All Dolled Up!

Charlotte

"Well, I mean, I guess there's no need to do it right away," he finally said. "Yeah, I can see that it would make sense to at least wait to see if I can get a better price.” Despite myself, I felt my heart soar like an eagle at that statement. So there was a chance! “About the book, I met a total dead end though. I guess I can try putting photos of the pages on the Internet and see if someone has seen a copy, though I haven't seen the exact text anywhere else." He then finished his drink, and then seemed to suddenly remember something. "Oh right, let me get something I got for you."

He left the house and, after what appeared to be some sort of struggle, appeared holding a small black instrument. It had keys like a piano, but also had buttons on the top. “So, I think you already know that I can’t get you an actual piano, but this is a synthesizer. It can come close to working like one.”

The entire instrument worked on electricity and did not have strings or keys, which I found greatly odd. Granted, much of the new things within this new age were complete mysteries to me, but this somehow felt stranger than all of them. What kind of instrument that worked using keys didn’t have strings to hit or pluck?

With that said, it did work and did in fact sound like a piano. Until he hit a button on it and it sounded like something else - a harpsichord now.

“Witchcraft,” I muttered under my breath.

“Really? Not the smartphones or anything else, this is what makes you finally think of witchcraft?”

“Why can it sound like anything?”

“The television plays any audio, you know. This is kind of the same. You just have to program each key to play a different note.”

“…”

Rather than answering him further, I decided to test it out and play a chord. It was unfamiliar to me after all these years, and while I tried to play that old tune that I remembered, I could tell it came out wrong.

And as my fingers hit the wrong keys over and over, I wavered. This was going to take time, but there was something else that I had to do. “Thank you for this, Charlie.” I gave him a peck on the cheek- which probably meant nothing in these times but was the farthest extent to which we would’ve gone back in my day. As for that time I had flung myself at him… well, that was when I had been overwhelmed by my passionate feelings. People from my time likely would have been appalled if they had seen that scene, though I could imagine that May might approve.

Right now, when I was thinking things through, even something as small as this caused me to blush as if I’d done something exceptionally scandalous.

“No problem at all,” he said, though the wide smile on his face disappeared like the morning dew after what I said next.

“Can you keep this safe for me?” I asked, handing him the necklace.

He looked like I had just handed him a pail of cow dung. “Wha- no-, Charlotte, I can’t possibly take this!” He even backed away as if the necklace was some sort of lost artifact that had been dug up from a Pharaoh’s tomb that was cursed to bring misfortune to whoever took it.

“I couldn’t live with myself if it was stolen,” I told him. “And I can’t protect it all the time. For a good portion of the day, I can’t move. Even if I was wearing it- which I can’t bring myself to do, imagine if someone just broke into the house and took it off me while I couldn’t do anything but glare at them. I wouldn’t even be able to do that properly come to think of it. Can you imagine how awful that would feel? And if I leave it just lying around the house, it’s even worse.”

“Charlotte,” he said, quickly sitting down as if he was afraid that he would pass out. “I… just can’t keep something that valuable. It wouldn’t sit right with me if it was ever stolen - and I don’t even know where I’d keep it. The…” he paused, as if wondering what the right words were. “…every moment I’ve had that since it was cleaned, and since I got to know how much it’s worth, it’s been weighing on me. I can’t get the thought of someone stealing it out of my mind either, and I don’t know where I’d keep it. Plus, isn’t the whole point of it that it’s yours? Shouldn’t you be keeping it?”

“Aren’t… the two of us together? How is you keeping it different from me keeping it?” I asked him. I was sure that my mother would have no trouble entrusting my father with anything valuable. That gave Charlie pause, as I didn’t think he had been expecting that line of reasoning.

“Yes, but Charlotte, surely you must understand that it’s hard for me to keep it somewhere that it would be safe… and because… because we’re together, I couldn’t bear the guilt if it was stolen,” he said.

I tapped my foot. “Well, in that case why don’t we dig a hole outside and bury it underground like a pirate’s treasure?”

Charlie smirked - the tension from his face gone for but a second. “I’ve always actually wanted to do something like that… yeah, come to think of it, this is something actually valuable enough to warrant doing something like it. My grandfather used to say that there was buried treasure under our old house, though he was probably just messing with me…” He then paused and had a strange expression as he said those words. “Then again, I have a feeling he was messing with me in more ways than one. Still, I guess outside in the backyard is a good enough place to keep it.”

I held the box up. “Why not just put it back where we found it?”

“Back there? Are you sure?”

It sounded like a crazy idea on first thought, but then again, it had already kept it safe for a long time. “Yes. It is safe there, we’ll just keep it in this so that means it won’t get dirty.”

“But, then won’t you be unable to reach it?”

“You can always move that dresser for me,” I told him. “And it’s not like I intend to wear it all the time.”

“Alright,” he said. “If you’re sure about this, I think I have something more secure - one of these mini-safes that’s supposed to be pretty fire and flood resistant.” He came back with a small box that was heavy to the point that I wouldn’t be able to lift it. But it did in fact look sturdy enough and like something that could protect the necklace from the elements.

And so, we went back to that room, and he moved that old dresser to the side again. He handed me a small flashlight this time so that I could see a bit better, and I squeezed myself in, dragging the box along with me. I held the flashlight between my teeth as I advanced. The safe made a terrible noise while I dragged it over the floorboards, but I didn’t think it would cause any permanent damage to them.

Unlike last time, it was easier to see where I was going. It even occurred to me that there might be something here that I hadn’t found last time.

“Hey, are you alright?” I heard Charlie call out.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” I said. Even with this fake body, the dust irritated my lungs and made it hard to see even if it couldn’t cause any permanent harm. “I just want to see if there’s anything else here… oh?”

It was easy enough to see why I had missed this the last time I was here, because it looked like trash and wouldn’t have felt off from the surrounding cobwebs. It… as I took a closer look at it, I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at even at this time. I felt a bit revulsed at the thought that it might be the corpse of a rodent or other such vermin, but upon prodding it with my finger, it felt, off for lack of a better word.

“Are you really okay?” Charlie called out.

“Yes, I found something else,” I said to him as I crawled out. No doubt that I was coated from head to toe in dirt now, and so was what I had found. “Do you know what this it?”

“It just looks like random trash,” he said.

“I thought that too, but it looks too specifically made to just be rubbish,” I told him. I took a closer look at it, and came to the conclusion that it looked like a very crude doll. It was made of some strange sort of fiber, probably wool or something of the like, but it was degraded in places such as it was hard to tell what it was. “It kind of looks like a person.” Some of the fiber was wrapped around its ‘waist’ so to speak, though as far as dolls went it was very crude with something that sort of looked like a head and two legs, nothing more. No facial expressions either - if you didn’t look closely at it you would’ve easily thought that it was just a bundle of string.

Charlie peered at it closely. “I… kind of don’t think so. It just looks like a bunch of string.”

I pursed my lips. Was I just imagining things? It did look like a bundle of string, but I didn’t think I was wrong. “I think someone made it this way on purpose, and kept it there for some reason.” However, it still looked like trash, and so I kept it on top of the dresser while Charlie moved it back into place. “There! Now no one should be able to get it!”

“What if you want to see it and I’m not around?”

“No problem,” I said. “The main thing is that no one can steal it away.” I didn’t want the last and only heirloom I had to be taken away by someone else. It was frustrating knowing that so many of our things had been stolen while I had been unable to do anything about it, and so I was definitely going to keep this thing safe.

Charlie scratched his chin and seemed to be pondering something. “Is something bothering you?”

“Ah… don’t take this the wrong way but… does your dress come off?” he asked.

At first I didn’t understand the question, and then when I did I felt my face flush at the implication of what he was saying. I took a step back instinctively, “W-Why are you asking?”

Charlie’s face, too, turned a bright shade of red reciprocally. “Wait- no! I don’t mean it like that- it’s just, I’ve never seen you change your dress all the time I’ve known you, and I know that it cleans itself, but… um, are you completely unable to wear something else or… is it like a part of your body since it regenerates?” He trailed off, seemingly not wanting to complete that sentence.

“I uh… can wear other things,” I said. “But do you not like this dress?”

“No! That’s not what I mean, I just… I wanted to understand your ah, condition better,” he said.

“Well, I’m going to go clean myself then,” I said.