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The creaking of the bedroom door woke her mother up. Upon seeing her silhouette in the doorway, her mother pushed herself upright into a sitting position. She watched as her daughter moved with deliberate steps towards her husband, who was still fast asleep. She barely had time to register what was going on before the knife descended from her daughter’s hand into her husband’s chest. In the dark, her hands fumbled over the hilt of the knife that she felt protruding, feeling a wetness that could only be blood, as he gasped.
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The teddy bear was thrown out, and later picked up by a street urchin. He had it for just two months before it was stolen from him by another street urchin, together with a host of other things he had picked up from his jaunts in the streets. The new possessor of the teddy bear was ambitious for his twelve years, giving it to a pretty woman he met in a bar in a childish attempt to woo her. Not knowing what she could do with it, the woman kept the bear for eight years, during which she got married. The teddy bear sat in a corner, forgotten and gathering dust until one day, she rediscovered it in its hiding place. On the day of the birth of her first child, she gifted it to the baby, who was just as big as the teddy bear’s leg.
The baby boy didn’t live beyond a month, and the teddy bear was returned to the dust-filled corner for another year. Her marriage broke down as she devoted more time to her grief than her husband, and she soon returned to her previous occupation. She met an amateur collector, who was fascinated by the teddy bear she had talked about one night. After taking a look at it the next day (its home-made exterior fascinated him), he offered her a small sum, which she accepted. And so the teddy bear had yet another owner.
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“I’ve saved us,” the child said, her voice barely audible over her mother’s panicked screams. “He cannot hurt us. I’ve saved us.”
Her mother looked up at her daughter, who was standing triumphantly next to her dying husband. The child’s eyes reflected little flecks of light that were coming in from the window. She fell silent as a deep terror rose up within her. That person in front her was not her daughter, and had not been her daughter for months.
“Rebecca. Rebecca?” Her voice was unnaturally high and loud.
“I'm right here,” the child said.
The child’s mother shook her head.
“I’m Rebecca too,” the child said. “He’s dead,” she added by way of observation.
The child’s mother looked at her husband. He had stopped moving. It didn’t feel real anymore, nothing about this felt real. She laughed, and didn’t stop until she had collapsed in a heap of tears that gave way to dead faint.
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When she came to, the child had already done away with the body and cleaned the blood off the floor, although the sheets on which she was lying were stiffened and unevenly stained dark red. She had been in a delirium the past day, the child calmly reported. She laughed hysterically, but the child’s gaze soon shut her up. This was real, her daughter was no longer her daughter, and a stranger had killed her husband. Nothing felt real anymore.
For the next two days, the child’s mother lay in that same, blood-soaked bed with a high fever. During those two days, the child was careful in her ministrations. She didn’t bring aspirins, but instead used wet towels and herbs, which she found in the kitchen. The treatment might have been archaic, but it was clear that the child knew what she was doing.
Whether delirious or lucid, the child’s mother kept asking the stranger who she was and what she had done to her daughter. The child responded freely. Now that she had completed her task, there was no need to hide.
She was Rebecca too, but from a different time. She was the oldest daughter of a blacksmith who frittered his time and money away on pursuits that were detrimental to the well-being of his family. Her mother had been a resourceful woman, who had sought out means of making ends meet for herself and her four children. She had tried to keep her bitterness at a minimum, but her husband’s irresponsibility had soon resulted in her constantly nagging at him in front of her children, a case that had caused him to soon lose his mind as the youngest two children parroted what their mother said. The blow to his ego had soon exacerbated into full scale madness as she heard him muttering to himself in his workshop one day, plotting to torture and kill the five of them in their sleep and display their bodies at the tavern as proof of his capabilities.
Knowing that her father’s madness would only increase their suffering and make them the brunt of society’s disapproval, Rebecca had one day mixed rat poison into the food she was preparing for her mother and siblings. She had refrained from eating the food herself in an attempt to ensure her father did not misuse their bodies in any way. When he returned home the next day, he had found everyone dead and Rebecca in tears over what she had done. In a rage, he had brought her over to his workshop, where he first tortured her with hot coals, and then, just before she lost consciousness, hacked her body into pieces. He had left these pieces for days while he disappeared. When he returned, he brought with him a whore. He tore open a teddy bear that his wife had sewn for her children and stuffed Rebecca’s remains into it, coercing the whore into sewing it back for him. He then killed her and buried her together with the rest of his family in the garden in the dead of the night. Finally, he returned to his workshop, fashioned a noose out of rope and hung himself from a beam.
All this Rebecca had observed through her vantage point on a table in the workshop. She did not know why, she did not know how, but she had lived through the teddy bear ever since. She had tried to speak to others, other children who had kept her, but they had not been able to understand her. They had gone mad, she reported calmly.
When she met this other Rebecca, she had felt a connection unlike any she experienced with any of the other children. She needed to protect this Rebecca, this Rebecca could understand her. She knew she would have to kill Rebecca's father to prevent him from harming her like her own father did her. But she wanted to know this Rebecca as well, the girl who shared her name. She wanted to understand her as she never did the other children she had she had helped. So she spent months slowly filtering into Rebecca’s consciousness and taking control of her body. Do it too quick and Rebecca would have be harmed, maybe even have gone made like the others, she told the frightened woman.
The woman begged Rebecca to release her daughter again and again. Rebecca did not listen at first, but once she had finished her story, she agreed to return the little girl. She was pleased now. She had protected the child Rebecca from harm and her job was done. She had even protected Rebecca's mother, who would inevitably have found that her husband was a good-for-nothing, although (and at this point, the first hints of uncertainty appeared in her face), she had not seen it yet. She was certain it would have happened someday, though. The mother agreed. She would have agreed to anything this creature said, if it would get her daughter back.
The child Rebecca was returned to her body, although her mother did not know how. One day, it was the creature tending to her and the next day, it was her own Rebecca. Childish and unchanged, with no memory at all of what had happened. She had taken one look at the blood-soaked bedsheets and shrieked. It had taken a good part of the day to convince her that it was just something Mother had spilled on the bed.
Convinced that Rebecca was her child again, her mother had tried to convince herself that it had all been a dream and torn open the teddy bear. It took all her courage to gather both bones and bear, shaking, to drive them to a cemetery far from their home and bury them secretly in the ground.
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The collector kept the teddy bear hidden away in his private museum, never to see the light of day again. For over fifty years, the bear was handed over from collector to collector, seemingly without consequence. At long last, it found its way to the house of a certain Raymond A. Gilbert, whose passion for collecting teddy bears was the only way he could contr
ol his obsessive tendency to squirrel away almost anything that could be amassed in great quantities.
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The child never recalled anything from that time, although she began to have a deep-seated fear of teddy bears. Her mother moved them out of the house three months after the incident and loathed to buy her daughter any toys. She died a year later from unknown causes, after which the child went to live with her other father, Raymond A. Gilbert, whom her mother had forbidden her from seeing since her father's death. He was happy to have her with him, but he could never understand why she refused to enter the room where he kept his teddy bear collection for the twelve years she lived with him. He wasn’t the best of fathers, but he tried hard until the day he found himself driving back home with his latest teddy bear – a brown bear not unlike that he had given to his daughter years ago – when he accidentally veered into the wrong lane and was killed by an oncoming lorry.
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