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Where Is She?
She turned to look at me … again. “Where is she?” Her voice too low, too dark, too gravelly from years of silence, or possessed by an icy decayed spirit.
My throat constricted. I could feel my heart pulsating behind my eyeballs. A single bead of sweat dripped down my temple and dropped onto my trembling fist.
I said nothing.
“Where is she?” the doll repeated in a more menacing tone.
In my periphery I felt the power of the claw hammer I’d set out onto the counter before my girlfriend left for her mother’s. The hammer silently called out to me, “Do it. Do it now.”
Porcelain can’t be alive I’d told myself the first time I’d been left alone with the antique doll and saw it move. My girlfriend brought the haunted thing into our home and said it was her great grandmother’s. And then its damn head started swiveling to watch me when I was home alone.
Maybe somebody hexed the hateful toy. Whatever its voodoo origins, I wanted it gone.
With a swift move I grabbed the hammer, raced across the room, and grabbed the bitch by its neck so tightly my fingers cramped. I could hear the demonic thing trying to scream, but I forced its face onto the cold kitchen counter and brought the hammer whizzing through the afternoon air down onto its tiny skull. It exploded into a thousand tinkling pieces.
Breathlessly and with vindication oozing in my voice, I said, “Maybe you didn’t hear me when I said ‘scary dollies die’.” My too low, too dark, too gravelly voice sounded triumphant in clearing away the Victorian horror.
The mess was all over the kitchen, so I bagged it up, put it in the trunk, and drove to the woods. I wanted everything gone when my girlfriend came home. Maybe she wouldn’t notice.
I dug a hole, pulled the bag from the trunk, heaved it into the Earth, poured siphoned gasoline over it, lit it afire, watched it burn through heat waves, and smelled the acrid smoke. Then I buried the ashes.
It was over. No more creepy doll.
When I pulled into the driveway at home, the night was lit up with dozens of flashing red and blue lights and the sounds of police radios. I found 20 cop cars waiting around my house. I could see my girlfriend’s mother crying in the yard. She stood behind a dozen cops with guns pointed at me.
One asked, “Where is she?”
