8 #2
I needed to get off the sofa, find Grandma, and figure out some way to talk to her.
Maybe I could write something down? It’d be hard.
If Haunted Doll was a D&D build, then dexterity would be the dump stat.
Actually, everything would be the dump stat.
If there was an advantage to being dead, I hadn’t found it.
I wasn’t strong. I didn’t have any powers.
I couldn’t even close my hand around a pen.
But maybe I didn’t need to. If I found some paper and an inkpot big enough to dip my whole arm in, then I wouldn’t need a pen.
What would I write?
Hi Grandma. It’s Lucy. I’m trapped in the doll. No this is not a joke. Kyle Lawson killed me. Could use a hand returning the favor.
How would I convince her that it was me?
P.S. sorry I didn’t eat the dinner you left me.
It all sounded like a sick joke, but it was the only plan I had.
The only one I thought might work, anyway.
My grandma had always been a little bit weird.
She believed in healing crystals, psychics, and UFOs.
I hoped that meant she believed in ghosts too.
I hoped, once she figured out that I was here, she’d help me kill Kyle.
She’d spent nine months in prison back in 1972 for assaulting a police officer.
I didn’t know what that police officer had done, but I reckoned the odds were even to fair that Kyle had done worse.
I imagined his raging red face turning white as he saw my grandma and her shotgun.
That image gave me the strength I needed to sit up, still clumsy and uncoordinated, head lolling to one side in a way it hadn’t before. I scraped my arm across my face, trying to push the veil back and succeeding only in tangling my puffy sleeve in the lace.
My ringlets weren’t ringlety anymore, the hem of my skirt was unraveling, and my whole body was spotted with dried slobber and dog hair. But none of that mattered.
I inched myself forward, stitches straining, skirts tangling, limbs jerking unnaturally. Eventually the slope of the cushion gave way and I slid off the sofa, tumbling down onto the floor with a solid thump.
Cookie twitched in his sleep, but didn’t wake.
I rolled onto my belly and pressed my hands into the carpet.
My knees were slightly bent and didn’t move.
But, on the other hand, I didn’t have a pelvis, so my hips were flexible as fuck.
I kicked aside as much fabric as I could and pushed my toes into the ground.
Slowly, shakily, I walked my hands up the side of the sofa, shuffling my feet closer until they were flat against the carpet and I was standing.
I was standing.
The thrill of that tingled sharp and terrifying in my stitches.
Keeping my hands against the sofa, I took a step, and then another, and another.
My core strength was nonexistent. My legs were rigid and pulled at my stitches every time I moved them. My skirts dragged behind me, threatening to unbalance me. But I was doing it. I was walking.
I wondered if this was how Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary felt walking up the summit of Mount Everest—a stomach-turning mix of terror, exhaustion, and triumph.
They were the first people to stand on the top of the world (and make it back alive).
I was the first doll to walk across my grandma’s living room (and there was no way I was making it back alive).
It felt absurd to compare the two situations, but I couldn’t help it.
Just like a mountaineer, I focused on the intoxicating dream of success—of killing Kyle Lawson—and took another step.
I reached the edge of the sofa and kept moving, wobbling a little now that I no longer had anything to lean against, but not stopping. I couldn’t. At any moment, time could speed up again, and this window of opportunity would snap closed. I had to keep going.
Just like Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary walking up their hill.
Mad. Free. Victorious.
Oxygen deprived.
I smothered that thought before it could take hold and focused on the path ahead, winding between Grandma’s stacks of stuff.
When I was human size, this route would’ve been tight but familiar.
Now, at thirty centimeters tall, it felt like I was tottering along the dried riverbed in the belly of a canyon, alien and foreboding.
I didn’t have far to go.
The arts-and-crafts box was in the dining room, under the table. There was paper in there, and ink, and—
A sensible brown shoe stepped into view.
I stopped moving, my head flopping back to stare up at Auntie Dawn. She was standing in the doorway wearing a tailored jacket, a new wig, and the pasta brooch I’d made for her when I was four years old. The lines around her face fell slack as she saw me, eyes widening, mouth forming a perfect O.
The shock of it sucked the anger out of my limbs. I teetered, then dropped, limbs splaying gracelessly on the carpet.
“Tiff!”
“Yeah?” My grandma’s voice sounded small through the walls.
“W-where did the doll come from?”
“What doll?”
“It was standing.”
“What doll?” Grandma repeated as I frantically tried to regroup.
Think angry thoughts. Think angry thoughts. Think angry thoughts.
A new pair of feet walked into the room. Dull pink slippers and knitted rainbow socks. Grandma.
“Oh. That’s one from my workroom. Did Cookie have it?”
“It was standing, Tiffany.”
I tried to twist my head, to look up at them. I couldn’t even manage a twitch.
Fingers wrapped around my middle, the ground dropped away with a sickening lurch, and then, in a blur, Grandma appeared, studying me with red-rimmed eyes.
Any chance I had of summoning up my anger died with a sad little sputter.
Grandma looked . . . thin. Her cheeks carved hollow, her eyes sunken, and her hair, normally braided, left to hang limp, frayed, and gray around her jaw.
She was wearing her My other pair of shoes are skis shirt, which she’d always loved, even though she’d never even seen snow. It hung too loose off her frame.
“Don’t touch it,” Auntie Dawn said. “It’s filthy.”
“It’s fine,” Grandma muttered as if to herself, gently wiping my plastic blonde hair out of my face. “Just a little dog hair. I’ll clean it. Good as new.”
Her smell engulfed me. Unwashed skin, grilled cheese, and the sharp clash of too many perfumes.
The desperate need to cry was back, like a cluster bomb detonating behind my glass eyes, again and again and again.
My stuffing felt like it was going to burst through my chest, my porcelain limbs hung as heavy as lead, and my stitches twisted, tight enough to snap.
I wanted to wrap my arms around her and hug her so tight her bones clicked.
I wanted to scream and cry and tell her that none of this was her fault.
I wanted to be alive again, to be alive and hugging her, to feel her hugging me back.
“Leave the doll,” Auntie Dawn said. “We’re going to be late. You still need to get dressed.”
“I’m not going,” Grandma said.
“You are,” Auntie Dawn replied, voice low and serious. “You need to be there.”
“I’m not g—”
“You need to be there. I don’t care how you feel about police, Tiff. This is bigger than that. You know what they’re saying.”
“I don’t care what they’re saying.”
“You need to start caring. You need to start caring right now.”
“Lucy is de—”
“No. Don’t say that. We don’t know where Lucy is. She might come h—”
Grandma’s face twisted in a way I’d never seen it twist before, her brows collapsing, her lips wrenching apart. A couple of tears escaped her closed eyes. “I can’t, Dee. I can’t. I know she’s not OK. I know. She wouldn’t leave Cookie shut up in a room without water. She wouldn’t—”
“Tiff—”
I wanted the clock to stop.
I wanted everything to hold in place.
I wanted time to think.
And, for a strange, gut-churning moment, the universe obeyed. Auntie Dawn’s voice stretched and slurred, turning into an ugly, elongated drone, unnatural and nerve-racking, like nails down a chalkboard. Grandma slowed too, her face a picture of grief, caught in heartrending detail.
I summoned every ounce of will, of anger, of desperation I had left and threw my arm up, first one, then the other, reaching toward Grandma, reaching for that hug.
I didn’t know what I’d expected.
Auntie Dawn screamed and slapped me out of Grandma’s hand. For a moment I hung there, my skirts just starting to billow, my arms still outstretched.
Grandma’s eyes opened, her face falling slack in shock, her lips parting around a small gasp. In that instant, I thought of the paper in the arts-and-crafts box under the dining table. I thought of my plan to write a letter—just two words, over and over again: I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m—
Time snapped forward, a rubber band springing back into shape.
The ground surged up, and my vision split in two, one eye going left, the other right. I saw, from two angles, Auntie Dawn kick my body away, the crunch of broken porcelain deafeningly loud.
“Dawn!”
“It moved! It moved! It—”
“It’s just a doll. It’s just a doll. It’s—”
“No!” Auntie Dawn’s voice was high and getting higher, like a jet engine, powering up, getting louder, faster. “I’m telling you! It—”
And then everything was a blur, time swirling away from me, Auntie Dawn’s voice, Grandma’s, Cookie’s surprised, frantic barking smashing together as everything shrank down, my lost eye dipping to black, my connection to my shattered pieces dimming into nothingness.