My nephew, Ian, sent me an email - telling me about a dream he had of children singing "Ring-a-ring-a-rosy" and then falling down dead. In the dream he was also pursued by a cloth faced doll - that he could only see out of the corner of his eye. He asked me to write a horror story based on his idea.
Here's the first, unedited draft.
The Cloth Faced Doll
By Paul Mannering and Ian Wills.
Some dares are stronger than magic spells. Stronger
than a pinky-promise. Stronger than swearing on your grandmother’s grave, even
though she is still alive, plays tennis twice a week and gives you money on
your birthday. Some dares are invoked with the words passed down through the
playground generations, from the older kids to the younger ones. Some dares you
have to accept, or be forever known as the kid that chickened out on a
dare. Which is why Toby Shannon crawled
through the wire fence around the old Saint Yvonne School after dark, after
bedtime and after being dared to go into the abandoned building.
He had to come back with something to prove his
bravery. Then he would be in the gang. Part of the group that sat together at
recess and lunch. Part of the group of friends that no one messed with. He
would be in and then the bullying would stop.
The Saint Yvonne School was one of the oldest
buildings in the area. It had been closed for a hundred years and had been
haunted for even longer. Hayden, who told Toby what he needed to do for his
initiation dare, said that a kid sneaked in to the school one summer and they
never found him until a week later. When they found the kid, his hair had
turned white and he couldn’t speak. Now they kept him in a padded room up at
the Bellview hospital, even his parents didn’t visit him.
Toby sometimes thought that a padded room at Bellview
would be a nice change from going to school every day. Being pushed, and teased
and laughed at, having his schoolbag thrown in the toilet, and his lunch thrown
into the bushes. Compared to that, sneaking into a creepy old building would be
easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.
The fence was rusted mesh, diamonds of wire with a
trim of wind-blown litter and dead weeds. In places the fence had rusted away
and you could squeeze through the gaps. The grass inside the fence seemed dead too.
Like nothing could grow in the shadow of the old school. Toby had asked his dad
about the school. He’d told him to look it up on the internet. The websites
said that the school had been turned into a hospital, during a Cholera epidemic
a hundred years ago. Children who got sick were put there, beds lined up in the
classrooms and hallways like a hospital ward. A lot of the sick kids died. Toby
looked at old black and white photos, some of them showed stern faced nurses
and doctors in white coats and stiff uniforms. Others were photos of sick
children, lying in beds, their listless eyes sunk deep into their pale faces.
Under his feet the brown grass crunched with a sound
like stepping on spilled cereal. Toby didn’t run, he walked, through the dead weeds
and all the way up to the wide stone steps at the front of the building. The
school stood three stories high, all the windows were boarded up, even the ones
with bars over them in the round towers at the top corners.
At the top of the five wide stone steps Toby crouched
down and listened hard. He could hear the wind blowing through the dead trees,
making them creak and moan. He could hear the shrill scream of the wind racing
through cracks and gaps in the walls. Screaming like the ghosts of children
with dark eyes sunk deep in their skulls. Toby pulled a board, it was loose,
just like Hayden said it would be. The door behind it had a hole big enough for
Toby to slip through. He was small for his age, which is why the bullies picked
on him. Inside he stood up, the Super
Dude Sam torch he carried clicked on and the narrow beam of yellow light made
the shadows rear and stampede along the walls. Beyond the light, the darkness
seemed darker. Toby waved the torch around, like a light-saber. “Voom-voom,” he
whispered, the sound vanishing into the open space of the large hallway he
stood in.
The floor was covered in dirt and trash, the tiles
were arranged in a diamond pattern of brown and grey. Directly ahead and a bit
to the right a set of old wooden stairs led up to the second floor. Toby looked
around, the old wooden walls, the peeling paint and wallpaper, the empty cans of
spray paint and cigarette butts. It seemed weird that no one had painted the
walls though. There were no tagged messages on the dirty walls. Just discarded
cans and signs of teenagers being here. Maybe
the ghosts got them? The thought rose unbidden and unwanted in Toby’s mind.
He swallowed hard and thought about how the bullying would stop if he just did
this one thing.
Walking forward he passed the stairs, heading towards
the back of the building. According to the floor plans he had seen online, one
of the children’s wards was back there. A door of dark wood blocked his way,
the oval handle of black metal set high on its face. Toby reached up and turned
the handle, the door opened when he pushed. A slow agonised scream of stiff
hinges echoed off the walls and nearly stopped his heart. Toby froze; all he could hear now was the
thudding of his heart and the thin rasp of his breathing. Holding the torch in
one hand, he dug his asthma inhaler out of his pocket and took a deep sucking
gasp. Holding his breath until he saw stars he exhaled slowly, the tight
feeling in his chest easing and the taste of medicine in the back of his throat
felt comforting.
The space beyond the door had been filled with junk.
Old bed frames, with coiled springs and wooden frames were stacked haphazardly
around the room. Toby took a careful step forward, the light flashing and
catching the mouldering piles of discarded mattresses, like giant rotting
cheeses, pierced with holes where rats and birds had made their nests. Toby
stared as one mattress quivered and a rat squirmed out of it, Toby swallowed
hard, remembering a story, an old story
found in a box of old books, a story about an evil Chinese sorcerer who
would put a live rat on people’s bellies with a pot over it. Then he put a dish
of hot coals on top of the pot and added more coals until the rat got so hot it
would chew its way out the only way it could to save itself from burning.
Another shot from his inhaler helped Toby keep breathing.
He walked into the room, stepping around the old beds
and away from the mattresses that with the lumps that bulged and slithered
where the rats moved. At first he thought it was the wind, a soft sighing
whisper, and a cold draft brushed over his neck. Toby turned around, rubbing
the back of his neck checking for spiders. The door stayed open, and he could
see all the way out to the gap in the front door. A straight line that he could
run- no not run. If you run, they
will get you. You need to be brave and
walk. One steady step at a time, always expecting that cold dead hand to
fall on your shoulder and drag you down to where the dead children waited in
the dark.
Toby reached the end of the room, there were a few
rat-chewed magazines with weathered pages stuck to the floor. Those were no
good. He needed some trophy that couldn’t have been found somewhere else. Maybe
a piece of the mattress covering? The image of tearing off a strip and a whole
swarm of rats tumbling out of the hole made Toby shiver. No, best to leave the
mattresses well alone.
The sighing whisper came again, Toby thought he could
catch the almost words of a song, a nursery rhyme. It sounded familiar. Turning
his back on the room Toby walked carefully to the door and heard the whispers
again. Atishoo…Atishoo…we all fall down… Children’s
voices, singing, somewhere very far away and very faint. Every hair on the back of his neck now stood
up. Every nerve tingled. He would not run. If he ran they would grab him. A
hundred pale ghostly hands would drag him down and he would be trapped forever,
singing a song older than the children, older than the building, older than
anything except death.
Breathing slowly Toby reached the front door and then
looked around again. The sounds of children came clearly in the still air; the
faint whispers, girl’s voices, boy’s voices, all whispering and giggling. Toby’s
fists clenched. The plastic body of the Super Dude Sam torch creaked. “Stop
laughing…” he said quietly. The sound
continued, he heard the bustle of nurse’s skirts, the creak of wooden floorboards,
the coughs and moans of the sick and dying. Over it all he could hear the children, the
whispering, laughing children. Laughing and whispering like the bullies at
school. The ones like Hayden, and Jessica and Grant and Sarah. The ones he
hated so much he would rather go into a haunted house at night than have to
face their torture for one more day.
“Leave me alone!” Toby’s anger burst out of him in a
shout. He wheezed for air and fumbled for his inhaler but it slipped through
his sweat-slicked palm and bounced across the floor. The torch light found it,
lying in the dust and dirt at the bottom of the stairs. His breath whistling
through the tight band closing around his throat Toby stumbled forward and on
his knees he snatched up the inhaler. Pressing it, he couldn’t get enough air
in for the vapour to work. A panicked feeling of suffocation gripped him and he
pressed the trigger again, finally his airway opened and he took a third dose,
inhaling deep breathes and waiting for the panicked shaking to stop.
A girl in an old fashioned dress stood on the stairs
in front of him, like someone from an old black and white movie. Except she was
made of grey mist and he could see the stairs behind her. Her hair was braided
into two long whips that hung down her back. Her eyes were shadows, circles of
darker black in the shadows of her face. Cradled in the crook of one arm she
carried an old fashioned doll, its body was carved from wood, the head made
stitched from a scrap of cloth and padded, only one button eye remained and the
dress she wore had a faded pattern of checks. Just like the girl, all colour had bled from
it. Like the girl, the doll was now a grey shadow thing.
Around him the unseen children sang, Ring-a-ring-a-rosy… Toby would have screamed, but the air just
whistled out of his throat. He whimpered and lifted the torch, hoping that the
light would banish this thing born of the horrifying shadows. When the beam
touched her, the girl melted away, like steam vanishing from a bath. The doll
dropped to the wooden steps, landing with a solid thunk. Toby snatched it up and backed away. He didn’t care about
proving anything to anyone anymore. The need to get away from this place
blanked every other thought.
Once the board was back in place Toby walked quickly,
still afraid to run, all the way to the mesh fence. Once he had crossed the
street, then he ran. He ran until he wheezed and shook. Climbing back in his
bedroom window he stuffed the doll in his school backpack and took regular
puffs on his inhaler until he fell asleep.
Hayden and his gang left Toby alone the next morning
before school. They waited until the morning break to gather around him,
penning him in, giving him nowhere to run to.
“Bet you didn’t go. Bet you were chicken!” Hayden said
and the others laughed. Jeering and making chicken clucking noises.
Toby unzipped his Super Dude Sam backpack and pulled
out the doll. The head of it was padded with something soft. Woollen hair and
rough stitching marked the face and eyes. Circles of red had been painted on
the cloth cheeks, now the faded colour gave the doll a strange, feverish
appearance.
“I went there. I saw a ghost and she gave me this.”
Hayden blinked and stared. The filthy doll stared back
with her single button eye and her cotton stitched mouth seemed to smile.
“HA-HAA! Toby plays with dolls!” Hayden yelled and
pushed Toby hard. He fell down, the doll yanked from his grip and raised
triumphant as evidence of Hayden’s chanting. “Toby plays with do-olls! Toby
plays with do-olls!” The others took up
the chant, and Toby felt tears stinging his eyes. They weren’t going to make
him part of their gang. They never expected him to do what they dared. Being
brave hadn’t changed anything.
Hayden and the others danced in a circle around him,
chanting, and laughing. Other children came to see who was lying on the ground.
They eagerly took up the chant too, Toby
plays with do-olls! Toby plays with dolls! It echoed and swirled around
him. A dark tornado of noise that swept the last hope of his hope away. Toby
curled up in a ball and cried, the voices of the children blurring until he
heard them merge with a whisper that grew in strength until it was all he could
hear…
Toby plays with
do-olls!
Ring-a-ring-a-rosie
A pocket full of
posie
Atishoo!
Atishoo!
We all fall
down!
Then silence. Toby opened his eyes and sniffled,
wiping the snot and tears away from his face with a sleeve he sat up. Hayden and the others were lying on the
ground, the doll sat in the centre of the circle, near Toby’s feet. The children
did not move. Arms and legs splayed in all directions, they lay like puppets
with their strings cut. All so still and quiet, and Toby knew, with a sudden
and terrible certainty, dead. All of them had fallen down and they would never
get up again.
He picked up the cloth faced doll, and just for a
moment, he thought he could hear the sound of children laughing and singing a
very old song…