Horror Tales (2 page)

Sharon, shocked, drowned a scream of horror. The knife slipped through her fingers and fell gently on the blanket. The full moonlight had hit in her right wrist... And there, shining brightly was the unmistakable mark of a fang: the mark of the lycanthrope!

––––––––

S
he found it lying on the ground. It looked like as if another girl had forgotten her in that corner. She knew that it was not right to pick up something that didn´t belong to her, because someone had to be the owner of such a wonderful porcelain doll, with that laced black and blue dress; but in reality she wasn´t stealing it... The doll was abandoned, and anyone could take her equally, or it could get ruined by the rain and the wind...

She arrived home and her mother logically asked her. She regretted not having an answer prepared, and she immediately knew that her cheeks would betray her if she lied.

• Where have you found this doll?
  
• I´ve found her at the crossroads of M Street and 10. It was abandoned...
  
• But this doll must be some other girl´s. It is a porcelain doll, it´s wearing a nice dress, and it seems really expensive...
  

Penny made that face with which she knew could convince her mother, and as usual, it didn´t fail this time.

• Alright, you can keep her. But if someone comes asking for her, or if we hear that in the neighborhood they are looking for her, we will give her back to her owner immediately.
  

Cathy thought that she, once more, was spoiling her child. But she didn´t feel strong enough to contradict her. Since the divorce, she had been very sensitive. It had been a very complicated trauma to assimilate for a little nine- year- old girl. In any case, if someone came by asking for that wonderful doll, they would give it back to its legitimate owner and case closed.

The days went by and the doll had become Penny´s best friend. She took it with her everywhere: to school, to the park, to the excursions... The best part of it was that nobody had asked for her, and therefore, the fright of having to tell her good - bye had been gone almost completely.

• And this doll?
  - asked Paul, her father, the first time he saw it.
  
• I´ve found her on the street. Mum let me keep her –
  answered quickly Penny, fearful that his father could object.
  
• I don´t like her. She seems to be angry. Besides, it doesn´t fit you, it´s too... cheesy.
  

Penny stared at her doll´s face and discovered that
it had changed
. It was true, now she seemed angry. But until then she appeared to be happy and smiley. She didn´t pay attention, because she wished to be with her doll anyway.

That night, Cathy believed to hear voices coming from her daughter´s room. She was too tired to get up, and this wasn´t the first time that Penny stayed awake playing until late hours. But that night... She seemed to hear a voice...
strange, different
...

• Who were you talking to last night that late?
  – Cathy asked her daughter the following morning, while they were having breakfast.
  
• To Pat
  – answered Penny without giving it too much importance.
  
• To Pat? Who on earth is Pat?
  
• My doll
  – replied the little girl, showing her mother the doll that she carried everywhere.
  
• Have you named her like that
  ?
  
• No
  .
  That´s her name. She told me so.
  

Cathy approached the doll and took her in her arms. She stared at her closely: she seemed to be changed, different. She felt an immediate strange sensation.

But that very weekend, she heard again her daughter talking to someone in her bedroom. This time, she couldn´t get to sleep. The other voice was very peculiar, too different to Penny´s as to be an imitation. What the hell was going on?

Not being able to restrain her curiosity, she got up of the bed, barefoot, and walking very slowly approached her daughter´s room, sticking her ear behind the door. Yes, her little girl was talking to
someone
, but it was impossible that that other voice was Penny´s! Could some school friend have ventured to come to the house that late and talk to Penny through the open window...? Hard to believe, but not impossible. Of course, if that was the case, both of them would take notice. Suddenly, she heard something that made her shiver:

<>
, Cathy told to herself. Then, the most absolute silence came. A few very uncomfortable minutes later, she seemed to hear some footsteps wandering around the room. For just one moment, although it could seem ridiculous, Cathy felt something similar to horror. Everything was so weird. Ploughing out courage from her own guts, she quickly opened the door. She couldn´t repress a scream: it
seemed
to her that the doll, situated on the chest of drawers in front of her daughter´s bed,
was turning
its head just when she was opening the door with determination.

Her daughter shot at her a surprised look. She seemed sleepy, and a little bit scared.

Cathy checked that the window was well closed and then she took the doll, now that it looked like a lifeless object in her hands. But again she felt, she seemed to sense, that the expression of the doll had changed once more: she showed a determined look, even defiant.

Again, she felt the heaviness of the divorce on her, and that after Penny´s parents split up, she could not deny the doll to her, because she was suffering in silence, and that object, that doll she was becoming so fond of, at least seemed to give her daughter certain happiness.

The week passed by with certain normality. However, Cathy couldn´t help but thinking about the doll.
About Pat
. She had become almost an obsession. She thought it was a bad influence for her daughter. And then they were
those expressions
. When the weekend came and Paul, her ex-husband, told her he didn´t like it either, she saw a door opened.

They had a hard time convincing Penny, who almost broke into tears when she sat in her father´s car, heading to the house they owned in the city outskirts, leaving her beloved Pat in her bedroom.

That night Penny phoned her mother to wish her a good night and to tell her all she had been doing during the day in the company of her father.

Cathy went to bed early. But soon she felt uncomfortable: she knew it would not be easy for her to get to sleep that night and she thought of taking a tranquilizer. It happened to her rather frequently, when Penny slept outside home, no matter if it was her ex- husband´s home. At last, she relaxed, but when she was almost asleep, she seemed to hear
someone
was whispering somewhere in the house. At first she felt the shivers, but then she got up determined to frighten the possible intruder away. She took the wireless phone with her, in case it was necessary to call the police, and a starter pistol (she was terrified to use a real one). She left her bedroom barefoot, walking slowly along the carpeted hallway of the second floor. It was in that exact moment when she discovered that the whispers came from Penny´s bedroom.
How could it be?
She approached to the closed door, but she didn´t dare to open it.

And then, a deadly silence invaded the whole house. She waited a couple of minutes, almost holding up her breathing. She knew that on the other side someone was awaiting. And, tuning her ear, she seemed to hear some weak footsteps, which wandered around the room fairly slowly. Determined, she opened the door in a rush, pointing with the starter gun at the center of the room. Nobody was there.
Wait a moment
: the doll was thrown in the middle of the room, and she perfectly remembered having put her on the bed that same afternoon. Who had moved her? She searched desperately in the bedroom, looking even inside the closet and under the bed. There was no one there. And suddenly, a crazy idea crossed her mind. It was an idea as ridiculous as terrifying. She picked up the porcelain doll from the floor and looked at her face. Indeed:
she had changed again
. Now she was showing a malevolent smile, in which some irregular and sharp teeth could be spotted. Was she becoming insane? Furious, she smashed the doll against the wall.
Pat
´s porcelain face cracked, and it was marked by a huge scar that made a path, from her forehead to her chin. Cathy, satisfied, went back to her bedroom even more relaxed and fell immediately asleep.

The next day, around eleven, the phone rang at Paul´s home. It was really strange that someone phoned on a public holiday, and he thought that maybe it was his mother, wishing to invite him and her granddaughter to have a barbecue and to eat a delicious plum pie. 

Paul tried, with consternation, to obtain some more information, but the sheriff refused to facilitate it. He left Penny in his parents´ house, without telling her anything, and he headed to his previous home. It was surrounded by a yellow tape, and lots of neighbors and journalists were crowded outside the house. He asked for the sheriff and some agents took him immediately to the hall, in which they had improvised a kind of office for both the police and CSI.

The sheriff took Paul upstairs, as if he already knew the whole house. He shrugged his feet, drowning, without getting to believe that all that was really happening. And in his mind, a fixed idea was harassing him:
How would he explain Penny that she was not going to see her mum ever again?
But all his thoughts vanished when the sheriff pointed at Cathy´s body, lying face- down on her bed.
What the hell was that!
His ex-wife had her neck completely rotated, obviously shattered, counterclockwise to the rest of the body. Her eyes injected with blood seemed to overwhelm the orbits of her eyes which loosely kept them attached to the face. Paul fell on his knees on the floor and broke into tears like a little baby, disconsolate.

He just nodded between sobs. He thought he would faint when suddenly an image startled him: between his knees and the leg of the bed rested Penny´s doll, that wicked doll. She was lying on her side, with her
perfect
face of fine porcelain, and she was sending him a stare of satisfaction...
Yes, she was looking at him, and she was pleased to see the pain that the crime she had committed was causing him!

A
t last he had spotted his dreamt place. Maybe he could leave behind, now and forever, all his problems, those damn
problems
that had been pushing him since a few years ago. The house has situated at the top of a small hill, just in the outskirts of the insignificant town. It was a wonderful construction of Victorian style, lovely and far away from the bustle. Exactly what he needed to recover his senses and to retake his profession: architecture.