Night of the Living Dolls

by Joel A. Sutherland

  She ignored that and asked again what I was holding.

  “Grandma’s journal,” I said. “I found it in the attic yesterday and hid it out here.”

  “Under the deck?” Lucy asked. “What if it rained?”

  “I didn’t think of that,” I admitted, looking thankfully up at the blue sky. “I found it in a hidden compartment in a trunk along with her school yearbook.” Now that I’d told my sister that much, I decided to tell her everything. “The trunk had six old dolls in it. There was a different name written on each and I found pictures of girls with the same names in Grandma’s grade two class. I don’t think they were hers.”

  “Why did she have them if they weren’t hers?” Lucy asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I looked away. My gaze landed on the back hedge.

  The hedge swayed in the wind and sounded eerily like quiet footsteps and whispers.

  “I wish she was here,” Lucy said.

  “Me too,” I said heavily.

  We sat in silence for a while, each wrapped up in our own thoughts.

  Something moved, a shadow on the other side of the hedge like the one I’d seen the day before. But this time, I could’ve sworn whatever had been there was peering through at us.

  “What was that?” Lucy asked.

  “You saw it too?”

  Lucy nodded.

  “Someone is spying on us,” I said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Who’s there?” I called out, surprising Lucy. She flinched a little when I spoke.

  Whoever was hiding on the other side of the hedge didn’t answer.

  I stood up and walked quickly across the backyard. I caught glimpses of the shadow winding through the branches and thick foliage as if it was keeping a close eye on us. But by the time I reached the hedge, the shadow was gone.

  Lucy joined me. “Did you see who it was?”

  I shook my head and pushed my hands through two cedars. The needles scratched and pricked my skin as I dug my hands in deep. I parted my hands and peered through the opening.

  On the other side of the hedge was … nothing and no one. Just the empty field I’d played in when I was younger.

  “Maybe it was an animal,” I told Lucy. I looked up at the clear sky. “Or maybe a cloud passing over the sun.”

  “Let’s make sure,” Lucy said.

  I didn’t really want to leave Grandma’s backyard, but I also didn’t want Lucy to think I was scared, so I nodded and slipped through the hedge. Lucy followed.

  The air on the other side was noticeably chillier. I shivered and felt goosebumps raise the skin on my arms. The hint of an odd smell tickled the inside of my nostrils. It smelled like a mix of grilled meat, copper pennies and—

  “Smoke,” Lucy said.

  “Excuse me?”

  She looked startled by my presence as if she’d forgotten I was still there. “It smells like smoke here.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t remember the field ever smelling like that before. “Someone must be barbecuing,” I offered. I looked toward the small houses down the road on Ashton Lane.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Lucy said, her voice full of doubt.

  She followed me into the middle of the field and we turned around, scanning the surroundings. As usual, there wasn’t much to see other than grass and weeds and rocks and the old stone fireplace in one corner of the lot.

  “No spies,” I said.

  Lucy agreed. “No animals either.”

  And no clouds, I thought. What had we seen? The field was too large and open for the source of the shadow to have run out of sight so fast. The only hiding place I could think of was the fireplace. I pointed at it and said, “Let’s look in there.”

  We walked slowly around the fireplace. Moss had spread over the surface of the stones like a green rash, but nothing was hiding behind or inside it.

  I placed my hand on the stone to lean into the mouth of the fireplace and look up into the chimney. As soon as my skin made contact, an image flickered through my mind. I saw a large and foreboding building, so vivid that it took my breath away. I flinched and pulled my hand free, and the vision disappeared. It had only been in my mind for a fraction of a second, such a short time that I immediately doubted it had been real.

  “What happened?” Lucy asked.

  “Nothing,” I said with a forced smile that I hoped looked reassuring. Nothing like that had ever happened before and I must’ve touched the fireplace dozens of times. I clearly needed more sleep. My head started to throb as if a headache was coming on.

  I wondered for the first time what had happened to the building that had been reduced to its fireplace. I surveyed the rest of the field, tracing an imaginary line starting at one side of the fireplace, around the field, and back to the other side. There was a pattern in the grass that might’ve been where the building’s walls used to stand. It was hard to pinpoint, but the grass on the “inside” of the building was darker and stood still, while the grass on the “outside” was a brighter shade of green and moved like a gentle rolling wave.

  Without thinking I leaned against the fireplace again and once more saw an image flash in my mind, but this time it wasn’t a building. Instead my head was filled with roaring flames. I immediately stepped back; the fiery image disappeared and my head began to pound. I moaned and doubled over.

  “Zelda?” Lucy asked, concerned. “You’ve got to tell me what’s going on!”

  “I will,” I said quietly. “Once this headache passes. But for now, don’t touch the fireplace.”

  The wind picked up once more, this time sounding like a voice that was both far away and uncomfortably close.

  Die … it seemed to say, the word drawn out to its breaking point. Die …

  “Do you hear that?” I asked.

  Lucy nodded.

  Die …

  “It sounds like …” I said.

  “Mom,” Lucy finished.

  I listened closer. Not “die” but “da.”

  “Zelda?” Mom called. It sounded like she was on the other side of a wide lake, her voice travelling cleanly over the smooth surface of the water. “Lucy?”

  “We’re here, Mom!” I shouted back. Lucy and I hustled across the field and passed through the hedge. I hid the journal beneath my shirt.

  “Zelda! Lucy!” Mom’s voice was much louder the moment we were back in Grandma’s yard. “Your father and I were worried sick. When we got back and found the house empty, we thought …” She stopped talking and wrapped us both up in a tight embrace.

  I laughed, partly from nervousness and partly from my mom’s overreaction. “We were only gone a minute or two.”

  Mom pulled back and stared at me quizzically. Now it was her turn to laugh nervously as she shook her head. “We came back more than half an hour ago and we’ve been looking for you the entire time.”

  I didn’t believe her until she pointed at her watch. It read 2:47. I’d stepped outside at two o’clock.

  Mom was right. Lucy and I had been gone for at least half an hour, if not a little longer. But that was impossible.

  I smiled and said, “Time flies when you’re having fun.”

  Mom smiled back but she looked a little concerned too.

  She couldn’t have been as concerned as me. Half an hour had passed in a matter of minutes. A small portion of my day was missing.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “You’ve been glued to your phone for hours,” Mom said after coming into the family room to get one of Grandma’s photo albums.

  “Just texting Camryn,” I said. Which wasn’t a complete lie. Camryn had texted me once a little earlier to tell me she was hanging out with Allan and Sam while they played a video game called Kill Screen that I’d never heard of. But it wasn’t the full truth either. I hadn’t texted her back — what would I say? K thnx?

  Instead Lucy and I had been scouring the internet for any clues or information about who used to live behind Grandma’s house and what had happened to the place.
The image of the building that had flashed in my mind the first time I’d touched the fireplace was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it.

  “It’s nice you and Camryn are still such good friends,” Mom said.

  I didn’t really know how to answer that, but luckily I didn’t need to. Mom left without waiting for a response.

  “Find anything yet?” Lucy asked for the hundredth time.

  I sighed. “No, nothing yet.”

  Lucy was sprawled out on the opposite couch. She got up and sat beside me. “Wait. Why are we searching for clues online?”

  “What do you suggest we do instead?”

  Lucy shrugged innocently and said, “What about Grandma’s journal?”

  “Of course!” I said. “Follow me.”

  “Where to?”

  “The attic,” I said. “I want to show you the trunk and the yearbook.”

  I grabbed the journal and led Lucy up to the third floor then pointed out the trunk in the corner.

  “So that’s where the dolls are, eh?” she said.

  “I hope so,” I replied. “Yes,” I added. I reached behind the trunk and pulled out the yearbook, which I handed to Lucy.

  Lucy flipped through it while I opened the journal and started to skim the entries.

  “Find anything important yet?” Lucy asked.

  “Not yet,” I said. Everything I’d read had been typical little kid stuff, like what Grandma wanted for her birthday and how much she loved her parents. But then I turned another page and an old, yellowed newspaper clipping fell out.

  “Bingo,” Lucy said.

  I picked it up off the floor and read the headline aloud: “Street Renamed in Honour of Headmistress Ashton, One of the Many Who Perished in School Fire.” The article was from 1954 and had two pictures, the first of a large stone building with the caption “Summerside College in 1940.” And then it all clicked.

  The image of the building I saw when I touched the fireplace was familiar because I’d seen a picture of it in Grandma’s school yearbook.

  “The fireplace on the other side of the hedge is all that’s left of Grandma’s school,” I said.

  “I wonder why she never told us that,” Lucy said.

  I wondered the same thing and tried to think of an explanation. Then something in the second photo caught my eye. It was a picture of the charred and smoking ruins of the school, with a caption that said the photo was taken the morning after the fire in 1952. But what caught my eye was the hedge — Grandma’s hedge, but the backside of it. It was much smaller and more well groomed. I pointed it out to Lucy because what caught my eye about it wasn’t actually the hedge itself, but something else.

  In front of it was the distinct outline of a dark, ghostly shadow.

  ***

  I couldn’t sleep that night. Not well, anyway. I tossed and turned, then slept for a bit, then tossed and turned some more, then slept a little more. This went on for hours. The consistent sound of Lucy’s deep breathing from the floor beside me got under my skin. Why couldn’t I sleep as peacefully as her? Sometime after 2 a.m. I gave up trying and turned on my phone.

  Camryn had texted again.

  hello???

  earth to zelda

  u forget ur phone or something?

  I sighed, then sent her a quick response.

  I’m ok - just busy

  I considered adding “And, you know, kind of preoccupied with the death of my grandmother,” but decided against it.

  I nearly tossed my phone aside in frustration, but instead placed it on the bedside table, on top of Grandma’s journal. I looked at the journal in the pale light of the moon. I hadn’t read any further, but it felt like the right time. I didn’t think I’d fall asleep, so I figured why not?

  The yearbook was from 1952, so I flipped through the journal pages until I found an entry dated with the same year about a third of the way through.

  I read it.

  Dear diary,

  Im sad. Today was bad. I took the cookies Mommy and me baked and gave them to the girls but they did not like them. They said they wood not eat them if they were dieing of hunger or if they were the last food on erth. Hattie took the bag and thru it on the ground and stomped on them and said no one could eat them becuz they were poisen. I asked her what she ment and she said they were poisen becuz they were made in my house and my daddy is the school care taker and we are poor, so the cookies wood be full of dirt and worms and other things humans cant eat.

  I dont know why they are so mean. I wish the girls liked me. I just want to be frends.

  I sat and stared at the page for a while, confused. I’d assumed Grandma and the girls were friends since they’d lent her their dolls, but the journal entry made it clear they were anything but friends. My confusion quickly gave way to sadness as I pictured Hattie stomping on the cookies Grandma had baked for her. Why would anyone be so mean?

  I reread the part about why Hattie said the cookies were poisoned.

  I asked her what she ment and she said they were poisen becuz they were made in my house and my daddy is the school care taker and we are poor, so the cookies wood be full of dirt and worms and other things humans cant eat.

  Grandma’s father was the school’s caretaker? I didn’t know that. Add it to the list.

  “I can see through anything,” a voice in the darkness said.

  I slipped the journal beneath the waistband of my pyjama pants and pulled my T-shirt over it, hiding it instinctively. Then I rolled over and checked on Lucy. She was still fast asleep, and in the crook of her arm was Sadie Sees. She’d held me to my promise to lend her the doll for the night.

  “You awake, Lucy?” I whispered.

  She didn’t answer. She must’ve jostled Sadie’s string in her sleep, like she’d done before.

  I rolled onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. Sleep, I pleaded with myself, sleep, sleep …

  “I can see through anything,” Sadie said again.

  I rolled over and looked at the doll. She stared back at me. Not only was it strange that Lucy triggered Sadie to speak in her sleep again, but Sadie never repeated the same expression twice in a row.

  It must’ve been some sort of glitch. I rolled over once again. I wasn’t going to fall asleep staring at my sister and my doll.

  “I can see …”

  It couldn’t be, not three times in a row. I turned to look as quickly as possible, and as soon as I locked eyes with Sadie Sees she finished her sentence.

  “… you, Zelda!”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It couldn’t be. It didn’t make any sense. Sadie Sees had looked me in the eye and said my name.

  Her eyes were so disturbing. They looked like real eyes — just like in that dream I’d had, but this was definitely not a dream.

  “I can see you, Zelda,” Sadie had said. And something about the look in those human eyes peering out of her doll face made me believe her.

  Suddenly I had an uncontrollable urge to laugh even though there was nothing funny about it.

  The doll stared at me silently from Lucy’s bed. There was an odd look on her face — it was like she was thinking.

  Lucy yawned and rubbed her eyes. “Zelda?” she said groggily. “What is it?”

  My doll, I thought. She said my name. She said she sees me.

  I couldn’t bring myself to say that out loud. A wave of nausea rolled over me.

  Lucy sat up quickly, as if she sensed that something was very, very wrong.

  Sadie tumbled off the bed and landed face down on the floor between me and Lucy.

  “What is it, Zelda?” Lucy asked, her voice frantic. “You’re scaring me.” She sprang off her bed as if by catapult, stepping on Sadie before leaping into my bed.

  We held each other. I kept my eyes on the doll.

  “She looked at me,” I said shakily. “She said my name.”

  “Sadie Sees?”

  I nodded.

  Sadie’s arms spun in their shoulder sockets
and she placed her palms on the floor beneath her chest.

  I flinched and Lucy buried her face into my neck, squeezing me tight. She couldn’t watch what was happening, but I couldn’t look away.

  Sadie pushed her small body up and got to her feet. She looked at me again with her unnaturally real eyes and her pleasant smile that appeared horribly out of place. For a moment we just stared at each other in silence before she spoke.

  “Don’t be scared,” she said. Her voice still sounded like Sadie’s recorded phrases, but her mouth moved in perfect sync with her words and her eyes no longer moved side to side as she spoke.

  “What do you want?” I asked, trying my best to keep my voice steady.

  The doll took a step toward me. “I want to be with you, Zelda. I want to be with Lucy too.”

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  She took another step closer and then paused. She looked left and right and raised a hand to her mouth. Her fingers curled and uncurled, and then she said, “I’m so sorry. This must be terribly frightening for you. I should have told you right away.”

  “Should’ve told me what?”

  Her plastic smile widened. “I’m your grandmother, Zelda.”

  For a moment I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t breathe, and I could hardly even think straight.

  “What?” I managed to say.

  Lucy pulled her face away from my neck and peered at the doll.

  Sadie nodded. “It’s me. Grandma,” she said. “I know I don’t look like myself …”

  That was an understatement.

  “But it’s true.”

  “Grandma?” Lucy asked in disbelief.

  Sadie nodded again.

  Lucy quivered, as if part of her wanted to give Grandma a hug and part of her still hadn’t gotten over the fear and shock.

  “What are you doing in Sadie Sees?” I shook my head, not completely able to believe that this conversation was taking place.

  “I …” Sadie spread her arms out to her sides and shrugged. “I thought this would be less shocking for you both than if I’d appeared in the night looking … well, like a ghost. I didn’t want to scare you, but now I’m not sure this was any better.”