It was one of those peaceful nights that was almost too good to be true. His wife was out with a friend, and their little girl had just fallen asleep. With a satisfied smile, Sam crept down the stairs. He had lulled Anna to sleep with only one bedtime story. He had plenty of time to enjoy his solitude.
He stopped at the foot of the stairs, surveying the carnage of domestic life with a toddler. It was cold outside, so Anna had spent all day tearing apart the living room. Gigantic jigsaw puzzle pieces were strewn across the floor, toy cars were upended as if in the aftermath of some tiny collision, and a plastic tea set was laid out for a late supper on the coffee table. Amidst it all, umpteen stuffed animals gazed up at him, as if guilty of creating the scene while he had been upstairs.
Sam set to work. The sooner the room was tidy, he thought, the sooner he would be sitting down with a beer watching some mindless sci-fi movie. With the softest baby steps, he crept around the living room gathering up toys. He imagined he looked like a thief, caught on CCTV with the footage played in reverse, sneaking objects back into their hiding places.
The doorbell rang and Sam snapped his head around to glare in its direction. He paused, features frozen, trying to draw any trace of sound into his ears. Nothing. She was still asleep. He glanced at Snitch, the family dog, who returned a lugubrious gaze from his bed in the living room corner. Gone were the days when a knock on the door would send him into a fury.
Nonetheless, he thought, what sort of idiot rings a doorbell at this hour on a nice family street like this? He glanced at his watch and admitted to himself that 8pm wasn’t that late, as he stole to the door.
Sam glanced through the peephole at a small person-shaped brown blob. The streetlight’s yellow glow was fuzzed and refracted around where a head might be, suggesting long frizzy hair. A small woman then. He opened the door without putting the chain on first.
Cold air rushed in. In the back of his mind, the frugal part of Sam’s brain heard the thermostat behind him click, and the boiler in the kitchen thrum into life. In the doorway stood a small, middle-aged woman. She wore one of those knee-length padded coats that always seemed to be purple, and had hair that couldn’t choose between blonde and brunette. Her face suggested a long, happy life recently rent by sadness. Sam didn’t think she was wearing makeup, but he knew he was useless at that sort of thing. He could certainly tell she had been crying.
Sam thought he recognised her, and felt the mild panic of a face half-remembered. He hadn’t lived on the street that long, and was determined to get to know everyone. To be part of a community. Whatever was wrong, he wanted to help, but his first priority was avoiding causing offence. As he framed an uneasy welcome, he considered what cunning questions he could use to extract her identity.
‘Mr Taylor,’ she interrupted. ‘My name is Margaret Langley. I sold you a doll’s house a few months ago?’
He remembered buying the doll’s house. It was Anna’s favourite toy and she played with it endlessly. This woman isn’t getting it back, he thought, no matter how upset she is.
‘Of course, Margaret, of course I remember. Call me Sam, please. Do you want to come in?’ he asked, hoping his tone of voice made it just clear enough that he wanted her to stay right where she was.
‘Yes, please, we need to talk.’
She bustled past him into the warmth of the hallway, and Sam closed the door behind her. With her back turned to him, she began taking off her coat. He rolled his eyes, feeling his beer and movie slipping away. She hung the coat on a free peg and he ushered her into the kitchen, warning her of the need to be quiet.
‘That’s what I came to talk to you about: your little girl,’ Margaret said, lowering herself onto a kitchen chair. Her voice spoke of private school and a life in the country, but now it cracked with emotion. ‘And my doll’s house. I assume she’s playing with it?’
Sam felt his lip curl and his eyebrow’s furrow. His wife told him he became patronising when he was angry. She said it was something he should work on, but he didn’t feel like working on it right now.
‘Of course she’s playing with it. She’s three. What did you think she was going to do with it?’
The corners of Margaret’s mouth drooped and her grey eyes filled with tears. She pulled a tissue from her cardigan pocket and dabbed at her face. Sam instantly regretted his tone, and turned to the kettle to make amends. ‘Tea?’ he asked with forced levity.
The next words came as a whisper, as if the pain that drove the question was too great to be allowed full voice in this warm, family home: ‘Has she broken any of the dolls?’
Sam stopped his tea-making and looked at this woman who had invaded his quiet night in, sitting there staring at her hands as they pulled and twisted at her tissue. She didn’t look insane, she looked sad. He decided to try to be kind.
‘Well, yes. Again: she’s three.’ Sam forced a chuckle. ‘Breaking things is very much what she does!’
The woman sagged into the chair.
‘Look, I’m sorry if this was some sort of family heirloom, but don’t you think you should have told us that when you sold it? Or maybe not sold it at all?’
‘Which ones has she broken?’
Sam was irritated by the suggestion that he could recall every toy Anna had destroyed over the past few months. He spun back to his labours, bashing mugs onto the worktop and rattling teaspoons around just a little too loudly.
‘Did she break the legs of the little girl?’
The question chilled the kettle-steamed air around him. No, Anna hadn’t, he thought. But the dog had chewed the legs off the little blonde dolly the first day they brought it home. Sam stared at her. Margaret’s eyes were wide with despair.
‘She did, didn’t she? I know because my daughter fell from a ladder, just after we left the doll’s house with you. The hospital tells us she might never walk again.’
Sam’s head began to swim, and he realised he wasn’t breathing. He took a deep, cleansing breath, and prepared to respond. But the woman hadn’t finished. ‘And the man. The daddy dolly. What happened to him?’ she asked in her strangled, painful whisper:
This was madness, Sam knew. A woman struggling with grief, searching for something to blame for a run of bad luck. He very much wanted her out of his house.
‘I don’t know what happened to the “daddy dolly”. She broke a few of them, I know that. We bought some new ones to replace them. Look, let’s be reasonable…’
‘That’s what I said,’ she cut in. ‘Be reasonable. That’s what I said to my mother-in-law. The doll’s house was hers, she gave it to us when Tilly was a little girl.’ She sobbed, just once, at the mention of the name. The daughter who had the accident, Sam assumed.
‘Mother-in-law’s in a home now,’ she went on. ‘She hates it there. Hates us for putting her there. I told her about the doll’s house to cheer her up, I thought she would be pleased that another little girl was playing with it.’
Sam listened and watched as the tissue was reduced to a pile of damp confetti on his kitchen table. He could tell this woman, Margaret, was on the edge. He began wondering whether he could let her drive herself home.
‘She went crazy. She told me it was cursed, that she cursed us for selling it and we would regret it. She said if anything happened to her house or her dolls, we would suffer. Of course, I didn’t believe her. But first Tilly’s accident, and then…’ Her hand went to her mouth, her next words almost imperceptible: ‘my Steven.’
Her face disappeared behind her hands, and Sam looked around the room for inspiration. Anything to change the subject, or offer solace. Or encourage this woman to leave. He took a faltering step towards her, and she looked up, an expression of purest rage seared across her features.
‘This ends now,’ she said. Before Sam could stop her, she was on her feet and out the door, the kitchen chair sent clattering onto its back. She stormed up the stairs. Sam followed, swearing as he trod on one of Anna’s toys, feeling it snap beneath his foot.
She hesitated on the landing, guessing at which door to open. She appeared to Sam like a pantomime ghost, illuminated from below by the insipid glow of a plug-in night light. She guessed correctly, and Sam leapt after her into the gloom of Anna’s playroom.
He couldn’t see her face, but he could tell Margaret was staring at the doll’s house. Her shoulders rocked as her breath came in gasps.
‘Don’t you break that house,’ Sam whispered. ‘Anna loves it. I’m sorry you’ve been through a rough time, but that is nothing to do with a toy house. I want you to leave, right now.’
Margaret didn’t respond. Sam put out a calming hand, stopped it in mid-air as he reconsidered whether touching her might make the mad situation even worse.
She lunged forwards, snatched up a doll, and turned to face him. In the darkness only her tears caught the twilight of the hallway behind him, frosting her eyes with an alien luminosity. His own eye’s adjusted, and he saw the doll she held in her white-knuckled fist was a tiny elderly lady. He understood why she had come.
In one motion, she gripped the grey-haired little head in her other hand, and ripped it off. The two pieces tumbled to the floor, and silence rushed in around them. He could hear Anna’s gentle breathing carrying from the adjoining room.
‘I would like you to leave,’ Sam repeated, hating the tremulous note he caught in his voice.
Sam followed her down the stairs, overtaking her as she retrieved her coat from the hook in the hallway. He opened the front door, and waited.
Margaret stepped into the icy night, turned and said: ‘I’m sorry.’ Then she was gone, striding towards her car. Sam closed the door and locked it.
He rested his forehead against the door for an instant, feeling the chill of the glass. With a rueful shake of his head, he turned back to face the hallway, all quiet and central-heated and bathed in warm light. That, Sam thought, had been very weird. He headed back to the stairs. He wanted to check in on Anna, to reassure himself that all was back to normal.
On the bottom stair, the ‘naughty step’ to which Anna was banished whenever she misbehaved, lay the forlorn remains of the toy he had stepped on. It was one of the new dolls they had bought to replace the ones that had broken. A mummy dolly. A cold breath of fright brushed the skin of Sam’s neck.
The moment was pierced by the shrill of a phone, and the cold breath of fright froze into glacial terror in his gut.
With trembling hands he extracted the phone from his pocket, feeling his heart thudding against his ribs. He pressed the green button, and heard his wife’s friend’s voice:
“Hello Sam, can you hear me? Oh God, Sam, there’s been an accident.”