The pins are the first thing found. They lie in a drift beneath the sill of the east window at Saint Wennock's Row, forty or fifty of them, each bent at the same angle, as though something had pushed them out from inside and then stepped politely aside. The sill itself is clean. The pins are rusted to the color of dried cider. The doll is a poppet of burlap and sailcloth about the length of a man's forearm, stuffed with sawdust, grave moss and what smells like cedar. It has a seam down the middle of its face that does not quite meet. Its eyes are two black shirt buttons sewn at different heights, and the left one is always damp. It does not walk when watched. It is found elsewhere in the house afterward, one room nearer the sleeper.
Three accounts, set side by side. Marguerite Delacroix-Ames, who keeps the chandler's shop on the Row, says the doll arrived in a bread crate and that it takes only the pins people give it. She sets out a saucer of salt-pork rind each Friday and has never once been bothered. Her nephew says it is a puppet gone wrong, nothing more, and that the crate was never bread. A drover passing through Ruthmas Ford, who gave no name, says he slept with one beside his boots and woke with every blister on his feet gone and every one transferred, neatly, onto his left hand.
The practical matters are these. It eats nothing a person would call food, but the pork rind vanishes and the saucer is licked bright. It leaves pins, damp patches the size of a thumbprint, and a faint scorched-cloth smell. It is tracked by the pins: where they fall in a line, the doll has passed. I measured the stride between two damp patches on the cellar flags with a length of waxed twine and found it just under four inches, though the doll itself is nine inches from heel to crown, so it does not move like a thing that has legs. At Saint Wennock's Row, no one will pull a pin from the floor with a bare hand. They sweep them into a clay pot with a hearth brush and bury the pot under the doorstep, point down.
One claim I cannot check. Delacroix-Ames insists the doll knows the name of whoever last lied in the house, and that the pins are aimed. I found no way to test this. When I left on the morning coach, the shop window held a row of candles and a clean saucer. On the sill behind them sat a single new pin, still bright, pointing at the road.
- Classification
- Animate poppet, sewn constructed haunt
- Habitat
- Back rooms, cellars, windowsills
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 9 inches, heel to crown
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Cottage rooms and market-town shops
- Binomial
- Pupa spinicola
- Diet
- Salt pork rind, spilled secrets
- Temperament
- Patient, watchful, quietly vindictive