prologue

The first time Michael saw it, the doll intervened.

Six years old, he followed his uncle Ted, who’d offered to watch him while his parents were at dinner. Ted tucked him in, read him a story, and closed Michael’s bedroom door when he left.

Then Michael heard the stairs to the third-floor apartment creak. And he panicked.

Was Uncle Ted leaving him alone?

In the dark?

This night, as a nor’easter blew into Aroostook County from Canada, Michael wouldn’t be left behind. Not in the dark house. He was out of bed and following. The narrow, panelled stairway to the upstairs apartment was outdated and dark, lit by a single hanging lightbulb.

The floorboards creaked again.

“Uncle Ted?” Michael’s voice was a whisper in the dark. His bare feet padded up the stairs.

His uncle never allowed him up there. “My personal things are up here.” He’d always closed the door behind him quickly. Even his father concurred: “It’s your uncle’s space. Leave him be.”

But this time, aware of his in loco parentis responsibilities, Ted left his apartment door open, unaware his young nephew crept behind.

Three steps from the top, Michael crouched, peering over the top step, seeing his uncle’s flashlight pointing beneath the sofa. Michael could hear windswept snow like sand against the windows. His uncle held the flashlight between his teeth as he tugged a wooden box out from under the couch.

First Michael saw the thick plastic, then red felt. Then he saw something else. His eyes widened and narrowed as he struggled to comprehend the beauty.

Absently his hand brushed something in the dark stairwell. He turned, still crouching, his eyes falling upon the porcelain doll. The figurine beside him had a disfigured face, years ago having melted in the summer heat and frozen during winter before the attic was converted to Uncle Ted’s temperature-controlled apartment.

To six-year-old Michael, she looked like the face in the trick mirror at a circus—elongated and frightening. He gasped and recoiled, accidentally knocking her down the stairs.

He bounded down them behind her, the sound of his footfalls drowning in the wake of the doll’s crash. He was in his bed, feigning sleep, by the time his uncle descended, picked up the pieces of the doll, and checked on him.

As Michael lay in bed, he heard his uncle reclimb the stairs to his apartment, the place Uncle Ted had lived since March of 1990.

“Stay out of Uncle Ted’s apartment,” his mother would reiterate many times over the years.

And so the apartment door remained locked.

But in the ensuing years, Michael had learned where the spare key was. It’s like visiting a secret place, he wrote in his diary. Feels like I’m time-traveling when I go up there. Feels like I’m meeting a deity.

And as he grew older, the wooden box spawned his fascination with history. And with art.