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.

My mother still won't get rid of it, and now her reasoning has curdled from sentiment into something worse: she's afraid that destroying the thing that WARNS us is somehow the same as declining the warning, and that the deaths would come anyway, only now without the mercy of notice. I think she might be right, which is the worst part. So the doll stays, in the hall, facing the wall between gatherings, and every family Christmas we file past it with our eyes down, and then, at some point in the evening, someone gasps, and we all look, and we see who it's facing, and the party ends inside everyone's chest while the sherry goes on being poured.

It's facing my mother this year. She noticed before any of us. She's been very calm about it, which is how I know she believes it completely. I don't know what to do. There's nothing to do. You can't argue with a doll that's never been wrong. You can only, I suppose, make the year count.