All Dolled Up!

Charlotte’s POV

In the days that followed, I often saw Charlie reading the book that we had found, usually with a frustrated look on his face.

“Is something the matter? Can you not translate some of it?” I asked him one day when curiosity got the best of me.

“What? No, I uh, actually finished it,” he said.

“Really?”

“Well, what can be finished from it,” he said. He opened it to the last page and pointed towards the inner seam. “It looks like a few pages were removed. I don’t know where they are, and I still haven’t seen a duplicate book like this anywhere.”

My face fell. “So, we’re no closer to finding things out than we were before, are we?”

“Actually, I think I might have an answer,” he said.

“Really?”

“I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” he said. “And, I want you to bear in mind that this is all just conjecture and I might be totally wrong - but let’s start at the beginning. What do we know about your curse? There are two rules right, that you can only come out at night, and that you have to stay in the house, correct?”

I nodded.

“Let’s start with the second thing,” he said. “Why would you need to be locked to this house? Only reason I could think of is that maybe there is a ‘source’ that powers your body that is only in the house, but if that were the case, wouldn’t you expect yourself to gradually get weaker the further you got from the house? You wouldn’t expect yourself to suddenly turn off the moment you walked outside, it feels too- extreme, if that’s the right word. You’d think that you’d slowly tire out before, at a certain distance, you’d fall over.”

“Seems to make sense,” I said.

“So, what does the other explanation for that leave? I think there’s a specific reason that you can’t leave the house,” he said. “And if you look at the book, a good section of it is dedicated to Egyptian philosophy. Now, the ancient Egyptians, they had these jars, you see, called Canopic Jars, where, once someone died, they would put their organs in each one.”

“Yeah, I remember hearing about that,” I said. “Weren’t they really wrong about that though? They would throw away the brain even though that is the most important part of the body?”

“That they did,” he said. “But, they also had concepts for things like the soul, called Ka, Ba, and the Akh. What if… instead of just putting one’s organs in jars, they could also put a part of their soul? And if that Canopic Jar, which by the way, here’s what they look like.”

He pulled up photos of them on his phone. They looked like ceramic figures with the heads of animals.

“What if you made one that looked like a human, with arms instead?” he asked.

“Why would that explain why I’m stuck in the house?” I asked.

“Let me get to that - so they also had a practice in the olden days, well, olden days of the Egyptians, where when pharaohs died, they would sacrifice their servants to serve them in the afterlife. Another big thing that they believed in was keeping their tombs undisturbed,” he said.

“I don’t really follow.”

‘What I think,” he said, “is that you’re some sort of guardian - as in, like something that would be used to guard a pharaoh’s tomb. That might even explain why you’re so attached to this house at first, I mean, maybe it’s just part of the enchantment that you’re supposed to guard this place.”

“I do that because it’s my family home,” I said. I mean, I felt that I was so attached because it was my family home - if there was some otherworldly aspect to it I would have no way of contesting that.

“Maybe that’s a part of it, but maybe there’s more to it,” he said. “That wasn’t the only thing that I’ve looked into. Do you know about the Terracotta Army?”

I nodded.

“So, what was their purpose but to guard the Emperor in the afterlife? What if you’re the same, meant to guard this place,” he said. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? Think about it, you never get tired, don’t need to eat or drink, and can stay vigilant all the time. If it wasn’t for your lack of strength, you’d make for a great guard. Heck, haven’t you done a good job at keeping people away all this time as it is?”

“Why only at night then?”

“I can’t figure that part out,” he said. “Maybe… well, for most cultures that’s when strange things happen, or when the barrier between this realm and the spirit realm weakens or whatever. Or think of something else this book mentions - the homunculi!”

“Those weird small creatures? Are you just saying that because I’ve shrunk after?”

“No, it’s more of, the idea of making things that could live on their own through alchemy,” he said. “The only thing is that homunculi are supposed to be completely new creations, not the souls of people transferred into other objects. Or, although this isn’t mentioned in the book, the idea of a golem - a creature given life, made from dust or mud. Or maybe even, something ceramic like a porcelain doll? And what’s its purpose? To guard, or help the person who made it. Still, there is the mystery though…”

“...of why only the night, and why I’m not something entirely new, but something transformed from a living person,” I finished his thoughts for him.

“Yes,” he said. “This book isn’t ancient, it looks like it was written in a language that is pretty close to modern-day German, and it doesn’t feel that old either. I think it’s not actually linked to any of those concepts I’ve mentioned earlier, but it’s rather something else. An attempt to obtain immortality.”

“Immortality?”

“Yes,” he said. “Assuming that you’re not being punished in some way for something, which I can’t see as you haven’t done any kind of unforgivable crime, we can only reach the conclusion that this is something someone wanted to achieve. Maybe they even thought that by doing so, they were saving you from your illness…”

“If so, they thought wrong,” I said darkly.

“I know,” he said. “But mad scientists have been trying to achieve eternal life for ages. And, haven’t you achieved that in a way? A life that would not fade.”

“Charlie, if I had been offered a deal to continue life like this, if I had been given a choice, I would have never taken this,” I said. “I would’ve asked to be left alone to die in peace, where I could be with the rest of my family, and so that I would not have to endure the loneliness and emptiness that I have felt for so long.” I paused, realizing how it was that I must have sounded. “Of course, that would be before I knew that I would meet you. If I knew that I would meet you in the future, and how you would… complete a part of me that I didn’t even know was missing, I would have accepted that offer without hesitation.”

Charlie nodded. “Thank you for that Charlotte, I can only hope that I’ve added as much light to your life as you have to mine.” He smiled. “But you see why someone might resort to it as a, well, last resort, right? If you knew you were going to die, but you had something to live for, or, you just wanted to prolong your existence so that you could find a better way around it one day, or maybe even a way to reverse this condition and get back to life, I can imagine some people who would take it.”

I shook my head. “Whoever would willingly do this would be someone completely out of their senses, and I say that even knowing that I’m with you only because of it - because there is no way that they would know what the future would hold in store for them. What if they were cast out of the place they had made, and were forever left as nothing more than a doll?” I shuddered. It was a fate that continued to occasionally worry me, and if there was another thing that Charlie added to my life it was the knowledge that if something like that were to ever happen to me, he would find me. Yes, he would not leave me rotting in some garbage dump somewhere for all eternity.

“Completely out of their senses,” Charlie mused, as if the phrase had some sort of secret meaning behind it. However, if he had found some hidden wisdom from those words of mine, he did not share them with me. “Well, we won’t know because it looks like part of the book is missing for some reason. You didn’t find any hidden pages stashed somewhere, did you?”

I shook my head. “And if there was something, it would have been either thrown out or sold off.”

Charlie sank into the sofa. “Still, Charlotte, I might not have the answer now, but I won’t stop searching for one as long as I live. And one day, one amazing day, we will walk out of that door together. And it won’t be me carrying you, it will be the two of us arm-in-arm.”