Chapter 4: A doll's Hair

Adeline often spent her time in the dining room near the curio cabinet brushing her doll’s hair, or simply sitting cross-legged, facing the wall, and conversing sweetly. Other times she might lie on her tummy with her heels kicked up in the air while she softly pet the carpet with her fingers, as though she were running her fingers through someone’s hair.

“Quiet strange, this one,” said the mother to no one in particular.

Her parents would peep in occasionally to check on what she was up to. Thus far, most of her experiences had been mostly kid-friendly. But Adeline was the one with the gift. Not them. She knew more about it than they did. If there ever was a troublesome spirit, which was extremely rare, Adeline had learned how to turn them off and shoo them away all on her own. She used to get nightmares and sensations of blackness, fear, panic, sorrow, sadness -- all the stuff you would expect from a troubled soul. Adeline had figured out how to attract mostly happy souls.

But this was different. Sarah was a troubled soul. She was not bad, or evil. Just troubled. And potentially dangerous. Adeline knew it, but she felt compelled to be involved, like she would be part of solving a riddle and she needed to be around for it to happen. And it came with an overwhelming feeling of sadness. Adeline believed this feeling did not belong to her, but it felt like hers, and she knew she must resolve what was behind it so she the sadness could be alleviated.

She had no idea how the story would play out. There was never much of a pattern to it, really. She just knew what she needed to do, when she needed to do it, and she did it. That was it.

The problem was, she always solved her riddles by conversing with the dead. In this case, Sarah would not converse with her at all. She would not even send her images to work with. Instead, she just watched Adeline with an attentiveness somewhere between neighborly acknowledgement and distant boredom. But no conversations took place. After all, how could one converse with a floor?

To Adeline, it was less a matter of frustration and more a matter of, “Hmmm. This is curious. The label on this bottle says I must drink this potion if I am to shrink small enough to fit through that door. Very well, I must drink it then.”

And so she sat in the dining room each day and played with her toys patiently, knowing at some point she would know what needed to be done. She favored the doll most of all, when she hadn’t played with it for months. She would comb the doll’s hair and talk to it as if it were her own child.

“There, there, Penny” she would say. “You’ve gotten very pretty now, haven’t you? It should be such a shame to see you go away. I don’t know what I should do if something like that happened. I think I might disappear into this floor and let it swallow me whole. I simply couldn’t bear it.”

Her mother thought it was sweet how Adeline was talking to the doll. Sarah, on the other hand, began to feel something stir inside her, and she did not like it.