Case #0191112
Statement of Detective Jonathan Wagonback, regarding a doll he came into possession of. Original statement given November 12th, 2019.
Dolls are weird things, aren’t they? My mom used to own a bunch of them and eventually handed them off to my sister, Nicole, when she was just ten. I’ve never been a fan of dolls. Not saying I have a big fear of them, I just don’t like the way they look. They’re always watching you, even when you’re not in the room. Their presence was almost always there. I ignored the dolls, of course, and focused on important childhood things, like bugs and sticks and mysterious disappearances. Okay, maybe I was the only kid to focus on mysterious disappearances of a cat or dog gone missing, who cares. I had to spice up my childhood, somehow.
Anyway, long story short, I hate dolls. And I steered clear of dolls until I came across one when I moved to Marticoo, Pennsylvania. It was a small town. Not a lot of people lived there and the people were… nice, I guess? They didn’t speak to me or my girlfriend, Lizzie, they just stared at us. I tried to strike up a conversation with a nice old lady who lived across the street from us, but she just looked at me. Her face was saggy too and eyes empty. Not, like, literally empty. They were almost void of life, I suppose. I figured maybe it was my lack of sleep catching up to me and I didn’t linger on it much longer.
You see, I was beginning a new job at the Marticoo Police Department as lead detective and I had a lead on a new case centered inside of Marticoo. Several people had gone missing and I put it upon myself to figure out why. Police Chief Warren Harper told me to ignore it (unbelievable, right?) but I continued on. I continued on because I wanted to help those that were missing. It eventually led me down a twisting path of other unsolved cases that were nestled inside of Marticoo, left to dust in an unopened archive in the library. Like, why would they hide the mysterious murder of one Amelia and Richard Tate, from the public? Or, the killings of not one, but two families in Marticoo? I had brought it up to Warren, but he simply told me those were stories someone made up for the press because the general public would “go into a frenzy if they ever found out about the murder cases”, were his exact words. Frenzy my, excuse my language, ass. Before I came here, I believed there were more than a hundred unsolved cases and not one single person at the police department was doing anything about them.
It frustrated me, but I continued. The missing persons’ case, named the Luckfolk Case, was getting me nowhere and I began to feel very helpless, very quickly. Lizzie tried to encourage me but her words meant nothing to me. That’s probably very selfish of me to say, but it’s the truth. The town was sucking out every bit of hope I had because no one cared about what I was doing. I wanted to be called a hero or the greatest detective or something, just to prove I was somewhat mediocre.
Anyway, I’m getting off track. Dolls, right? I stumbled upon a Raggedy Ann doll in one of the storefronts when I was walking in town. It was small and lay neatly on a shelf with its little doll hands in its lap. I stared at it for a while and as I was looking at it, I felt as though it was staring right back. Of course, I told myself it was just a childhood fear coming back to bite me in the butt.
I was knocked from my fixation by a gentle tap on the shoulder. I spun around and there was a lady with dark brown eyes standing there. How long she had been standing there I didn’t know, and when I tried to ask who she was, she simply smiled wide. Her teeth were very white, that much I remembered. And when she finally spoke, after what felt like ages of just me standing there awkwardly, her voice came out in a whisper. Like, the whisper of fingernails against your skin. It chilled me to my bones, honestly, as I half expected her to be just like everyone in the town. Emotionless zombies.
Anyway, she started talking about the doll in detail. How it was made, how the hair had come from a real person, though I’d like to believe she was just saying that to scare me, and how the town really, in my terms, loved their dolls. Supposedly, there was a doll festival in June, and I don’t really remember the details of it all since my memory has been slipping as of late. I don’t really remember anything at all. It’s all a fog in my head and I’m trying my best to get through it. But, the fog continues to roll on and on and on and on and on and on and on and then I am left alone in a place. What place I can’t tell you. Maybe it is Marticoo. Maybe it is my college dorm. It changes every single day.
Sometimes I’m not in my own body. Sometimes I’m outside of my body as I watch it tear and claw and stab its way through a mass of bodies. It becomes a wild animal, crackling and snarling as the blood pools around my own feet, but I don’t move. I stay there as the blood continues to rise and rise and rise and rise and rise. I am covered in blood and laughing. She’s whispering in my ear, too. She’s so very proud of me. I must continue to please her.
I’ll wake up tomorrow morning and there will be blood under my fingernails. There will always be blood on my hands. The red, metallic scent fills my nostrils once again and I am freed from my body. I am here to stay. I am here to kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Stab. Cut. Slash. Cut. Kill. Stab. Repeating the process until she is satisfied. I wish I could wake up from this endless nightmare. I want to wake up, please help me wake up.
FOLLOW-UP NOTES
- Well, for a variety of reasons, this statement is difficult to follow up on. A lack of fine details in regards to the people makes it impossible to find anyone to interview.
- Detective Wagonback was not available to make a follow-up statement. Along with that, the Marticoo Police Department refused to speak with Institute staff. Cordelia, unfortunately, warned us against having Kelly break in to take police records, so I’m afraid we won’t be able to do much with this case for the foreseeable future.
- More statements involving senseless violence and dolls. I don’t think those two topics are inherently connected, but I don’t like how often these things seem to come up.