Sanctum Sanctorum · Track 72 · middle

The Doll Room

Lyrics

Up from the heart. Past my own door.

Up from the Night Nursery, where the shadows still know my shape.
The hallway floorboards count my steps in a language I've almost forgotten.
Left is the Portrait Hall. I don’t look. Their painted eyes are too loud today.
I take the Servant's Stair instead, narrow and steep. The air grows thin and smells like dust and time.
Up to the Attic Landing, under the single bulb. So many doors. But I only came for one.

Here. The air is heavy with camphor and something sweet, like old paper.
They sit in rows, a silent congregation.
Bisque faces from 1902, shiny plastic from 1981. They don’t judge the difference.
The Greiner doll with the patented head, her human hair is still braided so tight.
A little city of the unbreathing.

Hello, little mothers. Hello, tiny dead.
Your glass eyes hold the room. A perfect, curved copy.
I look into one, and see myself looking back.
And behind me, a smaller doll in a smaller room, staring into an even smaller eye.
The world inside the eye is the only world. And you are all watching it.

There’s the little wooden trunk with its brass latch.
The miniature hearse is inside. I remember the story. Or I remember remembering it.
The little black plumes for horses that were never born.
Sometimes, if I hold my breath, the click of porcelain on the shelf makes black feathers fall like snow in here. A winter no one can feel.

This room is the house's memory of being watched.
Before the people, after the people.
They saw the arguments in the Master Bedroom.
They heard the fever in the Sick Room.
They don’t blink. They never have to blink. They just collect the light.

A city of the unblinking.
A jury of the forever.
I close the door.
But the looking doesn't stop. It never stops.