A Natural History of Hell: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

carrying a lantern and wearing a mask. As far as I can tell, the doll makers were usually women in disguise. There’d be a knock at the door, three times and then three times again. The parents would get up and answer the call. When the child was finally ushered into the dark room and seated next to the fireplace, the doll maker was already there in her own seat that faced his. Her hands were reportedly blue, and bejeweled with chains and a large ring, its carnelian etched to show an angel in flight. She was wrapped in black velvet with a hood sewn into it to cover her head. And the mask, the mask was a story unto itself.
    “By all accounts that mask was dug up on one of the local farms. It had deep-set eyes, a crooked nose, and a large oval mouth opening bordered by sharp teeth. It was an old Iroquois False Face mask, and could have been in the ground a hundred years before it was plowed up. It was made of basswood and had rotted at the edges. One of the farmers painted it white. I suppose you’re starting to see that the whole community was in on this?”
    “Everybody but the kids,” I said.
    “Oh, the tenacity with which the secrets of the doll maker were kept from the young ones then far exceeds what’s now done in the name of Santa Claus.”
    “So they wanted to scare the kids?”
    “Not so much scare them as put them in a state of awe. Remember, the promise was that the doll maker was coming to them with a gift. The competing qualities of her aspect and her purpose no doubt caused a heightened sense of tension.”
    “Do you know anything about the False Face mask?”
    “The False Face was a society of the Iroquois tribes. Their rituals dealt with healing. There were two ways to join the society—if you were cured by them or if you dreamed you should join them. It doesn’t really have any bearing on the word-doll tradition. Just an artifact that was appropriated by another culture and put to another purpose.”
    “OK, the kid is sitting there next to the fireplace with the doll maker . . . ”
    “Well, the parents leave the room. Then, as I was told by those surviving members of the ritual back in my graduate days, the doll maker tells the child not to be afraid. She’s going to make the child a doll to take into the fields with him or her, a companion to play with in the imagination while the hard work goes on. The doll maker cups her hands in front of her like this.” Beverly demonstrated. “And then leans over so the mouth of the mask is right over her palms. You see?” she said and showed me.
    “The voice was a kind of harsh whisper that none of my interview subjects could hear well or follow completely. The words poured out of the doll maker’s mouth into the cupped hands. One woman told me a string of words she remembered her whole long life that came from behind the mask. Hold on, let me see if I can get this right.”
    While Beverly thought, I took out my cigarettes and held them up for her to see. “OK?” I asked. She nodded. I lit up and drew the coffee cup closer to use as an ashtray. She held her hands up and snapped her fingers. “Oh, yes. I used to have this memorized so good. It’s like a poem. My mind is scattered by age,” she said and smiled.
    She was still for a second. Her eyes shifted and she stared hard at me. “ The green sea, the deep down below the sweep of rolling waves, whales and long eight-legged pudding heads with eye over which the great ship glides, and Captain Moss spinning the wheel . . . That’s the part she remembered, but she said the whole, what was called, ‘talking out of the doll,’ went on for some time. The average I got was about fifteen minutes. When the doll maker spoke the last word, she rubbed her hands together vigorously and then reached over and covered the child’s ears with them.”
    “You mean as if the words were going inside the kid’s head?” I asked.
    “I suppose, but from that night on, the child had, in his or her imagination,