Warlock Wolf / Bring The Night / Chapter 4

Twenty-five minutes now they were poking around this mansion going room to room with flashlights—and what were they looking for? He couldn’t even believe it. His friends might ask, and what would he tell them? He’d been a federal law officer in Tennessee looking to bust organized crime enterprises around drugs and robberies. They would never believe him when he said he was looking for a homicidal doll. He didn’t believe it himself.

The Cartwright mansion had twenty-five rooms. From a central block body spread two wings, one to the east, the other to the west. Now he was on the second floor in the western wing, heading into the last room at the end of the hall. They’d split into groups, which sounded like a terrible idea if you were searching for a homicidal doll, but there wasn’t a chance he was going to find one, so he let Maddie make that choice. The girls seemed to have their own set of ways, so he allowed it. What did he know about the occult, anyway?

The coroner had arrived before they set out, and Boston had Nixon hang back with him on the stoop while the rest of them poked around for a devil doll, Boston keeping the devil doll part to himself and not telling Rufus, Nixon, or the coroner. But once science got its hands on that corpse in the library, they might have some real answers.

The farther he got from the redhead called Lizzy the more common sense prevailed. They were both in the western wing, but now he couldn’t see her, the whole idea of a doll killing that toymaker grew more ridiculous. The growing return to rationality was comforting.

Now he was walking through the doorway of the last bedroom and flicking the light on, about five minutes from being done this charade.

This final doorway led to a child’s room. Then, on second thought, maybe it was an old woman’s. Or a little girl in the 1800s. They were probably similar. He pictured a creepy old woman in a rickety wooden wheelchair with the mind of a child, and for the first time on his search of the rooms he got a shiver strong enough it rattled the flashlight.

The room had one window, fifteen feet tall, that must look out on the front drive. The curtains were drawn. On the left side of the room was a bed. Not just any bed, an elaborate one. But he was used to it by now, all the rooms he’d searched were opulent, and this one was no different. The bed was a polished oak four-poster with floral-printed bunting that wound around its frame. There was a rocking chair, a set of dressers, a standing mirror in one corner. Between him and the bed a huge Oriental rug stretched without its edges touching a thing. An open closet door faced the foot of the bed.

No homicidal dolls. So far.

Now he lumbered to the bed, shining the flashlight from left to right, despite the room being well lit by a small overhead chandelier. The flashlight’s beam was like a focused eye pinpointing and illuminating some of the room’s darker seams, waiting—but not expecting—to see a doll looking to kill him.

He sat on the bed, a high one, legs barely bent before his butt rested, his heels on the floor. He worked the flashlight on and off, looking at the rug. He was fuzzy and bewildered. It was an odd feeling he’d got coming into the mansion, and those girls claimed it was the effect of ‘black magic.’ He’d believed it for some reason, but now it seemed so crazy. How long had he been awake? Let’s see, it was almost four in the morning now. He’d got in let’s say around ten, he was at the airport in Tennessee at seven, he’d spent the day at work after only four hours of sleep the night before. No wonder he felt nauseous coming into this place. It had nothing to do with the occult. The O-Branch was nothing but a step in the right direction for him. The higher-ups wouldn’t make him an SAIC. in robbery, not till he was probably in his thirties. But now he was an SAIC—even if it was just in the occult.

He flipped the flashlight around like a baton, twirling it, shaking his head, stretching his legs out and stomping his feet. The coroner must be itching to get his job done downstairs, and that’s when they’d get some real answers, so he stood, made his way to the open door at the foot of the bed. The closet beyond was dark, but he craned his head in, flashlight ahead. Nothing but clothes hanging along the right side. His free hand swept around the wall until it found a light switch, clicked it on.

A shelf ran the left-hand side of the closet at head-height. Standing on that shelf like soldiers on parade were a mishmash of maybe two dozen dolls. Little girls and little boys dressed in Victorian costumes, their dead doll eyes staring blankly across the room to the other side where the clothes hung. A funny sound croaked in his throat, his scrotum tightened its grip on his balls, and he took a staggering step back, reflex pushing his right hand inside his suit jacket to rest on the butt of his Glock. Wouldn’t that be something? The new guy shows up, freaks out, starts blasting holes in a bunch of dolls. Still, he kept his hand on the butt of his gun.

From the clothing side, he brought down a shoebox off the nearest shelf, never removing his eyes from the doll lineup. The shoebox went down to his feet, and he shuffled it to block the doorway. The occult was bullshit, but right now the idea of stepping foot inside this little girl’s closet of creepy dolls and then having the door slam behind by some paranormal force had his heart rate a little high. The old shoebox would stop the door from closing. 

Gun hand safely at his side and rubbing off the damp on a pant leg, he investigated the dolls. The idea that one of them could cock its head in his direction had him facing the fact he might pee his pants for the first time in twenty years, but at least he could get outta here, slam the door behind him. But as he stared at them, he felt more foolish. One of these things wasn’t going to come to life, and even if it did, a good old one-two jab-cross combo would put any one of these vintage pieces of garbage on their asses.

With a little more confidence now, he walked deeper down the line of dolls. They were all dressed in costuming of the 1800s with boys in woolen knee-high britches and country caps, the girls in lacy Victorian dresses, some of them holding parasols. They had polished shoes and stiff postures; cherubic faces, the girls sported cotton-corded hairdos with pigtails and fringes.

Near the end of the line he found a gap about a foot across where a doll may once have stood but no longer did. Somehow, seeing that absence brought another cold shiver. The idea that one of these soldiers on parade had stepped out of rank, headed downstairs with a plastic butcher knife, stabbed a man in the balls and in the eyes until he was dead got his stomach fluttering. That airport burrito did another jumping jack, a gastric surge of chicken and salsa doing a spicy lunge up to his esophagus. His hands went cold, but his upper lip went warm and sweaty. There was that upheaval in his system again: an overheating, a sudden languidness washing over him. Jet lag or black magic, whatever it was, working through him tonight.

Something about that absent-doll space made him feel uneasy. So he backed himself out of the closet, keeping an eye for any movement from the dolls, as ridiculous as it seemed. He nudged the shoebox with his toe, and closed the door behind him. What were the chances a two-foot tall doll with immobile hands would have the dexterity to turn a door lever? Low. Door closed meant he was safe. Probably.

Still, he backed away further, eyes on the closed door, moving to the side of the bed again and sitting down. The disquiet didn’t abate. He still felt that nausea. And a feeling of danger. A feeling of impending. He rubbed his hands on his knees, palms slick and sweaty. His heart rate wasn’t going down, and that spicy mash still sat in an uncomfortable lump in his diaphragm. But this was it. The search was done. He found dolls, lifeless ones, and this was the final room.

Perhaps, it was all still bullshit like he suspected. Or, maybe right now the blonde-haired one, Goody, had a doll hogtied in the parlor. Maybe she’d whacked it over the head with a candlestick, and while it was woozy, she’d tied it up with a length of yarn. That got him chuckling, thinking of it now, coming down to one of those fancy main floor rooms and finding that girl sweaty and exhausted with her hands on her knees, a screaming, mewling devil doll with its wrists tied to its ankles. He laughed out loud.

That was when something touched his ankle.

#

He screeched and jumped about a foot off the mattress, high-stepping a dozen feet away from the bed toward the door. Wheeled around, hand on his Glock again, he looked at the bed, heart pounding. There was nothing there.

“Jesus Christ, Black,” he said, laughing at himself.

A sound in the hall had him poking his head out to see Lizzy coming his way, still deep down the hall, then dipping into a room on the other side. She didn’t see him, so he didn’t wave; whatever was happening between him and her it was best left untouched tonight.

He returned into the room, standing again on the soft square of the Oriental rug, still laughing and looking at the bed.

“All right, you devil-doll fuck,” he said, feeling pretty darn confident right now. Glock unholstered, he made his way back to the bed, about six feet out, moving with caution. Down on his knees with his gun ready at his hip like an Old West gunfighter, he said, “Come on out with your hands up,” saying it quiet in case someone overheard and thought he was a loon.

Now he set himself down, with the gunless hand extending out intending to pull up on the bed’s frilly valence. Hand twitching, he paused, fingers afraid to tug up and discover all the awful things his imagination told him may be under the bed.

Fingers quivering, a half second away from pulling up the fabric, something else whisked it up for him.

A small, curved plastic hand snatched the bed skirt upward, and crawling on all fours like a baby, a Victorian doll scrambled toward him with surprising speed, a bloody toy butcher knife clutched in one hand.

“Jesus, fuck,” he yelled, gun hand tracking out to blast its face off, but it was so fast it was inside his perimeter before he could pull the trigger.

He reeled backward, falling on his ass and kicking his legs, the thing coming at him, and he somersaulted, throwing his feet up in the air and rolling over onto his stomach, the doll—whatever it was—jumping on his back. In the split-second he’d seen it, he registered its horrors. Its clothes were bloodied; its face was caked in dried black blood, its doll eyes weren’t blank like its closet compatriots, they sizzled with evil; its mouth clacked toylike, tiny painted teeth chattering in its Kewpie crescent mouth. The thing was on his back now, that sharp plastic beak of a mouth nipping at his neck. It was hot, like it radiated hellfire. The gun was gone from his hand, he didn’t know where it was or what he was doing, only that his life was about to end at the hands of a tiny old doll.

Flipped onto his back, he tried to crush it against the floor, feeling its hot, weightless form bouncing between his shoulder blades. It let go of the plastic butcher knife, and the knife stuck flat to the side of Porter’s neck with sticky blood. He ground himself against the doll, crushing it under his body weight, vaguely aware of the frantic, frightened sounds he made—gasps and yips—he was seconds away from pleading to God to be saved.

That’s when he saw the figure at the door—a tall, slender redhead in a leather jacket and private school uniform.

Legs thin and bare, well-formed with skinny knees, she moved with swooping grace. It was Lizzy, pulling something off her back—it was that sword fucking thing, or whatever he’d thought it was—her hands scrabbling at it, eyes wild, snapping free the leather thongs and ripping away the burlap.

Bright bloody pain shot through his ear. The doll had chomped on him, biting the flesh of his earlobe, gnashing its way up his auricle, practically pulling the ear off his head.

“Fuck,” he yelled, jumping and bucking, throwing his head back to smash it against the doll, but ending up just thumping his head on the hardwood flooring. He saw stars, he saw blood—his blood.

Now the thing was bigger than life, taking up his full field of vision. It had mounted his chest. Its terrifying, harrowing face snapped and bit at him, and all he could think was how the one called Maddie said it was like a chimp. An evil, primal energy, one that would go for his testicles, one that would remove his fingers and his eyeballs.

A shriek built in his chest, but he choked it away. A vision shone in his mind’s eye how the toymaker died tonight. This thing on his chest had been armed with a small plastic knife, jamming it into the man, thrusting and thrusting.

Then the doll was gone. 

In the doll’s place, the beautiful girl named Lizzy stood above him now in some strange pose like a golfer after a wicked swing. Thrust over her shoulder was a shimmering blade.

It was a sword that she’d had tied across her back, its hilt in black, and the pommel a large crystal. The steel blade glowed in the lamplight.

“Holy shit,” he said, looking at her like she was the best thing that had ever existed. His heart swelled in his chest . . . but now she was moving, those long legs prancing, and he turned to see the doll knocked all the way to the closet door, working to its feet, minus one arm.

It whipped around, it’s little doll head clacking on its plastic neck. It was a horrible thing encrusted with black, dried blood, and the blazing, glowering eyes of a demon. He hitched his breath, his eyes went wide, but Lizzy was on top of it, bringing down the sword in an overhead arc that split the doll in two and smashed it into pieces. Its head split open and fell apart like eggshell. Black smoke puffed from its neck-hole, accompanied by the terrifying screech of a man’s primal scream.

He clutched his hand over his chest at the fright the sound brought. Lizzy fell to her knees, the sword let go and clattering on the carpet. She scrambled frantically, withdrew from an inside pocket a scroll of paper wound with bright red ribbon. She loosed the ribbon, unfurled the paper, held it down on the floor with a hand spread on either side so it wouldn’t curl back up again. She chanted something, her voice low but vibrating in his ear as if she was whispering it right next to him.

“Uk thoth yello ock amando...”

The sparkling black smoke that hung in the air above the doll in a wafting horizontal pattern turned to dust, then fell to the paper like black sand. Lizzy let the ends of the paper loose, and it curled itself up again. He could see from her back that she was breathing heavy, her sides going in and out, and she worked the red ribbon underneath the paper and carefully retied it.

Now she stepped away, hands held up, tiptoeing backward like she’d just located a landmine.