Doll House

XIII. The Woods

Victoooria.

Vicky. Come here, Victoria. Come out.

The voices don't ask and they most certainly do not beg. They don't plead and they make no concessions. Outside the house, the voices lurk and they make their way through the walls as if through a clear plastic straw. There is nothing to keep her safe from them, no place she can hide that the voices can't access.

She's going mad. There's no other explanation for it and even she knows, isolated up here, from the other children and the rest of the world, that only crazy people hear voices. Only people who've got something wrong in the head and she doesn't think it fair that she should have something working wrong in her head. She doesn't want to go crazy, because who'll speak to her then? What chance will she have of ever making friends if all she can talk about is the voices inside her mind?

No, no one wants to listen to that.

And she can't sleep, because then, the voices will get inside her mind, too. And then, there would really be no escape. There are no escapes, she reminds herself, but there are loopholes and if she concentrates real hard, she can make things go quiet inside her mind. She can stop them from making noises. For a while.

Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

She's growing sleepy now. She hasn't dreamt in forty-eight hours and she doesn't think she can go much longer. There is nothing to do in the endless night, no one to talk to in the pitch black bedroom of eight. She listens to the other girls' breathing. Greta, on the other side of the room and with her head in the clouds and always in a frizz. Greta snores. And normally, Victoria doesn't like the snoring, except now, she does.

The snoring's good, keeps her awake. Many times now, her eyes have closed briefly, just enough for her to glimpse the ever-inviting world of dreaming. Yet another peculiar idea would begin to form in her mind and just then, just as she allowed herself to slip into a sleep of no return, Greta's piggy-like snore would jolt her back to wakefulness. Incredible how that happened, how she could sit on the thin border between two alien worlds and jump from one to the other.

Victoooria.

She's Victoria now, even though she was Vicky not too long ago. But she can't be anymore. Vicky doesn't seem like someone the woods would know, much less call to and besides, she doesn't feel like Vicky anymore. She feels... old.

It's been six days since the Overall Man took Tara, but sometimes it feels more like six years. She's not a child anymore, not the girl who ran out into the woods that morning. But she doesn't know what she is now. Not a grown-up.

Perhaps a ghost.

The woods are full of ghosts. Victoria knows this, yet she's not quite sure who told her. She sees them now, whenever she pictures the forest (and when she closes her eyes, there's always the forest that waits for her) – hiding behind the trees, perched atop the lower branches. She doesn't know what lurks on the higher levels and she's not sure she wants to. There's something cold up there.

But she can't remember how she knows this and the not remembering drives her mad. She knows this. She knows many things she didn't know a week ago and it infuriates her and she's scared, even though there's no one there to soothe her. To tell her it'd be alright again.

It's not.

In the night, she makes her way soundlessly through the dormant house. She knows now that it wasn't luck that saw her and Tara out the door that morning. It wasn't chance that kept Miss Francine – such a light sleeper, normally – asleep as they creaked and crackled through the old house. It was them.