The Porcelain Game

My name is Elara, and I have always seen things others cannot. As a child, I thought the flickering shapes at the edge of my vision were just tricks of light, and the soft sounds from my bedroom were the house settling. It wasn’t until I mentioned the little girl who played with my toys that my mother’s face went pale, and she told me, in a voice that chilled me more than any ghost, that no one else saw such things. We were not a religious family, and my parents scoffed at the idea of spirits or demons. They said my imagination was too vivid, that I was growing out of it. But they didn’t live in my room.

Our home was a creaking Victorian on the outskirts of Millbrook, a town that prided itself on being ordinary. My bedroom was at the top of the stairs, with a bay window that overlooked the overgrown garden and the woods beyond. It was there that I first noticed her, a blur of pale pink in the corner of my eye. She would appear when I was playing with my porcelain dolls, a collection my grandmother had passed down. She would stand at the foot of my bed, her form flickering like a faulty lightbulb, and sometimes I heard giggles that were not my own. As I grew older, she became more solid. I could see the intricate lace of her dress, the faint blush of her cheeks, the way she cradled one of my dolls with a child’s care. But there was wrongness about her. The top of her head was a clean, gory stump, and a dark ichor dripped from her neck, staining her dress.

I tried to ignore her, but she was persistent. She would wait until I was absorbed in my books or homework, and then she would start to hum a tune. It was a nursery rhyme, something I vaguely remembered from my own childhood: ‘Ring around the rosie, a pocket full of posies.’ But her voice was a hollow, warbling thing, and the final line, ‘Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,’ always came out as a choked sob. I began to notice she wasn’t alone. There was another figure, taller, in a faded blue dress. She would stand in the hallway, her head tilted, and when I looked at her face, I saw nothing but smooth skin where her eyes should have been. Two dark sockets, like empty wells, and from them, a viscous liquid wept.

One evening, I had had enough. I was seventeen, and I was done being afraid in my own home. I marched into my room, grabbed my favorite doll, the one with the cracked porcelain face, and held it up to the little girl in the pink dress. ‘This is mine,’ I said, my voice shaking. ‘You cannot have it.’ The spectral girl’s head cocked, and for the first time, I heard her speak, not in a voice but directly into my mind. ‘We only want to play,’ she whispered. ‘She has been lonely since we fell.’

The next day, I went to the local historical society, hoping to find some explanation. An elderly librarian named Mrs. Albright, who seemed to know the town’s dark secrets, handed me a thick, dusty record book. ‘The old Whitmore house,’ she said, her eyes darting to the window. ‘It used to stand where your home is now, but it burned down in 1901. A family of four perished, two daughters and their parents. The daughters were said to be inseparable, always playing together. Their names were Alice and Beatrice.’ She paused, and her voice dropped to a near whisper. ‘Some say the fire was not an accident. They say the father was a cruel man, and the girls’ nursery was kept locked. The girls were often seen at the window, waving, but never smiling. After the fire, people reported hearing a girl’s voice singing, and a child’s laughter coming from the ashes.’

Armed with this knowledge, I returned home with a strange mix of fear and determination. The sisters were not monsters, but victims. That night, I sat on my bed and spoke to the air. ‘Alice, Beatrice, I know your names. I know what happened. Tell me how I can help you.’ The room grew cold, and the lights flickered. The little girl in pink appeared, but this time, she was not holding a doll. Her hands were at her sides, red-stained. The eyeless sister materialized behind her, and I felt a pressure in my mind, as if they were trying to communicate without words. Then I heard a faint, sad song: ‘Ring-a-ring o’ roses, a pocket full of posies, a-tishoo! a-tishoo! We all fall down.’ But they did not fall. Instead, they both knelt in front of me, and the pink-dressed girl held out her hand. In it was a small, burned object, what looked like a child’s wooden top.

‘We want to go back,’ they said, their voices overlapping, creating an eerie harmony. ‘To the ground, to the ashes, but we cannot find the way. We played, and we played, and the door closed. The fire took us, but the game never ended.’ I realized then that they were trapped in a loop, reliving the moment of their death, and they played with my dolls to cling to any remnant of childhood joy. Their singing was not a mockery but a plea. The knocking I had so often heard at my door was not to scare me, but to ask for an answer.

I made a decision. The historical society had told me the location of the old family plot, where the Whitmores were buried in unmarked graves. I took the top, which the girls had given me, and I went to that overgrown cemetery. At the base of a gnarled oak, I found a small depression in the earth, and I dug. I uncovered a metal box, and inside were two small porcelain dolls, charred and crumbling. They were the very dolls from my collection, or so I thought, but these were older, with the same pink and blue dresses. I placed the top beside them, and as I did, the air warmed, and I felt a release of something heavy. I drove home, and for the first time in years, my room was quiet. No laughter, no knocking, no humming.

I had thought it was over. But a week later, I was in my room reading, and I heard a faint, familiar tune. It was coming from inside my closet. My heart raced as I opened the door, and I saw, on the floor, my doll from the house. But now it was arranged in a small circle, surrounded by other dolls I had never seen, all with old-fashioned dresses. And in the center lay the wooden top, spinning slowly on its own. A voice, soft and childish, whispered from the shadows: ‘You found us. Now you must play.’ I slammed the closet door shut, but when I turned around, the room was different. The walls were peeling, the furniture was old and covered in dust, and the window showed not my garden but a burning field. The sisters stood before me, their hands outstretched. ‘One more game,’ they sang, ‘and then we can rest.’ I heard the floorboards creak as they stepped closer, and I saw that their empty eye sockets were now glowing with a dim, hungry light. I had not freed them; I had only invited them into my world, and they were not done playing.