“Bring me to my eyes.” Mia leaned her torso forward, arms flailing for Lenny. Her withered hand clutched at Lenny’s shoulder, and she leveraged Lenny to hoist herself off the couch, joints cracking as she rose.
Mia resembled a pile of rattling walking sticks swathed in a blue robe as she hobbled to the living room mantle. Allow me, wretch and wiseass that I am, the high honor of being your crutch, Lenny thought, leading the way.
They stopped in front of a jar nestled behind three wax dolls. Lenny offered to help unscrew the lid, but Mia scowled at her. Lenny should have known better. Of all the things she did for the old biddy, putting her eyes back in was one of the few things she’d never been allowed to touch. It was just that Lenny had never seen her this fragile before.
Mia fished a pair of eyeballs out of a translucent, viscous liquid and fingered them into her sockets. Lenny turned her head away and heard a faint squelching sound as Mia maneuvered them into place. The sound wasn’t the worst part; it was the stream of thick liquid that rolled down her cheeks. The fake tears made her seem sad, perhaps even kind.
Mia was anything but that.
Lenny turned her head back to watch Mia’s hands after she heard her scoop up the dolls. Mia held the three of them close to her eyes, studying the sticks harpooned through their palms, pinning each hand to the doll next to it. They were a trio bound together in a closed circuit.
Lenny recognized Mia’s doll by the charcoal pits it had for eyes, same as hers, and the strand of her thick, black hair wrapped around its neck. The doll was charred in places from its time in the flames while the fresh wax doll it was connected to through its right hand was an unblemished stand-in for the young girl Lenny had recruited for Mia.
Allison? No, Alice. Maybe. She had stopped remembering their names all these years. It was easier to think of them as nameless. Nameless dolls instead of named humans. It was the doll she had to find and bring here, the doll that suffered in the end because of it.
Not the person.
Lenny had always wondered who the third doll was, also charred like Mia’s. She’d even risked a peek, searching for some sort of marking while Mia wasn’t looking. All Lenny had found was something etched into its back. They were strange letters she did not recognize. And there were too many of them to be just a name. Some characters looked regular, like ‘k’ and ‘t.’ But there was an ‘o’ that had a vertical dash inside it, an ‘n’ that had a stem longer on one side than the English version. Was it a spell? The incantation that made this whole thing work?
Then again, Mia had never spoken anything to work her dark ritual. After the dolls were all tossed in the fire, that’s when Mia would change.
“Where is the girl?” Mia asked.
Lenny gave her a funny look. “In the backroom. Where they always are.” Every kid—every doll—ended up in the same place. The guest room down the hall. Odds were usually high that Mia would get an offended, bestial look whenever Lenny “got too fresh,” but Mia only nodded this time.
“Ah, right, right.” Mia shuffled away.
Lenny was relieved Mia did not make her come along. The cave, Lenny called it. No light penetrated its interior, despite there being a jalousie window. No sound got out either. Not that the doll had screamed when Lenny had locked her in its bowels. Even if she were to make a sound, it would only ricochet in the room until it faded out. Flatlining in the depths of the cave’s darkness.
The doll wasn’t like the others, who had kicked and clawed, cried and shouted. She made no effort, as far Lenny could tell, to scheme or plot her way out. This doll had seemed to understand that the moment she’d stepped foot in this house, this was where her life would end.
It unsettled Lenny, actually. She had only seen that behavior once before, and that was when Mia had brought her here. Lenny had come quietly too. Not because she trusted Mia, but because Lenny had made a simple trade on a bench at the bus station: whatever Mia wanted in exchange for a roof and a full belly. Nothing Mia could ask for would cost more than another night out there.
But now Lenny was not so sure about the price.
“You know you’re the only one I trust,” Mia said when she eased back onto the couch. Her chest caved in after every couple of words, as if she needed to withdraw inward to gather the energy for something simple like speaking.
Lenny nodded, not sure which Mia she preferred. This version seemed tamer—this old and feeble thing. Somewhere in Lenny’s stomach, a corded feeling knotted up at the thought of her passing. Which was dumb. Nobody cries when the mean lunch lady retires. Lenny would leave the body right where it lay and step over it on her way out without ever having to worry that Mia would find her. She would never have to think of Mia ever again. Or any of this. And she would think that all these things hadn’t really happened to her.
They had happened to some separate, evil twin.
Was Mia even capable of dying anyway? Lenny had seen Mia’s skin unline itself countless times, the agility return to her body after her ritual was complete, leaving her coiled like a snake ready to strike. And every time, something in Lenny loosened too, like a nickel dropped into a jukebox. All her insides would light up. She had been twelve for more years than she could count. Lenny had never seen Mia fail to grow young again, yet she had never seen her grow this old either.
Lenny let her eyes circle the woman who had fed and sheltered her all these years, the way Mia had beat it into her. That is to say, around her, never at her—because, child, keep it moving.
“Come over here and learn something, Leonora,” husked Mia.
Lenny sat down next to her.
“And knees together, Leonora.” Mia pinched her on the arm. “You are not a sailor.”
Lenny snapped them shut. Quick follow-throughs were appreciated around Mia.
“Now, these dolls are from the old country.” Mia’s skin flashed gold as she spoke, there and gone so fast that Lenny wondered if it had been a trick of the light.
Mia wound a curl of the latest girl’s brown hair around the fresh doll’s neck. “I had children of my own, back there. Beautiful ones.” She looped the hair into a knot. “But someone took them from me.”
Lenny had lived under Mia’s roof for—well, she did not know how long—and Mia had never once mentioned kids of her own.
“I did not use these back then. Many, many years ago, I was…different. More vicious and impatient. There was a time when I didn’t mess with the power of these kolossoi at all. Just ate the children outright.” Mia tapped the third doll, the one with the strange letters carved into its back. “Her mother took my precious babies from me. So now I borrow from her.” She pulled the knot tighter. “What we do now is more humane. They should be happy I’ve changed my ways.”
Something tingled across Lenny’s body, lifting the hairs on the back of her neck. She had always thought something similar as she recruited the next doll for Mia. That they should be happy. They should be happy to have shelter. They should be happy to have food. At least for a while.
Why, then, did it sound so hollow now?
Mia set the dolls down on the coffee table, her arms moving slower than when she had tied the hair to the doll, only moments before. “You must start a fire for me and throw these in it. I don’t have the energy left this time.”
“I thought I wasn’t allowed to touch them,” Lenny recited.
Laughter shattered out of Mia’s mouth, the wrinkles around her eyes having deepened a decade’s worth overnight. “You do what I tell you to do. And I need you to start a fire and throw these in. Now, don’t make me repeat myself. If the dolls aren’t in there by the time I wake up, you won’t like what wakes up.”
