This Barbie Doll Keeps Staring at Me (1) (Patreon)

A/N: A story that bounced in my head for a long while. Barbie dolls! Because, why not? This is unpolished, if you guys would like to read the continuation, let me know. Also, warning: this story will eventually contain explicit content and in****. You've been warned. 

Chapter 1: My Barbie Doll Can’t be This Creepy

The sky matched the mood perfectly. A God must have been mourning with them.

The heavens wept and thundered. Damiano didn’t even bother to open his umbrella, allowing the water to soak him instead. His thought process was sluggish—a fatigued turning of the gears. His perception of time lagged.

He had yet to get over the beautiful smile his sister had secretly given him a week ago. When she foolishly thought he wasn’t looking.

Because he was always looking. It was his prerogative as the older brother. Someone had to take up the job, and he didn’t trust his mother to filter out the rotten apples from the good ones.

And now he watched as her casket was lowered into the bowels of mother nature.

‘How could this happen…’

Damiano couldn’t wrap his head around that simple yet painful concept.

‘She’s dead’.

He simply couldn’t.

The confusion went hand-in-hand with the sizzling pain. His skin was burning. A heat that increased with each second, enough to give the impression that the water soaking him was evoparting into wispy steam.

Beside him, the mourners cried, sobbed, and comforted each other.

His mother, Katerina, was uncharacteristically mute. There was a thinly-restrained edge of despair, and anger, in her eyes. It was the only hint of emotion in that impassive face.

“She’s in a better place now.”

Someone croaked out, in a desperate attempt to reassure themselves, and those around them, that death was not an end, but a beginning.

'Idiots. All of them.'

There’s no better place than your own home, with your family. Come on. Face it. You can’t die at 17. Not like that.

Damiano had done religious studies when younger.

What righteous God would allow such untimely death? To reap a soul who deserved life more than others and leave a family to grieve over it, with no perpetrator to blame?

It was unexplainable. In a way, it was unavoidable.

She had gone to sleep with a smile on her face, a smile Damiano knew he was the cause of. Except that she never woke up again. She was still, cold… lifeless. A husk whose soul was drained. There was no thrashing—no signs of struggle.

She was simply there no more.

‘Carmen… what happened to you…’

A coiled fist of ice pounded in his chest. It made his breathing condense into vapor.

 ‘Who did this to you?’

His hands clenched into fists. The muscles were pulled taut, the knuckles white.

Unbeknownst to him, his eyes dilated, a spark igniting deep within their abyss.

Overhead, a lance of lightning cut the sky in two. Its flash so bright, and its rumble so loud, that it startled everyone out of their stupor.

“Damiano, calm down.” A hand folded over his shoulder. The reassuring touch was familiar — the way the voice hissed his name, not so much.

He blinked, looking up at his mother.

“I am calm.”

Katerina tilted her head low, giving him a look he couldn’t analyze the meaning of.

Meanwhile, the priest, Father Something, his hands clasped in front of him, cleared his throat and addressed the gathering of mourners. “Let us pray. Dear God, we ask that you comfort those who mourn and give them strength in this difficult time. We ask you that you welcome Carmen into your loving embrace and grant her eternal rest. May her memory live in our hearts and may we always strive to emulate her kindness and compassion. Amen.”

Then the earth was shoveled all over the casket. Damiano frowned as he watched the dirt pile up, covering every inch of Carmen’s burial ground. It was methodical the way everything proceeded.

‘I can’t accept this…’

Damiano shrugged off Katerina’s hand and stalked off.

“I’m sorry.”

Was all he said.

“Damiano...” She called out, the strength in her voice slowly fizzling out as she watched his back disappear among the dispersing crowd.

Katerina heaved a deep breath as she stared at the slithering flashes of light in the clouds. ‘I can’t hide him away forever…’

As if on cue, a sense of ‘doom’ engulfed her entire being. She snapped her head towards the distance. Mist gathered, curling out of the ground, and condensing into a thick wall of pure malice.

Between the swirling white, malevolent eyes stared back at her.

‘They’re approaching…’

…

Damiano came to painfully regret heading back home. If he concentrated enough, he could almost single out Carmen’s lingering scent. It was an illusion of the brain.

And it was stupid, because, logically, he knew that it was not possible. But logic had a nasty habit of disagreeing with his more emphatic side. The one that sorely missed his sister.

“I shouldn’t have come back home…”

The memories that dwelt there were still so vivid, so raw. Carmen’s laughter bounced off the walls, like an echo of the past, of yesterday. Damiano followed the spectral trails of her mirth, knowing that he was more likely chasing after a ghost that wasn’t there.

Still, he pursued her elusive presence, drawn deeper into the labyrinth of memories.

What was he supposed to do?

He felt so empty. Hollow.

‘Desperate men do desperate things.’

Something brushed his face. Not the wind. The windows were latched shut — the weather outside was raging with the indignation of a wraith. The symphony played well with his emotions.

“Come closer. Hold me. I’m waiting…”

A faint, feeble whisper poured into his ears.

“Carmen…” His steps faltered for a moment. She was not there. ‘Of course, she isn’t…’ He had not hit that rock-bottom yet. He might have been wrought with a soul-tearing pain, but it was not enough to make him hallucinate her voice.

Ironically enough, he found a sliver of comfort in that conjured voice.

Under better circumstances, he would have found it creepy.

Now, he just wished Carmen would never cease to speak.

To forever pour those sweet syllables into his ears.

The ghostly laughter led him to her room. Carmen’s room. He opened it, halfway expecting to see her there, again, whole—alive. The room was exactly how it was left once Carmen’s body was wheeled out of the room. Annabelle didn’t have time, nor the state of mind to clean it, and Damiano preferred to leave it that way.

It had to stay untouched. Every wrinkle of the sheets; every misplaced item; every trace Carmen had left behind. It had to stay like that, stuck in time. The warmth had no doubt faded, but the memory would continue to live on through all of those details.

It was not healthy to think that way, but Damiano was quite past that point already.

He was hearing voices, for God’s sake.

The curtains were drawn shut. And whatever smidgen of the gloomy daylight managed to squeeze through the cracks, they miserably failed to lighten up the place.

A peal of lightning rumbled amongst the rain.

There, on the bed, briefly flashed by the smile of the now-gone thunderclap, lay a doll. A barbie doll. One of the old models. Its blonde mane was a little roughed up, and its perennial smile seemingly having lost a bit of its original luster.

Damiano felt the stifling burn in his chest again. It clawed at his skin.

The doll used to belong to Carmen.

Its dress, as red as Carmen's favorite lipstick, was a bit tattered.

Damiano picked it up, gleaming memories of a better time from the doll's aged, plastic exterior. He held it in his hands, reverently, as if it were a priceless relic. And it was. More valuable than anything he owned. The sentimental value didn’t have a price.

Honestly, it was a miracle that none of its limbs were missing — for such was the fate of toys as old as this one. Carmen took good care of it.

Interestingly enough, the doll was sitting on a slip of paper.

A familiar handwriting, neat and beautifully inked across the sheet, caught Damiano's attention.

Please, take care of it. Just as you would if it were me.

It felt like a will, of sorts. An inheritance. Damiano didn’t own dolls. He didn’t keep them. And most importantly, he didn’t play with them.

‘For her, I’ll make this exception.’

For her, he’d do anything. But it was normal. Expected, even. He’d do the same for his mother as well. Just as they would for him.

With a tender touch, Damiano brushed a bit of the doll’s hair to the side.

‘What did Carmen name it again?’

“Carrie…”

A fond smile managed to surface on his face.

“Carrie the doll.”

Damiano pocketed the slip of paper and left Carmen’s room. He decided to enthrone Carrie on a high spot in his room, somewhere safe and inconspicuous. And so he did. Atop a wall shelf, right above his TV. Carrie sat there, smiling away.

“Hmm.”

It might have been his imagination—dolls tended to be quite creepy, after all—but he had the vague impression that Carrie was staring at him. It was weird, because she was still, unmoving; a lifeless toy. However, everytime he moved, and happened to glance at Carrie, it felt like her eyes were tracking him, somehow.

Perhaps it was the uncanny valley. A common phenomenon, as far as he knew. But with Carmen’s death still being such a fresh wound, creepy or not, there was no way he was going to move Carrie somewhere else.

“For now, you’ll stay there…” Damiano muttered, feeling slightly amused at the thought that Carrie could understand him. It was silly, he knew it, but he used the doll as a communication link to Carmen. Maybe, wherever she was right now, she could hear him?

With a heavy, troubled sigh, Damiano shook his head and headed out — he did leave his mother quite abruptly. God knew she needed him as much as he needed her at the moment.

Carrie’s eyes, throughout the whole time, were fixed upon him.