[1,069 words]
I am the doll maker for the children who dig in the forest.
You can try to stop them digging, but they always do it anyway. There are places in the earth that call to you when you’re that age, and you just have to stick your hands into the mud and bring up whatever you can catch. Sometimes it’s beetles or worms, but more often than not, it’s the eyes.
If a scientist ever travelled up this far, a botanist or biologist, they would probably say that the eyes are just fossilized tree resin, natural and benign. They look like blown glass and come in all sizes and colours. Some have human pupils, and some have a cat’s or a goat’s.
Our grandparents say, like their grandparents before them, that you must put the eyes beside your bed, to watch while you sleep. It seems silly at first, but the children learn quickly that the eyes have a preferred place and refuse to be anywhere else.
I started putting the eyes into dolls after it happened to my sister.
She’d found two of them: one red, one brown. Once, she dropped the red one. It cracked on the wooden floor. The next morning she woke up and couldn’t see out of her right eye. Her eyes had been blue, but that one has been red ever since. Some sight has returned to it over time, but she couldn’t bear to look at them afterwards.
Our mother tried to throw them away, but they kept coming back. Even burying them back where my sister had found them did no good. They’d always be there, on the nightstand, by nightfall. How they got in no one knows.
To make my sister feel better, I made her a doll. It was a plain thing, just sewn together from scraps and stuffed with grass. The mismatched eyes were only a little less eerie staring out from a stitched-together face, but it worked. She named the doll Lucy, and kept it on the foot of her bed, facing her while she slept. It seemed to make the nightmares go away.
Other parents began requesting dolls for their children, once my sister started boasting about hers. I was sixteen then, and realized if I charged for making these dolls that I might postpone having to go work in the lumber mill with my father for a few years. Perhaps, I could avoid it altogether.
That was some years ago now, and all the children have dolls. The kind of doll depends on the eyes they find. If the child only finds one eye, then I make a pirate with an eyepatch, or a puppy with a floppy ear falling over the blank space where another eye should be. If they find an uneven number of eyes, I hide one at the back of the head, but I have to be careful to keep the hair from covering it.
One exceptionally unlucky child has a spider doll.
My workshop is my bedroom, with all the unfinished works watching me as I sleep. I tried to work somewhere else, but if they can’t watch me sleep, they try to return to their children. It’s the only way I can keep them long enough to do my work.
The trouble lately is that I haven’t been able to sleep, not since the sound of the loggers faded from my backyard. They left me a barren open field for the wind to roar through and batter itself against my walls. It used to, instead, run its fingers through the leaves of the trees and let them whisper through the night. Perhaps it’s the noise that keeps me up, or simply middle age catching up with me.
I often work late into the night now. Sometimes I roam around the main floor of my house, picking things up and putting them down when my mind can’t settle.
The eyes don’t like it when I don’t sleep in my bed.
If I don’t get into bed by a reasonable hour, or if I get up late into the night, I’ll leave the room and come back to find my work undone. I’ll find eyes on the floor, rolling around like marbles- or worse, they’ll all be lined up in a row on my desk, staring at the door.
My grandmother used to say that the eyes watched for nightmares, that they warded us from evil dreams. After my sister and I had gone to bed, however, we could hear the grown-ups suggesting other theories. My father once said that they consumed our nightmares, that they fed on our fear and despair. No one has known for sure, not for generations, but I think I have finally begun to understand.
I saw the thing the eyes watch for, when I was up and out of my bed one night. I saw a tree in the corner of my living room, where the moonlight doesn’t quite touch the edges. A tree with branches that looked like antlers, and a hundred hollows where eyes might go.
It won’t go where the eyes are, but I know it wants them. I don’t leave my room after dark anymore.
The dolls tell me of the blind witch in the woods, who gave up her eyes for the children to watch over them while they slept. The dolls also tell me of the thing downstairs, how it tried to steal her sight. They tell me, too, of how it used to stand outside and listen to me work, how it cannot hide now that the forest is gone.
It has told me things, too, through the floorboards. It’s told me many things about the forest that the dolls will not, about the blind witch’s hatred and lies.
It knows, as I do, that fewer children live here these days, since the land is now barren. My final commission is complete. It’s a pretty doll with a single dark eye and flouncy hair. Her owner is picking her up this afternoon. Then, there will be no more eyes to watch me sleep.
I have been digging in the dirt, where the forest used to be. No adult has ever found an eye, but perhaps I could be the first.
I hate to think of what the last tree might do with no one left to watch.
Victoria Meyer is a ghost-story enthusiast based in Vancouver, where she lives with her partner and two cats. Her dream is to own a haunted house with an unreasonable number of secret passageways.
