Culture Carve

ALL DOLLED UP

Monday, October 26th, 2020

Bedtime

It was almost Halloween, and Gracie was going to get all dolled up. That was what Mom kept saying. Gracie didn’t know what that meant, not exactly, but it sounded fancy, and she was going to be a princess, so she supposed all dolled up was the right thing to get. They couldn’t go trick-or-treating this year, but that didn’t mean she and Mom couldn’t wear costumes and watch scary movies past bedtime, so that’s what they were going to do. Gracie scrolled past pictures of princesses on her tablet until screen time was over. Then she went to bed, and she fell asleep.

Tuesday, October 27th, 2020

Dead of night

Hiya, Gracie.

She woke up because she had to pee. Nothing abnormal about it. That was going to be a word on Friday’s spelling test. A-B-N-O-R-M-A-L. She breathed each letter as she walked down the long hall to the bathroom. She could do it by herself now. She was brave enough. A-B-N-O-R-M-A-L. Past Mom’s room. Past the red-eyed smoke alarm in the guest room. Past the door that led to her brother’s room, which had been closed since…well, since. It wasn’t until her butt was planted firmly on the toilet, toes curled against the cold tile floor, that she wondered if maybe it hadn’t been the pressure between her legs that had woken her up.

Hiya, Gracie.

Carmen had used to say that. He had started saying it after he got back from seeing It at the theater with his friends a couple years ago. Gracie hadn’t liked it, and she hadn’t said she hadn’t liked it, not with her words, but he should have known from the way she clammed up like…well, a clam, every time she got home from school and he greeted her with a Hiya, Gracie. She had been dreaming before she had woken up, hadn’t she? That was where she had heard those words again. Nothing to be afraid of. Just a dream.

Gracie finished her business and made the long walk back to her room. She pushed the door open but did not enter. She looked around. There was nothing abnormal about it. Her tablet on the desk. Dinosaur nightlight snug and glowing against an outlet. Mr. Giggles slouching in a corner, the jagged line of stitches that criss-crossed the seam of his mouth finally coming undone after years of neglect. Nintendo Switch atop the TV. A stack of Magic Tree Houses nearly half her height next to the bed.

“Hello?” she asked. But there was no answer.

She climbed under the covers. A-B-N-O-R-M-A-L. She kept spelling until her eyelids dipped. She thought she heard a gentle G’night, Gracie somewhere between an awake R and an M that went adrift on a sea of sleep, but by then she was dreaming again, and therefore there was nothing to be afraid of, no matter how abnormal it seemed.

Wednesday, October 28th, 2020

Dead of night

Hiya, Gracie.

She woke up because her feet were cold. Those words were there again, sitting on the surface of her mind like the oil on water Mr. Haddersham had shown them in science class on Monday, but they weren’t why she had woken up. She had woken up because no matter how she arranged her blanket, she couldn’t get it to cover both her head and her feet—the way she liked it—and her feet were so cold she imagined her toes brittle enough to break off like little candies.

There was a rice sock in the cupboard downstairs. Mom had gotten it for her once.

She could get it by herself, couldn’t she?

Yes. Yes, she could.

Gracie slipped out of bed and padded down the long hall, past Mom’s room, past the red-eyed smoke alarm, past The Door, and past the bathroom, puffing herself up with a deep breath when she reached the top of the stairs. She always took them fast, because if she took them fast, then the monster under the steps couldn’t catch her, couldn’t reach out and grab her ankle and pull her into that black space where it lived. So: one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve-thirteen-fourteen-fifteen-sixteen-seventeen, and there she was, uncaught, in the kitchen.  

She heated the rice sock in the microwave.

On the way back up the stairs, one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight, Gracie nearly tripped over Mr. Giggles. Had Mom put it there? Had Gracie brought it herself and forgotten in the fog of half-sleep? Its chin rested on its chest, and its disproportionate arms and Hamburger Helper hands dangled between its knees, as if it had just received bad news.

“What are you doing here?” Gracie asked.

She snatched the doll up and took the remaining steps more slowly now that her arms were full. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. When she passed The Door again, it was Open, and she could see Carmen’s room, untouched since…well, since. The Door hadn’t been Open before, had it?

There was a poster on the opposite wall. Some musician. Heavy eyeliner, hair that fell in dreads around his face, electric guitar cradled in slender fingers. He had always scared Gracie. His glittering eyes seemed to pierce through the poster, dark and inviting, promising something she wasn’t quite old enough to understand. She hurried past The Open Door. When she returned to her room, she tossed Mr. Giggles back into the corner where the doll had slumped for years. She hadn’t played with it since she was a kid.

“Just trying to keep you safe,” Mr. Giggles said. “Remember what happened the last time you ran up the stairs in your dinosaur pajamas?”

It was true. Her dinosaur pajamas were too big, and she had tripped on the hem while bounding up the steps two years ago. Mom had been out, and Carmen had taken her to the hospital with a gushing gash in her forehead. There was still a pale scar above her eye. She wasn’t thinking about that now, though. She was thinking about how Mr. Giggles had just talked to her.

“It’s a lot to take in, I know,” Mr. Giggles said. “That’s why I wanted get the ball rolling a bit before Halloween. Give you some time to process.”

“H-how?” was all Gracie managed to say.

“Lotta time. Lotta hard work.” Mr. Giggles waved an arm that had no muscles, gesturing vaguely at its—his?—mouth. She could see the inside when he spoke, and the cotton reminded her of a snake, puffy and white. Wasn’t there a kind of snake called a cottonmouth? She was pretty sure there was. “You assumed it was just the years, didn’t you? Wearing me down. But I had to undo these stitches, one…by one…by one. All so I could speak to the girl who couldn’t be bothered to clean the cobwebs from my face.”

“I’m sorry,” Gracie said.

“No, no,” Mr. Giggles said. “I’m sorry. You didn’t even know I was alive, and here I am hurling accusations. It’s unbecoming. Tell you what—why don’t you get some rest? I’m a doll. I can’t hurt you. We can talk again tomorrow. Start things off fresh. Sound good?”

The horizontal seam on Mr. Giggles’ face spread up the sides, fabric tearing as his cloth cheeks split, exposing even more of his cloudy interior. Gracie realized what he was trying to do. The smile didn’t reach his beady black eyes—but then again, his eyes were, literally, beads. No smile could ever reach them.

There was nothing he could do about that.

Thursday, October 29th, 2020

Dead of night

“Hiya, Gracie.”

She woke up because she was thirsty, or because that stupid doll was speaking to her again. She didn’t know which and she didn’t care. Maybe it was both. She seized Mr. Giggles’ arm and hauled him down the hallway—he hadn’t been lying when he said he couldn’t hurt her, she realized as he flopped along at her side and said, “Hey, hey, hey, what are you doing?”—past Mom’s room, past the red-eyed smoke alarm, past The Open Door, past the bathroom, down the one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve-thirteen-fourteen-fifteen-sixteen-seventeen stairs, through the kitchen, through the living room, out the front door, and into the garbage can waiting on the curb for pickup. She slammed the lid on Mr. Giggles.

Gracie went back inside, got a glass of water, and then went back to bed. She shut The Open Door on the way.

Friday, October 30th, 2020

Dead of night

“Do you think I’m trash, Gracie?”

Gracie woke up. Mr. Giggles wasn’t in the corner, and he wasn’t in the garbage either. He was sitting at the end of the bed, next to her feet, which were cold. She was thirsty too, and she had to pee. But Mr. Giggles was sitting at the end of the bed, and he was asking her if she thought he was trash. No one had stitched his mouth back shut. He was still smiling.

“N-no,” Gracie said.

“Then why did you put me in the garbage?”

“Because…I was scared.”

“Scared?” Mr. Giggles’ head flopped to the side, the closest he could make to a gesture of curiousity. “You’re a big girl—aren’t you, Gracie? Why would you be scared?”

“Dolls aren’t supposed to talk.”

“No,” Mr. Giggles agreed. “I suppose they aren’t. Hell, I thought the same thing when Palaphant spoke to me for the first time. He was the one who taught me, you know. How to undo the stitches. How to talk. And then you just tossed him in the trash, as if you didn’t treasure him through your childhood like a trusted friend.”

“Mom did that. She said there was no way to fix him.”

“No. No…I suppose there wasn’t. That’s the downside. Your love kept him alive for a long time—he might be alive even now, wherever he is, whatever landfill—but no matter how much you love them, dolls still fall apart. It’s a bad way to go. Alive, but only alive long enough to die a long, slow death.”

It made sense, Gracie supposed. It made sense the way you needed fuel to start a fire, and fuel to keep it going. Things that weren’t supposed to be alive ran out of life when they ran out of love. What didn’t make sense was why Palaphant had never spoken to her. Gracie mulled that over for moment, and she decided that maybe it was like in Toy Story, where even though the toys were alive, they had to pretend like they weren’t, because that was the only way the world made sense to people who weren’t toys, and they were the ones in charge.

“But Palaphant was my favorite,” Gracie said. “You were a gift from Grandma. I didn’t want you, but Mom told me it was rude to say no, so, you know.”

“Ouch!” Mr. Giggles tittered. “Well, the truth is, Gracie…I’m not a doll, and I’m not alive. Do you know about heaven?”

“Yeah. Pastor Al says Carmen went there.”

“Right!” Mr. Giggles said. “Right, exactly. Well, sometimes the people who are supposed to go there get lost—like that time you got lost at the mall, right, Gracie?—and they end up back here. But it’s really sad, because they don’t have a body anymore.”

That made sense, too. Not long after the Zoom call with Pastor Al, Mom had brought home a jar, and she said it was Carmen, and it was still sitting on a table in the living room, but it was too small to be Carmen for real. The real Carmen was in heaven.

“It’s like not having a home,” Mr. Giggles continued. “I know you were really young, but do you remember when Dad left, Gracie, and you and Mom had to move? Imagine if you left your old house, and you couldn’t find your new one, but when you went back to your old one, someone had already torn it down.”

“That’s what happened to you?”

“See, you’re a smart girl, Gracie.”

Mr. Giggles seemed like he had more to say, but he didn’t, not yet. He waited for Gracie. She was a smart girl—wasn’t she? She had seen enough of Poltergeist, years ago when Carmen had played it on the living room TV. She had seen a preview for Annabelle. She had seen bits of that Buffy episode, the one with the dummy. She had seen the cover of that Goosebumps book. She was a smart girl, and smart girls knew that dolls who came alive were evil.

They were always evil.

Gracie got out of bed. She went into the guest room, piled several pillows on a chair, and stood teetering on her tiptoes, which was the only way to make herself tall enough, and she still had to stretch to unscrew the red-eyed smoke alarm. Then she opened The Door and went into Carmen’s room. She got the lighter Mom kept in there. It was for lighting the candle, which Mom did when she felt extra sad, which was most of the time. Then Gracie went back to her room, and she closed the door, and she squeezed the trigger, and she held the flame under Mr. Giggles’ foot until the cloth blackened.

The doll screamed. Gracie thought, just for a second, that there were tears in its eyes, but then she realized it was the reflection of the fire flickering in those glassy black beads. There were no tears. She moved the flame closer. Dolls couldn’t feel pain.

“I know it was you, Gracie,” Mr. Giggles growled.

“What?” Gracie said. “What was me?”

“The one who got sick first.” Gracie’s finger unsqueezed the trigger. She was suddenly shaking. Mr. Giggles seemed almost pathetic now, dangling in her grip, his ropey red hair falling almost to the floor. His foot smoked. His head flopped to the side, and his eyes met hers. “You know it was you, too…don’t you? Carmen wasn’t leaving the house. You’re the one who got sick. You’re the one who brought it in. You’re the one who gave it to him. Weren’t you?”

Gracie was still thirsty, her throat drier than ever as she tried to think of something, anything she could say, but she didn’t have to pee anymore, and pretty soon her feet were no longer cold. Carmen has used to clean her up when she did that.

“You ever wish you could make it better, Gracie?”

“Of course I wish I could make it better, you stupid doll!” Gracie sobbed. She didn’t know when she had started crying, but here she was, with aching eyes and the taste of salt on her lips. “But I can’t. He’s gone. I can’t make it better.”

“That’s the thing, though, Gracie—you can. That’s why I needed to speak up. That’s why I needed to speak up now. Because tomorrow is Halloween, and Halloween is a very special day. Do you know why?”

Gracie shook her head.

“Because Halloween is when the wall between this world and the other gets very, very thin. You think I wanted to be in this body? No. No. I wanna feel warmth again. I wanna drink a tall glass of water. But it’s a hell of a lot easier for someone like me to get into the body of a doll than the body of a human. Do you know why?”

Gracie shook her head again.

“It’s because you need consent. Look, I didn’t make the rules, but I have to follow them. Things like me, things from the other side…we can’t lie. We can’t hurt you directly—that’s why ghosts are always throwing things around, doing spooky shit instead of knifing you in the face. Sorry for saying a naughty word, by the way. And they can’t take your body without consent. Do you know what consent is, Gracie?”

Gracie shook her head a third time.

“You’d learn about it in school in, oh, maybe two years or so. But I can teach you right now.” Mr. Giggles reached out, reached up, and the tip of his cloth finger soaked up her tears, one by one by one, until her cheeks were dry. “It means, tomorrow night, I’m going to ask you a question. And it means you’re going to say yes.”

Saturday, October 31st, 2020

Dead of night

“How did the spelling test go, Gracie?”

The question didn’t wake Gracie up. She had been awake since she had gone to sleep, her bladder full, her feet cold, her throat raw. She didn’t know why he always waited until the dead of night, but she had waited, and he had waited, and now both of them were done waiting, except for Mr. Giggles, who was waiting for her to answer. Everything was A-B-N-O-R-M-A-L.

“Good,” she said.

“You know what I’m going to ask next, right?”

“Yes.”

“And what’s you answer?”

“How do I know you’re really him?”

“Oh, come now, Gracie. You already know that.”

“I guess,” she said. But it was true. He knew about Hiya, Gracie. He knew about the fall on the stairs. He knew about getting lost at the mall. So she asked something else: “What does it feel like?”

“Oh, Gracie,” he said. “I’m cold. I feel hungry, but I can’t eat. I feel thristy, but I can’t drink. I feel tired, but I can’t sleep. Every moment is misery. The stitches behind my eyes are coming undone, and the world is going dark. There are spiders inside me. I can feel their little legs. Oh God, Gracie, get me out of here. Give me your body. Help me. Save me.”

“What do I do?”

“Just say yes, Gracie. Just say—”

“Yes,” Gracie whispered.

She expected something to happen. She wasn’t sure what, exactly—a flash of light, a swirl of sparks—but what happened was nothing. She tried speaking to Mr. Giggles. She asked him what it was going to feel like. But he didn’t answer her. He didn’t say anything. Eventually, finally, Gracie fell asleep.

Daytime

“You’re sick, sweetie.”

Her mom’s hand on Gracie’s forehead woke her up. But she felt fine. The sun was shining, and when she scooted back on her bed and propped herself up so she could see the corner of her room, she saw that Mr. Giggles was gone. 

“I know you were looking forward to getting all dolled up for Halloween, but you have to stay in bed and rest today.” The smile didn’t reach her eyes.

“Mom!” Gracie protested.

“If you’re feeling better this evening, maybe we can still watch a movie. Okay? I’m gonna make you some soup. Oh, and Gracie?” Her mom held up the lighter. “This stays in Carmen’s room. Okay?”

“Fine,” Gracie grumbled.

After her mom left, she huffed and pulled her knees up to her chest. Where had Mr. Giggles gone? Now that she thought about it, she did feel a bit warm. She looked at the clock. It was still twelve hours until bedtime. She could be better before then, couldn’t she? She resigned herself to soup.

But when her mom came back, the TV dinner tray did not have soup on it.

It had Mr. Giggles.

“Mom?”

“Chicken noodle,” her mom said. “It’ll make your throat feel better.”

“Mom, that’s—”

“Yeah, I know,” her mom said. “Homemade is better. But Campbell’s is all I had.”

“No, Mom….”

“Just eat it, Gracie.” Her mom sighed and set the tray down over Gracie’s lap. Mr. Giggles stared up at her. Her mom produced a very large knife, from where Gracie didn’t know, and sawed off Mr. Giggles’ hand. She impaled it on a fork as if it were a piece of meat. “You want to get better, don’t you?”

Gracie began to cry.

“Eat it, Gracie,” her mom said. She held the puffy white hand in front of Gracie’s mouth, which Gracie relucantly opened. Her mom inserted the hand. She pushed it deeper, deeper, past the back of Gracie’s tongue and down her throat. “That’s it. Good girl.”

Her mom fed Gracie pieces of Mr. Giggles, one by one by one, until they were all gone. Gracie’s belly was swollen. Her mom told her to get some rest, and then she left. Gracie knew she was going to fall asleep again soon. She felt…not tired, not exactly, but like her head was cloudy. Like it was full of cotton.

Bedtime

“Hiya, Mr. Giggles.”

The words woke her up. But what drew her attention first was the wispy-something tickling her back. She instinctively tried to brush the webs away, but her arms did not respond, except to flop around like fish on the beach.

That was when she saw herself.

“There is so much flesh.” Gracie was sitting on the bed across the room, her eyes bright and unblinking in the glow of her dinosaur nightlight. She wrapped her arms around himself, then ran her hands down the sides of her torso, then across her tummy. “I hardly know what to do with it all.”

Mr. Giggles tried to scream, but the only thing her mouth did was open and close silently, and she thought again about fish. She tried to pucker her lips. Tried to blow a raspberry. Tried to do anything. But all she could do was smile. With every once of willpower she had, she raised her arm and touched her tongue, but the only thing she felt was felt.

“Yes,” Gracie said, wiggling her toes. “Talking will take a long time to learn. Maybe the longest. And if you do it around anyone besides me, well…you can guess how that might go. Speaking of which, here comes—”

Mom opened the door.

“How you feeling, Gracie?”

“Great!” Gracie sprang out of bed and put her hands on her hips. “I am feeling most magnifique. Can we watch Hereditary for Halloween?”

“That is way too scary for you,” Mom said. She put a hand on Gracie’s forehead. “Well, you don’t feel feverish. Maybe it was just a stomach bug. How about Nightmare Before Christmas?” Mom winked. “We can still get all dolled up. Sound good?”

“Perfect.”

Gracie smiled. It was a tender, tentative smile at first, the curve of her lips resting comfortably against her cheeks. But then the corners crawled farther, farther, revealing her teeth, exposing the braces she had gotten last year, until, at last, her eyes were smiling too.

“There’s my baby girl. I’ll come get you in twenty minutes.”

Mom left.

Gracie turned, still smiling, head lowered like a hunting lion, and stalked towards Mr. Giggles, and she moved by placing one foot directly in front of the other and only on the balls of her feet, and when she was close enough, she pounced, snatching Mr. Giggles up and tracing a finger along her—its?—lack of lips.

“That was the thing I hated most about being a doll,” Gracie said. “Smiles never got to your eyes, and if they don’t get to your eyes, they’re hardly even real smiles, are they? You gotta know they’re real. I wanna be real with you, Mr. Giggles.”

Gracie opened the window and set Mr. Giggles on the sill. Across the street was a yard popping with plastic ghosts and graves, and a giant pumpkin, and an even gianter spider with animatronic legs that made it look as if it were creeping up the side of the house. A chilly autumn wind cut through Mr. Giggles. No goosepimples appeared on her arms. She instinctively tried to shiver, but all that happened was her head flopping to the side. Gracie leaned on the sill next to her.

“Weird, isn’t it?” she said. “How you can still feel everything. You’d think, being made of cloth and cotton, that’d you be warm, but I suppose it’s different when the cloth itself is your flesh. Still, it hardly compares to Cocytus. I went there once on a work trip. You know the phrase ‘a snowball’s chance in hell’? It’s quite silly. Not specific enough. Because, like, obviously, if you toss a snowball into Phlegethon, it’s gonna be gone like—hey, I can snap my fingers again! But in the Ninth Circle, that snowball is gonna be pretty much okay until Revelation.”

Mr. Giggles was already cold, but she suddenly felt thirsty too, and like she had to pee, and like the little legs of little spiders were inside her, moving. She wanted to throw up, but she had no stomach to throw up from.

“Yeah, I suppose I should start at the beginning.” Gracie took Mr. Giggles’ hand and shook it. “Hi. My name is Scarmiglione. I’m a demon. I was born in Malebolge, and I worked part-time as a member of the Malebranche. Dreadful job. Had to make sure barrators stayed in the lake of pitch. But I did the work, I did it well, and eventually I saved up enough to move to the Fifth Circle.

“My next job was working under Eligor on the Flesh-Wall of Dis, near the Festering Gate. That’s how I met your brother—packing him into the Wall. See, we used to just stuff everyone in as-is, but then Lucifer started implementing all these reformations to make things more humane, blah blah blah. Stuff drifts down from Earth. You have ACAB, we have AHAW. All Harpies Are Whores. Which, frankly, isn’t true, and kind of anti-feminist, I think. I had a lovely fling with a Harpy when I went through the Wood of the Suicides on my way to the Wall of Dis.

“Anyway, after the reformations, we were required to remove the brain before we put someone in the wall. Like, they’d still suffer, but they wouldn’t be, you know, reflecting on it or whatever. Kind of a ‘no thoughts, just vibes’ approach to eternal torment. Don’t worry about Carmen. He’s got a lovely view of the Styx.

“You know how you have, like, drugs and stuff here on Earth? Well, that’s what brains are in hell. You get this rush of, like, a person’s life and memories when you eat their brain, and sometimes you get a bad one, like if they died in a genocide or something, but for the most part it’s a pretty okay way to relax after work. So, suddenly, there are a lot of spare brains lying about. You can probably guess what happened next.

“Eligor got fed up with Lucifer’s reformations, and he got it in his head to foment a little rebellion. You can imagine how well that went, which was…about as well as Lucifer’s own rebellion. The worst part is that the rest of us on wall-duty were stupid enough to go along with it. We were banished from hell, which probably sounds okay to you, but, you know, Upper Hell isn’t that bad, especially when you can find employment. Much preferable to wandering the mortal plane as a spirit, searching the world for a little girl you saw in the memory of someone back home.”

“You…told me…you couldn’t…lie.”

“Did you just—talk, Mr. Giggles? That took me months. You’ve got a strong will in you, girl. I like that. I like it so much, in fact, that I’ve decided to keep you around. I wasn’t lying when I told you that love can keep a thing alive, Mr. Giggles. You are a selfless, selfless soul, who graciously gave me this beautiful body. Someday, it will have babies, and those babies will have babies, and I will make sure they all love you as much as I do.’’

Mom’s voice suddenly came from the hall. She was singing as she approached Gracie’s room. “Boys and girls of every age / Wouldn’t you like to see something strange? / Come with us and you will see / This, our town of Halloween / This is Halloween, this is Halloween….” Mom knocked on the doorframe. “You ready to get all dolled up, Gracie? Close that window before you get sick again.”

“Can I bring Mr. Giggles?” Gracie asked.

“That old thing? It’s so creepy—I heard you pretending it could talk a minute ago, which would have freaked me out when I was your age. Don’t you want to donate it or something?”

“Oh, no,” Gracie said, and the smile reached her eyes. “I love Mr. Giggles.”

“You’re braver than me, baby girl.” Mom shrugged. “Go ahead and bring him, then.”

“Thanks,” Gracie said. She lifted the doll and kissed it gently on the forehead. Its cloth skin folded inward until her lips were fully inside it, soft and round and moist. “Oh, Mr. Giggles. I think you just might live forever.”

THE END