Tracie Hicks

The sun dipped below the horizon, casting long shadows through the forest as Megan raced between the trees. The earthy scent of moss and decaying leaves filled her nostrils, and the cool autumn wind nipped at her skin. Gnarled branches clawed at her hair and clothes, but she barely noticed, her mind consumed by the presence stalking her.

It had started as a harmless dare from her friends—spend an hour alone in the haunted woods at midnight on Halloween. Megan laughed it off, confidence masking any unease. What was there to fear in these familiar woods behind her house? But the moment she stepped into the shadowy embrace of the trees, dread crept down her spine like icy fingers.

The forest was deathly quiet. There were no hooting owls, no skittering nocturnal creatures, and even the wind seemed to hold its breath. The darkness pressed in, thick and suffocating, broken only by the faint beam of Megan’s flashlight.

Then she saw a flicker of white behind an ancient oak, like a pale face peering out. Megan’s pulse quickened, and she stepped back, dead leaves crunching under her feet. The figure came into view, and Megan’s breath caught in her throat.

A doll. The porcelain face was cracked and stained, with matted clumps of brown hair and tattered rags for clothes. But it was the eyes—glassy, lifeless, yet filled with dark hunger—that pierced Megan’s very soul.

She tried to run, but some unyielding force rooted her feet to the ground. The doll glided toward her, its movements jerky and unnatural. A high-pitched, grating giggle bubbled from its throat, worming into Megan’s mind and chilling her to the marrow.

Sheer terror shattered the paralysis. Megan fled, crashing through the undergrowth. Thorns tore at her skin, and branches whipped her face, but she didn’t dare slow down. Behind her, the doll’s laughter grew louder and closer with each echoing peal.

Megan’s muscles burned, and her lungs screamed for air, but she pushed harder through the dense woods, desperate for the safety of home. The doll toyed with her, savoring the hunt, prolonging her terror with an almost palpable glee. Against her better judgment, Megan glanced back, immediately wishing she hadn’t. The doll floated through the air behind her, arms outstretched, its porcelain face split into an evil grin. 

A gnarled root snagged Megan’s foot, sending her sprawling to the damp earth with a sickening thud. The coppery taste of blood bloomed in her mouth as pain lanced through her ankle. She scrabbled desperately at the dirt, dragging herself forward, but it was too late.

Icy porcelain fingers clamped around Megan’s neck, yanking her into the air like a rag doll. It drew her close, hairline cracks and chips covering its face. Its breath washed over her, reeking of decay and ancient dust.

“You’re mine now,” it hissed.

Megan tried to scream, but no sound emerged. Colors bled together as the world spun into darkness. The last thing she saw before oblivion claimed her was the gleam of triumph in those pitiless glass eyes.

Miles away, a strangled gasp tore John from sleep. His heart thundered, sweat drenched his shirt, and his hair plastered to his forehead. Beside him, his wife Sally stirred, brow furrowed as if sensing his distress even in slumber’s depths. John stilled, trying to slow his breathing, convincing himself it was only a dream.

But an unsettling sensation prickled John’s skin, an inexplicable awareness tugging at the edges of his consciousness. Something was wrong. Profoundly wrong. He slipped out of bed, careful not to disturb Sally, and tiptoed down the hall to his daughter’s room. He paused at the door, unease coiling in his gut like a serpent. Slowly, he turned the knob; the click echoed like a gunshot in the silence.

“Megan?” he whispered. “Honey, you awake?”

Silence surrounded him, broken only by the hammering of his own heart. With trembling fingers, John fumbled for the light switch. The sudden glare blinded him momentarily. As his vision adjusted, the scene before him twisted his stomach into knots.

Megan’s bed was empty, covers strewn about haphazardly, like the aftermath of a struggle—curtains billowed in the breeze from the open window, a specter dancing in the moonlight. 

“John? What’s going on? Where’s Megan?” 

Sally’s worried voice startled him. He hadn’t even heard her approach, so consumed by the gnawing fear unfurling in John’s chest that he couldn’t answer her—the words lodged like shards of glass in his throat.

Instead, John bolted, not even feeling the bite of the cold hardwood on his bare feet as he pounded down the stairs and out the back door. Damp grass squelched between his toes as he sprinted toward the woods looming in the distance, a crouching beast against the star-flecked sky.

“Megan!” The desperate cry ripped from his throat, swallowed instantly by the night’s vastness. “MEGAN!”

Only the mocking echo of a giggle on the wind met his ears, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. John ran into the forest, uncaring of the branches that scraped his skin and snarled in his hair. 

He ran for what seemed like an eternity, his muscles screaming and his lungs searing as if he had breathed pure fire. The flashlight beam danced wildly off the tree trunks, casting eerie, undulating shadows in the underbrush that seemed to move with a life of their own.

Exhausted to the point of collapse, John stumbled into a small clearing and spotted a crumpled form on the ground. Heart in his throat, he staggered over and dropped to his knees. Megan. Golden hair haloed her ashen face. Her eyes were closed, her skin cold as marble, and she looked like a broken china doll. 

Gathering her into his arms, John felt almost delirious with relief upon detecting the shallow rise and fall of her chest. He cradled her close, tears cutting tracks through the grime on his face. His foot struck something, sending it rolling into the shadows. 

A doll. Porcelain face cracked and grimy, stringy hair matted, rotting rags hanging off its tiny frame. But those eyes… John turned his gaze away, unable to bear the weight of that knowing, hungry stare boring into him. A sudden, fierce urge seized him to smash the vile thing into powder, to grind it into dust beneath his heel.

But Megan stirred then, a tiny moan escaping her lips, and his priorities snapped back into ruthless focus. He had to get her out of there, get her home, and keep her safe. The doll could wait. It wasn’t going anywhere.

The trek back through the woods passed in a blur of shadows and rustling leaves. John felt eyes on him the whole way and heard eerie giggles sifting through the boughs, but when he whipped around to look, he saw only the impenetrable veil of night pressed close. 

By the time he stumbled back into the house, Sally had called an ambulance. 

Megan was whisked away, poked and prodded, scanned and examined within an inch of her life. But as it turned out, she had no memory of that night. The doctors could find nothing wrong, and within days, life settled uneasily back into its normal rhythm as if nothing had ever happened. But John knew better. He had seen the doll, touched it, and felt the ancient malevolence radiating from it. It was real. And it was far from done with them.

John glimpsed it from the corner of his eye—perched on Megan’s dresser, peeking around doorways, lurking at the edges of his vision, always watching with those unblinking, glassy eyes that seemed to follow him no matter where he went. He tried to convince himself it was stress, his mind playing tricks, but deep down, he knew the truth. The doll was biding its time, waiting. For what, he couldn’t guess, but the very thought filled him with dread.

Then came the whispers. 

He would hear Megan through her bedroom door some nights, her voice too low to make out words, but the noise of a one-sided conversation was unmistakable. Whenever he asked her about it, she would shrug, her expression distant, and say she was talking to herself. John didn’t believe that for a second. He knew the whispers, the blank looks, and the way Megan seemed to be slipping away from them a little more each day. It was the doll. Somehow, some way, it was taking her from him.

Sally told him he was being paranoid, that Megan was just processing the trauma of that night in her own way. That things would get back to normal eventually, he’d see. But John, his unease festered, growing into a cankerous wench that roiled endlessly in his gut. He couldn’t bring himself to share his suspicions with Sally. John could barely stand to entertain them himself. But he watched—Megan, the doll, always alert for any sign, any hint of the danger he felt circling his family like a hungry shark scenting blood in the water.

When the doll disappeared a few weeks later, John tore the house apart, searching for it. But there was no sign. It was just gone—vanished like a specter from a half-remembered nightmare. Megan took the loss hard. She cried for days, inconsolable, bewildered by her parents’ lack of understanding. It was her friend; she sobbed. Her best friend in the whole world. They had to find it.

But as the days stretched into weeks with no sign of the doll, Megan’s grief gave way to something far more worrying. She turned inward, spending hours sitting motionless, staring into thin air. It was like all the life, all the vibrant energy that made her Megan had been drained away, leaving only a vacant shell behind. 

Sally tried to coax her to eat, to engage, but it was no use. Megan just drifted through the days like a ghost haunting her own life. The doctors had no answers. Physically, she was fine, they said. Whatever was happening, it was all in her head as if that made it any less real. Any less devastating. John felt his little girl slipping away in front of his eyes, and he was powerless to stop it.

Then came the night that would be forever seared into John’s memory. The night, his worst fears bore bitter fruit. He woke to the sound of giggling drifting up from downstairs, high-pitched and strange, yet familiar. Heart in his throat, he leaped from the bed and took the stairs two at a time, Sally’s startled questions chasing him down.

He found Megan in the living room, facing away from him, her body swaying gently as if to some unheard music. But it was what she held in her arms that froze John’s breath. It was the doll. It was back, clasped tight to Megan’s chest as if it had never been gone.

“Megan?” John barely recognized his own voice, threadbare with dread. “Where… where did you find that?”

Slowly, Megan turned to face him. Her face was ghostly pale in the moonlight, spilling through the windows, eyes lifeless. When she spoke, it was with the hollow voice of a stranger.  

“She never left, Daddy. She’s been here all along. Waiting.”

The doll’s head swiveled towards John with a soft click, lips peeling back from tiny, gleaming teeth in a leering grin.

Throat dried as bone, John forced the words out past the fear choking him. “Waiting for what?”

“For me.” Megan’s voice was no louder than a sigh. “She’s lonely. She needs me. And I need her. We belong together.”

Megan turned and walked towards the front door, steps stiff and jerky, like a marionette with tangled strings. Jolted into action, John lunged after her—only to be slammed back against the wall by an invisible force, pinned like an insect in a display case. 

“Megan, no! Don’t go with it!” He thrashed against the unseen bonds, wild with desperation. “Fight it, baby, please!”

But Megan was already pulling open the door, the doll clutched to her like a lifeline. She paused on the threshold, turning back for one final look at her father, eyes brimming with an emotion he couldn’t name.

“I love you, Daddy. But I belong to her now. Forever and always.”

Then she was gone, vanishing into the night, leaving only the dying echo of the doll’s triumphant laughter behind.

They searched for months. Police, private detectives, psychics, and anyone who might have a prayer of a chance of bringing their little girl home. But it was as if Megan had simply vanished off the face of the earth. There was no trace, no trail, no clues. Just an empty bedroom gathering dust and a yawning, ragged hole in their lives where she should have been.

As the years passed, bit by bit, John and Sally lost hope. The police moved on to newer cases. The media lost interest, and the town slowly forgot about the little girl who walked out her front door and never returned. Only John and Sally remembered. Only they still waited, clinging to the desperate dream that one day, their baby would find her way back home.

But that day never came. And so they grew old in a house too big for two, weighed down by grief and regret and questions that would never have answers. Sometimes, Sally would catch John standing at Megan’s bedroom window late at night, staring out into the woods as if he could will her into being if he just looked hard enough. 

But mostly, they tried to forget. They tried to move on as best they could, though they both knew a piece of them would always be missing. Would always be out there, lost in the dark, with their only child.

Some said the doll was still out there, too. They said it moved on once it had drained Megan dry, off to find a new plaything, a new soul to claim for its own. Others whispered it kept Megan with it always, imprisoning her in an eternal nightmare playdate from which there could be no escape.

But in the end, all that mattered was that it got what it wanted. What it had been waiting for, all those years in the dark. A companion. A prize. A child to have and hold and covet so none other could ever bring warmth or light to the endless reaches of its cold porcelain heart.

And that it was patient. It would always be waiting—for the next lonely child, the next lost soul, the next Megan. because, in the end, the doll always got what it wanted.

And it had forever to wait.