Page 17 of She’s a Doll

It was working, but not right. Its hands jerked forward, sometimes only a second, sometimes in leaps large enough to cut out hours. The room went dark, then light, then dark again. I realized it was the sun, rising and setting. I watched, fighting down my horror as I tried to understand what I was seeing, why time would be moving so fast, and why it’d been holding still before.

Almost as if mocking me, the clock froze again, and I heard a sound, distorted and unnaturally deep. A moan of despair, echoing through the house, echoing from my grandma’s bedroom.

I spun out.

Fear.

Confusion.

Pain.

It was hard, in the violence of that, to rationalize. It was hard to even comprehend what I had seen. But somehow, I did.

Ghost Lore Fact #1: Time is fucked up when you’re dead.

Sometimes it was on pause and sometimes it was on fast-forward, but as far as I could tell, rewind wasn’t an option. Which meant I was wasting time. If I wanted to do something, I couldn’t hang around, processing my feelings. I didn’t know how much time I’d already lost. Probably a lot. I needed to get back. I needed to take control of this situation. I needed to see my house, to see my grandma, and to see Kyle Lawson being fed slowly into a combine harvester.

Yes. I needed that most of all.

No matter what else happened, Kyle Lawson needed to pay.

That thought unfurled inside me, cold and powerful.

I clawed my way back out of the darkness, out of the storm, out of the violence of grief to stare at that clock.

It waved, arms swinging around in a janky sort of rumba, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, and sometimes catching on a moment, giving me a static picture of the room before whirling relentlessly onward. I saw Grandma come and leave, a blur of familiar colors. I smelled burned food. Grandma never burned food. I heard Cookie barking, deep, panicked, echoing barks.

He was still barking.

I tried to zero in on these moments, but they slipped away, lost in the riptide of time.

Worse were the pauses. The single seconds that felt like hours, days. The clock caught between ticks. The smoke detector’s low-battery beep stretched out into a scream like train brakes, metal on metal.

It was too much. How was I meant to talk to my grandma? How was I meant to stop Kyle? How was I meant to fix this? I wanted help. I wanted a goddamn tutorial. Press X to jump. Hold L2 to crouch. But more than anything else, I wanted to dial the difficulty level down, to veto this mechanic, for everything to just go back to normal.

But it didn’t.

I’m not sure how long I stayed there, a witness, no better than a glitchy old security camera, half blind and more than half broken. It could’ve been weeks. Months. It might’ve turned into years if it wasn’t for the moth.

It was night and time was holding relatively stable when the moth crawled under my veil, fuzzy gray legs tangling in the lace, faceted black eyes staring. I watched it, unable to do anything else, as it maneuvered over my skirt, into my lap, and up onto my face. Its brown-gray abdomen blotted out my sight, small sharp feet scraping at my nose, at my mouth, at my eye.

It probed at the stitching in my shoulder, at the fabric beneath.

I’d seen moth-eaten fabric before. I’d pulled shirts out from my grandma’s piles and wiggled my fingers through the holes to show her. Google said they didn’t eat cotton, but experience told me they weren’t that fussy. If it wasn’t synthetic, it was on the menu.

That included me.

I heard the sickening wet rustle as it plucked at my stuffing, feet scrabbling to push itself in deeper, and deeper, wings battering at my face.

That was when I got angry.

I’d been through so much bullshit.

I’d worked my arse off to be an adequately competent business administrator.

I’d survived Ginger’s weird Stepford-wives tea party.

I’d tried to phone a friend.