Enter the Snowflake's lair... Circulation: 177,384,884 Issue: 315 | 26th day of Collecting, Y9
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The Dare and the Doll


by dan4884

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Also by extreme_fj0rd

It was a foolish thing to do. I know that now. But when Malianne had dared me in the first place, how could I say no? The prize was too sweet to give up. And anything I could do to one-up my super-competitive sister was worth it in my eyes.

     But as I crept through the back door of the dilapidated cottage, I was having second thoughts. No, scratch that, I must've been at third or fourth thoughts by then. The owner of the house was creepy to say the least, and I really didn't want to come face to face with the old Elephante. The rumors about him had circulated through the neighborhood so much that they weren't rumor anymore, they were an accepted fact. And I didn't want to become another vague memory in the long storied history of Neovia. No dare was worth that.

     But it was too late to go back. I had to get in (which I was in the process of doing at the moment), find something to prove our suspicions of the old man, and get out before said Elephante could catch me. And if I did all that, my sister promised to take on my chores and duties for the next month. Like I said; how could I resist?

     Yellow wasn't a good color for creeping through the darkness, but thankfully as a Xweetok most of my fur was dark brown. I pressed myself against the wall anyway, breathing as quietly as I could.

     The floorboards creaked in protest against my paws as I made my way along the corridor. Dim light came from an open doorway on the left, and I held my breath and listened for noises. Malianne had said she'd seen him leave to go shopping, but it would fit her character perfectly to lie to me about something like that.

     I heard nothing. The house, it seemed, was empty.

     I peeked around the edge of the doorway. The room beyond was a living room: small, dusty, and crowded. The windows were letting in the light I'd seen, but it wasn't much stronger in the room itself. Dust hung thickly in the air.

     Almost holding my breath again so as to not start coughing from the dust, I edged into the room and looked around for something that I could present to Malianne as evidence. At first glance, I saw nothing.

     The room—a parlor, I believe—had simply a couch and a love seat caked with dust and age. There was nothing else of interest, so I continued on in my search. Finding nothing on the first floor, I ascended the rickety wooden staircase and found four rooms to sift through. I chose the first door on the left, but as I grabbed the handle, I heard a clatter on the other side of the door and the handle was suddenly free to separate itself from the door. I pulled it away and knelt to gaze through the hole created by the handle.

     There were stacks and stacks of things lying around. I had hit the jackpot! Standing straight once more, I cautiously pushed the door open. With a gasp I watched as the door, instead of opening inward, creaked and fell with a loud thud on top of one of the larger piles of papers. Dust rose up into the air so thickly that I could no longer see my paws held a few inches in front of my face. I coughed as the dust invaded my lungs.

     When the dust finally settled in what seemed like ages later, I was able to get a good look at some of the things the old Elephante had stored in here. But when I realized what lay scattered around the room, I wanted to run out of the house and never return.

     There were stacks of old newspapers, yellowing with age. There were books piled on chairs, which was normal enough, but they all had titles in languages I couldn't decipher. Some even had different alphabets, and were all odd symbols and strange signs. There were implements made out of twisted metal that, while they gave me no clues as to their purpose, looked like things made to serve evil.

     The worst thing, I decided the moment I laid eyes on it, was what was sitting on top of one of the piles of things. The little doll with its black-button eyes looked handmade, and the packet of pins sitting next to it just made things worse. It gave me shivers just to look at it, especially in that house with its dead stillness.

     But it definitely was proof of our suspicions. The pile it sat on was just a few feet from the door, and I leaned over to snatch it up.

     The door was a harder problem to solve, and at last I pulled it back upright and hoped the Elephante wouldn't notice anything. He was old, and the light was dim inside the house. And the layer of dust over everything in the storage room had indicated that he didn't use that room often.

     Doll in hand, I leapt down the stairs two at a time and darted towards the open window behind the decayed couch I had entered the house in. Racing through the yard, I met up with my sister, who was watching from behind a tree at the back of the yard, her blue Uni hooves pacing impatiently.

     "Any longer and you would have been caught," she said breathlessly as we left. "He was just opening the door when you came out the window."

     I was relieved, to say the least. Coming face-to-face with the old Elephante would have spelled the end for me. I didn't even care about the dare anymore. I was just happy to make it out of there alive.

     "So what didja get?" she asked nonchalantly, trying to mask her curiosity.

     "This," I said with an evil smile. I showed her the doll and the pins.

     She gasped. "So it's true, then," she said. I nodded.

     "And guess what else?" I said with a smile.

     "What?" she asked, curiosity getting the better of her.

     I pulled something out of my pocket, and she gasped with glee as she realized what it was.

     A single white hair.

     ***

     "So how did you two spend your afternoon?"

     We glanced at each other.

     "We played tag," I said quickly, at the same time Malianne said, "Hide and seek."

     Our owner smiled, ladling soup into bowls. "All right," she said. "Keep your secrets." She gave a bowl to each of us to carry out to the table, and followed behind us with a plate of bread and a bowl of salad.

     We sat down at the dinner table. Our owner dipped bread in soup and ate. Malianne did, too, eating and chatting easily with her about nothing. I stared down at my soup and tried to summon up the appetite to take even a spoonful.

     "Aren't you hungry?"

     I glanced up. "Oh. Um. No," I said, hoping I sounded convincing. "I had a big lunch... while you were out."

     It was almost true. I had had a larger lunch than usual, and I wasn't hungry, but the two weren't connected in any way. The lack of hunger was more caused by the small doll now pushed deep under the mattress of Malianne's bed. We had pushed the white hair in through a loose seam. Malianne had insisted on pushing pins into it before we went down to dinner, and the thought of the silver gleam of the pins still made me slightly queasy.

     Malianne herself, from behind our owner's back, glared daggers at me as I spoke. I couldn't glare back, since our owner was looking right at me, but I took her meaning well enough: don't give anything away.

     "I see. Well, you should try to eat a little, at least, so you don't get hungry right before bed." She smiled pleasantly at me and went back to eating. Malianne did, too.

     I pushed my soup away from me. The reflected shifting light on the silver handle of the spoon made me shiver.

     "Can I be excused, please?" I asked.

     Our owner frowned with worry. "Are you all right, Kolia? This isn't like you."

     "I'm just feeling a little... sick, that's all," I said queasily. "Please, can I go?"

     She nodded after a moment. "I suppose. Go lie down, dear."

     I stood up and left without looking at Malianne. I knew what her expression would show.

     ***

     I held the small doll in my hand carefully. It had no distinct shape, but that didn't matter with the hair attached. To think that I was causing the Elephante pain, no matter how mean he was, was a terrifying feeling. I carefully pulled the pins out and was tucking them into the nightstand drawer when my sister burst in.

     "What are you doing?" she hissed.

     "Being humane," I replied. "This isn't right, Malianne. All this is scaring me."

     "Nonsense. That Elephante deserves this." She wrenched the doll from me and twisted the head all the way around.

     I screamed and tried to snatch it. "No! Don't!"

     Malianne laughed. Our owner's voice floated up the stairs. "Play nicely, girls."

     My sister sneered at me. I glanced away.

     "It isn't right," I repeated. "No matter what he's done, he doesn't deserve that. Anyway, he hasn't done anything to us--"

     "Remember last summer?" The sneer had left her face, and she looked almost kind. She sat down on the bed, and I followed suit. Malianne still gripped the doll tightly in her paw. "When we were out in the garden, playing? And the Elephante was out trimming his lawn. With scissors."

     I shivered. That had been a little strange. He'd been collecting the sheared-off bits of grass in a bag.

     "We were playing catch, and the ball went into his yard," Malianne continued. "And do you remember what he did?"

     I looked down, remembering. He had risen from his grass-clipping and looked at us. Just stared. For minutes on end--what seemed like an eternity. Then he'd turned and gone inside.

     "But still! He didn't actually do anything. He just looked at us."

     "He took our ball, Kolia," Malianne reminded me. "Don't you remember? We went and looked, and it wasn't there."

     "So what?" I argued. "It was just a ball. Are you saying losing a ball is equal to torturing him?"

     "You know that's not the only thing he's done to us," Malianne spat back. "Don't make me the villain here, when he fits the bill so readily."

     I opened my mouth to reply, but a sound from downstairs interrupted me. There was a knock at the door, and I could hear our owner approaching it.

     "Hello, ma'am," said a pleasant voice. "Your pets seem to have something in my possession, and I was wondering if I may speak to them...?"

     My sister and I froze. I turned to her and hissed, "What do we do?"

     "Hide it, quick," she whispered as our owner called for us. "Under the mattress again."

     I lifted the bed slightly and shoved the black fabric doll under it and hurried to catch up with Malianne as she descended the staircase. In the foyer the hulking brown Elephante stood with our owner, who looked rather uncomfortable next to the behemoth Neopet. I tried to put on a happy demeanor, but it was incredibly difficult given the circumstances.

     "Kolia, Malianne," our owner said, "you remember our neighbor, right?"

     We nodded. I didn't dare look at Malianne.

     "Hello, girls," the Elephante said. I think he tried to smile. It was grotesque, his old, wrinkled face folding into new and strange configurations. "How are you?" He patted us on the head, tugging at our fur.

     Beside me I could feel Malianne trembling in rage and fear. "What do you want?" she burst out at last. I flinched, taking an involuntary half step back.

     "Malianne!" our owner scolded.

     "It's all right, madam. Some pets will never come to any good, even with the best of owners." He turned back to us. "I believe that you have something that belongs to me. Malianne, isn't it?"

     She nodded sullenly.

     "And Kolia." He leaned over suddenly. I could see all of myself reflected in his pouchy, dark eyes. "You seem like a nice enough girl. Do you think you could run and go get it for me? I'll just wait here."

     "We aren't going to give it back to you." Malianne folded her arms. "You'll just do horrible things to people with it--voodoo." She spat the word out. "You're evil."

     "Voodoo!" He laughed sharply, throwing his head back. "You think it's for voodoo?"

     Malianne faltered. "You--you mean it's not a voodoo doll?"

     The Elephante's laughs boomed through the entire house, and I shivered. I could feel his cold laugh rattling my bones. "No, of course not. Why would I be making voodoo dolls?"

     "But...the pins!" I sputtered. "It looks just like a voodoo doll!"

     The Elephante smiled. "I make children's toys for a living. That doll you found was a prototype; a new design I was working on. And the pins; well, I can't sew without pins!" He chuckled. "Now, may I please have my doll back? I would hate to have to redo all my work on it."

     "I don't believe you," Malianne burst out.

     Our owner stared at her sternly. "I think both of you need to stop arguing with our neighbor and return his possession. How you got it in the first place, I'm not sure, but if I find out that you were somewhere you shouldn't have been..." she warned.

     I sighed and hurried upstairs to collect the doll. When I returned, Malianne was still glaring at the Elephante, who was awkwardly trying to make small talk with our owner.

     The Elephante greedily snatched the doll and pins from my paws and turned to go. "Thank you very much," he said with an eerie grin. "Good night."

     ***

     The sliver of the moon shone through the gnarled trees as it rose higher and higher in the night sky. Malianne was sleeping soundly; but I couldn't stop thinking of our little adventure earlier. I stared out our window into the surrounding forest. I glanced at our neighbor's home. The light in the room I had ventured into was still on, even at this ungodly hour. I shivered. Whatever he was doing, it wasn't designing children's toys.

     "Ouch!" Malianne suddenly yelped, ripped from sleep. I jumped slightly from the sound and sat up.

     "What happened?" I whispered. She rubbed her eyes and sat up as well.

     "I just got a sharp pain in my back," she muttered.

     Suddenly, a shooting pain went up my spine as well. I shrieked with surprise.

     "Did you get it too?" Malianne asked, fear rising in her voice.

     My eyes widened fearfully. "Malianne... he patted our heads earlier, remember?"

     It would be a very long night, it seemed.

The End

 
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