The air around Preston Street seamed completely dead. No cars travel on its pavement during the middle of the day. From the country fields to the next house a quarter mile away, no one was ever around, except one person. "One, two, three, four," five year old Annabelle Vandelson counted to herself as she bounced her new ball up and down the driveway. She never notices how empty her street was during the day, as if the sense of seclusion were normal.
After a few minutes, she dropkicked the ball into the big bushes by the fence. "La, la, la!" she sang to herself as she skipped the edge of the yard. Once she reached the bushes, she bent down to search for her toy. But it wasn't there. She crawled under for a closer look. After a quick glance left and right, it seemed to be nowhere. After a few seconds, Annabelle decided to crawl along the fence to look. She crawled slowly to check under each bush. It takes a while since the whole yard was surrounded by large bulky bushes.
She crawled the whole side of the fence to the end of the backyard. Turning at the corner of the fence, she crawled along the edge of the backyard, which was lined with even bigger bushes. She checked under every bush, but hoping to find her ball. "Where is it?" she asked out loud. She was almost ready to cry when she felt something different under one of the bushes. Her eyes widened at her discovery. It was a very old, worn out doll that looked at least one hundred years old.
"Mommy! Mommy!" she ran to the house carrying her discovery. She ran into the house without closing the door in excitement over her new toy. Annabelle's mom was busy washing dishes in the kitchen. She looked back at Annabelle a bit startled.
"What is it, Annie?" she asked.
"Lookit this new toy I found in the bushes!" Annie practically screamed in excitement. "Isn't she pretty?"
Her mother looked a bit shocked upon sight at the doll. Apparently, at age five, Annie didn't have very good conception of what was 'cute'. The doll's cloths were all worn out and stained with brownish blots. The hair was tangled within itself. There was a large stitch across the forehead. The color of the whole doll itself was half-worn out. The eyes had a vacant look; they were all white and void of any life.
Annie's mother almost seemed mesmerized by its vacant expression. She spaced out for a few seconds. She quickly gained consciousness and set the doll on the table. "That's nice dear," she replied and walked to the living room couch. She suddenly seamed tired. Within seconds, she quickly drifted into a deep sleep on the couch.
Annie decided to leave the doll on the table and play with it later. She still wants to find her ball.
At around three o' clock, the door opened and a tall figure entered. By now Annie's mom was awake again but has decided to just ignore the doll and its empty eyes. Still sitting on the couch she looked to see who was at the door. "Oh, hi honey," she greeted the figure. It was her son, Curt Vandelson.
Curt was quit easily the largest member of the family. At 6'4", he easily towered over his mom by a foot and this was a fact she could never quite get comfortable with. Despite his rational attitude and quiet temperament, he just seemed like a giant monolith to her in the past two years when he reached his current height. She hated to stand by him. She was afraid of his new size and strength. She tends to keep her distance and doesn't say much to him.
Curt slowly walked to the kitchen for a drink. After opening the fridge with his immense, powerful hand, he grabbed a water bottle and chugged it within seconds. After throwing the smashed up plastic bottle in the trash, something caught his eye. He saw the old doll on the table. Its dead eyes caught his and in that moment, he seemed to see something in its cold face. The doll seemed to have power over him; however, it wasn't the fatigue his mother felt earlier. It seemed, to him at least, that the doll wanted to speak to him.
This only lasted for a few seconds; no sooner had he started to look, Annie ran inside. "Hey Curt," she shouted with glee. "You like my new dolly? I think I'll call her Connie."
"Oh yeah, sure," Curt replied apathetically upon regaining his touch on reality. "I've got stuff to do. I'll be downstairs if anyone needs me."
Curt's room was down at the end of the hallway in the basement, which was just fine with him. It was quiet down there, which was how he wanted his room to be. 'I've got a lot of homework tonight,' Curt thought to himself. He walked to his desk, got his math book out from his bag, and started to work.
He couldn't focus on his work tonight. Images kept popping up in his head. The images of a little girl with white eyes and bloody cavernous wounds on her face kept popping up for reasons unexplained by Curt himself. They just kept popping up over and over again. It was like the image at the back of his head wanted to talk to Curt, but couldn't; she almost seemed desperate to contact him, but something seemed to hold her back. The bloody image just stood at the back of his head staring back with an inscrutable disparity. The image flashed on and off in his head like a deadly strobe light.
By the time Curt finished his homework, it was starting to get dark out. Because of the repetitive images going off in Curt's head, his two-hour homework assignment took three hours and he seemed tired at this point. The image of the girl vanished from his mind, which was of relief to him.
'Time for dinner,' thought Curt. His mom usually didn't cook on weekdays, much to the annoyance of the rest of the family. Lately, within the past year or two, Curt noticed how his mother seemed afraid to talk to him or be in his company, as if she believed he was going to commit some awful deed. Her apathetic attitude as of late hasn't gone unnoticed by the rest of the family. His father, whom everyone just calls Don, has been critical at length of his wife's lack of performance around the house. At night, Don would often yell at his wife in the living room even if Curt and Annie were present in the room. Don would yell at his wife for her apathy and his wife would simply sit on the couch looking on in fear. Annie would look up to Curt in these moments and question him if 'daddy was going to kill mommy.'
When Curt reached the kitchen, he saw Don sitting at the table reading a magazine. He gave a quick glance at Curt and asked if he knew where his mom was. Upon shaking his head, Curt walked to the fridge and found the leftover chicken from three days ago. Relieved that he won't have to cook for himself, Curt grabbed the plate and sat at the table. He didn't bother to warm the chicken up; sometimes, to Curt, meat just tasted better cold.
Seconds later, Don asked Curt about the decrepit doll sitting at the middle of the table. "Hey Curt, what is that doll doing here? Where did it come from?"
"Annie found it in the back yard underneath the bushes," replied Curt. "She named the doll Connie."
"Where'd she get a name like that?" Don asked to himself out loud. "Anyway, I have been to each bush around our yard to see what I could find, but I never found anything. I never noticed that thing out in the yard."
'Interesting,' Curt thought to himself. After a couple seconds of pondering, he decided Don had just missed the doll. After a quick glance at the doll, he noticed something on the back of its neck. There was a small plaque of wood with the letters C.V. carved into it. Not wanting to overanalyze the doll, however, Curt decided to return to his meal. But still, why did this strange little toy seem to have this influence on him?
Later that night, before he went to bed, he told himself to forget about the doll. Once Annie finally chooses to take care of the thing and put it in her closet and forget about it, he will hopefully never see it again.
The old hallway was dark. Curt stumbled around looking for a light switch. He looked around, hoping for even a hint of light. But here was nothing except darkness. Seconds later, he tripped on something hard. After feeling the ground, he felt that it was covered in smooth sticks. He also felt rocks with two large holes on one side with an edge down below with several sharp edges. After getting up, he stumbled into the wall. He felt something.
It was the light switch. Finally he had found it. He flicked it on. After doing so, however, he quickly wished he hadn't. The whole floor of the hallway was covered in bones! Those weren't sticks he felt and tripped over. They were the remnants of the limbs of others. Most of the bones still had flesh on them which contained swarms of maggots and flies. And the rocks with two holes on the side weren't rocks. They were skulls. A couple still had eyeballs rotting off of them. When blood flowed from the skulls' eyes, it seemed as if they were crying. There were about seven of them in the hallway.
Curt quickly rushed back to his room, where the decay was even worse. Not only were there bones; there were large clumps of decaying flesh rotting off the dismembered limbs. They were everywhere to be seen; they covered his desk, piled up in his closet, and skulls hung down from the ceiling. The rotting flesh was fresher here. The blood from the corpses flowed through his room like a decaying river.
Seconds later, he noticed his bed. There were no bones on it at all. But he wished there were. There was something else in his bed. It was under the covers. He slowly walked to his bed, barely making a sound. He got closer, and closer, and closer but the thing under the covers didn't budge at all. It must be sleeping.
He slowly reached for the covers to see this creature. After a few seconds, he touched the lump on his bed. After a quick jerk, he unveiled the thing in his bed. He jumped back and tripped over somebody's pelvis upon sight of the being in his bed.
The figure sat up and looked at Curt. It was the same bloodstained girl that appeared in those images earlier that day. She flashed an anguished glance like she was just as afraid as Curt. She stood up slowly and wobbled towards Curt. Her hideous wounds quickly became apparent to him and made it appear that the girl had suffered some appalling attack. He couldn't move upon sight of the girl.
Within seconds, she started to speak. But it wasn't in a gurgled monstrous voice Curt had expected. It was in an innocent, desperate voice.
"Please get rid of it," she begged. "Please get rid of it now before it gets you too."
"G-g-get rid of what?" Curt stammered. "What are you talking about?"
"Please kill it," she continued to beg. "It got me. Now it wants you. The screws are becoming undone. Get rid of it now, while you still can!" By now, the bloody little girl was practically screaming as she begged. Something was causing her intense pain.
"I don't know what you mean!" Curt protested.
"Get rid of it now!" she screamed. Curt looked on at the anguished face of the girl; seconds later, she vanished in a quick blast of darkness.
Curt quickly jumped out of bed panting and covered in sweat. He looked around himself. Aside from the usual dust in the basement, the floor was clean. The walls were normal and there wasn't a sight of decay anywhere in the room. Not even a dead bug.
"It was all just a dream. It didn't happen," Curt told himself as he breathed a sigh of relief. He had never had such a seemingly real dream or nightmare before.
It was morning by now and the sun was peeking through the windows toward the ceiling of the room. It was Saturday today so he didn't need to worry about doing anything. Curt still felt tired, however, from the stressful dream and decided to sleep another hour or two. However, before he went to lay back down, he heard something. He heard a cold, chilling voice.
"You can't stop it," the voice whispered in his ear. "You can't stop it. The screws are becoming undone. Control your life, I will." He heard the voice repeat these words over and over again, like some deadly mantra going off in his head. The voice kept saying the same words repetitively in its cold harsh requiem without cease. "You can't stop it. The screws are becoming undone. Control your life, I will."
Curt took another look around him. He hopped out of bed in search of the source of the noise. No matter where he went, the voice never seemed to get any closer. He searched the floor and walls. But he couldn't see anything. Then something caught the corner of his eye.
It was sitting on his bed. The doll Annie found was lying there, but how? Curt looked around his room, but when he looked back to his bed, the doll remained in its same position. "You can't stop it," he heard the voice say. "Control you I will. Inevitable your eternal downfall will be. You can't stop it."
Curt walked to the doll for a closer look. "Are you talking to me?" he asked the doll. No reply. Once he approached the old toy, the voices stopped and the room reached its previous state of reticence. " I must be tired," Curt assured himself. "I just need to eat some breakfast.
Upstairs, Annie was eating some cereal while her mom was upstairs, getting yelled at by Don. This was the usual Saturday morning when Don would blame his wife for his misery. Annie hated listening to them. She heard all of Don's words.
"What were you thinking?!" Don yelled at her. "You don't do shit around here! And you just seem to scared to even want to be here anymore! Can't you at least get a job if you won't do anything here?" His wife made no reply, which was also pretty common. She just listens to herself get yelled at.
While Annie was listening to the argument upstairs, the basement door opened down the hallway. Curt walked out of the hallway and to the kitchen, paying no heed to his parents. He opened the fridge and grabbed some milk and eggs. He never really liked cereal.
Annie noticed him sitting across the table. She also noticed that her doll wasn't at the table. After giving Curt a quick glance, she asked, "Have you seen Connie?"
Curt didn't want to talk about the doll, so he asked, "Who's Connie?"
"My doll," replied Annie. "Have you seen her?"
"I haven't seen nothing," answered Curt in a haggard tone. 'I don't know why you'd want to see that doll anyway,' he then thought to himself.
"When you find her, can you bring her to me?" Annie asked.
"Sure."
After finishing breakfast and an hour of TV, Curt went back down to the basement where he found the old doll still sitting on his bed. Once again he heard the voice. This time, however, it seemed to be trying to have a direct conversation him.
"So, you returned," hissed the voice, sending a chill down Curt's spine. "Under my power, you will be."
"You're talking some more," Curt replied to the doll. "But why are you speaking to me? Why not Annie? She found you! Why do you want to control me?"
"Silly little boy," laughed the voice. "I'm not speaking at all. Talking to yourself, you are. I cannot speak, at least not now. Just a heap of rags and filling I am. You're just talking to yourself without realizing it. Your screws are becoming undone."
"I am not talking to myself," Curt mouthed angrily to the doll. "Whatever you are trying to do, I will beat you. I'll beat you!" Curt grabbed the doll in a fit of rage and threw it into his wall, but with little avail.
"Silly child," taunted the doll. "Anger strengthens me. Linked to my power, your emotions are. Childish fits are pointless."
"Stupid peace of shit," Curt mumbled to himself as he once again grabbed the doll in his iron grip. "I'll beat you!"
"You want me gone, yes?" taunted the doll as they headed out the door. "I'll never go away. Make it easy for yourself. Just let it happen. You can't stop it."
Curt quickly walked upstairs and quickly bolted from the house before Annie could see him with her doll. He then ran to the shed for a shovel. After a few minutes of searching, he found one underneath a pile of trash. Once he grabbed it, ran back behind the shed into the bushes and started digging. With his powerful arms, he easily dug out chunks of dirt larger than the doll itself. "I'll show you," Curt yelled to the doll. "You won't win. I'll put you underground like the peace of dirt you are!"
"You're making this too stressful on yourself," the doll warned Curt as he tossed the doll into the hole.
"Screw you, doll! I'll show you stress," Curt sneered to the doll as he piled the dirt on top of it. "You may have done this to others, but you won't get me." Seconds later, he piled the last lump of dirt into the hole.
A/N: I hope you enjoyed the first chapter if Idle Doll. Chapter 2 should be up very soon.