Diane Jenkins and her daughter, Mallory, drove to their new
house in a California suburb. Mallory stared blankly out of the passenger
window with her deep blue eyes.
“This is going to be fun,” Diane said. “See, honey? There’s a
public pool, and a playground.”
Her daughter
sighed and continued to gaze out the window.
Poor kid, Diane thought. Not only does she have to get over the divorce, but I had to go and
uproot her life as well.
They had spent
most of the trip in silence, when they turned to the last street. Then Diane
noticed something, and she thought, Where
are the kids? The sidewalks are clean, streets are empty, and there’s no bikes or toys strewn around on the
lawns. She’d
grown up in a place just like this, so it seemed strange, but she dismissed the
feeling. I’ll
bet they’re all used to playing inside.
Diane pulled into
the driveway of their new house. “Here we are! Come on,
let’s see your new room.”
She hopped out of
the rental truck and bounded over to the front door, while Mallory trailed
behind. They both got in and stomped up the stairs to the master bedroom.
“This is my bedroom,” Diane explained. “Yours is right over
here.”
Mallory turned to
find a smaller bedroom with striped, pink wallpaper.
“It’s your favorite color!” Diane’s words sang a cheerful tune.
Mallory sighed.
Pink wasn’t her favorite anymore. She hadn’t told her mom about the boy
she shared her new favorite color with. Solemnly, she trudged back down the
steps, wishing that at the very least, the room could be blue.
Diane frowned.
She had hoped for a different reaction.
Mallory got home
from a walk to introduce herself to the neighborhood kids. Mom pushed her to do
it, and sadly, there weren’t many girls. The boys didn’t seem to like
her, either, and they all played baseball during the day. One of girls was a
five-year-old autistic, who seemed to be more interested in coloring than
anything else, and the other was a ten-year-old named Bianca, who had bunch of
handmade dolls and a neat little dollhouse. Mallory was a little old to be
playing with dolls, though.
“Is that you, Mallory?”
“Yeah, mom.”
Mallory could
smell dinner: something with hamburger meat in it. She walked into the living
room and threw herself backwards over the armrest of the couch. She looked to
the television, annoyed that her mother had yet to set it up.
“Did you meet anyone new?”
“Just the girl two houses down. There aren’t a lot of other
girls here.”
“That’s a shame. Is this girl nice?”
“Kinda, but she still plays with dolls.”
“Well, it wasn’t that long ago that you were playing with dolls.”
“Yeah, when I was in the third grade.”
“Maybe she’ll grow out of them soon. At least give her a chance.”
“Okay,” Mallory said with an exasperated sigh.
The next day,
when Mallory knocked on the door, Bianca’s mother, Joyce, invited
her inside.
“Would you like anything? Juice? Lemonade? Anything to eat?”
Joyce offered.
“Um, no thank you.”
“Well, okay. Bianca’s in the den. Just holler if you need
anything.”
Mallory was
slightly uncomfortable with Joyce’s generosity. She
strolled to the end of a hallway, past the living room and the kitchen,
glancing into a couple of other rooms. When she reached the den, Mallory saw a
few dolls and a dollhouse.
Mallory walked
further down the hall. “Bianca?”
She looked
through a door to the right, and found a room that looked similar to her mom’s,
which she guessed belonged to Joyce. Then Mallory opened another door down the
hall to reveal a trio of dolls sitting together looking up at her.
That’s
weird, Mallory thought.
“Mallory?” Bianca stood at the doorway to the den. “Is that you?”
“Yeah, I came over because I thought…” The idea of playing with
dolls just seemed so boring. “I thought I’d play with you.”
“Come on, I’m playing in the den. I just had to go find
Veronica. She was trying to make a break for it. See?” The yellow-haired, blue
eyed girl held up a red-headed, frowny-faced doll in a purple dress. “But she
didn’t quite make it.”
“Yeah, sounds like fun,” Mallory lied, following her into the
den.
“Let’s see. I have Veronica, and here’s Sarah, Allie, Terra, and
Monica. The other four are in my room.”
“Four?”
“Yeah, why?”
“When I was looking for you, I only saw three in your room.”
“What?”
“Well, I might be wrong. Maybe it’s under the—”
Bianca bolted to
her room, and Mallory heard slamming doors and drawers. Then, Bianca rushed
back into the den.
“I know where she is,” Bianca fumed, stomping past and into a
door at the far side of the den. “Aha! There you are, Carrie!” She walked out
with another doll in hand. “She always hides in there. Thinks it’s her room,
but I’ve got her.”
“Um, great,” Mallory mumbled.
Bianca sat by the
dollhouse and placed Carrie inside. “Here,” she said, handing
Mallory a doll, “You can play with Monica, and I’ll play with Carrie.”
Mallory didn’t
expect the chill that she got when she held Monica in her hand. Monica’s hair
was black felt, her eyes were pepper-grey beads, and she had peach-colored
cloth for skin. Touching the doll unnerved Mallory, but she didn’t give it much
more thought.
Bianca placed
Carrie on a chair in the dollhouse and pointed to a seat across the table. “That’s
where Monica sits. We’re getting ready for a special party.” She placed her
hand on her doll and spoke, “That’s
right. We’re going to welcome the new girl!”
Mallory quickly
rolled her eyes before Bianca looked back at her, smiling. Placing Monica in
her chair, Mallory spoke for her. “Ooh,
is there going to be cake at the party?”
Bianca took her
hand off of her doll. “You know there’s going to be cake. I
always make a cake.” She touched Carrie again, shaking her. “And we can hang out together while Bianca
makes it. We’ll have the real fun before she gets back.”
That was mean, Mallory thought, before speaking for
Monica. “Oh, Carrie, you don’t
mean that.”
Bianca spoke again.
“Monica, please. We
always have more fun without Bianca. She’s a weirdo, you know that.”
Mallory didn’t
say anything. Why is Bianca being so mean to herself?
“It’s okay, Monica. She’s just teasing me.” Bianca looked back
to Mallory. “Carrie always says that.”
Diane reached
Bianca’s
house, and Joyce showed her to the den.
“Hey,” she said. “How’s
it going?”
Mallory frowned
and held up a doll.
Leaning in to
Mallory’s
ear, Diane whispered. “Don’t worry, she’ll grow out of it. We’re going home
after I talk to Bianca’s mother. Okay?”
She walked over
to the living room where Joyce was sitting.
Joyce looked up. “Thank
you. Bianca’s been playing by herself since…” her voice trailed off.
“Since when?”
“There’s been a number of disappearances here over the last
couple of years. All girls.”
“Oh, my. Were any of the girls her friend?”
“All of them were.”
Diane’s
eyes widened. “What? Are you serious?”
Joyce turned her
head away, but nodded.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. It must be tough on you.”
“It’s okay. It’s okay, really. Just promise me that you’ll let
Mallory continue to come over and play here. Bianca’s been lonely. She’s torn
up about the girls. I just know it. She’s been hiding it, and I don’t want her
to be alone. Besides, it’s not safe outside.”
“I understand, but why not move away from here? If there’s a
chance Bianca might disappear like the others, why wouldn’t—”
“I watch her during the day. I work from the home so I’m always
here.”
“But what about the disappearances?”
“I keep a really good eye on Bianca, just like I will with
Mallory.”
“Well, I have been meaning to make arrangements for her during the day, but—”
Joyce’s
eyes lit up. “Perfect. She can stay here.”
“I don’t want to put you out or anything.”
“No, it’s fine. Please. For Bianca.”
“I have to think about it.”
“She didn’t seem that sad to me,” Mallory said, forking at her
dinner.
Diane took a sip
of coffee. “Some people have different ways of dealing with sadness.”
“So this means I’m going to be spending a lot more time with
Bianca, then,” Mallory’s voice oozed sarcasm. “Yippee.”
“Look at the bright side, Mal. This means more time to get her
off the dolls.”
“Nothing’s going to pull her away from those dolls, mom.
Seriously, there’s something weird about her. She has to know where they’re at,
at all times. If one of them goes missing, she looks around until she finds it.
And she loses her dolls a lot. It’s like they move around or something.”
Diane smiled. “Well,
you know how it is to lose something. Like your CD player, for instance. That
was the first thing you unpacked.”
“That’s different. I only have one CD player.” Mallory held up a
finger. “She has nine dolls. If I had nine of one thing, it wouldn’t matter to
me if one went missing.”
“She has that many?”
“Yeah and she obsesses over them. I know almost all of their
names, she talks about them so much.”
“Well, maybe she’ll burn out, soon.” Diane shrugged.
“Burn out?”
“Yeah, you know, get too much of her dolls at once. Get sick of
them.”
The next day,
since Mallory had met the neighborhood, Diane decided to do the same. Starting
with her next door neighbors, she introduced herself to an Italian couple,
hoping soon to have children of their own; and a single father with two sons.
Diane intended to
get to Bianca’s house to pick up Mallory, but she planned on making her way
around the block first. So she knocked on the door to the next house, and met
an older woman named Katherine. They sat out on her porch for a small chat.
“I met your daughter earlier,” Katherine said. “She seems like a
nice girl.”
Diane sat in a
rocking chair. “She really is. Do you have children?”
“Two boys and a girl,” she said, pouring Diane and herself
glasses of iced tea. “But as I told Mallory, they’ve grown up and moved away.”
“Thank you,” Diane took a sip from her glass. “A girl, huh? One
of the few, in this neighborhood.”
“Well, that wasn’t the case until about three or four years ago.”
“Oh, yeah. I heard about that.”
“From whom?”
“Um, from Joyce Karrington.”
Katherine sighed.
“Ah,
Karrington. She told you about the disappearances?”
“Yeah. What exactly happened?”
“Some went missing elsewhere, but most of them were here, in
this neighborhood. Then
there’s
Monica Jordan, the one who disappeared at the beach. Most of the adults think
she got pulled away by a riptide, but they still haven’t found her body. And
Terra Louis, she—”
“Wait, how do you know these things?”
“My son’s a police officer, and my husband, Bill, was a
detective. They were vexed over it.”
Diane was
confused. “Well, then, where did they go?”
“There’s no telling. They arrested some suspects, but Bill never
turned up any hard evidence, and the girls kept going missing.”
“What about the other girls?”
“I’ve seen your daughter walking around. Did she tell you about
the girls? Little Julie Morris doesn’t leave the house and Bianca Karrington…
she gives me a bad feeling. I wouldn’t let her around your daughter, if I were
you.”
Diane choked on
her tea. “Why would you say that?”
“I’m just a bit suspicious of her.”
“She’s a little girl!”
“Exactly.”
Diane stared at
Katherine, confused over the logic presented to her.
Katherine
continued, “Nine girls, and they were all exactly like her. Why didn’t she
go missing? What’s so different about her?”
“Can you hear yourself? Do you know what you’re saying?”
The old woman
could see that Diane didn’t believe her. She put on a smile and
laughed. “Oh, I’m sorry, what am I thinking, scaring you like this? I’m just
being paranoid.”
“Oh, that’s all right, I suppose it does sort of make sense, in
a weird way,” Diane said, finishing her tea. “But I have to go, gotta meet the
rest of the neighborhood.”
“Yes, of course,” Katherine replied. “It was nice meeting you.”
The next day, mom
had to go to work, and Mallory was to go to Bianca’s
house, again. She passed Katherine’s porch, where Katherine sat, drinking a
glass of iced tea. Katherine knew that Mallory was going to Bianca’s, and she
didn’t like it. She had watched at least six girls walking the same path as
Mallory. Something had to be done.
“Young lady!” Katherine shouted, “Young lady, can I ask you for
a favor?”
Mallory stopped
short of Bianca’s driveway. “Um, sure, uh, Missus?”
“Norris. Just call me Katherine, though.”
“Okay, Katherine, what do you need me to do?”
“Just sit up here with me for a bit. Do you want some cookies?”
“Sure.”
Katherine had
baked dozens of cookies and arranged them on a platter. She’d
make an ideal grandmother, if only her children would get to settling down
anytime soon. Mallory was wooed by this offer of cookies and time away from
Bianca. She grabbed three and sat down, and Katherine introduced herself.
“Look what I made!” Bianca showed off a new doll that bore a
cute resemblance to Mallory, with brown hair and deep blue eyes, along with
jeans and the t-shirt from yesterday. The doll sat on the floor, staring at
Mallory, who was put off by a strange smell.
“Um, Bianca?”
“It’s you!”
“No, well I mean I know it’s me, but it’s, um… Do I smell like
that all the time?”
“Oh, I had—”
A poster of
Justin Bieber swished off the wall.
Bianca quickly
spoke up, “Rusty tacks. I was drinking cherry Kool-aid when I was making
the doll, and I spilled my drink on it. I needed something to keep it from
staining, and my mom told me that if I put it in a box of garlic cloves, it
would—”
A shelf suddenly
fell from a nearby bookcase, along with a number of books, three dolls, and the
box of garlic cloves, which also spilled out and revealed that there were
purple flowers inside as well.
“—take the stain out.”
“What’s with the flowers?”
“I was hoping they’d make it smell better.”
“It didn’t work very well.”
“I know, but I asked my mom and all we need to do is air it out.
Let’s take it outside.”
“Oh, okay,” Mallory said, reaching for the doll, “Let’s do tha—”
A loud crash made
her stop short. Shards from a shattered floor-length mirror were all over the
ground. The top of the frame leaned against the bedpost it hit, and Monica, the
doll that Mallory had played with the day before laid on the bed, looking like
it somehow caused it. Mallory then looked at the collapsed shelf, remembering
the three dolls that lay there, and then to the poster. One of the corners had
torn, with the tack still stuck in the wall, while the other tack slipped free
and was in the poster, draped over yet another doll, which had one green eye
peeking out from under it.
This room is too weird, Mallory thought. I’d
rather not be here.
Bianca hadn’t
taken in the scene, as she was intently watching Mallory’s fingers outstretched
and about to clutch at her present.
When she took the
doll, Mallory had a slight tingling sensation where they had touched. She
thought, Did I feel something?
“C’mon!” Bianca exclaimed, “Let’s go outside.”
Mallory followed
Bianca out of the room, as the glass crunched beneath their feet, and Joyce met
them at the doorway to see what was going on. And even if Mallory wasn’t
exactly sure what happened, she knew one thing for sure. The doll didn’t smell
bad to her anymore.
As Diane was
leaving for work the next morning, she noticed Bianca playing outside by
herself. Diane stopped near Bianca and rolled her window down.
“Hey, there,” Diane yelled out the window.
Bianca looked
toward her.
“What are you doing out here by yourself? Isn’t it dangerous?”
“Mallory hasn’t come outside, yet. I don’t think she’s awake.”
Mal’s
been fighting me to let her stay home, Diane thought. I didn’t think she’d sleep in to get more time
away from Bianca, though.
Diane got out of the
car. “C’mon.
I’ll let you into the house. You go in there and wake her up.”
Bianca didn’t
try to wake Mallory. The girl hoped to take what she needed from Mallory when
she came over that day, but this was better, since she could get it faster. She
guessed that Mallory had trouble sleeping the night before. The first stage
made the others uneasy in the same way. It wasn’t the first time Bianca would
be stealing from a sleeping girl’s room.
She looked around
for the doll. The floors were clean, and it wasn’t sitting on the desk or
dresser. The girl turned to Mallory and realized that Mallory had slept with
it. Bianca smiled, but that didn’t stop her from taking the doll and a
well-used hairbrush from her nightstand.
Bianca went
through the ritual in her head, as she left the house and walked in front of
Katherine’s porch, where Katherine sat, frozen in mid-drink of iced tea,
staring at the items Bianca carried. Setting her glass down, Katherine couldn’t
shake the dreadful feeling that she may be too late. She saw Bianca enter
Mallory’s house empty-handed, and though Katherine hadn’t figured out what
Bianca was up to, she could only assume that the two things that she held were
Mallory’s and that Bianca had stolen them.
At noon Mallory
awoke to a splitting headache and the same garlic odor from before, along with
a burning smell. She stumbled out of bed and through her doorway. Her sight
narrowed to a tiny sliver. Afraid, she felt her way through the hallway and
stood, hoping to look for the cordless phone. Mallory took a step, but she didn’t
feel her leg. She leaned onto her other leg to keep balance, but that one was
also numb. When she fell forward, she rolled down the stairs, hitting her head
on the wall. Mallory felt it, but she didn’t feel the pain. Everything stopped
as the light went away.
“Hey, there, Mallory. Don’t be scared, now. It’s okay.”
The room was
dark, and Mallory couldn’t move.
“We’re going to be best friends forever. I know a lot of girls
say that, but we’re really going to be.”
Mallory got used
to the low light. She sat up to see that she was wearing a different shirt,
which she straightened out to see the pattern. It was the same shirt she wore
two days ago. Then she noticed her hands, knobby with stubs for fingers. She
held them out in front of her face, wiggled her fingers, and rubbed her skin,
but with no result; the feeling hadn’t returned.
She panicked,
trying to figure out where she was. Mallory couldn’t
breathe or blink her eyes. She distinguished that same poster on the wall,
taped where it was ripped before, the bookcase, once again holding all of its
shelves, and the frame of the broken mirror, standing empty.
“What’s the matter, Mal?”
Bianca’s
face looked warped like a fun house mirror, and absolutely gigantic. With one
big hand, she scooped Mallory up and carried her off. Mallory’s sight swung and
bounced with Bianca’s footsteps. Rolling and jumping, until Bianca held her
back up.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “It won’t just be us two…”
In a fraction of
a second, Mallory noticed her reflection in Bianca’s
humongous eyes, as her hand turned to show Mallory the dollhouse. Inside, nine
frowning dolls were engaged in a tea party, topped with a cupcake in the
middle. Bianca placed Mallory in an empty chair, between Monica and Carrie.
Mallory looked around, recognizing each doll by name, and spotting a
hand-written banner on the wall that said, “Welcome Home, Mallory!”
