Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (43 page)

    "Do you see?" she said. "My perfect, adorable little people?"

    "You have so many," he said.

    She took a step further into the room and lifted the doll from the floor. She manoeuvred its limbs so that it lay completely flat in her hands, as would a body in a coffin.

    "How long have you been collecting?" he asked.

    "Oh, nothing so vulgar as collecting," she replied, sounding quite put out. "As with all beautiful things, it is more a question of them finding us, do you not agree?"

    She placed the doll in a sitting position on a nearby chair.

    "All the world's beautiful things, all great works: we are humbled before them. We have no choice in the matter, I'm afraid," she continued.

    She gave a little titter, overtly girlish.

    "So it is," she said. "They found me."

    He looked about himself. There was a doll by his right foot. He moved his foot cautiously and looked at Kaaiija.

    "What is it that they are made of?"

    "Many of these are bisque: unglazed porcelain. See, Madeleine has wooden upper arms."

    She indicated towards a doll sat at a small table with a teacup in a raised hand. It was the only example, as he could see, of doll-sized furniture in the room. All other fittings - those over which the dolls were arranged - were of normal size. The doll with the teacup was completely bald. The head appeared mottled with dull grey marks.

    "Its head-"

    "Yes. They are pepper marks. They are impurities found at the time of the firing. Poor thing."

    He noted that the room was perceptibly colder than the rest of the flat. He moved away from the doll on the floor.

    "Are many of them very old?" he said.

    "Nineteenth century. They were made by the great craftsmen: Bremillon, Vrassier. Look here: a Peliebvre Bebe - see her moulded tongue and teeth?"

    He did not much like the one to which she was now pointing. Its head was obviously painted as to resemble flesh colour, though it had a distinct bluish quality.

    "Their faces are very expressive, aren't they?" he said, meaning quite the opposite.

    "They are perfect, adorable little people," she repeated.

    She stood regarding them.

    "You are obviously very knowledgeable on the subject."

    "Not at all," she replied. "I am no expert, simply an aficionado. Many of these have been in my family for quite some years. My father - he was a very well travelled man, although his origins were simple. On Valetada our house stood with nothing but marshland for miles in every direction."

    "What line of work was he in, if you don't mind me asking?"

    "He was a craftsman. A kind, good man: my father."

    "Did he himself make dolls?"

    "Not dolls, no."

    She bent down and gently drew the doll with the moulded teeth towards her.

    "See here: she is a Moulandre and Rasp from Bueurze. Again, bisque. There are so many, David."

    She gestured towards the dolls seated on the chairs.

    "Wax over Papier-Mache. Vuissart and Kuennier: they created the most exquisite automated models."

    He recognized, then, the doll that he had found by his doorstep. It was positioned on a chair next to another doll whose features were obscured by a small white bonnet. It was wearing the same shoes and the same blue dress, but there was an ugly maroon mark across its face that had not been there previously.

    "Can I presume that some of these are automated?"

    "Oh, no. Not at all."

    "But - the doll-" he said. The room really was very cold indeed, and he felt the prickle of dampness in his armpits, "-it was on my doorstep."

    "Like I said. She is full of mischief."

    She looked at him for a few seconds without moving.

    "Marguerite," she said.

    She lifted the doll from the chair and held it towards him, as if indicating that he should take it. He looked at the mark on its face. It ran from the right eye down to the jaw.

    "She says she is very grateful to you for helping her find her way home," Kaaiija said, with an expression of intense seriousness. "She is very grateful to you."

    He did not know how to respond. In truth, he felt utterly ridiculous.

    "Very grateful."

    Kaaiija repositioned the doll on the chair. He heard the whisper of the dress fabric against the material on the armrest. She turned towards him, and for one moment her face was full of anguish, as if she were stricken by some deep and private pain.

    "We are all so very lonely here, David. Our poor forgotten family."

    "I'm very sorry to hear you say that."

    "It is the same wherever we go."

    She closed her eyes. When she reopened them the expression was gone, and replaced by something akin to hunger. Her eyelids narrowed and she took a step towards him.

    "I wish, David, to thank you, as well."

    Although he truly had no intention of doing so, there was something about her manner that made him move towards her.

    "You are really very kind," she said.

    He shivered. Her body was in front of him, and he went to her as if controlled by unseen hands. She put her hands on his body and then her lips were against his, inexpressibly cold. The room was full of her perfume. Their lips touched for only the briefest of moments before they parted. But what happened then was so frightening and so utterly unlike anything that he had ever experienced that he wondered if he had not simply imagined what he saw. What happened was this: as she pulled away her face shifted somehow, and in one fleeting moment he gained the impression of that which lay underneath the make-up being completely beetle-black all over. She looked at him sharply, as if she had sensed his unease.

    "So kind," she said.

    He took a step away from her, and sensing some obstruction on the ground, looked down to his feet.

    His shoes were covered in hair: strands of cobweb-fine hair.

    "David," she said.

    "Forgive me, but - it's quite late," he replied, though he had in fact lost all sense of time. He was no longer sure what day it was, or if it even mattered.

    "It's quite late," he repeated.

    "It is late," he heard her say.

    He looked at her and saw that her black eyes were glistening greedily. Something in the room moved: a doll seated on the window-sill shifted slightly, and he caught its movement in his peripheral vision. He felt, suddenly, on the edge of something utterly inexplicable. He shifted his feet: the hair sighed lightly around them.

    "The dolls' hair-" he said, "-Madeleine, Marguerite - it is very realistic."

    "The hair is real. It is all my own."

    "But you said they were nineteenth century?"

    "It is true," she replied.

    He took a further step back. The hairs had amassed around his feet: a number too great to count. The eyes of the doll in the white bonnet rolled over once, the lashes very long and dark.

    "Kaaiija," he said.

    And then he heard it: the same noise he had heard earlier in the living room, only now the location of its source was evident. Something was moving in the room that lay to the other side of the hallway: something that moved as if taking great pains to conceal that very fact. At once, Kaaiija's expression became utterly vacant.

    "My father," she said. "He is awake."

    "Your father?" he said, with some alarm. "Forgive me but I thought that you lived alone?"

    "Alone?" she replied. "No, not alone."

    "In that case I should go. I'm sorry, I had no idea," he gasped.

    She took a step towards him.

    "Will you not stay, David? My father would love to meet you. I have told him so much about you."

    He noticed that the area around her lips was very grey and smeary looking. He raised his fingertips to his own lips and they came away covered in some waxy white substance that had got in under the nails.

    "I'm sorry," was all he could say. The thought of meeting the woman's father was not a concept that he could entertain.

    "I am sure the two of you will have much to talk about," she said.

    "Forgive me, Kaaiija," he replied.

    She looked at him very gravely.

    "It's
Kaaiija,"
she said.

    She laid a hand on his, and it was as if there was no movement in her at all: as if she were nothing more than a brittle shop-window dummy. He tried to release his hand from her grip, but he found that he could not. She laughed: a horrid sharp sound.

    "David, you look so frightened. You don't have to look as if I were about to eat you."

    He went to say her name, but then he stopped. Something was moving in the hallway behind him. It was moving very slowly, but its tread was that of something enormous: a person who may have to lower his or her head by a considerable degree in order to enter a room. He realized too, that the room was now filled with movement. The dolls were awake. The doll with the teacup in its hand was standing up from the table, its petticoat caught above its wooden knees. Its head revolved on its axis with a dull creak: a painted smile upon its lips. The doll with the ugly mark on its face -
his doll, Marguerite,
he thought irrationally - had stretched itself to its full height and was clambering down the side of the armchair in which it had been seated. He watched with mute horror as the doll wearing the white bonnet slowly raised its head and revealed to him the face that lay beneath.

    He heard the doll say his name in a voice that was shrill with childlike glee, and then Kaaiija's mouth was full of laughter: her teeth like shards of glass: her face a mask of cracked porcelain. Something loomed above him, its shadow vast, and he understood, with a sudden clarity, that there would be no remains: no, no remains. Not even his pale white feet or small moulded tongue would be spared. He heard a voice utter a word in a language long dead and silent, and then the thing that called itself Kaaiija fell upon him: her eyes black and glassy: her embrace as dark as deepest winter, and from every side: small pairs of eyes watching him, unblinking.

18 - Steven Erikson - This Rich Evil Sound

    I'm not an old man. Sometimes the tracks old men think along are so deep cut nobody can see where they're going, maybe not even see the tracks themselves. But then I think that maybe there are different kinds of old. People say I should've been born a hundred years ago. Does that make me old in some way? They don't mean harm when they talk like that. It's just that they don't know me. I was in love with this girl, once, back in high school. Her name was Linda, and she was pretty popular, I guess. One day in the lunchroom I got down on one knee and sang for her a love song. One of my buddies had laid a dare on me - they sat at their table laughing and cheering. It was something I wanted to do anyway. No harm in it. The guys thought it was silly, but that's all right, too.

    I know people make fun of me. I just look at things different from others. Before I got big I used to get in fights. There's always guys who don't like the way you look at things. They think it makes you weaker than them, maybe, and that's what they were trying to prove by fighting me. By the time I was fifteen they left me alone. They still figured me weak in my head, probably, but my body didn't look weak, not any more.

    I'm twenty now, so people have been leaving me alone for about five years. I don't mind. I like being alone. I quit school when I was sixteen, headed out into the bush. I spent the winter in northern Manitoba, nearly froze my feet off. I learned to lay trap lines from this Ojibwa Indian. He didn't know a word of English, except "nineteen seventy". I tried to teach him "nineteen eighty" because that was the year, but I don't think he ever got it. When I got back to Winnipeg I applied for and got a trapping licence and that's what I've been doing ever since, out in Whiteshell Park.

    In summers the park is full of people, so I head to Grassy River where it's quieter. But in the winter the only people in the park are rangers and trappers and old people who don't like the city and stay in their cabins. I don't mind running into those people, because we usually look at things the same way, and they don't make fun of me or anything.

    This winter I was working Redrock Lake and the Whiteshell River. I'd heard from one of the rangers that Charlie Clark was wintering for the first time up at his cottage on Jessica Lake, so I decided to pay him a visit. Ever since they'd retired, Charlie and his wife had been spending the summers out here. But his wife died last summer, so he was all alone. I knew he'd be glad for some company.

    I use a tent, but most trappers got cabins, because the years just pull at you and pretty soon a tent or quincy's too cold. It gets hard checking the lines when all your bones ache. Charlie wasn't a trapper, but I knew he'd understand and put me up for a couple days so I could dry out and get toasty. I'm pretty tough but I don't mind some luxury when I can get it.