Silent Doll

by Sonnet O'Dell

  “I’m sorry, child,” she said in a small voice.

  “Well, that’s a start. I mean, you’ve got a lot to apologize for, as I see it. When you feel like sharing everything with me, you know how to get in touch. I’ll bring these back in a few days.” I lifted the books in my arms to indicate what I meant and started for the stairs.

  I wasn’t going to cry. It hurt to be at odds with Virginia, but I just didn’t know if I could ever trust her as completely as I had before.

  She said, quietly, “I’m trying to keep a promise to protect you. I wish that you could understand that.”

  “The best way to protect me is to teach me to protect myself. You know the whole give a man a fish, teach a man to fish deal. Whatever.”

  Virginia came to stand at the top of the stairs as I reached the bottom. “Cassandra—”

  I looked up.

  “I know it’s wrong to wish so, but you won’t ever call me grandma, will you?”

  “Does that seem likely to you?”

  We stared at each other for a long time. The grandfather clock in the hall chimed six times and the sun rose. Her house disappeared around me. I stood in the middle of a stranger’s living room. Damn it. I hated crossovers that I wasn’t locationally prepared for. I was lucky it was so early in the morning.

  I headed for the front door and put the books down while I fiddled with the dead bolt. I heard a small squeak from behind me and turned to see a small, pajama-clad boy standing on the stairs. He was rubbing his sleepy eyes and holding a bear by one paw.

  “Who’re you?”

  “Um…I’m the tooth fairy, kid.” I put a finger to my lips in a shhh gesture. “I popped in at the wrong address. Just go back to bed and I’ll let myself out.”

  “Okay,” he said sleepily and shuffled back up the stairs. I unlatched the door, grabbed the books and hightailed it out of there.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Now that I’d made a start on helping Trinket with her problem, my conscience allowed me to sleep. I collapsed against my pillows and was out in an instant. Thankfully, I didn’t really dream.

  When I woke at last, back on the other side, I blinked at the clock and discovered that I had slept for twelve hours. I guess I really had been exhausted. I showered, haunted by a creeping uneasiness the whole time, then toweled my wet hair and settled cross-legged on my bed to read.

  The combination of alchemy and true magic to create Trinket was treated as a theoretical concept by most of the scholars on the subject. The alchemist created the doll itself; could make it walk and perform simple tasks, but that was all clockworks. A series of mechanisms that made gears hum and pulleys raise and lower weights. That did nothing to make the doll alive to the degree that Trinket seemed to be.

  By the standards of alchemists, of engineers, and creators, Trinket was the pinnacle of achievement. Whoever had made her was a genius. I found myself wanting to see inside her, to know how she worked; then felt ashamed at my curiosity. She was one of the most interesting creations I had ever encountered—which thought made me realize that I was torn between calling her a creation or a person. She might be man-made, but there was an intelligence inside of her that didn’t make any sense.

  I left my bed in favor of putting on some clothes, a pair of jeans, and a black T-shirt showed the stages of evolution—except in the last one, the modern man had turned around to face the others. The legend underneath read: “Quit following me.”

  I went into the kitchen and put a pop tart in the toaster. While I waited for that I made a quick trip downstairs to fetch the mail. It consisted of an official invite to the after-moon bash at DJ’s bar on Monday, the electric bill, water bill, and a second notice about having missed my cable subscription fees. They were threatening to cut me off. I sent that one flying straight into the trash when I got back to my apartment.

  I put the pop tart in my mouth, holding it between my teeth so as not to burn my lips. I stopped to get a glass of milk from the fridge and stared at the pot of African violets that were sitting on top. I still hadn’t solved who had sent me the flowers and nothing more had arrived. The rhyme only had two types of flowers in it: “roses are red and violets are blue”—a complete misnomer. Violets were, as their name suggested, violet. Part of me wondered how this poem was supposed to end. I’d seen a million versions of it because there were so many words that did or could be made to rhyme with blue.

  I’d run through the list of men I knew in my head several times and come up with no positive idea as to who’d sent them. Aram would have taken credit. Jareth didn’t want a romance, just a physical connection. DJ had the chance to mention the flowers over our set-up date and hadn’t. Simian could have sent them, but he’d have surely filled DJ in, so that DJ could claim credit and therefore my good graces. Hamilton was showy and brash; he would have delivered flowers in person to reap any reward immediately. Benjamin hated my guts. LeBron and I didn’t see each other that way; besides, he was chasing another cat up a tree, literally.

  I chewed on the pop tart, now cool enough to eat, and tasted the strawberry filling on the tip of my tongue.

  There was always Magnus, I thought idly; but he’d moved away to Manchester. Perhaps even the move hadn’t been enough to stop him from thinking about me. Then I thought how incredibly vain that sounded. Magnus and I were over, way over and we were moving on with our lives. Any flickering of anything between us, at least on my part, had been doused thoroughly with a bucket of water.

  I went into my room, lay down on my belly and selected another book from the pile, thumbing through the pages. I had a tendency to get bored with books that were a tad too technical; they read like stereo instructions. Instruction manuals and I were not on speaking terms. I had to have someone else set my stereo up.

  I chewed and tried to read, getting lost in the words. I knew the meaning of most of them; it was the sentences they were in that made no sense. I’d always been a more hands on kind of learner, just delve right in and work it out through trial and error—which is why my mother had banned me from the kitchen at age seven. Apparently Rice Crispy stars did not require sprinkles. I couldn’t follow a recipe to save my life. Which, to be honest, wasn’t a big worry to me. If I ever entered a battle to the death I doubted my opponent would challenge me to a bake off—not even demons are that sinister.

  I brushed crumbs off my page and kept scanning through the pages. I was getting nowhere. I reached down the side of my bed to get the glass of milk I’d brought in with me and took a long glug. Ever seen those advertisements—Got Milk? One day the poor grammar of that sentence was going to send an English teacher into a graffiti frenzy.

  I chuckled at the mental image and turned back to my book. In the middle of the book I’d been reading sat one of the others. It must have slipped when I’d moved on the bed; I gently pushed it back out of the way. It slipped again to bang me in the elbow. Frustrated, I pushed it off the bed altogether. It hit the floor with a thunk. I turned my eyes back to the pages under me—and the book I’d tossed aside struck me square in the side of the head.

  I looked around suspiciously, rubbing my sore temple, then picked the book up and read the title. A Magical Approach to Animation of Mechanics.

  “Jesus, okay, I can take a hint,” I said aloud, glaring at the empty room. At a guess, my ghost was back. Anyone from the other side that was in my apartment at cross over, got stuck in my apartment till the sunset again. I was surprised to find that included ghosts. Spirits, apparently, see more clearly than humans do. Shame you had to be dead to get that kind of insight.

  I thought about the ghost that Incarra had seen in my spare room. He was wearing an apron, looked like a workman of some kind, and had said help her. I wondered now if maybe he had meant Trinket. Could a spirit attach itself to someone like Trinket?

  The book was more interesting than any of the others. It discussed the possibility of attaching a soul to an inanimate object. It was like possession. The theory was complex
but in simplest terms it boiled down to this: if you could make something delicately tuned to the slightest fluctuations in energy, a soul could operate with willpower alone.

  I’d seen it on a smaller scale when I’d pushed a ghost into establishing a possession over a stuffed toy. It had been able to move about and operate the voice box, but the toy had been too basic for anything else. It had been limited by the vessel. Taking that into consideration, Trinket was a miracle. A sophisticated machine, almost an android or automaton, but created of cogs and a little magic. The magic itself was delving into necromancy. Necromancy could be a deep, slippery slope that could lead to great darkness—if a vampire didn’t kill you for displaying the talent in the first place. I went to my own shelf and pulled out a book I’d bought on the other side about zombies and the reanimation of the dead.

  In necromancy, you called a spirit back to its earthly body, holding that body together with blood and magic. Any zombie that you created using your blood you had complete control over, if you were powerful enough. However, there was nothing to say that you had to call a spirit back to its own flesh. What if a person who had died was given a new body? A mechanical body that wouldn’t have to expend as much energy to hold together? You could create someone like Trinket.

  It was extremely dangerous; in calling out to the spirit world, there was no guarantee you would get what you wanted. There were many spirits that would want to roost in a virtually immortal body.

  I turned to the page on creation and control of a reanimated person. Blood was important here; you called the spirit by blood and then controlled it by that same blood. It had no choice but to do what you wanted. So, if you ordered the spirit not to speak of something, it couldn’t.

  I flicked to another part of the book and began reading about loss of control. If a necromancer was weak, then the zombie could break free or rampage, but that was very rare—because if you didn’t have the strength to raise it in the first place you couldn’t have controlled it. The zombie usually fell apart soon after the separation, because it didn’t have the magical energy required to sustain itself. Its battery eventually ran down, its neural pathways deteriorating; first it would become confused and then, usually, violent. Then the flesh started to rot again.

  I was sort of glad to know that the cognitive processes went first. It would be horrible if you were still completely aware when your body started to rot. I shuddered and turned the page. A second way to lose control of a spirit was if someone else stepped in and forced the connection to break. This was it, this was what Trinket wanted.

  My excitement faded as I read further. If I cut her free, that would be it for her. It was right there in black and white. If I broke the connection between Trinket and her mother, without another source of magic to use as fuel, the essential essence, the spark of life that was Trinket, would be lost. She was a spirit, a pure essence wrenched from wherever the unbound dead go—and she would get sucked right back there. Earthbound spirits had a direct tie to something on the mortal plane, a metaphysical cord between them and a person or place. A spirit that had been pulled from some other place—I didn’t want to call it heaven, as heaven and hell were very solid Christian concepts—had no ties to the mortal plane other than that supplied for it by the sorcerer’s magic.

  It was strange for me to say that I didn’t believe in hell, as I’d met a demon. Hell as the name for a realm of demons I could accept. It was the whole Christian concept of hell that I had trouble with. I could believe in a godly being, but not in the whole he made the world in seven days way.

  I think how the planet came to be was a matter of energy, or magic, or both, colliding to create the earth. The magic spawned its own creatures that evolved separately from man, beings so powerful that when man did evolve it thought them gods. Man had never agreed on a universal principle, so each of these beings were worshipped separately. Maybe they gained power from that worship, from the willingness of their worshipers to share their energy.

  Over time some gods became obsolete, lost power, still existing but separate from humans—existing on a place outside normal human perception. Like the Elves once had and the Fae still did. If creatures of benevolence existed like that, I was sure that creatures of malice and evil were just as prevalent. It was only through a concept like Christianity that we’d named them demons; perhaps they’d had their own name once and adopted the new one because it suited them.

  It was a complicated mess when I tried to think about it too hard, and I ended up with an unending list of questions. Did angels exist if demons did? If so, what were they and did these other god-like creatures create them? If so, how? How did an angel fall to become a demon? What was it about the demon races that made them unable to exist on the human plane without assistance?

  A shiver ran down my spine. I looked out the balcony windows; the sun was setting behind the buildings. Another night, another unanswerable question. If all of it was true, how did my alternating realities work? Maybe my stepfather had been right, and everything had its opposite. Every coin had two sides, after all; maybe it was another ingrained concept.

  I shook my head. I was driving myself into a right old melancholy funk. Ever since I’d learned the truth about myself I’d been dwelling on the concepts of life, the universe and everything. I really, really had to get a life.

  The crux of the situation was that the only way to help Trinket would be a death sentence. She’d wanted freedom, but I wondered if she truly understood what that meant.

  * * * *

  The Circe de Poupee looked vacant. There were no crowds of people outside, the windows were dark, and when I pushed open the door I saw the velvet rope had been fitted into a corner of the foyer. A sign on the chain hanging across the stairs said closed, but I could distinctly hear music rising up from below. I ducked under the sign.

  Downstairs, the stage lights were on but the audience and band sections were empty. A boom box sat on the edge of the stage, playing a track from Madame Butterfly. I moved through the chairs and froze at the sound of footsteps on the stage. I turned my head, fully expecting a reprimand, but the person on stage was absorbed in a complex routine with a large paper parasol. She was wearing a modified purple kimono, decorated with delicate pink Sakura in patterns and a fluffy black skirt. It gave the impression of a mini geisha. Her hair was black, done in two nested buns from which dangled a multicolored spectrum of ribbons.

  I watched her twirl and turn the parasol multiple times, both open and closed, until she dropped it. She cursed, dropping down to her knees and banging her fists together in frustration. My phone rang, which made her look up. I scrolled my finger across the ignore feature.

  “Miss Cassandra?”

  I looked back to the stage to see blue eyes fixed on me. “Trinket?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m sorry, you just look different.”

  She examined her hair with her fingers.

  “Oh!” She bounced up to her feet. “Wait right there.”

  Trinket vanished off into the wings while I made my way up to the stage. She had her blonde curls again when she returned, fiddling under the hairline. She gave me a self-deprecating smile.

  “I’m a giant dress up doll. Parts of me are interchangeable.” She sat down on the edge of the stage next to me, swinging her legs back and forth.

  “Do you have to practice a lot?”

  “Mmm, or I forgot the routines. Momma says practice makes perfect.”

  “Where are the rest of your family? Aren’t you open tonight?”

  “They went shopping earlier, and then probably to dinner or a movie or something. It’s supposed to be our night off.”

  “You didn’t go because?”

  “Because bad behavior isn’t rewarded,” she said with a scoffing tone I thought was supposed to be derision. “She ordered me to stay here and practice, so I practiced. How’s your case going?”

  She asked the question without looking at me, so she didn’t see m
y shrug.

  “I’m doing what I can. I couldn’t sleep last night, so I got to work on what you asked.”

  “You did!” She perked up instantly. “Did you find something?”

  “Yes and no.”

  Her brow furrowed, actually furrowed: a line formed in the coating that was her skin. She was amazing, and no power in the verse could make me destroy her.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s not a viable option.”

  “Well, shouldn’t I get to decide that?”

  “All right.” I took a deep breath. “Do you understand what you are? A mechanical doll with a spirit attached?”

  She made a big round O with her mouth. “I guess so. I never really thought about it. I just—as long as I can remember I’ve been like this. Not that I understand how it works, how I work; it puzzles me sometimes. I know this isn’t a human body.” She put her hand on her chest. “It’s a machine. What is a human body but a machine made out of organics instead of mechanics?”

  “I understand your point,” I said, smiling. “But a living body and its—spirit, soul, essence, whatever term you’re more comfortable with—are attached to each other with a metaphysical cord.”

  I’d met a soul-sucking demoness almost a year ago who had to seal up the souls she stole in special vials because a soul’s natural response was to ping back into its living body, drawn to it by that cord. If the body died, I could only assume the soul was drawn somewhere else.

  “So, what’s keeping me all joined up?”

  “From what I can gather, magic. Let me try to explain things a little more.” She gave a little gesture with her hand to indicate I should continue. “I would define you as a pure spirit, as you’ve never been a ghost. Then again, ghosts aren’t creatures of magic.”

  “Then how do ghosts do it? How do they haunt?”

  “When a person dies—and do keep in mind that a lot of this is theory—the tie breaks. An extremely powerful emotion can create a new tie, like an anchor keeping the spirit here. Guilt, vengeance, remorse—it has to be a very strong emotion that tethers them to a person or a place.”