Dollmaker

“Scary story,” said Roman. Robert nodded.

“We probably all need some real sleep,” I suggested. I still felt very sick from the drinking of the day previous. So it was agreed that we would all return to our respective rooms and try to rest.

“Hell of a birthday party, though,” said Robert. He clapped his hand on my shoulder, and we walked together back to the house. I retired to my room, while my wife excused herself. She said she need to cook something for when we woke up, and I suppose she did, because when I regained consciousness from my next dream there was indeed a great, brothy, vegetable filled soup. It had the aroma of onions and tasted like the best, if sweet, meat. I believe it was made from venison.

When I fell into my bed, which seemed lighter than ever, I once again had a strange dream. In this dream I was that devilish child self again. But in the dream I saw myself making a model. I was whittling, then carving out the shape of a human: he had a gaunt, thin face, and a strange lost look in his eyes. The figure seemed to be searching for something. I saw myself from above as I painted on the face, and arranged the clothes: a smart suit, in a style not unlike that of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. That child self, that figure from the dream, then moved on and started carving again: this time, the figure of a woman. She looked something like Betty Hutton, but there was something just… wrong about her appearance.

I couldn’t place it at first. But then I realised that there was something missing from her stomach: a hole seemed to be placed through her body. And a chip was made carefully, intentionally in her head. From that chip there flowed a strange sense-- if not a visual, physical object-- of a streaming darkness that surrounded the whole little wooden doll. The devilish figure then set these objects down next to the dollhouse that had lately been my birthday present.

I awoke, shaking. No one was in my bed, and I wondered just what my wife had been doing. I smelled the good and immediately repaired to the kitchen. She was nowhere to be found. I could hear bumping and speaking upstairs, but I could make out no words from the sounds. It did sound like some humans speaking about something-- the other inhabitants of the new mansion, I supposed. I decided that I had best eat food before anything else, so I scooped some of the soup from the crock pot and poured a bowl. I sat in the kitchen, at a small table with a checkered table cloth, and slurped down the soothing liquid. The dull headache from the night and day before had subsided. I felt free and clear of the liquor that had clouded me. I thought back to the story of the day previous. It seemed like so much fiction. How fun, I thought then, to live in a house without a legend. How strange to be bewitched by the same name that had called to the previous owner.

Rather than search for the others, I made my way down to the mailbox that was at the end of our driveway. I had to pass through the living room, where the dollhouse rested. As I did, I noticed that my wife’s doll was knocked, somehow, underneath the table. Meanwhile, the three dolls representing my friends all seemed to be in the room corresponding with Roman’s room in the real house.The two males were standing upright, but Miss Gilda’s depiction was laid down on the bed. My own doll was in the living room, standing exactly where I had left him. I picked him up and tucked him into my pocket. To this day, I do not know exactly why I was compelled to take the doll with me down to the mailbox.

The mail had come, and with it was a present from my mother. Like my friends she always tried to find the best toy to give me. I suppose I might have every once in a while liked something more appropriate for adults as a gift, but my position then, as a great toymaker, fairly necessitated that everything given to me related to my profession. I don’t suppose that a cobbler is always given shoes or the tools to make shoes on his nativity, yet there is some reason behind the gifts I received. They did help with my research into playing, at least as much as having the various objects of play allowed me to think about the ways in which these things are played with.

I collected the package and went inside to open it. On the kitchen counter I unwrapped it to find a set of simple doll making tools and a few choice clothing sets. I carefully unwrapped the package and viewed the instructions. It began with the usual nonsense about carving an elephant out of marble. That old platitude-- to carve an elephant remove everything that isn’t an elephant. How unhelpful, I thought, to the child without the talent to carve. At least there could have been more direction in the directions. The whole thing was bare bones. I took up the tools and stared at them. Then I carefully examined what I was supposed to carve a doll out of. It was two blocks of wood. Looking back through the directions I found pictures of various dolls supposedly carved with this very set, but I knew the dolls. On closest inspection, scrutinizing the photos very, very closely, I realized that they were factory-line made products of a competitor. I threw the whole set down and stormed out.

“I refuse to use these,” I said. Yet something called me back to them. Something like a voice that ran through my head. I was nearly at my dollhouse when I heard it. A small, tiny, soundless voice that instructed me to build the dolls. “Give us life,” the voice inside me said. I shook my head and tried to prevent the sound from continuing. But it insisted, kept playing over and over, until I indeed went back into the kitchen and tried my hand at making the dolls.

I had never before and have never since been able to carve a doll of any sort. I am, alas, fairly untalented in all the areas of skilled carving and even toymaking except for that original idea which made my fortune. Other than plastic dinosaurs, which were molded by others around pictures and concept art I decided upon, and the one invention I made while I was sequestered at Nevermore, there has never been inspiration flowing within my hands.

One time during my youth I was **** to take a ceramics class. This was not of my own volition, but due to the requirements that I take such an elective course in order to pass high school. Every time I attempted to use the wheel to throw a pot I only came away with a face full of clay and a squashed, barely recognizable circular shape. To pass the class I was reduced to making little masks and strange models in the clay, pretending they looked like something, and then turning them in and hoping for a B mark at best.

This time, however, something in me, or perhaps in the house, propelled my work forward. My hands moved dexterously over the block, whistling away, until finally a face began to take form. I began to scream, I think, when I started to see what the wood was becoming: the very same face I had seen in my dream the night previous. I couldn’t stop, it seemed, and very soon I had the whole doll created. I set it down after an hour and tried to walk away. Tried to do anything else. But each time I tried to leave the scene the voice in my head came back and would not be quiet until I continued to bring the doll to something like life. I carefully colored in the face and the body, and then made the suit as well, sewing carefully with the needle and threads that came with the doll making kit.

As I was so occupied, the other inhabitants of my house passed through, seeming to live normal days around me. I was known as fairly capricious in my work habits, sometimes not working for days on end, claiming I had no muse, before finding a burst of inspiration and working until something wonderfully new had been created. I suppose that that is what they all thought I was doing. Miss Gilda leaned over to encourage me, gave several suggestions I suppose I took, as did my wife. Florez kissed me on the cheek and reminded to eat as I continued to very carefully work. As I have said, I tried to escape. But each time I left my task the sound returned to me, as if it were the only sound in the world, a vicious dungeon keeper that **** me onwards.

When I had finished with the male doll, I began to work on the second piece of wood. I knew what was coming: I was to produce a ghoulish figure, something of a destroyed woman. It was no surprise to me when I had finally shaped a ghostly soul out of the wood and she appeared with a hole in her stomach. It was very clear to me that these dolls represented, somehow, Hurry and Memoria Hendrickson. I wondered where I should put them when I had finished. But the task at hand remained, as I began painted Memoria’s small face. In my dream I had not known as much detail as I put into her visage here. It seemed that her mouth was very small, barely a cut or a nick into the wood, and that she rouged her cheeks something fierce: that took up most of her face. She was something, I think, like Clara Bow or, I suppose, she might have passed for Helen Kane.

After she was fully painted, I dressed her in period clothes. Then, and only then, I was able to set down the doll and walk away. I was still dissatisfied, somehow, and had definitely an uneasy feeling about the whole place. I decided another walk into the fresh air would do me good, but I dared not go alone. I went to Florez for companionship, but she was detached, somehow-- and told me that it was a personal time for her and to ask her later, when she did not feel so ill. Instead, I knocked on Miss Gilda’s door. She was not there, but when she heard me knocking, she opened the door to Roman’s room-- just where she had been placed in the dollhouse. I still did not make a connection between the placements in the house and the placements of the people in the real world, but I was shortly coming to that conclusion.