EL BK5 | Chapter 1 - The Children Turned into Dolls (PT.1) (Patreon)

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So, this one is a bit older and written as a standalone-nosleep style chapter. Bit of a throw back, but it's not random >:] Good luck piecing it together. Your reference is BK3-Chapter 11. The POV for this story is a halfway house worker for infants. I've hesitated to post it since my writing style has changed so much ahaha hopefully you still enjoy!

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Twenty years ago I was a part time nurse, working at a halfway house for infants and children. We took in kids ranging from newborn to five years old in cases of abandonment, or where the parents gave up the child after birth without any prior arrangement. Most were only with us a week or two while the legalities were worked out, but occasionally there would be a hiccup along the way and a stay might get extended for a few months. This is to say, there wasn’t often time to get attached.

The house itself was a small two story mansion built in the 1800’s and located in the older part of town. Set back on the block, it was enclosed on all sides by tall wooden fences and a small picket fence out the front. Little knick knacks of all manner filled the house, glass figurines, porcelain dolls, and crochet objects. The ornaments crowded the windowsills and shelving. They had once belonged to the previous owner who left them to the house in her will when she passed, and they stayed even when the house was renovated.

In the winter, storms rattled the window panes and water leaked in through the seals. The floorboards were old and creaky, and the walls crawled when the furnace was on. Racoons occupied the attic, and birds nested in any opportune nook or cranny in the brickwork. Similarly, yard maintenance was almost non-existent because no one had the time to do the gardening while taking care of up to twenty kids at a time. So in the summertime the long front yard was an overgrown mess of trees and shrubs that hid the house from the street. While in the winter, those same plants became little more than a tangle of withered branches reaching for the windows at night. 

However, the home was warm and safe. The children were clothed and fed, and there was always a spare bed for any who needed it. One could hardly imagine the place was infested, I certainly didn’t. Perhaps I could say I first noticed the signs in the summer of 1999. It was a warm season with uncharacteristically wet weather.

A storm raged outside and I was tucking a pair of toddlers into their beds for the night, when an ungodly ruckus disturbed the peace. A large tree branch had crashed into the adjacent room, shattering the glass windows and splintering the wood paneling. It was in the nursery, and I rushed in to check on the children.

Wind howled through the broken window and the babies screamed at the top of their lungs, crying out in confusion. Glass had landed on the child nearest to the window, but he was largely unharmed, and while the whole event was certainly shocking, no real harm was done.

We ushered the infants from the room one by one, and when morning came I went back to inspect the damage. In daylight it wasn’t as bad as I had first thought. The branch had fallen away cleanly. But it had smashed through the false balcony into the window on its way down, leaving mild property destruction in its wake.

I suppose I found it fortunate in a way, you see, the nursery was only a small room to begin with. It was painted a soft lavender, floating shelves lined with porcelain dolls decorated the free space and it was the window towards the back that had broken. Ordinarily, that window didn’t open, rather it led to a small, enclosed, balcony and was sealed shut.

It was a decorative feature, complete with a carved crib housing an ugly doll, and until the branch fell, we had been unable to access the space from the outside nor from the inside. Now that the window would need replacing, I thought it a good opportunity to open the space and hoped we might be able to extend the room into the balcony somewhat. 

As I daydreamed of the possibilities I lifted my skirts and carefully stepped over the puddle of water and glass to look into the crib. The doll was a chunky fellow with a soft stuffed body facing downward and swathed in blankets with strands of thread draped over it like spider silk. Its head, hands and feet were ceramic, but covered in a thin velvet for texture.

A fine layer of dust turned to grime in the damp air coated the thing and I reached down intending to pick it up to clean it. However, I found the doll too heavy to lift. It seemed stuck into its bedding with its entire body and I was taken aback. The whole display was one piece, and the crib was bolted to the floor.

Recognizing the exemplary craftsmanship it would have taken to make such a fine toy, it was decided that the doll would remain in place. Instead, the interior window was removed, and the exterior enclosing of the balcony was repaired, leaving the crib where it was behind only a short wall where the window had once been. 

We thought it elevated the room to keep the original feature and as the weeks passed, nothing seemed to change. I wish I could have said I noticed small items moving or disappearing, but with so many children coming and going from the house, it was hardly a surprise that things would move. What I noticed instead, was the webs. 

Thin, straight strands of silk began to pervade throughout the house. They were difficult to see at first, nothing more than delicate hairs spanning the distance between objects. They initially appeared in the nursery. I was dusting the mantlepiece dolls and was surprised to see threads coming from their clothes. They attached to the walls and I brushed them away believing them to be cobwebs, only for them to reappear more numerous the following day.

I began to think we had a spider infestation and misted the shelves with bug spray. It wasn’t until I was tending to one of the children that I began to grow concerned, for a familiar thin strand appeared on the child. It attached to her cheek, and stretched out across her mattress to the headboard of her crib. I brushed it away with a small frown, and the child began to cry as it pulled her skin.

It came off with a firm tug, and for a moment I wondered if I had just pulled an abnormally long hair off this child’s face. However, each night more strands attached themselves to her and I made the decision to change her crib, fearing some kind of spider invasion despite never formally seeing a spider.

Moving her seemed to help the thread's situation and I became pedantic about cleaning. I ordered the entire house be scrubbed, from top to bottom and had an exterminator come out.

“I’m sorry ma’am, I don’t know what to tell you,” he said with a complacent shrug as he finished his inspection.

“What do you mean you don’t know? I’m telling you we have spiders,” I stated firmly.

“Not so far as I could see, racoons in the attic though.”

His services were entirely unhelpful and it was clear he didn’t believe me. I began to believe then, that the problem was the time of day. Perhaps these little bugs were hiding during the day and so I took to patrolling the halls at night. Scanning the floorboards with a flashlight in a paranoid attempt to catch the web-makers in the act.

In this endeavor, I was walking between my room and the kitchen when footsteps followed me down the hall. They were rapid heavy thuds, like that of a child caught out of bed. We had more than one night goblin—children who thought it was funny to sneak about the house at night, and I turned quickly to catch the culprit, only to be greeted by an empty hall.

Narrowing my eyes, I shone the flashlight slowly across the floor and caught a glimpse of a child hiding back behind a tall vase out of sight. “You know it is well past lights out,” I called into the darkness to no response, “I will give you until the count of three to go back to your room, or else. One. Two-”

I stopped as something skittered across the floor away from me. It moved too quickly to be a child, and it was too small. Not more than knee height and it made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end as I tried to rationalize what it could have been. If we had any pets in the house, I could have suggested it was that, instead, I decided it must have been a raccoon from the attic and pursued it. 

The soft creak of a door gave away its location and I stormed after the racoon with intent. It had scurried into the nursery with the infants, and I couldn’t imagine the kind of diseases it would bring. Without any hesitation I flicked on the lights, and to my dismay, couldn’t find the creature. I searched that room high and low, before deciding I must have imagined it.

I spent the remainder of the night drifting in and out of sleep on a chair in the corner of the room, and the following morning woke with a start to a knock on the door. Another of the other caretakers answered it to find two men standing on our front porch. It wasn’t often that men came to this house unannounced and it caused a small stir. One was tall and handsome with gray eyes and brown hair, while the other had luminous blue eyes and dark hair.

“I think you might need our help, can we come in?” The taller one began with a nervous smile.

“We didn’t order any maintenance?” my college answered in soft confusion.

“Oh, not maintenance, ahhh… has anything unusual happened lately?” he continued.

“N-.... No?” she answered, taking a small step back as if ready to close the door.

“Don’t,” the man with the blue eyes warned, “If you turn us away now, we won’t be inclined to come back. Have you noticed any threads in the house?”

Hearing that caught my attention and I moved to go to the door, but, my coworker is a nervous woman, and she shut the door quicker than I would have. I suppose that wasn’t unreasonable. Nonetheless, I opened it again as soon as I reached the entryway, but the men were gone.

I hurried outside and jogged to the street, but they were nowhere to be seen. It was rather like that had evaporated and I found myself wondering if they truly could have helped, for it was that very night that we lost a child.

It was a little after midnight and the house was still and silent. There was no commotion, nor any kind of fuss. Yet, when I awoke to feed the youngest of the children, I noticed one of the cribs glistened in the dim light. For a moment I could have thought it was covered in a plastic of sorts, only to soon realize the shine was a mass of silken threads.

They coated the entire crib like frosting and I rushed to the child. Tearing at the strands and clawing to get to the child. When I reached her she was cold to the touch, the skin around her hands, feet and face was hardened like ceramic while her body remained floppy and I recoiled in shock. No logical part of me could understand, I prayed it was a joke of some kind, that the child had been switched with one of the dolls from the shelving but that wasn’t the case.

The child had been more or less liquified and her extremities had hardened with decay in only a matter of hours. Emergency services arrived not long after but there was nothing that could be done. Instead I stood outside, bathed in flashing red and blue light and shivering with the cold as workers quarantined the house.

Children would have to be relocated, and at this time of the night that was a problem all its own. Across the street sat a black car with unusual white rimmed tires, and I chose to focus on that instead of the dead child in our care.

To be continued... <-<-PREVIOUS BOOK | NEXT CHAPTER ->-> | ᓚᘏᗢ CHAPTERS LIST