13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  She took her eyes off the creepy dolls and started sorting through the documents. Subpoenas, court orders, legal documents… she cringed at the sight of them and sipped her coffee hastily. She had to finish dealing with these docs within an hour, before waking Kylie, dressing and feeding her, and driving her to the day-care. Then she’d get a small breakfast and take a hot cappuccino to the law firm for her boss. Cursing under her breath for wasting the weekend, she began to file the documents into separate files. At that moment, something caught her eye.

  The porcelain dolls had moved. They had both been positioned by the fireplace in a sitting position, but one was now lying on her back as if she was toppled. Emma nearly sprayed her mouthful of scalding coffee over all the documents.

  What the hell! She thought and stared hard at the dolls. It was still dark outside, thanks to the tall trees and a lazy midsummer sun. This spooked her. She shrugged the thought forcefully from her mind and returned to her work. Perhaps they were loosely lodged by the fireplace, she told herself with false reassurance.

  Five minutes passed and the next alarming event occurred: the fallen doll’s head turned at a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree angle, and this time Emma saw it happening! She screamed and pulled her feet onto the sofa, put down the document in her hand and rubbed her eyes innocently, as if convincing herself that this wasn’t real.

  This can’t be it. I know what happened: the doll slipped off, fell to the ground and her head rolled back upon impact. That’s all there is to it. I’m imagining everything else, she said to herself convincingly, but making a bleak job of it. She was genuinely frightened by this. Emma approached the dolls and picked both of them up. The head-turned doll looked like that demonized girl from The Exorcist, while the other one looked like Annabelle from The Conjuring. Emma’s heart started beating faster in her chest.

  My daughter plays with them! She though indignantly as she stormed towards the walk-in closet in her room. She stashed the dolls as far back as she could, and closed the door, thinking to herself that there was no time for her to be spooked by potentially haunted dolls. Emma still hadn’t ruled out hallucinations. Hallucinations are quite likely when you’re hungover after a night of drinking.

  She decided to wake Kylie up earlier than usual, and made her way to her room thinking to herself, there’s no way she’s going to play with those two anymore. I’ll get her all the Barbie’s she wants.

  Now that Emma had spent well over two weeks in this new house, her initial excitement had subsided, defogging her eyes of the naivety which had clouded her decision. The house was too damn cheap, and now, slowly, the way horror tends to creep up on you, she began to realize that there was something wrong with this house. The walls seemed to breath in and out; the wallpaper, floral prints in black and white, looked eerie, seemingly straight out of some Tim Burton movie, and the dense omnipresent silence was beginning to discomfit her.

  *****

  It was five o’ clock. Emma was off from work. It turns out that Kendrick had forgotten about the documents he had given her. She spent two hours working on them at the office and, when she did submit them to him, he shrugged and said, “Lovely, now move my ten o’clock to eleven. I’ve a meeting with the head of Parks and Recreations. He wants to hire my services! I’ll laugh in his face and say, ‘Not on a government’s budget, you can’t!’ and watch the look on his face! Ha!”

  What a douche, she’d thought.

  Right now, she was standing in front of the day-care, waiting for Betsie to escort Kylie out of the building, and sure enough, she came out holding Kylie’s hand.

  “Hey Honey, how was your day?” Emma said as she ruffled her daughter’s hair playfully. But Kylie seemed to be angry. She shoved her mother’s hands away and stormed off to the car, opened the door and sat in the back.

  “What’s the matter with her?” Emma asked Betsie.

  “Miss Kingston, there’s no other way to say it,” Betsie began. “But your daughter’s a handful.”

  “That’s what I pay you for, not so?” Emma said, vexed. She had never known her daughter to be a handful. What on earth was Betsie talking about?

  “Oh, pardon me. I meant, she’s been a handful today. On any other day, she’s the quietest kid in the day-care, minding her own business in the corner, playing with her dolls. Today she was causing such a ruckus all over the place. She didn’t even eat lunch!”

  The dolls.

  “You mean her porcelain dolls?”

  “Yes. Those’re the ones!”

  “I sort of hid them in the house. I thought they weren’t a good influence on her,” Emma said in her defence.

  Betsie the babysitter looked at her quizzically, as if not understanding a word of what she had said.

  “I’m sure you have other kids to tend to. Take care,” Emma said and headed back to her car, feeling the gaze of Betsie intensify at the back of her head. Great, now she thinks I am one of those mothers who thinks toys are bad for their kids.

  *****

  Emma left Kylie in the care of SpongeBob, Squidward and Patrick, to take a shower. Thank God for television programming, she thought and undressed to get in the shower. The door to the bathroom was open. She could hear Patrick screaming at SpongeBob and her daughter laughing.

  Good, she thought as she turned the tap on. Hot water serenaded her and she comforted in its warmth. The events of the morning seemed more and more distant and, as she took her bath, Emma realized that she had definitely hallucinated the dolls’ weird behaviour. She made up her mind to return them to her daughter once she was out of the shower.

  But then the television’s sound stopped coming. Kylie was intelligent enough to turn it off on her own, just like she was able to swipe across Emma’s iPhone to play Fruit Ninja. Emma decided to pause her peaceful shower to see what her daughter was doing if she wasn’t watching the television.

  She wrapped a towel around her and crept downstairs to watch Kylie, who was sitting in the living room right where Emma had left her. But instead of watching TV, she was playing with the very porcelain dolls Emma had hidden in her walk-in wardrobe this morning!

  The wardrobe was always locked. There was no way Kylie could have retrieved them. Freaked out of her wits, she said in a shaky voice, “Kylie, Honey, where did you get these dolls?”

  “Under the sofa, Mommy,” Kylie said, without turning her head.

  Emma ran back to her room, dressed hurriedly and opened the walk-in wardrobe. It was already unlocked, she went in and looked where she had hidden the dolls.

  They weren’t there!

  She retraced her steps to the living room, adamant on finding out the truth. She went to her daughter and said, “Kylie, Honey, where did you get the dolls?”

  Kylie avoided her mother’s eyes. Emma said “Kylie” again sternly and she looked guiltily up at her.

  “From the wardrobe.”

  “Was the door locked?”

  Kylie shook her head.

  Emma breathed a sigh of relief and went back to her bathroom. Bath time had been ruined, but she still had to comb her hair. While she did so, she brooded over a number of questions.

  When did she get the dolls out of there? She literally just got home. How did she know where to find them? I hid them while she was asleep. Why is she so attached to those two in particular, and not to the dozens of other toys she had?

  It then struck her and she began to laugh at herself. “I’m all alone in a house with a kid. Of course, these delusions will start popping into my head!” she told her reflection in the mirror. The reflection looked unconvinced.

  *****

  “What are you laughing at, Kylie?” Emma asked her daughter. She was sitting on the sofa, eating the remains of last night’s pecan pie, enjoying a large cup of tea and reading a new book recommended by her colleague from work. She could say for sure that her colleague had a questionable taste in literature. Kylie was sitting on the floor playing with the dolls, with her grape juice and salty crac
kers lying unnoticed beside her.

  “Lily told me a joke!” Kylie said, still laughing.

  “Is Lily one of your dolls?” she asked her daughter. Kylie didn’t respond but started laughing even harder. Whatever the joke was, it was between her and Lily. Would you look at that, Emma thought amusedly, she’s three and already cutting me out like a teenager! Emma was not particularly surprised by her daughter’s imaginary friends. Kylie was an extraordinarily imaginative kid.

  “Alright kiddo, you’ve got to get back to bed, and mommy has some work to do,” Emma said. She put her empty cup and plate in the kitchen and took Kylie to bed. Kylie insisted on bringing the dolls with her. Emma didn’t refuse.

  When Kylie was all tucked in bed, Emma went downstairs to her writing room, her sanctum sanctorum and took her seat in front of the dark window. There had been a lot of creative juice flowing through her, which was one explanation for hallucinating so that morning, and she needed to assuage the writer within.

  After writing only one page, drowsiness sneaked up unnoticed, and started seeping in through her eyes. She yawned and went to her room. It was eleven o’ clock. She checked the front door and back doors to make sure they were locked and then crashed in her bed, where she was certain that sleep would come as swiftly as a deer.

  She turned the lights off and closed her eyes.

  It wasn’t long before another inexplicable event occurred. Emma was drifting into sleep when she heard thud, thud, thud, the sound of barefoot footsteps, slowly making their way from one end of the corridor to the other, towards her room!

  Thud. Thud. Thud. Blunt footsteps. Slow footsteps.

  Emma gasped and put a hand over her face to stop the sound from escaping. Had someone broken into her house? Unlikely, seeing as how she had locked the doors.

  The humdrum of steady footsteps echoed in the dark house. Emma mustered her courage, turned her iPhone’s flashlight on and got out of her bed quietly. She opened the door and peaked out to see the perpetrator. No one was there.

  She hurried to Kylie’s room, in her urgency not bothering to switch on the lights, and checked. Her daughter was asleep, surely she had not been walking around the house. The footsteps were heavy. They were most certainly not those of a kid. They had stopped as soon as she was out of her bed. Maybe today’s fill of hallucinations hadn’t done bestowing bounties on her yet, she thought, making a mental note to see a therapist. Perhaps all these disturbing events had a psychological connection to her violent relationship with Ben. She cringed at the possibility that these footsteps belonged to Ben.

  Unnerved, Emma walked back to her room and that’s when she saw it. A spectral shadow of a woman, translucent and phantom-like, walking at the end of the hallway. Thud, thud, thud. Its footsteps issued those dull thuds. Mortified, Emma froze in her tracks, her breath freezing in her lungs and forming icy shards that made it painful to draw breath. The thing she could only presume was a ghost walked towards the end of the hallway and disappeared. But before it did, it turned its head and stared with her dead, petrifying eyes at Emma.

  Emma blinked unbelievingly. When she opened her eyes, the entity she’d seen was no longer there.

  “This is not real. This is not real. I am tired and I am seeing things. That’s just it. This did not just happen,” she told herself as soon as she could draw breath again. She noticed that her feet and hands were shaking. The room had become icy cold. Emma looked around and saw her daughter sleeping peacefully, oblivious of the haunting that had just transpired.

  For the first time in her life, Emma Kingsley had seen a ghost and she was scared stiff. She unfroze herself from the spot and made her way back to her bed. Midway to her room, she realized that she was too scared to sleep in her own bed, and went back to Kylie’s room and slipped into bed beside her.

  Sleep did not come to Emma that night. She stayed awake the whole night, scared and somewhat perplexed. What had happened today? She thought as she recapped everything in light of recent events. Everything did make sense now. The dolls moving of their own accord; their displacement from her closet; the footsteps and the ghost.

  Emma was certain that the house was haunted, and her maternal instinct kicked in when she decided that Kylie would be better off living with her grandparents for the next few days.

  Throughout the night, whenever the wind rustled leaves outside or an owl hooted, and there was no shortage of them in the trees surrounding her house, Emma flinched with fear. Paranoia got the better of her making every silhouette a ghoul and every sound a siren shriek.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  A Real Dream

  The very first thing Emma registered when she woke up was that she was not in her own bed. Kylie was curled up in a ball of cuteness beside her, breathing through a gaping mouth. She smiled at her daughter. She then pondered over the peculiarity of not being in her own bed.

  What had happened last night? And then it all came back like a fitful fear that broke through the barrages of reason and sanity. The phantasm from last night! She remembered it. The ghostly apparition with the death-stare! The footsteps! The dolls! It all came back. Emma began to hyperventilate. Sometime during the throes of dread last night, she had managed to sleep. And she recalled that she had vowed to send Kylie to live with her grandparents for a while.

  It was six in the morning. Emma dialled her mother, knowing that she got up at five thirty every morning, like clockwork. The line rang and her mother answered on the third ring.

  “Hello? Ems? What is it? Is everything alright?” her mother asked, sounding worried. Her daughter was not one for unsolicited visits or calls at odd times of the day. The last time she had done so, she had been beaten and was bleeding badly.

  “Hi. Yes, Mum. Everything’s okay, I guess. I just wanted to ask you if I could drop Kylie at your house for the day,” she said. She didn’t say that she was dropping off Kylie indefinitely because that would worry her parents. Baby steps. “I’ve some work that needs to be done and I can’t do it if I have to take care of her all the time. Can I drop her in an hour?”

  Her mother said that it was okay, that they were missing their favourite and only granddaughter and that it would be fun to have her with them for the day.

  Emma still could not shake off the events of the day before. It was all so vivid. She doubted whether hallucinations were as lucid as what she had experienced. She got dressed, made coffee, scooped her sleeping daughter from her bed and headed for the car. Her parents’ house was very close, and it took her five minutes to drive there. Her mother was already waiting on the porch. Lucile Kingsley was a very reserved woman; calm and level headed. One could say that she was the peacemaker of the family. Besides all that, she was empathetic and, as Emma climbed the steps to the porch, Lucile extended her arms to take Kylie from her.

  “Don’t you go worrying about her for now. You do what you’ve got to do,” she said and kissed her daughter on the cheek.

  “Thanks Mum,” Emma said. For a second she considered telling her mother everything. She wanted to get this load off her chest. Her mother was a devout Catholic, unlike her. Emma had decided that remaining a godly person in today’s society was simply neither possible nor viable, but there were moments when she felt a closeness to some divine entity; God, providence, karma, the Holy Ghost, Ram, take your pick. Last night was one such moment.

  Emma drove to the law-firm, skipping breakfast and went in before anyone else. The guard at the door tipped his cap to her and gave a curious look as to her early arrival. She smiled at him and headed for the elevator. She had something she needed to do. She was still without internet at home, and had not yet called the broadband company. Her only access to the online world was through her computer at her desk.

  Emma fired up the computer and clicked on the internet explorer icon. She knew that if her preference in internet browsers became known, she’d be the butt of all IT jokes. To be quite honest, she didn’t know why people hated the explorer. It was simple, sleek a
nd minimalistic, and its speed had nothing to do with it itself. Coupled with a good computer and a powerful internet connection, the internet explorer ran faster than Firefox or Chrome. The computer at her desk was the latest iMac with eight gigs of RAM and, as the best law-firm this side of London, they enjoyed a one gigabyte per second connection. She opened her favourite search engine and typed in ‘porcelain dolls, haunted.’ The first ten search results all revolved around contemporary horror movies and their Facebook fanfiction pages. She found what she was searching for in the arcane second page of Google search.

  A forum with numerous ‘experts’ on the topic opened up. The first comment caught her eye. It said that amongst all the items that can be haunted or possessed by ghosts, porcelain dolls and oil paintings topped the list.

  Reading all the similar comments confirmed her suspicions. If the dolls were indeed possessed, it meant that the ghost which she saw was also real. This meant that she had indeed heard the footsteps.

  “God help me,” she said under her breath.

  *****

  She had the house to herself all day, her parents had taken Kylie to the amusement park. They sent her a ‘selfie’ with the kid and texted her that they would be taking her to the cinema that evening to catch the premiere of Moana. Emma smiled as she read the text, and replied with a ‘thanks Mum. It means a lot’ and put her phone down. Today had been a good day. So far, there had been neither hallucinations nor ghastly interventions.

  I should make spaghetti and sauce and watch something funny, like a Ryan Reynolds rom-com to distract myself, she decided and went to the kitchen. She threw spaghetti in the pot and poured water over them, humming a tune as she did so. She lit a fire under the pot and went to the cabinet for tomato ketchup and soy sauce. As she went to open the cabinet, she felt a tingle of icy coldness creep from the nape of her neck all the way down to her spine.