CM SEARS
Hellfire, Bad Dolly!
The wizened, shaky shopkeeper frantically thrusts the prettily eerie, lifesize baby doll into my toddler’s arms, “Free for you today–Halloween special.” The navy sailor’s dress was cute, but one eye is coated with a filmy white cataract and the other bruised like this baby doll has been in a bar brawl. Perhaps it’s a smudge from the dingy, crowded second hand shop? Still, she has platinum blonde hair that looks almost human, and long lashes, and a pert painted-on mouth. Bemused, for there’s no “Halloween Special” sign in sight, I exit the store, and rub at the mark on the dolly’s eye, distractedly. Immediately, I stumble and fall to my hands and knees in the battered parking lot. The doll flies twenty feet away and lands bottoms up in a soiled umbrella stroller, hardly worth the $4 on the price tag. The beautifully intact brown leather shoes point up like deer antlers. Baby Lily is bawling and tries to crawl into my arms even before I am on my feet. My work jeans are torn, and there’s a gash in my knee. Blood trickles down and the cut is only a few centimeters from needing stitches. “Damn it!” I cry out, squelching the blood flow with a tissue.
“Sh…sh…sh…” I soothe Lily, “Mommy’s allright.” I think perhaps the new-to-us doll will soothe my girl. When I pick the doll up, there’s an eerie sensation of worms wriggling within. A mechanical cry emits from the toy’s innards. “Oooh!” I say, nervousness hedging out the pain in my knee. “She’s a crier!”
“What shall we call her?”
“Ursula!” Lily blurts out in an unusually clear voice.
“Very well then…Ursuala, meet Lily. C’mon now love, let’s get home to Papa.”
In the minivan on the way home, my little girl dropped the doll from her lap and kicked at it until it was flipped over again, belly down on the cheerio-strewn carpet. “Two for Tuesday” is playing on RIFF, and Ozzy Osburne’s just died. “I’m goin’ off the rails, on the crazy train,” Ozzy vamps, and Lily closes her eyes and sucks her thumb, looking content.
Later that night, cleaning up toys, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up at attention. I turn at a scratching sound, and am shocked to see the wretched doll, scrambling up a wall on all fours. Her eyes look more deranged than ever, and she actually blinks at me, long eyelashes opening and closing slowly. “Ben!” I call out, hoping my husband will wake up from Jeopardy in the den. Ursula shoots a look filled with daggers at Ben, who has just waltzed in from the den to get another PBR. “Oh my God,” he pales and clutches the doorframe. He falls like a tree to the floor, and I kneel down immediately to check his situation. Within minutes, his insulin pump kicks in, and Ben’s sugar is stabilizing.
Meanwhile the evil doll glares at me from the top corner of the ceiling, where she has collected spider webs around herself, or perhaps spun webs and spiders out of herself. I bat the cursed thing down with a dust mop, throw a trash bag over it, but still it’s kicking, writhing and crying on the floor. Rambo, our German shepherd whines and runs to his crate to take shelter. “Rambo! C’mon buddy,” I call to our “guard dog” in desperation, but he turns his tail to me in his crate. I pick up a crystal paper weight, and whomp it down over and over until the possessed doll stills. “Ben?” I whisper, “what should I do here?”
“Get rid of it honey.”
“What, me? Why me?”
Ben’s face contorts, “Who brought it in here?” and for just a moment I have flashbacks of the Shining: Jack Nicholson yelling “Here’s Johnny” while hatcheting his way through a locked door.
Tommy comes out from the den with his Gameboy in hand. “Mom?” he says looking fearful, “what’s going on?”
“A feral raccoon got into the house,” I stammer, thinking fast, “but I got this. Do me a favor, can you go into Lily’s room and play your game? Just for a few minutes?”
“Geez, Mom,” and he takes one look at the kicking brown boots now exposed from underneath the hefty bag and clutches his belly. He looks like he might barf. When will this horrid night end?
“Go! Sit in your M & M bean bag chair in Lily’s room, and don’t come out until Daddy or I come get you,” I instruct him, drill-sergeant style. He wastes no time tip-toeing to relative safety.
I grab a container of salt, whisk the bag off the deranged bad dolly, and douse the thing down. Smoke begins to rise off it, but the kicking stops. I wrapped it in another trash bag, and drag the thing back into the minivan, filled with existential dread. I drive a few miles down towards the railroad tracks, where there’s an abandoned ladder factory. I’ve seen a dumpster there, on my short commute to work at the college. I pull up to this setting, which looks like a Google image search for “urban blight,” and see an appalling sight– discarded toys everywhere. It looks like a Tyree Guyton installation without the whimsy and good cheer. Busted cars, deflated playballs, moldering Teddy Bears, moss covered blocks and bowling pins; even a torn Twister mat sags dejectedly from the dumpster, like a flag of surrender. But worse is the side of the building: toy soldiers, action figures, and a whole collection of eerie dolls –nasty Barbie’s and Monster High dollies included– hanging from the factory, where they are chained and tied to the scaffolding erected for workers to rehab the musty, rotting building. When I pick Ursula up, my stomach wrenches in protest, but I keep my resolve and hurl her into the massive dumpster. I leg it back to the aging Chrysler, and burn rubber getting out of there. My knee is throbbing and my hands are trembling. One eye is blurry and I look in the rearview and see a cloudy film growing over it like a leech. This is not a good development. I must have gotten salt in my eye, I muse, feeling spacy and detached.
I park in the back, and call from my cell into the house. Ben picks up, sounding shaken. He checks the doors and the windows before inviting Tommy out. Lily is safe in her crib, which assures me the coast is clear. But, when I corner the house, rounding the fence to the front door, she's on the stoop with a bloody smile. This hellfire bad dolly keeps coming back. She crawls towards me, and I hear the high-pitched mewl, “Mama, Mama” and the voice isn’t Lily’s.
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Photograph by CM Sears
