books and toys and tapes and clothes. His rock collection and bug collection and a pile of old homework.
And the doll.
Daniel carried the sack out of the closet and put it on the bed, taking out the nearly finished figure. He picked the doll up gingerly.
It was as repugnant as it had been before, and once again it seemed familiar to him. He thought of the noises in the night, in the hall, his certainty that the doll was on the prowl, looking for him, and though it was daytime and he could hear the sounds of the street outside, the television in the family room, he was acutely aware of the fact that he was alone in the house with this horrible figure.
Its expression was fixed, formed from the newspaper photos, but it seemed different from yesterday, more purposely hostile, its eyes narrowed, its teeth bared.
Maybe he remembered it incorrectly, but he could have sworn the eyes had been more open, the mouth closed.
Maybe Tony had altered the face after their confrontation.
There was no indication that the doll could ever be mobile, much less animate, and its taped and stapled limbs hung limply down as he gripped the midsection, but Daniel had the impression that it was playing possum, pretending to be dead when it wasn't.
That was ridiculous.
Of course it was. This whole thing was ridiculous. It was ridiculous for him to be secretly searching through his son's room in the first place. But he felt no embarrassment, and no matter how much he tried to intellectually discount his feelings, they were still there.
He looked down at the doll and was suddenly afraid.
What would happen when Tony finished his 'project,'
when the doll was complete?
He didn't know and he didn't want to find out.
He knew what he had to do.
Daniel shoved the doll back in the bag and carried it outside. He dropped it on the grass next to the back porch and walked into the garage, wheeling out the barbecue.
Opening the lid, he picked the sack up off the ground and unceremoniously dumped the doll into the ashes.
He walked back into the garage, emerged with lighter fluid and a book of matches. He knew this was going to extremes, but he could not be sure if he simply tore the doll up and threw it away that it wouldn't return, that it wouldn't drag its pieces out of the alley and over the fence and through the backyard to his bedroom. He couldn't afford to chance that.
He'd seen the Telly Savalas Twilight Zone. He knew how these things worked.
His feelings did not make any kind of rational sense-- the fact that he was referencing a TV
show as validation for his actions should have told him that--but as he doused the doll with lighter fluid and put a match to it, he felt an absurd sense of exhilaration. He saw the face go up in flames, the toilet-paper tubes blacken and crumble, the Big Gulp cup melt off its wax and burn, and for the first time since he'd seen Tony with the doll, he was able to breathe easily.
He would tell Tony that he had gotten rid of the doll when his son came home, and he would forbid him to make another one. He should have done that last night.
It might seem irrational to Margot, but he was still the boy's father, and if he wanted to enforce an irrational rule or prohibition, well, he wouldn't be the first father to have done so.
The components of the doll had all burned themselves out, but he turned on the hose and soaked everything with water, just to make sure, before going back into the garage and getting a shovel. He scooped up the ashes from the barbecue, dumped them in the plastic sack, and tossed everything in one of the trash cans in the alley.
He mashed down the sack with his foot, transferred garbage from one of the other cans to throw on top of it, then replaced the lid. Once again, he found himself looking up the alley for any sign of the small strange shadow he'd seen before.
Nothing.
He hurried back into his yard.
Were these things connected? The doll and the shadow? The inexplicable feelings of fear and discomposure he'd been experiencing? He had the sense that they were, but he could not imagine how and he could not begin to comprehend the meaning behind it.
He pushed the barbecue and carried the shovel back into the garage, then walked into the house and washed his hands in the kitchen sink before getting himself a Diet Coke from the fridge. He'd left the television on in the family room and, coincidentally enough, The Twilight Zone was on the Sci-Fi channel. It was the episode in which a girl disappeared into the wall of her house, the one he'd always assumed had been the inspiration for Poltergeist, and as he watched it for the fiftieth time, alarm bells began going off in his head once again. There was a connection here, something he knew he should be picking up on but just couldn't quite figure out.
He stared at the television, watched the mother and the father kneel before the wall, calling to their little girl, and it came to him.
The House.
That was it. The House. The home in which he'd been born and where he'd spent the first eleven years of his life. He could remember very little about the House, only flashes of images, portions of events, but there was something about it that reminded him of the girl lost in the walls.
There'd been something scary about the House.
The fact that he could recall almost nothing at all about his childhood home disturbed him. He knew why, of course, and though it wasn't really surprising, it was unsettling to realize just how easily he fit into that cliched niche, that stereotypical pattern so often exploited by headline-grabbing doctors and the media during sweeps weeks.
He couldn't remember because that was where his mom had died.
He was disappointed in himself that he was so predictable, so typical, and the thought occurred to him that everything else that seemed to be happening--his uneasiness, the shadow, the doll--could all be part of some psychological problem that could be traced back to this one event.
But that wasn't be possible. He'd lived a perfectly normal life all these years. The normal, happy life of a well adjusted man, a husband, a father. The House had not affected him at all.
Perhaps his long stretch of unemployment had put stress and pressures on him that he couldn't recognize, wasn't able to acknowledge.
He should try to find out if that was the case. A psychiatrist would be the best idea, he supposed, but he was loath to go that route. Despite all the positive propaganda distilled through the media over the past decade, there was still a stigma attached to it in his mind, and he couldn't picture himself lying on a couch, spilling his guts, and letting some stranger give him advice on how he should act and how he should feel and how he should live his life.
Besides, they didn't have the money for it.
And, truth to tell, he didn't really believe that his perceptions were off, that what he was thinking, feeling, and experiencing was part of some mental disorder or buried emotional problem.
He had seen the shadow.
There was something wrong with Tony's doll.
There was a reason for him to feel uneasy.
A psychiatrist might be able to help him remember, though. Might be able to recall his memories of the House.
Why did he think of it as 'the House'? he wondered.
With a capital 'H'? He wasn't sure. He couldn't even get a clear picture in his mind of the House's exterior.
Or his bedroom. Or any of the other rooms inside the structure. He could see only a long hallway. And a dark
