Rhiannon watched as Hyacinth reached around to the back of the figure’s plaster head. Its mouth began to glow with faint amber light, which revealed the too-wide grin of the dummy to be a fabric-covered speaker, the kind that might bring one feelings of nostalgia if one had memories of wartime gatherings around a cathedral radio to listen to melodramatic plays. Rhiannon had no such memories and therefore the mouth was horrible.

Static gushed from the dummy’s speaker/mouth. Underneath this incessant whir Rhiannon could hear faint strains of music and distant voices all struggling to be heard, to emerge from the static like fish breaking the surface of deep water.

The great lidless eyes began to spin. They were twin plastic discs, each bearing a spiral pattern. They glowed as they spun around and around and again. Was Hyacinth attempting to hypnotize her?

No, this effigy was a radio receiver, its dial-eyes prowled the bandwidths in search of transmissions.

Hyacinth nestled close to the thing and whispered something into where its ear should be.

Rhiannon had already begun backing away from the colourful crawlspace, but when she heard the doll speak as if in response to Hyacinth’s question, Rhiannon turned and ran.

On hands and knees she scaled the wooden steps, dragging herself toward the landing.

Her hands had managed to slap down on the linoleum of the kitchen floor when Rhiannon felt something grip her ankles. She screamed and tried to kick, but Hyacinth was unnaturally strong for so slight a person. She scrabbled upon Rhiannon’s prostrate form, looped her wiry arms around Rhiannon’s waist and heaved her clean off the stairs.

“Shhh,” she cooed, “shhh…shhh. It’s fate, darling. It’s not about you or me.”

Swiftly and inexorably, Rhiannon was being pulled back toward the hatch in the wall.

“All we ask is that you listen, just listen.”

Rhiannon was thrust through the square aperture. The wooden lane was filthy and rough. The blinking lights made her nauseous. And the sight of the horrible mannequin reduced her backbone to putty.

Closer to it now, closer than she would have ever wanted to be to such a thing, Rhiannon could see that the effigy’s body was nothing more than a hollow frame of chicken wire wrapped in a cheap white leotard. The pattern of the wire mesh was pushed firmly into the fabric, creating the illusion of reticulated flesh. And yet the gardener’s gloves that capped the hands betrayed the thing’s true nature: it was nothing but a pathetic scarecrow, without so much as a post to perch upon.

But scarecrows with their heads of straw and sackcloth cannot speak as this thing spoke. Its voice was as ugly as its shell. The spiral eyes spun around and again, pulling in random fragments from countless broadcasts. Hyacinth’s advisor was a child of Babel.