Doll Eyes

A few years ago a pretty young lady by the name which I am not going to tell you, lets call her Julie, went through her attic and found something that changed her life forever. She had been going through a box where she kept porcelain dolls (she had kept an enormous collection of them when she was young) and amongst her digging she found a doll that she said, she'd never seen before. Or at least, she didn't remember. There was something very odd about the doll.

It was wearing a torn linen shift dress, starched stiff, with the skirt clinging to the dolls legs in some places, almost as if adhered on. The doll's hair had been red but now it was tangled with lint, small mothballs snarling it. But these were not nearly as unsettling as the next thing that was off about the doll. She turned the doll over to face a maniacal laughing and dimpled bisque face that had no eyes.

Another thing that she thought to be odd was that there was absolutely no damage to the eye sockets. She wasn't scared at this point but kind of shivering at how morbid the dolls tiny rosebud lips looked, turned up into what looked more like a mocking sneer than a smile.Julie said that then for a reason, she couldn't remember why...She closed the box and took this doll down with her.

For the next few months the doll lay facedown in an empty drawer in the room Julie and her husband slept. Because of being a supermom that Julie is, the doll faded out of her mind and she forgot it completely. It lay in the drawer. Waiting to be found again.

Julies parents had divorced in their advanced age and so there was the arrangement. The details I don't know but Julies mother, Audrey, moved in with Julie, her husband Mike, and two young sons George and Nathanial. Audrey moved into the guest room and Julie had her husband mike move the chest and drawers so she would have a place to keep her clothes.

So of course it didn't take long for Audrey to find the doll. Since her daughter had forgotten about the doll completely she discovered it just as she was starting to unpack. Big mistake. When she found it she held the doll upside down by its feet and stood there.

Julie says that she just found her mother standing there, her eyes boring into the doll's fiendish face. She looked like she was trying to decide something in her mind. When she was her mother like that, it scared her and she took the doll from Audreys hand. This broke her out of the trance and she blinked.

"Where did you find that?"

"In some boxes. Why?"

"I thought I got rid of that-- thing the minute I got it."

So Julie told me that they both went outside (leaving the doll inside) and both had a cigarette...The first that Audrey had had in 19 years. Her daughter stared at her, worried. She exhaled and began to explain, sitting down on the swinging porch chair and staring straight ahead.

"When you were just three months old, we moved into a small house in a suburb just outside of New York. We lived there for only two months, and I met the woman who lived next door. Her name was Jennette--I don't even recall her last name, but we quickly became aquainted, and just as quickly became close friends. Almost every day we would sit, just the two of us, on a swing kind of like this, and talked for a good whole afternoon.

Anyway, she had a little girl who inherited her mothers firey red hair. If I remember correctly her name was Leslie..Yes that was her name. On one afternoon, whilst in the middle of a deep conversation a man with a brief case and of generic discription stepped up on the patio. I remember what the exchange was. Not word for word but I remember it was a bit like:

'Hello ma'am, I'm Mister Rikard-Gates. I am a custom doll-maker and am new to the area. May I interest you in a brochure?"

He produced a pamphlet from his brief case and handed it over to Janette who, with genuine interest, looked it over. I saw some pages, entailing how he would make the have any shade of hair desired, thesame dimples, the same everything.

She told him in an odd flat and outfront tone "I want one. let me go get my check book"

She opened the screen door and came back out in just a few moments. I saw that the check she gave him was already completely filled out.

then he asked to see her daughter.

She yelled into the house calling Leslie. I remember hearing her little step running to the door and her bursting out of the screen door with a cheerful look on her face. When she just glimpsed at the strange man she was blinded by a polaroid that he shot of her. And then, just like that he left.

I had a rocking chair in front of the window that I would feed and rock you to sleep with. I'd turn off the light so you would go to sleep faster and i would occupy myself just by looking outside. A week and a half after seeing the doll-maker I was rocking you to sleep like I would always do when I saw the silhouette of a man carrying a collapsable ladder.

It was him.

He began to look around before he went to the side of the house and set his ladder up. He set it up so he could reach leslies window. I saw as he lightly rapped on the window and the tiny hand that opened it. I saw him offer her something and as he went down she climbed down along with him. Thats when he took her hand and led her away."

Audrey began to sob, but when she gained some composure she continued.

"I saw him take her away. I knew that I needed to do something but...I was too scared to. I was afraid of telling Janette what I saw...because I thought about what would happen if she assumed it was me? I couldn't turn to the police either for the same reason.

When I saw jeanette crying as police officers interviewed her she was sobbing. I was watching from the same window. The guilt ate me up inside and I still had the urge to tell..but I never did...I was too much of a coward.

Two days later I was sunning myself while reading a paperback when they had a delivery fand left a box on their door stoop written in pink lettering. The mail person knocked and waited for a while, but since there was no response the postman shrugged and left.

I turned my attention back to the book. Or I tried to. But flashes of the doll-maker kept coming up on my mind. I knew what that delivery was; and it was unnerving. I stayed out thirty minutes more and looked up from my book when I heard Janette's screen door open.

She looked so worn down; she hadn't switched out of her long beddress even though it was two in the afternoon. Her red hair that had usually hung down to her back in intricate waves was frizzed out and stood out around her head like a ginger red cloud.

We made eye contact for a moment, her eyes being the saddest thing I have ever seen in this world, even today. That was the closest thing to the most fathomable pain a person could carry in their eyes. She turned and went back inside.

It was a few days later that your father and I woke up to the sobs of Jeanette. We looked outside that cursed window to see Janette pounding the ground with her fists and her husband, standing as if he were frozen there. Even the detectives and the police officers were wearing expressions of extreme distress.

The whole day I was restless, I couldn't find anything out and there was a terrible ripping feeling in the back of my mind because I had already known the moment I heard Jeanettes sobs. It wasn't until the paper arrived the next morning that I saw the headline of:

Murdered Six Year Old leaves a community grieving

'six year old Leslie -- has left the entire suburb in a daze. Leslies body was found mutilated and was discovered near the bank of a nearby creek. A criminal investigation is underway"

it was only a day later that Jeanette used a gun in the murder-suicide of her husband. I was the one who discovered them after a day of not seeing any sign of either of them. I found the door unlocked and left myself in. I went upstairs and eventually found myself in their bedroom looking at their bodies. a single bullet shot wound through her husbands eye left him lying on a blood soaked pillow. It looked like she shot him in his sleep. And she had a bullet perfectly in between her eyes, which stared up at the celing in an infinite gaze. the pistol was still clutched fast into her hand.

This is when I called the police. I used the phone they had on their side table and found a paper that was neatly folded and deliberately place for someone to find it. While I waited for the police to arrive I read it. Jeanette had wrote the first part, and her husband the second part. They said they were sorry and they went on to both talk about how they simply couldn't go on without their daughter."

Audrey looked into the distance with tears pouring down her wrinkles cheeks.

This was when Georgie and Nathanial were yelling hyperacively and bounced out of the front door holding the doll. They swung it around violently and asked Julie "This is ugly! can we smash it with our tool kits!?"

before she could answer Audrey answered them instead

"Yes boys. Smash it. Smash it into dust."

They ecstatically left the doll on the porch in front of Julies feet as they went to fetch their hammers. She tried to not look at the dolls face but instead ignored it and wearily looked around.

The boys bounded up the steps and without hesitation brought down their hammers on the doll's porcelain head. It broke open and the boys immediately stopped in shock.

two withered and shriveled orbs with a dark circle scarring in the middle sat beside a mummified ear, the tip of a nose and a full set of finger and toenails in a dusty heap before Julies feet.