The Fifth Doll

by Charlie N. Holmberg

  Rolling onto her back, Matrona gripped the chisel and flung it sideways. The thud of the blade striking the wall reverberated up her arm.

  Her vision cleared, and the house quaked.

  Matrona gasped and turned toward the wall, blinking away tears. There was a small hole in the wall where the chisel had struck.

  The ring around her middle blazed again. Screaming, Matrona took the chisel in both hands and dug it into the wall, pushing the blade as far as her trembling arms could. The floor bucked beneath her, knocking more dolls to the floor. A sudden wind rammed the window, as though the chisel had attacked the air and earth and not the tradesman at all.

  The ring vanished. Sucking in a deep breath, Matrona scrambled to her feet, her body little-more substantial than a rag doll. She grabbed the doll wearing her face and ran back through the house until she stumbled past the portico and fell to the ground. Her shoulders heaved with every breath. Her muscles stayed taut in anticipation of the next wave of pain. It didn’t come.

  Swift footsteps neared her, and a shadow blotted out the sun.

  “What’s wrong? What happened?” Jaska’s voice engulfed her. Strong hands grabbed her shoulders, then clasped the sides of her face. “Matrona?”

  She looked up into his dark eyes. Over his shoulder, she saw Olia a ways off, studying them.

  “The dolls,” she croaked. “We have to get them out of the house.”

  Jaska looked down at the doll Matrona held in her hand. He didn’t question her, didn’t hesitate. Springing to his feet, he dashed into the tradesman’s house, returning seconds later with an armful of dolls. He dumped them onto the earth beside Matrona and darted back for the second load.

  Matrona forced herself to stand and rubbed at her middle. Olia neared, a bouquet of weeds clenched in one hand.

  “Stay here,” Matrona rasped to the older woman. Jaska dumped more dolls beside Matrona, and when he ran back into the house, she followed. She stepped in the kitchen to pocket Feodor’s, Galina’s, and her parents’ fifth dolls before hurrying into the doll room after Jaska and pulling more villagers from the shelves. She picked up her hem to make a bowl out of her skirt so she could carry more.

  She brought them outside and dumped them beside Jaska’s final load.

  The village flashed gray before her eyes, dark houses caught in the torrent of a snowstorm.

  Chapter 21

  The vision lasted only a moment, punctuated by Olia’s scream. Then all was as before, green and grassy, the sun shining in a wood-grain-patterned sky.

  Jaska’s face had gone pale. “Did you see . . . ?”

  Matrona nodded.

  Olia dropped into a crouch. “We’ll lose our toes, we’ll lose our toes. No sheep saved. No wool, no socks.”

  Jaska looked at his mother, his shoulders stiff. “Was that . . . Russia?”

  Matrona shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t remember enough of it.”

  The ground trembled under their feet, as if a great beast moved beneath it. Jaska placed a hand on Matrona’s shoulder as though to steady her—or himself.

  “I think Slava can still reach us through the dolls,” she said once the earth had settled. “I saw him.”

  “You did? Where?”

  She explained—the story became so simple when related through words. Shorter and easier than it had been to live it. She explained the house as a doll, the Nazad, the seam printing itself into her middle. Jaska paled at that last part.

  “So I took the doll out, and it stopped,” she finished. “And the quaking . . . it started with the chisel.”

  “You’re all right?”

  She nodded.

  He licked his lips. “Will it stop?”

  She shrugged, and in return the ground grumbled.

  Olia stood and began looking around, reminding Matrona of a bird. Jaska let his hand fall from her shoulder. “Removing the dolls from the house didn’t take us back to Russia. If we’re in the dolls, and the dolls are in that house, and that house is, supposedly, in Russia—”

  “Then taking them out should bring us home.” Matrona gazed out to the village. “Maybe it almost did.”

  “That could be why we saw the snow,” Jaska concluded.

  She nodded. “Perhaps the spell is weakening.”

  Jaska knit his fingers through his hair and tugged on the locks. “So what do we do now? Wait for it to snap?”

  “I don’t know how the magic works. He never told me.”

  Matrona’s vision flashed again, the sky turning gray and solid, snow spinning through the air. The wood flickered away, but Slava’s bright house stood untouched. A chilled gust engulfed her, shaking her down to her bones. The change lasted half a heartbeat before the sun snuffed out the icy weather.

  Matrona’s pulse sped in her chest. She glanced back to Jaska, who stood wide-eyed as a dormouse. “Slava cares for himself above anyone else. His house may be the safest place for us right now, so long as we keep the dolls outside of it, where he can’t influence them.”

  When Jaska didn’t respond, she stepped up to him and put a palm on either of his cheeks, urging him to look at her.

  “We’ll solve this. What we can do is open the others’ dolls to restore them like I restored you. They’ll remember more than I do; they might have ideas that can help us. I already opened all the first layers.”

  “Three days for each layer, Matrona,” Jaska murmured. “Will Slava find a way to strike back before we’re done?”

  She dropped her hands and chewed on her bottom lip. “Opening the back door was the same as opening Slava’s first doll. I’m not sure how to open the others. But I believe that if Slava opens all of his dolls, the Nazad will cease to exist. Perhaps the village itself will unravel. I don’t believe he can find us without ruining everything he’s created, and he will not risk that.”

  “Why does the Nazad exist?”

  Matrona shook her head. “I’m not sure.” She pondered the question, trying to piece together the ill-fitting puzzle Slava had created. “Perhaps this is where reality and sorcery collide. A space between spells.”

  “And if he opened his dolls to come here, there would be nowhere left to come,” Jaska said methodically, thinking. “He’d be freeing us, possibly undoing these . . . spells that he believes will prolong his life.”

  That gave Matrona a spark of hope. “Then we’re safe.” For now, but she didn’t want to voice her doubts. “We have to stay here, in the Nazad, where he can’t reach us. Not yet. We have to open the dolls, or the village won’t remember. Three days . . . Slava set that time limit for safety, but we might be able to open them faster than that.”

  Jaska looked toward his mother, who appeared to be trying very hard to stomp out a bug in the grass.

  “And have a town full of madmen,” he said.

  Though the ground beneath Matrona’s feet didn’t shake, she heard the rumble of the earth’s movement from the south of the village. A flock of starlings flew up into the sky, and the trees bowed under a heavy gust of wind.

  “Madmen, or a village in pieces,” she whispered. “But we have to try. Just with one. If we lose him, we’ll still have the other, and we’ll know to be more careful with the rest.”

  “Him? You know who to open?”

  She nodded. “The man most likely to understand both worlds: Pavel Zotov.”

  Matrona ran back to the Zotov household, seeing the world flash before her one more time—the blink of gray swallowed up the izbas and replaced them with sparse wood, where the trees stood tall and close and naked. The heavy snow had lightened to a few flakes, carried on a breeze that rose bumps across her skin.

  Matrona collected the rest of the fifth dolls in a bag and packed everything Roksana would need for the move—a change of clothes, the midwife’s tonics, rags for her bleeding. Then Matrona guided her quiet, barely lucid friend back across the village to the tradesman’s house. She settled Roksana down on the bed upstairs. Roksana didn’t seem to recognize
she had moved. Olia would stay in the front room with either Jaska or Matrona, and whoever wasn’t with the two women would be just beyond the portico, guarding the dolls.

  The ground shivered around the house as Jaska and Matrona opened the second dolls of every person in the village.

  After the first night in Slava’s home, Jaska spent most of his time in the wood, searching for a door or a break in the loop. He found nothing of use, save for the doll of a hunter, caught in a bed of clover. Matrona itched to open Pavel’s doll, but managed to wait two days before unscrewing doll number three—the one that would return his memories to him, were he whole.

  She hadn’t shared her thoughts with Jaska, but if three days was the true minimum for opening the dolls, Oleg could take Pavel’s place. Perhaps it was cruel to take such a risk with a man’s life, but they needed to make haste.

  It seemed like a decision Slava would make, and that made her stomach turn.

  “I can only hope he can receive his memories in the state he’s in.” There was no way of knowing, since Jaska, whom she’d also awakened in the Nazad, had memories of only the village. She reassembled the revolutionary’s doll outside the steps by Slava’s front door. “If he doesn’t remember, we’ll be lost.”

  “We’ll open the others tomorrow,” Jaska said. The rest of the villagers would be given the benefit of Slava’s three-day rule.

  Matrona nodded and rested Pavel’s doll at her feet. She looked over the village, its foliage still green, its homes seemingly normal save for the lack of wood smoke haloing the chimneys.

  “Matrona.” There was tightness to Jaska’s voice. He breathed long and slow through his nose as he, too, looked out on the village.

  Matrona rolled her lips together.

  He remained silent for another moment before choosing his words. “Why help me?”

  Her stomach fluttered. “You know why.”

  “And you know my reasons. They’re not there because some doll spell put them into my head.”

  “Jaska—”

  “What I need,” he began, speaking each syllable with care, “is truth. Commitment.” When Matrona didn’t respond, he added, “Those things tend to be absent in my life.”

  She kneaded her hands together. “I’ve never lied to you.”

  “Are you still for Feodor”—he waved at the dolls—“after all of this is settled?”

  Her stomach eased, and she let out a breath. “No. I can’t fool myself into thinking marriage with him is what I want. Not anymore.”

  She glanced to the pile of dolls, half-expecting Feodor’s to rise above them.

  Jaska’s voice was smooth as butter and pitched as gently as a night breeze. “What do you want?”

  She looked at him, at the intensity in his dark eyes. Dark as midnight, as river silt, as sin.

  He repeated himself: “What do you want?”

  Matrona shook her head. “You’re as foolish as the rest of them if you don’t know.”

  “I need to hear it.”

  “You, Jaska.”

  His lip quirked just enough to show his one-sided dimple. He leaned forward and kissed the tip of her nose; Matrona lifted her chin to kiss his lips. Despite the wrongness of everything around her, the warmth of his skin felt right.

  They took in the village as though it were a sunset, as though it would change if they waited long enough, but nothing disturbed the view save for the occasional growl from beneath the soil. Matrona’s thoughts gradually turned back to the dolls.

  “Will we open them all?”

  “Hm?”

  “The fourth dolls. Most of the people here will have years of memories of Russia. They might be grateful for what Slava did, but they may also be angry. Others will be confused.”

  Jaska frowned and leaned back against the steps. “You’re worried about a mob.”

  A vague memory of shouting surfaced in Matrona’s mind. A cold street, her mother and herself pressed under an eave. Marching men and women in tattered clothing that almost matched the gray cast of the sky.

  “Matrona?”

  “What if he’s right?” she asked, looking over the dolls. “What if he did save us?”

  But Jaska shook his head. “He’s wrong.”

  “How do you know? You have no memories of our true home.”

  “Because he made us forget.”

  He looked at her, his dark eyes clear and resolute. He held his brother Viktor’s doll in his hands. “If we would have welcomed this place, he wouldn’t have made us forget the other.”

  Matrona pulled from his gaze and peered out over the village. “I suppose you’re right. I don’t remember enough of Russia to know for certain. I wish I did.”

  Leaning over, he pressed a kiss to her temple. The contact made her shiver. The ground rumbled in response.

  “They’ll know the truth.” He tipped his head toward Pavel’s doll. “Or at least he will.”

  Matrona lifted the doll so that its eyes were level with her own. “I’m praying he’ll have some insight.”

  “Even I’ll pray for that.”

  A smile tugged on Matrona’s lips. She lowered Pavel’s doll, rested it against her knees. She heard Roksana singing another verse of her lullaby inside the house.

  “Jaska?”

  “Hm?”

  “What if Russia no longer exists? What if it’s only a memory?” She frowned, looking at the wooden caricatures of her family and friends. “What if we don’t exist?”

  Jaska was quiet a long moment. Matrona listened to his breathing.

  “Then I guess he’s right.”

  “Who?”

  “Slava. If we only exist in his world, then he really is our god.”

  A chill spiked Matrona’s heart at the sentiment. She pressed her lips together.

  “Matrona?”

  She shook her head. “Even if it were true, Slava is one god I will never believe in.” She glanced to the pile of dolls. “And it will be no secret.”

  Chapter 22

  Nothing changed in the two days that followed. The earth rumbled, even shook at times. The village flashed unpredictably, showing dark houses far smaller than the village izbas. Gray skies, light skies, snow spotting the ground. The images never stayed long enough for Matrona to get a good look. Through it all, the dolls remained dolls, and the mad remained mad.

  Two days. Matrona was willing to risk it. She only hoped Pavel was willing, too.

  She left Roksana sleeping and Olia pretending to knit and stepped outside, where Jaska guarded the dolls from both the madwomen and the supernatural. He didn’t ask Matrona what she was doing—perhaps it was clear on her face. Maybe he’d even expected her.

  Only two days. Please don’t be mad, she prayed, clutching Pavel’s small fifth doll in her fist. She knelt beside Jaska and picked up the carpenter’s layered doll and opened the first layer. Condemned by your people.

  Opened the second. Condemned by yourself.

  Opened the third. To see who you were.

  Opened the fourth. To see who you could become. Is that the riddle, Slava?

  Like hers and Jaska’s, the fourth doll’s center was hollow. She slipped Pavel’s fifth doll inside, then carefully pieced together the layers. Once the paint had lined up on the outermost doll, the seam vanished beneath her hands just as Jaska’s had done.

  Jaska started; Matrona stood and spun around, searching—

  Pavel Zotov knelt just beside the portico, cradling his head in one hand. His dark hair was tied back in its customary tail, and he wore a dark kosovorotka and faded gray slacks. He groaned. The sensation of rain and falling tickled Matrona, and her doll-sight revealed a dusting of bewilderment in this man, a desire for freedom, and a blazing fire of leadership. There was no release of secrets from the opening of the first doll. Had the Nazad nullified that consequence?

  Would it take away his memories, too?

  “Pavel?” Matrona whispered, taking a tentative step toward him. Jaska found his feet and
put a protective shoulder in front of her. “Pavel, are you . . . well?”

  “Feel like someone’s taken a saw to my head,” he said. “I—”

  He was still as an oak trunk, silent as a candle. Slowly he lifted his head, wincing against the sunlight. He looked at Jaska first, then Matrona. The village spread out before them. Slava’s house behind. His knees creaked as he stood, and his eyes narrowed.

  “What has he done to me?” he asked, gazing back at the village. “What has that bastard done?”

  “You remember.” The words were a breath of relief on her lips.

  Pavel turned toward her. “Remember . . . yes, I remember. This isn’t . . . How did I not know this isn’t where I’m supposed to be?”

  He reached out for one of the house’s columns and leaned against it, again pressing a palm to his forehead. “Alena, Luka . . . he brought them, too. And Oleg. All of them . . .”

  “I estimate it’s been about two decades, Pavel.” Matrona tried to keep her voice soft, as though it would lessen the blow of the words. “He’s trapped us inside dolls of our likenesses, starting with you. It began as an attempt to stop a revolt, but then the tsar turned on him. He made this place his refuge, it seems. Only, he trapped all of us here with him.”

  Pavel shook his head, winced. “How do you know this?”

  “I’ve seen it. Slava tried to make me his protégé.”

  Pavel glanced to the pile of dolls for the first time. His features slackened.

  Jaska said, “You may be feeling ill. We rushed your release.”

  “My what?”

  Matrona glanced at Jaska. “Let’s get you some water, and a chair. I’ll explain everything.”

  The bowl of cigar ash rattled atop the side table as the earth growled beneath the house.

  Pavel waited for the grumbling to cease before speaking. “That’s one of the quakes you mentioned?”

  Matrona nodded.

  Pavel tapped his fingers on the arm of a wicker chair. Olia occupied the plush chair Slava favored. She had tuned out the conversation, mindlessly tying lengths of yarn into various knots. Jaska had situated himself on the floor, and Matrona sat on the edge of the wooden armchair. Pavel looked at the ceiling. Matrona wondered if he was merely thinking, or if he was imagining his slumbering daughter-in-law above, or his lost grandson. Though he hadn’t said as much, Matrona could see from his hardened expression that he would never forgive the tradesman for what had become of his family.