Serenity (Watty finalist 2013)

Doll Eyes

The next morning Mr. Thorne woke up to Jacqueline. He was feeling healthier after his rest, though a little groggy and stiff, and his bandages were fresh.  It would have been a perfectly fine morning; normally he was not opposed to waking up to an attractive woman, particularly when she was in his lap as Jacqueline was, but there was something distinctly unpleasant to waking up to your torturer and captor, Mr. Thorne would know, it was something he had done often enough to his own victims. Jacqueline kissed him on the forehead and nuzzled her head into his shoulder in a sleepy hold.

“Good morning, love, did you dream about me?”

“I don’t dream,” Mr. Thorne replied cooly. “Is this some pathetic attempt at seduction?”

“No, just something I’ve wanted to do for awhile.” Jacqueline closed her eyes and cuddled into Mr. Thorne’s chest which was as rigid as the chair he sat in.

He examined his former student under his calculated gaze. The childlike whimsy that he had once misplaced as innocence was still there, though he now categorized it as immaturity. She had grown more experienced but experienced can only be conjoined with wisdom if you learn something from it, which she hadn’t. In fact she had gotten even stupider, something Mr. Thorne thought was impossible until now. And she was still holding onto her fantasy world. A fantasy that he did not have the patience to oblige by playing prince.  

“You don’t feel anything.”

“What are you babbling on about now?”

“You don’t feel anything,” Mr. Thorne repeated. “You thought you would but you don’t, not even with me. You can’t. It’s not possible for people like us, we’re numb. The numbness will never leave, never, not even by killing me.” Jacqueline pinched his playfully on the nose.

“You can’t play mind games with me Master Thorne.”

“I don’t need to,” Mr. Thorne said. “Do you know when I know when I decided to take you in?”

“Enlighten me.”

“You were ten. I saw you bloody with three teenage boys running away with their tails tucked between their legs and covered in cuts from head to toe. You had put razors in between your fingers and every punch you threw gave them three deep slices as well as a nasty bruises. A scrawny girl in a dusty dress with a swollen eye and bruised body trudging back to the home with razors and an old doll.”

Jacqueline had been a calm child, in appearance at least. You could never tell what she was about to do. She would look absolutely serene one moment and the next she would be trying to to see if people’s heads came off like toys. When confronted the blame would always fall her her doll, Mary Anne, a worn out porcelain girl with watchful glass eyes.

“They stole my Mary Anne,” Jacqueline said, her eyes foggy as she reminisced the memory fondly in her mind. 

Mr. Thorne would later make her burn the same doll she had so fiercely protected, to test her; at first she resisted but eventually obeyed after some convincing. It was the only thing she ever fought him on but the task hasn't fazed her in the least. Mr. Thorne remembered her blank stare looking almost surprised as she watched Mary Anne’s face burn but no other emotion had been invoked. He had wanted to see her cry, or see if she was even capable of tears, and the result of complete indifference to destroying her childhood companion had pleased him at the time. Now he viewed it a warning sign that he should have heeded.

Jacqueline viewed Mary Anne’s burning as her first kill and even back then she liked to take souvenirs. After the flames had smoldered out, she searched the debris and salvaged the doll’s glass eyes. They currently hung around her neck in a small glass bottle but were kept hidden under her clothes.