Reverend Charles E. Carruthers
January 5th, 1914

What I have witnessed is not something to be taken lightly. It would feel inhuman and disgusting on my tongue, hence my reversion to pen and paper. And I would even go as far to say that my words will, regardless, trivialize the actual degree of horror I’ve experienced. My world has grown immensely dark and troubled; around every corner I sense the heat of an invisible body and have avoided my children’s rooms as if they were infected with the great plague. It might as well be so. I struggle with myself, with a partial desire to pack up all of their play things and bag every doll, for in the presence of my children I don’t trust such potential vessels of terror. Perhaps I’ve gone mad. But, then again, I’ve seen what I’ve seen and it can’t be reversed, and I mournfully murmur “if only, if only,” in my head for some hope that my memories will wipe themselves clean of all evil. I am a vessel for God, I remind myself. I am God’s servant. I need not be afraid. But in saying this I am blinded by an insatiable thirst for benediction: It is my duty to uphold the safety of my children and my wife; so accordingly, I have confined them and myself to house-riddance. This is what keeps me vigilant.

Reverend Charles E. Carruthers
January 7th, 1914

I’ve mustered the courage to confront the reality of recent transgressions. Not my own, but those of a friend from boyhood, though unfortunately such a kinship has since been splintered and in the process damaged my perception of myself and my own reality. My memories died in the west wing of my lifelong church: a section which has been closed off for the past five years. Five years before that, I was only a boy and enjoyed the company of my fellow “Sunday- scholars” along with the guidance of our elder, pastor Isaac, and his assistant who was widely known simply as “Nana,” in the little blue playroom with peeling window-pane and speckled paint. The window looked out on a cow pasture which permeated the glass with its foul stench, despite the window always being closed. This was the only thing I didn’t like about the playroom, as a boy. Isaac and Nana reclined on the two-seated easy chair as we children calmly compromised the territory of our block-castles. We didn’t often play with the dolls, because Isaac’s heavy eyes upon us when we did stirred a thick tension in the room all at once, as if he had found some deep, deep connection within their lifeless eyes. He told us to “be careful” and “handle them gently,” as if they were made of china and not soft buckskin. Hence why I was more partial to Nana; she didn’t talk often and donned a steely glare, but she didn’t tell us what to do and I was drawn to her. Whether it was for some strange fascination of her tragic aura, or for her enigmatic silence, I do not know. You see, her brother, her husband and her five children all died from the plague, and she was left alone in a cloud of distant despair. I felt sympathy for her, and often stood by the pot of awful smelling stew she brewed for every service-supper to keep it from burning. Pastor Isaac was a craftsman of sorts, and made anything from cabinets to crocheted bonnets for his wife. And then there were the dolls. Everyone knew they were his creations but kept quiet, being such a sport was perceived as oddly effeminate. In the corner of the playroom, stacked neatly on four surprisingly sturdy shelves were a series of dolls with paper-smooth faces. Each one was sealed with the name of a passed congregation member in remembrance and appreciation of their life, and appropriately, each doll donned the likeness of its deceased clergyman or father, grandmother or youth. I was always intrigued and even unnerved by the engravings, which went as follows: “This is,” followed by the name of the deceased, as if their very being were preserved within. The dolls showed frequently as the plague swept over the New English countryside. We, steel-faced and empathetic, helped one another move on. But I can never move on from what I now know to be reality, and for the fact that my entire childhood was an illusion.

One day I grew curious. I liked the dolls more than most, and sensed somewhere in my soul that the creation of one of Isaac’s fine caricatures was in the works, judging by the recent death of a remarkably young man who had a new wife. He died in sleep two nights before. I wandered into the playroom alone, humming, running my hand against the chipped wooden banister lining the hallway. With youthful jubilee I hop-skipped through the door, with the goal in mind of catching Isaac’s fine craftsmanship in the process. Immediately, my voice caught. At the time I fooled myself, coaxing my head into some fine fantasy in which I wasn’t really there and I wasn’t hearing the noise: an incessant, sufferable groaning echoed, muffled, through the space. A human in pain. A sob, a whine, or something violated my innocent ears and my legs responded; I backed away and sped-walked down the hallway, blaming my wild imagination—suddenly grown deep and dark. And I ran straight into Isaac. Back turned, he was hunched into himself, deeply pondering, brooding, like a vulture. I screamed, and found fear for Isaac throughout the next month, spreading a rumor among my classmates that he was a vampire. They too trembled in his presence, and so Isaac backed away meekly, insipidly bending to our will, allowing himself to be personally damaged by our fragile fantasies. When his eyes struck an empathetic chord within my child’s heart, I pretended to be fed up with my storytelling and I would routinely retreat to Nana’s silently welcoming presence, humming to myself as she combed her tapered nails through my hair wordlessly. And she smiled.

Years later I returned to that room as a reverend myself; I couldn’t get the pained moan out of my head. Besides, I didn’t have much time before the west wing was evicted; a week prior, the nursery ceiling had caved in, giving the church mothers a great fright. And upon remembering, I recalled another strange instance the same day of the cave-in; I had walked into the sanctuary hours after the service ended, and I made my way to my desk…only to find that Nana sat enveloped in the darkness of my office, alone. Back turned and still as stone. Suddenly a vision of Isaac, brooding and curled into himself, flashed across my thoughts from years ago.

Suddenly my thoughts were penetrated by a foul stench wafting from the playroom. I creaked the door open, perplexed at the smell, seeing as the cow pasture had been covered over by a new gas station two years prior. As overwhelming as the smell was, I stepped through the door and walked inside to survey the area. I felt oddly large and bumbling, as if my adult self had suddenly invaded the realm of my childhood self, uninvited. But I smiled and looked on with fond nostalgia, especially when my eyes lay on a single doll sitting in the far left corner of the shadowy room. I approached it, thinking back to Isaac’s wary protection of his dolls and their neatly assigned seats stacked against the wall. The shelf was gone from its place, but upon further investigation and momentary distraction from the doll in the corner, I discovered it in a large storage bin in the closet, in which each doll was smiling and pristine as ever. I returned to the doll on its own out on the floor, lifting it gingerly. What I saw next molested my very soul in a way I would not like to relive, yet I feel the incessant nagging to write this all down so that I may find some sense in all the madness. Ironically, my discovery of that doll shattered my childhood forever, for the doll was not fully intact. I stopped and squinted at it. I could tell that his arm was coming apart at the seams. My horror surfaced slowly as I watched a brown liquid seep from the doll and run down my fingers; I let out a cry and immediately let the doll fall to the floor, only for it to burst open and reveal a blackened mess. With trembling hands, I lifted it again to get a closer look. Organs; human organs.  A human heart, shriveled and dark. The heart of a person with a life and a family—once, that appeared in my vision to be pulsating grossly. A blackened mess of tissue and stuffing. I was conscious of my mouth moving and my body seizing up as I uttered “no, no, no,”  under my breath again and again, heart racing—and I dropped the specimen in disgust and realized to my horror that the doll’s skin was not that of a buck; and I rushed to the closet and pulled out the caddy of dolls stashed neatly away, tearing them open one by one to reveal a mangled massacre: a crusted, bloodied mass of human parts stuffed into children’s playthings, playthings which were meant to commemorate…
The deaths.
My mind flashed suddenly to the image of Isaac once again. The deaths. Isaac. My childhood, disparaged. And thusly commenced a mental breakdown. In my agony I yelled a sob away and plunged my fist through the wall, heaving and retching on the floor. The wall was paper-thin, of course. I felt certain I knew what I would find behind it, and in anger and defiant refusal to accept the present reality I tore at the decomposing wall with my bare hands, stripping away chunk by chunk until limbs were visible, then bare torsos. And then faces. Hung by wooden studs and strung up like butchers’ meat, the bodies of all of the congregation’s “victims of the plague” dangled, missing chunks of skin and hair, grossly decomposed and unrecognizable, all with holes bored into their blackened and seeping chests. So this is why the dolls were marked so specifically. I fell to my knees and opened my mouth to choke back a sob, scanning the row of corpses. And something shuffled behind me. My sobs caught in my throat and  my blood truly ran cold, so that I shivered. Breathing heavy and girding myself for what I might confront, I whipped around, to find that another doll sat meekly under the windowpane; one that hadn’t been there before, as if it had walked on its own. It was Isaac. In a mad rampage I tore away at the wall in search of his body, and I discovered it at the far end of the room. Something was different about his death, though; he seemed to have hung himself. A chair lay on its side below his hanging feet. His lifeless eyes bugged out at me, coated with a fresh pall of death. I retrieved a note clutched in the rigor mortis of his hand. It simply said: NOT MY DOLLS, in bold frantic script.

Needless to say, I left immediately and began to piece it all together: the mysterious soup that Nana stirred up and served to every congregation member, many of whom often “died of the plague” afterwards. I remembered her nails running over my scalp and I nearly retched again. I remembered her odd silence and the moment I found her alone in my office; I remembered that forced, pained smile she would flash at me from behind a calloused visage. And I called the authorities promptly; they looked for her in her current residence and she must have fled, for there was no trace of the woman. They searched the church thoroughly, and they eventually concluded she must have died.

One day I found the boldness to visit the west wing once more, and to investigate for further signs as to Nana’s disappearance. I did not believe for a second that she was dead. Her presence haunted me in dreams, dreams in which I stood face to face with that woman, whose eyes suddenly flashed dark as coal and teeth grew sharp and pointed, blood dripping from her mouth. I woke up in a sweat every time, my hatred for her growing deeper and darker. And so when I stepped into that room again, I might have been girded for mental warfare, but I was not prepared to see what I did. A lone doll sat upright in the center of the room. I could not see it, so I had to approach it, tentatively. When I squinted I saw.
The doll was me. And I was smiling.
And I ran. And ever since, I’ve been hiding, waiting for the day when she shows at my door, sweetly offering me some of her special stew.