Episode 2: The day it all Began

It started out as most things usually start…with the stupidity of humans.

“Burn her!”

“Witch!”

“Hit her again!”

“Pastor! Light up the stakes properly!”

The fire cracked and spat like a living thing, black smoke rising in serpentine coils to a sky that refused to rain. The woman tied to a pole didn’t scream. Not once.

“I didn’t hurt anyone. Let us go and you’ll never see us again.”

She pleaded with the townsfolk, but it fell on deaf ears.

To them, she was a witch. Accused of bringing a neighbor’s dead child back to life. Ironically, it was the same neighbor who turned her in. Unfortunately, her resurrected child was killed soon after.

The witch’s punishment would be much severe.

She stared as the flames licked at her dress, hair, and skin until the whites of her eyes boiled away and the smell of cooked flesh turned the town to silence.

Her final words were quiet. A promise.

“She will make you all pay for your sins.”

But in the ash, they found something.

A child holding a doll.

A girl wrapped in rags, no more than two years old, silent as soot, staring up at the sky her mother had blackened.

The witch had known they were coming. The neighbour whose child she helped came knocking at her door, begging for forgiveness.

She shut the door in her face. Began to pack.

But it was too late.

She heard them outside. Saw the pitchforks and torches from her window.

She could have run easily but not with her daughter, barely two years old; she would not make it. Not to mention, carrying her would only delay her escape, so she came up with a plan.

She could have run. Alone, she might’ve escaped. But not with her daughter. Carrying would slow her down. Worse, they’d catch them both. She knew the townsfolk’s cruelty would not let her child live.

So she made a choice.

She had accepted her fate already, but couldn’t let her daughter face the same.

Using old magic she swore she’d never use, she crafted a voodoo doll. Incanted protections into the doll’s spine and wrapped it in hair, thread and love.

Once she made the doll, it vanished, merging with her daughter like a parasite clinging to its host.

However, the old magic had a condition:

The doll would hold no sway over a heart empty of love.
But if the girl ever felt true love — even fleeting — the doll would awaken, and through it, exact control over her soul and, by extension, everything she could summon or destroy.

Read from The Girl and the Doll Book.

Long ago, in this town’s dark past, there was a girl — a lonely, unloved child, rumored to be a witch’s daughter. The witch herself had been unspeakably powerful, tormenting the town with plagues, storms, and madness until the townsfolk rose against her and burned her alive.

Yet when they found her child, swaddled in rags among the ashes, they could not bring themselves to kill her. Some claimed it was mercy; others feared what her mother’s dying curse might do.

To prevent this, they turned the whole village against her. They taught their children to spit at her feet, to run when she came near. She was the ghost in the corner of every classroom, the shadow no one spoke to on the playground. Years passed. She grew up unnoticed, blending in.

Yet children are fickle creatures, and hearts are stubborn things. When she turned sixteen, for the first time in her life, she felt the warmth of innocent affection — a shy crush, a single act of kindness that made her heart grow fonder.

And that single flicker of love cracked the prison the townsfolk had so carefully built. The doll did not work how it was intended.

Perhaps the doll had waited too long. Perhaps it had learned hatred on its own. No one knows for certain.

What is known is this:
The doll woke. And with it, the curse was born.

The Bell.

When it rings, time was over.

Chime.

Hope was gone and death was all that followed.

The Suits.

Forged from the girl’s deepest fears and her buried rage. Puppets of bone and cloth and blade, moved by the doll’s unseen strings. When the bell tolls, they hunt.

They came dressed like men but moved like hunger. Weapons that gleamed like bone. Hands that bent the wrong way. No eyes. No mouths.

There is no way to know for sure what they looked like, since all who saw them, didn’t live to tell the tale. They do not question and do not discriminate. They knew not foes or allies, just targets.

The Girl

Since the first bell rang, the townsfolk have forgotten her face. Her name slipped from every tongue. Some still search the woods and alleys for the child they betrayed, hoping for mercy.

No one remembered even who raised her.

Not even the boy who made her love.

But the wise ones — if any wisdom remains in this cursed place — search for her only to find the doll within her and break it.

Before the next bell tolls.
Before the suits come again.

Before dawn rises and the spell breaks.

I hope you’re somewhere praying.”

“Stop it, Michael, you’re scaring me,” Sasha said, her voice thin.

Michael grinned and shoved the old book toward her. “What? Everyone’s heard it. ‘The Tale of the Girl and the Doll.’ You'd better read it. Might save your life.”

He tossed it at her face.

It hit her nose.

“Ow!” she snapped, rubbing it. The book fell.

A girl picked it up off the floor.

“Now my nose is all red. So annoying.”

“What a jerk,” Tania muttered. She handed it back to Sasha. “Come on. Let’s get home before the sun goes down.”

As she walked away, Sasha glanced at a dark window and saw a pale face staring back.
But she didn’t know it yet.
Didn’t know her at all.