A Nest of Nightmares

DOLLBURGER

When she listened hard, Karen thought she could hear the men downstairs searching for dolls. Although she didn’t know what they looked like, she thought of them as hairy troll-like men with the large square teeth of horses. She glanced at the attic door. All her dolls were safe in there. Surely the men would never come upstairs into her room?

The thought made her clutch the blankets to her chin, her body rigid with the effort of not breathing. The bed was safe, it had always been a sanctuary, but she didn’t know the powers or limits of these doll thieves and could only guess at protection. She’d learned about them just that morning, from her father.

‘Daddy, have you seen Kristina?’

‘Let daddy read his paper, sweetie – he doesn’t know which doll Kristina is,’ her mother said, flipping pancakes.

Daddy dipped a piece of toast in his coffee and looked at it thoughtfully before biting. He replied with his mouth full.

‘Did you leave her downstairs?’

‘Yeah – I think.’

Daddy shook his head. ‘Shouldn’t have done that. Dangerous. Don’t you know what happens to dolls that get left downstairs all night?’

Karen glanced quickly at her mother. Catching the half smile on her mother’s face, Karen raised her eyebrows sceptically.

‘No,’ she said, in a tone that dared him.

Daddy shook his head again and consumed the last of the piece of toast.

‘Well, if you leave your doll downstairs, you can just expect that when those men come looking – ’

‘What men?’

He looked surprised that she should need to ask. ‘Why the men who eat dollburgers, of course!’

‘Dollburgers?’

‘Just like hamburgers. Only, of course, made out of dolls.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘People don’t eat dolls, and dollburgers are just tiny hamburgers, like what Mommy made on my last birthday, which you feed to dolls.’

‘But dolls don’t eat – people do.’

‘You pretend,’ Karen said, exasperated with him. He was shaking his head.

‘I don’t care what you call little hamburgers – but I happen to know about dollburgers. People eat them, and they’re made out of dolls. There are people who just love them. Of course, they’re illegal; so they have to sneak around, looking for houses where little girls have forgotten to put their dolls safely away. When they find abandoned dolls, they pop them into a sack until they collect enough to grind up into dollburgers.’

‘That’s a story,’ Karen said.

Her father shrugged. ‘I’m just trying to warn you so when you lose a doll you’ll know what’s happened to it and maybe you’ll be more careful in the future.’

Her mother came to the table. ‘No dollburgers in this house. Pancakes though. Karen, get your plate if you want some.’

Karen suddenly remembered where she’d left Kristina. Of course – last night before she went to bed, she and Kristina had been lost in the wilderness and had crawled into a cave to rest for the night – Kristina must still be in the cave.

‘In a minute,’ she said, and went purposefully into the living room.

The bridge table was the cave, but there was no doll underneath. Karen dropped to her hands and knees. Kristina was gone. Something gleamed in the corner by a table leg, and she picked it up.

A blue eye gazed impassively up from her hand. There were some shards of pink plastic on the carpet. Kristina?

‘Karen, do you want pancakes or don’t you?’

‘In a minute,’ she called, and carefully picked up each tiny piece and put it in her pocket. She looked at the eye again. Kristina’s eyes were blue. She put the eye in her pocket.

‘Daddy,’ she asked over pancakes, ‘do the people – the people who eat dollburgers – do they ever just, you know, eat dolls? I mean, right where they find them?’

Her father considered. ‘I suppose sometimes they get so hungry that they might just crunch up a doll right there, with their teeth,’ he said. ‘You never know what they’ll do.’

‘I’m sure Kristina is perfectly safe,’ said her mother. ‘I’ll help you find her after I do the dishes.’

After breakfast Karen went up to her room and examined the eye and the pieces of pink plastic, the last remains of Kristina. What Daddy had said about the dollburger eaters was real, then, and not just a story like the grizzly bear in the cedar closet.

Karen had the attic room. Her closet was actually the attic itself – without wallpaper, beams bare overhead and decorated with bits of discarded furniture and boxes of old clothes. She kept her toys there, and it was home to all her dolls. She took Kristina’s eye there, climbed onto a rickety chair, and put it in a secret place atop a ceiling beam. It would do better than a funeral, she thought, since there was so little of poor Kristina left.

The dolls watched her steadily from their places. Karen looked around at all of them from her position atop the chair, feeling queen of all she surveyed, giant queen-mother to all these plastic, rag, and rubber babies.

Hard-faced Barbie sat stonily beside doltish Ken in front of their dream house. Her clothes spilled out of the upstairs bedroom; two nude teenagers (Barbie’s friends) sprawled in the kitchen.

The bride doll sat next to Princess Katherine where she’d sat for months undisturbed. There was dust in her hair, and the shoulders of her white gown looked grimy. Princess Katherine’s crown was bent, her green dress stained, and her lower right leg secured to the upper leg with Band-Aids and masking tape.

Raggedy Ann, Raggedy Andy, Aunt Jemima, and Teddy­bear slouched together in the rocking chair. The talking dolls, Elizabeth, Jane, and Tina sat grimly silent. The babydolls had been tossed into one crib where they lay like lumps. Susan, bald and legless, had been wrapped tenderly and put in the blue plastic bassinet.

Karen looked at the top of the old dresser, where Kristina used to sit with Beverly. Now Beverly sat there alone. Karen felt tears in her eyes: Kristina had been her favourite. She suddenly felt uncomfortable standing above her dolls, felt that they were blaming her for Kristina’s disappearance.

She felt guilt, a heaviness in her stomach, and thought she saw grim indictment on the still, staring faces.

‘Poor Kristina,’ she said. ‘If only someone had warned me.’ She stepped down from her perch, shaking her head sadly. ‘If only daddy had told me before – then I could have protected her. When I think of all the times I’ve left some of you out – well, now that I know I’ll be sure to take good care.’

She looked around at the dolls, who had not changed expression, and suddenly the silence of the attic became oppressive.

Louisa, Karen’s best friend, called that afternoon. ‘Would you and Kristina care to join me and Isabella in having a tea party?’ she asked in her best society-lady voice.

Karen assumed a similar voice to reply. ‘Oh, my deah, I would love to, but Kristina has been kidnapped.’

‘Oh, how dreadful, my deah.’

‘Yes, it is, my deah, but I think I shall bring my other child, Elizabeth.’

‘Very good. I shall see you in a few minutes. Ta-ta.’

‘Ta-ta, my deah.’

Elizabeth was one of the talking dolls, always her favourite until golden-haired Kristina had come as a birthday gift.

Louisa’s little sister Anne and her ragdoll Sallylou were the other guests at the tea party, treated with faint disdain by Louisa and Karen for their lack of society manners.

‘Why don’t you let Elizabeth eat her own cookie?’ Anne demanded as Karen took a dainty bite. Elizabeth had politely refused the treat.

‘Be quiet, silly,’ Louisa said, forgetting her role. ‘Dolls don’t eat cookies.’

‘Yes, they do.’

‘No, they don’t.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘They do not.’

‘Well, if they don’t, then what do they eat?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Pretend food,’ Karen amended. ‘They have to eat pretend food because they only have pretend teeth and pretend stomachs.’

Anne shook her head. ‘Sallylou has real teeth, and so she has to eat real food.’

‘Oh, she does not,’ Louisa said. ‘All you do is mash cookies in her face so she gets crumbs all over her. Show me her teeth if she has them.’

‘I can’t, ’cause her mouth is closed,’ Anne said smugly.

‘You’re just stupid.’

Later, when they were alone, Karen told Louisa what had happened to Kristina and watched her friend’s eyes grow wider. This was no story; it was real and immediate, and the proof was the blue eye now lying on a bed of dust and staring unceasingly at the attic roof.

Karen’s ears ached from trying to hear movement downstairs. She always lay awake at the top of the house, feeling silence and sleep wrap the house from the bottom up until it finally reached her and she slept. But now every distant creak of board, every burp of pipe, made her tense and listen harder. She’d left no dolls downstairs, of course, but what if those men should not be deterred by stairs but were lured on by the scent of dolls up in the attic?

She thought of Louisa across the street and wondered if she too lay awake listening. Louisa, she knew, had put all her dolls under the bed, the safest place she could think of.

Karen suddenly thought of her own dolls, more frightened than she, sitting terrified in the dark attic, listening to the sounds as she did and wondering if the next creaking board would bring a dark sack over their heads, labelling them dollburger meat. It was her duty to protect them.

She went on bare feet to the attic door, the full moon through her window giving her light enough to find her way. She opened the attic door and thought as she did so that she heard a movement inside, as if perhaps a doll had been knocked over.

She had to go inside the attic several feet to reach the light cord. Her bare foot nudged something as she did, and when the light came on, she looked down to see what it was.

Poor, bald, legless Susan lay naked on the floor, and Karen noticed at once that Susan now was not only legless, but armless as well. When she picked her up, small shards of pink plastic fell from the arm sockets.

Karen felt an almost paralysing fear. They were up here, somehow in the attic without having come past her bed, and already they’d begun on her most helpless doll. Holding Susan to her, she began to gather all the other dolls into her arms. She lifted the skirt of her nightgown to make a bag and tumbled the dolls in there. They were scattered around as if they’d been thrown, none in their right places. Barbie on the floor, Ken in the rocking chair with Raggedy Andy and the bride.

Every time she bent to pick up another doll, she was sure she could hear the muffled breathing of the hungry dollburger eaters and feel the pressure of their eyes against her back.

She began to pray, whispering and thinking, ‘Oh, please, please, please, oh, please.’

Finally she had all the dolls together, and she stumbled to the door and closed it, leaving the light still burning in the attic. For safety she pushed her chair in front of the door.

Then she went to bed, arranging all the dolls around her, lying down, falling asleep sandwiched by their small hard bodies.

She may have dreamed, but she never woke as they began to move closer to her in the night, and she didn’t see the crumbs of plastic that fell from Elizabeth’s open, hungry mouth.