Animated Doll

One night I was having trouble sleeping. This isn’t uncommon on a full moon, and I was perhaps waiting for it to be out of vision. I could see it outside my window, and I had watched it rise up out of the forest that surrounds my house.

It was 12:30 at that time, and I decided to get out of bed and watch the moon from my window. The room was filled with the sound of deep breathing, that of my girlfriend Tammy who was sleeping soundly and I envied her.

The moon was big and slightly gold in color. I rubbed my eyes and sighed. When I looked back out the window I saw a faint light in the distance. At first I thought it was headlights, maybe from one of our neighbors coming home.

As I observed it more closely, it seemed to be stumbling, and moving towards our property, very, very slowly. I was becoming very uneasy but proceeded to watch it for around another 5 minutes. As it got closer I could make out the figure a little better.

At that point I wished I hadn’t, it seemed to be an infant, a toddler wearing a tattered dress from what I could see. There was something weird about its walk though. It seemed to lean to one side in order to place its leg out in front of it. Like it didn’t have use of its knees. I decided to wake Tammy up because this is just too weird.

“hey” I whispered.

“hmm? What’s wrong Chris?” she said completely in a haze of half asleep confusion. She rubbed her eyes and inhaled deeply. “you have to see this…” I took her hand and led her to the window. It was gone. “damn it!” I said in frustration. “What’s going on?” I stared out the window for a moment longer, and it re appeared from behind a tree, it was making its way left from the road it had been walking down, directly on our fenced property of about 4 acres all together. It was quite a distance from our house though.

“What the hell is it? It looks like a doll! What do you think it wants?” the crippling fear was evident in her voice.

“I..I don’t know”

It stopped and turned its head towards our window. I quickly dropped to the ground and pulled Tammy down with me, I hope it didn’t see us. I then waited a few moments before I had a look to see what it was doing. It was now walking in our direction. “It saw us! It’s coming!” I whispered. “Why us? What do you think it’s going to do?” “I don’t know, I really don’t, I’ve never liked dolls and that’s the reason.” The room was then filled with the sound of my heartbeat. It was pounding against my chest, trapped by my rib cage. It echoed through my head and I desperately wanted it to stop because if the doll thing could hear it, then it would find us for sure.

Neither of us dared to move at that point we listened for a few hours, Tammy eventually fell asleep in my arms but I stayed and listened for long after that. The only thing of significance I recall hearing was slow taps possibly on the window, but I would not look up.

I’m not sure how, but I managed to fall asleep because  I woke to the sun shining in my eyes. The sky was filled with large scattered clouds, one of which soon covered the sun. It was early afternoon but everything seemed sinister. Tammy was still next to me. I got up, carried her to the bed and then left the room to look for anything that brought sense to what happened the previous night.

I inspected the hall. Nothing. The bathroom. Nothing. Then the living room. I thought it was fine until I saw handprints on the full length windows. A series of tiny handprints. All made by a left hand. It was all real, it had happened. Maybe I need to look at the history of this place. I know that an old lady owned it before I did. She passed away a few years ago, and the house was put up for sale. I know there’s an old box of books of hers in the basement. I never went though them because I didn’t think it was right. Now I need to know what the hell is going on. “Morning. Are you ok?” Tammy said from behind me.

“I guess” I smiled, trying to reassure her that everything was going to be fine although it wasn’t very convincing. “find anything?” I nodded and pointed to the hand prints.

“Whoa ! What the hell? This is really weird.”

“We have to find out what’s happening. I’m not waiting for it to come back! Lets go through the old lady’s books, maybe we will find something.”

We proceeded to the basement. It was the old box in the corner, covered by the sheet. There were some old books, possibly diaries and photographs. Tammy picked up the photos and started flipping through them.

I picked up a strange book, it was not a diary, but seemed to contain incantations and things of the occult. It was definantly a form of dark magic.

“holy shit…I think I found it” Tammy mumbled.

“let me see” she handed me a photograph, it was of a little girl with long braided hair, and dark eyes, possibly around 8 or 9 who resembled the doll- the doll she was holding… it seemed to be an exact replica of the little girl.

We needed more information; I flipped through the pages of the strange book, and found paged marked with a line of blood, traced down the right side of the page. It was an exchange to transfer your soul to an inanimate representation of yourself, so that it may grow old instead of you. “This little girl didn’t know what she was messing with, where would she even find this?”

“I don’t know, maybe someone gave it to her…she wouldn’t of known it existed surely”

There were two other little books in the box. One said “Marie” and the other said “Annie”. I know Annie was the name of the lady who used to live here. I started reading maries diary, Tammy read Annie’s. “their sisters” I said.

“Yeah it says Marie started acting strange one day” “what’s the date on it?”

“6th June, 1958”

I flicked to that page. “it said she felt angry with her family for not letting her do what she wanted. She was big enough to do things on her own and didn’t need her parents’ permission to leave the house when she “needed to”.”

I looked through the few pages before that, and she said the ritual had been completed, and that she would remain beautiful forever, but if her body loses its life, her soul would resurrect the  inanimate representation 50 years after her death, so that it may return to  the body. “Marie died a week later, apparently she drowned.”

“Ohh….” I said dreadingly and I let Tammy read the paragraph that explained what she wanted to do.

“so, the doll is Marie? And it was returning to the body? So…wait! She must be buried here somewhere.” Tammy said.

“Then…then what happened after she finds the body?” I said as I quickly skimmed through the lines marked page.

“The Resurrection charm is to be placed on the bodies chest. Draw blood from a living person un willingly, let it spill on to paper or wood, engraved with the name, age and death date of the body. It then must be burnt and the ashes sprinkled in a circle around the body. Once this has been done, a nail must be driven in to the heart of the representation to allow the soul to escape. The soul is then free to return to the body, but however if it gets lost or does not wish to return to the body then it is doomed to wander the earth forever.

There is another way but it is risky. If you choose to resurrect the body before the soul is back inside it(this option recommended if you have performed the soul exchange and your body has died). The living corpse will most likely destroy you(if it does the body will destroy itself also). To do this, instead of driving a nail through the heart of the representation, you must offer a part of yourself and nail it to a tree with the resurrection charm symbol carved on it. The body will rise and may either take the nail and drive it through the heart of the representation, destroy the representation, or even run away to kill everyone in sight.” I read all we needed to know.

I stood up and went up the stairs, Tammy followed.

“I wonder if it has the blood” I said. “Chris! Your arm” Tammy was completely shocked.

I inspected both of my arms, I could see anything until I saw the small blood stains on my shirt. I lifted up my sleeve to find a rather small but deep cut near my shoulder.

“That wasn’t there last night! She was here! She watched us sleep and-…we have to kill it. I want it gone” I was really freaked out, and more determined to kill this thing. I proceeded up stairs into the living room. I went to the door, to find it unlocked, that’s how she…wait no. IT got in. It’s not human I don’t want to think of it as having any human qualities. I went outside and looked into the woods taking in every detail. A chilling breeze rushed through the trees and brought with it the smell of burning.

“Come on! Its almost finished, we have to stop it!” I ran into the forest against the wind, its cold biting at my face.

I turned around to see where Tammy was. She was running behind me with a knife in hand.

“I brought this. Just in case…” she said.

“Good.”

We waited for a while, listening. An unearthly shriek filled the air, and then followed by the sounds of growling, like a deranged animal making mince meat of its prey. I grabbed Tammy`s hand we paced slowly towards the source of the sound. We got closer, and the sound became more distinct. I stepped on a stick and it broke under my foot. Everything went silent. The noises stopped. We heard rustling behind us.

My head whipped around, I couldn’t see anything though. There it was again, to the side of us. It was moving really fast. Tammy raised her knife, ready to defend if we had to. We moved closer to each other feeling completely surrounded.

All of a sudden she was ripped from me. She screamed and the knife flew out of her hands. I turned to see that she was being attacked by a creature, with long dark hair, abnormally large eyes and was deformed. It had extremely pale grey skin, thin boney arms and legs.Around its lips were blue a feature of suffocation- drowning.

It started clawing at her stomach as she struggled against its unusual power. I quickly grabbed the knife and drove it into the back of the creature. It had no effect. I pulled the creature off Tammy, who was covered in blood. It was shrieking and clawing at my arms. I pulled out the knife and attempted to decapitate the creature. Its claws sunk into my flesh causing blood to flow in streams of red down my arm.

I finally regained enough strength to drive the knife into its neck and sever the head. Its head dropped on the ground. The body stopped struggling and went limp, but it was still moving slightly. I released it and watched it fall. I rushed over to Tammy who was going pale and loosing consciousness from blood loss.

“its over… its done, we did it. Its not coming back.”

She nodded weakly, and inspected her injuries. There were deep scratches on her arms, face and even worse on her stomach. She was lucky not to be disemboweled. I looked back over at the body, and saw it was gone. Vanished. I looked back at Tammy.

She was gone too.