SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

She looked at the body on the table, the blood replaced by the fluid, the skin looking waxen under the oppressive light bulbs. There was no moonlight, and the workshop was a silent crypt—she’d never seen herself so close to her demise.

“I’m not sure I can solve this problem, either.”

He smiled, sympathetic, before lacing an arm around her shoulders and squeezing lightly. “I have faith in you.”

He brought tea and biscuits. She upgraded the look of the Creation itself from flesh-colored to gold and bronze. She replaced organs with clock parts and muscles with elaborate systems of levers and pulleys and pistons. She was close.

A second note arrived.

I hope this delay doesn’t mean you have stepped down from the assignment, Miss V. May I remind you, you shook my hand, we’re bound now. If not by law, then by honor. With love, G.

But there was no honor among thieves, and Rosie let out a bone-chilling scream when the second body, too, started to rot.

She returned to the house of mirrors after the third body, after the stench in the workshop became so intense she had started to work with a mask. Theo himself had moved works in progress to his own house—business wasn’t so bad it could justify selling miasmatical baby dolls. No need to pass on the honors of an unfortunate childhood at the hands of a Varadys masterpiece.

Rosie said the words over tea with the lady, staring at impeccable nails tapping the arm of the powder blue armchair. The room reeked of rotten roses, or perhaps just roses in general, and she was the one bringing in the rot. “I can’t give you everything you want in one companion. It’s impossible. I can’t do it.”

The lady didn’t answer with anger, instead putting on a polite mask of curiosity, her face inquisitive in the way small wrinkles formed around her eyes.

“Then who can? If not you, then who?”

“I need a lot of time, and effort…”

“And I can pay you for both.”

“Yes, ma’am, I understand, but…”

“What seems to be the problem?” The lady set down her glass, sitting up straight, adjusting a curl of her hair behind her pierced ear. “Miss, why do I have a feeling you’re failing on purpose? Avoiding my notes, refusing to give me any feedback on the assignment I ordered…this isn’t a game to me. You may be as fickle as a child, and very well, for you are still one, but I am not. If you don’t want my business, just say so, and I’ll send my assistant to search for it elsewhere.”

Rosie didn’t acknowledge the frustration building up, but when her fingers clenched too tight around the teacup she’d been handed just minutes before, suddenly too warm, too slippery, too uncomfortable, she broke.

“Then search for it elsewhere!” She threw the teacup at the wall, where it broke and scattered, staining the wallpaper, transforming the floorboards into a porcelain minefield. The lady’s hand rose to clutch her pearls, as if comfort lived in the texture of the string of masterpieces around her neck, the result of a hundred underwater jobs well done, never disturbed by the sensory overload of death, the entrails in trash bags discarded by the entrance, the dismayed looks on the faces of innocent young assistants. Her breakdown seemed out of place in the shadowy room, and she cradled her head in her hands, pressing fingers against the cane of her nose to keep from crying. “Forgive me. Forgive me, ma’am, I don’t know what got to me.”

“I will ask you again, Miss…” The lady touched Rosie’s bare wrist, then her fingers, until she had them trapped in her own. She pulled them out, as if relaxing the claws of some murderous animal, and carefully placed her own cup between them. Rosie let herself be maneuvered, herself a doll, but not much of a companion. “…what seems to be the problem? I don’t know about machines, or whatever else your work consists of. But I know about fear, and frustration, and if what you need is help coping, I might be able to offer it.”

“The only thing you can offer me is your understanding. What you’ve asked of me…it’s not possible.”

“I thought you made dolls for dreamers. I thought you could make anything work.”

“I’ve started to doubt that myself.”

“What is it that you don’t want to achieve, Miss? Fame? Fortune? Is my generosity not enough for you? Or do you pity me, like everybody else?”

“It’s nothing of the sort, ma’am, nothing. It’s just I haven’t found the solution to this particular problem yet, and there’s nothing I can do. I can’t do it until inspiration…until the solution comes to me.”

The lady bent forward, setting her sharp chin on the back of her folded hand.

“Is that the way you work? You sit and wait for inspiration to strike you? For the solutions to come to you? Doesn’t seem too productive to me, Miss. What if inspiration doesn’t feel like coming?”

“Then I disappoint my customer, ma’am.”

The lady laughed, looking away, sitting back in the chair, disturbing the blanket over her legs as she crossed them underneath the fabric. “And that shouldn’t ever be an option, should it? Lest disappointment be something they can’t handle.”

She dared look up at the woman, but her skin was perfect and powdered and her hair fell in ideal curls over her shoulder, and her earrings were long cascades of jewels that mingled between them, and she was so alluring that she couldn’t bear the thought of having disappointed her.

“If I may ask…why haven’t you considered escaping?”

The lady blinked, closed her eyes for a moment as the corner of her lips rose, cat-like, in a satisfied smile.

“Do you think me stupid, Miss?”

“No. No, not…not at all.”

“Nothing you can possibly say to me about my own life or condition will make more sense to me than what I can already say to myself. You don’t know me. I didn’t invite you here to give me life-changing advice.”

She stood. “You are correct. I will return to work.”

The lady let her walk away, a few tentative steps, before putting out her cigarette on the marble surface of the side table. She rose, and Rosie had never seen her stand—if not exactly tall, she looked ominous, wrapped in a dark shawl with only her claws for front clasps.

“Will you?”

“Yes. Yes, I will. I will try the best I can.”

The woman inched closer, running thin fingers through Rosie’s blonde locks. “And answer my notes this time, will you? I’m very interested in knowing how you work. Since I can’t…go out to see it myself.” She closed the distance between them, and Rosie felt herself freeze, until the lady planted a soft kiss on her jawline—then she melted. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to invite you to come work here until you’re done.”

It was a threat disguised with a kiss, and Rosie caught it somewhere in the air between the skin her lips had touched, and the fingers she brought up to trap their fading presence.

The solution came to her a few days later, after two hours of sleep and a cup of despicable tea, as she leaned on Theo’s silk-covered shoulder and coached him into painting a doll’s eye just right . She didn’t let him know, but she counted every minute, every second until he boxed the doll and announced he was leaving for its delivery. Like a dutiful wife standing guard by the window, following her undutiful husband’s footsteps until the nearest corner obscured him from view, she waited. And then, she flipped the sign. Dolls for dreamers, absolutely, but not always, not then .

She planned carefully, drew letters and diagrams, collected all the materials and contacts she would need to make it work. From the cash register, a heavy stash of bank notes. From behind the counter, her tool bag. She walked out a little after sunset, turned right in the direction of the shady inns and alleys where drug dealers and similar night crawlers made their living, and didn’t come back.