Laughter at the Academy Read online

  Charity was meant to be my revenge.

  Morning dawned and found me still sitting there, now drawing careful swirls on the resin body that would soon play host to her head. Her wings would get the same treatment before they were strung into place. She was less a bat-girl than a demon-girl, but “Charity the bat-girl” had been her name for so long that I couldn’t stop thinking of her that way. I reached for my silver paint, and paused as my hand found an empty jar.

  “Shit.” I’d been working without pause, and hadn’t stopped to assess my supplies. Charity needed the silver to be properly finished. I glanced to the clock. The doll shop would be open in ten minutes. This was their big gather-day, but I could be in and out before anyone had a chance to notice that I was even there. I wiped down my brushes, capped my paints, and stood. Just a few more supplies and I could finish my work.

  The drive to the doll store took about fifteen minutes, minutes I spent reviewing what I was going to buy and how I’d explain I couldn’t stay if Willow or Joanna asked me. I was deep in thought when I got out of the car, walked to the door, and stepped inside, only to be hit by a wave of laughter and the smell of peppermint tea. I stopped dead, blinking at the swarm of people—mostly women, with a few men peppered through the crowd—who moved, chattering constantly, around a series of tables that had been set up where the racks of pre-made doll clothes were usually kept. A second wave hit me a moment later, this one redolent with sadness, and with the smell of cold.

  My stolen dolls were here.

  I shoved my way through the crowd, ignoring their startled protests, until I reached the table. There they were, all my missing vessels, even Strawberry, although someone had redressed her in a garish red and white checked dress. They were set up as a centerpiece, surrounded by a red velvet rope, like that would ensure that people looked but didn’t touch.

  “Marian?” Willow’s voice came from right behind me. She sounded surprised.

  I couldn’t blame her for that. I had other things to blame her for. I whirled, pointing back at the table as I declared, “Those are my dolls! How did you get my dolls?”

  Willow’s expression hardened, going from open and genial to closed and hard. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, dear. Those dolls were sold to us by a private collector, and you’ve always been so adamant about not showing or selling your work that I can’t believe you’d have sold this many to him. They’re a fine collection, but they’re not yours.”

  I ground my teeth together, pain lancing from my damaged molar, before I said, “Yes, they are. They were stolen from my apartment two nights ago by my ex-boyfriend. I filed a police report. We can call them and get them down here; I’m sure we’ll find your ‘private collector’ matches Clark’s description.”

  Her eyes widened slightly at his name. I resisted the urge to smack her.

  “He didn’t even lie about his name, did he? Clark Hauser. You probably wrote him a check. You’ll have a record.” I shook my head. “You had to know those weren’t his. I bought most of these materials here, and they’re not common combinations. You knew. But you took them anyway.” The crowd around me was silent, watching. I turned to them. “Think they’d buy your dolls too, if you got robbed?”

  “We didn’t know they were stolen,” said Willow. “We bought them legally. We—”

  “Give the lady back her dolls,” said a weary voice. Willow turned, and we both looked at the dark-haired woman in the workroom door, leaning on her cane. Joanna focused only on me. She walked slowly forward. It felt like she was studying me, taking my measure. She stopped about a foot away, and said, “Doll maker. That’s what you are, isn’t it? You’re the doll maker.”

  I nodded mutely.

  “I always wanted to meet one of you.” She waved a hand at the table. “They’re yours. Take them. I knew we couldn’t keep the collection as soon as I put hands on it. They’re dangerous, aren’t they?”

  I nodded again.

  “Then get them out of my store. Was that all you came for?”

  I found my voice, and managed, “I needed some silver paint.”

  “Take that too. Call it our apology.” She smiled thinly. “When you take your revenge, doll maker, don’t take it on us. Willow, get the lady her paint.” Willow hurried to obey.

  I looked at the crowd, and then back to Joanna, and said, “Thank you.”

  Joanna smiled. “You’re welcome.”

  Restoring the vessels to their proper places made me feel infinitely better, like a hole in the world had been closed. I apologized to each of them, and twice to Strawberry: once as I was stripping off that horrible checkered dress, and again as I placed her back on her proper shelf. I felt their approval, and the approval of the Kingdom beyond. Silver paint in hand, I sat down and got back to work.

  Crafting a vessel for the self is easy, once you know how. It requires understanding your own heart—a painful process, to be sure, but your own heart is always close to hand. Crafting a vessel for someone else is an uphill struggle, and I felt it with every stroke of the brush. I mixed the last of the silver paint with blood taken from the small vein inside my wrist, and it made glittering brown lines on Charity’s skin. There was a moment right before the designs drew together when I could have stopped: I could have put down the brush and walked away. But Clark had struck me, had stolen from the Kingdom, and he had to pay for what he’d done.

  I dressed Charity in a black mourning gown and placed her in a long white box, covering her with drifts of tissue paper. Then I fed Trinket, left the apartment, and drove to Clark’s house. I left the box on his doorstep. I didn’t look back as I drove away.

  Clark didn’t come to work on Monday. That wasn’t unusual. Clark didn’t come to work on Tuesday either. People were talking about it in the break room when I came to get my coffee.

  Wednesday morning, I called in sick.

  The key Clark had given me still fit his lock. I let myself in. There was Charity on the floor, full to the point of bursting, and there was Clark next to her, eyes open and staring into nothingness. He was still alive, but when I waved my hand in front of his face, he didn’t blink. There was nothing left in him.

  “You shouldn’t open doors you don’t know how to close,” I said, bending to slide my arms under Clark and hoist him to his feet. He would have been surprised to realize how strong I was. “It’s dangerous. You never know what might happen.”

  Clark didn’t respond.

  “I never told you where my family was from, did I? We’re doll makers, you know. We go all the way back to a man named Carlo Collodi. He wanted a child, and he used a trick he learned from a woman named Pandora to open a door to a place called the Kingdom of the Cold. It’s a good name, don’t you think? There’s no room for sorrow there. The people who live there don’t even understand its name. He called forth a little girl, and as that girl grew, she learned so many things the people of the Kingdom didn’t know.” I carried Clark to his room as I spoke.

  “Sometimes that little girl sent things home to them. Presents. But more often, she used the things her father had learned from Pandora. There’s too much feeling in the world, you see. That’s what Pandora really released. Not sin: the ability to feel it. So the little girl collected feeling like a cistern collects the rain, and when she held too much, she pulled it out and sealed it in beautiful vessels. Sorrow and anger and joy and loneliness, all held until her death. We can’t contain as much as you can. We’re not made that way. But we need something to pay our passage home.” Home, to a place I’d never seen, with halls of porcelain and nobility of carved mahogany. We were revered as craftsmen there, and all we had to do to earn our place was keep repaying Pandora’s debt, catching the excess of emotion that she had released into the world, one doll at a time.

  I unpacked my father’s last four remaining dolls before I unrolled the bundle that held my tools, pulling out the first small, clever knife. “Every vessel holds a piece of the maker’s soul. We pac
k it away, piece by piece, to keep us alive after we cut out our hearts and use them to make a child. That’s not the only thing we need, of course.”

  The scalpel gleamed as I held it up to show him. “Puppets come from blocks of wood. Rag dolls come from bolts of cloth. What do you think it takes to construct a child?”

  Clark never even whimpered.

  There was a message from Father’s nursing home in my voicemail when I got back to the apartment. I didn’t play it. I already knew what it would say: the apologies, the regrets, the silence where my father used to be. That didn’t matter anymore. My chest ached where I had sliced it open, and I rubbed unconsciously at the wound, looking around the room at the rows upon rows of dolls filled with my living. They would sustain me now that I had no heart, until the day my daughter was ready to be the doll maker, and I was ready to stop patching the cracks left by her creation.

  She snuffled and yawned in my arms, wrapped in a baby blanket the color of tissue paper. She’d have Clark’s perfect smile and perfect hair, but she wouldn’t have his temper. I’d given her my heart, after all, just like my father had given his to me.

  The police would eventually notice Clark’s disappearance. I’d left no traces for them to follow. A good artist cleans up when the work is done, and I had left neither shards of shattered porcelain nor pieces of dried, bloodless bone for them to track me by.

  I walked to the couch and sat, jiggling my daughter in my arms. She yawned again. “Once upon a time,” I said, “there was a man who wanted a son. He lived on the border of a place called the Kingdom of the Cold, and he knew that if he could just find a way to open a door, everything he dreamed of could be his. One day a beautiful woman came to his workshop. Her name was Pandora, and she was very tired…”

  The dolls listened in silent approval. Trinket curled up at my feet, and the world went on.

  In Skeleton Leaves

  You may have picked up on the fact that I am absolutely fascinated by Peter Pan. There are so many ways to approach his story, from the literal to the symbolic, and the fact that it both is and is not in the public domain makes it all the more enthralling. You have to walk carefully when you’re following the second star.

  John Joseph Adams—again—invited me to contribute a story to Operation Arcana, a collection of military fantasy. Naturally, I thought of children and pirates, and playing the game of war. I also wanted…

  I wanted to approach Peter’s story from the perspective of the girl whose story it was meant to be all along. War doesn’t only belong to the soldiers. It belongs, equally as often, to the ones they leave behind.

  “He was a lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees…”

  —J.M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy

  The sun rising over the lagoon tinted the water in shades of red and gold. Nothing moved, not even the wind, which had ceased blowing sometime after midnight, stranding ships at sea and rafts on shore. It was a moment of rare peace, and while it held sway, it was almost possible to pretend nothing had changed: that this was still a place of endless summers and endless games, where growing up was a choice and not a foregone conclusion. This was still Neverland.

  Then the sun finished rising, and the red streaks on the surface of the water remained behind, the blood marking the places where the dead had fallen. This was still Neverland, but it was no longer suited for bedtime stories.

  “I don’t think I can betray her.”

  “Do you ever want this war to end?”

  The ragamuffin army gathered in the shadow of the oaks drooped, their thin shoulders weighed down by birch-bark armor, their arms exhausted from the strain of holding swords and shields against the enemy. Those who had been lucky enough to stay behind and miss the night’s battles moved through their ranks, offering cups of water and wiping blood from split lips and bruised foreheads. Only whimpers broke the silence; whimpers, and sighs as Wendy after Wendy found one of their charges on the verge of collapse.

  “This can’t go on much longer,” murmured one of the Wendys, whose name had been Maria before she came to Neverland. She barely remembered the life she’d left behind. She knew there’d been a man who had hit her, and a woman with sad eyes who had never intervened, but more and more she found herself wondering if that was really worse than this endless parade of dead and dying children.

  “It will go on for as long as the Pan wills it,” said another Wendy stiffly.

  Invoking the Pan’s name ended all attempts at conversation. The Wendys scattered like so many birds, the blue ribbons in their hair and tied around their upper arms standing out like brands in the gloom beneath the trees.

  The sound of distant crowing alerted them that their time was almost up, and they worked faster, trying to bandage every wound and wipe every eye before the inevitable happened: the curtain of branches at the far end of the clearing spread wide, and the Pan floated inside, her feet drifting a foot above the hard-packed ground. Her Wendy walked after her, hands folded behind her back, and the Pan’s three lieutenants followed. They were the children who had survived the most battles, and their eyes were dead and dark with too much dying.

  “Five Lost Children died last night—rejoice, for we killed twice that many pirates.” The Pan’s voice was jovial, as it always was; she announced death as if it were just another game. “Their bodies have been given to the mermaids, as apology for the three mermaids who were also killed in last night’s fighting. Our alliance continues strong.”

  Each of the Wendys looked to their own charges and then, with pleading eyes, to the Pan’s Wendy. There was not a one of them who was not missing someone, but that could mean their children had been sent to scout, or were out gathering ripe apples and fresh strawberries to feed Pan’s army.

  The Pan would never think to give the names of the fallen—forgot them, in fact, as soon as each Lost Girl or Boy breathed their last. Dead things held no interest for the Pan.

  Her Wendy sighed and named the dead: “Christopher, Agnes, Jimmy, Minuet, and Xio.”

  One of the male Wendys cried out before muffling his sobs with the heel of his hand. The other four who had lost children managed to keep themselves under tighter control. It was too late: the Pan’s eyes had found the Wendy who dared to cry aloud. She loosed herself like an arrow across the clearing, stopping to hang in the air before him as she demanded, “What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

  The Wendy swallowed, trying to take back his tears. It didn’t work, but he pressed forward all the same, saying, “Minuet was one of mine, Pan. I didn’t realize… I’m going to miss her.”

  “Miss her? Miss who? All your children are here!” The Pan shook her head, pouting petulantly. “It’s like you don’t want us to have any fun, Wendy. You’re a stick in the mud. Why, I bet your children never get to play any good games.”

  The Pan’s Wendy took a sharp breath as she grasped the danger. She stepped forward, forcing a laugh as she said, “Why, that’s not so! I’ve seen his children playing lots of games. He’s an excellent mother, Pan, one of the best. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s crying only because Minuet is going to miss playing with her brothers and sisters, like any good Lost Girl.”

  The cornered Wendy nodded in rapid agreement. “Yes! Yes, Pan, it’s just as she said. We play such lovely games, it’s a pity Minuet won’t be able to play them with us anymore.”

  “Ah,” said the Pan, starting to turn away. “You must have the best games in Neverland, then.”

  “Oh, yes,” said the Wendy carelessly, thinking the danger was past. He didn’t see the sudden tightness in the eyes of every other Wendy in the clearing.

  The Pan whirled back toward him. “Liar!” she crowed. “My Wendy is the best Wendy, which means I get the best games, and not your children at all! And if you lied about this then you must have lied about that, because that’s what liars do! Snips! Gantry! Take this Wendy’s children to the enlistment tent. They need to learn how to play properly.”
r />   The Pan’s two lieutenants began grabbing the younger children, collaring them by ones and by twos and dragging them out of the clearing. The Wendy started sobbing in earnest, blubbering incoherent pleas for the Pan to leave his children alone. The Pan’s hand caught him across the cheek, sending him crumpling to the ground.

  “You’re not a Wendy,” said the Pan. “You’re just a scared little boy. Follow Gantry to the tent. We’ll teach you to play yet.” She raised her head, looking around at the carefully composed faces of the other Wendys and the remaining Lost Children. “Enlistment is open for another two hours, and then we’ll play at sword practice, and then? Back to war.” Her smile was almost bright enough to make up for the darkness in her eyes. “Beautiful war.”

  Somewhere in the back row of Lost Children, a little girl began to cry.

  The Pan made yet another grandiose speech about the glories of war before she turned and flew out of the clearing, off to do whatever it was she did when she wasn’t terrifying Lost Children or challenging pirates to fights she couldn’t win. The Wendys began calling their children to them, counting noses and tweaking ears when necessary to get them to fall into line. There was a time when this process would have taken hours, with the youngest Lost Ones needing to be cossetted and cajoled into lining up and quieting down. That time was in the past, and as every one of them knew, what was past was beyond recovery. Past was even more inaccessible than the bottom of the lagoon, with no helpful, hurtful mermaids to dive and bring things back to you once they were lost. In a matter of minutes, the children were lined up and the Wendys were leading them away, leaving the Pan’s Wendy standing alone and looking at nothing.

  “Cecily.” The name was accompanied by a small hand on the side of her arm. The Pan’s Wendy turned to see a girl who looked scarcely seven years of age standing beside her. The girl was wearing a much-mended cotton dress, and had her cottony hair tied into two puffballs on either side of her head, each secured with a blue Wendy-ribbon. “We need to speak of things, you, and I, and the other Wendys.”