There was no one left in the town who spoke of Malcolm Griswold. The townspeople simply whispered about his store, where strange dolls sat behind the glass. They didn't mention his name anymore, not after the stories had been told—stories of those who disappeared, of the small town where nobody asked questions.
Malcolm's hands were always stained, though the townsfolk never really noticed. It wasn't as if he tried to hide his work, but the lines of his palms, twisted with age, had long since stopped flinching.
His fingers moved across the doll parts as if they were an extension of his very bones. He carved their faces, shaped their bodies, and sewed their clothes with a precision that made people uneasy. Yet, nobody ever dared ask where he got the bodies for his dolls.
At 72, Malcolm had perfected the craft. He could make a doll that looked like any person he chose. He had done it so many times before, and each time he carefully recreated every feature, every inch. His dolls were perfect replicas, all of them.
The first doll he ever made wasn't like the others. It had the same empty glass eyes as the rest, but the body, the skin, that was different. He had made it from the flesh of his first victim. The man who had come to his shop and mocked him, laughing at his delicate work.
The laughter echoed in Malcolm's ears as he prepared the body. He had made the man into a doll, and it wasn't just a sculpture of him—it was him, every inch of that awful man.
And then something happened. The doll moved.
It wasn't a grand shift or a sudden lurch, but just a small twitch. A hand, stiff at first, stretched open. The eyes blinked. The lips moved.
Malcolm wasn't sure how it worked, but that was when he realized the dolls weren't just for display. He could make them do things, things he couldn't do himself.
He had lost count of how many dolls he had made since then. At least twenty. Each one based on a victim he had taken, each one coming to life in ways that made his heart skip. They didn't just sit on shelves. No, they moved. They acted. And they killed, just as he had taught them to.
The police never connected the disappearances to him. Malcolm was clever. He knew the perfect times to take his victims, when the town would be too distracted to notice. No one ever saw him leave his shop at night, not once.
The town never looked too hard at the dolls that crowded his display window, even as the bodies piled up in secret.
Malcolm always had a plan. A victim would walk into his shop, perhaps seeking something for a loved one or simply out of curiosity. And when the doors closed behind them, that was when he would act.
He would carve them into a doll, just like all the others. He'd keep their eyes, their hands, their hair, but he would twist the rest into something... different. The magic was old—he knew it by heart—but it always worked. The dolls never failed him.
But the older he got, the harder it became to control them.
One evening, late in the night, a man came into the shop. His name was Edward, and he had heard the rumors. He had heard about the dolls that never moved, the way they always sat, their eyes always empty. Edward had come to see for himself. He didn't believe in such things—dolls moving, no.
Malcolm watched him carefully as he browsed. The old man's hands gripped the edges of his workbench, his knuckles tightening with every step Edward took around the room. He could feel something in the air. The dolls could sense it, too.
Edward stopped in front of a doll in the corner of the shop. It was a woman—beautiful, with long, dark hair. Her face, soft and smooth, was sculpted in such a way that no one would know she was made from real skin unless they touched her.
Edward smiled, then reached out a hand to lift her from the shelf.
"No," Malcolm whispered, barely audible. But Edward didn't hear him.
When the doll left the shelf, Malcolm's heart started to pound. He could feel it. The dolls had grown restless. They had been waiting for too long. He had been too careless, too distracted by his age and the effort of carving every piece.
Edward brought the doll close to his face. He was speaking, but Malcolm could no longer hear his words. All he could hear was the sound of the dolls, their eyes beginning to blink, their fingers twitching.
"No," Malcolm whispered again, louder this time. "Don't do it."
But it was too late.
The doll in Edward's hands moved. It twitched, and its head turned. Edward jerked back, startled. The doll stood on its own, its legs stretching out, cracking like dried wood.
Before Edward could react, the doll reached up and grabbed his throat. It wasn't a natural move. It was jagged, mechanical, like something had taken over. Edward gasped, trying to pry the doll off, but the fingers tightened.
Malcolm's heart was racing, his hands trembling. He tried to shout, to do something, anything to stop it, but nothing worked. The magic he had relied on for so long had begun to unravel, and now it was turning against him. The dolls were in control.
Edward fell to the ground, his face turning purple. The doll continued its grip, unrelenting, as the others began to move from their places. They crawled off shelves, their limbs jerking unnaturally as they joined in. They swarmed Edward's body, their tiny, lifeless faces now twisted with a hunger. Malcolm tried to run, but his legs wouldn't move.
One of the dolls turned toward him. Its face was twisted, its features mocking him, as if it knew what he had done.
The old man sank to the floor as the dolls gathered around him, their wooden fingers scraping against the floor. They weren't just his creations anymore. They had become something else—something darker, something beyond his control.
And as the dolls closed in, one by one, they did to him what he had made them do to others. He screamed, but it was no use. His cries were drowned out by the scratching of tiny feet and the gnawing of teeth.
The last thing Malcolm saw before his world went dark was the face of the woman's doll, its eyes wide open, filled with an emptiness that mirrored his own.
His heart stopped, but the dolls didn't. They never stopped.