Fear of the Dark: An Anthology of Dark Fiction

by Maria Grazia Cavicchioli

  So there had been an old woman, and she might as well have been childless, for all her son cared about her things. His pickup was empty. Everything was on the curb, the doll included, thank God.

  Thank God?

  No reason to be relieved. She didn’t want the doll. Think how dirty it had to be. Still, she stayed by the window, watching. Bob came out of the house with cardboard boxes. She could ask him for the doll, a memento of her friend.

  No! Imagine how he’d look at her.

  She left the drugstore milkless. Back in the car, she slumped behind the wheel until Bob drove off. It was dark, but the streetlights were on, and people were in and out of the drugstore. God, she was acting crazy. Incipient dementia, Willard would have said. Or small vessel disease, or late-onset psychosis — she could hear his voice reciting the diagnoses, right down to his chill undertone of amusement. Tomorrow she’d make a doctor’s appointment, just to reassure herself. For tonight, she had to get home.

  An hour later, when a battered van stopped in front of the cape, Peg still sat in her car, stiff with cold. A scrawny man and two little girls piled out. While the man wrangled the recliner and end table into the van, the girls poked through garbage cans and boxes. Peg’s heart jerked, then raced. Kids today didn’t care for dolls, did they?

  The smaller girl spotted the doll’s hand and tugged until its head appeared, bandanna askew. Peg itched to blast her horn, scare the scavengers away. Wasn’t garbage picking illegal?

  The larger girl came over and hauled the doll free.

  Forget the horn. She’d tell the girls the doll was hers, thrown out by mistake.

  The girls headed toward the van, swinging the doll between them.

  Peg got out of the car.

  Suddenly the scrawny man yelled, in some language Peg couldn’t even name. The smaller girl hugged the doll close, but the man wrested it from her and tossed it over the cans onto the sidewalk. By the time Peg crossed the street, he had hustled the girls into the van, and it had pulled away from the curb, heading toward Hope.

  The doll sprawled, arms akimbo, one leg bent beneath it. Peg had meant to grab it and run back to her car before anyone could notice her. But the second she touched the doll, her sense of absurdity vanished. It wasn’t that its wrist was warm. It felt like the cold plastic it was. It wasn’t that the doll’s eyes pleaded, like a hurt child’s. But its eyes did open, the spring-wink mechanism jarred, and there was recognition in their glassy blue depths, and acceptance.

  “It’s all right,” Peg whispered. She repositioned the doll’s limbs, wincing when the twisted leg popped back into its socket, and then she cradled it against her chest and put it not in the trunk, as she’d planned, but on the passenger seat, with the belt snugged across its lap.

  ○

  In her laundry room, Peg first noticed how badly the doll stank of stale smoke and oil. She threw its pajamas and bandanna into the washer. The doll was filthy; compared to the pink of its newly exposed skin, its head and hands and feet were a grimy gray. She sprayed a paper towel with window cleaner and wiped the doll’s cheek. The towel turned black. The cheek stayed gray. Three towels later, she finally saw pink, but it was pitted, as if tainted air had eaten into the plastic.

  Peg put the doll on her folding table. She felt queasy, as if she’d drunk too much and her tipsy euphoria was starting to wear off. The doll wore the same smile it had worn in the window, but now the smile seemed contemptuous instead of sweet. Of course distance had played its part, allowing her to see in the doll what she had wanted to see… and what had that been? She couldn’t remember. Under the fluorescent lights of the basement, the doll just looked cheap and nasty.

  Stomach roiling, she threw the gummy towels into the trash. The garbage picker had been smarter. He’d spurned the doll. Spurned. It was a strange word to think of, so let her play the psychoanalyst for once — she could do it, after listening to Willard for forty years. What did a doll represent? A child, obviously. Maybe the child Willard had never given her. It hadn’t been her fault. The doctors had given her a clean bill of fertility. But Willard had refused to be checked. He’d claimed he didn’t want children, but Peg had known the truth. He was afraid of finding out he wasn’t perfect. Had she really cared? Hadn’t she been glad there was one part of her Willard couldn’t use? Except now that he was gone, her triumph was hollow. Their child would have been all hers now. Instead she was alone.

  Except for the doll.

  No, she wouldn’t play that pitiful game. After Willard, she was glad to be on her own, remaking her life for herself.

  Holding the doll by an ankle, she went outside to the garbage bin and dropped it into the nearest can. Then she jammed down the lid and hurried inside to wash her hands.

  ○

  It wasn’t until the next morning, looking out the kitchen window at a dim chill rain, that Peg remembered she’d left the doll’s clothes in the washer, on top of a load of delicates. Disgusting. She went down to get rid of them. But the pajamas and bandanna were gone — she emptied the whole load looking for them. Had she put them back on the doll? No, she’d dropped it sexlessly naked into the garbage can. She checked the trash; the ball of grimy towels confirmed her memory of having brought the doll home.

  Peg went out to the garbage bin and pried up the lid of the nearest can. The can was empty. So were the other two cans. Empty.

  She stood in the rain, a hollowness growing inside her that had nothing to do with her unfinished breakfast.

  ○

  By noon, she’d accepted the only reasonable explanation for the doll’s disappearance: that she’d never had it at all. Those dirty towels, they could be the remains of another cleaning project, and there was no other evidence. She’d dreamed or hallucinated the whole ordeal. In a few days she’d see her doctor. Meanwhile, she’d get some work done.

  She scoured the house of the last of Willard’s things. Books that had wandered from his study, cufflinks that had strayed into her drawers, unswallowed pills, they all went into boxes she taped securely shut. Her back ached before she was done, but she felt almost exultant. One more effort would finish the exorcism.

  She hefted the boxes into the study, so intent on the job that she didn’t notice anything wrong until she was juggling the last box heavy with psychiatric journals toward Willard’s desk. Short of her goal, she saw it, and the box slid from her suddenly numb arms to split open on the floor with a hiss like a punctured bladder. Or was the hiss hers?

  In the bay of tall windows facing the street, the doll stood, dressed in its pajamas, bandanna jaunty, waving at people as they walked toward Blackstone Boulevard and the park.

  She hadn’t put it there, but she had to have put it there, in some kind of fugue.

  ○

  Her tires squealed as she veered into the drugstore plaza right under the nose of a blatting bus. Peg jerked her foot from accelerator to brake. She couldn’t kill herself or someone else because she’d gotten a stupid scare, especially when the solution was so simple.

  She parked in her slot by the fence. She opened the trunk. Simple. Simple, too, now that it was shrouded in a garbage bag. She ran across the street to the shotgun cape and shoved it headfirst into the can the little girls had plucked it from. The circle was complete. The doll was home.

  Back home herself, Peg took two tranquilizers. They lulled her to sleep and kept her there, even through dreams of the doll, its bare feet floating just above the pavement as it skimmed with hideous speed up Hope. It flashed in and out of shadows. It grinned, red lips splitting over white teeth. The teeth were the worst thing about it; she woke up with the image of them stuck in her groggy brain. The bedside clock read eleven-thirty, but that couldn’t be right. She never slept past nine. The doorbell was ringing: long, insistent buzzes. Peg pulled on her robe and dragged herself downstairs.

  Bella stood on the porch. “I’ve been ringing for ten minutes,” she said. “What is it, Peggy, you sick?�
��

  Was she? “A little. A cold.”

  “Well, that’s too bad. I guess you don’t want to come to lunch?”

  Oh, it was Wednesday. “I’m sorry, Bella. I overslept, or I would have called.”

  “No problem. Can I get you anything?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Halfway down the steps, Bella turned back, frowning. “Oh, and that thing. It’s a good joke, but I wouldn’t leave it there. People will think you’re batty.”

  “What?”

  “In the window. Where’d you find one like it?”

  Peg closed the door and leaned against it. It was half an hour before she made it back upstairs, where the clock read twelve-ten. She stood in the shower until it washed away the last of her grogginess, and then she dressed in garden clothes, as if to tackle a dirty job.

  ○

  She had given the doll every chance.

  On the Wednesday when Bella had spotted it in the study window, Peg drove it to Attleboro and left it in a supermarket dumpster. On Thursday, she buried it deep in the dunes off Matunuck Beach. On Friday, she weighted its garbage bag with bricks and dropped it off the Jamestown Bridge into the middle of Narragansett Bay. Now, conceivably, she could have retrieved it from the dumpster or the dunes, but no way, sane or sleepwalking or raving mad, could she have gotten it back from the bottom of the Bay.

  It was Willard.

  That realization had crashed into her trank-fogged brain Saturday morning, when she’d walked into the study to find the doll back in the window, pajamas dripping with salt water, raised hand draped with seaweed. Instantly her mental fog had lifted. She’d even smiled. Had she expected Willard to leave her alone forever after? With an ego like his, it was no surprise he’d come back to haunt her. No, the only surprise was that he had submitted to such a grubby embodiment as the doll.

  She pulled on the asbestos-lined gloves from the study fireplace and spun the thermostat to the top. Then she carried the doll to the basement utility room, stripped it and laid it on Willard’s workbench. Though she’d always let Willard deal with the old furnace, she knew how to open the burner chamber door, and she opened it now to fierce heat. The wet pajamas and bandanna sizzled as the flames ate them. Plastic would melt, wouldn’t it? She’d find out.

  She’d meant to start with the doll’s head, but its eyes sprang open no matter how hard she pressed on their bristle-fringed lids, trying to lock the spring-mechanism. So it couldn’t stare into her sweating face as she dismembered it, Peg twisted the head to one side. She wrenched at the right arm. It was attached more firmly than she’d expected in a cheap toy. She pulled a putty knife from the tool rack, worked it into the joint between arm and shoulder, and twisted the blade. The bulbous arm connector appeared, like the cap of a bone. As it did, the shoulder joint started to ooze. Not blood, not seawater: thick yellow fluid that stank like vegetables rotting in a dark cellar bin. She gritted her teeth and kept twisting the knife.

  The doll’s torso seemed to shudder under her palm. She looked away from the oozing joint and saw that its head had turned toward her.

  She dropped the knife and retreated. The doll’s right arm rotated until it was fast in its socket again. Under half-lowered lids, its eyes glinted.

  Meeting them would be deadly. Staring at the ceiling, Peg sidled to the bench and picked up the doll. If she turned its shoulders on a diagonal, maybe she could squeeze it whole into the furnace.

  She had reached the burner chamber door when a cool plastic hand touched her cheek. Her scream dwindled to a moan before it left her throat, for she’d been startled into looking down into the doll’s eyes, and they held her frozen. The glare from the furnace struck their glazed convexity, kindling it to amber life, inhuman, never human, not Willard, older still, colder still, speaking: You promised.

  She shook her head.

  You did, the first time you waved back.

  Peg tried to take the last step toward the furnace — already the doll’s head was so close to the door that its painted hair was blistering. Movement was impossible. The eyes held her.

  You will take care of me until you die. You promised.

  “And what will I get?” The words slipped out of her on a scant exhale. She didn’t have breath enough to shout.

  Nothing. Nothing but me.

  The doll’s eyes closed. Peg’s arms tingled with renewed life, and she knew that now, physically, she could thrust the thing into the fire.

  Instead she closed the furnace door.

  ○

  The little wool suit cost more than her wedding dress had, but it fit the doll perfectly. The plastic skin was scrubbed to an all-over pink, and every morning before breakfast, Peg dusted it.

  All of Willard’s relics she gradually returned to their old places, because until she did, she would stumble over them in odd places around the house. One morning she found her chintz sofas smeared with the ink Willard had kept for his fountain pens. She replaced them with the leather couches she’d exiled to the study. Another morning her Fantin-Latour prints were on the floor, their glass faces shattered. She got the muddy abstracts from the study and put them back up. Evidently the doll didn’t like its domain cluttered.

  On the first day of the first spring after the doll’s arrival, she uprooted the roses she’d planted by the gateposts. Stiff from the effort, she straightened away from broken canes and scattered leaf-buds and looked at the study bay. The doll stood in the center window, head spun around toward her, smiling.

  Years passed with the house remaining the same. Bella and her set dropped away. No loss, really, but no new friends replaced them. The mailman came, and the delivery men. Peg did what she had to do to care for the doll, to make a home for it.

  ○

  On the first day of another spring, as she stood in the bay behind it, she saw a woman walking a pug. The woman jerked the dog up short when she came opposite the bay, and Peg watched as she lowered a hand to her thigh and, just noticeably, waved at the doll.

  Peg closed her eyes. Her heart, weakening lately, thudded faster, but she wasn’t afraid. The thought of a long rest was welcome.

  “Will you make her get rid of the dog?” she asked.

  When she opened her eyes, she saw for the first time out of a dream, the teeth behind the doll’s smile.

  Anne M. Pillsworth is a long-time resident of the Providence area, Lovecraft country, which informs much of her writing. Her short stories have appeared in Pedestal, Night Terrors, Bellowing Ark, Zahir, Arkham Tales and Mindflights. Her debut novel, Summoned, will be published by Tor Books in June 2014.

  What She Dreams

  by Brian D. Mazur

  Monica drags herself along the floor of the cold, damp hall, sliding from patches of light, back into darkness. The light from the open grates above offers no comfort, despite its brightness. Likewise the shadows in between offer no place to hide even though they are the blackest she has ever seen.

  There is no sound coming from the thing that has followed her, other than the scraping of Its talons on the rock surface. It has no odor, and she has yet to see It, save for the curl of Its razor-sharp nails just as It struck out at her.

  This started behind the dead darkness of closed eyes, where she was transported to this endless, doorless hall with the scrapes echoing off the pitted cement walls.

  The first time she breathlessly ran, stealing frequent looks back into the bottomless black as It moved forward with that incessant scraping. Now she drags her legless body, wondering just what It did with the legs that she had once been so proud to show off.

  She squints ahead through the sweaty strings of her dark hair, down the long, seemingly endless corridor. Grit and stone have become imbedded in her arms and sides, drawing blood as she painfully drags herself along.

  Each time she finds herself in this nightmare, she begins in a new spot that presents nothing but an endless path ahead. But now for the first time, as she peer
s through the darkness, she sees a shaft of light, a small square in the distance. A loud gasp escapes her lips and she is renewed, dragging herself faster, digging her fingers, now all bloody and torn, into the floor of the hall.

  Scrape! Scrape! Scrape!

  She cries out as she looks back into the eternal shadows.

  Scrape! Scrape! Scrape!

  The gloom undulates and throbs.

  Scrape! Scrape! Scrape!

  She digs her fingers in deeper and pulls harder, ignoring all spikes of pain. She looks ahead; the light was much closer now.

  Scrape! Scrape!

  She gasps.

  The shadows tighten around her!

  She can’t breathe!

  Scrape!

  There is a doorway, right in front of her! Light bathes her face. Laughing, she pulls herself across the seam that separates light from dark. The air is warmer here, so much warmer! And it is silent. She laughs the laugh of a child full of Christmas.

  Then It drops down in front of her, sucking up the light and warmth like a sponge. Three large, black, hooked claws attached to granite gray feet, curl, uncurl, and curl again, right at her trembling, outstretched fingertips.

  Scrape! Scrape! Scrape!

  “Oh, God!”

  She cries and shakes as she sees Its arm rise and slash down in an arc toward her. Her cries turn into screams….

  Monica awakens instantly, but silently. She is bathed in sweat, but her pulse doesn’t race and her heart doesn’t feel as if it will burst through her chest. Calm. Just like the other times, everything seems all right in the two a.m. darkness.

  Hesitating, Monica reaches out with her left arm and snaps on the bedside light.

  In the dim light she sees that her right arm is gone, removed just above the elbow. Just a smooth porcelain knob now, as she knew it would be. Just like twice before when her legs were taken.