Elizaveta opened her eyes. The room was cauldron-black. Someone had extinguished the candles while she’d had her eyes closed.

Jesus?

Where was he?

Her heart continued to race, though no longer from pleasure but fear.

She heard the noise again.

Rusty hinges?

“What was that?” she whispered.

“Trapdoor,” Jack said.

Why would someone be going down into the crawlspace?

Or were they coming out?

“Jack—”

“Shhh.”

A heavy crash. The hatch slapping the floor. Then scuffling.

Someone climbing the ladder?

Elizaveta jammed a hand into the pocket of her shorts and produced her lighter. She clicked the button frantically. Metal struck the flint three times before a spark ignited the butane and a small flame whooshed into existence.

Holding the lighter high and in front of her, she gasped.

Two dolls stood before the trapdoor. They stared at her with their glass eyes and their furtive smiles. One wore a diaphanous tutu and nothing else, and its head seemed to have been transplanted onto its body from another doll, as it was much too large and a different skin tone. The other wore a dirty white infant bodysuit, its face and limbs charred black in a number of places.

They started toward her, their movement jerky, like clay animation.

Their brows furrowed in anger. Their smiles turned to snarls.

“Shoot them!” she said, but no sound escaped her mouth.

The topless one with the transplanted head seized Jack by the hair and dragged him back toward the trap door. It disappeared down the hole, dragging Jack after it like prey into its lair.

The remaining doll cocked its head, studying her.

Its bodysuit, she noticed, was undulating. Something was beneath it. No, many things were beneath it, moving, squiggling.

A black scorpion scuttled out of the neck hole, up the doll’s face, into its hair. Another one followed. More emerged, dozens, hundreds, spilling out from the short sleeves and where the Velcro extension closed over the crotch.

The plagued doll opened its arms for a hug.

4

Elizaveta jerked awake, momentarily disorientated, unbalanced, the tatters of the nightmare raw and disconcerting.

“You okay?” It was Jack. He spoke quietly.

She looked around the room. The candles still burned. Jesus and Pita appeared to be sleeping against the opposite wall. The trapdoor was shut.

She nodded. “Bad dream.” She rubbed her forehead with her fingers. This made her aware of the stiffness in her shoulder. She rotated it experimentally.

“Still hurts?” Jack asked.

“A little,” she said.

“It will be okay. If nothing bad happens in the first couple of hours after a sting, nothing will.”

“So you are potato and scorpion expert?”

He imitated her voice. “Las Vegans know scorpions.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“Sort of.”

“You can’t do Russian accent.”

“Da. It ees easy.”

“No—you have to tighten throat. Seriously. And speak from bottom of mouth.”

“I eem Boris. I vill conquer Yevrazia.”

“Yevrazia?”

“Eurasia.”