Mystery Tribune / Issue Nº12

Victoria’s Nasty Little Secret

Victoria’s Nasty

Little Secretby Lisa Black

Mary told me about the doll on Tuesday. I told her she was nuts.

We had met for one of our lunch-outs after she stuffed her six-year-old daughter into a leotard to learn jetes, and I needed to get away from the office before I told my current client that adding 10 more floors to their office building would not compensate for their lack of social success.

“I’m not kidding,” she told me.

“You didn’t sound as if you were.” I exercised some discipline and offered her the last roll. Happily, she felt too discombobulated to take advantage of my gesture, and I buttered those carbs right up. It bought me time to choose my words carefully. “Which is what worries me, because, you know, there’s no such thing as a doll possessed by an evil spirit. That only happens in the movies.”

“I thought so too. But what’s happening is not possible. Simply not possible, so I don’t know how else to explain it. The doll moves by itself.”

We’ve known each other since the fourth grade, and other than partying the night before the LSATs (resulting in a well-established career in yoga instruction) and letting her toddler talk her into getting a sheepdog (which sheds enough hair to fill the average football stadium to brimming, weekly), she had never evidenced mental instability before. I ate my artisan whole-grain crumpet and let her talk.

“Kayla wanted this doll—actually I think she wanted the pony with tackle that’s available as an accessory, along with a Corvette and a town home and a briefcase and a boyfriend—so her dad gave it to her for her birthday this summer. No big deal, it joined the ranks in her bedroom. But three weeks ago, I was cleaning the house—”

I should mention that what Mary refers to as a ‘house’ would be considered a ‘McMansion’ by the 99 percent: three floors of marble, cathedral ceilings and mahogany trim. “Cleaning the house” meant coordinating the twice-a-week cleaning lady’s visits and perhaps throwing in a load of laundry to tide them over in the meantime.

“—and I put all Kayla’s toys back in her room. I know I put the doll next to its pony on her window seat with all her other dolls and the stuffed octopus. And only the stuffed octopus,” she couldn’t resist adding, finding her child’s individual quirks endlessly amusing. “The other stuffed animals go on the bed, except for the coral snake, which goes over the bulletin board.”

“... there’s no such thing as a doll possessed by an evil spirit.”

I could feel my childless brain wandering, my eyes no doubt glazing, and she picked up the pace.

“I got some coffee in the kitchen, went to my office, paid a few bills online, called about the cable bill. Then I wanted a refill, so I go back to the kitchen. The doll was sitting next to the coffee pot.”

“Hmm.” I said.

“Not possible,” she insisted with a deep frown, bringing out wrinkles I had never noticed before. “I know exactly where I put it, on the window seat in Kayla’s room upstairs, and 15 minutes later it’s sitting on my kitchen counter.”

“Kayla was playing with it.”

“Kayla wasn’t home. No one was home. Not my cleaning lady, not my sister, not Kayla.”

Logical explanation, I told myself. No such thing as a haunted toy. “It was a different doll.”

“She only has one Victoria. It’s got green hair and this perky smile that irritates the crap out of me. You can’t miss it. Besides, even if I’m losing my mind, even if I put it in Kayla’s room the day before, it hadn’t been there 15 minutes before when I got my first cup of coffee. How do you explain that?”

I couldn’t. “Green hair?”

She rolled her eyes. “Fashion trends last about 30 seconds in Kid World.”

“What kind of doll is this?”

“Victoria, like I said.” I’m sure my face appeared blanker than unused copy paper, so she elaborated: “Like a Barbie. Big boobs and a ton of clothes and cute shoes.”

“Expensive?” I don’t know why I asked.

“No—just a knockoff Barbie. Available at Target, Walmart, whatever.”

“That can’t be right, then. There’s no such thing as a haunted Barbie. Possessed dolls are always some unique china thing that great-grandma brought from the old country.” I considered, then amended, “Or maybe a Raggedy Ann. Those things always seemed creepy to me.”

“I know that,” she said impatiently. “But listen, that was only the beginning. The next week Kayla had left the whole setup, house, car, pony, doll in the family room—”

“Which one?” I had to ask. I always have to picture the spaces.

“The ground floor one off the kitchen. I left it there, I was busy with the art museum luncheon arrangements and I didn’t have time, and it was a Friday, I figured she’d pick up wherever in her game she’d left off, wouldn’t have homework on the weekend. The doll was on the pony when I looked. Again, no one home. I even had the alarm set. The doorbell rings, I go to answer it, and she’s sitting on the foyer table. Perky little smile right next to my Chihuly vase.”

Haunting the coffee pot was one thing. Haunting a unique piece of glass art seemed to cross a line with Mary. I asked, “Who was at the door?”

She blinked. “UPS. Something I’d ordered from sss. But last night was the worst.” She rubbed her temples, her dry salad untouched. I had no idea what was going on. The idea of my vital, straight-A student, Atkins diet friend suddenly talking about haunted dolls belonged to an alternate dimension.

But I cared.

So I patted her shoulder. “Tell me.”

“I had had enough. Kayla only really cared about the pony anyway, so....” She pressed a fist to her mouth but the words escaped in a rush anyway. “I threw the thing out. It was garbage day. I put little Victoria in the kitchen garbage, tied the bag shut, carried it out to the can and dragged the cans to the curb. Then, I’m telling you, I stood at my window and watched until the garbage truck dumped it. I stood there for an hour, didn’t move, didn’t pee, nothing.”

Haunting the coffee pot was one thing. Haunting a unique piece of glass art seemed to cross a line with Mary.

I had forgotten my own lunch by then, with a dreadful suspicion of where this would lead. “And?”

“Truck dumped the can, I went out and checked the can to be sure it was really empty, dragged it back in.” She sipped the dry white she had ordered, alcohol at lunch only another marker of her agitation. “Kayla got home, didn’t even notice. I felt great, could concentrate on my work, Kayla ate her dinner without a fuss, I went to bed thinking—thinking I was safe, even though I wouldn’t let myself think that, I’d never even put my thoughts into words, not even in my own brain. Because there’s no such thing as a haunted doll, right?”

Normally I would have said yes, of course not. But by now I’d been warned to reserve judgment.

“I woke up and it was on my bed. Sitting up on my bedspread, though it fell off when I moved. I swear I—” The fist went back to her mouth and the gorgeous blue eyes filled with tears. “I have a nightlight in the hall in case Kayla wakes and wants to come in with me—she’d outgrown that but started up again after Nick moved out. So there was enough backlight that I saw that little silhouette as soon as I opened my eyes. I—I screamed.”

I patted her hand. A waiter approached us with a water pitcher but, sensing drama, veered off.

“Thank heavens I didn’t wake Kayla—she’s at that sleep-through-anything stage. But—am I losing my mind? I know I’m not crazy. I threw that thing out. I watched it go! And then it appeared...”

I am not often speechless, but right then I couldn’t think of a single, solitary thing to say. Because I believed her. I had never met anyone less crazy than Mary. If she said a cheap, mass-produced plastic doll was moving around her house under its own power, then a plastic doll was moving around her house under its own power.

“Will you come over? Take a look at it? It’s still in my bedroom—I can’t bring myself to touch the thing.”

“I peered closely at the doll. Silky fiber hair, cute little outfit of a collared sleeveless top combined with a leather-like miniskirt with matching vest.”

“Um.” Why she thought I would have a method to deal with devil dolls, I didn’t know. Perhaps she thought in my experience as an architect I might have come across haunted buildings before. Perhaps I was the only person she could trust not to immediately post on social media how Mary Billings had lost her mind.

What could I say? “Okay.”

Her house had not changed since I’d seen it last, huge and beautiful and tidy... all except for her bedroom, where the unmade bed now had a miniature but voluptuous green-haired beauty atop the mussed comforter.

“Is that where you left it?”

“No,” Mary sighed from depths of hopeless misery. “I told you I left it where it fell. I can’t make myself touch it any more.”

I hesitated, then berated myself for hesitating. I refused to show fear in the face of a plastic doll. I made myself stride over to the bed and pick the thing up. Victoria’s perky smile didn’t falter, though I could swear she took a breath, the rigid, molded torso expanding ever so slightly under my fingers. Or perhaps I only imagined it after Mary gave a tiny gasp behind me, reacting to either my bravery or my folly.

I peered closely at the doll. Silky fiber hair, cute little outfit of a collared sleeveless top combined with a leather-like miniskirt with matching vest. Her feet were clad in plastic riding boots. I wasn’t sure how the green hair meshed with the cowgirl motif, but then I’d never met a real cowgirl. Perhaps they were more avant-garde than I knew.

Nothing fearful there, only an inexpensive plastic doll. The eyes were the only item of particular quality, deeply glossy orbs with a sort of reality to them that the blue-lined lids and airbrushed lips lacked.

“The inside of the little plastic head, from what I could see through the small, flexible hole, seemed the same as the outside.”

While I was feeling brave, I pulled the head off, earning a louder gasp from Mary. Fearless... except I hoped she wouldn’t notice how I kept my fingers off the miniature face. If Victoria walked, she might also bite.

The inside of the little plastic head, from what I could see through the small, flexible hole, seemed the same as the outside. Flesh-colored, rubbery plastic. I put it back on the knob between the shoulders and frisked the rest of Victoria through her clothing, even looking up her skirt even though it made me feel like a pervert. I saw nothing that would explain the doll’s sudden motility.

I asked, “Have you spoken to anyone else about this? Your neighbors? Family? Nick?”

“I don’t even know who lives next door to me, except that they each drive a Lexus and have three little yappy dogs. Nick is Mr. Rationality—come on, he designs cell phones for a living—and he was so good about custody that I don’t want to give him any excuse to revisit the issue. I can’t tell my sister... she still thinks I’m nuts for marrying him in the first place.”

In other words, what I might lack as a ghostbuster I more than made up for in discretion. “All right,” I said. “Then let’s try an experiment.”

I threw Victoria off the Main Street bridge—somehow managing to do so undetected and therefore not cited for littering.

Victoria waited next to Mary’s coffee pot to greet her the following morning, a sprig of seaweed sticking out of her cleavage.

I dropped her down the sewer. I tossed her in the back of a pickup truck full of sheet metal while stopped at a red light. I would have nuked her in a microwave but knew that would make a mess and set off the smoke alarm, earning the ire of the old lady in the apartment above mine.

I took her out back—while Kayla went to a Girl Scout meeting—and burned her in Mary’s perfectly landscaped fire pit. I watched the plastic face crumple into a melted marble of flesh-colored goop and the fake leather miniskirt burn with a lemon-yellow flame. It made a disturbing image, I admit. But what came next disturbed even more, because while I put the finishing touches on my client’s office building and Mary instructed a room full of senior citizens how to make like a crane, Victoria settled back in to Kayla’s window seat and the melted goop disappeared from the pit.

Mary came home and promptly called to ask if she and Kayla could bunk with me for the foreseeable future. I said yes and, in a burst of hubris that I regretted before the proposal even left my lips, said I would stay at her house until I discovered the secret of the overly persistent Victoria.

Upon arrival, Mary and I traded keys while Kayla whined up a storm about vacating her bedroom on a school night; it disrupted her entire evening routine and she predicted—correctly—that my condo’s kitchen would have none of the right ingredients to pack her lunch for the next day.

I asked only one question of Mary: “Where is she?”

“On the living room credenza.”

I couldn’t be positive which room she meant—the house seemed to have three different living rooms—but found little Victoria easily enough. She sat at the edge of the surface, her back against an antique soup tureen with one leg dangling and the other kicking straight out, all defiant insouciance, daring me to try to kill her again.

I looked her straight in her perky little smile and pulled a Glock 40 out of the holster at my back. “You’re not the only one who can play cowgirl, sweetie.”

I didn’t shoot the thing, of course. I wouldn’t put a hole in Mary’s mother’s mahogany credenza and besides, murder had already proven ineffectual. Instead I gently laid Victoria in a metal cash box I had brought along for just that purpose and sealed the hasp with a combination lock. Then I climbed into Mary’s bed and went to sleep with the box under my arm like a lumpy teddy bear.

“My body jolted awake in the dark bedroom, snaking away from the metal thing in my bed with instinctive terror.”

It took a long time to get to sleep. From time to time I heard a rustle under my chin, which I told myself came from the box moving against the sheets as I breathed. It certainly wasn’t Victoria shifting in her metal coffin, waiting for me to nod off before completing another impossible escape.

It couldn’t be that.

But eventually I nodded off anyway.

I heard scratching. A faint, far-off scratching noise that crept into my ears like smoke licking around a corner. One eyelid slid up, reluctant and disbelieving.

Inside the box, Victoria worked at the lid.

My body jolted awake in the dark bedroom, snaking away from the metal thing in my bed with instinctive terror. I paused only because I couldn’t hear the sound over the beating of my heart. After a moment, I heard it again.

But the box lay mute. The scratching came from the bedroom door, the one I’d left open. The hallway light Mary had spoken of still burned, so that I could see what awaited me.

Victoria was there. And she had brought friends.

I could see the outline of her swishy green hair. She stood upright, one hand on her pony to steady her. Two blobs sat on the other side of the horse, a ball-shaped thing with legs and a long, thin creature I guessed might be the snake that lived atop the bulletin board. Next to Victoria rested her Corvette, which could explain how she seemed to move around the house so easily.

I climbed—cautiously, I admit—out of bed, keeping the lockbox tucked under my arm, the Glock in the opposite hand. I approached the doorway, and again, I admit that my heart beat like a hummingbird’s, and if as much as mote of dust had drifted through that hallway, I would have shot it without the slightest regard for Mary’s hardwood floors.

Nothing moved.

I flicked on the light, then sunk to the ground. Cross-legged, I set the lockbox in front of me and twirled the lock. Keeping an eye on the array just over the threshold, I threw open the lid.

Victoria.

She had not escaped.

But there she stood next to her pony. So either the plastic doll had mastered cloning along with locomotion, or something both more mundane and more sinister was at play here.

“I apologize,” I said, speaking to both Victorias, “for what I’m about to do to you.”

“What am I going to tell Kayla?” Mary said. We were in her kitchen, drinking coffee, with nary an errant toy in sight.

“About her doll?”

“About her father.”

Childless me couldn’t help her with that. How to explain to your child that one parent had been gaslighting the other, trying to get her—with said child, incidentally—to abandon the house he felt should have been given to him in the divorce. I didn’t envy Mary the task. Especially since Nick would be unlikely to serve any real jail time, with only a restraining order to keep him from trying again. At least she had changed the locks and the alarm code.

Outfitting the doll’s eyes with minuscule cameras and transmitters, then adding another coat of plastic to the inside to disguise same, presented no trouble for the tech genius Nick. That explained the choice of doll—it had to be something cheap and mass-produced, so that no matter how many times Mary and I threw them out, melted or otherwise disposed of one, he could simply buy its identical twin. The cops had found another three in their boxes, lined up in his basement.

Two can play at the hidden nanny-cam thing, and the ones secreted in my overnight bag, briefcase and purse had clearly caught Nick’s midnight invasion. Not to mention, the cropped point of view of an 11-inch-tall doll presented certain limitations. A palm over her plastic face kept Victoria from seeing what I’d imprisoned her in, so he didn’t know to look for the metal lockbox. And if he had, waving the Glock around perhaps dissuaded him from trying to sneak it from under my slumbering form. Instead he could only hope I would be too freaked out to check the lockbox after finding the new Victoria in the hallway. His best-case scenario? I would run screaming from the house, never to return, and Mary would call the movers without further ado. She would tell her real estate agent—not coincidentally, Nick’s college roommate—that she didn’t care what she got for the house, just get her out of it as quickly as possible. An interested buyer, who happened to be dating Nick, would snap it up.

“I can’t thank you enough,” Mary told me, her color already much better.

“Well,” I admitted, “I wouldn’t turn down a few free sessions of downward dog.” /MT