The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror Read online

  Boldly Travis Reidl steps inside this room. Because there is nothing and no one to prevent him.

  Travis whistles through his teeth, impressed by the floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookshelves filled with books. Fireplace, enormous antique desk. “So many fuckin books! Nobody ever read so many books.” It is the resentment of one who might once have wished to read such books, but knows himself lost to them now.

  Jeering Travis examines the items on Mr. McClelland’s desk. Ledger-sized appointment book, black fountain pen, silver lead pencil. Silver! Travis shoves this into a pocket. There is a calendar inset in a leather frame—“Lookit this fuckin thing!”—that seems particularly to enrage him.

  Grunting, Travis pulls out drawers in the large mahogany desk. Most are filled with files. I am grateful that he isn’t yanking the drawers out of the desk and spilling their contents on the floor. In the lowermost drawer, he has discovered something—he whistles through his teeth. It is a gun. He lifts the gun in his hand, and his eyes narrow with excitement.

  “Jesus! Just what I need.”

  I am very frightened. I did not know there was a gun in the house. I had no way of knowing. Why did Mrs. McClelland forget to lock the door!

  I want to run away, to run out into the street and call for help, but I know that my cousin Travis will punish me terribly if I try. He will shoot at me—he will shoot one of my legs, to bring me down. And he will laugh at me on the floor screaming in agony. Didn’t I warn you, Han-na! You disobeyed.

  Somberly Travis examines the gun, turning the chambers. Is the gun loaded? Travis asks me if I know what Russian roulette is.

  No. I tell Travis no.

  I do not know what Russian roulette is. (Of course I know what Russian roulette is.)

  I am trying not to cry. Still I am thinking Travis likes me! He will not hurt me.

  It is like prayers in church. Heavenly Father who gives us all blessings. All blessings are from You. Begging God to be good to you because your terror is that God will not be good to you. And so I am begging my cousin Travis though I do not dare beg aloud.

  Remembering how Travis had said in a dreamy voice he’d have liked to bring a gun to school. Remembering the “massacre” comics. There were no guns in his mother’s house, for an older brother had fired an air rifle at Travis when he’d been a little boy, hitting him in the back, and his mother had taken the gun away from the brother, and threw it in the Black Snake River. And Travis had not been allowed to have a gun. He’d said, When I’m old enough I can buy my own guns. I won’t be living here. I don’t need anybody telling me what to do.

  Now he has Mr. McClelland’s gun, which is like a gift to him. If you believe in fate, or destiny—this is not an “accident” that the gun has come into Travis’s hands. And so gravely he examines it. He turns the cylinder, peering into it. He is transfixed, there is a strange radiant smile on his face. Despite the sallow skin and dirty, matted hair I can see that my cousin is a beautiful boy. A beautiful ruin of a boy. A young-old boy, with bruised and bloodshot eyes. I am afraid of Travis but yet, I am drawn to Travis. His eyes lifting from the gun to mine, rapidly blinking as if the sight of the gun is dazzling and he is part-blinded.

  “Did you ever hear of a suicide pact? I think it would be the test of love.”

  It is very strange to hear the word love uttered in Travis’s scratchy voice.

  But quickly I shake my head—no.

  Though thinking, to be found dead, in a boy’s arms—this is a haunting thought.

  There was a couple in the high school who’d died together. But it was believed that the boy had killed his girlfriend, driven his car into a lake, through ice, so that they’d drowned together.

  Like an actor in a film Travis positions himself in front of a mirror above the fireplace mantel. To my horror he presses the muzzle of the barrel against his head. He smiles at himself in the mirror, winks; brushes a strand of ratty hair out of his eyes. Then as if he has only just thought of it he lowers the revolver, carefully shakes bullets out of the cylinder, drops them into a pocket. Slyly he looks at me, who has been standing all this while a few yards away, unable to move.

  “See? The gun isn’t all loaded. There is a chance.”

  “Travis, no. Please—put the gun away.”

  “‘Russian roulette.’ Just one bullet left. It’s cool.”

  Fascinated by what he sees Travis continues to stare at himself in the mirror. His posture is straight as a soldier’s. He seems to have forgotten me. He poses holding the muzzle of the barrel against his forehead as a dreamy look comes into his eyes. It appears that he is about to pull the trigger, then he whirls like a gunfighter in a western, with bent knees, aims the muzzle at me instead and pulls the trigger. There is a click!—on an empty chamber.

  I am so frightened, I have wetted my underwear. My heart is pounding. Sweat breaks out in my underarms. But Travis just laughs at me.

  “Try another time? Hey?”—he points the barrel at me and I crouch, shielding my head. As if this would stop a bullet.

  Begging, “No please. No—please. Travis . . .”

  Travis laughs. He is excited, elated. He has me powerless. I am his captive. His vassal. He is the Black Snake Avenger, about to execute a hapless captive.

  “I told you, there’s just one bullet in the cylinder. There’s a chance.”

  I am too terrified to respond to my teasing cousin.

  Travis says, “Kneel down.”

  “No, Travis. No please.”

  Travis rubs the muzzle of the gun against the side of my face which I try to keep hidden—the ugly red birthmark beneath my left eye. Cruelly teasing—“Hey. Want me to shoot this off?” He thrusts the barrel into my mouth. I am choking, terrified. He would not pull the trigger and murder me—would he? The muzzle strikes against my teeth, a pain so intense it registers as numbness. I am trying not to cry uncontrollably. I am trying to obey Travis so that he will pity me, and have mercy on me as he’d used to do when we were children. Telling myself he would not kill me, for he loves me. Yet, Travis is laughing meanly. That sniggering laughter of boys who have found someone weak to torment, who cannot hurt them in return.

  And now Travis does something I would not believe he would do—he tears open my sweater and pushes the gun muzzle against my breasts—the puckered, terrified flesh inside my small white cotton 32-A brassiere. The gun muzzle is damp from my saliva but still cold and I am shivering and shuddering and so frightened, I have wetted myself—again. And Travis shoves the gun barrel down inside the waistband of my corduroy pants—as if he wants to “tickle” my stomach—and farther down, between my legs—and I am screaming now with pain, and squirming—Travis is grunting and laughing quick as if out of breath from running—flush-faced telling me that I will have to be punished for wetting myself for I am a dirty disgusting girl.

  I am crying helplessly now. Travis has mercy on me, but it is the mercy of disgust. With his booted foot he shoves me away. He drops the gun onto the leather chair as if it has been defiled by the wetness in my underwear.

  “Stop crying! Nobody has hurt you—yet. Walk—on your knees. Walk, and you can save yourself.”

  I am on my knees, close beside the chair. Desperately, clumsily I reach for the gun—the gun Travis has let drop—it is a miracle that I have the gun in my hand—in both hands. The gun is heavy—heavier than I would expect. The barrel is long, and hard to keep lifted—it wants to lower itself, like a dousing rod. Seeing me with the gun in my hands Travis cries, “Hey! God damn you—” as I pull the trigger—try to pull the trigger; it is not easy, and at first the trigger doesn’t move—and then it moves, with a click! on an empty chamber. Travis is furious now swooping to snatch the gun from me and I pull the trigger again and this time there is no click! but a deafening explosion, and Travis is jolted back—Travis is shot in the chest—the look of fury fading from his face as he fal
ls to the floor.

  Like a terrified animal I am crawling away—trying to crawl away—on my hands and knees. I am desperate to escape Travis who (I am sure) will lay his hands on me and hurt me very badly for having disobeyed him.

  The gun has fallen from my hands. The gun is too heavy to hold. The gun is on the floor, close by Travis who is lying in front of the fireplace groaning and thrashing. Though I can see blood spilling from Travis’s chest none of this is real to me—I cannot believe that Travis has actually been shot—it is clear that Travis is teasing me, and in another moment will leap to his feet, to punish me. Yet, the gun has fired—I can feel the impact of the shot, a quivering sensation in my hands and wrists. The sound was deafening, there is a roaring in my ears so loud I can’t hear, and I can’t think.

  Except—It was an accident. The gun fired by itself.

  12.

  It was an accident—I think. Travis had the gun and his friend tried to take it from him and—the gun went off.

  I did not see his face. I did not recognize his voice. When he and Travis broke into the kitchen I knew not to look at him for I was in fear of my life.

  On the floor for a long time I could not move.

  There was a pressure inside my head like a balloon being blown to bursting. I knew of cerebral hemorrhage, I had looked the words up in the dictionary and had frightened myself.

  How long it was, after Travis’s friend ran out of the house, I don’t know. And then, there was the doorbell ringing but so far away, I could barely hear it.

  And then, the neighbor came to the back door. And saw the window had been broken and saw the bright-lit kitchen and no one in it and called Hello? Hello? Is someone here?—and came into the hall and into the room where Travis had fallen, and I had fallen, and saw that Travis had been shot and believed that I had been shot as well where I was lying unconscious on the floor, my head just off the rug and onto the hardwood floor where it had struck hard but it appeared that I was breathing, and so he knew I was alive.

  13.

  Gun Accident at Drumlin Ave. Residence

  Burglary Accomplices Quarrel, Gun Fires Killing Area Teen

  As if the gun had fired by itself, and the bullet had lodged in the seventeen-year-old Travis Reidl’s chest totally by chance, perforating his heart. The aorta was torn, within minutes Travis bled to death. Travis Reidl whom those who’d known him since childhood would call troubled, difficult, school dropout, suspect in recent break-ins in Beechum County. Of whom it was said that his mother had spoken of getting an injunction from the county court to keep him away from the family home—Not a bad boy in his heart but involved with drugs and drug dealers and it is no surprise, one of those bastards killed him.

  In the Sparta Journal it would be reported that the individual who’d fired the gun, the “accomplice” of Travis Reidl, had not yet been apprehended by Sparta police.

  14.

  It is twenty-six years later. I have been staring out the window at the dark dripping November sky. Downstairs, my mother and children are in the kitchen. A smell of fresh-baked banana bread wafts up the stairs. I am expected to join them, and I am eager to join them, except—my legs are weak, the pulses in my head are still beating.

  Outside there is something urgent in the sky. The swirl of the sky of early winter. The way life is sucked into a whirlpool, spinning faster and faster, until it disappears into a point. The wind has risen, the windows are drafty. Blackbirds are flocking in the tall trees that surround my parents’ house, a storm of blackbirds, so many it is astonishing—almost, it is frightening. A welter of wings against the window, broken-off cries in midair. Hundreds of black-feathered wings—thousands?—preparing to migrate south. I feel a powerful yearning, impossible to describe. I want to go with you. Where are you going, don’t leave us.

  I am thinking of how I was questioned by sympathetic Sparta police officers and by other adults who cared for me, and did not wish to upset me further. For I was dazed and mute from what had been done to me and would not recover for a long time. And would not be “normal” for a long time. The story that I would try to tell over and over was a confused and incoherent story for I had been traumatized by what had been done to me by my own cousin Travis Reidl. Chipped tooth and bleeding lips from the gun muzzle shoved into my mouth, red welts on my breasts and belly, bruises in the “genital area”—in the newspapers, these shameful details would not be revealed.

  Who was your cousin’s accomplice, I was asked.

  And all I could say was that I had not seen his face. I had not recognized his voice.

  Did he threaten you, if you told? If you identified him?

  Did he say that he would come back and kill you, Hanna?

  I could not speak. I could not speak aloud, the men listening and taking notes.

  But whispering to the woman police officer who was so sympathetic, when he’d opened his pants to urinate in Mrs. McClelland’s jade plant, because he was drunk and he was high on drugs, I had quickly shut my eyes and turned away.

  What is his name, could you describe him, could you identify him, but I said that I could not for it would be a terrible thing to mistakenly involve an innocent person in the death of my cousin.

  Police questioned the Drumlin Avenue neighbor who’d called 911. Police questioned other neighbors who claimed to have heard a car’s doors being slammed shut, men’s voices outside and a girl’s scream and a single gunshot at 7:10 p.m. but no one could identify the vehicle, still less the accomplice of the slain boy.

  Several times police brought twenty-two-year-old Stevie Weitzel into headquarters for questioning. They were certain that Weitzel was the person who’d accidentally shot his friend Travis Reidl in a break-in/burglary that had gone wrong but each time they’d had to release Weitzel for there was not enough evidence to arrest him.

  If Weitzel had been my cousin’s accomplice he would have known that he had not shot Travis and just possibly, he could have guessed who had shot Travis. But Weitzel could not have claimed that someone not himself had shot Travis for to have claimed this would be to acknowledge that he’d participated in the break-in with Travis, but had run away before anything had happened.

  Instead, Weitzel claimed that he knew nothing about the break-in on Drumlin Avenue, nothing about Travis Reidl that evening. He’d last seen Travis days before, he would claim.

  It was not an era in which small-city police detectives knew to secure a crime scene carefully. Fingerprints on the weapon used to shoot Travis Reidl at close range were said to be “smudged.” No fingerprints were taken from me.

  The gun was returned soon to Gordon McClelland, for it was Mr. McClelland’s lawful property.

  Those weeks, months of ninth grade when I carried myself like glass that might shatter into pieces at any moment. Treated like a convalescent by my friends, as by my teachers. Seeing pity in their eyes, and a kind of repugnance. For whatever had been done to me, they did not wish to know.

  In those days there were no words like sexual abuse, molestation. Rape would not be uttered aloud, nor would rape be printed in a family newspaper like the Sparta Journal.

  And so, no one knew exactly what had happened to me, even the doctor who examined me, and wrote his report for the police. Nor could I have been expected to explain, who lacked the vocabulary also, and who lapsed into heart-pounding panic and spells of muteness if questioned too closely.

  The neighbor who’d dared to come into the McClelland house would tell of having found the bodies—the shaggy-haired boy “like a biker” shot in the chest, the girl who’d looked scarcely older than twelve or thirteen collapsed and scarcely breathing, he had thought had been shot also.

  He had knelt over the girl, and tried to revive her. He saw that her clothing had been torn. Her skin was deathly white. Her eyes were rolled back up into her head like the eyes of a doll that has been shaken hard and her
bleeding mouth was open and slack with saliva but—she was alive.

  The following week, Gordon McClelland was discharged from the medical center in Syracuse and returned to his home but the McClellands would not live in the house on Drumlin Avenue for long. Their house had been defiled, Mrs. McClelland said. The beautiful old Colonial would be sold at below its market price to a couple moving to Sparta who knew little of the “gun accident” and did not wish to know more.

  Mrs. McClelland returned to our homeroom and to teaching social studies for the remainder of the school year but was not so buoyant as she’d been. Often she seemed distracted. She did not always listen to the answers to questions she herself had asked which made us restless, and uneasy.

  No longer did she take time to make up her face as she’d done before. The glamorous pageboy hairstyle had vanished, often she merely brushed her hair behind her ears, or fashioned it into a knot at the nape of her neck. No one would have said that she resembled Jeanne Crain. Though she wore many of the same clothes they were no longer so striking on her.

  The McClellands would move from Sparta soon after their house was sold.

  After the initial period of police questioning no one spoke to me about what had happened to me that night.

  There would be the rumor, that Hanna Godden had been hurt. By her own, older cousin—hurt.

  In the (unspeakable, shameful) way in which a girl can be hurt by a boy or a man.

  Yet, this was not so. I knew that this was not so. A terrible thing happened in my presence but it did not happen to me.

  The early 1960s was not a time in which children or adolescents who had suffered “traumas” were brought to therapists. In fact, there were few therapists in Sparta. In fact, the term “trauma” was not common usage. Like other adults of the era my parents believed that healing was a matter of not dwelling upon the past.

  Mrs. McClelland did not blame me for anything. She understood that I had not invited my cousin Travis into the house, and that I had begged him to leave. She said to my mother, “Poor Hanna! It was my fault to entrust someone so young with such a responsibility” and my mother said, flattered, “Oh no—Hanna was happy to help out. It was an accident, the terrible thing that happened.”