Blue Eyes

Spoiler

Target Pokemon: Gothita
Rank: Medium (10-20k)
CC: 11255

For as long as Mary could remember, the doll had sat on her great-aunt’s mantle. She was fine with it staying up there, too; the oversized, sightless blue plastic eyes had always unnerved her, and the bruise-colored purple fabric made it look like it had been strangled. They didn't visit Aunt Eleanor often, anyways, because as Mary’s mother put it, she was ‘just a bit strange and a little creepy, frankly, and I don't want my children to be influenced by someone like that, even if she is family.’

Aunt Eleanor herself was a tall, imposing woman, with blue eyes and dark hair going grey and done up in elaborate hairdos involving lots of bows and bobby pins. She looked like she didn’t know what color was.

So mostly Aunt Eleanor was only seen at Christmas and Thanksgivings, with the occasional funeral thrown in, and she was a sort of shadowy figure in the periphery of Mary’s mind. On one memorable occasion, she was sent to live with Aunt Eleanor for three days when she was seven, while her father was in the hospital. The whole experience was mostly glossed over with fear for her father in her memories, and it was difficult to remember specifics beside the fact that Aunt Eleanor was an ever-present and vaguely intimidating figure.

That, and the disproportionately big blue eyes of the doll always staring down at her, following her around. She’d taken to avoiding the living room after the first day.

After her parents brought her home, she asked them please to not sent her back there, ever, and they honored her wish.

So it wasn't really a surprise that they were the last in the family to find out about her illness. Of course they attended the funeral, but there weren't many tears wept or words spoken. Aunt Eleanor was a strange woman, after all; old, in poor health, believed in all manner of fairy tales, and mostly stayed secluded in her house, There wasn't much mourning.

No, the surprise didn't come until the reading of the will.

Much of her wealth (which was considerable, surprisingly enough) and belongings were divided evenly among her three children, the rest spent on several donations to various charities and token gifts to the few family members she had actually been close with.

Mary got the doll.

She didn't know why; it wasn't like she'd ever shown any interest in it, or anything. She didn’t even want it, but when she tried to tell her parents that, they hushed her and told her to honor her aunt’s wishes by accepting it. So she forced a smile and tried not to shudder when she had to hold the thing.

It was wearing a black dress adorned with white ribbons, and its head was too large for its body, and everything about it just set uneasiness crawling underneath her skin.

When she got home, she locked it in her closet, and thought that would be the end of it.

So, of course, it wasn’t.

Two days later, as she was falling asleep, there was a thudding sound from inside her closet. She jerked awake, holding a hand to her chest, a scream building in the back of her throat. She sat perfectly still, heart thudding in her ears, half wondering if she’d imagined it in her half-dreaming state.

Ten minutes went by, with Mary’s fingers clutching fistfuls of sheets and her knees pulled up close to her chest, straining to hear for any noise or movement. Nothing.

After twenty minutes, the stressed tension in her chest began to ease. She took in a few deep breaths and it relaxed further. She laughed breathlessly, quietly amused by her own paranoia. She must have imagined it. Losing her aunt, no matter how distant, had clearly had more of an impact on her than she had thought.

Then she heard the closet door creak. This time she did scream, grabbing the reading light from her bedside table and frantically holding it out in front of herself as though it was a weapon that could fight off whatever monsters were lurking. The weak beam of light fell on the closet door.

It was open a crack, and all of a sudden the shadows were longer and more threatening.

Mary tucked herself into a ball, pulling her limbs in as close to her body as she could and wishing that the light switch was next to her bed and not by the door. Some childlike instinct was insisting that if only she could get the lights on, she would be safe, but she wasn't about to leave the temporary sanctuary of her bed.

Luckily, she didn't need to, because the next minute her parents burst in, clearly just roused from sleep by her cry. Her dad scrubbed at one eye with a fist as he asked, “Mare-bear? Sweetheart? Are you okay? Did you have a nightmare?”

“There's a monster in here, dad,” was all Mary said, her voice tight and frightened. “It was in the closet and now I don't think it is dad I'm scared please kill the monster dad?”

Her dad chuckled. “Sure, baby, I'll kill the monster. Let me just take a look…”

He pulled the closet door open far enough to glance in, and then opened it all the way, shining a flashlight into the dark hole in the wall. “No monsters here, Mare-bear,” her dad said with a comforting smile. “I think you're safe.”

As he turned away, the light of the flashlight caught the doll’s bright blue eyes for half a second before the door slammed shut, and Mary whimpered in fear. Her dad heard the noise and frowned, crouching down beside her bed. “Hey, what's wrong?”

“The doll,” she muttered. “Aunt Eleanor’s doll. I don't like it. It scares me.”

Her dad’s tired and worried expression softened into a fond smile. “Okay. You don't have to be scared of it, alright? It's just a doll. But if you really don't like it, then we’ll get rid of it tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay,” Mary whispered, and her dad pressed a kiss to her forehead and murmured ‘good night’ before padding out of the room.

Mary couldn't fall asleep for the rest of the night, and the next morning came downstairs with deep circles carved under soft green eyes and her hair messily frizzed up on one side. Her parents had to leave to work each day, leaving her alone for several hours while winter vacation rolled on.

Her dad had said he'd deal with the doll when he got home, take it to Goodwill or something, but that meant first leaving her for several hours. Alone. With the doll.

She piled books in front of the closet door and waited, watching it carefully. The door didn’t move, and neither did Mary. Every time she heard a noise from outside, she flinched, sleep deprivation fueling her paranoia. She grabbed a pillow from her bed and hugged it to her chest, resting her chin on top of it. Her back was pressed against the opposite wall, as far as she could be from the closet while still having a clear view of it. Her heart thudded out an irregular beat.

By early afternoon, the seconds ticking by far too slowly, she decided she couldn’t do this anymore. She sidled up to the closet, approaching from the side like she could catch the thing inside by surprise. She reached out, hand closing around the knob (it was so cold, was it supposed to be so cold?), twisting the icy metal, and yanking it open, letting the door bounce against the opposite wall.

The doll was right where she’d left it. It hadn’t moved. This did absolutely nothing to ease her frazzled nerves, and she recoiled slightly. Her imagination was stuck in overdrive, spewing out dozens of horrific scenarios that might take place when she touched the doll. She swallowed down her panicked fear with great difficulty and picked it up, holding it with her fingertips as far away from her body as possible.

She nearly tripped going down the stairs, moving too fast, but she arrived in the living room without incident, ripped the screen away from the fireplace and threw the doll underhanded into the flames.

All the nervous tension knotting her shoulders slowly drained away as she watched the old fabric blacken and curl away from the cotton stuffing, but she wasn’t truly relaxed until she saw the two plastic blue eyes resting alone in the ashes at the bottom of the fireplace.

It was gone. She let out a great exhale of relief, chest heaving. She could almost laugh at herself- now that the doll was gone, the memory of it wasn’t nearly as frightening. It was a doll. Nothing more than a toy. She felt a little guilty, even, for burning up Aunt Eleanor’s last present to her, but she couldn’t bring herself to be truly sad about it.

She did laugh then, the sound feeling light and free after twelve hours of her chest being compressed by irrational terror. A little creak of a door and she’d fallen to pieces- it was almost embarrassing. She wasn’t sure how she was going to explain to her parents that she’d burned the doll in a fit of panic instead of just waiting an hour for them to get home and deal with it.

She was suddenly tired, the lost sleep from the night before catching up to her all at once now that the fear-fueled adrenaline rush had faded. Her eyelids drooped, and she just barely managed to haul herself up onto the couch and curl into a tight ball before sleep enveloped her. As her eyes fell shut, the last thing she saw was the pair of orphaned plastic eyes, boring into her own from their nest in the ashes.

She woke up briefly when her dad came home, when he picked her up and carried her gently up the stairs to tuck her into bed, but then exhaustion overcame her again combined with the soft warmth of her bed and she sank back into sleep.

When she woke up again, the sun was gone and her room was dark, painted starkly by the silver winter moonlight through the windows. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes with a fist, blinking around the room. She was rested, now, and she couldn’t fall back asleep, to her frustration. She yawned and looked up, eyes falling on the shelf across from her bed.

She froze.

No.

She’d burned it. She burned it into ashes, there wasn’t anything left, this was a bad dream, it was a nightmare, it had to be. She scrubbed at her eyes frantically, then looked again. It was still there. It was still staring at here, those dead blue eyes wide and glassy. Her heart thudded in her chest as she scrambled back as far as she could move, back pressing against the headboard.

She blinked and it was sitting at the foot of her bed. Her scream caught in her throat, and fought to keep her eyes from flickering shut again. They dried quickly, and tears gathered in the corners. Eventually, she couldn’t manage it anymore, and her eyes closed for just a fraction of a fraction of a second.

When they opened again, the doll was sitting on her chest, feeling so much heavier than a little scrap of cloth and stuffing should. She couldn’t breathe.

The blue eyes drilled into hers, glowing faintly, and Mary couldn’t look away. She couldn’t move. Her limbs were like lead. Her vision started to go foggy, everything darkening and fading away except for those bright blue eyes, and then even those vanished, leaving her in darkness.

~~~​

“Mary, time to- oh, you’re already awake,” her father said with a smile, watching from the doorway as she adjusted the doll on the shelf. “Right, the doll. I’m sorry we didn’t deal with that yesterday. Do you want me to take it with me to work and drop it off at Goodwill?”

The girl turned to face him, bright blue eyes sparkling, a cold smile tugging at her lips. “No thanks, Daddy. I think I’m going to keep it.”

 

claimed

 

LENGTH



It’s all good here.


GRAMMAR



I found a couple of errors in this story.

It’s not a HUGE error (and I’m sure you just mistyped), but the tense is wrong. It should be:

The one thing that I saw being repeated isn’t necessarily a mistake, but in my opinion could improve your writing immensely. I’m gonna use this sentence as an example:

I feel like your transitions could be greatly improved by adding a comma. So in this case you would have one after “Of course”. It popped up a couple of times in the story and I just thought I’d give you a heads up.


The next thing I noticed: run-on sentences. I noticed this popping a couple of times throughout the story. You like commas (and that’s not a bad thing), but sometimes, too many commas can be overwhelming. Take this sentence for example:

This paragraph could be greatly improved if you split it up into two sentences. For example:

By doing this, you’re making the sentence less of a mouthful and more pleasant to read. (It also helps your story flow better). What I like to do after I write a story, is i try to read it with a metronome playing in my head. It helps me measure the pace of the story and see if there are any stops that throw of the beat. I’d really like to see you try this next time!


Other than that, I found no other big grammatical or spelling errors.




CHARACTERS/DESCRIPTIONS



Mary (Mar-Bear) seems like a cool kid. I got a clear picture of her in my head. You described her facial features and appearance at an appropriate level and had some very decent indirect characterization. The only major problem I had with Mary was that I was confused about her age. For the first half of the story, I imagined her as a girl in her mid to late teens. The main reason being that it was too early in the story to tell based on her actions and that there was nothing particularly said about her appearance to make me think so.I did eventually get a clear message of what her age is based on how her parents treat her.


I love how you do your descriptions. You never come out and say, “Oh this is Mary, she’s 8 years old, has green eyes and brown hair.” You drop little hints that describe her piece by piece at the perfect moment that it fits.


Next is gothita. Although you never actually came out and said that the doll is a gothita, you gave a clear enough description that had me thinking gothita the moment you talked about her ribbons and blank, purple eyes. (gothita is also a very unique Pokémon, so that helps). Although gothita doesn’t move for most of the story or talk, it was still the focus of the story. There wasn't a moment where I thought gothita was being left out or ignored. The entire time I was thinking: What is gothita doing? Why can she move? Are her intentions good? If this were a higher ranked story though, I would expect a much larger role in the story for gothita.


Next are Mary’s parents. Mary’s mother wasn’t even present in the story if I recall correctly, so you do get a pass there. Her father, on the other had, was present enough and had a large enough role to be relevant to the story. He did have a few lines throughout the story but wasn’t described to as much detail as the other characters. Although this is a medium story, so it’s not as important to describe every character present as if this were a complex story.


Lastly is the creepy (and dead) Aunt Eleanor. She was described in considerable detail, which was way more than you needed for a medium story. I was kind of curious to know what kind of illness she died of, so next time you should go a little more in depth.



PLOT



The plot was simple, but not something you see everyday. Kind of reminded me of 39 clues. Distant relative dies, unsuspecting relative gets something. I’m not saying it’s a bad plot because it’s simple. In fact, I quite like the mysterious undertone it gave your story.

First, let’s talk about the intro. The intro was solid. You gave me a hook when you talked about Aunt Eleanor and her creepy doll. You set up the basis of the story within the first few paragraphs, and you created your main character.


The rest of the story was good. I found no plot holes or unnecessary parts. Quite the opposite actually, I found the ending a bit rushed. It would have been nice to know what happened that night with gothita and Mary. When you had her waking up, I found myself quite confused as to what happened and I had to read back to take come up with my own story for what happened. With that in mind, this is a very nice set up for a sequel. Tell me about the doll’s origin, what happens between Mary and gothita next?


RESULT


Ok, let’s see. Story: Check. Grammar: Check. Characters: Check. Length: Check. WELL WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT. Seems like you’re eligible for a brand new doll from participating stores. Gothita captured!