The Devil Dolls
Just one tale from
We are confronted on all sides by the unknown and unexplained, however confident we may feel in our cocooned, hi-tech world. Our planet hangs suspended in a black sea of infinite space, and not only are we ignorant of what marvels and horrors are to be found hidden in the depths of our Universe, but we know precious little about the elusive realm of what we call the supernatural right here on earth. The following eerie tale is a case in point.
In 1905, there stood a veritable Aladdin's cave of hardware, toys, glassware, kitchen utensils and ornaments at 439 Mill Street in the Dingle. The shop was called Procter's Variety Bazaar, and was one of the most popular stores in south Liverpool, frequented by both adults and children alike.
Days before Halloween in 1905, a man wearing a black, out-of-vogue, three-cornered hat and a calf-length black cape walked up Mill Street, one foggy late-afternoon. He halted at the door to Procter's Variety Bazaar, gazed through the window at the various items on display, then entered the premises. A young shopkeeper, Miss Williams, regarded the unusually dressed stranger with a curious eye, then inquired if she could be of any assistance. Using sign language, the swarthy-featured man conveyed that he was mute, then opened his long double-breasted astrakhan coat and displayed an extraordinary sight to the shopkeeper.
Inside the coat, hanging in a neat row at the inside pocket, was a line of five dolls, each about five inches in height. Three were of men and two of women, all dressed in detailed, realistic-looking attire, including bowler hats and bonnets. The shopkeeper understood that the man wanted to sell the dolls, so she went to consult the store's owner, Mrs Procter. The collection of dolls was purchased for five shillings, and the mute man tilted his hat and left the shop.
As soon as he was out of sight, Mrs Procter displayed the five dolls in the shop window. She was pleased with the unusual purchase, they would fit well with all her other oddly-assorted merchandise, and she announced that she would charge a florin for each one.
On the following morning, a Mrs Briggs stormed into the shop in an hysterical state, and said that one of the five dolls in the window - the one wearing the bowler hat - had obviously been based on her late brother Harold Medlicott. He had hanged himself after being found guilty of fraud at his job in a bank. The doll's face was identical to Harold's and the clothes the figure wore were identical to Mr Medlicott's attire, down to the smallest detail.
"Remove that wicked thing from the window at once!" Mrs Biggs sobbed, "Look at its face! It's our poor Harold to a tee!"
Tutting to herself, Mrs Procter removed the doll in question from the window for a while to appease the disturbed woman, and get her off the premises, but later put it back on display and it was soon sold to a nine-year-old girl named Penny.
Over the next three days, several distressed people came into Procter's shop, claiming that the dolls were the exact replicas of loved ones who had recently died and should be taken out of the window, out of respect for the dead. But Mrs Procter was a keen businesswoman and had paid good money for the dolls. Three more were sold to Penny's mother, but the fourth one was purchased by a man for his four-year-old daughter Georgiana.
A week later, Georgiana's father burst into the shop, holding something wrapped in a tissue. He explained how, two days before, Georgiana had come running to him saying, "Dolly's hurt". The girl had accidentally stepped on the doll, and was alarmed to see real blood and other noxious matter issuing from it. The doll was taken from the child and put on a shelf in her father's study. It soon began to give off a repulsive odour, and seemed to be decomposing.
The slimy object was taken back to the fancy-goods shop where Mrs Procter, by now heartily sick of the dolls and cursing the day she had set eyes on them, was at a loss to explain its deteriorating condition. She could see for herself that something was badly amiss and she reimbursed the man without hesitating.
The four other dolls were also returned in a similar state, and a refund was given for each one. Mrs Procter was furious - the dolls had not only lost her five florins, but had also alienated a good number of her regular customers. She put the horrid, putrefying figurines in a box with a tight-fitting lid and then thoroughly scrubbed her hands to get rid of the smell. Even after several scrubbings with strong carbolic soap her hands were still impregnated with the filthy smell of rotting flesh. She would have thrown the hideous dolls away there and then but she intended giving them back to the man who had sold them to her, along with a piece of her mind and a demand for her money back. However, she didn't get the chance because the swarthy, enigmatic stranger was never seen again.
Weeks later, Mrs Procter was doing a stock take when she came across the box. She gingerly opened the lid, intending to empty it of its weird and repulsive contents, and saw to her horror that it now contained five slimy little skeletons, each dressed in clothes that reeked of decomposition.
Mrs Procter swiftly disposed of the gruesome effigies, and tried to tell herself that the mute man who had created them must have been suffering from some strange mental illness. But for years afterwards a much more chilling thought haunted her mind; had the black-clad doll-maker been the devil himself? Had the dolls indeed been the shrunken forms of real people who had died and lost their souls to Satan because of iniquities committed when they had been alive? The devil is said to have a black sense of humour, and the blood-filled, look-alike dolls of that Edwardian Halloween bear all the hallmarks of his fiendish pranks.