fears-as if I might touch this fetish and instantly find my mind and
soul trapped within it, while some malignant spirit, previously
immobilized in the doll, came forth to establish itself in my flesh.
Gleeful at its release, it would lurch into the night to crack virgins’
skulls and eat the hearts of babies in my name.
In ordinary times-if such times exist-I am entertained by an unusually
vivid imagination. Bobby Halloway calls it, with some mockery, “the
three-hundred-ring circus of your mind.” This is no doubt a quality I
inherited from my mother and father, who were intelligent enough to
know that little could be known, inquisitive enough never to stop
learning, and perceptive enough to understand that all things and all
events contain infinite possibilities.
When I was a child, they read to me the verses of A. A. Milne and
Beatrix Potter but also, certain that I was precocious, Donald Justice
and Wallace Stevens. Thereafter, my imagination has always churned
with images from lines of verse: from Timothy Tim’s ten pink toes to
fireflies twitching in the blood. In extraordinary times-such as this
night of stolen cadavers-I am too imaginative for my own good, and in
the three-hundred-ring circus of my mind, all the tigers wait to kill
their trainers and all the clowns hide butcher knives and evil hearts
under their baggy clothes.
Move.
One more room. Check it out, protect my back, then straight down the
stairs.
Superstitiously avoiding contact with the doppelgdnger doll, stepping
wide of it, I went to the open door of the room opposite the hall
bath.
A guest bedroom, simply furnished.
Tucking my capped head down and squinting against the glare from the
ceiling fixture, I saw no intruder. The bed had side rails and a
footboard behind which the spread was tucked, so the space under it was
revealed.
Instead of a closet, there were a long walnut bureau with banks of
drawers and a massive armoire with a pair of side-by-side drawers below
and two tall doors above. The space behind the armoire doors was large
enough to conceal a grown man with or without a chain saw.
Another doll awaited me. This one was sitting in the center of the
bed, arms outstretched like the arms of the Christopher Snow doll
behind me, but in the shrouding brightness, I couldn’t tell what it
held in its pink hands.
I switched off the ceiling light. One nightstand lamp remained lit to
guide me.
I backed into the guest room, prepared to respond with gunfire to
anyone who appeared in the hall.
The armoire hulked at the edge of my vision. If the doors began to
swing open, I wouldn’t even need the laser sighting to chop holes in
them with a few 9-millimeter rounds.
I bumped into the bed and turned from both the hall door and the
armoire long enough to check out the doll. In each upturned hand was
an eye.
Not a hand-painted eye. Not a glass-button eye taken from the
dollmaker’s supply cabinet. A human eye.
The armoire doors hung unmoving on piano hinges.
Nothing but time moved in the hall.
I was as still as ashes in an urn, but life continued within me: My
heart raced as it had never raced before, no longer merely revving
nicely, but spinning with panic in its squirrel cage of ribs.
Once more I looked at the offering of eyes that filled those small
china hands-bloodshot brown eyes, milky and moist, startling and
startled in their lidless nakedness. I knew that one of the last
things ever seen through them was a white van pulling to a stop in
response to an upturned thumb. And then a man with a shaven head and
one pearl earring.
Yet I was sure that I wasn’t dealing with that same bald man here, now,
in Angela’s house. This game-playing wasn’t his style, this taunting,
this hide-and-seek. Quick, vicious, violent action was more to his
taste.
Instead, I felt as though I had stumbled into a sanitarium for
sociopathic youth, where psychotic children had savagely overthrown
their keepers and, giddy with freedom, were now at play. I could
almost hear their hidden laughter in other rooms: macabre silvery