creds; lil_bear
I like to think that I'm a rational woman with a good head on her shoulders. But there are just some things that I've experienced that my rational conscience just cannot explain.
Among my earliest memories are the ones where I am a young child being tucked into bed, my mother turning my lights off and telling me to "sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite." She would shut the door. Within five minutes, it would begin. I was never scared, watching the porcelain dolls on my dresser turn to each other and have silent conversations. Their painted lips moving ever so slightly, illuminated only by the moonlight. Their heads, swiftly and silently, swinging to the left and right as they spoke to each other. I would try my best not to move, to feign sleep, because if I made any sound or movement at all, they would immediately cease all movement. I tried to call out softly to them one time, trying to assure them I wasn't a threat, dying to know what they were talking about. I wasn't scared. I felt...privileged. A witness to magic. But they had no interest in me. As I got older and rational thought overtook the innocence of childhood belief, the dolls moved less and less, until one night they just stopped. Never moved again. I was eight years old.
Eight years later, I had forgotten all about the dolls. In fact, a few years earlier their silent stares started to creep me out so I actually put them in my closet so I wouldn't have to look at them. Not that I still believed they could move at night, there was just something about them that made me uneasy. There was one doll that didn't make it into my closet, only because she was too big. I received her as a present when I was just three years old and she stood taller than me. I named her Janet. She had blond hair and piercing blue eyes that opened and closed when you picked her up and laid her down. She had a tiny bow mouth that, for whatever reason, was painted into a little pout. She was made of cheap hard plastic and her legs would "walk" with you if you held her hands. By the time I was sixteen, Janet had been exposed to many years of wear and tear. Janet's hair had been cut a few times, bald patches everywhere. I had also ripped out her eyelashes and painted her face with clownish make up. Her clothes were long gone and she stood naked, leaned up against the wall. There were times I would suddenly feel a pang of regret for how I had treated her over the years. I would suppress those feelings as quickly as they would come, because that's just silly. She was only a doll. A creepy doll who I would sometimes turn to face the wall so she couldn't stare at me. But still, I could not bring myself to throw her away.
By this time, my little sister was six years old and we shared a room. One evening while my parents were out, I was talking to a friend on the phone while in my room and my sister came in to go to bed. She lay in bed for a few minutes while I chatted away as teenagers do. She then asked me if I could go downstairs to the kitchen phone as I was bothering her and she really wanted to go to sleep. I agreed and told my friend that I would call her right back. I hung up, said good night to my sister, closed the bedroom door and walked down the stairs into the kitchen. I picked up the phone to call my friend back and she answered on the first ring. I apologized and asked her where we had left off in conversation, when I heard a bloodcurdling scream from my sister upstairs. I dropped the phone and immediately ran up the stairs two at a time, threw open the door and turned on the light. My sister was on her bed, curled into a ball in the corner of wall, blanket pulled up to her chin. She was sobbing uncontrollably and her whole body was shaking violently. There was an awful, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Something told me this wasn't a case of a spider crawling up a wall and it certainly couldn't have been a nightmare as she had been wide awake all of 60 seconds earlier. As much as I wanted to run to my sister to comfort her, my feet were like lead and I could not bring myself to take one step into our room. I spoke gently and calmly to her, trying to get her to tell me what had happened. After a few minutes, still shaking, she able to get one word out and my blood ran cold. "J-J-Janet."
I lost all nerve at that point and could no longer remain calm. "What about Janet?" I asked. "WHAT ABOUT JANET?!" I repeated desperately when my sister could not answer me. She looked at me and through her tears said, "She walked. And looked at me." It was at this point that I looked to where I had left Janet just an hour before. I had been doing a spring cleaning of our room and had laid Janet, facing outwards, against the wall under the window. I had placed her in between two garbage bags filled with stuffed toys we were going to donate. I positioned her in such as way as to ensure she didn't fall forward. As I looked towards Janet now, I almost vomited. I ran to my sister, picked her up out of her bed and ran downstairs with her. By this time, even I was crying. Janet was no longer under the window. She was now standing up against the foot of our bunk bed, which was perpendicular to the window. And she was facing outward. If there was any way she would have fallen, she would have just fallen forward, face first on the floor. She could not have fallen like this. I had no reasonable explanation and therefore, could do nothing to comfort my sister; or myself, for that matter.
Once she had calmed down some more, my sister told me that after I left the room, my sister thought she heard some rustling at the foot of the our bunk bed. She looked down from the top bunk, only to see Janet take a few steps away from the window toward our door. When my sister gasped, Janet quickly cocked her head up to the left and looked at my sister dead in the eyes with her icy unblinking stare. That's when my sister recoiled in horror and screamed.
After an hour, I gathered my nerve (and after having turned on all of the lights in the house), ran into my room to get Janet and I threw her in the basement. When my parents came home, I relayed to them through tears what had happened. They scolded me for scaring my sister and told me to grow up. I should have figured they wouldn't believe me. This was eighteen years ago. Every once and while, my sister and I bring up the encounter with Janet and, to this day, my sister vehemently denies that it was any kind of prank. Having witnessed her physical reaction that night, I know she is telling the truth. My parents refused to throw her away because she was my first doll. We begged them not to bring her back into the house. Janet now sits in the attic of the garage. Staring. Unblinking. Waiting.
