The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The husband glanced out the front door, and saw nothing—no one.

  “Audrey? What’s wrong? Was someone in the house?”

  The wife tried to explain. The wife tried to recount what had happened so swiftly, and improbably. The wife stammered trying to explain to the disbelieving husband what she herself could scarcely comprehend: a stranger had appeared at the top of the stairs, guiltily acknowledging her presence—begging the wife not to call the police—insisting she hadn’t taken anything—“And I said I wouldn’t call the police if she would just leave.”

  The girl appeared to be Chinese, the wife said. She was tall, slender, with long sleek black hair—“Not young, not a teenager. In her twenties. She was carrying a leather bag, and she wasn’t wearing shoes.” After a pause the wife added, “She may have been ‘high’ on drugs . . . She seemed unsteady on her feet.”

  The husband was listening with a faint smile, as of disbelief. He had seen no intruder in the house, himself. He had heard no voice except the wife’s upraised voice.

  “I thought I heard you calling, Audrey—‘Who’s there?’ But I didn’t hear any reply.”

  “There was an intruder! She was talking to me! Her voice was soft, I could barely hear . . .” The wife spoke rapidly. Her heart was beating unnaturally hard, now the danger should have been past. The husband continued to question her, but didn’t seem altogether convinced.

  They were upstairs by now, in the darkened hall. The wife smelled a faint scent of hair lotion—not her own, she was sure. A single lamp burned in their bedroom and on the bed, with the look of having been dropped in haste, its screen still luminous, was the husband’s iPad.

  “Look, Henry—she had your iPad! She was using your iPad.”

  The wife spoke decisively now, the husband would have to believe her.

  “It’s as if she knew we were going out for the evening, but not that the evening was canceled. She didn’t have time to steal anything—we took her by surprise.”

  Henry snatched up the iPad, frowning. He was a person who didn’t like surprises, and he didn’t like intrusions. The wife spoke to him but the husband seemed scarcely to be listening, as if his mind were rapidly calculating.

  The wife was regretting she’d allowed the girl to walk past her carrying a leather bag. The wife was regretting believing the girl when she’d insisted that she hadn’t taken anything. “I was so taken by surprise, I didn’t know what to do—but I didn’t want to punish her, she seemed like a nice person . . .”

  They saw that the girl had left a pair of knee-high leather boots behind, on the bedroom carpet. One supple, beautifully tooled dark boot stood erect, the other had toppled over. These were expensive, high-quality boots, the girl had abandoned in her flight.

  The silk comforter on their bed had been dislodged, as if the girl had lain there, typing on the iPad, with the comforter gathered around her for warmth. You could see the intimate impress of her body in the bedclothes, where the fragrant scent of hair lotion was stronger.

  The wife said, with a nervous laugh, “Do you believe me now, Henry, that someone was here?”—but the husband only just shook his head, frowning—“Well, something has happened, darling. That seems certain.”

  They examined the rest of the bedroom, checked closets and bureau drawers, but the wife was very rattled, and could not think clearly: it appeared that, in her closet, clothes on hangers had been shoved to the side, and her bureau drawers, that contained undergarments and stockings, might have been ­rifled-through—“But I don’t know if she took anything.”

  The wife’s jewelry was kept in a red-lacquer box with a half-dozen little drawers, that could be locked with a little key; she never troubled to lock the drawers, and so the jewelry box was vulnerable to theft—but again, peering into the little drawers in haste, blinking moisture from her eyes, she had no idea if the girl had taken anything.

  She’d felt a little stab of dismay, and of embarrassment—her bathroom wasn’t altogether clean, at least not so clean as she’d have liked it to be, if an intruder like the Chinese girl were to see it. The mirror above the sink wasn’t clean, the sink counters weren’t clean, the sink required scrubbing so that the chrome fixtures gleamed . . .

  What the husband thought of his own bathroom, on the farther side of the bedroom, the wife had no idea. A cleaning woman came each Monday and stayed much of the day, vacuuming the numerous rooms of the house and restoring them to some degree of cleanliness, but it was four days since the woman had been here. Circumspectly the husband was saying that nothing of his had been taken, he was sure; he would look more closely in the morning.

  The husband spoke irritably and negligently, as if the subject were too petty for his concern. But he’d taken up his iPad at once, and shut off the screen.

  Where had the iPad been? the wife wondered. She’d have supposed that the husband kept it downstairs in his study, with his other electronic equipment; but when she asked the husband, the husband shrugged and said he had no idea.

  No idea? How was that possible?

  “I said, Audrey. I have no idea. I haven’t even glanced at this iPad in weeks. Unless I travel, I don’t use the damned thing, as you must know.”

  “But—what was the girl doing with it? Was she looking at your email? Or—sending messages of her own?”

  “I don’t know. My impression is, nothing.”

  “But—she must have been doing something.”

  “Really? How do you know? She might’ve just switched on the iPad when you surprised her.”

  The husband was walking away. The wife was speaking to the husband’s back.

  The wife was dismayed that, at this crucial time, when she and the husband should have been brought closer together, the husband kept himself at a little distance from her, aloof to the situation, annoyed and yet amused. The wife was dismayed that her emotional unease meant so little to the husband, who often remarked that he didn’t like “weak”—“emotional”—“needy”—people.

  The husband went downstairs. The wife lingered upstairs to look into other rooms, that were darkened—it did not seem likely that the girl had entered these. (In the morning, when she examined closets, she would discover that clothes had been pushed aside, and footwear on the floor appeared to be dislodged; a stack of framed photographs, kept in a closet, had been examined; but if anything had been taken, the wife could not identify it.)

  “Audrey darling—look! Your intruder must have been thirsty.”

  Downstairs in the kitchen, where an overhead light was burning brightly, the husband had discovered a single carton of orange juice on a counter, opened.

  How strange! The Chinese girl had taken the carton from the refrigerator, probably she’d stood in front of the opened door and drunk.

  “I suppose it’s possible that one of us left the carton on the counter,” the husband said, and the wife protested, “Of course not! We might have had orange juice at breakfast but that was hours ago . . .” yet stubbornly the husband said, “Still it’s possible, Audrey. You’ve been known to leave things out, and to be surprised at discovering them. And why on earth would this ‘Chinese girl burglar’ take time to drink orange juice?”

  The wife had no idea. The wife could only stammer that she was sure neither of them had left the orange juice on the counter . . .

  Since they’d returned from the unexpectedly canceled opera, the husband had been in a mood both irritable and playful. He’d been gracious to the wife in the presence of the couple with whom they’d had dinner, as often he was; but now he was rather coolly perfunctory, impatient.

  “Henry, look!” On another counter, in front of the microwave oven, was a part-filled bowl of miso soup and ramen noodles. And in the sink, an opened eight-ounce container of plain white nonfat yogurt with a spoon stuck into it, partly empty.

  “Our intruder must have been hungry. Thi
s solves the ­mystery —she broke inside a house to find something to eat.”

  The husband laughed, this was so absurd. But it was an explanation he would accept, in its very absurdity.

  “She didn’t look hungry, Henry. She didn’t look poor.”

  “If she took time to eat in such circumstances, darling, she was by any definition hungry.”

  There was no reasoning with the husband in one of his moods.

  The wife thought it strange, Henry was speaking ebulliently, as if expecting to be overheard. His hair was disheveled, as if he’d run his hands through it. He’d loosened his handsome silk necktie. Negligently he opened cupboard doors in the kitchen—opened and closed them, noisily. “Nothing missing? No more? Maybe the mystery intruder has left a dwarf accomplice behind, who will crawl out of hiding after we go to bed, and cut our throats.”

  The wife shuddered. Why was that so funny?

  The wife wondered at the husband’s mood, for the husband seemed both fascinated by the intruder, as she was, and eager to push all thoughts of the intruder aside as of little significance.

  “We can look more thoroughly in the morning,” the wife said, trying to speak practicably. “Tonight—it’s a relief, nothing terrible happened.”

  “Virtually nothing ‘happened’ at all. If we were to summon the police, what on earth could we tell them? They would end up blaming us.”

  The wife was feeling the aftermath of the shock. Her heart still beat strangely, as if in reproach.

  “I wonder if she was—‘high’—on drugs? She behaved so strangely . . .”

  “In what way, ‘strangely’?”

  “The way she looked at me—spoke to me—the pupils of her eyes seemed dilated . . .”

  “If she were Chinese, as you say, her eyes would be dark. Very difficult for you to have discerned, at a distance of a few feet, if the pupils of her eyes were ‘dilated.’” The husband spoke lightly, derisively.

  This was so, the wife supposed. And yet—what other explanation for the girl’s behavior?

  “You know, Henry—we don’t really know what she took from us. She was half-running right past me, with a large leather bag—I didn’t think to ask her to show me what was inside.”

  This was not altogether true: the wife had thought of asking, but had not dared. Even at such a time, when a stranger had violated the privacy of her household, she’d felt too much the hostess—constrained, inhibited. Polite.

  “Don’t be silly, Audrey—you surprised the intruder. She didn’t have time to stow things in her burglar’s bag.”

  “Maybe she did, before I came in. How do you know?”

  “True. I don’t know. I didn’t see the ‘intruder’ in fact—I’ve taken your word for it.”

  “‘Taken my word’—what do you mean?”

  “Just what I said. I didn’t see any Chinese girl, only you saw her.”

  The wife wanted to protest—what of the iPad on the bed? What of the boots left behind?

  The orange juice, the miso soup?

  “And why do you persist in saying ‘Chinese’? Could you ­really distinguish between Asian nationalities, darling? Korean, Thai, Japanese . . .”

  At the Institute, the husband worked with many Asian and Asian-American scientists. The wife had to concede that probably she could not identify a Chinese face among the faces of other Asians—if she’d called the police, she would have hesitated so identifying the intruder.

  The wife was confused by the husband’s attitude. It was not unlike him, in a time of crisis, to turn the situation back upon her, if he could; the husband had a way, both jocular and cutting, of punishing the wife for upsetting herself and him. Throughout their marriage, the wife had become conditioned to keep mild crises to herself, to deflect “bad news” where she could, and never complain to the husband if she could avoid it.

  Whining. Complaining. It isn’t very becoming in a woman.

  Please can we drop the subject.

  But now the wife was thinking what a mistake she’d made entering a house that had been broken into, without knowing if the intruder or intruders were still inside. And Henry hadn’t called her back—he’d seemed to be encouraging her, to find a way inside their house.

  If the intruder had been a man, or men, with weapons! The wife might have been killed.

  It hurt her, that Henry seemed indifferent to the danger she’d put herself in for his sake.

  She thought—But why isn’t he upset? Why doesn’t he care?

  As if he’d only now just thought of it, the husband went to check his study. The husband’s at-home study was a large, spacious room at the rear of the house, the door to which was sometimes locked. (To keep out the wife? But the wife would never have entered the husband’s study uninvited.) Tonight, the door was securely shut but not locked. And the room was darkened. The husband switched on an overhead light and glanced about, frowning—“Doesn’t look as if anyone has been in here.”

  “Are you sure, Henry? Your desk . . .”

  The husband’s computer screen was dark, but the drawers of his desk were part-open. The husband usually kept the drawers uniformly shut, as he tried to keep his desk top clear and uncluttered. His success as an administrator, Henry often joked, lay in his insistence upon answering emails daily, if not as quickly as they came in.

  It was possible the intruder had visited this room. The wife heard the husband curse, under his breath. But then he laughed, as if the situation were absurd—preposterous. He would not become indignant. He would not become upset. He would examine his study more thoroughly in the morning, he said. “There’s no hurry now, obviously. The ‘intruder’ has departed.”

  The wife said, uncertainly, “Are you absolutely sure we shouldn’t call the police, Henry? Maybe . . .”

  “No. The last thing we want is police officers bumbling around our house and blaming us for leaving a door unlocked.”

  Locking up the house had fallen to the wife’s responsibility and it was true, sometimes Audrey didn’t trouble to lock a door during the daytime, if she wasn’t going to be away for long. But leaving the house for an evening was a different matter. The wife was sure she’d locked the door. It had become second nature for her to make sure that the doors of the house were locked, as she took care to lock the doors of her vehicle.

  Half-ironically the wife said, “What shall I do with the boots?”

  “Put them outside in the morning. Not by the front door, but out by the driveway. Maybe the mysterious ‘Chinese girl’ will come back to get them.”

  It was like the husband to issue such a command, with a smile. And to add, after a beat, as if he’d only just thought of it, “Please.”

  The wife thought it was strange, and yet it felt natural—to treat an intruder with such thoughtfulness. For the Chinese girl was clearly not a burglar—not a criminal. Nor was she homeless. To have called the police to arrest her would be cruelly punitive, and the wife did not want to hurt her. Thinking—She must be desperate, to behave the way she did.

  The wife was aware, too, that the husband was observing her, and judging her. Throughout their marriage of not quite eight years she’d been aware of the husband’s observation and judgment, that had often been severe; she understood that something in her very soul was stunned, and niggardly. But she was determined now to behave as the husband wished her to behave, and to surprise him with her equanimity.

  And so in the early morning, the wife set the handsome leather boots carefully outside, as the husband had instructed. The Wheelings’ red-brick Edwardian house was set back in a large, wooded suburban-rural lot; from the front door, you could barely see the road at the end of the driveway. No one could see the boots set in the grass beside the front walk unless she made a point of coming onto the Wheelings’ property, and looking for them. The wife thought it unlikely that the Chinese girl would
come back for her boots, but she was determined to follow the husband in his suggestion.

  The previous evening, the girl must have come to the Wheelings’ house by chance. Very likely she’d been walking through the residential neighborhood of deep, wooded lots and tall trees, with no clear idea of where she was going. She’d bypassed other, more brightly lighted houses in favor of the Wheelings’ darkened house. It was not possible to think that the girl had set out intending to break into their house, but somehow, she’d gained access to it. She’d dared to open the door, and step inside. The wife imagined her soft, clear, melodic voice—“Hello? Hello? Is anyone home?”

  Beyond that, the wife couldn’t imagine.

  It was purely chance, her coming here.

  It does not mean anything!

  Through the morning, the boots remained beside the walk, untouched. When the wife glanced outside she was startled to see them—like a living being, they were, that had been stricken, and fallen into the grass.

  At midday, the wife had to go away for a few hours; when she returned, the boots were still there in the front lawn, unmoving. And then she forgot about the boots, and in the early evening when the husband returned from his office at the Institute the husband went outside to check, and happily reported that the boots were gone.

  The wife was astonished, for she was certain that the girl would never have dared return for the boots. How could the girl have even imagined that the Wheelings would leave the boots outside for her . . .

  “Henry, are you sure? The boots are—gone?”

  “Gone, darling. Gone.”

  The husband laughed, as if the little adventure had come to a fitting end. The wife tried to laugh, though she was hurt. After her kindness to the intruder, the girl hadn’t thought to tell the wife that she was grateful.

  She is ashamed, I suppose. She wants only to never see us again.

  The husband seemed pleased with this ending. The husband kissed the wife, lightly on the lips. The husband was in a heightened mood, his skin flushed, and an alertness in his eye, and the wife could smell a faint smell of alcohol on his breath, for there’d been a lavish reception at the Institute late that afternoon.