by Al Ewing
“Welcome back,” muttered Niles sarcastically, in response to the narrative voice. “Here was I thinking you’d gone for good.”
He shook his head, burying his face in his hands for a moment, and then reached for the flat brown package, shucking it open and sliding The Doll’s Delight out of the cardboard sleeve. By H.R. Dalrymple, he read. Illustrations by Mervyn Burroughs.
It was a thin book, perhaps twenty pages with a hardback cover – he recognised the illustration from the grainy photo he’d seen on that website of ’fifties ephemera. He’d assumed its disturbing quality had been an accident of the low resolution, but if anything the front cover was worse now that he could see it clearly with his own eyes.
It was a painting of a little girl, sleeping in a field at night. At least, he assumed she was meant to be sleeping – she looked dead. The anatomy of the neck was all wrong and it looked like it had been twisted and broken – meanwhile, the girl’s skin had a waxy sheen to it, as though it had already begun to rot. The delighted smile on her face made her look like a member of a suicide cult.
Around the corpse danced a number of creepy-looking dolls and toy soldiers, each with a fixed glare and a macabre grin painted onto their varnished wooden faces. Any one of them would give a child nightmares – together, they looked like they were going to crawl out of the cover en masse and devour the first maternity ward they laid eyes on.
Finally, in the corner of the illustration, hiding in a clutch of wild flowers, there hunched the coup de grace. It took Niles a good minute to work out that the creature was supposed to be a little brown field mouse, as opposed to a slavering rat.
Either The Doll’s Delight was some covert branch of the MK-ULTRA program designed to cause the maximum trauma in a young mind, Niles decided, or Mervyn Burroughs was spectacularly unsuited to be an illustrator of children’s books.
He settled back on the couch, opened the book up and began to read:
THE DOLL’S DELIGHT
By H.R. Dalrymple
Illustrations by Mervyn Burroughs
In the watches of the night
We gather for the Doll’s Delight
We laugh and play and never fight
When boys and girls are sleeping.
Here’s the ballerina fair
And here is Mr Teddy Bear
You never saw a sweeter pair
When boys and girls are sleeping.
Here’s the soldier with his gun
Who’s run away to join the fun
He won’t make war with anyone
When boys and girls are sleeping.
See them laugh and see them sing
A-dancing in the fairy ring
Your dolls can do most anything
When boys and girls are sleeping.
Here’s the peg-boy made of wood
Saying things he never should
Not all your dollies can be good
When boys and girls are sleeping.
See him shout and see him curse
He started bad, he’s getting worse
He’s so unpleasant and perverse
When boys and girls are sleeping.
Little dolls who can’t be nice
Must learn to be, or pay the price
And be devoured by rats and mice
When boys and girls are sleeping.
Now the dolls are full of grace
And every dolly knows their place
There’s not a single frowny-face
When boys and girls are sleeping.
In the watches of the night
They gather for the Doll’s Delight
They laugh and play and never fight
When boys and girls are sleeping.
“When boys and girls are screaming, more like,” muttered Niles.
The cover was the least of it.
Each of the poem’s nine verses was copiously illustrated in a double-page spread by the extraordinary talent of Mervyn Burroughs, children’s literature’s answer to Francis Bacon. The first four, admittedly, weren’t quite as bad as the rest – once you’d seen the cover, and you had a stiff screwdriver inside you, you could just about stand to look at them. The illustration for the fourth verse in particular – the ‘fairy ring’ – was almost pleasant in comparison to the others, or at least only mildly ugly. If you were an art teacher in some adult education class and you saw Mervyn Burroughs paint an illustration like that in your class, you’d only take him aside and gently explain things like ‘perspective’ and ‘how to mix paint,’ before refunding his money and sending him merrily on his way. You wouldn’t attack him bodily with a T-square.
On the other hand, if you saw him working on the illustration for the fifth verse – the ‘wooden peg-boy’ that Niles now found himself gazing in horror at – you’d most likely go straight to the police and warn them about the dangerous serial killer.
If Mervyn had been forced to play with the ‘peg-boy’ as a young child, it might explain a few things. Niles had never seen any toy remotely like it in his life. He doubted anyone else had either. If he was being particularly charitable, he could claim it reminded him of a Victorian clothespin doll, but where those dolls were usually beautifully carved and lovingly painted, the ‘peg-boy’ was a whittled lump of driftwood, with horrifically thin limbs, dark, piggy eyes gouged out with the point of a knife and a hateful, sneering slash carved across its face to serve as a mouth. He made the other dolls in the scene, hideous as they were, seem like beautiful objets d’art. Niles had finished his second vodka looking over that picture, and had to go and make a third.
He’d run out of orange, but it didn’t matter. If he was going to keep looking at the ‘peg-boy,’ he’d take it neat.
Flipping over the page, he grimaced and made a little noise in his throat. The next illustration was even worse – a shot of the ‘peg-boy’ dancing and shrieking, the slit of his mouth yawning open in a way that seemed comical at first glance but got progressively more horrific the longer you looked at it. It was like something out of Heironymus Bosch. The other toys shrank back from him as if he was a terrifying homunculus they’d called into being, while in the shadows there lurked the faintest suggestion of demonic eyes.
Niles tilted his head, letting the warmth of the third vodka run through him. It occurred to him that if he stopped looking at The Doll’s Delight as a children’s book, it actually made some sense. The perspective was still off, the colours still veering between muddy and garish, there was still no clear idea that Burroughs knew anything about the anatomy of humans or dolls... but take this out of the context it was allegedly meant for and it might be a fascinating piece of outsider art. Burroughs might be the Henry Darger of his generation – well, aside from Henry Darger, of course. Maybe that was the point?
The next page showed a rat – Niles had been right the first time, it couldn’t be a mouse – emerging from the bushes and gnawing grotesquely at the peg-boy’s face, carving deep gouges into the wood. Around the unfolding nightmare, the other dolls cheered, dancing much as they had in the fairy ring. Niles felt his belly crawl up to his chest, do a lazy loop and then slowly dig its way back down again. No, he decided, this wasn’t for children. It couldn’t be. There was a terrible, savage bitterness to the verses – what had Matson called it? Vicious camp.
Listlessly, he flicked through the remaining pages – the peg-boy was simply gone from the world, leaving only the toys with their glassy expressions, dancing and playing as relentlessly as they had at the book’s opening, while the verses seemed to suggest some ghastly Orwellian nightmare. Who was Henry R Dalrymple? A situationist? A performance artist? Some pseudonym for Burroughs, or the other way round? Or a disgruntled children’s author rebelling against the medium?
He flipped through it again, looking for clues. There was a dedication on the inside front cover, in pencil – To Aspy; Well, I gave it a shot. Uncle Hank. Curiouser and curiouser. He found himself wondering what the story behind it was – how the whole book
had come to be.
He sighed and tossed it onto the table. Well, he didn’t have time to waste on that now – he had a pitch to write. The back cover stared up at him – a single image of the red wooden soldier, his painted grin leering mockingly, fascinating him. He reached out to flip it over, but that just brought him back to the front cover again. He could see now that the thing in the flowers was definitely a rat. He thought about rats in flowers, flowers in dustbins, the juxtaposition of images...
No. Now was not the time. He quickly moved his laptop to cover The Doll’s Delight, removing the temptation. Then he went to the kitchen and made himself a fourth vodka.
“Right,” he muttered, returning to the couch, drink in hand. “The Dangerous Mr Doll, take one.” This was going to be the big one – the one they’d remember him for. An exegesis on the subject of life, fiction and Fictionals, wrapped up in just over two hours of girls in bikinis and exploding volcano bases. Everything he’d learned over the past few days in one soul-searing package.
Steady, he told himself.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
And open on...
He couldn’t think of anything. “Open on...” He mumbled the words out loud, but his voice just sounded high-pitched and feeble in his ears. His head felt raw, empty, scraped out like a pumpkin. Open on... something. Open on what?
He tried to imagine himself talking to Dean, or Jane, or Mike. All three of them, in some boardroom or meeting room somewhere. All of them waiting to hear what their pet genius had to say.
“Open on...” the author said, and paused. The producers looked up at him, expectantly. In the corner of the room, he could hear a clock ticking.
One of the producers looked at his watch.
Suddenly it came to him. “Open on a Fictional, lying inside a ring of stones on a grassy field,” the author said. “His face is being eaten by rats and mice.”
The producers shifted uncomfortably in their seats.
Niles winced, furiously rubbing at his temples. “God, no. Not that.” His head was starting to throb unpleasantly. He hoped he wasn’t coming down with a cold.
“Open on...” the author thought desperately for a moment – “Open on a ring of stones in a forest. A ballerina dances with a large stuffed bear.”
One of the producers looked at the others, shaking her head. “What is this, Tim Burton? Come on, we’re trying to make a serious movie here.”
Niles looked at his glass for a moment, then tossed it back in one. “Write drunk, edit sober,” he muttered to himself. It was good enough for Hemingway.
“Right,” he said, voice thick and choked. “Pitch for Mr Doll reboot. Go. We open on...” He licked his lips, staring at the sliver of hardback peeking out from under the black plastic of the laptop. “We open on...”
“We open on a small, carved wooden figure. Limbs like thin twigs. Mouth a cruel slash in its face. Eyes bored out with the point of a switchblade.” The author leaned forward, urgently, locking eyes with each of the producers in turn. “Underneath the figure – wet grass. It’s night. A field. A ring of stone. The thunder cracks! Lightning flashes – illuminating a single set of footprints. Someone left this strange talisman here. But who? And why?”
The producers craned their neck, lapping it up. “Who?” asked one of them, breathlessly, his watch forgotten. “Why?” asked another. The author looked down at them, eyes filled with cold command. He paused for a long moment – then spoke.
“I haven’t the foggiest idea,” he said, and threw himself out of a window.
“Fuck it,” Niles growled, and lifted up the laptop.
HE LOOKED FOR Mervyn Burroughs first, trying every search he could think of, but aside from the website he’d already seen, nothing came up. “Weird!!!” remained the only word available on Mervyn.
He had a little more success with Henry R Dalrymple, but not much. There was a Henry Robert Dalrymple on Wikipedia – a Canadian Professor of Chemistry who occasionally appeared on children’s TV, born in 1962, not the right one – and any number of Henry Dalrymples on the various family tree research sites, but combing through those would have taken him weeks. Although he supposed he could cut the time down by checking if any of them had nieces named ‘Aspy’ – that couldn’t be a common name. It was almost certainly short for something –
He paused for a moment, then picked up the hardback and turned it over, examining the spine. Aspidistra Press. ‘Aspy.’
He tried the White Pages – didn’t bring up a match. Of course, if she was his niece, there was no reason why she should have his surname – even if she did, she might have married and taken someone else’s name in the meantime. On a whim, he tried ‘Aspidistra Burroughs.’
Three matches. One in Michigan, one in Tennessee, one in California.
The one in California remembered The Doll’s Delight.
“Oh my goodness,” she said, in a frail, bird-like voice, “Uncle Henry’s book! Do you know, I’d almost forgotten about that.”
“Well, I’ve got a copy here actually,” he said, unable to hide his smile. He was feeling an immense glow of satisfaction from just talking to the woman – with the four vodkas in him, the conversation felt like real progress towards the goal of a finished pitch, even though the sober part of him knew that he was only taking himself further and further down a blind alley. “Just got it today.”
She laughed. “Ha! How’d you like it? Scared the pants off you, I’ll bet.”
“It, er, it was certainly something,” Niles smiled. “I’ve got a few questions I was wanting to ask you about it, actually –”
“Well, here’s one thing I’ll tell you for nothing,” she said with a little chuckle, “you want to hang onto it. My Dad and Uncle Henry only managed to print up a few of them – not even double figures, I don’t think. Your copy’s probably worth something.”
About $120, thought Niles, not counting postage and packing. “Actually, I think it’s your copy.”
“No!” She sounded shocked.
“There’s a dedication here in pencil, saying To Aspy. It’s how I found you, as a matter of fact.”
“You are kidding! It’s the very same one Uncle Henry gave me? Do you know, I thought that was gone for good! How much do you want for it?” There was a noise from the background – someone voicing an objection. “Oh, hush up, Meadow! It’s my money, I’ll blow it how I like! Or, for gosh sakes –” She sighed down the line, exasperated. “My daughter would like a word.”
Niles could actually hear the roll of her eyes.
“Hello?” A younger, harsher voice. Niles could tell he wasn’t going to get on with her. “Listen, we’re absolutely not interested in buying anything over the phone right now.” A murmur of protest in the background. “Mama, I don’t care! You’re not falling for another scam!”
“Well,” Niles interrupted her, “I wasn’t actually planning on selling it. I could give it to her, if she wants, but –”
“Is this a book club?” Meadow said, sounding suspicious. “Because we’re not interested in signing up for any of those either. Listen, can I speak to your supervisor?”
“I don’t have a supervisor,” Niles sighed, “I’m, I’m sort of tracking the evolution of a story –” He realised how ridiculous it sounded even as it came out of his mouth. “I mean, I’m interested in this children’s book I’ve got and I was wanting to ask your mother a few questions about it –”
“We’re just not interested in buying anything right –“ Melody started, and then there was another interruption from behind her. “Mother, I’m trying to help you –” The line went dead.
Niles stared at the phone for a moment, wondering if he should call them back. He really didn’t want to waste any more time talking to Meadow – then again, that seemed to be the only way to get the answers he was looking for. He really felt like he was on the cusp of something important.
“Spare change?” the author grinned at the passer-by, through w
hat few teeth remained. The man took one look at him – the long, greasy hair, the unkempt beard, the hollow set of his eyes, the stinking, filth-covered shawl that was wrapped around him like the decaying skin of some mangy animal – and almost vomited into the gutter. “Spare a little change, sir?” the artist repeated, rattling his tin mug. There was a single bottle cap inside.
“Get a job!” the passer-by cried – an instinctive howl of pure revulsion.
“I can’t,” the author moaned. “I’m on the cusp of something important.”
“Then again,” Niles said aloud, “I should really get back to the pitch.” If Aspidistra Burroughs really wanted to talk to him, she could surely always phone back. Right now he had to work out how to make Mr Doll work, without bringing in fairy rings, whittled wooden dolls, or giant rats eating the hero’s face.
He checked the time – thirteen minutes to eight. Well, no sense starting on an odd number. He’d wait until ten to. Or maybe make himself a hot drink and start fresh on the dot of eight.
Maybe half past.
He sighed heavily, staring at the dead phone for a moment, willing it to ring. When it did, he was quite disappointed to see that it was Bob.
NILES STARED MOROSELY at the phone, waiting for the buzzing to stop. It was the third time Bob had called, and Niles still wasn’t about to pick up. He considered turning his phone off altogether, but he didn’t want to miss a call back from Aspidistra, if it should come – or even Mike. Or Maurice might finally return one of his calls, he mused.
