The Collected

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

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  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Teaser

  Copyright

  I’ve always had a strange fascination with dolls.

  For as long as I could remember, they’d been my favorite toys. I never knew why. It’s not that I especially enjoyed dressing them up, or even playing make-believe. It’s more like … dolls always seemed like friends. Better friends than real people, or better than my big sister, Josie, at least.

  Dolls were always there for me.

  To listen.

  To help.

  To share.

  Maybe that’s why I liked them so much.

  At night, I could hear them talking. Could hear them whispering secrets that made me feel a little less alone. A little less strange. The only person who made me feel that way was my grandma Jeannie … until she was gone.

  Dolls don’t die on you when you need them most. Dolls don’t abandon you. Dolls live forever. They are the perfect family. The perfect friends.

  I’ve always had a strange fascination with dolls. But I suppose that’s not all.

  Dolls have also had a strange fascination with me.

  If only I’d known that fascination would turn deadly …

  One of my first memories is of my doll putting her hands around my throat.

  I was four. Maybe five.

  I was in my bedroom, playing with my toys—a stuffed bear, a stuffed bird, and a princess doll. Princess Honeysuckle was my favorite. We went on the most exciting adventures together. Sometimes we flew to the moon and ruled over aliens. Other times we cast magical spells over our enemies. This time, I think, we were playing house. It’s hard to remember.

  I just remember that one moment, I was lying on the ground, playing with Mr. Bear and Ms. Parrot. I looked over and saw that Princess Honeysuckle wasn’t on her throne, ruling over her kingdom.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d gone missing like that.

  But it was the first time it happened in the middle of playtime.

  Normally, she just vanished when I went to bed, and I would blame my sister for coming in and stealing my toys while I was asleep. Not that Josie ever admitted what she’d done. The dolls would always show up after I yelled at her, though. In a day or two.

  I was about to call out to Josie—maybe she’d snuck in while I wasn’t paying attention.

  And that’s when I felt it.

  Two tiny hands on my neck.

  Wrapping around my throat from behind.

  I yelled and sat up, tossing my stuffed animals to the side as I grabbed for whatever was squeezing me.

  I found Princess Honeysuckle smiling at me.

  Her lips and eyes were tinged with red.

  Her arms were open as wide as my neck.

  Maybe it was my imagination, but I remember her head twisting around—all the way around—and a giggle coming from somewhere deep inside her plastic body.

  Then my mom came in. She had heard me scream.

  “Are you okay, Anna?” she asked.

  “The doll,” I said. “She … she …”

  Except when I looked at Princess Honeysuckle again, she looked perfectly normal—plastic smile, dazed eyes, arms serenely at her sides.

  Mom took the doll. I never saw it again.

  It didn’t take long to sense that something was wrong with me.

  Princess Honeysuckle was the first doll I remember playing with, but she wasn’t the last. Nor was she the last to go … strange.

  When I was in first grade, I remember playing with other girls at recess. It was winter. After the holidays. We’d had show-and-tell that morning, and everyone brought in their new toys. Most of the girls had gotten new dolls, and we sat playing together in our corner of the gym while a blizzard stormed outside.

  Even in first grade, I didn’t really have friends. I remember being so excited, because dolls were the one thing I felt comfortable around. Maybe dolls would help me make new friends.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  My new doll, Adventurer Aurora, was the coolest doll I’d ever had. She came with all sorts of neat gadgets—binoculars and a Jeep and a working compass. Even Josie was jealous of her. Back then, Josie and I were still friends. Back then, she still treated me like her sister.

  Adventurer Aurora was investigating a forgotten tomb with my new friend’s doll, Mountaineer Mary, when Justina—the girl I was playing with—got up to go to the bathroom. I carried on playing without her. The dolls crept deeper into the shoebox caves, avoiding acid bats and fire mummies. And when Justina came back, she yelped out in fear.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  I was confused. “Playing,” I told her.

  She grabbed Mountaineer Mary and kicked over the shoebox cave, leaving Adventurer Aurora to climb out from the rubble. Justina ran over to the rest of the girls and started whispering. I remember them looking at me strangely. I just dipped my head and went back to playing with Aurora.

  As the weeks passed and I watched how my friends played with their dolls, I realized why Justina had been so freaked out. It wasn’t my fault, though. Really.

  How was I supposed to know that dolls were only supposed to move if you were moving them?

  How was I supposed to know that dolls shouldn’t be able to walk or crawl or adventure on their own?

  I thought that was how everyone played with dolls.

  I didn’t realize that to everyone else, dolls were just pieces of inanimate plastic.

  When I played with my dolls, they played back.

  When I was seven, we went to visit my grandmother and ended up staying for almost a year.

  I didn’t remember much about that time. I’d spent so many nights trying to remember what happened, but it’s like a part of me blocked it out, and Josie refused to talk about it. Like she was scared.

  But why would she be scared of the time we spent at Grandma Jeannie’s? Grandma was a sweet old woman who lived in a big house by the woods—I remembered that much. Just like I remembered she had a lot of rules to live by. Maybe that’s why Josie didn’t like talking about it. She hated rules.

  I didn’t remember much about the school in that town, though I did remember not really having friends except for one. I just couldn’t remember her name.

  I also didn’t remember what we did all year, though sometimes I woke up in the dead of night yelling. Something told me it had to do with our stay at Grandma Jeann
ie’s … but it didn’t tell me why.

  The one thing I could remember was Grandma Jeannie.

  When I was with her, everything seemed to be okay. We’d moved there because Mom had lost her job and Grandma was getting old and losing her memory. Being around Grandma when she couldn’t remember who we were was always really hard. But when she was her old self, she was my friend. We could talk about anything and everything.

  Except for dolls.

  That was the one rule of Grandma Jeannie’s I could remember, maybe because it didn’t make any sense to me.

  No dolls in the house.

  It was hard to be angry with her about it, though. I didn’t need dolls with her around. She was my best friend. My only friend. That was about the time Josie started treating me like I was a stranger, one she didn’t want to hang around. It hurt my feelings, because we used to be close. I even remember sleeping in her room a couple times when I was scared. Scared of … something waiting in the woods outside my window.

  When Josie was too distant or Mom was too busy, Grandma Jeannie was there to take care of me. To make sure I was okay and happy and heard. I knew living there wasn’t perfect, but when Grandma Jeannie was her old self, my friendship with her was. When my mom got a new job in the city and it was clear Grandma Jeannie could be on her own again, we left. It was one of the worst days of my life.

  I’ll never forget waving to Grandma as she watched us from the front porch with tears in her eyes.

  I just wished I could remember why a place that felt more like home than Chicago ever did could still give me nightmares.

  After we left, Josie vowed she would never set foot in Grandma’s house again.

  We were back in Chicago, in our new, slightly bigger apartment. I was in my room, playing with the dolls I hadn’t seen in nearly a year, using their storage boxes as mansions and mountains. Mom was out getting groceries when Josie passed by my room. She must have seen me playing through the cracked door.

  Immediately, she stormed in and grabbed the dolls from my hands.

  “Never,” she growled. “You are never playing with these again. I can’t believe, after everything we went through. After everything that happened to you …”

  “What … what happened?” I asked. Because I couldn’t remember, and I knew I should remember, and this was as close to admitting what happened as Josie had ever gotten.

  She breathed heavily, clearly angry. I almost thought she was going to throw the dolls at me—I’d never seen her this mad before.

  Instead, she chucked the dolls into a storage box.

  “Hey!” I yelled. I tried to stop her, but she was bigger than me. I grabbed her arm as she picked up more dolls and threw them into the box.

  She yelped. Jumped back.

  She shook out her hand as if I had shocked her. For a brief moment, the skin where I had grabbed her looked different. Like porcelain. Then it faded, though her anger didn’t.

  She gathered up the rest of my dolls and threw them all into the box, hefting it up and glaring at me.

  “This is all Grandma Jeannie’s fault,” she said. “We are never going back there. Never!”

  Then she turned and stormed down the hall.

  I heard the door open and slam. I wanted to run after her, to stop her, but the shock of what happened rooted me to the spot. When she came back in, the box was nowhere to be seen. She’d thrown my dolls in the dumpster outside. No matter how hard I cried that night, no matter how much I wished they would come back, I knew I’d never see them again.

  Without Grandma Jeannie or my dolls, I felt terribly alone.

  And from there, it only got worse.

  On my ninth birthday, Mom got me a doll. I was so ecstatic when I opened the package—a new Astronaut Amy doll, just what I’d always wanted.

  Mom smiled at my happiness.

  Josie flipped out.

  She grabbed the doll and started yelling. Saying that she wasn’t going to stay here if there were dolls in the house. That our apartment needed to become a doll-free zone.

  She threw out Astronaut Amy before I even got a chance to unwrap her.

  Mom was clearly upset. She scolded Josie, but she didn’t ground my sister. In fact, she took Josie’s side. That hurt my feelings more than anything else.

  Later that night, while I was crying myself to sleep over what was easily the worst birthday ever—the only good thing was the card from Grandma Jeannie, where she said I could come back and stay whenever I wanted—Mom came in and sat down on my bed. She tried to soothe me for a little bit.

  “Here,” she said, and handed me a wrapped present.

  I thought maybe it was Astronaut Amy, but it was some board game I knew I’d never play. I wanted to throw it in the trash. Before I could ask Mom why she had let Josie throw away my toys, she ruined any hope I had of having a real conversation.

  “It’s clear dolls upset your sister,” she said. “So I think it’s best if we just give her this one. Okay? No dolls in the house. It will be just like at your grandma’s.”

  Except there, I had Grandma Jeannie to talk to. Here, I don’t have anyone.

  I didn’t say that, though. I didn’t say anything. I knew in that moment that Mom had taken Josie’s side, and Josie didn’t want me to have dolls or friends or to be happy.

  Mom kissed me goodnight and left.

  Later, as I was falling asleep, I swore I heard Josie pause outside my door. I swore I heard her whisper, It’s for your own good.

  That night, I dreamed of a cabin in the woods. Cackling laughter. A shadowy monster with glowing white eyes. And dolls. Hundreds and hundreds of dolls.

  The next day, when I woke up, Astronaut Amy was sitting on my counter. Staring at me.

  I didn’t take any chances. With tears in my eyes, I threw her in the trash outside before Josie could find her.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered as I closed the bin lid. “But you have to stay here.”

  It felt like burying my last friend.

  Grandma Jeannie was the only person who seemed to see me … when she was able to see me. It seemed like her memory was getting worse and worse. Sometimes, she and I would talk for hours. Other times, we would go the whole weekend without her knowing who Mom or I were.

  Josie never came with us. I thought it was horribly rude, especially after Grandma became sick, but Josie always had a reason to stay home. An excuse. Things to study for, soccer games, even homework. After that yearlong visit, I don’t think Josie ever saw Grandma Jeannie again, save for the one time we brought Grandma Jeannie to Chicago for the holidays.

  That time didn’t count either, because Grandma Jeannie spent those few days believing she was seventeen again and kept thinking that my mom was her mom. Josie tried to laugh it off, but I knew she was sad. I heard her crying in her room when Mom took Grandma Jeannie back home.

  But the times when it was just Grandma Jeannie and me, when she was fully aware of who she was and where we were … those were some of the best times of my life. Sitting on the porch drinking sun tea, talking about life and school. She always told me that it was okay that I didn’t have friends right now. I was different from everyone else. Like she was. That made us unique. Special.

  She thought I was special.

  Josie just thought I was weird.

  Sometimes, Grandma Jeannie would tell me other things. Things that made more sense than they should have. She said that people like her and me saw the world differently. We saw the life force in all things. That was why sometimes it felt like I wasn’t alone in an empty room, or why it often felt like I was being watched. She said that I had to be patient with Josie, because she didn’t see things the same way I did. We each had our own talents, our own things that made us special. But mine, Grandma said … mine set me apart.

  I’d tell her about all the strange things that happened to me—like when I’d wake up in the middle of the night hearing whispers, or when I saw things that weren’t there from the corner of my eye—a
nd she listened and understood and didn’t judge.

  The one thing I never told her about was the dolls. Not after the first time I’d mentioned them to her; she got so upset she started yelling, saying I must avoid them at all costs, because they were “her tools.” I didn’t know who she was talking about, but she kept looking to the woods behind her house when she said it. Scared.

  So the dolls remained my secret. How they spoke to me. How they moved around me. How, sometimes, I felt more like a doll than a human kid, or the dolls felt more human than anyone in school. Like Grandma Jeannie, the dolls had always seemed to understand me.

  Until Josie made sure to take them away.

  Back home, I felt I was walking through a different world. Nobody saw things the way I saw them. Especially Josie.

  Ever since our time living with Grandma Jeannie, the things that made me feel different only grew stronger. And harder to keep secret. I did my best to keep them from Josie and Mom. I even kept them secret from Grandma Jeannie. Because it wasn’t the whispers in the night or the sensation that I could feel more than most people.

  It was the dolls.

  Even though I wasn’t allowed dolls in the house, I still encountered them.

  The worst was the sleepover.

  It had been a really strange morning. I’d woken up from more nightmares. Nightmares of being trapped in a cabin filled with tiny porcelain dolls, all of them with their eyes crossed out with marker. Nightmares of a giant shadow in the corner. Getting bigger. Growing closer. Devouring the dolls one by one, until its tendrils wrapped around me and swallowed all the light, laughing maniacally.

  Maybe that was why I felt off when I met up with my friends.

  Alicia and Soo-ji were the only girls who were willing to hang out with me, and it took all my concentration not to act strangely around them. We were walking down the streets of Chicago, and Alicia said we should run to the toy store to pick up toys and games for our sleepover that night. My gut dropped at the thought. Toy stores meant only one thing: dolls.

  But I agreed, because like I said, I didn’t want them to think I was weird, and what kid doesn’t want to go to a toy store?

  It started innocently enough. We walked to the board game section first and after a few minutes had picked out a couple games to play that night. I could have sighed with relief as we headed back to the register.