Book Five, Chapter 55: Broken Conduit

I set the cup in front of me, and the others joined me. After a quick look to ensure there were no omens under the seats, I admitted, “That was embarrassing.”

They were silent, and I guessed if they weren’t so distracted by the creepy dolls, they might have been laughing at me.

Andrew was straight to business. “It seems that every doll in here is an omen of some kind. Am I wrong about that? It’s difficult for me to differentiate each doll on the red wallpaper.”

I looked around. “No,” I said. “About half of them are omens, sure, but a lot of them seem to be omens for the same series—something called Summer Slumber Party, Parts One through Six.”

“That sounds about right,” Dina said, glancing at the variety of dolls.

“Personally,” I said, “I’d rather a doll be from a slasher than from some sort of haunting.” Then I thought about it, looked over at all the dolls, and said, “No offense.”

“I don’t get why we’re sitting here,” Michael said. “Shouldn’t we be, like, interrogating that Darla woman?”

“You really think she has any good information?” I asked, scooting my cup of invisible tea to the edge of the table. “She seems a little off her rocker.”

Still, I didn’t know what we were supposed to be doing here, and there didn’t seem to be a good way of finding out. Luckily, the answer wasn’t exactly hiding from us.

There was a loud sound from upstairs—like a door slamming—and then footsteps.

Darla screamed from the back of the house.

We all jumped up from our table and ran to find her. I looked left and right, making sure we weren’t encountering any omens.

“Don’t stare in that mirror,” I said as we passed one. I didn’t even have time to see what its deal was; I just knew to avoid triggering it. “There’s something tough in that drawer—leave it alone,” I added.

As we made our way to the back of the house, we realized that the collection of dolls in the front was only the beginning.

“All right, folks, be ready to run for the door,” I said.

I could feel anxiety rising; there was danger here, even if I couldn’t see it. And yet, I heard laughter echoing quietly around us, along with the pitter-patter of what sounded like a toddler’s footsteps—but maybe gentler.

“Why the heck did we enter this place?” I said aloud. It was instinct or maybe even the result of someone or something’s trope.

And then, suddenly, the laughter stopped, and all I heard was a very loud slurping sound coming from back in the direction we had just run from.

I looked around the back room. It was just rows and rows of dolls with little tables set up, similar to the ones up front but much smaller, with lots of tiny teacups set out.

Eventually, we found Darla lying at the base of the stairs.

“Are you okay?” I asked, still cautious of any omens.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I don’t know what came over me. Do you need some more tea?” she asked me.

“No,” I replied.

She nodded and started to try to stand up. At first, she couldn’t, and then she looked up the stairs at something I couldn’t see and said, “Peter, I’m sorry. I’ll just need a moment.”

I looked up the stairs myself, my heart pounding, expecting to see something horrifying. But all I saw was an empty hallway at the top of the stairs.

“What’s up the stairs?” Michael asked.

“That’s Peter,” she said. “Can you see him too?”

Of course, we couldn’t see anything.

“Maybe we should reconvene outside,” Andrew suggested.

I agreed; things were getting too spooky in there.

So, bidding Darla well as she sat on the steps, we all turned to leave. As we did, I caught a glimpse of the table we had been sitting at while we scoped out the place.

My tea had been sitting right on the edge of the table, but now it had moved—into the lap of a doll sitting where it had been. The doll was in the vein of Chucky but about fifty years older, with a little tan cap and lifeless eyes. Next to the doll was a knife.

It was both an Omen and an enemy, not unlike the Grotesque.

The storyline was called Kid Stuff, and it was a tough one. You triggered it by not playing make-believe with the doll and giving it food.

I stopped in my tracks, piecing it together. I had to assume that’s why we needed to have a cup of tea—to keep a thirsty doll distracted.

The doll didn’t move, and I had no evidence that it could move on its own, except for the fact that no one seemed to be around when it got onto the table. I wouldn’t have stared at it for very long, but when we turned toward the door, it slammed shut, blocking our exit.

Michael tugged at it and banged on it. It didn’t budge.

As we turned our backs to the door, bracing ourselves for a fight, Darla walked down the hall toward us and said, “Peter would like to see you.”

“We could jump through these windows,” Michael suggested. “I could break through, no sweat.” But as he said that, the shutters on the outside of the building closed around the windows, darkening the room and giving us a solemn answer.

We were not getting out. Not that way.

“This is… highly unusual,” Andrew said. I could hear a quiver of fear in his voice; normally, he was analytical and calm, but now he was casting his logic out like a prayer. “If we were being ambushed, I feel like it would have happened by now. We would have triggered an omen or something. This must be something different.”

I had to agree, though I was probably just as hopeful as he was.

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Before we could decide what to do, Ramona stepped up to the front of the group and said, “Take us to him.”

Darla turned and began walking back down the hall.

“What are you doing?” I asked Ramona. “Are you sure about this?”

“No,” she said, and then she started following Darla to the back.

I tried to use my pseudo-psychic powers to sense what it was we were heading into, but all I got was a sense of something powerful on the other end. I hoped desperately it was all in my head.

Still, we weren’t getting out through the door, so I followed Ramona, who was following Darla, back through the house and up the stairs.

Upstairs was just a normal, well-kept house filled with pictures. The photos featured a boy and a girl about the same age—they could have been twins. They looked like they’d grown up sometime around the 1920s, maybe earlier. For all I knew, it could have been as far back as the 1880s, though I didn’t think photography of this type existed then. They seemed to be on a farm in the middle of nowhere, but they looked happy.

A radio was playing softly in the hallway, an old-fashioned kind built into a cabinet.

“Peter, I brought them here,” Darla called out.

“Are you sure the door was locked?” I asked Michael.

“I tried to pull it off its hinges. It wouldn’t budge.”

I had to hope that Madam Celia hadn’t sent us to our deaths.

Darla led us across the landing at the top of the stairs to a bedroom. She opened the door and waved us in.

“Here goes nothing,” I muttered under my breath.

When we walked in, the room looked like a normal one from the 1950s or so—lots of magazines and model cars, the kind that you paint with special metallic paints. But all that stuff had layers of dust on it and hadn’t been used in a long time, it would seem.

On the far side of the room, by the windows, was a hospital bed. In it was a man who I had to assume was comatose, given the feeding tube and the fact that he was out cold. His skin was gray, and his hair was so wispy and fine that I couldn’t even tell its color, but it was something light.

On the red wallpaper, he was labeled Peter Who Knocked on the Door. He was Level 50 with a host of tropes that I couldn’t see. He was a Paragon.