The Doll

There was a figure standing in the shadows, a silhouette still in the corner. 

Elenore approached the window slowly, her eyes never leaving the dark figure, and with one motion, down she pulled the velvet curtains in a sweeping trail of dust. 

Her lips parted in wonder as she slowly stepped forward. The figure was too still to be human, posed lightly, ever so delicately, on the toe of one foot. 

She was a doll. 

She was a doll unlike any Elenore had ever seen, the most beautiful toy, the most beautiful figurine she could ever have imagined, brushed a deep midnight cobalt, gold flaking forward on her brow and cheek bones, her hair tumbling back over her shoulders. She had been made to be small girl about Elenore’s age, with slim, elegantly structured limbs, a perfectly sculpted face, and thick, dark lashes closed in a curling line over eyes large enough to look unnatural on anyone but this already impossibly lovely doll. 

Elenore stepped forward and slowly traced her fingers over its face. Not a flaw. Not a nick or a scratch or any kind of the slightest imperfection to suggest the hands that made it. A hand fell to lift a piece of lace from the shoulder of the doll’s dress. Her mother would have fainted with delight at its quality, at being able to touch a piece of its make. She tested the joints of one finger. Perfectly engineered, moving smoothly and without a sound, as if they’d been oiled yesterday. No dust on her shoulders, no rust in her joints, it was as if she had been set here only minutes before Elenore had arrived. But how? By whom? What person had taken such good care of her? 

Elenore stepped back and admired the doll once again, wondering desperately who had made her. What if that person were still alive? What if they could teach her? Maybe she could make a mate for this Nubian princess, so elegantly dressed. Maybe someday she could aspire to this level of skill. 

Her eyes fell again on the dancer’s face, and she stepped forward one more time, hand raised to lift one set of dark, perfect lashes. 

Gold met her eyes, an iris too impossibly layered to be the work of any painter, pupils too deep to be made by any man, and Elenore’s vision tunneled. 

She saw gold. Gold leaf, not gold iris. Gold gilding on the ceiling of the lovely, exquisitely decorated room, gold behind her back as she pressed herself against the wall in terror. Sounds came like she was underwater, or listening from far away, the sound of the iron machines poking their skeletal faces in through the door as they broke through in explosions of splinters. She screamed as they roughly twisted her arm behind her back, and then the woman came. The woman gliding in on soundless feet like an inhuman thing, the woman with red lips curled into a tiny, terrible smile, and eyes washed out with two swathes of black paint. The words she spoke were horrible and black and made her feel cold all over, cold to her very core, colder than she’d ever been in her life, cold enough to make her heart stop. She sucked in one last deep breath, desperate to fill her lungs with life, and then clattered to the ground.

Elenore fell to the floor with a crash. She still shuddered with second-hand terror. Up she stared at the doll's face, and then scrambled to her feet. This doll had been a girl- or at the very least alive, and someone had tried to kill her! 

Elenore grabbed the figurine by the shoulders and shook her hard enough to make her head wobble. “Wake up! Wake up! You need to wake up! Come on you can come back to life now!” She sounded so desperate to her own ears.

She took a slow, deep breath and let go of the doll’s shoulders. No need to act like a mad woman.

After a second she turned back around and started examining the doll minutely. That vision she had seen was real, she was sure of that, and it was this girl who had been hurt so badly by that terrifying woman with black paint on her eyes. Elenore had read enough fairy tales to know a spell when she heard one, and now that she knew, she had to find out if the spell on this girl could be broken, and if it could, how.