dolls that completed the ritual he’d learned at five years old.
They were all wired to a pegboard, their smooth plastic bodies covering nearly every hole, and the pegboard was the whole wall, by now. This was the work of years. This was a lifetime.
To honor them, the blood and meat the dolls had been wrapped in to simulate the birth for Daniel, it had been left to dry on them.
I threw up, had to fall onto my hands to do it, it was so violent.
And then the scurrying again. In the hall.
I looked up just after something had crossed from one side of the doorway to the other. And where my ears told my eyes to look, it wasn’t up at head-level, at person-level, but at knee-level.
Instead of a possum now, what I saw in my head was the doll my dad had bought for Janine. The one we’d buried. Only, it was crawling around on all fours, its elbows cocked higher than its back, its face turned up, to keep its eyes opened.
And when she talked, it was going to be that same language she’d taught Daniel. That same dead tongue.
I stood, fell back, dizzy, not used to this kind of exertion, and my hand splashed into the insides of the girl on the table, and I felt two things in the same instant. The first was the warmth of this girl’s viscera, when I’d assumed she’d been dead for hours, long enough to have cooled down. The second thing I felt was what Daniel was always looking for: a hard plastic doll foot. From the doll inside each of us, if you know where to look. If you cut at the exact right instant, and reach in with confidence, with faith.
My hand closed on the smooth foot and the moment dilated, threatened to swallow me whole.
I brought my hand back gently, so as not to disturb. So as to pretend this hadn’t just happened.
Whatever was in the hall had seen, though. Or heard the girl’s insides, trying to suction my hand in place.
Save her, a hoarse voice whispered, from just past the doorway. Don’t let her drown.
I stared at the wall of dolls, none of their lips able to move. I stared into the black abyss of the doorway. I studied the front- and backside of my gore-smeared hand.
“Daniel?” I said. Because I’d recognized the voice. Because who else could it be.
“Save her,” the voice whispered again, from lower in the hallway than a person’s head would be.
Unless that person was crawling. Unless, in the privacy of his own home, that person flashed around from room to room like that. Because that was who he was. That was what he was.
“Please,” I said.
No answer.
I backed to the wall shaking my head no, shaking my head please, and, from this new angle, could see into the supply closet, the one Daniel had taken the door off of. Probably because his hands, in this room, didn’t want to be touching doorknobs.
The doll our father had buried in our childhood, she was standing between two stacks of foggy plastic containers.
She’d been dressed, was just staring, her eyelashes black and perfect, her expression so innocent, so waiting.
Janine.
I wanted to fall to my knees—to give up or in thanks, I wasn’t really sure. I put my hand to my face and didn’t just smear my cheek and open eyes with the black insides of this dead girl, but my lips as well. My tongue darted out like for a crumb, just instinct, and the breathing in the hall got raspier. Less patient. Like this was building to something for him.
It made me cough that kind of cough that comes right before throwing up.
Out in the hall, Daniel sighed from deep in his mania, and then there was sound like he’d fallen over. From my wall, I could see one of his bare feet through the doorway, toes-up.
It was trembling. Like something was feeding on his face. Like the possum had come for him after all these years.
I crashed to the doorway to protect him, my little brother, to kick away whatever had him by the face.
It was just Daniel, though. He was spasming, his whole body, his eyes closed. It was a seizure. It was ecstasy.
“Daniel, Daniel,” I said, on my knees now, taking his head in my lap.
He trembled and drew his arms in tight, his mouth frothing.
After a whole life of being alone with his task, with his compulsion, with his crusade, I’d finally joined him, I knew.
This wasn’t a seizure, it was an orgasm. A culmination of all his dreams. I was the only one who could possibly understand what he’d become. What he was doing. And I was here.
His breath, it smelled like soap, and I had to picture him flaking a bar into a pile then lining his gums with it.
I sat down farther, to better cradle his head, and, when I had to angle him up to an almost sitting position, his eyes rolled open and he looked over to me, then down to my stomach as well, for the gift he’d been denied. The miracle he’d trained himself to sense.
My stomach. My digestion.
It wasn’t nerves. What I was experiencing, what I was feeling, it was smoother than nerves. More plastic.
I unsnapped my shirt, looked down where Daniel was, and the vague outline of a tiny hand pressed against the backside of my skin when I breathed in, like it was stable, it was steady. It was me doing the moving.
I pushed away, into the hall wall, let Daniel’s head fall to the carpet and bounce, his eyes closing mechanically, his right foot still trembling.
I was breathing too fast and I was breathing not at all.
And I could hear it now too, the whispering.
From the shop.
A whispering, but a gurgling, too.
The doll in the dead girl’s still-warm entrails. The doll Daniel had wanted me to save.
The whole wall watched me cross the room on ghost feet. I looked to Janine for confirmation, and when she didn’t say this was wrong, I plunged my hand back into the remains on the table, found the foot I’d felt earlier, and birthed this smooth plastic body up into the light, the body’s corruption stringing off it.
When I turned the doll right-side up, its eyes rolled open to greet me, its lashes caked with blood.
I carried the doll by the leg to Daniel, and brought it up between us like a real fresh-born baby, but it only made him shake his head no, like I wasn’t getting it. Like I didn’t see.
“Over, over, over again,” he said, turning sideways to reach down the hall. He tried to stand to go down there but wasn’t recovered from his fit yet. He fell into the wall, slid down.
I looked where he’d meant to go, though.
The only light that way was the bathroom.
I drifted there, the doll upside-down by my leg again, its hard plastic fingers brushing my calf through my slacks.
The hair. The sedimentary tufts of hair.
That had to be what he meant. Over, over: start over. The traffic light goes red, then it cycles back to green again, and hovers on yellow, spilling back to red.
I carried the tufts of hair back, jewels of glass glittering on those dried strands.
When I knelt down by Daniel again, he opened his mouth like a baby bird and I knew I was right: this was part of his process. You save one doll from inside a woman, and you start over with hair from one of the other women. Like paying. Like trading. Like closing a thing you’d opened.
“Here, here,” I said, fingering the hair from the jar, packing his mouth with it. His eyes watered, spilled over with what I took to be joy. “It’ll be all right,” I whispered. “We’re saving her, Daniel. We’re saving her.”
He coughed once, hearing his name, then again from deeper, and, using two fingers, I shoved the wad of hair in deeper, so it could bathe in his stomach juice like a pearl. So it could become a soul for him again.
I kissed him once on the forehead when his body started jerking again, this time for air, and, when he bit the two fingers I was using to make him human again, I inserted the new doll’s hand instead.
It held the hair in place until Daniel calmed. Until he went to sleep. Until there was no more breath.
I moved his right foot, to get his tremble going again, but there was nothing left.
My little brother was dead. His mission was over.
I kissed Daniel’s closed eyes, my lips pressing into each thin eyelid for too long, like I could keep him here, at least until I removed my lips.
Behind those eyelids, though, the balls of his eyes were already turning hard like the yolks of boiled eggs.
This is how you say goodbye.
I stood, wiped that new doll’s ankle clean—plastic holds prints—and stepped back into the shop, used a scalpel to remove the patch of carpet I’d thrown up into. I rolled that carpet up like a burrito.
Without looking up to them, I nodded to the open-eyed dolls then turned the light off with my wrist, stepped over what was left of Daniel, and made my way through the living room, out the front door.
“He ever show up?” the super or maintenance man asked, suddenly pruning something in the flower bed that didn’t need pruning. Meaning he’d had second thoughts about letting me in. He was standing guard, now. He was on alert.
In one hand I was clutching a small patch of rolled carpet I’d never be able to explain.
On my other hip, her cool face in my neck, was Janine.
I looked back to the door I’d just locked.
“No, never did,” I said, “but there’s water on the floor in his kitchen.”
The super or maintenance man stood, his brow furrowed.
“Sink?” he said.
“Refrigerator,” I said back, and followed him back in, pulled the door shut behind us, twisting the deadbolt.
Ten minutes later I stepped out again, my breathing back to normal, almost.
“Well that was different,” I said to Janine, and hitched her higher.
Walking along the side of the house back to the garage, to my car, I had to turn my head away from her to cough, and then place my hand on the wall to steady myself.
What is it? she asked
Her voice was perfect.
I spit a shiny conglomerate of segmented blackness up into my palm, and studied it.
“Nothing,” I told her, and somewhere between there and the car, I left my soul behind me on the ground.
Daniel’s Theory About Dolls
Dolls. I’ve been collecting three-faced dolls and doll parts—especially heads—for a number of years (I have no idea why). So what could be more natural than for me to edit The Doll Collection (thanks to Veronica Schanoes for the title). In addition to weird and dark stories, the book contains b&w photographs of dolls owned by me, Ellen Klages, and Richard Bowes. The masterful “Daniel’s Theory About Dolls” by Stephen Graham Jones is one of the extraordinarily creepy stories in the book.
The Mysteries
by Livia Llewellyn
(From Nightmare Carnival, 2014)
1
It is that unnamable time of a late December morning, that nighttime hour that bleeds into tired dawn. My great-great-great-great grandmother sits in the living room, in the dark. I hear the rustling of her ancient newspaper as she turns each delicate page. The furnace has shut down after its daily muted roar, and a distant tick sounds through the walls as the metal ducts contract and cool. Other than the paper’s whispers, it is the only sound in the house.
In the same dark, around the corner, past the foyer, I stand in the middle of the hallway, in my stained nightgown and robe, the ones I left behind some fifteen years ago when I left this place, my childhood home. My mother’s house, so lovely and modern and clean—before The Grand moved in and took over, like she takes over everything. The outline of my overweight body hovers in the large black-stained mirror at the end of the hall, by the always-locked front door. A distorted Pierrette with a marshmallow body and mouthless face. I raise my hand. A second later, the creature in the mirror reluctantly moves. I can’t blame it, I know why. The Grand can’t see me, but she knows I’m there. She reads in the dark. She outlines her lips bright red in the pitch black of windowless closets. She embroiders tiny, perfect stitches in absolute gloom. Even during the day, the curtains in all the rooms are drawn, the lamps turned off. —This is how it used to be, she tells me over and over again. —When I was a child, we didn’t have electric lamps. We didn’t have radios. There were no televisions or computers; we weren’t compulsed to entertain ourselves all day. We were self-contained. Everything we needed came out of ourselves, out of our own family. This is how it was in the world. This is how it will always be for me.
I open my robe and pull the nightgown up. If there is a demarcation between fabric and flesh, mercury and air, the creature and me, I cannot see it. I search for the familiar black triangle between my legs. Even that has vanished. I am no different than the bare, cream walls around me. Outside of us, nothing can be seen. Yet within—a carnelevare of the numinous, waiting for release. Everything I need will come out of me.
—What are you doing? the Grand calls out from the living room. —Are you up? As she speaks, I hear her sniffing me out, and my blood runs peppermint hot and cold. She likes it like that.
I let my nightgown drop, and shuffle and squint my way around the corner. Morning presses against the thick curtains, to no avail. Everything glows, but dimly so. Against the far corner of the couch she curls, a fragile mound of bones and skin dressed in soft, flowery clothes. The open newspaper obscures the upper half of her body. I see only legs and knife-sharp fingers, the leaves of dark print flapping back in between. Her feet are small and perfectly formed, with nails like mother-of-pearl. She hasn’t walked in a hundred and fifty years. She hasn’t needed to.
—Give your great grand a sweet breakfast kiss, she says, floating up from the cushions. The newspaper flutters to the floor.
2
—It’s time, my sister said. Her voice poured out of the phone like poison.
—No. Not yet. No.
—The Grand is sending for you, she continued over me, as if she couldn’t hear my voice.
—I don’t want to go.
