The Doll in the Driveway

It's Spook-tober, so I was in the mood to deliberately write a creepy tale. Dolls are scary, right?
 
There was a doll in the driveway.

Weird, yes. But not really shocking. I had seen little girls walking on the sidewalk, riding their bikes, skating in the street. There were clearly small humans nearby. Small humans that were likely to play with dolls. Small humans that might lose track of their toys, forget them when they were called home for lunch.

I stopped my car halfway up the drive. The doll had been forgotten, left behind, but that didn't mean it was okay for me to run it over. Someone loved this doll. Someone would miss it eventually and retrace their steps. I didn't want to be responsible for disappointment and possible devastation.

I left the car running as I got out to move the doll and clear a path to the driveway. The doll was warm in my hand, having soaked up all of the late afternoon sun. It was a floppy doll, understuffed, loose and shifty in my hands. As I lifted her up, her ceramic head and dark brown curls fell back. It looked so uncomfortable that I found myself adjusting my hands to support her head. Her head was heavy, especially compared to her almost empty body. Caught in my hand, she was positioned to look up at me. Dark brown eyes that tipped open and closed with the bobbing of her head.

I didn't like her looking at me. I tipped her head back to force her eyes closed and turned to lean her up against the front step. I wanted her to be super visible when her best friend came back to retrieve her. The eyes popped open again as soon as she was upright. It's just a doll, I told myself. No reason to feel weird under her stare. But I did. It felt strange, and I had to force myself, but I turned my back on her and walked back to my car.

As I pulled into the garage, my eyes were drawn back to her. She was staring at me, at my car. I hit the gas, in a hurry to get out of her gaze. I swear her head was turned toward the street, not the driveway, when I set her down. It's just a doll, I said again, out loud this time. There was no way she turned her head to watch me.

I closed the garage door just in case. I locked the door that separated the kitchen from the garage and checked the front door. I told myself it was just to make sure the little girl didn't wander in when she came to retrieve the doll. I might have believed myself.

Binge watching reality TV helped me forget about the doll. Until I turned off the TV and tried to settle into bed with a book. The little brown-haired doll child kept popping into scenes of the story she had no business inserting herself into. She interrupted a battle. Then a make-up make-out scene. That was too creepy to bear. I caved and closed the book, and took a pain/sleeping combo pill in an attempt to make her disappear.

Sleep eventually stole me. The creepy she-doll followed. Dreams of making coffee were twined with the doll's eyes popping open as she turned her head to look at me.

I woke up with a sleeping-pill hangover, feeling as if I hadn't slept at all. It was more than an hour before my alarm was set to go off, but there was zero chance of me falling back asleep. Again, I pretended that the doll on the driveway had nothing to do with my issues. I pushed the thoughts of her aside and drug myself through the shower, into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee. Only when I had a cup of sweetened caffeine in my hand did I allow myself to go peek out the window.

Impatient, I headed straight from the coffee pot to the front window and shoved the heavy blue curtain aside.

She was gone. No floppy body leaned against my front step. Thank God.

Every cell in my body relaxed. Deeply satisfied by what I did not see, I took a hesitant drink of flaming hot coffee. It was the best coffee ever. I turned to go tuck myself into the corner of the couch to enjoy the rest and try to gear myself up for the day ahead.

She was sitting in my spot.

The mug slipped from my hand, cracking as it hit the hard floor, splashing scorching hot coffee over my toes. I screamed. The sound made the doll turn her head to look at me. It also made me wish I hadn't dropped my coffee. I wanted something in my hand to hurl at the creepy little doll-child. I wanted something to make her stop moving. I wanted something to make her go away.

I swear she raised an eyebrow and one corner of her mouth twitched up in an evil grin as she started to move her legs, her arms. She was trying to climb down out of my cozy spot.

I stepped away. My back hit the edge of the window sill. I was out of room. She was almost to the floor. If she made it, I imagined she would be able to dart across the floor to me. An image of her reaching for my legs, her mouth opening into a bloody, angry maw flickered in my mind. I screamed again.

Then I realized I still had a moment before her feet got to the floor. I was wasting time. I forced myself to look away from her, to turn my body and run. I was halfway down the hall before my brain caught up and I realized I made the stupid, trapped-in-a-horror-movie choice. The front door was closer. I should have gotten the hell out of the house instead of moving toward a space where she could trap me. There was no door to the outside on this side of the house.

I did the best I could to recover from my stupid decision. I slammed and locked the door to my bedroom. If nothing else, I had a solid door between us. Between my legs and her gnarly little teeth. Which I hadn't really seen, but was totally convinced she had.

What were my options? My cell phone was sitting on the table next to my bed. I could call someone. 911. Or Jessica. But what would I say? There is a doll holding me hostage in my house. There was no way to explain what was happening to someone over the phone. And I couldn't just ask someone to come over. They wouldn't be prepared, ready to defend themselves from the deadly doll.

So no calling for help. I would have to find a way out of this. A way around her.

I looked at the bedroom window. Technically, I could use it to get out. The problem was what was waiting on the other side. Right under my window was a cluster of rose bushes. Rose bushes that I had neglected for too long. They were hugely overgrown, a tangle of branches and thorns waiting to pierce me like a shish kabob. I wasn't that desperate to get out. Not yet anyway.

I moved back to the door and pressed my ear against the wood. I was careful to keep my feet far away from the narrow gap at the bottom. I wasn't sure if her skinny little arms could fit through, but I wasn't going to risk it. I held my breath to make the room truly quiet. I didn't hear anything. But she was a small, floppy little doll. I was sure she could be stealthy as she crept down the hall. I waited, hoping to hear anything, any sound that would tell me where she was, even if it was right on the other side of this door.

Nothing.

I was tempted to throw the door open and make a run for it. But she could be right there. She could have made a stop by the kitchen to grab a knife.

I stepped away from the door and moved into the attached bathroom. Somewhere in one of these drawers I had to have a mirror. A small one that I could slide under the door, allowing me to see where she had gone. By the time I found one, the bathroom floor was a disaster. I had made so much noise digging that it occurred to me she could have picked the lock and made her way in. She could be waiting on the bed for me.

I crawled across the floor and peeked around the bathroom door jamb. The door that led to the hall, the door that I had closed and locked, was open. I stopped breathing. I couldn't breath, couldn't make the muscles move to pull in air. I could make my eyes move. I scanned the room, expecting her to pop out at me. When I wasn't attacked, I could finally draw in a breath.

For a moment, I considered closing myself in the bathroom, putting a door between her and me. Again. But from the bathroom, I had no outs. No phone. No windows. Just me. In a bathroom. Until the end of time, possibly.

I also considered standing and making a run for the door. Turning my back on the bedroom, on the bed and the hidden space underneath it, however, was not happening. No way was I leaving her an open, undefended path to sink her needle-teeth into the back of my legs.

I had to find out where she was. I had to find a way around her. Which meant looking under the bed.

I sat in the doorway, staring at the bed. I wished I could will the stupid plaid bed skirt to lift up into the air, show me what or who was hiding underneath. It did not move.

I started to move across the carpet, crawling on all fours, ridiculously aware of every swishy-crunch of my hands and knees crushing the carpet fibers. There was no way she was going to be surprised, no way she would miss the fact that I was moving toward her hiding spot.

Halfway to the bed, I froze, convinced that she wasn't under the bed at all. She was clearly in the closet, peering out through the slats at my exposed back as I moved away, oblivious to her impending pounce. I could go check the closet, but then my back would be to the bed. I could back out of the room into the hallway. But what if she never came in the room at all? What if she just nudged the door open to trick me into coming out?

Commit, Sara. Talking to myself again. I refocused on the bed skirt, restarted my momentum across the carpet.

I was going to puke. I was going to pass out. I was going to pee on the floor like a terrified, over-excited little puppy.

I held it all in, held it all together. Finally close enough to touch the skirt, I paused again. I just wished I could see her, wherever she was. She'd be so much easier to deal with, so much easier to avoid. To escape.

I was trying to escape from a doll. This was ridiculous. I was a big girl. I needed to pull up my big girl pants and just deal with the damn problem. I reached out and flipped up the skirt.

She didn't jump out at me. Nothing jumped out at me. With my big girl pants firmly in place, I scrunched down and tipped my head to the side, determined to see anything that was lurking under the bed.

There she was. Sprawled a foot or so from the foot of the bed, her arms and legs thrown out as if she had fallen from a great height. She wasn't moving at all. I waited, expecting her head to turn, her body to roll toward me, her limbs to scurry her in my direction. Zero movement, not even a flinch.

I wanted to poke her. But from the side where I was half-laying on the floor, I couldn't reach her. Not without crawling under the bed with her. Not happening. I took a deep breath and scrambled around the corner of the bed to the spot where she must have crawled under. I didn't let myself pause before I moved the skirt to reveal her. She was still still. Still floppily spread out. So I poked her. No reaction.

I pinched her red fabric shoe and pulled her toward me, watching her eyes as she slid across the floor. They stayed tightly closed. She stayed locked inside the doll body, refusing to reveal herself to me again. Honestly, it bothered me. I wanted to see her, wanted to have a chance to really face her.

With her just lying there, all of the tension drained out of my body. I couldn't physically maintain that level of vigilance, that level of panic. So given this moment of calm, it all fell out of me. She was just a doll, lying still on the floor where I could clearly see her.

I turned and sat with my back to the foot of the bed. After a moment's hesitation, I picked up the doll, held her under her arms in both of my hands, her eyes level with my own. They had drifted open as I lifted her. We stared at each other. Well, I stared at her. She did nothing. Because she was just a doll.

I closed my eyes and blew out the last tendrils of tension. That 's when I felt it. The tightening of the little doll body. I slowly opened my eyes. She was looking back at me. Really looking.

She lunged, giving me only a second to wish I had just run her over.

If you're still in the mood for spooks, I have a short story on Amazon, free with KU!