Once at the county fair a foreigner—a Russian with an elaborately waxed yellow mustache—was selling wooden dolls, cleverly made so that they seemed to be only one doll, pear-shaped and gaily painted, but inside each peasant woman was a similar doll except slightly smaller; and inside her a similar doll; and insider her; and inside her . . . six altogether, the smallest representing a peasant child, a brightly smiling infant.

Nord thought the dolls were the cleverest woodworking he’d seen. He bought one for Peggy, but she didn’t seem to see the cleverness—maybe because, being a woman, she’d never worked wood so therefore couldn’t appreciate the skill such a set of dolls required.

The dolls were kept, one inside the rest, in a cabinet in the parlor. From time to time Nord took them apart for the pleasure of it and to make certain they were all there.

The final time that he counted them was to feed them to the fire, and one was missing, the smallest and most internal. The last doll was so small it could fit in the manger of the Nativity Peggy set up on the parlor table every Christmas, except this past one. The Johnsons barely had Christmas at all. Nord took Rebecca, who was fourteen, and her twin little brothers to service on Christmas Eve, but it was strange without Peggy and Sarah, their eldest. Nord worried the whole time that one of the twins would let something slip—or that he would. A dribble of truth through a crack in the dam of their deception. Sitting in the uncomfortable and confining pew, between the twins so they wouldn’t squabble in heated silence, Nord wanted to tell all. He had the urge to raise his voice above the congregation’s booming carols. Hark! he would shout, and herald the terrible truth, confess the crushing family shame.

But there was a separate shame, a shame that was his alone, and it tethered him from testifying to his friends and neighbors. It was the shame, the withering embarrassment, that even he, the patriarch, was not allowed to know the whole truth. Peggy and Sarah withheld it from him as faithfully as acolytes.

No matter how much he raged or pleaded or pouted, they would not say who the father of Sarah’s baby was, the baby who was destined to arrive during this relentless snowstorm. It doesn’t matter, Peggy would say. You, Mr. Johnson, shall be the baby’s father. Think on the child in that manner now. It’ll be better when he’s born. You must be his Papa, and I his Mama. She would pause. And Sarah his sister.

You shall tell me the truth, Mother, he would insist, but Peggy was as recalcitrant as a rusted hinge, as tight-jawed as a canning jar. Peggy was as wiry as a wasp and her stubbornness carried a similar sting, a sting beyond her slight weight.

Nord would take his frustration to the barn and the bottles that kept his company there.

It had to be that good-for-nothing Billy Holcomb, sole offspring of that good-for-nothing Erasmus Holcomb, who fed himself and his family off the food he could catch in his traps. He’d never done an honest day’s work in his life while the farm he inherited fell to Bedlam and returned season upon season to its natural state. A small orchard, grown wild with weeds, still produced a crop of bitter little apples each fall, which Billy and his mousy, nerve-sick, and fist-shy mother would have to mount rickety ladders to harvest. Meanwhile, Erasmus would slink off to the woods to see what his traps had caught, some hapless, helpless creature he would kill at his calculated leisure.

Nord never liked Billy sniffing about, like a common beast in heat. Peggy insisted it wasn’t fair to judge Billy by the sins of the father. The apple never falls far, Nord would say. Peggy would shush him and his common sense.

But now who was right, woman? Nord said to the barn’s shadow-draped timbers. The snowstorm assaulted the farm, rattling the barn doors. An unearthly white light crept through the cracks. He had the odd feeling that the missing doll, the child doll, was up there resting on a rafter, watching him, judging him. The wind sounded like the shrieks of old women, and he recalled the Fates from his book of mythology—a long time ago, back when he would read for his own amusement. Nord remembered the sister who was the cutter of thread, A-something was her name, the one who sealed men’s fates, ended their lives.

Billy Holcomb deserved such a visitation, such a thread-cutting, such a blood-letting.

Sarah’s time was near. He corked the bottle and stepped into the storm. It was about fifty long paces from the barn to the house, past the henhouse and the stump where he chopped logs and kindling. With the blowing snow, it looked farther. At times the house disappeared entirely, prestidigitated behind a white veil. And a fog of whiskey. The disappearance summoned a surprising sense of relief, a relief so powerful it was almost pleasure. Nord didn’t want to re-enter the house. House of deceit, of darkness, where even he, the man of the house, was not allowed fully into the light.

It was a nest of lies, each larger than the next. Everyone must play their part in the grand deception, even the children, who knew about as much as their father was allowed to know.

Billy Holcomb did this to them. To him. The little good-for-nothing cock and his clan of reprobates. Well, good for something: corrupting the Johnson bloodline and adding more scum to the earth, scum that would bear the Johnson name. The thought of Billy’s filthy hands—fresh from removing some bloody carcass from his father’s traps—the idea of his putting them on Sarah, Papa’s little girl, barely sixteen, the bearer of sun-leaping pigtails just last summer, the thought of holding her with those vile paws while he did his worst to her—

The wind subsided for a moment, and the house reappeared. Abracadabra.

Nord began to walk, one leaden step after another. He was a big man, anvil-footed and graceless, even when sober as a Salvationist. He held up a heavily callused hand shielding the snow from his eyes. Its frozen pellets felt good on his drink-enflamed face. The cold. The pain.

He passed the henhouse and the stump where he chopped wood. The snow nearly engulfed it. Nord’s axe protruded from the frozen stump. He regretted that no logs needed chopping. The idea of wielding the axe-head with destructive force appealed to him. He imagined Billy Holcomb kneeling at the stump, his skinny neck laid bare across its oak surface, his snow-white skin eager, lustful for the lethal strike. Hungry for the axe’s heavy head to separate vertebra from vertebra. Perhaps Billy’s headless corpse would carom crazily about the yard like a turkey’s. Perhaps his head would know for a moment the price he’d paid for violating Sarah, for splitting their family asunder, for wilting Nord’s authority.

Nord let his fingers glide along the axe’s hard, smooth handle. He glanced up at Sarah’s bedroom window hoping to see Peggy there holding the baby. Then at least Sarah’s labor would be ended, her screams of agony all spent. There was no one at the window.

A cold memory, as hard as cement, was revived. Nord had been fascinated by the Russian with the elaborate mustache. His eyes were a luminous blue, a blue Nord had only seen in picture books—and painted on the peasant dolls for their perfect-circle eyes. The Russian’s gaze haunted Nord, bore into the back of his mind, and clean through to the front. In those days there was only Sarah and Rebecca, still in a diaper. Ellie and the twins had not yet come along. Nord returned to the fair the following day. He told Peggy he had to go to town for some seed. The Russian’s stall was taken down. The Russian gone—to where Nord didn’t dare to ask. Nord had only the dolls and their six pairs of eyes painted the blue of ice and sky and far-away cities and secret thoughts. He drove the horse hard getting home and went straightaway to Mrs. Johnson. Ellie was on her way.

Nord entered the house by the side door and stamped snow from his boots. The second he stopped he heard Sarah upstairs. There was nowhere in the house one could escape her suffering.

He went to the kitchen and found Rebecca and Ellie at the table. Rebecca was helping her sister cut dolls from old newspapers. The dolls, boy-girl-boy-girl, spread across the table holding hands. The twins were under the table playing a game of their own design, some complex contest with rules of engagement only they comprehended.

The paper dollies reminded Nord of the missing wooden doll. He turned his back to his children and pantomimed pouring himself a cup of coffee. In fact, he found the nondescript bottle in the back of the cabinet and poured its odorless home-stilled alcohol into a metal cup. He knew Rebecca was likely watching him and likely knew precisely what charade he was acting.

Nord was sure not to make eye contact with his middle daughter as he retreated to the parlor, the room most remote from Sarah’s, where she and her mother awaited the baby and the midwife, Mrs. Houndstooth. The storm delayed her—or the fact there was another baby due any time, over at the Fryes’ place. Maybe Emma Houndstooth preferred to deliver Roberta Frye’s baby to avoid having a hand in the ignominy of bringing Sarah’s bastard into the world.

Nord stood in the parlor sipping the liquor that was as bitter as wormwood. It was the least used room in the house, normally only occupied when a guest was visiting. For months no one had been invited into their home except Emma Houndstooth, by necessity. The concocted story held that it was Peggy who was enduring a difficult pregnancy, and Sarah, the dutiful daughter, had become a shut-in as she assumed her mother’s myriad responsibilities.

Because the parlor had always been a place for visitors, Nord often felt a visitor himself in the room. More than a visitor: a stranger. And since he’d been excluded from Peggy and Sarah’s special secret: an unwelcome interloper. In his own home.

He took a bitter sip.

The Russian’s dolls had occupied a shelf behind a glass door in the parlor’s curio cabinet. Nord had been staring out a window and was somewhat snowblind when he shifted his attention to where the dolls had been, thinking the missing doll would be returned to its place, sitting alone, isolated, minus the shells of its siblings. It wasn’t there, but a strange face in the glass returned Nord’s gaze. He stepped closer. No, it wasn’t a strange face at all. It was the bewitching face of the Russian, with the enchantingly twisted mustache, and the eyes of bluestone, eyes that seemed as waxed and as hypnotic as his blond mustache. Exotic, magnetic, hypnotic.

Nord met the Russian’s stare in the way he would not have dared all those years ago at the fair. Perhaps had he found him the following day, perhaps then he would have held his piercing, probing look—and not turned aside, confused and embarrassed and ensorcelled, as he had upon the unexpected encounter. For he did not want to look away, awkwardly completing the transaction for the dolls while studying the dust on the toecaps of his best boots.

The image reflected in the glass was so vivid, both spectral and vivid, Nord touched his lip in search of the curling blond mustache, finding only the unkempt stubble of a few days’ growth.

He knew where the missing doll was. He finished the terrible drink before placing the empty cup inside the curio, breaking the Russian’s entrancing stare by opening and leaving open the glass door.

Nord went back through the kitchen, careful not to meet Rebecca’s disapproving eyes. Leaving through the kitchen door he lost his balance, hitting the frame and stumbling down the snow-packed steps into the yard.

He regained his balance and leaned into the wind all the way to the barn. Inside, the storm was blocked, except for the unrelenting white light and the dreadful, doomful call of the three sisters.

The doll—she was up there, on the barn’s high rafter, hidden in shadow. Nord clumsily moved the loft’s ladder to the right spot, propping it against the beam. Then he took a length of coiled rope off a peg before beginning his climb, the rungs suffering his weight.

The tiniest doll, the innermost soul, would be his witness, her perfect painted eyes the last he would see, their fairy-tale blue the final, fateful color.

– Ted Morrisey

Author’s Note: “The Dreams of Babylon” is from a work in progress that is a prequel to Crowsong for the Stricken.