A HOMESPUN EMBRACE

A HOMESPUN EMBRACE
by Robert Luke Wilkins

The red-gold of sunset flickered through the old windows of Westford Elementary, turning its corridors into a quarter of hell. There were strange corners that didn’t belong, as though the architect had lost his wits half way through the design, and shadows stretched out for imagined monsters to hide in—and they did, no matter how hard Angela tried to shake them from her mind’s eye.

And it wasn’t as if it was a good job—scrubbing floors and wiping up elementary-child mess—but it was better than no job. Still, the more time she spent here, the more appealing unemployment became.

“Pay attention, girl!”

“Sorry—sorry.”

No matter her effort, things still never gleamed for her as they did for Lana, who clucked with annoyance at everything she did.

“You’re no good at this. I’ve half a dozen other girls who’d love this job—work harder, or you’ll be out.”

Angela said nothing, and returned to the patch of floor she was trying to scrub, willing it to gleam.

+++

It was long past sunset by the time she got home, her arms and back aching from the effort.

And now she had the house to face.

Her grandparents had left it to her—the lack of rent was a blessing, but if not for fond memories, she’d have sold up long ago. Its small rooms and low ceilings felt claustrophobic, but despite the smallness of the spaces, no number of lamps seemed enough to properly light them. She’d placed angel figurines in the deepest shadows, which helped—but it was no dream-home.

But if the house was a breeding ground for nightmares, then the garden was a well-tended patch of heaven. The manicured lawn and pruned rose-bushes showed her love, and since she was a little girl, she’d loved to sit and read books on the oak bench under the pear tree.

Today, she really needed her garden. She parked her old VW Bug in the back street, and entered through the wrought-iron gate that creaked ever so slightly as it swung.

The garden was lit by several solar lanterns, and the musky smell of pear-tree blossom welcomed her in. Some people hated it—a dirty smell, her mother had called it—but she loved it. Her cousin had said it smelled of semen, but to her, it seemed that semen smelled of springtime pear-trees. And—

She stopped.

Her book was still there on the bench—Love’s Cruel Song, with a handsome, shirtless man on the cover—but next to it, half in shadow, was an unfamiliar knitted doll, featureless and gruesomely gray, posed as though it was waiting for her. It was two feet long from head to toe, lumpy, dusty, and ugly—the color of decade-old concrete.

Her heart raced. Who had put it there? Why had they put it there? She opened her mouth to call out—and stopped, and glanced over at the house.

What if she’d left the door open? What if they were waiting for her, inside?

She glanced again at the doll, then crept over to the back door, each step careful and quiet, and tried the door-handle.

Still locked.

She let herself breathe out, slow, in one relieved whisper. Still locked! She looked back over at the doll, and felt foolish. It was just a doll, after all.

Could it be a gesture of love? She’d had a boyfriend who was like that, all toys and gifts, but he’d always left a note. And he’d had better taste than this.

Still, it seemed churlish to leave it sitting in the garden now—and the garden no longer felt quite like the refuge she’d been waiting for. She walked over to it, and crouched down.

“So, who are you?”

She picked it up and turned it over. Maybe if she cleaned it, stitched on eyes and a mouth, a pair of knitted wings on the back…yes, maybe it could be something. And if it was a gift, well, someone had meant well by it, even if they had questionable taste.

She glanced around the garden again, and imagined unseen eyes watching—a would-be friend, or some kind of stalker?

She grabbed the doll and the novel, went inside, and locked, chained, and bolted the door.

+++

She rinsed the doll off in the sink—the water, unfortunately, did little to improve the color of the thing—then squeezed it to try and flatten out some of the lumps. That hadn’t helped either, so she left it to dry in the dish-drainer.

Wings would help—wings, and a tumble in a washer, the next time she went to the laundromat.

The weather was balmy enough for a sandwich in the garden—but she wouldn’t eat out there now, not tonight. Part of her felt she should call the police, but what would she tell them? Officer, I’m the victim of reckless ugly gift-giving? Besides, it might be nothing. Perhaps it had just been left at the wrong address, or maybe it had been thrown over her fence, discarded, and had simply landed that way, sitting, quite by chance.

The thought made her feel oddly sad. Even an ugly doll deserved a little love.

Consigned to the house, she laid and lit the living room fire, warmed up beef stew left-overs, and sat down in her comfy chair in front of the fireplace. The smell of firewood and the beef stew together felt like home—she could remember it, from long ago—and she felt herself relaxing.

She picked over her food with a fork, selecting chunks of meat or vegetable one at a time, and reading through her novel, taking time to repeat the bits that she really liked.

Beneath the corner of her book, she saw a shadow shifting on the floor—cast long by the corner lamp, and unsteady, but creeping towards her. She froze for a moment, and then moved the book slowly out of her line of sight.

The woollen doll stumbled in from the kitchen, silent and unsteady on boneless knitted legs. It had no eyes, but she felt them on her, nonetheless.

She dropped the book, jumped up from the chair and grabbed the poker from the fireplace set. She pointed it at the doll, but she could feel the poker shaking in her hand. The doll stopped, and its head cocked slightly.

“I should have left you in the garden. Get out of here—now.”

She could hear the tremor in her voice—and the doll’s head snapped back up straight.

“Go,” she said, her voice raised. “Or I’ll—”

The doll twitched, and sprang—it was on her before she could swing. She screamed and stepped back, the poker falling from her grip as she stumbled into the wall—and then she felt dry, woollen hands touching her face, creeping over her skin. She screamed again, and grabbed at it—her hands fumbled, but her nails snagged it and she flung it from her. It bounced from the far wall, then fell to the floor.

It lay there, still—but something was wrong. Her right eye was dark, closed tight. She reached to rub at it, and froze—her fingers found neither eye nor socket, but instead, solid flesh and bone where they had once been.

The doll stood up, and as it turned to face her, she saw her lost eye staring back from its ugly knitted face, wide and eager.

A scream froze in her throat as she stumbled back a step, staring at her own eye as it stared back. What the hell was it? How had it done this to her?

Her heart was racing, her pulse wild with adrenaline—she wanted to run, to fight, to scream, to cry—but as she stared at that thing with her eye, she felt her adrenaline wrapping up around an unfamiliar anger. Anger at the thing, at what it had done—and that it had chosen her.

She bent and grabbed the poker again.

“Give—it—back,” she said, and though her voice now was steady with fury, she felt sure the doll was silently laughing.

Kill it, suggested a voice in her head. Kill it— maybe you will get your eye back.

The doll stumbled forwards unsteadily again, and Angela swung at it with all her strength—but it bent backwards in boneless limbo, and as the poker whistled over it, it grabbed onto her arm. She felt a tingling sensation, and then the doll fell away as the poker dropped from her grip. Her arm fell limp to her side, and she screamed as agony pulsed through it.

At her side hung a ruined sack of skin—all of the bones gone from within, from finger-tip to shoulder, and she clutched it to her body as it pulsed with pain, tears creeping down her cheeks.

Before her, the doll’s right arm was extended out to one side—loose, gray knitted wool stretched out thin over arm and finger-bones that were far too long for its false skin. She opened her mouth, and screamed at it—part terror, part pain, part rage. She wanted it to go, to leave her alone—she wanted it to stay here and die.

But it didn’t move. She bent slowly, watching the doll closely as her left hand reached for the poker. Her hollow arm pulsed with pain again as it fell loose, and the doll cocked its head to the side a little.

She gripped her weapon tight with her left hand, but it felt clumsy—she’d never been any good with her left. And what good would it do? How could you beat a knitted doll to death?

Her eyes glanced to the fireplace…

They moved at the same moment—it stumbled towards her, and she went for the fire. It was quick, but it stumbled and tripped over its new arm, and she thrust the poker into the wood and flames.

Then it was up again, and she saw its shadow as it jumped, and latched onto the side of her head. She screamed, and tried to turn away from it and shake it loose as it crawled around to her face.

She felt a tingling in her face—and then her scream was silent. She wrenched the poker from the fire—flames, burning wood, and smouldering ashes sprayed out, burning her, the carpet and the doll alike. There was a hiss, and a wailing, howling sound from the thing, as two voices screamed together at once.

It let go and fell back away from her—but she fell to her knees too, grasping at her face, her one eye wide with panic.

She couldn’t breathe!

And in front of her now, it smouldered and burned as her lost right eye stared back—but beneath that eye in the woollen face, she saw her own nose blistering in the flames, and her own mouth screaming in pain—her voice, screaming, and mingled with a horrid other.

Her burns were forgotten as her lungs screamed in agony—her left fingers clawed at what had once been her mouth, digging desperate, bloody holes into flesh down to solid, unyielding bone. Flames grew, licking up around the thing’s body, smoke pouring off it as her stolen flesh blistered. The thing stopped howling, and turned her mouth up into a wicked grin.

She felt her arm fall weak to the ground, and she saw the doll before her, still burning, her nose blackening in the flames as the carpet around it began to smoulder and ignite.

But the burning in her lungs seemed to grow more distant, and her vision was fading—darkness creeping in around the edges, and everything fading from focus, save for the thing closest to her—her own mouth, grinning at her, and slowly starting to melt…

+++

Silence broke, becoming a gasp, and the gasp became a scream.

Angela’s lungs burned, but she gulped in the air, and coughed as she sat up. Her hand flew to her face—her restored hand, flesh and bone again, found the eye in the socket where it had almost always been, and found her mouth, but she felt pain in her flesh as well as her lungs, and she tasted blood—when she lifted her hand away, it was thick with blood. She touched her face gently, and found painful holes where her fingernails had tried to tear anew her stolen mouth.

Her eye was blurred, the colors all wrong—her mouth and nose were burned and painful, and inside her arm, the bones felt far too hot.

But there, on the floor in front of her, lay the knitted thief—completely still, now, smouldering and blackened.

But the smoke she smelled was from more than the doll, and she felt the heat of the fire before she saw it—the carpet in flame, fire that danced up the walls, setting the angels aflame on the mantelpiece.

She jumped to her feet, and ran to the phone—then stopped.

She looked around at the house, and down at the doll. Her memories didn’t seem so fond, now. And it was insured, after all…

As the flames flickered up the side of the painting and up to the ceiling, she stared at the doll.

You can burn.

She kicked it into the heart of the largest flames, then ran for the back door.

+++

The insurance paid out, though her lawyer took a chunk. But it was enough to buy a new house—at the outskirts of town where money stretched further, with a pair of large fireplaces, no strange, dark corners in need angels, and outside, another beautiful garden with the self-same pear tree within it, carefully transplanted by some rather costly experts—none of whom had resembled the handsome men from her books.

She left the bench behind, and the school-job too.

The wounds had healed, but had scars where her fingers had dug, and where the flames had licked up over her nose and mouth. Her right eye was still wrong, too—the world looked orange and terribly out of focus, so she now wore glasses, one lens much thicker than the other.

All of it was a reminder to her in the mirror every morning.

The old house had burned—and the doll with it. But now, she wished, she had taken it with her—that she had burned it in front of her, watched every inch of it blacken and vanish for good. Because now, she wondered—had it really even burned? Had it ever been alive—and could you really kill something that wasn’t?

Sometimes, she woke screaming—images in her mind’s eye of the charred doll stumbling through her door, her hands grasping for a weapon in those first seconds when the dream still seemed real. And she thought she saw it, sometimes—in shadowy corners, or around trees and bushes at night.

So far, it had never been there.

It’s done—it’s gone. You killed it, and it’s never coming back.

But she could still feel it there, waiting—gray, ugly, and watching without eyes.

Fiction © Copyright Robert Luke Wilkins
Image by danivillar from Pixabay

Robert Luke Wilkins is a SFFH writer, ex-pat Englishman, software engineer, slave to cats. You can find his stories in @PodCastle_org, @OnSpecMagazine, @StupefyingSF

Twitter: @RobertLWilkins
Facebook: @robertlukewilkins