It all began the day Natalie returned from the hospital with Baby Anna, wrapped in a towel in her

arms. Baby Anna's golden head rested on her bosom; to Natalie it seemed like she was clutching
onto a bundle of sunshine, the warmth that spread itself inside Natalie's heart made her cheeks
flush and her eyes shine brightly. A piece of the sun seemed to have pierced her chest and made
a home inside the ribcage permanently.
.
Baby Anna looked at Natalie with her ocean blue eyes, Natalie found herself dissolving in
them...slowly, as slowly as cotton candy in a child's greedy mouth.
Stephen had arranged everything for their homecoming and now he stood, the proud father and
husband, holding Natalie's hand on the threshold of their new house. Both of them had weaved
so many dreams together and now the little pieces had come together and here they were,
together-a complete wholesome family.
They had gone through several treatments for three years before Natalie finally conceived.
Stephen never once lost hope, even though Natalie had, but anyway, the bitter past is better left
behind, Natalie thought sinking her head into Stephen's chest.
*_X_X_X_*
.
.
Stephen ushered them into the room that he had prepared as the baby's nursery. Grilled french
windows on the Southern side made the room airy, white curtains hung on them; a newly
polished wooden cot lay in the center of the room and beside it the baby monitor. Stephen had
stuffed the whole room with presents and toys. A huge Teddy bear was placed strategically
beside the cot as if it would look over the sleeping baby like a guardian angel. On one corner
stood a collection of dolls that wore the red ballet shoes, white socks and gowns of different
hues; they would start dancing as soon as a button was turned on; the corn braided hair of the
dolls and the rouge on their cheeks was a little out of place, observed Natalie a little distastefully.

(Part1/2): On the opposite wall stood a solitary man baby doll. It had a baby face with a pipe in its
mouth, the upturned lips gave it the look of perpetual grimace, black coat and pant completed
the look of this boy doll. Stephen had already started opening the rest of the gifts that were piled
up in the one remaining side of the room. Natalie was looking at her very own baby doll,
completely oblivious of Stephen.
Stephen was reading out the greeting cards attached to the presents as he kept on discarding
one gift wrap after the other.
.
"Grandma Louisa and Grandpa Philip send their love and they would visit baby Anna in
Christmas...
Uncle Lewis and Aunt Mary want to smother their niece in kisses... Hahahaha"
More sound of crumpling paper followed this monologue....
Suddenly a raspy, hoarse voice made Natalie's hair stand on end.
It was a rhyme, a male voice singing, again and again, that reached a frantic pitch in the end.
"Anna has a father
Anna has a mother
Serve meat on the platter
Make the baby fatter....
Fatter...Fatter...FATTER...."
Natalie looked behind startled and Baby Anna began to cry. Stephen was holding a clown doll in
his hand, he seemed awed by it.
"Woah, this is some genius craftsmanship right here. Look at it, this little fellow can juggle and
has a recorder, well someone recorded that rhyme and sent... But uhh, that rhyme was a pretty
creepy man" Stephen said, fumbling around for the greeting card.
.
"Well seems like I lost the card, must be Dr. Alfred or one of the nurses I guess, they were so
happy for us after all.

(Part 2/2): The sun was setting on the horizon. Shadows flickered in the corners of the room,
Natalie rocked Baby Anna and put her nose on Anna's chubby neck, she smelt of baby powder
and milk, Natalie felt love ooze out of every pore of her body. As Natalie put Anna back on the
cot again, she got the uneasy feeling of being watched, as if the embers from the Man baby's
pipe was burning a hole through her loose maternity gown and mocking her, tempting her to
make one false move. It was a contemptuous glare that seemed to chase Natalie around the
house. Somebody was watching them.
.
"Stephen? Can we please not make Anna sleep here tonight?"
.
"But why baby? Also, this will be a much comfortable place for Anna and you know that and
don't worry the Baby monitor is working absolutely fine."
Thus snubbed, Natalie bit her lips, Stephen looked at her with the same ocean blue eyes of baby
Anna's. He smiled.
.
"I love you Sugar"
.
"I love you too Papa bear" Natalie cooed while pinching Stephen's nose.

Part – 2

As Natalie nestled in the crook of Stephen's arm, she could hear the rhythmic breathing of Anna
from the baby monitor. Natalie was hovering somewhere between the state of sleeping and of
being awake when suddenly everything went pitch black.
.
Darkness...
.
A thud. A robotic cackling. Music.
Two dancing dolls. One in a blood red satin gown and the other in sunny yellow were moving
round and round on their pedestal.
.
Natalie shuts her ears and eyes tightly. They glare at her with their lifeless eyes, as if angry at her
gesture. They are reaching out for her~ their hands outstretched- the music has resumed, it is
coming from every corner of the room, it seems like an unknown nursery rhyme. Natalie stifles a
scream.
The dolls are swaying to the music as if in a drunken stupor- they are going around each other
now and tearing their gowns off eachother- wildly, frantically, they are clawing at eachother's
plastic skin- why are they oozing blood? It seems to go on and on like a pagan ritual before
sacrifice.They are screaming at her.
.
"Come Natalie, join us."
There is high pitched laughter as the red doll snaps the neck of the yellow one.
.
Natalie jerks out of her sleep. Perspiration covers her forehead. Baby Anna is crying but Stephen
has already gone to check on the baby. She lies down on the soft bed trying to ease her breath.
Stephen meanwhile has put baby Anna back on the cot and left the room.
Did the doll at the corner smile at her? Or did she imagine it?
.
She turns to the other side, her back to the monitor waiting for Stephen to return and comfort
her, but almost as soon as her back is turned she hears a raspy voice singing quite gleefully.
"Anna has a father
Anna has a mother
Serve meat on the platter
Make the baby fatter...."
.
.
Natalie sits up and peers into the monitor. Baby Anna is sleeping peacefully tucked in her lilac
blue blanket. The toys are as lifeless as before, but maybe a little more sinister. Maybe.

(Part 1/2): Dawn has filtered in through the purple curtains lending the orange room a violet
hue.The morning had none of the restlessness of the previous night. It was a warm summer
morning, and Stephen sat with baby Anna in the dining hall as Natalie was frying an omelette.
The aroma of food and bliss mingled together was creating a homely atmosphere that seemed to
reach to the baby too, who smiled and played and was unusually jolly.
.
As Stephen left for work after breakfast, Natalie waved him goodbye. It seemed to Natalie that
baby Anna was a little drowsy so she thought it best to let the baby have a little nap while she
would finish her other household chores and maybe also do some gardening. Thus prepared to
pursue this course of action, Natalie went to the nursery and put baby Anna in the cot who slept
soon enough. Natalie ran her fingers on baby Anna's chubby cheeks and whispered, "My baby
doll- mumma loves you, dadda loves you, my sweet little angel", as if on cue Anna smiled in her
sleep.
.
Natalie walked out of the room happily and left the door ajar.
She rolled up her sleeves, took her hat and gardening tools and stepped out into the July sun.

(Part 2/2) The afternoon sun bore down on her back, she doesn't remember how long she has
been out turning the soil for her Forget-me-not flowers. The stillness of the afternoon penetrated
her for the first time when she stopped to wipe her brow. No birds chirped, no squirrels ran from
tree to tree.
.
Natalie stood uneasily shifting her weight from one foot to another and that's when she saw it.
.
The curtain of the nursery fluttered and there he stood, juggling the balls; his gaze unwavering;
calculative as if measuring her. The Clown was watching her, an eerie smile on it's dead face.
Natalie ran inside. She was panting by the time she reached the nursery.
Anna was weeping, the cot lay upturned.
.
.
She was trapped inside the cot. The Clown was however in it's own place. The man baby seemed
to sneer at her, the teddy bear wasn't protective anymore it was maliciously looking at the
trapped Anna, the way some cruel boy would look at a bug before crushing it with his feet. The
ballet shoe wearing doll was lying face down but suddenly it turned it's head towards Natalie and
started laughing and singing.
"Anna has a father...
Anna has a mother
Serve them on the platter
Because how long will they be?
HOW LONG?"
.
That was it. Natalie picked up Anna in her lap and ran into their bedroom and shut the door tight
behind her.
They didn't step out till Stephen came home. The nursery was normal. So normal that it seemed
almost like a mockery, a farce of sorts. Natalie didn't want Stephen to think that she has gone
balmy in the head and thus hid the entire incident from him. The baby cried incessantly, Natalie
assigned that to stomach ache and went in the kitchen to make the night's supper.

Part – 3

As soon as her head hit the pillow. Natalie's mind wandered.

A cart is full of Teddy bears. A dark room.

(_This time she knew. She knew she was in a nightmare that she couldn't escape._)
.
Little Natalie is inside the cart, drowsy because she has been drugged; soon she will wake up and
find herself in a toymakers workshed.
When the lady in the supermarket offered baby Natalie a drugged Lollipop, she slurped it up
greedily and here she is now.
The synthetic fur of the bears irked her nostrils. She stumbled out of the cart and called out,
"momma? Papa?" Silence followed. Natalie looked around her, racks and racks of dolls and
teddies, and yet to be painted heads of dolls. They looked at her.
.
Whispered in her ears-"You will never get out alive..."
.
And that's how Natalie knew that never can a doll be lifeless. They were all painfully alive beneath
the dead veneer. They were all living, breathing, slithering with vindictive tendencies, and anger.
How old was she? Maybe two or three?
She doesn't remember, she remembers though that she had lost consciousness soon after.
.
She had been trapped there for maybe five or six hours before the police rescued her with the
help of the CCTV footage.
The woman with the glazed eyes who had picked her up was being taken into the police van and
she kept on crying-"She is my baby!!! God sent her to me. God took my little Angela from me
and sent me this one instead. It is goddamn evil to separate a mother from her child, you will rot
in hell. None of you fucking dunces will find peace"
.
The woman was psychotic and going through the trauma of her child's death, she didn't manage
to take away Natalie but gave her this unwanted gift of a recurring nightmare. A childhood
trauma that hounded her even today.
Natalie felt claustrophobic. The dream made her nauseous, she found it increasingly difficult to
separate dream from reality nowadays. Stephen was not home tonight, he was on an office trip,
he would be back the next morning.
As if for comfort Natalie turned towards the Baby monitor and what she saw froze the blood in
her veins.
.

(Part 1/2): The clock struck two. The air reeked of something ominous, something that could be
best described as death-like.
.
The dolls had gathered around the cot of Anna, the Teddy bear had leaned over the cot as if it
would smother the baby and choke it to death. The clown stood nearby juggling.
.
The monitor cackled, and then all at once, all of them looked at the camera directly and smiled
and the monitor went blank.
That was it. Natalie grabbed the fireplace poker and ran downstairs, she had to save her baby.
*_ *_ *_ *_ *_*
.
When Stephen came back the next morning, he approached the house cautiously. He couldn't
understand what was it that he feared but fear it was. Fear as stale but as obvious as the reeking
smell of urine in a public washroom, disgusting but impossible to ignore. Fear seeped in through
his heart even before he reached the porch of his blissful little house. Silence rested like a pall
over the house.
.
He walked in and perked his ears. Was that Natalie's voice?
He followed the sound of his wife's voice. The door to the nursery was open. Natalie sat on the
floor in a loose white nightgown, she was singing. Faintly, as if to herself.
"Anna has a father
Anna has a mother
Serve meat on the platter
Make the baby fatter...."
.
.
A sense of unease filled Stephen, he doesn't know why he had tiptoed around Natalie.
He found her rocking baby Anna in her arms.
.
But the thing in her lap could barely be called a baby, it's head had been bashed open. The
golden hair lay matted in blood giving it the look of the sky at sunset. The head was definitely
pummelled and half of her brain was out of her broken skull. The instrument of assault, a
fireplace poker, lay nearby. Natalie seemed to be in a trance, she was dipping her fingers in
Anna's blood and drawing a clown smile on her lips and she was singing that horrible song, but it
seemed more like chanting, a spell seemed to have got hold of Natalie. Natalie laughed gleefully
and rocked the bloodied baby in her arms.

Stephen walked out of the room and closed the door behind him, with trembling hands he called
the police.
.
The trial took place on one mirthless spring morning. Natalie was institutionalized. She was
diagnosed with Schizophrenia and Pediophobia- the fear of dolls- by the doctors. Her
Schizophrenia led her to project her phobia in ways that were quite fatal. Something had
triggered her childhood trauma and brought back everything that she tried to leave behind.
*********
Stephen stood on the porch of that cursed house that evening after locking the main door. He
was going to put it up for sale despite the bad reputation that the house had earned itself. They
had so many dreams, it had all started to look up or so had Stephen thought. He sighed, his
eyesight was a little blurry.
.
He backed his car from the garage and got on the main road, he looked at the rearview mirror
for one last time. He could see Anna's window, the curtains fluttered and in the shadow drenched
corner, a figure seemed to move aside. Stephen was shocked, he turned to look. He peered at the
window, his heart thumping way faster than it normally should. He had slowed down on the lane,
the radio suddenly turned on and he thought he distinctly heard-
.
"Anna has a father
Anna has a mother
Head smashed with a poker
Slyly smiled the Joker..."
.
What Stephen didn't know was that, this would be the last thing he would ever hear. His
distraction didn't let him see the truck that made it's way towards him. When it hit him, Stephen
thought he heard a raspy laugh coming from the radio before everything went red before his
eyes.
.
.