Moving in with your girlfriend is a time of extreme excitement and stress. You get to cohabitate with your lover, but you also have to uproot not one but two separate apartments and graft them together. Shelly and I characteristically waited until the final hour to pack her apartment and, in doing so, found ourselves strung out on Adderall and cigarettes, sorting through piles of junk in her closet at 2 in the morning.
Despite the stress, I felt great joy as I helped sort through her things. I felt like an archeologist studying the anthropology of the one woman I loved most. Her eyes lit up as she regaled me with stories of winning several blue ribbons at the 4H competitions as a teenager. I heard her wonderful laugh as we looked at the ridiculous haircuts she had in her school photos and pointed to the boys she used to crush on. It further affirmed my love for her and made me excited about opening the chapter of our shared life.
As we approached the bedrock of her closet, I discovered a box that read CHESTER in scratchy red crayon.
“Hey babe, what’s this?” I asked.
“Oh wait, no, don’t –” she protested.
But it was too late. I had already opened the box and jumped when I found a creepy wooden doll staring at me.
Eggshell white paint, which somebody had applied carelessly in short, haphazard strokes, covered the doll’s face, and the streaks of rouge on each cheek could not prevent it from looking utterly pallid. Its stringy black hair formed a cowlick in the back of its head, and its tattered, muddy clothes looked like they might disintegrate if touched. The worst part was its eyes – spaced slightly further than expected from the center; the bright blue pupils were set on bulging wooden balls, conveying an uncannily real earnestness. He seemed coiled up, trying to break free and lunge at me.
“Oh, sorry!” Shelly said, giggling nervously. “I didn’t want you to see this. I’ll throw it away now, sorry.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Of all the shit we’ve gone through tonight, this is hardly the most embarrassing. You really shouldn’t be ashamed–”
“You don’t get to decide what I feel ashamed about!” She snapped. She stood up, scooped up the doll in her arms like a baby, walked past the large black bags we’d filled with trash, and out the front door. I sat there stupefied as the door slammed loudly.
A few moments later, the door gently creaked open, and Shelly returned to the house. Before I could speak, she broke down crying. It was then she told me the story.
The doll, Chester, had been in their family for years. It was her grandmother’s first and passed down to Shelly’s mom and then on to Shelly. I had already known that her mom was the abusive alcoholic type, but I didn’t know that throughout Shelly’s childhood, she had forced Shelly to tote the doll around and treat it like a brother. Soccer practice, piano recitals, friend’s parties – the doll came with her anywhere she went.
If it weren’t bad enough to lug it everywhere, her mom would punish her if she didn’t talk to it as if it were real. It “chaperoned” her when she started going on first dates with boys when she was fifteen. As you can imagine, this didn’t work out well for any involved parties.
Until Chester started chaperoning dates, Shelly had placated her mother, finding it the simplest solution to avoid the brunt of the drunken beatings. However, the threat of becoming a social pariah in middle school overcame the threat of violence. Shelly would leave the doll at home, only to find it stuffed in her backpack or locker when she returned from lunch. Try as she might, she couldn’t escape it.
It wasn’t until Shelly’s mother passed, coincidentally right as Shelly was packing to leave for college, that she realized she couldn’t bring herself to leave Chester behind. At the last moment, she threw Chester in a brown box, loaded it into her Suburu, and drove cross country to college. It remained packed in various closets throughout her mid-twenties, a relic of her mother’s abuse that she couldn’t get rid of.
We stayed up the rest of the night together, talking. I listened to her stories and tried to be a supportive partner. Everyone brings their shit to a relationship, and I couldn’t stand to see her in so much pain.
The following day, she seemed better, so we finished packing and spent the rest of the weekend slogging through move-in tasks. At the end of it, we found ourselves physically beat down, emotionally drained, but fully moved into our new house. We still had a lot of work to do on the place, but we saved a fortune by renovating an old, run-down cabin in the woods.
Months passed, and I didn’t think about Chester or Shelly’s abusive family. That was until the doll started following me too. It started one day when I pulled a book off the shelf and found it crammed in the back of the bookcase, eyes aligned with the spine of the book so its big blue eyes were staring straight at me staring at me. I figured Shelly was pulling a macabre prank. She knew I would start reading Withering Heights, so she must have put it there to freak me out. I decided to brush it off.
But, of course, the pranks continued. Wherever I went, the doll seemed to pop up in our apartment. It was always when she was away, too, to add to the shock factor. Every time I brought it up to Shelly, she would look at me, and the doll stupefied and protested that she hadn’t done it and had no idea where it came from. Soon she started accusing me of putting Chester everywhere to prank her.
It was becoming a very toxic situation, so after the fourth time I found it wasn’t the bottom of our laundry bin, I snapped. I grabbed it by the scruff, put it in the trash, and handed the bag to the trashman.
I told Shelly when she got home what I had done. She seemed non-plussed at first but soon found an excuse to leave the house again and did not return for several hours.
The following day, I sleepily lumbered into the kitchen and reached into the pantry for the coffee beans, and there it was: the doll. He was sitting there with his porcelain white grin, taunting me. I grabbed it and charged into our bedroom, where Shelly played video games with her headphones on.
“We need to talk about this,” I said, thrusting the doll at her. “I think you need therapy. If you want to keep it at this point, that’s fine, but please stop making it ‘follow’ me around. It’s not funny.”
She slowly lowered the headphones from her ears, and her face twisted up as she was about to cry.
“I – I don’t know what –” she stuttered.
“Shelly, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I must be firm. If you insist on having the doll in the house, we may need to rethink our living situation.”
Finally, she erupted, tears streaming down her face and sobs bellowing deeply from her chest. She hadn’t cried like this since the night we were packing to move months prior. It was like I had lanced an infected wound, and it was pouring out toxic viscera. I tossed the doll down on the floor behind me, and it crumpled haphazardly.
An unfamiliar voice cut through the air as I walked across the room to comfort my apoplectic girlfriend.
“This is what happens when you get too close to boys,” A hoarse, high-pitched voice hissed behind me. “I told you he wasn’t good enough for you.”
My girlfriend stopped crying but stayed hunched over, her long black hair draped over her face. Fighting through the terror, I turned. The doll remained haphazardly crumpled on the floor as I had left it.
“Look what he did to me; look what he did to us,” The voice crooned.
The doll still did not move, and I could not discern the direction from which the voice was coming. It was like it was everywhere and nowhere all at once.
“Your mother was right! Only I can protect you. What would Mother think if she saw this wretched scene? You’d go straight into the bad girl room.”
I picked up the doll in the vain hope there was a recording device installed causing the sound, but there was nothing. It was just an ordinary doll.
“You heard him…”
At this point, I finally realized it; the voice was coming from behind me. It was coming from Shelly.
“It’s either him… or me.”
She pounced on me and tore and bit at my neck. I let out a cry and dropped the doll to the floor. She scurried to it on all fours in a flash and swaddled it.
“The bad man hurt me, sister,” Shelly said in her hoarse, doll voice. Through the forest of dark hair covering her face, I could tell she was speaking out of the side of her mouth like a ventriloquist.
“I’m so so sorry, my baby brother,” She said in her normal voice. “It won’t happen again. Please don’t tell Mother!”
“I’m going to have to tell,” She said again through the side of her mouth in the doll’s voice. As she did, she clutched her chest in a pantomime of exaggerated terror – as if the doll’s promise were the most horrific thing she could ever imagine. “Unless… you make the bad boy go away. Forever!”
She lay the doll down and rose to her feet. I tried to plead with her to calm down, but she launched at me with the fervor of a caged animal – thrashing, kicking, clawing, and biting. She had me pinned to the bed, and only after a full minute of the assault could I leverage my legs enough to kick her off of me. She twisted and contorted herself before quickly leaping back onto all fours, ready to pounce again. She backed into the doorway, blocking my escape. As she prepared to lunge, I dodged past her into the closet and slammed it shut.
She clawed at the door and wailed in her doll voice, “Get him, sister! Get him! Get the bad man!”
Despite the ongoing trauma, the combined scent of our clothes in our shared closet comforted me and made my heart sore. Shelly was acting crazy, but I figured she had enough of her faculties that sooner or later, she would get an axe and go The Shining on my ass. I grabbed an umbrella and prepared to defend against my lover-turned-attacker.
Then, I smelled smoke, and a dull orange glow crept from underneath the door. I held the back of my palm against the heavy wooden door and found it was warm. Shelly must have lit the place on fire. I’d get cooked if I stayed, so I decided to take my chances against my demonic girlfriend and charge through the door. I flung it open and rushed with my umbrella.
The smoke that filled the room choked my lungs and burned my eyes. I waded through it to find the exit but tripped and fell over Chester. The right side of its face was smoking, and its hair was aflame. Matches and a small can of gasoline that Shelly had ostensibly placed were sitting beside him as if he’d done it. Several feet away, she lay collapsed from smoke inhalation. I crawled to her and used the last ounce of my strength to drag her into the hallway, heave her over my shoulder and carry her to the lawn outside.
The cold dew wet the knees of my jeans as I lay her down on the grass bed. She came to moments later and violently hacked up black, sooty snot. It took about thirty minutes for fire and police to arrive at our remote cabin in the woods; by then, our place was a complete inferno. The firefighters gave us some water and blankets, and we sat together on the bumper of the fire truck and watched our first home go up in flames. It was only then that she spoke.
“What happened to him?” she croaked, her voice still a little hoarse from the smoke.
“He burned up,” I said. “He lit a fire and burned up the house.”
“So… he’s gone?” She looked at me hopefully.
“Yes.”
She stared back at the fire and smiled. Her head rested on my shoulder as she quietly sobbed tears of relief. From that night on, we never spoke about it.
Over the coming months, Shelly resembled more of her usual self. We laughed and joked while making dinner together and continued our favorite serialized shows as if nothing had happened. The only reminder of our one foul night was the frequent meetings with the police to tell them what happened with the fire. They didn’t seem to buy our story of an accident with the fryer, but since we weren’t seeking an insurance payout, they had difficulty finding a motive for our apparent arson. This, coupled with the fact that it seemed like Shelly genuinely believed that was what happened, meant they didn’t pursue charges.
They eventually wrapped up the case, and we settled into our shitty apartment in a crummy neighborhood. I was just glad to be rid of the doll and the weird, inexplicable hold on my girlfriend it had. There were still many unanswered questions, but I wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. That was until one day, Shelly came home with a big white box among the various bags of groceries.
“What’s this?” I said.
“Oh!” She squealed excitedly. “It’s a surprise!”
She undid the ribbon with the excitement of a kid on Christmas. My heart sank. I could see big, blue glass eyes peering at me through the mountain of tissue paper in which it lay. She picked the doll up and held it outstretched by its armpits like a baby.
“Isn’t he cute?!” She said with a wide grin. “I think I’ll name him Chester.”