New Fears--New horror stories by masters of the genre

by Mark Morris

  As with most hauntings, and every good ghost story, the events within the dollhouse began as seemingly harmless, only somewhat suspicious, occurrences throughout the home. But, also like every good ghost story, these events escalated quickly. Elvie watched the entire arc unfold from a child’s chair, her chair, the red plastic seat she occupied every day after school, impatient to know the fate of Ethan, his parents, and their Great Dane. Throughout the course of the haunting, Elvie’s parents recognized the worry in their daughter and made the usual attempts to make her happy. They bought her things. They took her places. They read stories, they joked, and they coddled. But the incredible events occurring in Elvie’s bedroom never crossed the boundaries of the dollhouse, and Elvie never felt it necessary to tell Mom and Dad of the haunting.

  Years later, as many as twenty-five, Elvie May would tighten up when her husband, Eric, asked her to tell their friends her ghost story. He’d egg her on, incapable of comprehending the impact the experience had had on Elvie’s understanding of the world outside the dollhouse. Tell them about the Smithsmiths, Eric would say. Tell them the story that took place inside of a house inside of a house. Often Elvie would turn red when Eric did this. Sometimes she hated him for it. Not because Eric was so out of line for suggesting she share, but because the images, what she’d seen take place inside the House of the Head, would return again to vivid, vibrant life, causing her to stare off into space, and shake her head no.

  No no no…

  * * *

  “Jesus, Randy,” Marsha said. “It’s nicer than ours.”

  “It is,” Randy smiled, crouched beside the pink-and-white monstrosity. Eight bedrooms. Three baths. An attic. A lounge. A library. Furnished fully, of course. When you split the thing open it was like looking into a museum. “She’s gonna love it.”

  Marsha noted the boyish sparkle in her husband’s eye. There wasn’t any talking Randy out of a thing when his eyes shined so. Still, she tried.

  “You spoil her.”

  Randy looked to her, smiling.

  “I do.”

  “Well I don’t know that you should.”

  “And why not? She might grow up liking her parents? What an awful position to put her in.”

  Marsha rolled her eyes.

  “Most children rebel,” she said. “So while you expect, and even plan, on her adoring us, she’s going to be running for the streets before we can say teenager.”

  For a beat, Marsha thought she had him. A brief passage of terror rose to the surface of his eyes, then sank again.

  “Look at it.” He pointed to the incredible dollhouse. “It’s all ready to go.” Then he stepped to his wife and laced his hands on her shoulders. “Marsha, I want you to remember what it was like to be a little girl.”

  “Randy.”

  “Nu-uh… hear me out. And I want you to really imagine how you would’ve felt if you came home from school to find… this all set up in your bedroom.”

  Marsha crouched beside it. She studied the rooms. Then she looked to the figurines Randy had picked out.

  “Only three people in all that house?”

  “Just like us. And we won’t add any more. That way she won’t ask for a brother or sister.”

  “It’s nice,” Marsha finally agreed.

  “It is,” Randy smiled, eyes sparkling. “It absolutely is.”

  * * *

  Elvie named the boy right away. Ethan was the name of Ashley Ford’s older brother. Such a nice guy. So, it was Ethan, Mother, Father, and Dane (the dog’s name was chosen after Elvie’s own dad told her what kind of dog it was.) Dane was great. Dane was big. As big as Ethan was. The dog stood higher than the dollhouse’s kitchen counter and could easily fill one of the beds in the many bedrooms. He was black all over and his muscles showed in the right light and his tail was perked up like his ears, as if Dane was constantly aware of the presence of the others in the house.

  And yet, despite the magnificent dog, Ethan was clearly the star of the house for Elvie.

  He wore dark-blue pants and a red sweater. His brown hair wasn’t all he had in common with Ashley Ford’s brother; Ethan had the same kind eyes. According to where she placed him in the house, he could even look like he was smiling. Like his cheeks were actually wrinkling up into a little smile. He had a watch, something Elvie wanted for herself. And his black shoes never left any marks on the gorgeous wood floors of her pink-and-white dollhouse.

  Ethan’s mother probably had the neatest outfit of the three. Tight yellow pants, an orange sweater, and green socks that showed just above her shoes. Elvie’s own mom called Ethan’s mother’s hair a “flip.” A green headband kept that flip in place.

  It was “a real modern look,” Dad had said. And Elvie knew it to be true.

  Ethan’s father was equally of the era: bell-bottom jeans, a button-down white shirt (open just where his chest hair began), and round glasses. Not quite hippies, Mom told Elvie, but certainly with the times. Ethan almost looked conservative by comparison.

  The family was a lot of fun.

  What was not fun was picking Ethan’s bedroom. There were so many of them to choose from. Because the master bedroom was for Mother and Father, Elvie had seven remaining rooms to choose from. But the longer Elvie took in deciding, the more the other rooms in the house seemed viable places for Ethan to sleep. On the pool table in the first lounge, for example. On the ironing board in the laundry room. And what was wrong with the green rug covering most of the floor of the library? Ultimately it didn’t matter, Elvie knew. Her dad had told her, This house is yours, Elvie. That means you do whatever you want to with it.

  For this, Elvie could let Ethan sleep on the roof. And yet, she finally decided to place Ethan’s bed in the den, giving him free run of the entire first floor of the dollhouse.

  It felt like the right choice. Elvie would like a room like that.

  And so life in the dollhouse began this way, and coincided with Elvie’s return to school. It was an abnormally cold September (years later, Elvie would begin her telling of it that way, It was a cold September, I remember that, when she told her then fiancé, Eric, about the House of the Head) but it wasn’t until the real winter hit that things became troublesome inside. Until then, Elvie didn’t always play with her dollhouse. She played with many toys and only when she tired of them would she rearrange things inside Ethan’s house.

  Often she’d give Mother a book and place her in an elaborately embroidered chair only inches from Father who tended to the fire. She’d put Ethan by an open refrigerator, Mother at the top of the stairs, Father at the bottom, as though looking for their son. It was great fun to use Dane as a foil. Elvie quickly learned that she could put the dog in the bathroom, close the door, and set Mother, Father, and Ethan outside it, looking to one another for what to do.

  Despite the blooming, merciless cold outside her own house, Elvie found life warm within Ethan’s.

  She also discovered that, despite the extremely fertile ground, she didn’t enjoy placing toys inside the dollhouse, toys that didn’t belong. A pony in the study might be funny, but it was also somehow irreverent. There was an independence to the dollhouse from the very beginning, and Elvie respected it devoutly.

  Life carried on. And Elvie watched it from the red plastic chair in her own large bedroom.

  Ethan woke up in the den, ate dinner with Mother and Father in the dining room (sometimes in one of the extra bedrooms when Elvie was feeling a little bored), played pool in the lounge, and cooked himself eggs in the kitchen. Sometimes she let him stay in bed all day.

  Michigan’s winter had arrived, whether or not the calendar said so. At five below zero, the district had considered canceling school; an opportunity, Elvie saw, to play with her house. But, disappointment of all disappointments, the elementary show went on, and Elvie was forced to wear the full gamut of winter clothing: two shirts (one long, one short), a sweater, gloves, hat, jacket, moonboots and scarf. She watched heavy snowfall outside her classroom
window. She saw the older kids making angels in the yard at recess. And the bus ride home was a slow one.

  Once home, Mom helped her out of her layers, and Elvie proceeded straight upstairs to her bedroom, where the dollhouse, split open on its hinges, still occupied the drawing table, leaving no space for anything besides.

  Something in the living room of Ethan’s house caught her eye.

  Elvie crossed her bedroom and knelt before it. She frowned, thinking at first that it was slobber, something Jack (her Jack Russell) had done to the house. She reached for it with a mind to wipe it clean. Then she pulled her hand from the house quickly.

  It was a head.

  The head of another figurine, slightly bigger than Ethan’s head, sat facing her on the living-room couch. She faintly recognized the features; the wide expressive eyes, the sun-bleached discoloration, the bald spots where its hair had eroded. The head once belonged to a body, Elvie knew, but she couldn’t remember which.

  Because the head was positioned on the edge of the couch, she could see the red plastic interior exposed at the open hole of its bodiless neck.

  Elvie hadn’t put the head inside the house. Yet, there it was. On the couch. Facing her.

  The head.

  Elvie quickly searched the rest of the house and found Mother and Father sitting on the edge of their bed together. It looked like they were discussing something serious. Elvie had seen Ethan’s mother’s posture before when her own mom was lost in thought. Worry. Concern. It looked like Ethan’s father was trying to console her.

  Downstairs, in the den, Ethan was sitting up in bed. His bed sheet was pulled up to his eyes. It looked to Elvie like he was scared.

  Had Elvie placed them this way?

  She gasped, quietly, when she found Dane standing in the doorway to the living room, his snout pointed directly at the bodiless head with the red neck set on the center of the couch. Elvie could almost hear the dog growling.

  “Elvie!”

  Elvie jumped at the sound of her mom’s voice and she accidentally kicked the drawing table that held Ethan’s house. The head on the couch fell to the living-room floor and rolled toward her. It came to rest on its side, facing Elvie still.

  “Let’s get a move on, Elvie! We’re gonna miss the previews.” Previews? Distantly, Elvie knew what her mom was talking about; tonight was movie night. There was a good one playing at the Americana downtown. But Elvie couldn’t take her eyes from the head that faced her.

  She looked up to the master bedroom and saw that Ethan’s father was now facing the bedroom door. As if he had heard something in the house.

  “Elvie! Why don’t you answer me?”

  “Coming, Mom!”

  Elvie looked to Ethan, saw he was still mostly hidden, the bed sheet still up to his nose. Dane still stood at the living-room door, but his snout now breached the threshold.

  Elvie shook her head, no, because she wasn’t sure what else she could do. Whatever she’d seen, the slight alterations in the figurines, Ethan’s father and Dane, must have been tricks of the light. She’d learned about tricks of the light in the kindergarten play. Elvie had played a carrot and Mrs. Dunbar had given Elvie her first taste of show business.

  Your costume may appear yellow now, but under the stage lights you’re gonna be as orange as a balloon.

  “Tricks of the light,” Elvie said to herself.

  “Elvie!”

  Finally, she looked away from Ethan’s house and then quickly left her bedroom and headed downstairs.

  But the look in Ethan’s eyes, the bed sheet to his nose, remained lodged in her mind.

  Halfway down the stairs she turned and ran back up. She flew across her room and reached into Ethan’s house and took the balding head from the floor.

  She tossed it beyond the drawing table, beyond her dollhouse, to the shadowed corner of her bedroom, where other toys and bright clothes lay in a heap.

  It made a soft plunk as it landed.

  “Fine, Elvie. We’re not going.”

  “Coming!”

  She forgot all about Ethan’s house at the movies. She laughed and Mom laughed and they both agreed the movie was a good one. She didn’t think about the head or Ethan or the dollhouse at all. Not until they got back home. Not until Elvie raced upstairs and rushed to her red chair and saw that the head was lying on the floor in the living room still, its wide painted eyes staring into her own.

  * * *

  At school the next day, Elvie couldn’t wait to get home. She found herself worrying about Ethan, his parents, and Dane. She hadn’t removed the head before falling asleep the night before. Instead, she’d laid on her belly, feet against the headboard, and watched the dollhouse from across her bedroom. Surely Ethan or his parents would move. They’d already done so once. Or twice. Maybe Elvie would catch them.

  She fell asleep this way, and when she woke, she found they had moved after all. In fact, they’d moved a lot.

  All bundled up and hating the fact that she had to leave, Elvie took stock from her red chair.

  Mother and Father were halfway down the stairs, Father first, an arm behind him, on Mother’s shoulder. They were both looking to the swinging door at the foot of the stairs, the doorway to the kitchen. Ethan was on the other side of the kitchen, standing in the dining room, his ear to the second kitchen door.

  The head was on the kitchen table. Tiny forks and knives were on the kitchen floor. The red at the base of its neck showed dull enough to look purple in the early morning sun through both Elvie’s window and the windows of Ethan’s house.

  Elvie looked for Dane.

  She found him outside the dollhouse, his plastic snout touching the kitchen window, looking inside at the head.

  “Who let you out?” Elvie asked.

  She looked back to Mother and Father on the stairs. Had they heard something? It certainly seemed like they had. Father was protecting Mother. Ethan was listening for more. And Dane wanted back in.

  The eyes of the head seemed to be wider than they were last night, as though watching both doors to the kitchen at once.

  Elvie reached a gloved hand into Ethan’s house. Then she paused. Last night she’d removed it. And yet, here it was.

  “Do something,” she said, staring at the figurines, the people of Ethan’s house. She watched them for a long time. As long as she could. She tried to make sense of the silverware scattered on the kitchen floor.

  Elvie’s bedroom door creaked open and she screamed as Jack raced across the carpet to her.

  “You scared me!” she said, gripping her dog by the scruff of his neck and rubbing her nose against his. Jack licked her and Elvie smiled and then Jack got bored of being in her arms and he wiggled out of them and raced out of the bedroom, as quickly as he had appeared.

  Elvie looked back to the house.

  The head was no longer in the kitchen. Now it was upstairs, on Mother and Father’s bed.

  And yet, Mother and Father were still halfway down the stairs, looking toward the kitchen door. And Ethan was still leaning against the other kitchen door. All of them still listening, waiting to hear more of whatever had worried them in the first place.

  But Dane… Dane was no longer at the window. Dane was nowhere to be seen at all.

  “Elvie!” Mom called from downstairs. “School!”

  Elvie got up and walked around the drawing table, walked to the back of the house.

  There she saw Dane seated on the drawing room table, looking up to a second story window. Elvie knew it was the master bedroom window. The room the head was in.

  “Who let you out?” Elvie asked him again.

  But she imagined she must know who let him out, because her own Mom and Dad let Jack out all the time for the same reason.

  Dane must have been barking too much. Must have been keeping everybody awake. Elvie imagined him trying to get their attention: look look, come come, there’s something in the house with us, something that doesn’t belong.

  Elvie w
alked back to the front of the dollhouse and felt herself grow hot in her winter clothes. What she saw scared her deeply. Mother was on her knees, picking up the forks and knives. Father was leaning over the sink, his plastic head close to the kitchen window. As if looking or listening for Dane. Ethan stood in the kitchen, too, looking up to the ceiling.

  Elvie followed his sightline, through the ceiling, to the second story, to the master bedroom, to the head upon the bed.

  Elvie thought about calling out to her own parents. Thought about showing them. Instead she left her bedroom and closed the door behind her. She’d have to see what happened next when she got home from school.

  * * *

  What happened next was bad.

  Elvie had done a good job of focusing at school. She didn’t think much about the dollhouse. Laughed with her friends, listened to her teacher, made a partial snowman on recess. It wasn’t until the bus ride home that she really started thinking about Ethan and his family, worrying about them a great deal.

  They were being haunted. That much Elvie knew. A dead doll was haunting a family of living ones. A broken figurine had come back, somehow, got into the house, and wouldn’t leave.

  What did it want?

  Only to scare the Smithsmiths?

  Elvie had come to call them the Smithsmiths that very day. She’d referred to them by name at school, talking with Jenny Penn. Unable to keep mum, she’d told Jenny that she had a great dollhouse at home. When Jenny asked what the name of the family was who lived inside, Elvie stuttered.