The Fifth Doll

by Charlie N. Holmberg

  Pavel stood and glanced around the room. A frown carved his mouth as he stepped into the kitchen.

  “Pavel?” Jaska asked, following him. Matrona rose from her chair and did the same.

  Pavel searched through Slava’s cupboard until he found a small knife block. A dry chuckle erupted from his throat when he brought it out to the table. “I made this.”

  Jaska held out a hand as though Pavel had become a wild boar. “It’s all right, we’ll—”

  “I’ve still got my mind,” Pavel snapped, pulling a knife from the block. He glanced to Matrona, and though anger toughened his brow, she saw clarity in his eyes. She nodded to Jaska, who relaxed.

  Turning to the nearest wall, Pavel stabbed the knife into the wood.

  Matrona gasped. Despite the sunshine that still poured down on the village, thunder boomed in the sky over the house. She stared out the window, confused. Did harming the house hurt Slava, or the village itself?

  “Hmm.” He ripped the blade free. He stabbed it again, and the earth bucked hard enough to throw off Matrona’s balance. She collided into Jaska, who grabbed the edge of the table to stay upright.

  Pavel hefted the knife a third time.

  “Enough of that!” Matrona snapped. “Yes, it works. I told you as much. You’ll topple the roof onto our heads with your experiments.” She didn’t understand the spells on the house. Was this place connected to Slava the same way Matrona’s doll was to her? It didn’t look like him, so surely the sorcery was beyond her comprehension. Yet when Matrona had stabbed the wall with the chisel, Slava’s manipulation of her ceased. Because she had hurt him back, or because she had risked damaging this small world he created?

  Pavel dropped the knife gracelessly onto the table. “There’s no way out?”

  “Not that we’ve found,” Jaska said. “I’ve seen no break in the loops. No secret doorways in the patterns.”

  “The house is the only thing we have any effect on,” Pavel concluded.

  Matrona focused on the gouges left in Slava’s kitchen wall. “In the doll world, we can leave the house.” She stepped past Pavel and pressed her fingers to the marks. She thought she could feel the wall shudder beneath her touch. “But not in the real world. If we even exist there.”

  “A puzzle meant for scholars,” Pavel spat.

  “Maybe not.” She pulled her hand from the injured wall. “You’re correct; the house is the only thing we can affect.” She swallowed. “If we cannot open Slava’s doll, perhaps our only alternative is to break it.”

  “You want to break the house?” Jaska asked.

  She nodded. “Pull down its walls, see what’s truly on the other side of them.” How much would it hurt Slava? Would it kill him? She shuddered, her stomach souring. She did not want the tradesman’s blood on her hands. If only she understood his magic!

  Pavel smiled for the first time since awakening. “I like this idea. I have tools in my shop—hammers, saws, chisels.”

  “Matrona.” Jaska crossed the room and took both her hands in his. “I want to escape as much as you, but if taking a chisel to the wall can cause the ground to shake, what will a sledgehammer do? We could be killing ourselves.”

  Matrona’s throat constricted at the notion.

  Pavel asked, “Do you have another suggestion?”

  Jaska frowned. Pressed his lips together. He was silent for several breaths—they all were. Then his shoulders slumped, and he shook his head.

  “The sooner the better.” Matrona hated the weakness in her voice. She could think of no other way. They couldn’t unlearn what they knew, and she would never let Slava wipe her memories to keep his false peace intact. Even if Russia was a terrible place, it was a free one, wasn’t it?

  “Will it risk the others?” Jaska asked.

  “Do you want to sit around and wait for them to wake, then take a vote?” Pavel quipped. “I’ve led people into far more dangerous situations. If left to choose for themselves, they will cow. If they see action, they will follow.”

  Jaska’s hands fisted. “You think them cowards?”

  “I think we’re wasting time.”

  “Enough,” Matrona said. “Let’s take Olia and Roksana back to Pavel’s home. Then we’ll get the supplies.”

  “Matrona . . .” Her name was almost a plea on Jaska’s lips.

  Standing on her toes, Matrona took his chin in her hand and kissed him, paying no attention to Pavel. Peering into Jaska’s eyes, she said, “I want to escape. I want to be free.”

  The sledgehammer was too heavy for Matrona to wield, so she fisted a smaller mallet. She felt like a soldier—that was the right word, wasn’t it? soldier?—going to war, leaving her loved ones behind. Olia and Roksana had been left in the Zotov izba with the dolls. If either of the madwomen wandered, it didn’t really matter. Soon, none of it would, if Matrona’s theory was correct.

  Pavel carried the heavy hammer, and Jaska wielded a sturdy saw. They walked in a line, Matrona in the middle, their paces even. As they approached Slava’s house, she saw, again, the illusion of the sleeping dragon—the shingles were its scales, the portico its great head, the hedgerows its tail. She watched it, unblinking, and in her mind saw it shudder with wakefulness, stretch out four massive legs that led to beastly feet with curved claws. Saw its head rise, tilt, and look at them, ready for the challenge.

  It’s just a house, she reminded herself. An enchanted house. A great doll.

  A cage.

  “God help us,” she whispered, and Jaska nudged her with his elbow.

  Pavel must have heard her, too, because he answered, “God isn’t in here.” They stopped before the house, and Pavel twisted his grip on the hammer. “He’s out there.”

  They stood for a moment. Gray flashed across Matrona’s vision. Pavel hefted the sledgehammer with a grunt and slammed its iron head into one of the house’s columns.

  The ground bucked as the painted wood splintered.

  Pavel grinned and swung again. The wood cracked under the blow. The ground trembled; glass rattled in Slava’s windows. Matrona heard a very distant shout, though she couldn’t pinpoint from which direction it hailed.

  The sky darkened.

  Pavel swung a third time, breaking through the narrow column. The quaking of the ground didn’t cease this time. Thick clouds—were they clouds?—began to bubble in the sky.

  Jaska turned around. “This is bad.”

  “Too late to go back now,” Matrona murmured. Gritting her teeth, tensing her shoulders, she walked up to a window and, grabbing the mallet with both hands, shattered it.

  She felt power ripple up her arms—not her own strength, but something from within the house. Something struggling, or perhaps escaping. Banging and cracking trumpeted Pavel’s work, soon followed by the long, rough draws of Jaska’s saw. Matrona moved to the next window and shattered it, then grabbed shutters and hung from them until their nails pulled free.

  Gray night encompassed them. Blotchy darkness filled the sky, rumbling and flashing with lightning. The ground quaked harder, until Matrona could barely stay afoot. An izba down the path began to crumble. A few tiles fell from Slava’s roof.

  “This is too slow!” Pavel shouted over the rumbling. “There’s an easier way to do this!”

  He set down the sledgehammer and hurried on shaking legs to the large leather bag he’d brought with him from his house, filled with more tools for dismantling Slava’s doll. To Matrona’s surprise, he pulled out a flask of kerosene and a box of matches.

  She dropped her mallet and ran to him, tripping with every step, until her hands clasped the kerosene.

  The quaking had become so terrible, she had to shout to be heard over it, even at such close range. “We don’t know how the spells work! You might kill him!”

  “Jaska’s out of harm’s way!”

  “Not Jaska!” she bellowed. “Slava!”

  Pavel pulled back, hand still on the kerosene. “And?”

  Matrona’s jaw went sl
ack. “Surely there’s a way not to—”

  He laughed, the sound of it swallowed by the collapsing walls of buildings in the village behind them. “Do you really think that whoreson would build himself a prison without a way out?”

  Matrona’s grip on the kerosene loosened.

  Pavel leaned closer as one of Slava’s walls began to cave in. “Where do you think he does his trades? He goes to Russia. There’s a reason his house has two doors!”

  Matrona swallowed and let go. Teetered on the trembling earth.

  “We’ll chance it.” Pavel ran up to the house, near where Jaska struggled to saw through the shuddering portico. He made a few gestures to the potter, who stepped back from the house, leaving the saw embedded in its wood. Jaska walked backward toward Matrona. The ground bucked and knocked him onto his backside.

  Matrona hurried to him, falling to her knees beside him. She couldn’t see straight from the shaking, couldn’t hear over the roar of their breaking world.

  The first flames caught her eye, lapping up behind the second window she’d broken. Pavel fell against the house, trying to stay upright. Crawled along its body to his sledgehammer. He unscrewed the head and coaxed flames onto the tip of the handle, trying to spread the fire that was already consuming the dragon from the inside out.

  A second burst of brilliance drew Matrona’s gaze skyward. Her bones became ash within her.

  “Jaska!” she cried, pointing.

  The sky was on fire.

  Chapter 23

  Matrona tried to find her feet, but the earth knocked her down and liquefied her muscles. She clung to Jaska, her eyes watering, her throat itching from the smoke pouring from Slava’s house. The orange flames reflected in Jaska’s eyes.

  A circle of flames whirled above them, eating away at the now-dark sky as if it were parchment, revealing pale gray behind it. Nothing but gray. Though surrounded by heat, Matrona’s flesh turned cold. It was as though she stared into the eye of nonexistence, and it stared back at her, laughing in a voice too similar to Slava’s.

  The flames continued to spread, stretching out like a molten ring, opening the gaping void in the sky. The heat struck Matrona, hitting her in a wave, burning her skin. Jaska turned into her and clutched her shoulders, and she buried her face into his neck.

  Was this really the end? Had they trapped themselves inside a kiln? Would their lives truly end in ash?

  The blaze brightened white hot. Matrona could see it through her eyelids, through Jaska. She screamed.

  The light choked out, and cold settled upon them.

  Jaska was warm against her. His breath danced across her ear.

  Matrona lifted her head, blinking away spots of color. She exhaled, watching her breath cloud and dissipate. Tall dark trees lingered nearby, their branches bare and crooked like the legs of a dead spider. The sky above them was gray—no, a pale blue. The wakefulness before dawn.

  Matrona pulled back from Jaska, shivering in the suddenly frigid air. She turned, her skirted knees scraping on cold, hard ground—a dirt-packed road lined with uneven stones, splattered with shadows, and dusted with . . . ash? A small izba barely larger than her bedroom stood lifeless nearby. And another one, farther away.

  Jaska shifted, stood. Offered his hands. Matrona took them and let him pull her to her feet. Her muscles still trembled with memory. She turned toward Slava’s house, but it wasn’t there. In the place where it had stood, there was only a well without a rope or bucket, cold and silent.

  Footsteps made her heart jump, and she saw Pavel behind a shed, stumbling as though he had a clubfoot. He blinked rapidly. His right sleeve was singed at the hem and elbow, and ash dusted his shoulders. Matrona thought of the fire that had consumed Slava’s house and of the flames whirling in the sky. The ash was all that remained of the world she had known for most of her life.

  A moan sounded nearby. Matrona whirled around and saw figures rising from the shadows between structures. Nastasya Kalagin. Georgy Grankin. Whole, restored. The sight of them did nothing to inspire the doll-sight she’d gained after opening her fourth doll. Had awakening to this new world extinguished it?

  “They’re . . . ,” Jaska began, but didn’t finish.

  “This is it,” Pavel whispered, crossing the road to the small izba. He pressed his hand to the door. His voice quavered with wonder. “This is it . . . Look at it. Untended, left to rot for what, twenty years? This . . . this was yours, Matrona.”

  “What?”

  Pavel stepped back from the small house. “The Vitsin household.” He glanced to Jaska. “If I remember right, your parents lived closer to the wood, that way.”

  He pointed . . . east. Matrona could see the first pale rays of sunlight licking at the cold sky.

  Voices began to murmur in the silence: “Where are we?” “Good Lord, I remember . . .” “How did we come back?” “Where . . . ?”

  “Over here,” murmured another, a baritone. Matrona gasped and turned to see her father and mother coming down the road from the direction of the trees.

  “There!” her mother exclaimed.

  “Mama!” Matrona ran up the road, feeling a happiness bloom within her that she hadn’t experienced for a long time—a childlike fondness for her parents.

  She embraced her mother, pinching away the cold for a brief moment.

  “Our home.” Her father pressed a palm to his forehead. “I remember . . .”

  “This is where we lived,” Matrona said, and her mother nodded, her wet eyes darting back and forth as though ghosts surrounded her. Matrona had never seen such an open, emotional expression on her mother’s face. It was as if she could see straight through to her mother’s soul. In that wordless moment, Matrona understood her mother better than she ever had before, even with the doll-sight.

  The other villagers reacted similarly. They were hushed, stiff with cold and memory, walking through a world remembered. The sun crawled up the sky, bringing a touch of life to the dead place that seemed to be on the verge of spring. It wasn’t until a plume of wood smoke billowed into the sky that Matrona and the others realized their old village was not completely abandoned.

  As Matrona and her parents wound their way toward the smoke, they were joined by several other villagers who had migrated toward the promise of warmth. Jaska had squeezed her hand before leaving to find his own kin, and Pavel had also stayed behind to find his family.

  By the time Matrona reached the street before one of the larger izbas, a second and third plume of smoke danced into the sky, billowing from large, controlled fires. Her gaze shifted to a handful of unfamiliar people who wore clothes much more ragged and darker in color than any worn by those from the village. There was a thin man with a scraggly graying beard and a thick hat made of fur; he threw some quarter logs onto a haphazard fire pit and waved the villagers forward. Behind him, a woman—perhaps his wife—handed out reedy blankets. She gave a pair of knit gloves to one of the older children.

  Matrona began heading toward the couple, questions filling her mouth, but the cry of a babe drew her attention to a dark-haired girl skirting between the collecting villagers, a jug of water and a ladle in her hand. A child was strapped to her chest. There were other strangers, too—an older woman and a man about Feodor’s age. Whether they were townsfolk who had been missed by Slava’s curse or needy peasants who had moved into the abandoned homes afterward, she didn’t know. But there was something about the girl . . . Matrona studied her face as the girl passed by the fire—her black hair, worn in two braids. Strong jaw, thick brows.

  Matrona’s breath caught in her throat. For a moment, her skin forgot the cold.

  Were it not for the shape of the girl’s nose, Matrona could have been looking at her own reflection. It can’t be . . .

  She didn’t realize she was moving forward until the heat of one of the fires brushed gooseflesh from her skin. But she walked away from it, bearing the cold a little longer. Approached the woman as she offered water to Irena Kalagin. S
tudied her again—yes. The thick brow, the dark hair. She even had gray eyes. A worn gray sarafan hugged her slender body, as though she didn’t eat enough, and her hands were even rougher than Matrona’s own. But the similarities screamed at her.

  Matrona took a few more steps, until only a pace lay between them. “Esfir?”

  The name was hoarse on her tongue, and too quiet, but the girl turned her head. She noticed Matrona. A few heartbeats passed before her eyes widened.

  “You . . . ,” she began, then shook her head. “I . . . No, my name is Sacha. But . . . you—”

  “Look like you.” Matrona’s words were a breath. Her heart beat too quickly in her chest. “I think . . . How old are you?”

  “Twenty,” Sacha answered, the ladle limp in her hand. “I don’t know the exact day. My parents found me when I was just a babe—”

  Matrona’s hands flew to her mouth, muffling an oath. It was her. Praise the Lord, it was her!

  Esfir’s—Sacha’s—eyes watered. “You know me.” A smile pulled on her dry lips. “You know me, don’t you?”

  Matrona swallowed against a sore lump in her throat and nodded. “But you were lost. If you’re her—my sister—then . . .” She shook her head. “Slava—”

  “Slava?” The name danced on Sacha’s tongue, laced with hope.

  Matrona shook her head. “Not a relation. I just . . . I thought we’d lost you.”

  Sacha moved forward—perhaps for privacy, or an embrace—but a wail from the bundle strapped to her chest broke the pull of her body.

  Matrona hugged herself. “Y-Your child?”

  Sacha shook her head. “No.” She placed a hand on the babe’s head. “The oddest thing, we found him, just as I was found—”