The first thing I noticed was the tight straps around my wrists and feet. I struggled to break free as the straps buried deep into my skin, making every move an agonising struggle. A blinding light shined on my face from above. I could make out the silhouette of a child, “she’s perfect, Daddy.”
I tried screaming for help, but the leather strap around my face made it impossible. The voice of a little girl giggling emanated around the room as a hand began brushing my hair from behind me. I froze as the cold touch of a porcelain hand began to delicately caress my cheek.
The last thing I remembered was the face of a frail old man crying about his dead daughters, and then I woke up here. As the giggling continued, the light above my head suddenly switched off. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. The silhouettes that moved around me began to come into focus, and suddenly I was greeted by a grinning, toothless, old man and behind him sat two life-sized porcelain dolls.
The dolls wore beautiful silk gowns with black, freshly polished shoes. Their Shiny black hair cascaded down their pristine, porcelain faces. “These are my little girls, Masha and Dasha,” said the man in a creepy raspy voice.
“Hi, Julie,” giggled the two dolls. The sound emanated from their direction, but they sat there motionless.
“My girls need a new mommy,” said the man as he moved behind the dolls and began stroking their hair as he stared at me with a toothless, lustful look on his face.
The man’s fragile frame moved awkwardly over to the table and removed the strap from my mouth. “Please don’t scream. It will scare my girls.”
“If there was a chance someone could hear me, I had to take it,” I thought to myself as I started screaming for my life.
“Make her stop, Daddy,” sounded a voice from one of the dolls.
The old man began reigning blows down on my head as I screamed. “He was inhumanly strong for a frail man,” as the blows kept coming. Every blow came with more anger and resentment. He stopped when I started to lose consciousness and left, leaving me alone with the two dolls.
I needed to get out of these straps. I tried desperately to escape the restraints when suddenly I heard a noise behind me. I looked at the chair where the dolls were sitting, and it was empty. I could hear the pitter-patter of tiny footsteps behind me. “You’re a bad mommy,” said a soft voice as I felt the cold touch of a porcelain hand stroke my face. Fear gripped my body when the cold, hard feel of a steel blade slid under my chin.
“Masha, Dash, naughty girls. That’s not how we treat guests, now is it,” bellowed the voice of the old man behind me.
When I looked up, the dolls were sitting back in the chair, staring at me with their black, lifeless eyes. The old man approached me from behind and started touching me. He ran his hands up my body before wrapping his bony hands around my neck. The stale, sickly smell of his breath washed over my face as he leaned in to whisper in my ear. “I could snap your neck like a twig,” he laughed before skipping back over to the dolls with childlike enthusiasm. “I think she could be the one. She seems different from the others.”
The old man skipped over to me with the same excited enthusiasm and undid the straps. I saw my moment and rolled off the table hitting the floor with a thud. He laughed as he landed a foot down on my back. “Broken dolls don’t get played with,” he screamed as he landed another foot down on my head. “Broken dolls don’t get played with and get put with the rest of the broken dolls.”
He walked to the other side of the room as I struggled for breath. He picked up a hammer and began banging the steel bench to test its strength. Adrenalin surged through my body as my eyes darted around the room, looking for an escape. I noticed the two dolls still sitting there staring at me. I pulled myself up from the floor before grabbing one of the dolls and making a run for the door.
“No! no! no! Not my Masha” screamed the old man as I ran for my life.
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I ran down a narrow hallway with a bunch of old mannequins strewn about the place. They had their mouths and eyes covered with tape as some sort of horrifying display. I ran down the hall, and I could hear the old man screaming for his beloved doll.
“Masha, Masha, come back to me, Masha.”
I came to a door at the end of the hall and slowly opened it to find a staircase leading up into total darkness. I heard the old man pounding down the hall. I shut the door behind me and made my way up the stairs. The further up I went, the thicker the darkness got. As I felt my way up the stairs, I heard a voice emanate from the doll. “You’ll never escape. You will die like the others.”
I made it to the top of the stairs, and the stench of death hit me. I felt around the walls of the room, looking for a light switch. As I moved my hands along the wall, I stumbled into a table. I touched what I first thought was one of the mannequins from the hall but quickly realised it was strangely cold and too soft to be a mannequin. I recoiled in horror and tripped over something on the floor. When I tried to pick myself up, a hand grabbed my ankle, and a strangulated moan emanated from the darkness. “Please help me,” said the voice.
In a panic, I kicked and kicked until whatever had my leg let go. I huddled against the wall, praying my death would be quick when a disembodied voice rose from the doll. “You’re in trouble now. Daddy’s mad.”
I heard the old man pound up the stairs whistling an unsettling tune. The door swung open, flooding the room with light. Skeletal remains littered the room, with a decomposing body on the table. The severely mutilated body on the floor seemed to be still alive.
He hissed before charging towards me. As he came at me, the half-dead body on the floor grabbed his leg, sending him falling to the floor with a loud thud.
I edged myself towards the door as he picked himself up from the floor.
“Take one more step, and I will smash this bitch into the floor. I will turn her to dust,” I said defiantly through gritted teeth.
“Don’t you dare,” said the old man.
I raised Masha over my head, and the old man collapsed to the floor. “Please, please not my Masha. Don’t hurt my baby,” he cried.
As I watched the old man turn into a sniffling bag of bones, I defiantly sent Masha crashing into the floor, smashing her porcelain face into a thousand pieces.
Something in the old man snapped, and without warning, he came charging at me. He picked me off the ground by my neck, sending me flying down the stairs and landing on the floor below, knocking me unconscious. When I came through, he had me suspended from the floor by my neck. He tightened his grip cutting off my airways. I started to feel the blood fill the back of my eyes, so I jabbed in his eyes with my finger, blinding him. I spotted an open window at the end of the hall, and the last thing I remembered, I was running for it.
After a thorough investigation, the police never found any trace of the old man or any evidence of bodies and no sign of any dolls. It’s been eight years since it happened. It was a consent struggle, but eventually, I started a family of my own. I married a lovely man named Sean, and Sean gave me a beautiful girl named Aisha, who was turning five.
All was looking great, and I was finally starting to put the events of that day behind me. It was my daughter’s birthday, and my husband had just gotten back from town after a small shopping spree for her. I was sitting there drinking coffee when my daughter ran into the kitchen.
“Look, mommy, look what daddy got me. The broken one is named Masha, and the pretty one is named Dasha.”
She raised Masha to her ear as if it wanted to whisper something to her.
“Masha said you can be their mommy too.”
