vehicle after him. He pumped a round into the shotgun he had dove for and hit the safety. The girls unnaturally coloured eyes went wide just before the shotgun roared, spitting fire and metal at point blank range into her chest. She flew off her feet and back out into the night.
Pumping another round into the chamber, he sat up just in time to see two small feet, one facing the wrong way, disappear into the sheltering dark of the nearby trees. He sat there for a while, not daring to put the shotgun down. He glanced at the seat, all around the inside of the vehicle. None of the mess that the shot should have caused was there. Even outside there was nothing but dirt, wood chips and an empty shell on the road.
It took what seemed like an eternity, but eventually he closed the door and put his shotgun back in its place. He left the new round in the chamber though. His hand was still wrapped around the parking break when the bolas crashed into the window frame of his door. Though his window was open, they smashed the rear driver side window as they wrapped themselves around the frame with vicious momentum. Weights snapped against the metal hard enough to make some large dents, as it quickly wound tight.
The tires screeched and the car leaped away. Morgan barely remembered to grab the wheel, almost driving off the road as he made his desperate flight in a haze of adrenalin and confusion. He was driving so fast that he almost drove right by a young man with glasses and a dark button up shirt sauntering casually down the street a few blocks away. There was too much of a coincidence for him not to be involved somehow.
Pulling right up onto the sidewalk with unnecessary aggression he leaned out to window to shout. “Hey Arthur! Get in the car, we need to talk!”
None of it made any more sense now that he was laying in bed staring at the ceiling. Just going through it in his head made him feel even more exhausted. As though he had actually lived it twice. Eventually sleep overcame him.
Sleep would only visit him briefly in volatile fits however. Staying just long enough to place a nightmare into his head before dashing away and hiding from him again. He woke up sweating after a dream that some implacable, unstoppable child was coming for him. She came, he shot her. She came, he kicked at her. She came, he ran. She came and caught him, small fingers closing around his throat. He woke up.
Worse was when he dreamed that he was back in that building, the two girls wrestling on the floor. This time however he aimed up and fired his gun, but the girl somehow still ended up with his bullets in her. She staggered back and fell down, hands coming away from her stomach covered in blood as she cried a sad, lonely, pain filled child's cry. Her eyes begging to know why.
It was early morning when after having woken up from another nightmare he decided to just get up. Sleep hadn't done him any good, so he went to the kitchen. More years ago than he liked to think about Morgan had worked for a summer as a line cook. The job had been low paying and thankless, but he'd learned to love cooking. So he made an unnecessarily large and extravagant meal. Making more food than he would eat, just to get lost in the process of making it. Usually, he ended up saving or throwing out a lot of the food as he rarely had anyone to share it with. He considered, not for the first time, getting a pet of some kind. A cat or a dog to feed the scraps to perhaps.
Not working until later in the day, he sat down with his tall pile of food, pulled out a small laptop, punched 'dolls' into the search engine and leisurely began to work at his breakfast.
It wasn't the first time he had searched it as the many visited links that popped up bore testament to. He knew this time to search so that he bypassed most of the childrens toys. This time however he didn't search for gang affiliations, cults or known drug aliases. He found pages where stories about possessed items and cursed heirlooms leaped onto the page. The screen filled with strange reports of people playing hide and seek alone with moving dolls, people killing with voodoo dolls and ventriloquist dummies burning down houses. He found nothing useful as far as he could tell, skimming it all while eating poached eggs with bechamel sauce. Switching to news reports was little improvement. The closest he found were rare articles about lucky children surviving massive trauma, but they were disturbing and not much help. None of them said anything about one walking away from something like a close range shotgun blast.
It wasn't until he combined a few choice phrases in the search bar that he found something. He put in 'Dolls; no blood; massive trauma' and 'unnatural eye colour' and a link came to the top of the page he hadn't visited before. It seemed eager to speak, zipping to the attached website as he clicked on it.
The page was poorly made and didn't abound with specifics. It was something different however, and it presented something that seemed to make more sense, if you had lived through the night that Morgan had, and were willing to suspend a certain amount of belief. It was a way of thinking he wouldn't have bothered with before, but it seemed silly to cling to what he had thought he knew without question now.
The page talked about a kind of artificial human, usually made to look like a small child. Apparently the belief was that certain individuals or perhaps a society of some kind, passed down esoteric knowledge of how to take certain items, and animate them. It spoke of people who could, with the right catalyst, take wood and cloth, clay and glass, wool and thread and make a Doll. These Dolls are woken up and move on their own, speak with their own voices and act with their own purpose. Dolls are (apparently) not just elaborate puppets but things that work and think and fight, often doing things normal humans can't and walking away from things that should kill or maim.
Morgan delved into the website with fascination, a healthy dose of scepticism and a large fork full of hash-browns. He took what little he had heard, and what he had experienced last night and compared them to the stories of people's supposed encounters with 'Dolls'. Most of the stories on the website were nonsense about being harassed by strange children at the store or black eyed kids asking to use the washroom in the middle of the night. Buried in the nonsense however were reports of little girls that didn't stand or talk quite right. Sometimes they had strange eye or hair colours, though usually they seemed mostly normal but for how they acted. Often they were seen with an adult, following obediently if stiffly. Then the adult would say something and the little girl would disappear into a dark alley at night without hesitation, or nimbly scale a building, or in one report lift up a dumpster.
Each of the stories that showed similarities to what he had witnessed, some of which were eerily similar, he took down notes on. Copying into a file the ones that seemed most promising. He wasn't sure what was more disturbing an idea, that someone had been able to make some kind of child looking robot construct, or that someone was using drugs or brainwashing to make these kids do these things. Both possibilities seemed equal parts insane and plausible given the previous night.
The slanted numbers on the sticky note that were his only lead seemed to leap up from beside his desk and glare. Arthur's number seemed to taunt him. Calling Arthur was not something he really wanted to do, as the other man had too much control over their interactions so far already. However he needed to find out what was going on, and stop this “Dolls” fiasco before someone innocent that didn't have a shotgun in their car got attacked.
The phone only rang twice before a small, oddly familiar female voice answered the phone. “Yes?”
“This is Officer Morgan with the police, I called to speak with Arthur.” He responded in his cop voice as he tried to scrape his remaining breakfast into a container as quietly as possible.
“Yes Officer Morgan, he has been expecting your call.” The girl responded stiffly and passed the phone over.
“Officer Morgan! How are you today?” Arthur asked as soon as he came on the phone, oddly cordial and upbeat in his greeting. At least he was until he suddenly snapped out “Sit still! This is hard enough to fix without you trying to eavesdrop at the same time!”
“I'm happy I didn't wake up skewered. What was that about?” Morgan answered with confusion.
>
“Sorry I was talking to Mei-mei.” Arthur answered somewhat absently. “Well interrupting a fight like you did is very dangerous and I don't know how badly the other was damaged. So I would say you are lucky not to be skewered as well.”
“I knew there was something about those two!” he exclaimed before calming himself and letting suspicion take over. “Wait, I didn't mention a fight last night. What do you know and why are you suddenly feeling so sharing?”
“Mei-mei filled me in on the details. It is against my better judgement to tell you anything honestly. Yes Mei-mei I AM telling him!” Arthur paused for an awkward moment. “However, Mei-mei tells me you were instrumental in her escape from their trap last night and avoiding a great deal of damage which would set us back. So WE decided that if we let you know what was going on, then maybe you would have the good sense to stay out of it.”
An hour after the call and a half hour after getting his leg stitched in the hospital, Morgan found himself in an older suburb knocking on a dirty, faded once-white door into a highly suspect basement. The frame, with peeling paint of the same dirty white of the door, was built into the basement wall at the end of a