Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 4567 | Page 222

time, familiar. As she stared at the doll, Hayden realized that it was beginning to look more and more like
someone she knew: It was beginning to look like her mother.
Grabbing the doll, Hayden ran to her hallway closet and threw it inside, slamming the door shut. She kept telling
herself she was being ridiculous and that she needed to get some sleep; but she couldn’t knock the fear or the
feeling that her mother was still around. She closed her eyes shut, but when she opened her eyes because there
was a noise coming from the hallway. It was the sound of a door creaking open, and then the small patter of
footsteps.
Her door was cracked open and she couldn’t for the life of her move to close it. The footsteps continued and
then stopped, right outside her door. Hayden could now see the shadow of two very small feet through the crack
at the bottom of the door. Slowly her door opened a little wider and the doll pushed its head through the
opening, the delicate look on its face now replaced by a look of pure evil.
T he doll stood in her doorway staring at her, the eyes which had once looked alive and life like, now looked
black and dead, but still as intense as the first time she had took her out of the box. The doll was saying
something, it said,
“You know what you did.”
“What do you want?” Hayden suddenly screamed at the doll as she found her voice.
She stared in horror as the doll began walking toward her and Hayden heard its voice for the first time.
“Now that I’ve found you, we’ll never be apart.”
Hayden screamed at the top of her lungs as she realized she was staring face to face not with a doll anymore, but
with her mother...
But when the darkness came, she didn’t try to fight it…
“How long has she been like this?” Doctor Niles asked the nurse as he observed her through the one- sided
mirror.
“She’s been like this for hours, all she does is stare blankly at the wall; she hasn’t said a word,” The nurse
responded. Doctor Niles opened the connecting door and stepped into the room that Hayden had been in for
the past few hours since being transferred from the hospital.
“Hello Hayden, I’m Doctor Niles. You’re at Shanghai Mental Health Centre.”
Hayden continued to stare blankly past the doctor, mumbling something inaudible. Doctor Niles continued,
“Can you remember what happened?
No response. Doctor Niles tried a new direction. “Your sister has arrived. I’ll go get her so that you can talk to
her.”
As Doctor Niles left the room, Hayden continued to stare blankly but her voice grew a little louder.
“Now that you’ve found me, we’ll never be apart.”