‘Every
little girl deserves a dollhouse,’ Ella’s dad had said, as he placed it down on
a large chest by the window, causing his daughter to dance and clap with joy.
But the well-intentioned present was to reduce the family to a strange
accommodation.
It
was Ella, who some weeks later, said her dollhouse was haunted. Houses maybe, said
both her parents, but not a toy. And just to reassure Ella, her mother opened
the dollhouse and checked inside. The interiors were modelled on Edwardian
grandeur, but like an old house needing a bit of a makeover, it was worn and tired,
frail and dusty. Ella pointed to the maid in the kitchen, a mummy and daddy in
the drawing room, a butler walking up the stairs, and the daughter laying down
in her bedroom. ‘But there are no ghosts,’ her mother said reassuringly. ‘Of
course not,’ Ella replied, ‘they only come at night.’
After
failing to convince Ella the supernatural was all make-believe, her dad decided
to inspect the dollhouse while she was asleep. He could see Ella had put mummy
and daddy in their bed, and the butler and maid at the kitchen table. He was
satisfied his adult reasoning was correct, when suddenly, the gas lights
flickered in all the miniature rooms. This was odd, because he knew there was
no electric for any moving parts. Then he heard his daughter’s voice behind him:
‘I told you there were ghosts!’
Ella’s
dad was ready to tell her to go back to sleep, when he heard a loud crack,
followed by another, and another. ‘They slam the doors daddy, when they are
angry, and they spit at you.’ As Ella said these last few words, he felt an
acute stinging pain on the side of his face. But this was only the beginning.
More stinging, more spit, came flying out of the dollhouse, burning through his
clothes and into his flesh. He grabbed hold of the Edwardian snake-pit, more to
protect Ella than himself, but recoiled, screaming out, as he felt both his
eyes receive blinding wounds.It was Ella’s mummy who dragged her husband to the bathroom, whilst Ella calmly closed the doors to the dollhouse. In the morning, after they had returned from A&E, with bandages over both her daddy’s eyes, Ella revealed what she had been told by the residents of the dollhouse.
‘They
told me they were really sorry and just want to stay. You must promise to look
after them and they won’t do anything wrong. But they said, if you try to sell
them like the other family, they will never forgive you.’ And what would happen,
Ella’s parents asked, if they did? ‘They wouldn’t say, but it won’t be very
nice.’
After
much discussion, and the willingness of Ella to play with the dollhouse, and
the commitment by the parents to redecorate the interiors, it became part of
the family, but cared for more out of fear than love for a potential treasured heirloom.