Cursed toys …
Short Story : Cursed toys
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark ( Horror Story)
By Prabir Rai Chaudhuri . All Copyright Reserved 2018
My grandmother recently died, we had to clear out her house, get rid of
all her belongings and divide them between my father and her brothers.
She left us, the grandchildren, nothing.
I don't blame him for having decided that way in his will. We were
never really close. We are one of those families that only get together at
wakes, as each one has taken their own path.
It wasn't always like this though. In fact, being back at his house
brought back memories of my childhood, when my uncles and my father still got
along.
My cousins used to play in the gardens at the entrance and on rare
occasions we would go into the patio. This place always represented a mystery
to us, it was like a time warp to the childhood of my uncles and my father. Everything,
although aged, was intact.
My grandmother's flower pots were still the same, and in the back, a
closed bathroom, hid a mountain of old toys. For my children or any child of
this time, they seemed terrifying, but for my cousins and me, they were
wonderful; there were cloth clowns, plastic and cloth dolls, brass robots , and
the one I liked the most was a kind of duck with a human body, it was not
Donald Duck, nor any that I had seen on television or in cartoons in the
newspaper.
I liked that doll because its eyes glowed in the dark, not in a scary
way, but its intention was quite the opposite, to light up a child's room a
little. At that time, the same technology that exists today did not exist and
in the State of Mexico, there were many economic shortages.
Because of the illusion of projecting light from its eyes, the duck
doll was my favorite.
It was easy to find it in the middle of the mountain of toys.
I remember that my grandmother's house, apart from giving us many hours
of fun, also gave us several scares. Right next to the patio, there was a room
with a bunk bed, where my cousins stayed from time to time.
One day, the youngest of all woke up crying, screaming that someone was
pulling his hair. We quickly turned on the light. He had a mushroom-shaped
hair, so he always wore it a little longer than us. I swear I saw as if an
invisible hand was forcibly lifting it.
That time, one of my aunts had us pray for my cousin to be released.
Another time, I was alone, in the bottom bunk bed. I heard something
crawling under the mattress and then I saw it go into one of the closets in
front.
I covered my face with a sheet, because I was very scared. Five seconds
later I heard a voice telling me to come closer.
I panicked, I wanted to scream but I couldn't.
That time I was saved by my grandmother, who called me from the kitchen
to go buy her something from the store.
That time I didn't want to go back into that room, because when I came
back from the store, I saw a doll
between the bed and the wall. I didn't want to look in the wardrobe, because I
wasn't the least bit interested in seeing what it was that was calling me so
insistently.
Now that we were cleaning up my late grandmother's house, I remembered
all those situations that scared me so much. When we had to go out into the
yard, I did so without looking at that room where so many things happened to
us. My grandmother's house had very strange architecture, all the rooms were on
top of each other and the damn yard was right next to the room where we were
scared so many times. I wasn't really scared, I avoided turning around just out
of caution.
We took all the toys out of the
closed room. I felt as if someone was whispering incomprehensible words in my
ear. At that moment, I thought it was my imagination, so I ignored it. Later, I
would realize that the whisper was a warning sign.
My father and uncles asked us to throw away all the toys, but one of my
cousins took two dolls home, another a wind-up monkey. I was on the verge of
not taking anything, I really didn't see the point in keeping such an old toy.
Cursed Toys
cursed-toys-1cursed-toys-1
When I left the yard, I dared to take one last look at the room, and
then I found it. There were those pair of eyes shining under a ruined wardrobe,
it was the duck I used to play with. I hesitated for a couple of seconds
whether to take it with me or not, but I ended up taking it, thinking that if I
ever had children, I would love to show them that toy.
I didn't take the toy home right away, in fact I forgot about it for a
week in the garage. In fact, it was my father who gave it to me.
It didn't take long for me to clean the doll and paint it.
It turned out so well that I decided to put it on the desk in front of
my bed.
The first night the doll was in the house, I had horrible nightmares ,
in which I relived everything I went through at my grandmother's house as a child.
This is the scariest dream I usually have. I'm sleeping on the bunk bed
and I hear something calling me again from the closet in front of the bed.
Something I can't see is running under the bed. Suddenly I want to run
down the hallway that leads to the kitchen, but no matter how hard I try, I
can't take a single step forward and whatever was under the bed chases me until
it catches me and puts me under the bed. At that point in the dream I always
wake up. And that's what I dreamed about the first night I had the toy in my
house.
Since it was the first time, I couldn't blame the doll, although when I
woke up, the first thing I saw was the light in its eyes, it was a very
different glow than I remembered as a child. I felt a little scared of its
eyes, so I put it away in one of the drawers and went back to sleep.
I had nightmares again. I dreamed that something was scratching the
drawer where I put the doll and that it
was starting to open and close by itself. I woke up startled, finding the
drawer open. I was confused, as I remembered that I had left it closed before
going to sleep.
From that day on, some drawers in the house began to be left open, not
only in my room but in the rest of the house.
Another strange thing that happened was that I kept losing the doll,
which I really liked; to date I have not found a similar doll, not even
searching on the internet, but I loved the effect of its eyes, so every time I
lost it, I would start looking for it hard.
One day while my mother was cleaning the house, she says she heard a
baby crying right behind a chair. She says the sound was so loud that she
jumped up. She went over to see what it was, but found nothing. Then she
crouched down to floor level and looked at something shining under the chair.
It was the eyes of the toy duck . My
mother took it and put it on my desk.
She recommended that I throw away the doll, because when she took it in
her hand, she felt a strange vibration that made her skin crawl. I refused to
throw it away, I didn't believe that what was happening had anything to do with
the doll, it looked harmless.
I ran into one of my cousins. She had taken one of the wind-up dolls,
and I asked her about it. She got serious, looked me in the eyes and asked me
if I believed in ghosts, and I replied yes.
Then he told me that he had to get rid of the toy, because ever since
he had it at home, strange events began to occur, of which the most terrifying
was that he heard the doll speak with a child's voice.
I didn't want to tell my cousin about what was happening in my house,
because even though at that moment I realized that the strange events that were
happening in my house were directly related to the doll, I didn't want to throw
away the doll, something inside me forced me to want to keep it with me.
Instead of throwing the doll away or burning it, I put it in a toolbox
that I keep under my bed. It was the worst thing I could have done.
Paranormal activity started in my house
One Sunday, my parents and I were in the living room. We were watching a movie, when we started to hear laughter behind us. My parents and I immediately turned around to see what was going on. We didn't see anyone, but the laughter kept on coming, this time coming from the hallway that led to my room. My parents ordered me to stay in the living room, I didn't obey them, I didn't want to stay alone in the living room, I was scared, so I followed them to my room.
My mother screamed in terror, while my father began to pray.
In my room, there was a being that looked like a child, its eyes were
shining just like the doll's . I can't
say for sure that it was a child, but rather it looked like something else
trying to look like a child, it was terrifying, its skin was stretched and its
eyes were something incredible.
I don't even remember how, I only remember that the entity disappeared
the same way it appeared, my mother fainted from fear, my father bent down to
pick her up.
When we were calm, I looked under my bed, there was the damn toy duck,
with its shining eyes.
I took it and went out into the street, after walking several blocks, I
left it at the foot of a door in a house.
We did not witness anything strange in the house again.
I asked my father if he was ever scared by his dolls, but he said no,
that what happened was that my grandmother dedicated herself to witchcraft,
since she was left to take care of us when she was very young, because my
grandfather abandoned them when they were very small. He believed that it was
possible that during one of those jobs, the toys absorbed some evil entity.
As far as I know, my other cousins went through the same thing with
those cursed dolls.
I hope that the people who found the doll threw it away.
Copyright © 2018 Prabir Rai Chaudhuri
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