Doll House

I. The Visitor

 In the night that listens, there is silence.

The moon never responds to Tara, even though Tara talks to the moon every night. She waits patiently for each child to go to sleep and leave her be, in her quiet and her dead of dreams. Tara, of course, can't sleep. The children like to pretend, but they all know better than to mistake her lying on her back for actual slumber. It is, after all, a game. And the children like the game and sometimes, Tara does, too.

Nobody asks Tara how she feels about it, whether she would like to sleep or eat or go to a party with the other dolls. Besides, their parties are always still-motion, the children faking dialogue while the dolls sit in perfect silence, thinking, wishing for the party to end already.

Tara remembers once, in the long ago, there was dancing at the party. It was an old party and the dolls were not the same – of the original dancing bunch, only Tara remains untouched by time or the immutable sleep that must envelop all things, eventually.

The children, of course, were different also. One of them, the woman with the sad blue eyes, still comes to visit Tara from time to time, though less and less often and soon, she will stop coming at all. The woman with sad blue eyes now has children of her own and in spite of all the toys, this is no place for children. The woman will stop coming, as all the others have stopped before her. Tara doesn't mind, she knows it's nothing personal, though she sometimes misses her old friends – the children who twirled Tara round and washed her dress carefully in the sink ever so often.

But they're gone now. All gone.

And sometimes, Tara wishes she was gone, too. That her time would come already and the Man in the blue overalls (not as blue as the girl's eyes, but still blue) would take her in his arms and throw her on his wagon. Nobody understands about the wagon. Except Tara. The other toys, they're far too young to see, to sense the evil that lurks inside the wagon.

But Tara can't really blame them. Once, she didn't understand either. She would sit, with her painted eyes and that perfect, permanently enchanted look on her face and she'd wonder at the old dolls. At the little, broken-down truck, who seemed to shy away whenever the Man in blue overalls came inside. She used to laugh – silently, as all dolls must – at the silliness of the other toys, at their strange game of hide'n'seek, at their pulling away, back into the shadows and the spider-web corners.

The Man in the overalls always found them, for he knew about the corners and the dark. He knew exactly where to look for broken toys and soon, he would know where to look for Tara.

The night passes, undisturbed except for a few quiet creaks and Tara's urgent whispers to the moon. Not long now and she's afraid she might not be able to see the moon from inside the old wagon. So she tells all her old secrets to the night sky again, even though the sky's heard them all many times before.

Hush now.

There is noise outside their room, though it's not yet daylight. Not dusk, they call it, but something else. A word like 'dusk' that Tara no longer remembers. And in this stillness of not-quite-dusk, something stirs inside the house and outside their door. Fingers wrap around the doorknob. Feet sticky on the hot, summer floor. Who's there?

But outside the door, there comes no answer.

Who are you? Tara asks again. For now, it is only Tara who dares to open her mouth and speak, only old Tara who dares confront the thing beyond the door.

"It's the Overall Man," a frightened whisper sidles up into Tara's ear. One of the young ones, a bright pink kangaroo come all the way from across the world. One who didn't seem to believe in the Overall Man, not two hours ago.