Paper Dolls

by Anya Allyn

  The little girl straightened, apparently feeling proud that her name had such a history behind it.

  "Phil-oh-meen-ahhh…" Jessamine blinked slowly. "That is a name to live up to."

  The little girl started to name all the statues on the shelf.

  Jessamine slipped back in sleep or unconsciousness—I wasn't sure which.

  Henry gripped my shoulder impatiently, his breath close to my neck. "Tell me exactly what you see."

  "I see Tobias and Jessamine sleeping."

  "Now give me names. I don’t care what bloody language they’re talking in. Just listen to their names when they talk to each other.”

  "Nicholas… Jerome.…"

  "Good. Which one is which?"

  "They are all statues on a shelf…. "

  Henry pressed the knife’s blade against my neck. "I don't want the names of bloody statues. I want the names of the people."

  I don’t want to tell Henry anything. But I was unable to direct my will. No—I’d been able to stop myself from telling Henry the name of the town the family had travelled to or what their house looked like. I just needed to concentrate harder, push Henry out. And push away the feeling of the blade on my throat. Find a way to get free from the trance Henry had put me under.

  A roar came from behind me. Henry was torn from me, thrown to the ground. I whirled around.

  Emerson pulled Henry up from behind in a single jerking motion, restraining him while Zach held his fist high. Zach punched Henry over and over, grunting in rage. Henry’s hand slipped inside his pocket, the blade of a second knife glinting dully.

  “Watch out!” I raced forward.

  Henry whipped his arm across in an arc, slashing Zach’s shoulder. He kicked his legs out, sending Zach toppling. Blood soaked through Zach’s white shirt. Emerson shoved Henry away and then stormed towards him. Henry fled into the park.

  My knees dropped to the ground beside Zach. I held a hand to his bleeding shoulder. “Oh God!”

  Zach grasped my arms. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”

  “I’m fine. We need to get you to the hospital,” I breathed.

  Emerson held his cell to his ear. “Dad, hurry! Zach’s been stabbed by some guy out here….”

  Mrs. Batiste patted my hand. “We can count ourselves lucky that things didn’t go worse than they did. Are you sure you’re alright, dear?”

  I shut my eyes for a moment, closing out the sight of the hospital waiting room—people with drained expressions occupying the chairs. “I feel terrible that Zach got hurt because of me.”

  “Nonsense. The cut will repair. We’re just relieved that all three of you are okay.” She smiled warmly.

  Zach’s dad walked up to us, two men in suits beside him. “Cassie, this is Detective Drager and Detective Sanderson. They’d like to ask you a few questions about what happened tonight.”

  I nodded at Mr. Batiste. “Of course. Can it be somewhere in private? It’s rather busy in here.”

  I walked with them to an empty section of the waiting room.

  At first, Detective Drager reminded me of Martin Kalassi. He was a big man, slightly soft around the middle and broad-shouldered. But when he spoke, He was nothing the same. His voice was sharp and to the point.

  “What happened, exactly?”

  I exhaled. “I went outside to answer a phone call. A man was there. Henry Fiveash. If you call Detective Martin Kalassi of the—“

  “Who’s Henry Fiveash?”

  “He’s… he’s an abductor of children….” I briefly told him who Henry was and who I was.

  He listened attentively but showed no change of facial expression. I could have been reciting a grocery list.

  He nodded. “All right, we’ll try to find out how this guy got into this country and track him down. And we’ll have a chat with your Detective Kalassi. In the meantime, don’t go anywhere alone, okay?”

  I shook my head numbly. “No, I won’t do that.”

  They strode away.

  Molly rushed over and handed me her phone. “I called Martin Kalassi. He wants to talk to you.”

  I spoke with the detective about what had happened tonight. He told me he’d liaise with Detective Dragar and work with him to find Henry Fiveash.

  Zach stuck his head in, a bandage visible on his shoulder. He wasn’t wearing a shirt—it would have been covered in blood anyway.

  I flung myself at him. “I was so scared when he cut you.”

  “Ouch!” Zach grinned down at me.

  “Sorry….” I winced.

  “Kidding. It’s not too bad—just a few stitches.” He grasped my chin with his thumb and forefinger. His gaze grew somber. “I’m just sorry I had my chance to get that guy in jail and I blew it. He got away. If I’d known that was Henry when I was hitting him, I don’t even know that he would have lived to get put in jail.”

  “I’m so, so sorry you and Emerson got involved in this.”

  Something intensely sad visited his eyes. “Don’t you ever be sorry. I don’t want you to get hurt. I just don’t ever want you to get hurt.”

  His hand trembled as he reached around the back of my head and drew me close to his chest.

  Molly paced our bedroom in her pajamas. The temperature had dropped another couple of degrees. It wasn’t freezing, but too cold to be out of bed. Exhaustion bled through me, congealing in every muscle of my body. Vestiges of the trance Henry had put me under remained in my mind, making my thoughts hazy, but I could still see everything about the train wreckage so clearly. The dogs sat outside our window whimpering, as though they knew Molly and I were in turmoil.

  “They’ll be coming back. If not Henry, someone else. We both know that.”

  “Yeah….”

  She stopped beside my bed, her green eyes wide. “How are you able to go into the past?”

  “I don’t know. It happened for the first time… when I wore the dress.”

  “Audette’s dress?” She frowned sharply.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t get it. When Jessamine made me wear it, it took me back to the past, but my own past. I didn’t go into anyone else’s memories.”

  “For me, it started with my own memories… but then I just somehow slipped into someone else’s—Audette’s. And then… I can’t explain it, but it’s like I stepped outside her memories, and I was just there, in another place, in another time—in a speeding train. Henry was there in the train… and he saw me.”

  Molly raised troubled green eyes to me. “You haven’t told me what it was that Henry was looking for in the memory.”

  “A book… he was looking for a book.”

  “What book?”

  “I’m not sure. He said it was old—centuries old. Tobias was meant to have it.”

  “Did you see it?”

  I nodded.

  “Whatever this book is, they’re going to a lot of trouble to find it.”

  I drew my knees up close to my chest.

  “Cassie, we need you to go back there.”

  “Where?”

  “Into the dream.”

  “I’m scared to go back into the dreams. It’s like I could be trapped there and never come back….”

  She chewed her lip. “But if I’m here with you, ready to bring you out of it…?”

  “Molly, I have to admit something. I’ve been right alongside you as you’ve been trying to find out answers, but in body not in spirit, you know? My first doctor, Doctor Alexia, told me it’s okay to block things out for a time, and I’ve been hanging onto that like a drowning person. What I saw in the underground… I’ve had to deny to myself that I actually saw….” My voice fell to a whisper. “Or I’d go crazy.”

  She swept her hair back over her shoulder, kneeling beside me. “I wish it were me that could see what you can see. If I could take that burden from you… I would.”

  Akina and Kishka put anxious noses to the window, making small patches of steam.

  “I wish I could have kept seeing
Dr. Alexia. I needed her. Instead, I got the psychiatrist who was one of them.”

  “Why did you swap to seeing a different psych anyway—that Dr. Verena?”

  “Dr. Alexia was rushed to the hospital with pains and bleeding—she was pregnant—and Dr. Verena took over all her cases….”

  My stomach clenched as I realized what happened to Dr. Alexia was deliberate. I’d been too caught up in my own stuff to see it. I wanted to run and vomit. I wanted to punch Dr. Verena in her smug face. I wanted Jessamine’s tea—and never have to know any of this.

  Molly dropped her head. “I shouldn’t be surprised they’d hurt a mother and baby.”

  “God. I don’t know even know where we go from here.”

  “I’m going to go get the book before they do.”

  “To Copper Canyon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Molly—you can’t. It’s too dangerous.”

  She shook her head softly. “I watched Prudence die…before my eyes. I watched the rest of you being starved to death. I watched little Frances clutching her stomach…with eyes like those of an adult. I can’t stand by and watch these people hurt anyone else.”

  “We can’t stop them.”

  “Then I’ll die trying. I died a thousand times over in the underground. I swore to myself, if I ever got a chance, I would find out the horror behind it all—and stop it. You and I both know there is more to this than Henry. You and I have both had the shadow of the serpent on us, have felt the power that is not of this world.”

  “Molly…the last thing you ever said to me in the underground was about the serpent. You were afraid of telling me something. You didn’t want me to know it… Can you tell me now?”

  She closed her eyes. Her lower lip shook. “I didn’t want to tell you then, because I saw you, I saw you at breaking point.”

  “Tell me now. I need to know.”

  She drew in a long breath. “If you die by the serpent… you will never be at rest. The serpent keeps you, twists you to her purpose… for eternity.”

  I remembered. Remembered the barbs of the serpent’s shadow, piercing me, tearing me with a terrible want, a clawing need. It wanted something of me—and if I gave it, the shadow promised me rest, peace. But even then I knew the serpent lied.

  “Oh God. Oh God….”

  “I saw Prudence twice after she died. I saw her torment. The first time I saw her… she spoke the only words I ever heard her speak. She said, I will never be free. And she drew something….”

  Molly took a notepad from the dresser, and sketched the symbol for infinity. She drew an eye within each loop of the symbol. She raised her eyes to me.

  I felt the cold terror of the underground close over me. That day when Molly told me the shadow, the serpent, was real. Prudence existed within that terror every moment. I saw myself, in the cave, the serpent’s jaws coming to crush me.

  It was real, it was real, it was real, it was real….

  And if the serpent was real, then the world of the serpent was real—wherever and whatever the serpent had come from was real. The thought was too big, too vast, too much….

  The next moment I was on the floor, vomiting, rapid breathing into the floor. I couldn’t deal with this, any of it. The room spun around me.

  Molly’s arm came around me. “Breathe, Cassie. Just… breathe.”

  I exhaled the air I didn’t even know I’d been holding, and breathed in deeply, an intense burst flooding my aching lungs.

  “I’ve been there, where you are now,” she said. “I thought I was going to die, just knowing what I knew. It hurts me to see you like this.”

  She handed me tissues to clean my face and brushed my damp hair back.

  I sat shaking. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to spin out like that.”

  “Maybe you needed to. You’ve been holding so much in. None of us have been able to talk this stuff out with anyone. No wonder we start to think it must be us that’s crazy.”

  “Molly… I’m coming with you.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t let you do that.”

  I pulled myself to my feet. “I’m packing now.”

  “Your mother would never forgive me. She’s given me this house, this family, to keep me safe. I can’t repay her by leading you away into yet more danger.”

  “Molly, she doesn’t know what’s out there. She doesn’t know. No one does. No one but us.” A wintry chill vined around my backbone. “I saw the shadow… after the helicopter took off from Devils Hole. I saw it outside the underground. It’s not going away. None of it is going to go away. I’m coming with you, okay?”

  She pressed her lips together hard. We stared at each other, the terror in her eyes reflecting the terror in my mind.

  JESSAMINE

  1920

  27. THE STRANGE NURSE

  Light sticks into my eyes when I open them. I feel cross and fuzzy and strange. I’m not in the red mountains anymore. I’m not with Philomena the Indian girl. I’m not in the hospital in the city. I don’t know where I am. Wild grasses blow in the breeze, leading down to a river.

  I rub the sleep from my eyes and see a house. A big house. But this is not my house. This is not the house grandfather promised me.

  “Daddy?” I call. No one answers.

  I’m in a wicker chair with a big fluffy blanket. My feet trip over each other when I stand. My leg hurts. I hobble along the river and see grandfather and a lady in a pale pink uniform talking. Grandfather looks different. His gray hair has changed to white. He and the lady don’t even notice me as I step closer. I squirm into the hollow of a tree that stands just behind them. The hollow squashes me horribly, which makes me even crosser, as it seems that I should have fit easily in here.

  “….things must necessarily change," the woman tells grandfather. She sounds odd and wears a funny pink cap. She could be a nurse but pink is a silly color for a nurse to wear. Perhaps she’s a pretend-nurse. At one time, I begged mother to buy me a nurse outfit, so I could look after daddy when he was sick. But she didn’t buy it.

  “Yes, of course,” says grandfather. He brings his thick eyebrows together, making a v-shape in between his eyes.

  The woman fidgets with her hands. “She suffered an enormous shock after the crash. It’s not clear whether there’s permanent brain injury or not. There’s no way of telling whether she will ever be normal again. She appears to believe she’s no more than around five years old. There’s some scattered memories from her older years, but for the main part, her mind has regressed to the past."

  "I'll take good care of her." His voice is weary. He doesn’t like this woman and neither do I.

  "Mr. Fiveash, with all due respect, I don't think you understand the gravity of the situation. She needs specialized care in a proper institution."

  Grandfather holds up his huge hands. “No granddaughter of mine shall be placed in an institution."

  Granddaughter? But I am his granddaughter. Are they talking about me?

  "Her mental state is delicate to say the least and could well worsen,” asserts the woman.

  "I'll not have her taken away. Circus folk look after their own."

  Grandfather’s words make me feel safe. I don’t like this woman and want her to leave. Her voice is like needles.

  Someone stands at a window, high above. Audette stares out with nastiness on her face, like an extra-sour lemon. I don’t like her either. She crushed my dolls.

  The woman and grandfather step past the tree. Grandfather’s eyes dart down to the tree hollow. He struggles to get down on his knees in front of me. His blue eyes crinkle at the edges. He has a strange scar on his forehead. He looks older. So much older, like he is sick and about to die. Hot tears well in my eyes.

  “Jess-of-mine,” he croons. “I thought you were sleeping.”

  “I was but the sun woke me,” I say grumpily.

  “I should have moved you into the shade, but you looked so peaceful. What do you think of the house?”

&n
bsp; “Whose house is this?”

  “This is your house, Jess. It was built while we were both in the hospital. You fell asleep on the car trip here this morning.”

  “This is not my house. Where’s the swimming pool?”

  “It gets too cold here to put in a pool, Jess.”

  “And where’s the lake gone? This is all wrong.”

  “We couldn’t stay there, in the house by the lake. We had to come somewhere where you could be safe.”

  “Well I don’t like it. And where’s daddy?”

  His forehead creased like he was going to get angry but his eyes just looked sad. “Your father… can’t be here. Please come out of there now.”

  The woman crosses her arms and gives a warning glance to grandfather, which she thinks I don’t see.

  Grandfather points up to the window that Audette stuck her ugly face out of a minute ago. “That’s your room. You get the best view in the whole house."

  “My own bedroom?”

  “Your very own bedroom.”

  The woman in the pretend-nurse outfit tells me her name is Sister Daniels, and helps me inside. She holds my elbow as we walk up a polished staircase. She doesn’t really help much, but does a lot of fussing. Grandfather follows. He proudly points the way to the room. The room has a four-poster bed and a dollhouse with miniature people in it.

  Below the window, trucks drive in on the dirt road and across a wooden bridge.

  I sit on the stool by the dresser and brush my hair. There is no mirror here. There’s no mirror anywhere in the bedroom. My hair is longer than it was yesterday. It’s never grown so fast before. Mother usually braids my hair when I’m practicing for the circus, so that it doesn’t get caught anywhere. But we are not with the circus today. And mother isn’t here.

  “I need a mirror,” I tell grandfather.

  “There’s no mirrors in the house, Jess. Except for the other bedrooms, and you are not to go in those. None of us need mirrors—they are the source of much unhappiness when our souls don’t match the image we see. A piece of glass can tell us nothing, and I want you to remember that.”