Behind These Eyes - Part Fifteen

When Belle woke up it was early and the house was silent. She didn't want to hit the button on the clock to find out what time it was, even its soft voice was too loud in the quiet hours before dawn. Rudolph was asleep on his bed in the corner of the room, she could hear him snuffling quietly in his sleep. She lay in bed, thinking over the events of the night before. She wondered what it was she was tapping into. Some kind of collective conscious of the dolls - if dolls could be said to have a conscious mind. These ones certainly seemed to. She wondered what it was that the dolls wanted. Because surely they wanted something. She guessed it was up to her to find out. If she work out what they wanted, maybe she could find a way to give it to them. Maybe that would silence them. Like the old Halloween rhetoric about the dead haunting the living until they had made amends - perhaps the dolls needed to do something, or express something, or make contact for some reason. She imagined it had something to do with the worries they held - after all, that's how they had manifested themselves, in terms of the worries they each possessed. Each doll only seemed to have one, at least only one that they were sharing with Belle, but that one worry had - in the four cases so far - been a big one. A gushing head wound, being hit with a hot frying pan, these weren't minor worries. Belle wondered if maybe she was expected to track down the perpertrators of these vicious acts, but that reasoning didn't stand for the man with the heart attack - surely no one in that situation could rightly be called a perpertrator. Maybe they were premonitions, and she was supposed to be somehow avoiding them, stopping them occurring. But she had no way of identifying the victims. When she experienced the worries, when she held the dolls in her hand, she always took the part of the victim. She felt what the victim felt, smelled what the victim smelled. She didn't see the victim though, she didn't know whether they were young or old, tall or short, male or female. She didn't know who they were, where they were, or what had gotten them into the situation they were in. As much as Belle felt in control at the time, now she just felt lost and very confused. What did the dolls want from her? And how was she going to deliver it?