The Doll Garden

Prologue

My father used to tell me I was as pretty as porcelain. I had believed him too. After all, he had never given me a reason not to trust in his words. Porcelain dolls were beautiful, fragile, and vintage. He'd told me I would have fit right into his expensive doll collection. The one he claimed to have built it for our mother during their marriage; the mother we'd never met.

I had believed him then as well. A naïve child, I was.

I was as light as a porcelain doll, not like the weight of a feather, but the weight of a girl with a hollow inside, and a thick exterior made with the prettiest of textures. Fragile, beautiful, and vintage. I'd wear those words to my last breath.

I'd worn them until his words were short-lived, when my blood lined the cracks of our polished mansion floors. I knew I'd become useless then. The screams that shook the walls from the balcony railing of the stairs were loud enough to overpower the migraine I'd fallen unconscious with.

"Jenna!?" I'd heard my father's screams join in with the rest of the people who saw it for themselves, moments before my eyes had closed. The screams were never-ending.

Ambulance sirens plagued my ears in the distance. But those were the only noises my ears twitched at when they went off. Other than that, I was as still as stone, lying on the cold, hard floor to die.

I was almost glad I couldn't see his face. He'd have been ashamed. Perhaps he already was. I heard it in his voice. Porcelain dolls were breakable, but they hadn't been known to bleed. Humans were known to bleed. I bled my memories until most of them were gone. But there was one of few things I hadn't forgotten.

Someone was out to damage me that night.

I remembered doctors questioning me as soon as I woke up. The blinding lights of the hospital burned my pupils. There were nurses in my face checking the IV in my arm. The news began to report the events back to me from the small black TV in the hospital room, as well as to all of Runswick, Rhode Island, I presumed, until doctors turned it off. Then, I'd been asked what I remembered. And that's when it all clicked. In brief fragments, what I thought I remembered flooded my mind.

I was nine steps down the hall, away from my room door—I counted.

The big clock in the grand lobby downstairs struck twelve—I'd heard the bells chime.

The moon was shining through the window above the clock—it had lit my path to the stairs.

There was a shove on my back when it was turned. I screamed.

Then I tumbled, and the lights went out. That's what I had told them. But I should've known no one would believe me. Not even my own family.

"Jenna . . . you lost your balance and tripped down the stairs," the police and doctors told me.

Camera footage had been pulled from the mansion. But nothing had been there to back up my claims. I wasn't safe. I was paranoid. Losing my mind. I felt like a prisoner in my own home. Someone was there. Someone was there. Then again, I'd been told all of my memories were distraught after the incident.

Anything that came from the mouth of a fifteen-year-old girl who could barely remember her name at the time would have been written off as a result of the accident. No, not an accident. It wasn't an accident. I swore it was an incident of someone's doing. Regardless of what my therapist had spent the last eight years convincing me, I knew.

However, having remembered that much, it was odd finding myself back here six years later, staring at the very estate I thought I had escaped for good, from the front seat of my little dark blue Chevrolet Impala. My grip on the steering wheel had my knuckles turning as pale white as the bones that rattled with nerves inside my body.

The last time I saw this place was the day I graduated from high school. I was just a seventeen-year-old ready to escape anywhere, even if that meant running off to college in NYC. I guess we all had to face our demons at some point in our lives.

"Home sweet home," I muttered with a sigh under my breath, sarcasm latching onto my words with the venom I felt.

The mansion looked the same, but it was all the more haunting. Because it wasn't me dying inside the mansion's walls this time. It was my father. And I was no longer his beautiful porcelain doll.