Object Transformation: The Doll

Practicing elder law may not be the most exciting of careers, especially for a lawyer, but it’s my job and I’m proud to help the older generation. Although ninety percent of what I do is help them get their affairs in order, you know for when they pass on.

Most of them are actually really simple and quick. I usually spend more time listening to older folk talk. They’ll usually talk about their day or a grandkid or two, but every so often I get a truly exciting story.

Now another thing that happens rarely, is collections. Every so often someone will have a large or expensive collection, and those usually require me to document and get an estimated value of the items.

Today is actually one of those days, the client today is an older woman. Her name is Meredith, she’s somewhere around eighty-seven years old. She has spent her life collecting and crafting dolls. Over the phone, she told me she has over a thousand of them, some of them are older than she is.

She started collecting when she was a little girl, her father actually used to run a shop that made them. I guess over time he taught her how to make them as well and eventually it became her passion.

She even has rare dolls, from Barbie to Cabbage Patch Kids. She claims to have the best collection.  Now it probably sounds weird how excited I am to view a ton of dolls, I mean I am an adult male. It’s a part of my job I love, the chance to see something so rare is exciting, even if they’re little girls' toys.

So I arrive at her house and ring the doorbell, it takes her a few minutes but she eventually opens the door and greets me. We sit down and begin chatting, she offers me some tea and cookies. She goes into more detail about her father and his passion for crafting dolls and how he passed it all onto her.

She also talked about how she’s been so sad since her hands don’t work like they used to. Although she can no longer create new dolls, she claims to have a new way to still have fun with her hobby. She made some weird comments about bringing them to life and giving each of them a personality.

After finishing my tea, I ask her if she’s ready for me to start looking over the collection and getting them all logged and accounted for. She happily leads me to what may be the creepiest room I’ve ever seen.

It was a massive room and every doll was in there. That’s right, all one thousand-plus dolls sitting in one room. I set up my computer on a spot on the table grab my camera and start doing what I do. One after another I picked one up, sat it in front of the camera, took a pic, and cataloged it onto my computer under her file.

I was in that room for hours, which you can guess starts to make you feel like you're being watched. Some of the dolls started to feel like they were begging for help, clearly, this room was getting to me. I should have taken a break, but instead, I made the dumb mistake of trying to try and rush through the rest of them.

That led me to drop one of the dolls, which caused the hand to fall off and break. I’m not a bad person and went to tell the woman about it, I have insurance for this reason and I’d make sure if it couldn't be fixed I’d be able to pay for it.

She held the doll for a good moment without saying anything. She put it back into my hand and walked away again without saying anything, but I could tell she was mad. I just waited there feeling awful until she returned.

She brought a book with her, it was old and was covered in strange symbols. She began to read from it, but the words she was saying were not in any language I spoke. When she spoke the last word she looked up and smiled at me.

I was extremely confused and just as scared. I began to back up, this was too crazy for me. I went to grab my laptop when I noticed my arm was disappearing. I looked back at the woman and asked her what she did.

She reminded me that she liked bringing the dolls to life and this is how she did it. She then admitted the real reason I was there. She wanted to fill each doll in this house with the soul of a real person. Over seventy-five percent of the dolls in this room were already occupied, and I was the next to fill a doll.

She told me she had a doll already picked out, but since I broke one, that one would become my new body. The rest of my body disappeared, the next thing I felt was my soul being sucked into the doll.

Everything was black for a while. When I came to, I was sitting on a little pink bed, presumably in one of the doll houses. I could no longer move on my own, but I could see, hear, and feel my new wooden body.

There was a doll-sized mirror in the room facing me, so I was able to see what I looked like now. That's probably a privilege a majority of the dolls in here didn’t have. I was wearing a short lingerie-type dress, with long pantyhose.

I had some sort of bow or headdress in my hair, holding it up. I had a lacey glove on one of my hands and of course, the other hand was missing. It was so strange. I can feel the bed beneath me, the clothes hugging me, and even the curves and joints of this body, but I can’t move or speak.

Why would anybody want to make someone else live like this? Without much choice, I just lay there. Days, weeks, months who knows how long had passed. Every so often she would remove me and clean me, change my outfits, and tease me.

When she was done, right back onto the bed I’d go. Eventually, I heard someone else enter the house. I have no idea why they were here, but I knew what was in store for them. The old woman did her thing and filled another doll, something she would do over and over again.

This time though, she filled a doll similar to the one I was in. She brought it to the dollhouse I was in and laid it on the bed next to me. She put one of her hands into mine and told us not to have too much fun together.

So there I was, trapped alongside so many others. Forced to live as dolls for a mad woman. I doubt anyone will ever be able to figure out that we’re all trapped, but I hope at least that witch will get what’s coming to her.