The Halloween Project 2024 - Story 2: They Followed Me

Dolls. Dolls. Dolls. They’re lovable, laughable, cuddly, the constant companion for young children. Looked at another way they might be sick, demented, perverse and cursed. Here’s a tale about dolls.

I can’t tell you what went wrong. Or even when. I don’t even know right now. I never did anything to deserve it. Why they followed me. Why they wanted me. But, of course, that‘s not really at all true. Yes, they did follow me, but they didn’t really want me. They wanted everything that I had. Every piece of my life. And all the people, that’s the worst part.

We all know about those stupid dolls in movies. Annabelle, and Chucky, hell, there’s even a Bride of Chucky. Voodoo dolls. Think about it. Children’s toys but they are creepy as hell. Those old-fashioned dolls that were as tall as a little kid. And those ugly ass dolls that would shut their eyes when you laid them down but then open them up when you stood them up. Always, always, after a while, those eyes would go wonky. One eye would be wide open as if it was staring into hell, and the other would be at half-mast like the doll suffered a stroke.

But I don’t remember this being that bad when I was a kid. My sister had dolls. Some creepy, some not so bad. I never played with them, but she lined them up in her room along a windowsill. Even then I didn’t like them. I was always tempted to go into her room, all dolls and stuffed animals and clothes and shit like that, a real girls room. I wanted to open the window and push the dolls out. It was a good three-story drop to the driveway below. Some would have survived, but a few would have had their heads caved in.

So it was all pretty normal until she fell out the window. My sister, I mean. A few dolls went with her. Now you’re thinking I had a hand in this but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I was at, get ready for this, Boy Scouts. I really was and that was a sad, sad day. Even with all the stuff that happened after that. She was seven, I was 11. At her funeral, someone, I guess my mom, put one of her dolls on the end of her little white coffin. I wanted to throw up.

That was when my mom lost it. First, she just stayed in bed for a long time. She didn’t go to work or church or anything. People came by the house, bringing food and stuff. Her sisters, all older, made little pilgrimages to her bedroom. Dad didn’t talk at all just cooked for us and went to work every day. I was in fifth grade and kids were either very nice and kind (girls mostly) or very quiet and kept their distance (boys). And that’s the way it went for a while until the next worst thing happened.

The doctor had prescribed my mother a bunch of pills, to calm her down, to lessen anxiety, to help her sleep. Who knows, there were a bunch of them. She started moving around the house a little bit like a quiet ghost, mostly in her bathrobe. But at least she was moving. Everyone thought that was a good sign.

She’d make a cup of tea and sit at the kitchen table with the morning newspaper opened in front of her. Then I’d say bye, and maybe she would wave her hand, and I’d go out to get the bus. When I’d get home in the afternoon sometimes she was up in bed, but sometimes she was still sitting in that chair, same spot, newspaper opened to the exact same page when I left her that morning. And dad, what can I say. If she was a ghost, he was a ghost’s caretaker.

Then one day I came home and mom wasn’t at the kitchen table. I called upstairs and there was no answer. That wasn’t so odd because a lot of times she was sleeping. For some reason I decided to go check. Remember I was 11. I pushed open her door and wanted to scream. Wanted to, but my 11 year old voice couldn’t quite catch up with what I was seeing.

Mom was splayed out on the bed head thrown back, mouth wide open. She was so, so still, and didn’t look like she was breathing. A spilled cup of tea had spotted the bedspread a tannish brown. There were pill bottles opened and empty here and there. But then my scream came.

There were dolls everywhere. Cuddly dolls and baby dolls, dolls that wet and dolls that cried. Big dolls with that one screwed up eye. Expensive dolls like Madame Alexander and other dolls, not just lying about helter skelter. She had propped them up in a perfect circle around her, like a classroom of dolls ready for the teacher to read one last story.

That was 24 years ago. I had gone to college, got a job as an accountant a couple of states over. My father died maybe 15 years after my mom. He was in his early fifties. It was coming, we all knew it. He always was a solid drinker. Cocktails in the afternoon when work was over. And then more cocktails as the evening went on. He’d fall asleep in the chair, not seeing whatever tv show was on. But once my sister and mom both died, he ramped up that drinking quite a bit. Hung on enough to do his job, however poorly.

At the funeral home, someone had put a fucking doll on the end of his open coffin. I almost fainted right there. I still don’t know who put that goddamn doll there. I went up and tried to act cool, but I snatched that thing. I heard a couple of people let out soft gasps. I took that doll and threw it in the trunk of my car. Later I went to my old house and in the backyard I soaked it in lighter fluid and burned that thing to charred ashes.

Now that should be the end of the story.

But it’s not.

I know now that our family was haunted. Cursed maybe. I don’t know why. There’s no reason. No bad juju in my family. Just a working-class family trying to live day to day. Celebrate holidays and birthdays. A one-week vacation at a lake when we were little. Nothing extraordinary. Except for one thing.

The dolls.

And here’s how I know. I live out in the country now, way out. I never found a wife or had kids, probably for a lot of reasons. But I like to walk in the forest. There are paths and sometimes I just head out in any direction, I’m good at that. Never have any trouble eventually winding my way home.

But here’s the thing, plain as day. Something is after me. And the reason I know is because I find...

Well, you know...dolls.

Maybe not every walk in the forest. Maybe once a week or at least once a month. Here’s a doll in the crotch of a tree. Another propped in the snow on an old overgrown stonewall. Buried under leaves, on the edge of a brook. Dolls in perfect condition. Dolls with mold and have caved-in heads. Of course, dolls with screwy eyes, one pointed this way, one that way, eyes open too wide. Eyes half shut.

Last week, a crow sitting on a limb cawed down at me, cawed and cawed until I looked up. It had a lumpy, frilly shape under its claw. It raised that talon, and that shape tumbled twenty feet to the ground.

A doll with only one good eye fell to my feet.