Poppet

Inside the Poppets

IN THE MENDIPS, Caffery wakes aching in every bone and joint. He lies there with his hands over his face, feeling the pain as a death sense. Dull and ancient. It takes a long time to go, and for him to find the energy to get up.

He sits in the kitchen drinking coffee – waiting for it to work. Then, when his head starts to move a little, he realizes he feels like this because something has occurred to him overnight. Something that outside in the real world would be unspeakable, but viewed from inside Handel’s skewed world order makes perfect, nasty sense. He pulls on an old sweater that’s hooked over the banisters and gets his glasses. He finds his Swiss Army knife and, buoyed up by the caffeine, opens the door to the utility room.

The window has been open overnight – cracked on to the secure setting so some air can circulate – and the room is freezing. Early sunlight comes through the window. The poppets lie on the tiled surface, motionless, eyes staring at the ceiling. What is it about them that makes him sure they’ve only lain down like this in the last few seconds? That all night while he’s been asleep they’ve been moving? Maybe creeping out of the window frame. Finding the nearest churchyard and lifting gravestones.

He pulls on his gloves and picks up the male doll. Graham Handel. Using the knife’s tweezer head, he carefully unpicks the stitching. Underneath the outer layer is an inner layer of stained muslin. This is covered in writing, though Caffery can’t immediately decipher it – or even decide which language it’s written in, the ink is so smudged. He finishes stripping the outside covering, lays it out to one side, like a miniature flayed skin, and sets to work unpicking the muslin. Inside is another layer.

When both dolls are unpicked he has lined up in his utility room eight tiny skins all in different shades and fabrics. One set of four has all the characteristics of a female, with breasts and hips. The other has a penis. Scattered among the fabric wrappings are the other things he’s discovered stuffed inside the dolls. The dolls’ teeth, he sees, are not fashioned from polished shells as he’d thought, but human. Eight of them – yellow and old. Incisors and molars. Two tangled masses of hair – one blond, one dark – and something that looks, to his experienced eye, like the shrivelled, mummified remains of human ears.