31 Days of Halloween: Day 28

When I was very little, I often spent the night at my grandad's house. My grandmother, who died when I was four, had collected a whole slew of dolls, a passion that runs in the family (don't get me started on dolls; if I had the money, I'd have a ton of them). The dolls lived in a huge glass-fronted cabinet in the main living room, a small army of porcelain figurines decked out as Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Scarlett O'Hara, and every other fairy tale and fictional heroine you can imagine. I wasn't allowed to play with these dolls, being limited to the American Girl dolls that she had gotten for us grandkids. But I used to stand and stare at the dolls, making up stories for them in which they came alive at night and had all sorts of wonderful adventures. I was a hopelessly romantic child, as you can see.

One night, as I recall (and maybe this is a warped memory), I was staying at Grandad's and sleeping over in the guest bedroom. Or maybe I was at home; I really don't remember. Suffice it to say, it was late, I was very small, and I wanted a bedtime story. My big brother was there, and he is a masterful storyteller. And so he tucked me in, made sure I had my bear, turned the lights off, and proceeded to scare the hell out of me.

The story as I remember it went something like this:

"You know Grandmommy's dolls, the ones you're not allowed to play with? Well, there's a very good reason that you can't play with them."
"What is it?"
"Have you ever seen anyone open that cabinet?" (I shook my head.) "There's a reason for that, too. But I promised I would never tell you."
"Why?"
"Because it might scare you so bad that you won't ever go back to Grandad's. No, I really can't tell you."
"Oh please! I won't tell Mom!"
"No, no, it's a bad idea. Forget I brought it up. I've got a story about a pony; you want that instead?"

By this time, naturally, I was frantic to know what it was I was not supposed to know. So I begged and pleaded for a long time, and finally, he relented.

"Okay, but don't say I didn't warn you. So, you know Grandmommy's dolls?" (I nodded.) "Well, those aren't really dolls. They're actually people."
"No way!"
"Way. You see, they were once girls just like you: bright, curious, full of adventure...but they all did something wrong."
"What was it?"
"The Evil Witch caught them all, and as punishment for being naughty, she turned them into dolls. Which is why you must never, ever open that cabinet. Oh, you might hear them say, late at night when you get up to pee, that if you open the cabinet, you can save them. That they can turn back into girls and live happily ever after. But you must never, ever listen to them!"
"Why not?"
"Because if you open that cabinet, you'll turn into a DOLL." (I gasped.) "A beautiful, cold, porcelain doll with a pretty dress and curly hair. And you'll have to live in the cabinet, and you won't be able to play with your friends, or get Christmas presents, or snuggle with Mom EVER AGAIN. We'll all wonder where you went, and what happened to Christie, and you'll be right there, unable to tell us that you're stuck in the cabinet. Because each of those other girls didn't listen to their brothers, and they opened the forbidden cabinet, and now they can never, ever go home!"

As you can probably imagine, six-year-old me was scared right out of my pants. For months after this story I couldn't actually walk past the doll cabinet, but had to navigate all the way around the house to avoid it. The dolls' cold glass eyes seemed to follow me, daring me to open the cabinet and join them, in a sort of reverse-Narnia. It took me years to get that my brother had been epically messing with me.

When I first heard this particular recording of Offenbach's Doll Song, I could only think that it would have been the perfect background music for that singularly creepy story.