The Doll Faces Whoever Will Die Next

The doll is genuinely old and genuinely hideous — a porcelain-headed thing in a mildewed christening gown, inherited down my mother's line from some Victorian forebear, kept out of a sense of duty rather than affection, sat on a chair in my mother's hall where nobody has to look at it much. We've all wanted to bin it for years. My mother won't; it's 'family.'

The thing the doll does, it does at gatherings — Christmases, funerals, the big family assemblies where the whole clan packs into my mother's house. At some point during every such gathering, without anyone seeing it move, the doll ends up facing a particular person. Turned on its chair, its horrible painted eyes fixed across the room at one specific member of the family. We noticed the pattern years ago and it became a running family joke, the sort every family has: 'Ooh, who's the doll looking at this year, better update your will,' cackling, topping up the sherry.

We stopped laughing the year it faced my grandfather at the Christmas gathering, and my grandfather — hale, we thought — died in the February. We nervously noted it. The next big gathering, a cousin's wedding, the doll spent the reception, per three separate people who swear they didn't move it, faced squarely at my aunt Peg, who was the picture of health and dead of a stroke by the autumn. Then an uncle. Then, chillingly, a young-ish cousin nobody would have picked, who was gone within the year in an accident none of us saw coming and the doll, apparently, did.

It has now, over about nine years and I've lost count how many gatherings, faced the next family member to die, every single time, correctly, in advance, with a lead time of months. We do not joke about it anymore. The gatherings have acquired a horrible held-breath quality — everyone clocking, on arrival, where the doll is looking, and the person it's looking at going quietly to pieces for the rest of the day, and all of us pretending, badly, that we haven't noticed, that it's nonsense, that Great-Great-Aunt Whoever's ugly doll is just an ugly doll.