Taylor saw it in his dreams. It was a startling likeness of himself, if dolls could be startling likenesses. They were the kind of dreams that faded from memory within minutes of waking, but left a lingering uneasy feeling for the rest of the day. After a month of sleepwalking through his days, he began to keep a diary by his bed to record the dreams as soon as he was pulled from them.
A dark room. Small hands – adult, but definitely female. There was something familiar about them, but he never saw the person attached to them. And the doll. Beaded blue eyes and dirty blond hair that looked like real human hair. A carefully crafted silk scarf around the dolls neck.
Pins. So many pins.
Taylor found that the more he forced himself to remember the dreams, the more tiny details he could pick out. The hair not only looked real, it appeared to be the exact same shade as his. Some days he could even remember where the pins were, and they seemed more and more to match up with the aches and pains he felt.
He told himself it was psychosomatic. He was feeling what the dreams told him he was going to feel. Yet, he wasn’t convinced. And if there was a right city to be in when you were under a voodoo curse, New Orleans was it. He had run there to hide and write his novel in peace, away from the disapproving eyes of his wife and family.
It seemed he had run to the exact place he needed to be.
Taylor left his apartment, an unassuming little room on the second floor of an old general store, and wandered the streets. It didn’t take him long to find a dark store front full of candles and crystals. He couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had followed him, but the streets were too full of people for him to really know. Taylor shook his head, told himself he was just paranoid, and walked into the shop.
The girl in the shop looked eerily familiar. She had long, dark hair and piercing green eyes that didn’t flicker when Taylor told her about the dreams. She just nodded and scurried off behind a beaded curtain. Taylor wandered the aisles of the store, inhaling the incense and reading the labels on a variety of candles – “For Luck in Love,” “To Break Curses,” “Money Maker.”
When the girl returned, she held out a small silk pouch which she instructed Taylor not to open. “Carry this on you at all times. You’ll be protected if you believe.”
Taylor wasn’t sure that he believed, but he didn’t see that he had much choice.
He carried the pouch for two weeks, marking down each day in his diary, but his headaches and sleeplessness only worsened. He sat at his desk overlooking the street below and tried to write, but the words wouldn’t come. His old fashioned type writer stared silently back at him.
Outside a cafe, sipping coffee and nibbling on a beignet, sat a girl with long black hair and green eyes. She sat alone and waited patiently for the tables around her to empty. When they had, she pulled a small doll from her purse. She stared down at the beaded eyes and blonde hair – carefully plucked from his hair brush before she left the hotel room – and sighed. A part of her hated to do it. She had loved him once; at least, that’s what she thought until she met him. But he left her after one night, as everyone warned her he would.
So he had to die.
She plunged a thick pin into the doll’s sewn-own heart. It was done.
She returned the doll to her purse and sipped her coffee in peace, knowing that somewhere, in his apartment, Taylor Hanson’s cold heart had beat for the last time.