“Can you see what’s inside?”
“Dolls,” Rowan answered. “Dolls made of … of hair and bone.”
“Yes, bone, and human hair, and human skin, and the parings of nails. Dolls of your female ancestors so far back there are no names for the oldest dolls, and they’ll fall to dust when you lift them.”
Rowan studied them, row after row set out carefully on a bed of old cheesecloth, each doll with its carefully drawn face and long hank of hair, some with sticks for arms and legs, others soft-bodied, and almost shapeless. The newest and finest of all the dolls was made of silk with a bit of pearl stitched to its little dress, its face of shining bone with nose and eyes and mouth drawn in dark brown ink, perhaps, even in blood.
“Yes, blood,” said the old woman. “And that is your great-grandmother, Stella.”
The tiny doll appeared to grin at Rowan. Someone had stuck the black hair to the bone skull with glue. Bones protruded from the hem of the little tube of a silk dress.
“Where did the bones come from?”
“From Stella.”
Rowan reached down, then drew back, her fingers curling. She couldn’t bring herself to touch it. She lifted the edge of the cheesecloth tentatively, seeing beneath yet another layer, and here the dolls were fast becoming dust. They had sunk deep into the cloth, and probably could not be lifted intact from it.
“All the way back to Europe they go. Reach in. Take the oldest doll. Can you see which one it is?”
“It’s hopeless. It will fall to pieces if I touch it. Besides, I don’t know which one it is.” She laid the cloth back, smoothing the top layer gingerly. And when her fingers touched the bones, she felt a sudden jarring vibration. It was as if a bright light had flashed before her eye. Her mind registered the medical possibilities … temporal lobe disturbance, seizure. Yet the diagnosis seemed foolish, belonging to another realm.
She stared down at the tiny faces.
“What’s the purpose? Why?”
“To speak to them when you would, and invoke their help, so they can reach out of hell to do your bidding.” The woman pressed her withered lips into a faint sneer, the light rising and distorting her face unkindly. “As if they would come from the fires of hell to do anyone’s bidding.”
Rowan let out a long low derisive sigh, looking down again at the dolls, at the horrid and vivid face of Stella.
“Who made these things?”
“They all did, all along. Cortland crept down in the night and cut the foot off my mother, Mary Beth, as she lay in the coffin. It was Cortland who took the bones from Stella. Stella wanted to be buried at home. Stella knew what he would do, because your grandmother Antha was too little to do it.”
Rowan shuddered. She lowered the lid of the trunk, and lifting the lamp carefully, rose to her feet, brushing the dust from her knees. “This Cortland, this man who did this, who was he? Not the grandfather of Ryan at the funeral?”
“Yes, my dear, the very same,” said the old woman. “Cortland the beautiful, Cortland the vicious, Cortland the instrument of him who has guided this family for centuries. Cortland who raped your mother when she clung to him for help. I mean the man who coupled with Stella, to father Antha who then gave birth to Deirdre, who by him conceived you, his daughter and great-granddaughter.”
Rowan stood quiet, envisioning the scheme of births and entanglements.
“And who has made a doll of my mother?” she asked, as she stared into the old woman’s face which now appeared ghastly in the light of the lamp playing on it.
“No one. Unless you yourself care to go to the cemetery and unscrew the stone and take her hands out of the coffin. Do you think you could do that? He will help you do it, you know, the man you have already seen. He’ll come if you put on the necklace and call him.”
“You have no cause to want to hurt me,” Rowan said. “I am no part of this.”
“I tell you what I know. Black Magic was their game. Always. I tell you what you must know to make your choice. Would you bow to this filth? Would you continue it? Would you lift those wretched pieces of filth and call upon the spirits of the dead so that all the devils in hell could play dolls with you?”
“I don’t believe in it,” Rowan said. “I don’t believe that you do.”
“I believe what I have seen. I believe what I feel when I touch them. They are endowed with evil, as relics are endowed with sanctity. But the voices who speak through them are all his voice, the voice of the devil. Don’t you believe what you saw when he came to you?”
“I saw a man with dark hair. He wasn’t a human being. He was some sort of hallucination.”
“He was Satan. He will tell you that is not so. He will give you a beautiful name. He will talk poetry to you. But he is the devil in hell for one simple reason. He lies and he destroys, and he will destroy you and your progeny if he can, for his ends, for his ends are what matter.”
“And what are they?”
“To be alive, as we are alive. To come through and to see and feel what we see and feel.” The woman turned her back, and moving her cane before her, walked to the left wall, by the fireplace, stopping at the lumpy roll of rug, and then looking up at the books that lined the shelves on either side of the paneled chimney above the mantel.
“Histories,” she said, “histories of all those who came before, written by Julien. This was Julien’s room, Julien’s retreat. In here he wrote his confessions. How with his sister Katherine he lay to make my mother, Mary Beth, and then with her he lay to make my sister Stella. And when he would have lain with me, I spit into his face. I clawed at his eyes. I threatened to kill him.” She turned to look fixedly at Rowan.
“Black magic, evil spells, records of his petty triumphs as he punished his enemies and seduced his lovers. Not all the seraphim in heaven could have satisfied his lust, not Julien’s.”
“This is all recorded there?”
“All this and more. But I have never read his books, and I never shall. It was enough to read his mind as he sat day by day in the library below, dipping his pen and laughing to himself, and giving vent to his fantasies. That was decades and decades ago. I have waited so long for this moment.”
“And why are the books still here? Why didn’t you burn them?”
“Because I knew that if you ever came, you would have to see for yourself. No book has the power of a burned book! No.… You must read for yourself what he was, for what he says in his own words can’t do anything else but convict and condemn him.” She paused. “Read and choose,” she whispered. “Antha couldn’t make the choice. Deirdre couldn’t make the choice. But you can make it. You are strong and clever and wise already in your years, wise. I can see this in you.”
She rested both hands on the crook of her cane and looked away, out of the corner of her eyes, pondering. Once again, her cap of white hair seemed heavy around her small face.
“I chose,” she said softly, almost sadly. “I went to church after Julien touched me, after he sang me his songs and told me his lies. I honestly think he believed his charms would win me over. I went to the shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and I knelt and prayed, and the strongest truth came through to me. Didn’t matter if God in his heaven was a Catholic or a Protestant God, or the God of the Hindus. What mattered was something deeper and older and more powerful than any such image-it was a concept of goodness based upon the affirmation of life, the turning away from destruction, from the perverse, from man using and abusing man. It was the affirmation of the human and the natural.” She looked up at Rowan. “I said, ‘God, stand by me. Holy Mother, stand by me. Let me use my power to fight them, to beat them, to win against them.’ ”
Again her eyes moved off, gazing back into the past perhaps. For a long moment they lingered on the rug at her feet, bulging in its circles of rusted chain. “I knew what lay ahead, even then. Years after I learned what I needed. I learned the same spells and secrets they used. I learned to call up the very lowly spirits whom they commanded. I learned to fight
She looked sullen, remote, studying Rowan’s reactions yet seemingly indifferent to them.
“I told Julien I would bear no incestuous child by him. To show me no fantasies of the future. To play no tricks on me, changing himself to a young man in my arms, when I could feel his withered flesh, and knew it was there all along. ‘Do you think I care if you are the most beautiful man in the world? You or your evil familiar? Do you think I measure my choices by such vanity and self-indulgence?’ That’s what I said to him. If he touched me again, I promised I would use the power I had in me to drive him back. I would need no human hands to help me. And I saw
