inside.
He hadn’t gone out that way, but maybe I could. I wanted to avoid
returning to the hall.
Keeping the bedroom door in view, I tried to open a window. It was
painted shut. These were French windows with thick mullions, so I
couldn’t just break a pane and climb out.
My back was to the bathroom. Suddenly I felt as though spiders were
twitching through the hollows of my spine. In my mind’s eye, I saw
Angela behind me, not lying by the toilet any longer but risen, red and
dripping, eyes as bright and flat as silver coins. I expected to hear
the wound bubbling in her throat as she tried to speak.
When I turned, tingling with dread, she was not behind me, but the hot
breath of relief that erupted from me proved how seriously I’d been
gripped by this fantastic expectation.
I was still gripped by it: I expected to hear her thrash to her feet in
the bathroom. Already, my anguish over her death had been supplanted
by fear for my own life. Angela was no longer a person to me. She was
a thing, death itself, a monster, a fist-in-the-face reminder that we
all perish and rot and turn to dust. I’m ashamed to say that I hated
her a little because I’d felt obliged to come upstairs to help her,
hated her for having put me in this vise, hated elf for hating her, my
loving nurse, hated her for making me Mys hate myself.
Sometimes there is no darker place than our own thoughts: the moonless
midnight of the mind.
My hands were clammy. The butt of the pistol was slick with cold
perspiration.
I stopped chasing ghosts and reluctantly returned to the upstairs
hallway. A doll was waiting for me.
This was one of the largest from Angela’s hobby-room shelves, nearly
two feet high. It sat on the floor, legs splayed, facing me in the
light that came through the open door from the only room that I hadn’t
yet explored, the one opposite the hall bath. Its arms were
outstretched, and something hung across both its hands.
This was not good.
I know not good when I see it, and this was fully, totally, radically
not good.
In the movies, a development like the appearance of this doll was
inevitably followed by the dramatic entrance of a really big guy with a
bad attitude. A really big guy wearing a cool hockey mask.
Or a hood. He’d be carrying an even cooler chain saw or a
compressed-air nail gun or, in an unplugged mood, an ax big enough to
decapitate a T-Rex.
I glanced into the hobby room, which was still half illuminated by the
worktable lamp. No intruder lurked there.
Move. To the hall bathroom. It was still deserted. I needed to use
the facilities. Not a convenient time. Move.
Now to the doll, which was dressed in black sneakers, black jeans, and
a black T-shirt. The object in its hands was a navy-blue cap with two
words embroidered in ruby-red thread above the bill: Mystery Train.
For a moment I thought it was a cap like mine. Then I saw that it was
my own, which I’d left downstairs on the kitchen table.
Between glances at the head of the stairs and at the open door to the
only room that I hadn’t searched, expecting trouble from one source or
the other, I plucked the cap from the small china hands. I pulled it
on my head.
In the right light and circumstances, any doll can have an eerie or
evil aspect. This was different, because not a single feature in this
bisque face struck me as malevolent, yet the skin on the back of my
neck creped like Halloween-party bunting.
What spooked me was not any strangeness about the doll but an uncanny
familiarity: It had my face. It had been modeled after me. I was
simultaneously touched and creeped out. Angela had cared for me enough
to sculpt my features meticulously, to memorialize me lovingly in one
of her creations and keep it upon her shelves of favorites. Yet
unexpectedly coming upon such an image of oneself wakes primitive