My Christmas with the Dead

You know how you can buy haunted dolls on the internet? You must assume most of them are scams. You want to clear out your dearly departed grandmother's overwhelming estate and, bless her failed heart, she loved to collect ghastly porcelain princesses. She never thought they were hideous, even with her failing eyesight.

You list them once, and no one buys, so you think to yourself, "What gimmick could I use to offload these monstrosities upon some tasteless sucker?" You hit upon some article about a troll doll or Cabbage Patch selling for thousands because someone with a weak literary flair typed out a low-grade horror story.

You think to yourself, "I passed high school. I bet I can do one better." You relist it, describing bleeding walls and unearthly moans in the night. You try to keep it vague. You don't know if there is some regulatory agency who might demand evidence that your cat exploded and her feline viscera spelled "Get out of the house this instant and don't accept a bid below $100 for my vessel."

Yours doesn't sell. You have neglected that the market is flooded with supposedly haunted dolls, some of whom manage to be described by someone whose skill hits that tiny overlap in the Venn diagram between "Very, very stupid" and "Clever enough to write something original and not a rehashing of the plot of a 1980s horror movie."

We, the ghost-buying public, have had it up to our eyeballs with your shenanigans. I may not know a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is southerly, but I sure as shooting know your Great Aunt Bess's Hummel figurines from the Lament Configuration. I'll grant you that I get taken about half the time, even factoring in how unlikely it is that your child's pinky started spouting "REDRUM." I have a garage full of supposedly haunted objects that I couldn't unload at a yard sale, not that I would. I used to prefer to be reminded of my mistakes, though I am no longer so sure.

On rare occasion, I do get lucky. I have a dybbuk in a medicine cabinet who promises me the world if I let him out to breathe. Remember that painting, the one with the puppet girl and all those hands reaching to drag her into the abyss? I've got the only original copy, though I've seen a few knockoffs floating around the secondhand market. Let people have inferior hauntings. I even have a guest bedroom lousy with those crying kid paintings that survived fires when nothing else did, though they may be made of asbestos instead of the souls of the flame hungry dead.

Still, it is the dolls that I cherish. I couldn't tell you for sure why that is. Ghosts seem to love nothing better than a creepy-looking doll for an anchor into this world. That might be the only point on which bad movies didn't lie to you. I liked dolls okay as a kid until one of them---a monkey I found in my parents' basement---started speaking to me. Before you fire up the incinerator, you should know that its conversational prowess was less telling me which loved one sucks what in which plane of existence and more asking if I wouldn't mind taking in into the sunshine for a little while.

Monkey was among my first friends, his presence discouraging other, mortal friends for years.

Ghosts are some of the loneliest people you will ever meet.

I learned that the relationship between a possessed doll and owner is tenuous. If you start helping them out, you are far more likely to end up with a dispossessed doll than with the fulfillment of a mystery. Who wants that, to be left with a shell? Ghosts are not like hermit crabs; no other spirit will move in once they abandon a doll.

Most ghosts are jerks. I know we want to hold out hope that death mellows people. Maybe it does. Ghosts tend not to be mellow. The best of them are the little girl ghosts. They chose the doll because they felt attached before death. So long as you treat the doll well and occasionally roll a ball on the floor for them to roll back, they will keep good company. The worst by far are the old men. They seem to think the only way to communicate is with threats of violence. It takes a long time to convince them that you don't spook and to please stop throwing books around the room. It creases the pages.

I'm not saying I would return a doll infested with an elderly male ghost. (No one accepts returns, even with a receipt.) I'm just letting you know that they aren't for beginners.

Don't listen to the ones who say they are demons. With my hobby, you run into the occasional monster. Let me assure you: they wouldn't be caught dead occupying a Barbie. Ghosts can get bored when they think you aren't listening to them, so they like to bluster to keep your attention.

I've studied ceremonial magic. Invoking, banishing, the whole shebang. The ghosts don't like the sound of it any more than you would, being told that someone insists you do something. You catch a lot more flies with honey than vinegar, as they say, though I warrant you get even more flies with corpses. Flies aren't too picky when you come to it.

I brought a few of the best-behaved ones into the living room. Lined up on the couch, I had a meticulously sewn boy doll in a sailor uniform (acquired on the black market after someone stole it from a museum in Key West), a handmade Raggedy Ann, and a My Buddy counterfeit covered in Satanic graffiti. Aside from the last one, I know that the dolls were loved before they became the earthly vessels of the ghosts. These dolls, they aren't possessed by previous owners. As far as I can tell, they were the best ports in the storm that is the afterlife.

"Yo, lady and gentlemen! Front and center, if you please." The gentlemen are in the sailor and the Raggedy Ann. Like I said, not too picky. Gender becomes something of a notional concept once your actual genitals rot.

The air grows still and sour. A breeze rises from nowhere, making the gossamer curtains dance--exactly the reason I have such frilly window treatments. When the temperature falls about ten degrees in as many seconds, I know I have their attention.

"If you are here, raise your hand."

Raggedy Ann's cloth arm judders and falls back into his lap, looking like the motion skipped a few frames. Sailor Boy is next, giving what I would otherwise have to call a pert Nazi salute. Given that he is an oversized ragdoll stuffed with straw by some apocryphal Bahamian maid a hundred years before, I do not expect much fluidity to his movements.

"Achtung!" I bark playfully.

My PseudoBuddy is last. Her hand tenses on the couch, almost subtle enough to miss. I smell for her telltale scent, baking cinnamon apple pie, leaning in close.

I jump back just in time to miss Raggedy leaping at my face. He lies on the ground where he has fallen, sewn face down and flat butt in the air.

"R.A., don't you know better than that? Now you get back on the couch this instant, you hear me?"

Raggedy falls flat, then flips onto his back.

"Now, mister!"

The doll flies and lands with a whump beside Sailor.

I don't take these threats too seriously. These spirits might be capable of harming me--their original owners feel the need to underscore this point before making relieved delivery--but they won't do it by throwing their vessels at me. In my time as a collector, I have woken with strange scratches on my torso all of twenty times, which might scare off the less hearty of my breed. But, really, I've had cats. They are just as willful and inclined to leave marks.

Most haunted objects try their little games only a couple of times. I like to imagine it like the new guy in prison. Sure, he may go after the guard once, but the other inmates aren't going to cotton to the disruption more than that. I treat my wards with more love and respect--and acknowledgment--than anyone with whom they have dealt. If they are smart, they respond in kind. And if they are narrow-minded enough to keep it up, I won't see a need to play with them any longer.

"You want to get all poltergeisty? You put that to good use." I pull out a large cardboard box, faded and worn, a thin laminate of packing tape waving in the gust picked up as Raggedy and Sailor's spirits check it out.

I leave them to their search as I pick up PseudoBuddy. "Hey, girl. You feeling okay?"

Over the course of a minute, the doll's head rotates a complete three-sixty.

"Oh, sweetie, what's wrong?"

I nod to the mirror over the fireplace. I've had a few new acquisitions shatter it in their eagerness to prove spookiness, but it does its job.

My breath condenses in the air as the temperature drops further. A blast of apple cinnamon hits me in the face. When I look at the mirror, an invisible finger writes in the fog:

Sad.

I turn to the box, which hovers just over the carpet at Raggedy and Sailor pry open the flaps. "Go look what I have for you."

The temperature rises back to normal. (Have I, in the past, used my ghosts to save on the air conditioning bill? Yes.)

Serpents of tinsel writhe from the box. A few glass orbs shatter as my three ghosts examine them.

"I thought we could decorate this place for Christmas. Make it seem homey, you know?"

The objects in the box resume being inanimate. The dolls regain vitality. The largest of the dolls, Sailor, turns his head to me, his jet eyes staring up. He doesn't bother with theatrics like writing on the mirror. He is old, and, a psychic told me, his spirit is fading. I don't know how this could be, that the spirit of a ghost could itself die, but I treat him kindly.

"Oh, don't give me that look." I wave him away. "It will be a lot of candy canes, and you know you love peppermint. I have a tree on the back porch---I'll move that in myself---and we can decorate it tonight..."

My engagement ring drops from the ceiling. Given that I had locked it in a hope chest in the basement and none of them had even shown the least bit of aptitude for apporting, this is a painful surprise.

I tell them, "Some people don't think living in a serially haunted house is a good time."

All three go quiet. I have that moment suddenly when I wonder if I am just a crazy person talking to dolls. Is this what abandonment does to otherwise reasonable collectors of ghosts?

He wouldn't be the first. Everyone thinks it is creepy fun to visit a haunted house right up to the point where the ghosts draw a little blood. But, silly me, I figured he could handle it.

PseudoBuddy never did.

He first banned haunted objects from the bedroom, insisting I put some banishing circles and salt under the carpet. This made the ghosts feel unwelcomed, but I did it for him. If he were allergic to my cat, I would at least make sure to turn on an air purifier when he spent the night, you know? It didn't seem like a massive concession in the long run. Maybe I needed a room without ghosts, and it might as well be the one with a bed in it, right? I could always get an alarm clock to make up for the fact that no one would shake my bed in the morning.

The ghosts started messing with him more, hiding car keys, draining his laptop battery, flickering the lights, the usual. They can't help it. It is their nature.

"You are always going to prefer ghosts you can control to people you can't." That's what he told me when he left.

It wasn't fair.

It meant nothing to say that the ghosts did not care for him. They tended toward possessiveness (no surprise) and had long since learned that few would care as deeply for them as I did. I was safe.

I don't blame my ghosts. If it weren't them, it would have been another excuse. The ghost of a teen suicide dropped a wrapped condom in front of my door with my ex left for the last time, the implication plain that he had been cheating, as we never needed to use birth control. It might have been a lie, that condom, something my teen found a use for finally. It hardly mattered at that point, except that I would have almost preferred that he left me for another woman. My heart could stand him dumping me for something I was not rather than something I am.

I slump onto the couch. I barely feel Sailor's weight as he stiffly crawls onto my lap. I squeeze him to me absently, soothed by the crackling of his stuffing. I pull a peppermint candy from my pants pocket and put it in his upturned hand. He lets it drop to the rug.

I fall asleep there, cradling a haunted doll in my lap, and dream of vast nothingness. Far from finding this disconcerting, the warmth of the nonexistence comforts me.

When I wake, each of the tame dolls sits in a half-circle around the sofa, even ones I had banished to closets to appease my ex. Have they watched my dream? Are their thirty minds the source of the oblivion? I smell baking apples and reach my hand out for PseudoBuddy, but no. The smell isn't spectral now, but hot and sweet. My bleary eyes clear to see the Christmas tree up and decorated, though two contrary spirits had their invisible hands at different sections. I hear a low warbling of carols, but I know I will find no electronic making the sound.

I squeeze Raggedy to my breast as a synecdoche for the rest, carrying him close as I take in the holiday cheer.

Ghosts can create when they see a reason to it, but most ghosts you will meet in your travels only repeat their actions while they were living. That's why you'll hear stories about spectral figures walking through walls. They are so set in their ways that they refuse to acknowledge the addition of walls since their death. Even the more self-aware of my ghostly friends tend toward repetition.

What they have made for me in a discordant tree, in a cracked mirror sprinkled with fake snow, in gentle waves of garland, even I would wager in the ingredients of the pie are not original designs. My acquisitions have formed around me in my sleep a shell of their yuletide recollections, as though I were a grain of mopey sand, and their memories were the lacquer that would form me into a pearl. Is this as comforting to them as it is to me?

Raggedy starts shaking in my arms. I think he wants to show me some bit of ornamentation of which he is particularly proud. Then, as he paws at me without sticking, I realize the truth: this is his attempt at a hug. I squeeze him back.

If I cannot have the love of the living, I can at least have my Christmas with the dead.