Revenge13 min read
My Mother, the Doll, and the Man Who Wouldn’t Let Go
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I always thought the worst thing that could happen would be losing someone. I never imagined losing someone and finding a copy in their place.
"It’s ready," my mother said, carrying the tray into the kitchen. Her voice was the voice I knew better than any other. The clatter of bowls sounded normal. The light from the window painted the rice white.
"You made liver?" I frowned and pushed my chair back. "You know I can't stand liver."
She smiled and put a slice on my plate. "Eat. You’re so picky."
"I—" I stopped. Saying what I wanted would be ridiculous. My real mother hated liver too. She would never have cooked it for me. "Okay," I lied.
That afternoon I told myself excuses. My mother was trying a new diet after losing at cards, she was worried about my grades, she was tired. People change. I kept replaying her laugh in my head to prove normalcy. But over the next week the small things multiplied.
She stopped going out with her friends. Her makeup was always immaculate at home. She hummed strange songs whenever the television was off. She spent whole days in her room behind closed doors. When I shouted, "Mom, I’m going out," she would only say, "Okay," without looking up.
One night thunder woke me. I turned over and saw a flash of lightning through the window. In the lamp-glare my bedside mirror caught a figure at the doorway: my mother, standing still, staring at me.
My heart stopped.
She was wearing a thin summer dress. "It's winter," I thought. "It's zero degrees out." I lay perfectly still. She didn't move. After a long time I heard her footsteps go down the hallway. The bedroom door closed.
I waited until the house was quiet and crept out. The front door opened silently under my hand. I ran into the dark street without thinking where to go—only one thought in my head: Uncle Fraser. If anyone would believe me, it would be him.
"Fraser!" I pounded at his door like a child who had been lost. He opened, sleepy, then stopped when he saw my face.
"What happened?" he said, and I started telling him the whole story. I told him about the liver, the humming, the midnight at the doorway, the doll I had found in her closet with the date printed on its dress—April 11, my birthday.
"You're joking," Fraser said once I finished. He laughed like he thought I was telling some book idea. "You write horror now?"
"It’s true." I shoved my phone at him, voice trembling. "Sweetie—that's my cousin—she told me mom called the wrong time. I didn't tell anyone I left the house. When I got back—"
We stopped because a woman sat on the sofa behind him. My mother. Calm. Composed. She had been there the whole time, eyes fixed on me. No surprise, no frantic "Where did you go?" She smiled like nothing had happened.
"You two look odd," she said. "Have breakfast."
Everything after that hour felt like being trapped inside film grain. She went home with us. I tried to hide the fact that my phone had disappeared. When I asked where it was, she shrugged. "On the table," she said. I ransacked the room and found nothing. I put a pair of scissors in my backpack before I went to sleep, as if a pair of scissors could be a key.
I tried to run again that night. I waited until the house sank into that quiet the hum of a refrigerator makes and slipped out. I froze at the living room doorway when a voice came from the dark.
"Where do you think you're going, dear?" it whispered, and the figure rose from the sofa with a slow, patient movement.
"You're not my mother," I said. The words felt like a plea and a weapon both.
She laughed—sharp, a small attack. "Silly child. Of course I am."
The laugh set my teeth on edge. She walked around me with no hurry. "Your daughter needs sleep," she said, voice flat. "Go to bed."
She reached out and touched the back of my hand. Her fingers were dry and cool. Something in me broke; I ran for the door. The handle wouldn't turn. I pulled until my shoulder screamed. She put a hand on my shoulder and the world tilted. I fainted.
Next thing I remember, I was in a white room with a ceiling like an empty sky. My chest hurt. My throat tasted like dust. Fraser and my grandmother were at my bedside. "You passed out at the front door," Fraser said. "We found you."
"Where's Mom?" I demanded.
Fraser pointed across the curtained bay to another bed. A woman lay there, so gaunt I could see the hollows. I checked her hand and found no pulse. The doctors called it malnutrition; she had been eating little. No one believed me when I said the person in the bed didn't match the one who had been stalking my doorway.
"She is your mother," my grandmother, Lenore, said later. "I know the mole on her neck. I have known your mother since she was small." But when she looked at the woman in the hospital bed she paled.
"I must check something first," Lenore whispered to Fraser. She opened her palm and ran a thumb across the woman's wrist, then behind her ear. The expression on her face hardened. "This is terrible," she said. "We must act carefully."
"I told you!" I said. "She talked to me when she wasn't awake!"
Lenore looked at me with the slow gravity of someone who'd seen ghosts her whole life. "She did talk," she admitted. "But the one who spoke to you was not exactly the body here. Something—some craft—has been made to fit your mother's shape."
"Made?" I whispered.
"It must be bound," Lenore said. "There are old things—folk methods—used to hold a spirit. Dolls. Knots. Names."
I had found something like that in my mother's wardrobe: a small doll, its dress stained and its tiny face smiling too much. The dress bore one faded line: 'APR 11'. I told Lenore.
Her eyes closed for a moment. "Bring it."
We took the doll to the hospital bedside and Lenore tied a single red ribbon to the doll's wrist. She looped a piece of my mother's hair through the ribbon and said something low and guarded. "This will bind for a moment," she said. "We must get the true soul back into its home."
We waited. For hours. For days. My mother slept like a hollow suit.
On the night we decided to act, I took the doll and held it trembling in both hands. "If you're there," I whispered to the body under the blanket, "if any part of you can hear me, I'm going to get you out."
Before Lenore could begin, the curtain behind the bed lifted and a man barged in with the swagger of a man who had broken every rule he ought to have kept. He smelled of smoke and cheap cologne and bad intentions. His mouth split into a grin the way a trap closes.
"Evening," he said. "That's a curious little toy you have."
"Who are you?" I demanded.
"Gustavo Ross," he said. "I collect things." He stepped closer and the whole room seemed to make way for him.
Lenore's face became a mask. "He shouldn't be here," she said. "He has nothing to do with this."
Gustavo laughed. "Oh, Lenore. You always liked to pretend you were the only wise woman in town. Listen—this is not about wisdom. It’s about taking back what's owed."
"Back what?" I asked.
He moved his jaw as if chewing on an answer before he spoke. "My wife and my girl," Gustavo said. "They were killed because of a car. Ten years ago you all walked away while I didn't." His eyes settled on me in a way that was like a map being folded. "Family tends to hide things. People with money make mistakes. People with power get away with it. I don't get away. I come back."
He smiled again. There was no kindness in it.
Lenore stepped forward with a loop of string. "Enough," she said. "You will not—"
"—you saved the child already," Gustavo said. He turned to me. "This little one will be the end of what is left of their bloodline."
The rest of the night slipped into a blur of chanting and cold sweat. Gus—Gustavo—spoke to the doll with an intimacy that made my skin crawl. The doll sat on the edge of the bed like a queen, and for a moment I could hear a faint child's laughter layered under Gustavo’s voice.
Over the next days I learned the pattern of their lives. Gustavo had been a man who had lost everything: wife, daughter—he blamed my father, Dyer Serra, for the crash years ago. In his bitter logic, if Dyer had taken responsibility or been punished, the rest might never have happened. So Gustavo had become something else: an avenger. He made dolls as prisons and chants as locks. He commandeered a spirit—beautiful, terrible—and taught it how to look like my mother, how to hum the songs and tie the hair just so. He thought it would break my family slowly, replace us until I was the only one left to carry the truth.
I followed them to their meetings. I watched "my mother" in their little room with the toys and the photographs. On the wall were dozens of my father's pictures, every face scratched and crossed until my heart gave a heavy bump. On a table lay five dolls—three I knew and two I didn't—and the one in the center had a heavy nail driven through its forehead. Next to it was a photograph of my father: blood on his face, bruised and dead. That photograph had been staged to look like an official paper; a headline cut off, a caption slashed. It was a shrine to someone Gustavo hated.
He spoke over and over of justice. "He will never forgive himself," he told the doll, and then he laughed and laughed.
"I want to know why," I whispered once, to the boy who slept in the chair at the back—the ghost boy who had saved me once. "Why keep going like this?"
"Because he wants company," the small phantom said softly. "He wants someone who remembers he hurt us."
Rex Gordon—small and pale and stubborn—nuzzled his knees. He had a child's fondness for paper cranes and day-old bread. He had been found by Egon Vogel, the old man from the village who wore the same coat every day and smelled of river mud and memory. Egon had called him a "rescue" and kept him in the dark room with the black cloth. Rex could go into dreams and pull threads. He had found me once when the house hollered like broken glass. Without Rex I would have been lost in the shapes Gustavo had made.
We began a plan that felt insane even as I spoke it aloud. It revolved on one thing: proof. If we could expose Gustavo—if the town could see him, the dolls, the pictures—then perhaps the old laws, the human ones, might take him. Or the crowd might do something worse. I didn't know which terrified me more.
I did not imagine how public the punishment would be.
We chose the town square on a chilly Sunday afternoon. Lenore had called neighbors, Fraser had done the heavy lifting, Egon arranged things, and Rex—small teeth like a child's—sat in the window of Egon's truck and watched. We had photographs, blown up and pinned on boards. We had the doll in a clear case. We had a recording—Gustavo's own voice confessing to binding spirits. Most of all we had witnesses: the nurse from the hospital, my cousin Marina Chambers who had once laughed at me, but now stood beside me, the shopkeeper who had seen me running into the street at odd hours, and a knot of neighbors curious enough to come.
"Are you sure about this?" I asked Lenore, voice a whisper.
"Child," she said, "Gustavo has done what evil men always do: he thought secrecy would be his shield. People need to see."
People lined the square. The sunlight made the plastic boards look like cold glass. I walked up to the mike like the world had shrunk to this single road and this one breath.
"This man," I said, and pointed to Gustavo standing across the plaza, "is responsible for making my family a monument of his hatred."
Murmurs rippled. Gustavo smiled.
"Is that so?" he said. He crossed his arms and looked like a man who'd put his money on fate. "Alright. Show me then."
Fraser stepped forward with a recorder. "Gustavo Ross, you are accused of captivity, of ritual binding, of kidnapping and intent to harm." He turned the device and played the recording. Gustavo's voice, ragged and sure, filled the square: "We will make them understand. We will make the names answer. We will take away their peace."
Faces changed from curious to horrified. "Is that him?" someone said. A child pointed. People began to pull out phones. Cameras flashed. For a breathless moment I saw the world split: the part that had believed my story and the part that had not.
Gustavo's expression hardened. "You have no proof," he spat. "A recording means nothing. She—" He waved a hand at the doll in the case. "—she is a doll. Your stories are tall tales for gullible minds."
But Lenore was ready. She walked to the doll and placed it on the table. With a thin, methodical motion she unwrapped the ribbons. "Look," she said. "There are knots in these loops. Old binding knots." She tapped the wood of the doll with a nail. "Not a toy. A prison."
An older woman in the crowd cried out, "I remember the woman in that photograph! She worked at the cotton mill!" Others started talking and the square filled with fragments: the grocery boy recalled a strange car on the night of the accident; Marina said she'd seen Gustavo loitering near the highway years back. The pieces began to fit like a map.
Gustavo laughed then, a small sound that couldn't fill the widening circle of eyes and phones. He moved forward through the crowd and for the first time his face showed him. The face of a man who believed himself beyond retribution was crumbling.
"You're going to ruin me," he said, surprisingly small. "You—do you know who I am?"
"No," I said. "We know what you've done."
"People!" Gustavo grasped at the nearest friend he had left—the crowd. "You have no idea what he did to me! My wife, my girl—look at me! I have the right to hate."
"Right?" someone shouted. "Right?"
Gustavo's features twisted between anger and triumph. "They ran away and left me to bury the rest. I swore to pull them back into the debt. I made a promise and I kept it."
A man near the front—Mr. Boston Martinez, who owned the bakery and knew how to press a crowd—stepped toward Gustavo and took him by the elbow. "You can't walk away from this," Boston said. He spoke kindly, but I saw the judgment in his eyes. "You will answer to the law."
Gustavo turned frantic. "You think law! I will show you law!" He lunged for the case. For the first time the case wasn't just a symbol. People crowded in. Phones pointed. "Stop him," someone cried. He grabbed the case. A dozen hands closed on him.
At that moment, faces turned to witness the final act: Gustavo's fall.
It was not how I imagined punishment—no jail doors, no judge's bench—but something flecked with communal cruelty and righteous release.
He was dragged to the center of the square, palms scraped and fingers wild. People pushed him down. He flailed like an animal who has lost the sky. Someone tore at his jacket as if unbuttoning a mask. Another pulled at the scarf that had been his banner.
"This is what you wanted!" he screamed, voice thin. "You wanted me to be ruined!"
They tied his hands with yellow tape—an ironic parody of the ropes he'd used on others. He wrenched and his voice climbed higher: first defiant, then pleading.
"You don't know what you did!" he said to the circle. "You should have understood!" His eyes flicked toward the doll case like a man looking for a last talisman. "I gave voices back," he said. "I didn't deserve this!"
Crowd noise washed over him. Phones buzzed, people muttered, some clapped, others broke into angry shouts. The nurse from the hospital stood with her arms folded, silent. "This is not how law is done," she said under her breath, but no one listened. A woman I had once met at the grocer's stall spat, "You made ghosts of people! You will see what it is to be judged by the living."
The shift in Gustavo had all the tragic elements of revelation. He went from poised predator to frightened man. He tried to bargain. "Please," he said to me suddenly, "Please understand—he was guilty. He deserved—"
"Stop," I said, harder than I meant. "If you wanted justice, you could have told it. But you took things into places not meant for you."
The crowd's mood changed to one of slow dismissal. People shouted and pushed. A young woman took a bandage from the kit she carried and wrapped his hands like a child bandaging a scraped knee— as if to keep him from escaping. The old man who had been his friend stepped forward with a small tape recorder and hit play. It played the recording of his voice, only this time the voice sounded paler, cowardly. "I am owed," it said. "I am owed." It became a grotesque loop.
Then, as quickly as the crowd had gathered around him, they began to move away. People snapped photos and uploaded them, and the square filled with an outer calm like wind after a storm. Gustavo sat on the stone, shaking, with his hands taped and his head bowed, and the applause that rose was a mix of relief and condemnation.
He had gone through stages: smug, pleased with the secret that made him superior; then irritated at being interrupted; then defiant; then flailing; then bargaining; then small and shaking. People who had watched and judged him now recorded him. Some wept; some laughed; many stood in silence. "He deserved to be hauled out," someone said. "Not like this—but he deserved the truth in the sun."
As the crowd dispersed, someone hissed, "Take him to the police." A line of phones called in. I felt oddly hollow. The public scene had been necessary, but watching a man break into pieces under other people's eyes left me unsettled.
Gustavo's begging grew softer. "Please," he whispered to no one and everyone. "I—I'm sorry. Forgive me."
No one forgave him. A dozen thumbnails froze his face: the man who had chased ghosts, now the ghost of his own making.
After that day, the long process of undoing began. The dolls were collected for evidence and later burnt under a careful ritual by Lenore and Egon. The police interviewed witnesses. Expert men in sensible coats took the photographs down and bagged them; they asked the hard questions and wrote the thin, cold forms. The hospital released medical statements. Dyer Serra—the name of my father—was never what Gustavo claimed. He had been a man who chewed life in pieces to give us the best he could, not a monster who ran from a crash. The crash had been—harsh and unfair—a blind slice of fate. But it was not fraud; it was not revenge.
At home, after the square emptied and the lights in store windows dimmed, my mother—real, the one breathing in her bed—sat up and blinked, like someone who had been asleep for a long, long time.
"Child?" she asked, voice raw and raw like wool.
"Mom," I said, pouring myself into the single syllable.
She reached for me. "I dreamed of a river," she whispered. "And someone was calling my name."
"You are home," I said. She put her hand on my cheek, and I finally realized what I had been fighting for: to put a hand where a hand belonged.
We buried strange things quietly after that: no more dolls allowed in the house, no more late-night absences, no more doors that wouldn't open. Gus—Gustavo—was taken away under official names and grayer lights. In court, he tried defenses that cracked in the face of witnesses and recorded confessions. He was found guilty of several acts that added up to a life of wrongs. He walked to the prison van with his head bowed. The town watched.
In the quiet that followed, I sat with Lenore and Rex in Egon's tiny room. The ghost-boy stretched like a cat and said, "You did it, sister. You held."
"Did we fix everything?" I asked.
Lenore smiled, older and somehow softer. "The world has very small stitches," she said. "You will never see all of them. But you did pull a big one."
"Where is he now—my father?" I asked, pressing the question like a thumb into a bruise.
His photograph remained on my shelf. Not a shrine anymore, but a memory. When I thought of him, I saw the small, bright man who had bought too many oranges for the old street seller. I saw him in the laughter in my throat on days when I could forget for a while.
And in the end I learned new rules: that some spirits find cages in dolls; that some men will bind pain to other people like a lit torch; that pain passed on rarely leaves the hands that touch it. I learned to look for the sound of a voice behind the door and to trust the old women in kitchens and the little boys who could slip into dreams.
"Promise?" Rex asked one afternoon while we sat on the stoop as spring finally came back.
"No," I said, and kissed the top of his head. "I'll be careful. But I won't be afraid."
He chattered contentedly, the way small things do when they are safe. Outside, life went on: Fraser called to drop off mismatched socks and jokes, Egon returned to his river and his newspaper, and my real mother hummed while making dinner. We kept the kid's drawing pinned where I could see it: a house with a red door and a paper sun.
On quiet nights I still wake in the dark, listening for knocked windows and wind. Once in a blue, bright panic I hear a thin sound like a child's drum tapping on a window: "da-da—da-da." I press my palm to the glass and smile.
"Not tonight," I whisper.
The End
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