“The white one?”

  “That’s right. The white one. I thought it fitting to put the doll in it.” She tapped her fingertips together. “And since then, I’ve been coming up with all sorts of reasons why the basement isn’t safe. The mice, and the stairs, and the leaks, and just—” She threw her hands up in the air. “All of it!”

  “Even the mice?”

  “We don’t have mice in the house,” she admitted with a huff of air.

  I gaped at her, mouth open.

  “I know, it’s a terrible thing to lie about.” She looked away. “Eddie keeps the mothballs down to make sure that the mice don’t come back.”

  “But… I’ve seen the mice before.”

  Wait. No. I haven’t.

  I’ve never seen the mice. I’ve just heard something moving around in the dark at night. I just assumed that it was mice because that made the most sense.

  Grandma said, “If you have, then it came in just this year with you. I just knew that if Eddie went into that basement, he would throw the doll away. The doll is special, Quinn.”

  “Because she looks like Aunt Molly.”

  “Yes, but it’s more than that. I know I never bought her—I don’t know where she came from.” She looked pensive. “Molly wasn’t a vain girl. She wouldn’t have made a doll to look like her. And the face, the lips, just—God, Quinn. I’ll get a picture of her out of the old family album from you. Then you’ll see what I mean. I’ve never seen a doll look more like a person before.”

  “The one in the rocking chair looks like my dad,” I blurted out, unable to help myself.

  Grandma said, “I know it does. But we’ve had it sitting around for just about always. This doll, it didn’t show up until after I lost your aunt. I know I sound batty, but sometimes I like to think my Molly is still in that doll. So I take care of her, changing her dresses and such.”

  Wait.

  In my dream, Molly had told me to thank my Grandma for her.

  Was that why? Because Grandma changed her clothes, because she made sure that Molly stayed clean and free of dust? Because she had lied to Gramps, instead of throwing her away?

  I worked my jaw a few times. If my dream had been real and not just a head-bonk dream, then that would make at least a little bit of sense. But there was also no way I could just be like, By the way, Grandma, when I cracked my head in the basement next to your secret lie-doll, I had a vision where she told me that she wanted me to thank you, and also, I killed a ton of people!

  I mean, come on. That just wasn’t going to happen.

  Grandma shrugged. “I bet you didn’t know you were moving across the country to live with a nut case.”

  My first instinct was to tell her that she wasn’t a nut case. But honestly, that felt sort of wrong. It was super nutty to lie to your husband of sixty years about a doll that you thought might have actually been your dead daughter.

  But it was equally nutty to feel as though I had actually been into a dream version of this house, met that daughter, and gotten to be friends with her. I mean, that just wasn’t normal. It wasn’t!

  But… I felt as though it was what had happened. Like, sure, my head had a lump on it. But I fell in the basement. I remembered falling in the basement, right after the pressure in the air seemed to change and my ears had popped. And then everything else, it felt too weird.

  The clown doll. Tabitha. Molly. All of it rolled into one great big lump of crazy confusion. There were no logical explanations for it, and the dream logic didn’t match up with the real world way of thought.

  That meant that there was only one other explanation for this whole mess.

  I smiled sadly. “I think we’re both a bit nutty.”

  My original goal was to say it like it was a joke; ha ha, don’t worry about it, Grandma! That kind of thing. But I couldn’t get my tone of voice to lift up, I couldn’t make it not sound like I was being a total sap.

  Suddenly, my Grandma all but jumped to her feet. She moved fast for an old woman, lurching across the room until she was standing in front of me. She flung her arms around my shoulders and pulled me tight up against her chest. The smell of her floral-plus-strawberries perfume was overpowering, but I buried my face against the crook of her shoulder anyway.

  My own arms snaked around her waist and clung. Fingers curled tightly in the back of her dress. A fat tear rolled down my cheek.

  Just the one, though. I blinked rapidly, focusing entirely on trying to will the tears away. I couldn’t let them keep falling. This was totally not the time to cry. Why was I even crying, huh?

  Anger curled in the back of my chest. At myself. At my Grandma, even though she hadn’t done anything wrong. At both versions of Molly, even the one that I didn’t know; the one that had died when she was just a young girl.

  “Oh, my Quinn…” Grandma hugged me even tighter. It was like she was trying to squeeze all of the sadness out of me, the same way that she had wrung the water out of the pink washcloth.

  It didn’t work.

  The sadness remained. Her perfume was starting to make my nose itch. It was always strong, but even more so tonight. It smelled a bit like maybe she had doused herself with it in lieu of getting a shower.

  “I’m sorry you have to be here,” said Grandma. “You will never know how sorry I am for that. My heart breaks for you. Your grandfather and I keep trying to make you smile, but we just don’t know how to raise children anymore.”

  She gave a heavy sigh, finally pulling back. I had to force myself not to pull in a hard breath of perfume-free air. Her hands stayed on my shoulders, fingers curled tight against them.

  Grandma continued, “I keep assuming you’re like your father—wanting to try our wine, afraid of the basement, enjoying certain foods—and you’re not. You’re your own person, and I have to act like it.”

  “Was my dad really afraid of the basement?” I asked her, surprised.

  “Terrified by it,” said Grandma. “He would only go down there if Eddie or Molly was with him, and never, ever at night.”

  “I didn’t know that about him.”

  “And I didn’t know that you weren’t like that,” said Grandma. “And that’s on me, honey, not on you. But it made me realize that we don’t know each other very well, do we?”

  “I guess not.” I let out a quiet sigh. “I guess that I don’t really know anything about you, either.”

  I didn’t even know that my dead aunt was named Molly, and not Pippin. In hindsight, I should have been able to figure that one out on my own. What sort of a name was Pippin Hoggwaller?

  Although, I suppose Molly Hoggwaller is only marginally better, just by proxy of Molly being a real name.

  Grandma let go of me with one hand, and used her crooked fingers to brush the hair out of my face, tucking it nicely behind one ear. “Let’s start over, what do you say?”

  Start over.

  I knew that she meant we should start over with how we had been getting along, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this would be a great way to start over with everything. That dream—it had happened. I was now sure of it.

  It was real, or at least, it was as real as a dream could be. But with this offer, I was getting the chance to just let all of that be pushed aside, and to move on as though it had never happened. I could just accept that things were different.

  And that sounded like maybe the best thing I had heard all day. All night. All month. Whatever, forever. The point was, it sounded like a sweet deal to me.

  Relief clear in my voice, I said to Grandma, “Sounds good to me.”

  With that little issue solved, I really did think that everything was about to get so much better. Guess I should have known that I was in the middle of the world’s biggest bad-luck streak.

  Grandma pulled away from me fully and said, “You know, I appreciate that you moved these dolls back, too.”

  “You didn’t do this?” I asked, surprised.

  She shook her head. “I thought you decided that you might have liked the look of a few of them, especially since you were putting your own into the mix.”

  “I didn’t put them here…and I don’t own any dolls.” I frowned. “Could Gramps have done it?”

  “No, no, Eddie would never come into your room. And he's’ a bit of a miser, Quinn, an absolute penny pincher. He wouldn’t have spent money on a new doll, when there are so many of Molly’s sitting around undusted.” She stepped over to the far wall, the one directly opposite the foot of my bed.

  Her arms folded neatly behind her back, fingers wrapping around her own sharply jointed wrists. She looked up at the shelf on the wall. On one end, there was a little porcelain doll dressed up in what could only be described as her Sunday best, and on the other end, there was a boy of the same make and model in a red vest and a white dress shirt.

  Those dolls had been there since I first moved in.

  It was the dolls in the middle of the shelf that made the tears spring to my eyes once more.

  “They’re so modern looking,” said Grandma. “I know that they must be new.”

  Next to the old-fashioned girl was a much more contemporary doll. She was fully plush save for her silicone face. Long blonde hair ran down the doll’s back. She had stars painted in her eyes—big ones—and her bright pink coveralls were rolled into cuffs just above her red glitter-covered sneakers.

  Alice.

  Beside her was a hard-bodied poseable doll, with an Art History book in her hand. She had on an olive-green spaghetti strap dress, with a white t-shirt underneath it. Big, ugly white bows were braided into her hair.

  May.

  In the middle, there was a wind-up doll. He wore a bright-pink striped shirt, and his bushy red hair was unkempt and messy, with a few strands of spider webs clinging to it. He was holding, bizarrely enough, a fishing pole. The wind-up key was missing from his back.

  Mr. Tart.

  A porcelain doll in a pinstripe skirt and a dark red jacket stood next to him, with skinny heels and a mop of messy dark brown hair and blue eyes. Her face had strange red staining on it, though it wasn’t anywhere else on the doll, and certainly not on the clothes.

  Mrs. Harringbone.

  There was a plush doll, made out of woven-together fabric. She had button eyes, and a shirt that was covered in white stars. Her mouth was twisted into a frown, stitched there permanently.

  The nameless hero from my book.

  And finally, sitting next to the boy that had always been there, was…

  Trevor.

  With a realistic face sculpt. Furious-looking eyes. And the meanest frown I’d ever seen on a doll. He was wearing the outfit I had designed for him, the reversed image of our school uniform, and he was holding a little plastic lantern in one hand.

  I felt like I was going to be sick.

  This was the family I had killed. Those were the people that I had stabbed, choked, and drowned! It was the boy who had lied to me and been burned up in return. My sins were right there, proving to me that it wasn’t a dream—not really.

  “They’re at least a nice addition,” stated Grandma, seemingly unconcerned about the fact that she didn’t know where the dolls had come from. “And if you’re feeling up to it, Quinn, why don’t you come to the kitchen with me? You missed dinner, and it’s so late, I would hate for you to go to bed hungry.”

  “Sure,” I croaked out, unable to look away from the dolls. “I’ll be right down.”

  Grandma lingered for a moment, then turned and tottered out of the room. Silence settled over top of me—well—us. I stared at the dolls, and they stared back down at me. Even though they couldn’t move their faces, I could still feel nothing but menace and hatred coming off of them.

  I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew that they couldn’t stay there. I grabbed the chair from my desk and hauled it over to the shelf. Then, quick as I could, I gathered up all of the dolls and hurried to my closet.

  They were all tossed inside, just like I had done with the Doll Hero in my dream. They landed in a heap, along with old clothes that I hadn’t bothered putting in the hamper, and a few bundled-up pieces of paper that had somehow gotten tossed in there.

  “Stay away from me,” I warned them. “You won’t like what happens if you don’t.”

  The dolls said nothing. I shut the door, locked it, and went to join my Grandma in the kitchen.

  All I need to do is ignore them. That’s all, I told myself, forcefully. Whatever, forever.

  About the Authors

  Qatarina & Ora Wanders are a fantasy-book-loving mother-daughter duo.

  Ora published her first book, Children of the Elements: A Steampunk Adventure, at 10 years old, and has no intention of stopping there!

  Qatarina already has a number of books in her arsenal—both fiction and non-fiction.

  When these two aren’t wandering around the world together (pun intended!) in search of exotic experiences, they are probably sitting at home having adventures by reading books next to each other on the couch…or maybe playing with their two guinea pigs: Mochi and Edgar Allan Pig.

 

 

  Qatarina Wanders, Imagined Away: The Chronicles of Quinn Book 1

 

 

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