The Whispering Doll

It was a stormy night the evening Clara arrived at the step of the house. The kind of house where the air lingers with dust and forgotten things. The kind of house that just seems to sigh with its own secrets. She had inherited the house from her grandmother after she had died under what no one in the family cares to discuss as mysterious circumstances. Clara had faced an insistence from within herself to visit the house.

Putting the neutrality aside, the house was crumbling—walls crying with peeling wallpaper, creaky floorboards that brought a pace to her heartbeat, and such an unsettling silence, she believed could be its own entity. While she did not believe in ghosts, the weight of the house pressed down on her like a disadvantageous trap.

She passed through the old living room on the first night after she had gotten settled inside. She didn't notice it, but it was cold in there, and the fireplace had likely gone unlit for some time. She then became aware of a doll stored on the mantle. It was small and delicate with wide, glass eyes fixed in a stare, its gaze didn't close, nor did they hashtag her own.

She had never seen a doll that looked like that. It was old and its porcelain face had hairline cracks and didn't hold a resemblance in any living image. That was when she noticed, in her peripheral, a cloth that stated her grandmother's name, "[lara jinn]." What she discovered next shocked her. It's a good thing she hadn't registered in unbridled panic for unutilized years—there was hair entwined around [insert name]'s neck, and Clara thought the memory turned malignant. "What is this?" she thought to herself as the whispering became inaudible.