A Nest of Nightmares

‘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.