Dear Ms. Johnson,

​

As of the date of this letter, you have been absent from work since 20 August 2023. Because your absence has not been approved, and because we have not heard from you, we have determined you have abandoned your position. In accordance with our attendance policy, we are terminating your employment effective 13 September 2023. 

 

Anne read and re-read the email through the gaps in her fingers. When the words blurred together, she wiped her eyes and read the letter again. She was frozen in her office chair the way someone might be when they don’t know what to do, and like most people who find themselves out of a job, she was thinking about going to the kitchen for a drink. 

 

She checked her phone and blinked at the missed voicemails from her mother, then slipped it in her pocket and stared out her bedroom door. The hallway looked longer than usual and she wasn’t sure if she had the energy to make the trek to the kitchen. After a quick glance at the email burning into her laptop screen, she decided it would be worth the effort. 

 

She trudged through a pile of laundry and plodded down the stairs. The kitchen welcomed her with the vinegary stench of food scraps turning rancid. She toed around an obese garbage bag she’d started to take out that morning before receiving the email notification on her phone. Her plan was to check it at her desk, then muster the courage to get in the car and drive to work. I guess that doesn’t matter now, she thought, picking up the trash bag and preparing to face the Virginia heat. 

 

Anne’s house sat at the end of a long, unpaved driveway. Weeds filled in the tire tracks weeks ago. She didn’t have any neighbors other than white tail deer, birds, and coyotes. While they didn’t make for great conversation, they left her alone, which was exactly how she liked things. 

 

Anne didn’t consider it a bad place to live despite the fact that one of the bloodiest battlefields in United States history was basically in her backyard. As it turns out, living so close to a place with that kind of history makes for affordable real estate. Sometimes she could hear tourists chattering while they strolled through the grass, suffering bug bites and sweating through their clothes. She could always predict what they were going to say as if they were reading a script she had memorized: “Which side won here again?” “Is this the Bloody Angle or is that it over there?” Which was usually followed by, “God, it’s actually so pretty. Look at the flowers.” Someone always said, “This place has got to be so haunted. You couldn’t dare me to come here at night.” Little did they know the only ghost haunting the Angle was a recently unemployed, twenty-nine-year-old recluse.

 

Anne threw away the garbage, dusted her hands, and checked her phone again, thumbing through the notifications from Amazon about a declined purchase before arriving at the texts from her mom. Each message was some variation of “Love you. Left you a voicemail. Call me when you get a chance.”  

 

She couldn’t continue ignoring her mom without facing more guilt than she could handle. She went inside, shut the door, and sank against it before tapping the first message.  Listening to her mom’s voice eased the lump in the back of her throat. She brought the phone to her ear. 

 

“Hey, baby. Listen, your cousin is getting married. You should have gotten an invitation. Let me know if you didn’t. We would love to see you there. I’ll take you if it makes the drive a little easier. I found a good therapist who specializes in treating amaxophobia. I know you’ve tried a lot of them, but this one sounds very good. He doesn’t take insurance but I’d be willing to pay for it.” 

​

There was silence as if Mom were waiting for a reply. Then, “Anyway, just let me know. Just please call me back so I don’t have to worry about you, okay? Alright. Bye.” 

​

Anne listened to the static at the end of the recording. She tapped her phone to the center of her forehead and took a deep breath. She wanted to call her mom and tell her what had happened with her job and why she had lost it, but knew what she would say. Honey, I thought you were getting better. Anne couldn’t handle listening to the disappointment in her mom’s voice on top of everything else. 

​

Maybe I can fix this, she thought, grabbing her phone. Just don’t think about it. Her feet took her to the kitchen where the car keys hung. She hesitated, her fingers hovering above the key chain, then she snatched them up and tumbled into the garage. 

​

Panic began to swallow her up when she slid behind the wheel. It always felt like water was trapped inside her chest and rising to her throat. Soon, she’d begin drowning, and she wasn’t sure if she could pull herself out this time. She hit the remote and the garage cranked open. Once the sunlight touched her dashboard, she felt as if she were breathing through a straw. It’s not real, she thought. It’s just in my head. 

 

She was shaking too much to turn the key or put her hands on the wheel. When she closed her eyes, she was back on the side of the highway staring at the missing windshield, glass shards sticking from her arm. Blood was everywhere. Kylie was in the driver’s seat crushed against the steering wheel, struggling to breathe. 

 

She jerked the key out of the ignition, took off her seatbelt, and hurried back inside where she sat on the kitchen floor and hugged the keys to her chest. She thought about how much she missed her friend, how much she wished she could travel again, and then she told the old house that she didn’t think she would ever get better. 

 

The forest darkened. She checked the window to see if the sun had gone behind a cloud. The gray sky between the branches had turned pink in places. Her stomach complained about missing both lunch and now, dinner. There was nothing in the fridge and little more than a container of dry beans in the cabinet, maybe, but she went to look anyway. She settled on a crushed packet of rice noodles, a packet of soy sauce from the last time she ordered Chinese takeout, and the one bag of frozen peas in her freezer. She didn’t like peas but kept buying them because they were cheap.  

 

Jameson made every bad dinner tolerable. She settled on the couch with her instant noodles and a couple of shots, flipping through local cable channels until she grew bored enough to try and clean some things. She took care of the dishes and the laundry. Sitting at her desk to research remote jobs sounded like a good idea, but she stared at her laptop screen until her eyes hurt, then gave up. 

 

She didn’t know much about the house’s previous owner; only that they took good care of it until a family member moved them to a nursing home, leaving the house to sit for over a year untended. The place still looked as if it belonged to a grandmother. Wooden walls, popcorn ceilings, large furniture, display cases full of antiques and dust bunnies. Maybe the antiques were worth something. There was a shop in town just a bike ride away. She squinted at her phone, lying on her back and balancing the empty glass of whiskey on her stomach, and searched: antique store, Spotsylvania. 

 

Madame Ismene’s Antiques and Oddities. The logo was written in Victorian script above a crow with two heads. “Closes at 9,” she muttered. She checked the Felix the Cat clock on her wall, his slit eyes frozen and forever watching the TV. Right, she thought. I never switched out that battery.

 

Musing the racks of an antique store while slightly drunk actually sounded kind of fun.

 

She filled a box of items she assumed would be semi-valuable: a metronome with the date 1925 etched into the wood, the cat clock because she didn’t like the feeling of someone watching her all the time, and a shoebox of comics in mint condition. She put a porcelain doll with red hair on top of it all – not because she thought it was worth something, but because she had seen a documentary about a possessed Raggedy Anne doll and didn’t want anything similar to that lurking nearby. 

​

⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆

 

Madame Ismene raked her fingernails through the doll’s hair as if it were her child. The woman looked as if she had just stepped off stage at the local carnival, wearing a ruffled dress, fishnet tights, and high-heeled boots. Anne wondered if her tattoos were portraits of all the big cats she had trained. A lion twisted around the woman’s left arm, a tiger prowled the other, and a panther hissed from the back of her right hand. 

 

“You don’t want to sell me this doll,” the Madame said. “I’ll buy it from you, sure, but you’d be putting yourself in pretty grave danger if you did.”

 

Anne guessed the Madame was around thirty years old, but she spoke as if she were a character from a Victorian novel. They were standing at a glass display case full of items from a witch’s lair. Cat bones, tarot cards, a dried lizard, the two-headed crow from the logo, stuffed and staring blankly through four sunken eye sockets. The shop was cramped, but it felt huge. Mirrors made the shelves full of toys, taxidermy animals, and figurines go on forever. Anne tried to keep her distance from a table of snakes floating in murky jars. The whole place stank of burnt sage and formaldehyde. 

 

“Did you hear me, miss?” The Madame asked.

 

Anne cleared her throat, struggling to make eye contact. The Madame had inked her scleras black, which made Anne uncomfortable, and she couldn’t stop thinking about how much that must have hurt. 

 

The Madame tapped the doll’s head with a gold-tipped fingernail. “Will you sell it to me or not?”

 

“I mean…” Anne shrugged. “Is it worth something?”

 

“It’s valuable.” 

 

Anne wanted to ask, And the other things weren’t? The Madame had offered her twenty dollars for the entire box. That was enough for two dinners if she were frugal.

 

“How much will you pay me for it?” Anne asked. 

 

The Madame sucked on her teeth. “Five-hundred.”

 

“Five-hundred…you can have it.” Anne pushed the pile of antiques across the counter. “I’ll take the twenty for the other junk too.” The comics were probably worth a lot more, but she just wanted to be rid of it all.

 

The Madame studied Anne’s face as if searching for a way to give a fortune or a reading, then she narrowed her eyes as if figuring out how to charge for that, or deduct it from the sale. “Listen to me closely, child…”

 

“Pretty sure we’re the same age,” Anne muttered.

 

The Madame ignored her. “You don’t want to sell me this doll. Bad things will happen to you if you get rid of it.”

 

The locals liked to put on acts for the tourists. Scare them a little. Anne thought about how she would mess with customers if she owned an antique shop minutes away from the Bloody Angle. 

 

“Oh, I see,” she said. 

 

The Madame propped the doll against a stuffed rabbit with horns hot-glued to its head. “This is a talisman. It protects you. It has a benevolent spirit inside of it that keeps your home safe from the malevolent ones. Without it, you’re allowing yourself to be vulnerable to anything else that might live in the house, good or evil. You said all these items were from the previous owner?”
 

Anne nodded.

 

“They probably got this doll for a reason. There was something…or some things…in their house from which they needed protection.”

 

“I…I understand.”

 

The Madame crossed her arms. “So I’ll ask you one more time. Are you sure you want to sell this to me?”

 

Anne held a belch behind her fist. The bike ride to town hadn’t sobered her up as much as she had hoped. “Do you pay in cash, or will it be a check?” she asked.

 

⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆

 

The house was quiet when she rode up the driveway. She stashed her bike on the porch and took the empty box from the basket, dropping it in the recycling bin. As she took off her helmet, a sharp pain shot through her ribcage like she had been hit by a small rock. 

​

She staggered, clutching her side, her welcome mat wavering in her vision. Just as she began scanning the porch for whatever hit her, the pain stopped. 

 

She was doubled over for a while, listening to the crickets and sweating through her clothes. This isn’t very flattering, she thought, not that it mattered. She tucked her hair behind her ears and went inside, muttering, “Probably because of the drink.”

​

Late summer in the South was unkind during the day and at night. Sundown brought little relief from the heat. With an AC several decades old, Anne usually suffered through warmer months listening to her vast collection of circulator fans push around the hot air. That night, the house was so cold, she thought the goosebumps on her arms would stand up and walk away. 

 

She closed the door and shivered over to the thermostat. She didn’t remember turning on the AC, but maybe drinking made her hot and she had decided to put a little faith in the finicky system at some point. To her dismay, the thermostat was still switched off. 

​

“You’re running on your own now?” she asked the grimy box above the couch. “Great. Another thing to fix.” 

 

She went upstairs to shower. The water heater was still working, to her relief, and it was nice to towel off afterward without immediately sweating again. She put on her favorite sweatshirt and fell into bed, stretching out her sore muscles. There were a few pleasures that could sweeten any bad day. Sleeping after a bike ride and a shower was one of them. Having a five-hundred-dollar check to cash the next day was another. 

 

⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆

 

The playground smelled like rubber, germs, and picnic food rotting in the nearby trash cans. Anne sat on a bench rubbing the yellowjacket sting with her chubby hand, her red-haired doll sitting in her lap. Her mom was sifting through a pack of Strawberry Shortcake band-aids, which Anne believed would make the sting hurt less. She was wearing a Raggedy Ann costume to match her doll. Her Halloween was officially ruined before the trick-or-treating had even started.

 

Kylie was crawling across the monkey bars and inviting Anne to a contest once she felt better. She swept her Rapunzel wig out of her eyes. Purple tulle hung between the bars. She had shredded her dress going down the slide somehow, then shredded it a little more while on the swings. “Bees can’t get you up here!” she laughed. 

 

“The good news is, you’re not allergic,” her mother said, unwrapping the band-aid. “We’ll put some baking soda on it when we get home. It’ll feel all better by the time trick-or-treating starts.” 

 

Her mother put the band-aid on the sting, then held out her hand, asking for the doll. Anne held it tightly to her chest. 

​

“I’ll keep her safe for you,” Mom said. “Go play with Kylie. It’ll make you feel better, okay?”

 

Anne couldn’t resist showing Kylie how much better she was at the monkey bars despite her yellowjacket sting. She left her doll on a bench full of the other children’s toys and stuffed animals.

 

The yellowjacket sting didn’t hurt at all the moment Anne hopped on the monkey bars. After an hour of playing at the jungle gym, it was almost time to go trick-or-treating, and she had forgotten that the yellowjacket had stung her at all. 

​

Mom was buckling her into the car seat when Anne sat up straight and screamed. 

 

“What’s wrong?” Mom asked. 

 

“I left my doll!” 

 

She struggled out of the seatbelt and nearly fell onto the asphalt. Recovering, she ran to the bench where her doll should have been. The playground was dark and empty. She could hear Mom call her from far away. Despite the heat radiating from the rubber mulch, she realized she was cold. She wandered to the bench rubbing the goosebumps on her arms. She stopped beside it, listening to her heart pound in her ears. 

 

The doll lay in pieces across the park bench, some shards wedged between the cracks. Something had torn its arms away. There were cracks in its face, and it was missing an eye, the other staring at her. She swore she saw the black bead twitch. 

 

Anne woke up cursing. After breathing in the darkness of her room for a few minutes, she laughed. The dream was so ridiculous that she couldn’t believe it had scared her. 

​

She reached for her phone to check the time, dropping it on her face first before holding it under the covers and squinting at the screen. Two in the morning. Her mouth was cotton ball dry, and her head had already hurt. She reached for the glass of water that had been empty since the previous night. She sighed, then clawed out of her bear cave made of stale quilts and unwashed sheets.

​

The house had gotten colder. She thought she saw her breath in front of her. “Something must be really broken about this place,” she said, wrapping a blanket around her shoulders. She shuffled down the stairs to check the thermostat again, swinging the empty water glass between her fingers. 

 

She smelled something putrid the moment she touched her bare toes to the carpet. Sometimes, on her bike rides, she passed road kill, and the stench followed her for a mile. The entire downstairs smelled as if someone had buried that roadkill beneath the floorboards.

​

Maybe something crawled into the vents and died. A squirrel, mouse, a raccoon…it wasn’t unheard of. Perhaps that was causing the issues with the thermostat, too, but that part didn’t make as much sense. 

 

There was a buzzing sound coming from the kitchen. Flies. She dragged her hands down her face, exasperated. Oh, my god, she thought. An animal did get in here and die. What a fucking day. 

 

She tried the light switch. Nothing happened. Confused, she used the flashlight from her phone to navigate to the kitchen. The stench of death grew worse. She tried the light switch again. Nothing. Now she was worried. She stepped over the threshold, swept the kitchen with her flashlight, and retched.

 

There were flies, yes, along with every other kind of insect that assists in the decomposition process. Maggots flip-flopped across the tile like moving grains of rice, and flies circled above them. Yellowjackets danced between the flies in search of a meal, and carrion beetles crawled through the maggots in search of a carcass. 

 

Anne didn’t scream. Maybe trauma does that to you. You’ve seen the worst already, and nothing really bothers you so much anymore. Everything else is just slightly annoying. Something from the woods died under the house. Not a big deal. This’ll just be another call to make and another bill to pay…

 

But there were footsteps upstairs. Long, slow footsteps that echoed through the walls. Anne stiffened. She was her thumb toward the emergency button on her phone when they–or it–let out a scream so shrill it turned her blood to ice. 

 

Anne didn’t think. She had her car keys in her hand and was running out the door. She snatched the cord and drew up the garage door manually, yanking it back with enough strength to send it crashing against the bumpers. Driver’s seat. Ignition. Engine. Transmission, gas pedal, I don’t give a damn if I run over my mailbox. She punched the gas and shot down the road while dialing 911. 

 

⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆

​

Madame Ismene’s lights were the only ones on in town. Anne never thought a menagerie of dead things in jars could be so welcoming. Adrenaline was making all the decisions for her. She didn’t know why she was at the antique shop rather than the police station. All she could think about was how much she wanted that doll back.

 

The Madame was behind the desk watching a cathode ray television. She took her feet off the exhibition table and stood up, then addressed Anne from inside the store, her hand creeping to the telephone beside the cash register. “What do you want?” she yelled. The fake British accent was gone.

 

“Did you send people to my house to play a prank on me?” Anne yelled. “You did, didn’t you?” 

 

The Madame furrowed her brow and all the piercings above it. “Prank? What the hell are you talking about?” 

 

“There are people at my house. Banging on things and screaming…come out, I need to talk to you!” 

 

The Madame reached under the desk. Anne stepped back, sure that the woman was reaching for a shotgun. Instead, the madame took out a ring of keys and went to the door. She opened it just enough to poke out her head. Her eyes were watery, and Anne smelled liquor and weed on her breath. 

 

“You said there are people at your house?” The Madame asked.

 

“I already called the cops. You sent people to play a prank on me, didn’t you? After all the stuff you told me about that creepy doll?”

​

The Madame’s eyes grew round. “All of that is completely made up, lady, are you serious? It’s a ghost story for tourists! I don’t even know you. I sure as hell don’t know where you live!”

 

“Do you still have it?” 

 

“What?” 

 

Anne reached into her pocket, grabbed the check, and waved it in Madame's face. “The doll. Do you still have it?”

 

“Forget about the stupid doll, you need to be with the cops!”

 

“I will be! Just give me the doll, please?”

 

“Why?”

 

Anne shifted her feet on the sidewalk. “Just in case.”

 

⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆

 

Anne held the doll to her chest while a cop sporting a Porky Pig physique explained to her, for the tenth time, that they had found nothing in the house and no one in the area, and would you consider disclosing the medications you take, ma’am? To which Anne answered, no, thank you. “It probably was just kids playing a prank,” the officer said, offering her a card. “If we find the perpetrators, you’ll be the first to know. Call if anything happens.” 

 

His stomach entered the cop car before he did.

 

Anne stood at the end of her driveway for several minutes after he drove away. She still had her car keys in her hand which were cutting into her palm. She’d never been so terrified to enter her own house. At the same time, she’d never been so proud of herself. She drove somewhere. No flashbacks, no panic. She did it all on her own.

 

She took a deep breath. “It was just kids playing a prank,” she told herself. “Asshole kids, but I’d rather deal with them than with….” She didn’t want to say the rest out loud because it would mean she had sunk all her hard-earned wages into a haunted house. 

 

She checked her phone. Five in the morning. How did all that happen in just three hours? Her head had that static feeling that comes with transitioning from a boozy haze to a hangover–a process she’d rather sleep through. She never did get that glass of water.  

 

She took the porch steps one at a time like how small children climb up stairs, digging her nails into the doll’s dress, then cracking the door just enough to peek inside. The house was warm. The smell of a grandmother’s perfume had replaced the stench of dead animals. Maybe none of it had happened at all. Would that be preferable to a real haunting, she wondered? If she were just the town’s lunatic calling the police once in a while to report alcohol-induced paranormal activity? 

 

There wasn’t a bang, nor was there the sound of a bullet whizzing through the trees, but something lodged itself between her ribs, and she collapsed, crying out and searching for the wound in her side. The doll hit the wood and shattered. 

 

Surrounded by porcelain shards, Anne grasped for her phone. She thought that she would smear blood across her clothes and then her phone screen when she dialed 911 again, but her fingers were clean. She looked at her side and found nothing. No wound, no pain, not even a hole through her shirt. 

 

She dragged her fingers through her hair, shaking. “I’m losing it,” she said. “Really, really losing it this time.” She was picking up the doll’s pieces and cradling them in her shirt when she heard a man weeping in the woods. 

 

“Hello?” She said, standing slowly. “Who’s there?”
 

BANG. 

 

This time, the gunshot echoed through the Salient. She scrambled for the last piece of porcelain and crawled inside, shutting the door. She started upstairs but froze and listened to her heart climb into her throat. 

 

There was someone in her house. They were walking in the kitchen with heavy footsteps, dragging their feet as if they were injured. The entire place smelled of rot and illness. Anne felt malaise as if she were sick along with her unwelcome tenant, and when they coughed, she felt it rattle in her own chest. Their shadow crossed the entrance. The figure was hunched like it was trying to cover a wound in its stomach and stop the bleeding. It opened its long mouth and shrieked. 

 

Anne held tightly to the doll’s pieces and rocketed upstairs. Why her room seemed to be the safest place, she wasn’t sure. Her logic was telling her to get out of the house, but her odds of escaping the gunman and their bullets were not good. From the sound of it, there wasn’t just one gunman out there. The woods were loud. Men were shouting at one another. Horses bellowed under the sound of cannon fire. It all sounded very distant like she was listening on the other side of a dream, but the dream was steadily growing louder…

 

She shut her bedroom door, locked it, and climbed onto her bed. Her hands were shaking. She dumped the pieces of the doll on the quilt and started putting it together. Its head had split in three places. She lined its chin with its nose, fixed the bridge between its eyes, then pressed the shards of its skull together and held it to her chest. 

 

There was silence. There were no gunshots, no one was weeping, and there were no footsteps downstairs. She kept the doll close until the sun came through her window, and the only sound outside was the jabber of tourists asking if the Salient was still home to all its ghosts.

​

She took out her phone and punched her mother’s number into the screen, mentally practicing all the ways she could say yes, she was braver than she thought, and could perhaps handle driving to the wedding with a little help. Also, she was going to put the house on the market; sorry for the short notice, and she would need to live at home for a little while…

 

⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆

 

Author’s Note

 

This is a short story I composed for a Halloween writing contest in 2023. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and was mostly a writing exercise for me as I wanted to practice executing character development under a word count limit (5,000 words or less) through prompt-based fiction. The prompt I was following required that I work a creepy doll into the story somehow along with a few other horror elements that weren’t terribly cohesive. I did the best I could to make it all work together. Whether or not I succeeded I’m not sure, but I did have a lot of fun writing it and managed to place first in my category.

 

I toured the Mule Shoe Salient once while visiting a friend in Virginia. I grew up in the South and am fairly used to visiting battlefields, but there was something about the Salient that I found to be particularly unsettling. People loved to tell ghost stories about it. Some locals said there were voices in the woods around it at night. Others claimed that they suddenly felt sharp pains – bullet wounds, perhaps – when they were on its grounds, but the pains went away as soon as they left. I didn’t experience anything unpleasant there other than some mosquito bites, but the place certainly had an odd feeling to it. Between its history and general atmosphere, it made for a pretty good storytelling opportunity.

 

Whether or not you’re reading this around the Halloween season, I hope you enjoyed this short and spooky tale. Thank you for supporting an independent author. 

 

Best,

Rowan

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