Fear Nothing

The nightstand lamp was still lit.

No bloody footprints stained the carpet, so no one could have reentered the splattered bathroom from outside and then returned here by that route to close the hall door.

I checked the bathroom anyway. I left the penlight in my pocket this time, relying on an influx of faint light from the bedroom lamp, because I didn’t need — or want — to see all the vivid details again. The casement window remained open. The smell was as repulsive as it had been two minutes ago. The shape slumped against the toilet was Angela. Although she was mercifully veiled in gloom, I could see her mouth gaping as though in amazement, her wide eyes unblinking.

I turned away and glanced nervously at the open door to the hall. No one had followed me in here.

Baffled, I retreated to the middle of the bedroom.

The draft from the bathroom window was not strong enough to have blown the bedroom door shut. Besides, no draft had cast the twisted shadow that I had glimpsed.

Although the space under the bed might have been large enough to hide a man, he would have been uncomfortably compressed between the floor and the box springs, with frame slats banding his back. Anyway, no one could have squirmed into that hiding place before I’d kicked my way into the room.

I could see through the open door to the walk-in closet, which obviously did not harbor an intruder. I took a closer look anyway. The penlight revealed an attic access in the closet ceiling. Even if a fold-down ladder was fitted to the back of that trap door, no one could have been spider-quick enough to climb into the attic and pull the ladder after himself in the two or three seconds that I had taken to burst in from the hallway.

Two draped windows flanked the bed. Both proved to be locked from the inside.

He hadn’t gone out that way, but maybe I could. I wanted to avoid returning to the hall.

Keeping the bedroom door in view, I tried to open a window. It was painted shut. These were French windows with thick mullions, so I couldn’t just break a pane and climb out.

My back was to the bathroom. Suddenly I felt as though spiders were twitching through the hollows of my spine. In my mind’s eye, I saw Angela behind me, not lying by the toilet any longer but risen, red and dripping, eyes as bright and flat as silver coins. I expected to hear the wound bubbling in her throat as she tried to speak.

When I turned, tingling with dread, she was not behind me, but the hot breath of relief that erupted from me proved how seriously I’d been gripped by this fantastic expectation.

I was still gripped by it: I expected to hear her thrash to her feet in the bathroom. Already, my anguish over her death had been supplanted by fear for my own life. Angela was no longer a person to me. She was a thing, death itself, a monster, a fist-in-the-face reminder that we all perish and rot and turn to dust. I’m ashamed to say that I hated her a little because I’d felt obliged to come upstairs to help her, hated her for having put me in this vise, hated myself for hating her, my loving nurse, hated her for making me hate myself.

Sometimes there is no darker place than our own thoughts: the moonless midnight of the mind.

My hands were clammy. The butt of the pistol was slick with cold perspiration.

I stopped chasing ghosts and reluctantly returned to the upstairs hallway. A doll was waiting for me.

This was one of the largest from Angela’s hobby-room shelves, nearly two feet high. It sat on the floor, legs splayed, facing me in the light that came through the open door from the only room that I hadn’t yet explored, the one opposite the hall bath. Its arms were outstretched, and something hung across both its hands.

This was not good.

I know not good when I see it, and this was fully, totally, radically not good.

In the movies, a development like the appearance of this doll was inevitably followed by the dramatic entrance of a really big guy with a bad attitude. A really big guy wearing a cool hockey mask. Or a hood. He’d be carrying an even cooler chain saw or a compressed-air nail gun or, in an unplugged mood, an ax big enough to decapitate a T-Rex.

I glanced into the hobby room, which was still half illuminated by the worktable lamp. No intruder lurked there.

Move. To the hall bathroom. It was still deserted. I needed to use the facilities. Not a convenient time. Move.

Now to the doll, which was dressed in black sneakers, black jeans, and a black T-shirt. The object in its hands was a navy-blue cap with two words embroidered in ruby-red thread above the bill: Mystery Train.

For a moment I thought it was a cap like mine. Then I saw that it was my own, which I’d left downstairs on the kitchen table.

Between glances at the head of the stairs and at the open door to the only room that I hadn’t searched, expecting trouble from one source or the other, I plucked the cap from the small china hands. I pulled it on my head.

In the right light and circumstances, any doll can have an eerie or evil aspect. This was different, because not a single feature in this bisque face struck me as malevolent, yet the skin on the back of my neck creped like Halloween-party bunting.

What spooked me was not any strangeness about the doll but an uncanny familiarity: It had my face. It had been modeled after me.

I was simultaneously touched and creeped out. Angela had cared for me enough to sculpt my features meticulously, to memorialize me lovingly in one of her creations and keep it upon her shelves of favorites. Yet unexpectedly coming upon such an image of oneself wakes primitive 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 doppelganger 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.