“Was it a typical construction choice,” Helsey says, in a slow, contemplative way, hands working carefully, “to make cognition and locomotion depend on entirely different power sources?”
“Oh, these things vary considerably,” the doll says, face down in the bench vice, head held still, neck and back forming an elegant curve; its bundled limbs are strapped down to a trolley, which is chocked in place next to the workbench.
When initially delivered — excavated from beneath the foundations of a ruined farmhouse, which is destined to one day be the site of a brand new eco-friendly house, the village’s new witch being progressive — the thing had been a slab of compacted clay with mere glimpses of ceramic. Careful cleaning had revealed its twine-bound pose, its sealed winding-hole, and the bundle of wool-bound sticks crammed down its throat, in entirely unmagical but distinctly heartfelt traditional local curse-practise.
“Could ship it down to London,” Helsey had said diffidently, to the witch. “DEFRA’s got protocols, if some old witchy shit turns up in a field or summat.”
“No,” the new witch had said, firm as iron and prickling as a ghost touching you, staring at the thing.
“Well, what do you want to do with it, then?”
“We’ll start with unstoppering its mouth, and go from there,” the witch said, something shimmering darkly in her expression, as if she knows how this’ll go. And then she blinked it away, looked sideways. “DEFRA?” she said, with a hint of laughter. “Might as well come right out and say since yer no kind of witch—”
“You know at the top of the road there’s the little bridge, and the village carries on after?” Helsey said, raising a brow. “Time was, that was officially the dividing line between two villages, Top Erping and Erping Wald. It’s all Wald, this side, but my mother was from up Top, and that gets me frosted out of village committee spats with deep roots as a foreigner wi’ no business. If you can’t take it from me, you’re not going to last.”
The witch looked her up and down, fey, hair billowed around her with terrible undercurrents in the still air.
“I can take you,” she said finally, in a combination of arcane terrifying and mundane smug that left Helsey blushing and worried, and headed up the village to the caravan she’s living in until the ruins stop being a building site, and left Helsey to work on the doll.
So the first thing Helsey did was crank the power washer down to the gentlest it goes, and start sloughing off the mud; then, when it was clear enough, set up her phone on a tripod to take notes of everything shoved in the thing’s mouth. It took pulling, gently as possible, with a set of pliers to finally dislodge the bundle; the ends of the twigs looked smashed, like someone had driven it all in with a hammer.
“Thank you,” the doll said in a tinkling voice, jaw hanging slack and unmoving, so Helsey had sworn and called the witch’s mobile and got her back down to look at it again.
Now, after several more rounds of cleaning, and several rounds of the witch muttering over it, eyes cold as lost lambs, dead and frost-covered on a hillside when the sun comes up on a bitter winter morning, the doll is clamped in place for Helsey to have a look at that keyhole.
“With the faculties and action decoupled,” the doll says, “one’s Miss has the option of letting this one wind down and still apprehend precisely its circumstance, and the passage of time until she sees fit to wind it again.”
Helsey looks at the winding-hole, between the blades of its shoulders, blocked from the insertion of the long-lost winding key or any replacement by a messy pour of molten metal — pewter, perhaps. “So blocking this is a punishment,” she says, matter-of-fact.
The witch — the present-day one — does not like the doll. Helsey wonders what she knows, or what kind of vibe it carries with it out of the past that the witch can feel.
“The villagers disposed of this one after putting its Miss in the ground,” the doll says.
“So that was them, was it?” It explains the messiness of the job. A witch could probably do some uncanny, seamless removal of a hole, as if it had never been there, which is — well, it’s not a sequence of words Helsey needs to be contemplating while she’s working. She pushes the new witch’s face out of mind.
“Yes,” the doll says.
“And you’ve been awake and aware, all under the clay, all this time?”
“Yes,” the doll says.
Helsey grunts. “Blimey,” she says, and goes into the front, and calls the witch, and tells her about it in a voice she hopes the doll can’t hear from the workshop. “Don’t mind me,” she says, “but it’s got a feeling to it. Think it’s a wrong ‘un. Are you sure about winding it back up?”
The witch is quiet on the line for a long time. “What makes you say that?” she says finally, in a way Helsey can’t discern a single blessed thing from. Probably it’s just that Helsey should mind her own business, and leave the witching to the witch.
It’s just a feeling, really. Something itchy. Helsey can’t say that.
“It talks like it knows it’s clever,” Helsey says, after her own pause. “But with this little sneer to it, like it can’t help giving away that it doesn’t think you are. It said the villagers stopped its winding hole up, after they put its witch in the ground.”
“Did it,” the witch says, still inscrutable.
“It didn’t say the villagers did anything to the witch,” Helsey says, reluctant. She knows she sounds paranoid. “It just said they put her in the ground. And then they did that to it afterwards. But it said it in a way to imply, if you see what I mean.”
She doesn’t know dolls — after the Dolly Laws, and the 1863 Constructed Servitors Act, they largely disappeared from everyday use. But there’s folklore; things built not to lie, and the sly ways things that can’t lie get people to believe untruths anyway. Or maybe that’s all cheap old anti-witch bigotry. Maybe the witch is making her thoughtful face on the other end of the phone, pigeonholing Helsey as a prejudiced yokel.
“Oh, don’t mind me,” she says wretchedly.
“Can you get it winding again?” the witch says.
“It’s witch-built,” Helsey says. “Couldn’t break it if they tried. Stoppering its winder was a warning. Like the curse bundle.”
They hadn’t wanted it to talk, whoever buried it.
“Unstopper it,” the witch says. “Give it one turn of the key, just one. But text me before you wind it.”
“Alright,” Helsey says unhappily.
The soft metal plug is easy to work. She drills it, softens with a blowtorch, pushes steel rod into it while it’s soft, to act as levers.
“Sorry about this,” she says dubiously, and taps on the rods with a lump hammer, to jostle the metal plug loose, shock it out of place a little, hair by quivering hairsbreadth.
It comes out perfectly, as though the witchmade material of the keyhole actively rejected it; which it probably did. Helsey peers into the hole, and examines the shape indented in the end of the pewter plug; digs out an old engineering book, with a plate of engravings of witch-mechanism winding key patterns.
She already knows there’s a matching one in a set of long hex-shank bits in a drawer here.
“Might have something on hand,” she says, and goes in the next room to text the witch. Clutches her phone, waiting long minutes as though she might get a reply back telling her not to do it, then eventually feels too stupid to anything but trail back in, find the bit set and a T-handle, and fit it all together into the doll’s back.
“One turn,” she says. “The witch said, to start out. You’ve been wound down a long time.”
“To be sure,” the doll says, and makes a giggling noise that sets Helsey’s teeth on edge.
She winds it, a single turn.
“Thank you,” the doll says, mouth working in time with its voice, now, and yanks its face free from the bench vice. Halsey jumps in place, unsure whether to lunge for it or away; answered by the gleam of one of her chisels in its hand. She goes for the front of the shop, but it gets loose from the trolley inhumanly quickly, with the aid of a scrupulously-sharp tool, and corners her before she can get out of the door into the street.
The winter dusk is setting in; no headlights on the road.
“This one thinks your cordless drill will make a wonderful winder,” the thing says cheerily, chisel pricking beneath Helsey’s chin. “You should show this one it.”
“What did they bury you for,” Helsey says, shaking. “What did you do.”
It smiles a terrible, beautiful porcelain smile.
“This one will show you,” it says, and backs her all the way back into the workshop, blood dribbling down her neck. “You have so many pretty things,” it says, crooning, eyes locked on hers, flat and shiny and inhuman. “Sharp and blunt and heavy and fine and fast—” and it forces her to sit on a bench and zip ties her wrists — must have seen her do something with them, while it’s been here, though she blanks on what, it’s just been about while she works, and her brain is very full, and she’s sort-of aware that’s because her mind is throwing a lot of trivia around in a hurry to avoid the thought that the doll is about to take her own tools to her.
“Did you kill your witch,” Helsey says, voice strangled. It giggles.
“Worried this one will do yours?” it says, and hefts the cordless drill. “This one wonders,” it says, theatrically, “whether this one should impress on you the value of cooperation before handing this to you for winding…” and flexes its fingers over the rack of flat sharp-toothed hole-boring bits.
“Just hand it over,” Helsey says hoarsely.
“No nobility?” the thing says mockingly. “No heroics? No delaying, in the vain hope the witch will realise something amiss?”
“No,” Helsey says, and it laughs, tinkling, and turns with the drill in hand, right into the silently-approaching witch swinging the lump hammer full force at its face. It goes down with a noise like a dropped tea set; a shard of flying porcelain stings Helsey’s cheek.
“I think I owe you a new hammer,” the witch says, holding it at arm’s length. The striking face seems to be glowing briefly red-hot in the shape of some terrible sigil; it’s smoking acridly.
“Think I owe you more’n that,” Helsey says fervently, and the witch looks her over quickly, eyes catching on her bound wrists. Lips pursed, she steps up to Helsey and does — something, and the plastic ties are no longer around her arms, only soft fingers tracing the marks where they’d bitten.
“Well,” the witch says. “Firstborn’s traditional,” and looks up through her lashes. “Though kids is usually a discussion for after you buy a girl a drink, at the very least—”
“Are you flirting?” Helsey blurts. “With an evil doll right there on the floor? I’ve see horror films, that thing’ll jump up any second!”
“It won’t,” the witch says, with deadly certainty, then softens. “Already left a voicemail for DEFRA; they’ll have what’s left run through a car crusher by teatime tomorrow.” She lifts one of Helsey’s hands and kisses the mark on her wrist; Helsey feels herself blush in places she had no idea she could.
“Well, don’t go thinking this’ll get you accepted by the village any quicker,” she warns gruffly.
