There is a car parked out front of ‘The House for Reclining Dolls’ and there is a child-sized doll buckled into its passenger seat. The owner has posed it such that the doll is reaching for the handle- eager to exit, maybe, or checking the lock. It’s eerie, but I dismiss the scene as good fun on the part of the caretaker. I appreciate an aficionado that doesn’t take their hobby too seriously and I have to believe that, worst case scenario, I would survive an encounter with a haunted doll.
Hector does his business and we step up to the door where a machine frets over my twenty dollar bill for several seconds before an industrial thunk indicates the revolving door has unlocked. The door’s glass has been plastered over with the sort of opaque and peeling plastic one recognizes from adult theaters. It’s done in a white and a message in bold letters reads:
The entrance opens on the fifth rotation.
People don’t read signs like this, though, and I can see where the plastic has aged and where it’s been torn by frantic scrabbling. The entrance slides shut before the first rotation is complete and that slim wedge of space between the door and the wall, which is bearable only for the fact that it’s normally so fleeting, becomes claustrophobic. The sudden activation of lights makes things worse. It illuminates the other four quadrants of the door and reveals, through a particularly large tear, that a doll, identical to the last, has been posed in the opposite wedge such that it seems to pushing the opposite way. It would be funny if not for the general sense of confinement and for the fact that the door is increasingly harder to move with each rotation, leading me to wonder whether I’m straining against the gears of the machine and if I won’t soon find myself stuck. Hector’s blind curiosity regarding the pursuant door further slows the process so it’s with some relief that, on the fifth rotation the inner-entrance has opened as promised. The door locks into place with another definitive thunk and the overheads switch off.
The room we face is echoey and dark except for an illuminated lever set into the floor several yards away. Hector steps in first and I comfort myself, once more, with the assumption that his instincts as a prey animal would alert us to danger even though I’ve had to save him from a slow-moving wall a dozen times in the last few minutes alone.
The machine that makes up ‘The House for Reclining Dolls’ runs on energy gathered by the door. All of that energy is held back by the lever and the lever leaps forward the moment I touch it. The author of Autumn by the Wayside hadn’t done much to prepare me:
‘What can be said about ‘The House for Reclining Dolls’ except that it is questionable taste on perfect display?”
‘The House for Reclining Dolls’ is a long, barn-style building and the walls are lined with dolls in rocking chairs. The venue’s clockwork sets the chairs in motion, tipping the dolls back and forth to demonstrate that each has the sort of sleep-eyes that open and close depending upon their orientation in the world. Larger, life-sized dolls are seated at floor level and smaller dolls in size-appropriate furniture continue up into the rafters where the creaking of their movement and the clicking of their eyes suggest hundreds more rock out of sight. They are synced and, at any given time, the dolls are all either resting or leaned forward with wide-eyed intent.
Hector’s prey instincts finally kick in. He pulls his leash from my hand and bolts across the room at a speed I wouldn’t have thought he was capable of. I take off after him, worried that he may find himself under a mechanical rocker and worried, too, to see that the front door now works in reverse, seemingly pulled backward by the doll that opposed me. It’s no longer a viable exit.
The barn takes a hard, mandatory right into a section where the dolls complete rotisserie spins, fluttering their eyes at the lightning-bolt flash of black that is a blind rabbit and its careless, panting owner. A left takes us through a room where all of the dolls are gathered at floor level and these are the worst of the bunch. They shake in place, their eyes waggling half-open and their hands vaguely clapping.
Hector pauses at a far wall, throws his meager weight against a door, and manages to squeeze out into the sunlight. There’s nothing beyond but desert and Wayside. Nothing safe.
Nevertheless, I stop when one of the dolls near the exit throws itself to the ground and seems to scurry on its face in front of me. The room is loud with wooden clapping. My peripheries twist with the erratic movement of the toys. The air has filled with dust lifting from the disused figures around me. They’re speeding up, I think, or drawing nearer.
The specimen on the floor jerks twice as I approach and a third time as I lay a careful boot on its chest. It offers no other resistance. I open the door and see Hector’s leash has caught the doll’s arm. Hector, himself, is calm. He hardly turns his attention from his nibbling a patch of grass in the sun. I untangle the leash and step over the doll and let the exit close on its wrist. A sign on the outside seems to suggest the tour has ended.
The doll out front hasn’t moved but I give the car a wide berth and jump back on the highway once the hatches are battened down. We take a motel room in the evening, the sound of wind in the trees too much like the creaking of wooden joints.
-traveler
