The Painted Doll

• 4 minute read
• Ages 9-13
• Horror Stories for Kids

When my grandmother died we spent a week clearing her house, and in a trunk in the back room, under three blankets, there was a doll.

She was old. Wooden, about the length of my forearm, with her face and hair painted on, and a red dress that had faded to pink on one side where the light had reached it.

The painted face was smiling.

My little sister Nida wanted her, and my mother said fine, and that was that.

The trunk

There was one odd thing, which I noticed and did not think about properly.

The trunk had a latch on the outside, and the latch had been fastened.

That is normal for a trunk. But there were also two lengths of cord tied round the whole trunk, top to bottom, knotted at the front. Somebody had put the doll in, closed the latch, and then tied the trunk shut as well.

My mother cut the cords with kitchen scissors and we did not talk about it.

Nida's rule

Nida was seven, and she loved the doll for about four days.

On the fifth day she came to my room and asked if the doll could sleep with me instead.

"Why?"

"Because she watches."

I told her that was silly and that painted eyes do not move. Nida said she knew painted eyes do not move.

"That's why," she said. "They don't move. But she's always looking at where I am."

I took the doll that night to prove a point. I put her on the shelf facing the wall.

In the morning she was still facing the wall, exactly as I had left her, and I felt quite pleased with myself.

It was only later that I thought: I had put her on the shelf at the far end of the room, and in the morning she was on the shelf nearest the bed.

The smile

We kept her for eleven days.

On the eleventh evening my mother was dusting, and she picked the doll up and went very quiet, and then she carried her to the window to see her in the light.

I asked what was wrong.

My mother said, "Was she smiling like this when we found her?"

I looked.

The paint was old and cracked and perfectly dry, the way hundred-year-old paint is. Nothing about it was wet or fresh or smudged. It had not been touched.

But the mouth was wider than it had been. Noticeably wider. It went further up on both sides, into a shape that a painter would not have painted, and the crack lines in the varnish ran across it as though it had always been that way.

Back in the trunk

We put her back in the trunk that night.

My mother closed the latch. Then she went out to the shed and came back with a roll of garden twine and tied the trunk shut, top to bottom, and knotted it at the front.

Neither of us said anything about it while she did it.

And then she stood there for a moment with her hand flat on the lid, and I understood that my grandmother had stood in that same spot and done that same thing, and had not written a note, and had not told anybody, because who would she have told, and what exactly would she have said?