“Why did you bring that evil-looking doll into our home?” I asked my wife Gena.
“There’s nothing evil about it. It was a sweet gift from the nice lady at the Thrift Store,” she said.
But I wasn’t so sure. The damn thing had evil eyes that surprisingly my wife couldn’t see.
“She has the cutest eyes,” she said when she showed the doll to me for the first time.
I couldn’t figure out why what was obvious to me wasn’t to my wife.
Did the doll show different sides of itself to different people? Was it that deceptive and supernatural?
Then I started thinking about how people showed different sides of themselves to different people, like the way they acted with close friends compared to how they acted with people they didn’t know as well. I had to stop that line of thought when I considered that I was giving human attributes to a lifeless doll. Yet, I remembered hearing about evil dolls who did have human attributes. And some dolls gave people eerie feelings because the dolls had scary eyes.
Our dog, a feisty Chihuahua named Taco, knew the doll was evil. He barked and growled at it when he first saw it.
“See?” I said to my wife. “Even Taco knows the doll is evil.”
“Oh, hush,” she said. “Taco growls and barks at people and things all the time. He’s just high strung.”
I knew better. Just like dogs can hear sounds we can’t, I believed Taco had a heightened perception for detecting evil. But it may have been at the cost of his life. The first night the evil doll was in our home, we found Taco dead the next morning.
“I know your devil doll did this,” I told my wife.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Taco was 15 years old and many dogs die when they are old. It was just a coincidence, a sad coincidence. I miss Taco. He was a good dog.” My wife’s eyes teared up.
“Maybe you’re right about the coincidence,” I said, not wanting to argue with my wife, especially when she was so sad over Taco dying, and I realized she had a point. Taco was an old dog and his death could easily have been a coincidence. But still ….
After Taco died, I walked past the doll and punched it in the head. I couldn’t help myself. I hated that doll so much it felt good to hit it, but, granted, it was immature behavior.
Shortly after I hit the doll, I got a wicked headache and severe dizziness. I fell to the floor barely able to talk and unable to get up. My wife called 911. I got diagnosed at the ER with a stroke and returned home in a wheelchair. Luckily, I was able to talk, and the doctor at the ER told me after I started my treatment plan and did some rehab, I’d be out of the wheelchair soon.
I knew that goddamn devil doll caused the stroke. When I arrived home and saw it in my wife’s arms, I swear for a few seconds it had an evil smile on its face. At that moment, my hatred for the doll increased a hundredfold. Reining in my anger, I silently vowed to kill the devil doll and rid our house of its curse.
That night after my wife fell asleep, I wheeled into the kitchen and pulled a steak knife out of the knife drawer. I wheeled back into the bedroom and reached for the doll that was in our bed next to my wife. Though it seemed to have supernatural powers, it offered no resistance when I yanked it off the bed by the neck. Capitalizing on that, I quickly sawed the doll’s head off with the steak knife. I wheeled out to the kitchen with the doll’s head and body in my lap. I unrolled a trash bag from the roll of trash bags kept in a cabinet in the kitchen. I spread the trash bag out and put the doll’s head and body into it. I wheeled it out to our condo’s dumpster and threw the bag in it, relieved to be finally rid of the devil doll.
After I wheeled back into our condo, I didn’t have the energy to hoist myself into our bed. I fell asleep in the wheelchair at the foot of it. When I woke up, my wife wasn’t in our bed. In her place lay the devil doll with its head intact. A horrible thought entered my mind. As if reading my thoughts, the devil doll sat up and smiled the most wicked smile I’d ever seen. Too distraught to be terrified by the devil doll’s animations, I wailed and wailed as I wheeled to the dumpster.
Bob Boyd