Chapter 48 — Regarding the Horrors Peter Discovered in Jumeau’s Bed Chambers
He placed his fingers upon the doorknob, careful that the old brass fixture wouldn’t clatter from his touch. With a feather’s touch, he pushed down on the handle, imagining the deadbolt within slip into the door’s interior mechanics. He opened it only a hair, and placed his eye to the crevasse. Jumeau’s room was pitch black, but he suspected she was there, somewhere. Perhaps with her nocturnal eyes, she was looking back at him.
He held the naked flames to the aperture, and the dark veil over the room’s mysteries pulled back just a little. A children’s choir of smiling faces reached out of the shadows, staring insanely back at Peter. He froze for a moment, counting the tiny people in the room. Then he realized they were dolls. Extremely creepy and antique, but only dolls.
Peter pushed inside, and saw the room was covered from floor to ceiling with marionettes, porcelain infants, cowboy ventriloquist dummies, fox eyed hina dolls in silk kimonos, resin figurines of scantily clad anime babes, and button-eyed sock puppets— it was a museum, centuries of creepy, uncanny creatures crowding every chair, bookshelf, and ottoman.
There in the far end of the room was a Victorian bed, and under the fluffy bed sheets rested Jumeau— and the way she slept! Flat on her back, looking straight up at the ceiling, hands folded together over her stomach. No human would sleep like that, unless a mortician had posed their formaldehyde stuffed body like that.
Peter tiptoed over to her desk, the surface full of wood shavings and a half finished, fully articulated hand. As he rummaged through her drawers, behind him, Jumeau slowly resurrected herself— her body rising from the lacy bedsheets, which took tremendous core strength, her eyes wide awake and staring at Peter’s intrusion to her puppet filled domain. And silently, from the bed, she watched him— sat and watched and nothing more.
Peter pulled out a leather-bound book and flopped it open. He held the candles over the pages and saw Jumeau’s handwriting— the letters all jagged and majuscule like a serial killer’s insane ramblings. He glanced back over his shoulder, saw Jumeau was awake and watching him, and returned to flipping through the diary— then he spun around so swiftly a candle leapt free and thunked on the floor. Horrific frozen fear ripped through his heart.
“I thought you were sleeping,” Peter blurted out.
“Oh yes. I was.”
Jumeau flopped back down against her pillow and pretended to snore— allegro, high pitched, practiced, and cute. Confused, Peter stood hunched, waiting for Jumeau to attack him with a spiked mace, or waiting for her inevitable interrogation, waiting for her furious reckoning, as was often the case when someone is caught breaking and entering late at night. But Jumeau only continued pretending to sleep, pretending in such a way that it was like a child play-acting, repeating lines they heard in a movie but their feeble child brain couldn’t understand.
Panic gradually decrescendoed from his heart. The terror he felt was no longer with him. For you see, Jumeau was method acting, and although she was horrible at it, she would not break character. If humans slept, then she too would sleep, and if a sleeping human would not awake from a silent intruder, then neither would Jumeau, such was her incredible resolve to not break character.
Peter returned to her diary and flipped through the pages. When he felt the page turning was a little too loud he said, “Oh my, what a heavy sleeper Jumeau is. I bet she could sleep through a hurricane.”
“Thank you, Peter,” she said, smiling. Then she resumed pretending to snore.
“Remember, people keep their eyes closed and don’t talk while they’re sleeping. And a person who’s really asleep would wake the next morning and be completely unaware that I was here.”
Peter glanced back at her and saw she was happily asleep, trying not to giggle from his compliments. Her diary entries were collections of random musings, pasted clippings of dolls from American Girl magazines, newspaper articles of Christmas shoppers trampling each other for whatever doll was popular that year, Polaroid photos and pirikura of of Jumeau with elves, and then he came across a poem that made him pause. He read it several times.
Hear the whispers in the night—
secret spy!
What a world of intrigue their covert action scry!
How they creep, creep, creep,
through the shadows, dark and deep!
While the moon, a silent keeper,
watches secrets from a sleeper,
with a stealthy, sneaky sweep;
keeping secrets, secrets, secrets,
in a coded, cryptic sequence,
for the hushed communications which so mysteriously swell
from the spies, spies, spies, spies
spies, spies, spies—
from the plotting and the scheming of the spies.
“Oh you are so fucking dead,” Peter whispered.
After snapping a photo of the damning evidence, Peter found that was not the only poem Jumeau had written confessing her betrayal. There was also sonnets, haikus, and limericks. A veritable treasure trove of confessions, each one digging her own grave deeper and deeper.
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There once was a traitor blockhead
whose flesh was icy as lead.
She schemed in the night
to steal Santa’s delight,
and leave children with stockings unfed.
And one more for the road:
A knife in Santa’s back,
the blood of Christmas bleeds
like cherry blossoms falling.
That next morning Peter was up early sweeping through the workshop in search of Santa. He found her walking beside Yuika, that fur-clad princess of an elf, sipping a hot chocolate and on their way to check up on the reindeer. He thrust his phone at her and told her to read the poems. He explained that Jumeau had written them. Poems about spying, poems about betrayal, and poems about secret messages.
“How did you get these?” Santa asked.
“I broke into her bedroom and read her secret diary while she was pretending to sleep.”
“That’s… not a nice thing to do.”
“And Jumeau is working with the Holy Spirit to bring the Christmas Apocalypse. Does that get her on the naughty list, or does she get excused because she’s just a doll?”
Santa read the poetry again in stoic silence.
“This haiku is terrible,” Santa said.
“I know.”
“It doesn’t even follow the 5, 7, 5 syllable rule.”
“Also, it’s about murdering you,” Peter said.
“Let’s talk to her about these poems.”
“Talk?”
“Yes. Talk. Because she’s our friend, and we don’t do anything that may harm our friends unless we’re one hundred percent sure she’s done something wrong.”
“Your friendship with that doll is going to get you killed.”
What happened next was so completely unexpected that no one could have prepared for it, not even the prepper elf whose job was stockpiling emergency food and supplies. Without warning the lights cut out. Darkness swallowed Santa, the elves, and the entire workshop. Peter instinctively put his hand onto Santa’s shoulder, to make sure she was still there with him. He felt her before him, but shadows had blotted out her face from his sight. The air between them froze, as if someone had opened a window and let in a wintery wind. Something ominous and deadly hung in the air. The emergency lights kicked on, and the workshop returned, shadowy and bathed in red light. Worry and confusion twisted across Santa face. A feminine laugh echoed. Peter’s blood ran cold. A snowstorm blew from within the workshop.
“We’re under attack,” Santa said.