A Life of Threads

The tiny hut nestled into the far side of the overgrown garden could easily be passed off by any nosy neighbour peeking through the curtains as a disused shed. A shed that had now become the graveyard for many garden tools that had rusted and snapped throughout years of the house being vacant of any life.

The men and women behind those rustling curtains were, however, wrong on many counts. Firstly, the shed was in no way whatsoever disused, nor was the house vacant. Not one rusty tool occupied the insides of the building.

Every night, as the bedroom lights of the surrounding houses slowly began to flicker out and the street lights dimmed down to nothingness, the back door of the old cottage would swing open wide with a creak that could only be muffled by the cloud of sleep surrounding the nearby houses. Then a figure would make its way through the growth of rhododendrons and dandelions towards the leaning wooden structure in the corner of the garden. When the path through the overgrown plants had been trodden down, the next door would swing open with another loud creak, then slam shut only moments later.

Inside the hut there was barely space to stand upright, what with the two shelves lining the parallel walls, and the murky black mirror leaning against the far side of the hut. Beside the mirror was a cobweb lined rocking chair. Though it was dusty and old, it was not quite as unused looking as the rest of the hut; it appeared to have a much thinner layer of dust and did not creak when used. The hut was not a pleasant place to be, unless you happened to be a spider, or a rat.

The shelves were the complete opposite to the dust and muck caked mirror, and showed no sign of even a single cobweb in the sneaky corners and tiny gaps. This was because the shelves and their contents were far from disused, and were the reason the mysterious figure would leave it’s safety each night.

Dolls. That was what lined the shelves in amazing numbers. Dolls piled on top of one another, dolls with long woollen hair, dolls with button eyes and naked bodies. Some were pale with wool wrinkling and unravelling, and others were tightly knitted and a colour that could only be described as the colour of tanned skin. They were sat in orderly rows along each shelf, though where room ran out a few would be thrown mindlessly in a pile on top.

At first glance one would simply wonder why a young child’s collection of toys had been discarded into this little old hut.

But then that person would probably notice the unique features of each doll, and would begin to recognise certain aspects. Was that Mrs. Awson’s frizzy red hair? And did the black mop with the streaks of pink and green belong to Mr. Riley’s troublesome son? At this point they would start to notice more and more details of the faces and bodies of the dolls, which would bring their attention down to the life like legs. This was where three, or in some cases two, words were sewn into the right leg, showing the name of the particular citizen that doll represented.

Jessica Marie Simmonds

Damien John Riley

Names that stood out clear as day in the tiny community of several hundred citizens, and sewn on faces with intricately painted button eyes that bore an eerie resemblance to the man or woman they were designed to be.

Beside the shelf on the left containing all the females of the village lay a precariously placed basket. It tilted to the side, its contents spilling out over the rotting floorboards and burying the mangled dead bodies of the spiders who had inhabited the hut before the mysterious figure had entered the house and seen the perfect little building, out of sight from the prying eyes of others, where they could practice their new found... hobby on the people who they had once known.

The figure, now safely into the privacy of the hut, reached out a long, shrivelled arm of gray skin towards the shelf of male dolls. Dirty overgrown fingernails on the end of spindly old fingers pushed aside the piles of dolls, searching through the mess of hair and naked woollen skin to where the man the figure had taken a particular interest in lay. When the doll was reached, it was lightly removed from its curled up position. Those long, nimble fingers carried the small replica across the room towards where the chair now slowly rocked. The movement of the figure in the hut had sent the chair into a slow rhythm, forwards and backwards continually, shaking up dust from the floor as it moved.

The figure, now moving into the small spot of moonlight cast through the panels of rotting wood, became visible as a female, though no more features could be picked out from the weak light glowing against her wrinkled skin.

She dropped down into the rocking chair, keeping the rhythm going with her bare, similarly wrinkly feet. The doll remained held carefully between her fingers as she reached towards the ground where the spilt basket of equipment lay. She selected only three items from the clutter; a thin, deadly sharp needle; a ball of red wool, and a pair of scissors. The collection of items made it seem like the incredibly old woman was about to do some knitting, perhaps an outfit for the naked male doll? But it was far from that.

With rehearsed precision, she turned the doll over in her hand, so that the pale back was revealed to her. Then, extremely softly, she ran the sharp, shining blade of the scissors down the woollen flesh, watching as the seams split open to reveal what was under the skin. The long knitted backbone stood out among the strands of red muscle and blood, curving slightly as the doll sagged in her grip. This part would be the most difficult, as if the man in question woke, he would be in enough excruciating pain that he could die. And the woman did not want him to die.

She wanted this to last.

So, exchanging the scissors for the needle, she selected a tiny spot in the centre of the doll’s spine, a place where common aches and pains could be found in any normal human being. He wouldn’t realise that something really terrible was wrong for a long time to come, as she would slowly torture the man with more and more pain each night, until his screams could be heard all around the tiny village and yet doctors, nurses and surgeons could not place a single thing wrong with him.

She ran the needle over this spot of the spine, loosening the threads that made up the long piece of wool. Then, without hesitating, she plunged the needle into the wool, separating lots of tiny strands.

Somewhere, many houses away where the old man had lived alone since the death of his wife, the real man grunted in his sleep and twitched from the discomfort in his back. But he didn’t wake. He was stuck in his nightmare, replaying the events of his wife of 50 years’ death.

The woman smirked, watching the doll twitch in her fingers. It was not alive, not by any counts. She was the one who brought it to life when she wanted to... use it. Any other time it was just a piece of
wool. A piece of art.

Then, with even steadier hands, she used the flesh coloured wool to stitch up the gaping hole in the doll’s back. The man would never know a thing.

Slowly, taking the utmost caution as she crossed the room, she placed the doll back onto the shelf, where it fell limp and lifeless once again. She was tempted to select any doll at random and plung the needle into the wool, but she knew better. In the years since she had discovered the art of voodoo, she had become familiar with the rules that cropped up from time to time. First, quick and painful torture with a needle would make people suspicious, as there was no possible way this could happen naturally to any human. Second, to make sure the house remained vacant, even if it meant leaving lights on or making large footsteps in the long garden grass to make the rumours of the house being haunted even more believable.

That was why she restricted herself to one doll at a time, slowly moving through every citizen of the tiny village who had ever caused her harm or grief. Anyone from her past who had done the minor things, such as start an argument or let a door slam in her face, were the first to suffer. She never killed those, only left them in constant discomfort and slight pain.

But then there were the more serious cases. The doll she operated on now was one of these, having played a major part in her past life.

He was an old lover, a man who she had shared many happy memories of her teenage years with. They had played together in the fields on the outskirts of town, sometimes just lying down beside each other in the sun with their hands linked in the tiny gap between their bodies.

But then everything had changed on the day she finally asked him a question that she had given up waiting for him to ask.

She’d proposed to him. Convinced that he was too shy and nervous to do it himself, she had taken him down to the meadows where the trees gave them a tiny bit of shade from the glaring sun, and taken hold of both his hands.

“I love you. I love you and I never want to leave you. And I know you want this so I have to ask for you. William, will you marry me?”

Silence followed.

Not stunned silence. Not happy silence. Uncomfortable silence fell over the couple, and the man slowly released the woman opposite him’s hands. He took a slow step back, then said:

“I’m sorry, darling. Truly, truly sorry. But I cannot say yes, as I recently found another woman, one who I feel like I am alive when I even glimpse her, a woman who sparkles in the sun and who reminds me of every star in the sky. And you are not that woman, however much it pains me to admit. I’m sorry.”

He turned his back then, walking away towards the direction of town, away from the still outstretched hands of his former lover, and not turning back once.

She had been more heartbroken than she ever could admit.

She had not moved on, had not been able to when the news of his new marriage had become the gossip of the village. Nobody cared for the emotional trauma she went through every day, as they all expected her to have gotten over the ended relationship a long time ago. Only he mattered now.

So she went on with her life, miserable and rejected, avoiding the eyes of the man every time they crossed paths in the street, and refusing to even go near the woman who had cruelly snatched her lover away from her. She had grown old in the village, watching her parents slowly deteriorate until they were on death’s door. She watched them die before her eyes, not even able to leave the house any more.

She told the neighbours that they were dead, and a funeral was held. It was always expected for everyone to turn up to a funeral in the village, as the population was small enough to fit them all into the graveyard to mourn the two who had been surprisingly close to every man and woman in the area.

Two people never showed up.

From then on, she remained in the house of her lost family. As the long years of loneliness passed by, she watched the solemn procession of long black cars removing the neighbours, and more and more of the residents.

But she never left the house.

And, as she merged away into the background of the village, people began to forget her. They forgot
about the woman who had once lived there and stopped noticing the house. And, when people finally began to remember the cottage of Mr and Mrs Jacks, they assumed their daughter had also tragically died, hiding herself away so as not to upset the villagers.

No one dared to enter the house to check if there was a rotting corpse lying on the carpet; they all were too terrified of the idea to even begin to think about doing such a thing. Besides, they had thought, she probably just moved away to another town. It would be useless to invade her abandoned house.

So they left the cottage alone, keeping up the lie that she had moved away whenever a newcomer to the village questioned the empty house with the overgrown grass and dead roses littering the front garden. The tiny picket fence was half collapsed, with rot eating away at the wood.

The only person who was completely certain that the woman had not left the town was her former lover. However, he didn’t dare enter the house either, for if she was dead, then her ghost would be desperate for revenge against the man who had thrown her aside like a rag doll for another woman, another woman who had tragically died from causes that no doctor or nurse was able to identify several months earlier. The internal wounds had been so horrific and her organs so mangled that a disease was out of the question, and no ordinary teens in alleyways could cause this damage with a couple of knives.

The woman smiled then, the memory of what she had done fresh in her mind. Rage had overcome her as she sat in the rocking chair one night, and she had ruthlessly picked the doll apart, seam by seam, her screams and cries echoed around the village.

It was just luck that her husband had been away in another village visiting family on that fateful day.

Now she was more careful with her work.

Turning slightly in her chair she found herself facing the dusty but well used mirror. Instead of projecting her old withered face back to her, it showed the murky image of a sleeping man, twisting and turning in pain as he slept. A few murmurs escaped his lips, but sound did not project through the mirror, leaving her to only guess as to what pleas were leaving him. She liked to imagine that in his sleep he returned to when they were together and would cry out to her for help from the pain tearing through his spine, but in reality that soundless mime could only be the name of the woman who came after.

A second later a spasm rocked his body, and his eyes flew open wide and his mouth opened in the obvious shape of the name Sandra. The woman curled her lip at the image and basked in the look of pain crossing his face as he rubbed at his back.

Dammit, She thought as the image of a torn up doll flashed across her mind. It was so tempting. The doll was there, the needles were here. He would feel more pain now that he was awake and he was so old that he was on death’s door already. She was just making it go by quicker.

Control yourself, woman, She thought angrily, but the image kept returning, the more she watched as he moved from his bed to take some pills that he obviously thought would dull the pain in his back. She frowned when she realised that they would.

Now or never.

He lifted the pill and water to his mouth.

Get the doll.

He swallowed down the medicine.

Get the needle.

He sat back down on the bed.

A roar that was clearly visible through the mirror and that she was sure she heard, even from this many houses over, ripped from his lungs as the needle tore down the skin over his back. He continued to scream as blood poured down his body in a river like fashion, and enough nerves torn that his body couldn’t react in any way other than to fall forward and hit the ground.

A hammering on the wall of his house was what alerted her to the limited time. She couldn’t hear it,
nor could she see it. But she could sense it. It was there.

With barely a second thought the needle kept tearing through strands and ripping apart the mangled, definitely dead body of the man in the mirror who she couldn’t bear to look at. This is for saying no.

She kept tearing.

This is for pretending I never existed.

The neighbours were into the house and running up the stairs.

This is my final act.

They’d found the body, and the screams had reached her ears. It was beautiful and terrifying.

One day soon, I’m going to die.

I hope I never see you again. I’ll make your death as close to hell as possible. And that woman’s. She never deserved you.

I’ll do all of this, even if it sends me straight to hell too.