Page 52 of Where the Dark Things Bloom

On a shelf behind it stood thirteen dolls. Each wore a tiny white dress with a lace hem, stained at the edges. Their hair was blonde, red, black, brown, strawberry-gold. Their glass eyes caught the low light and reflected it like the eyes of animals in the dark.

I inched closer. Something about them made the skin on my neck pull tight. They weren’t like the dolls I used to collect. These were… older. Real.

One had a scar just below her eye, shaped exactly like the one I had from falling off the swing in the orchard when I was nine. Another had a chipped front tooth. One had fingers burned down to the nub.

No.

My stomach clenched as I reached out and touched one of the dolls’ heads. The hair was soft. Too soft.

It wasn’t synthetic.

It was human.

I pulled back my hand like I’d touched something alive.

I stumbled toward the dollhouse, needing to look away from the row of tiny eyes. But the house didn’t offer comfort either. The miniature rooms were perfect. Too perfect. They mirrored the real Thorn Hall precisely. Even down to—

I blinked. Leaned in.

There was a figure in the miniature basement.

A boy.

Bent over, arms outstretched, pressing something into the wall. A girl knelt before him. Her hair was dark, and long. Tangled.

It was me.

I reached to open the dollhouse roof, to rip the whole thing apart—

Then the smallest doll on the shelf moved.

Her head twisted to the side with a small, mechanical click. Her lips did not part. But a voice poured out of her anyway.

A girl’s voice. Mine. Not mine.

“Run, run, run.”

My body started to shake. Cold swept through me like winter wind under a door.

Then, from behind the door of the room I was in, I could hear Dorian’s voice. He hit the door with an axe, enough to leave the whole big enough to fit his whole head, and as he pulled his head into the whole he licked his lips just before he said, “Here comes the Trouble.”

Calm. Icy. It echoed as if he were everywhere.

I turned. The door was cracking even more as he tried to pull his hand through the hole.

He was smiling. Wild-eyed. Beautiful. Terrifying.

His breath steamed in the cold air.

“I found you,” he said softly. “Trouble.”

He pushed through the opening, and his hand finally opened the door. The sweat slicked his hair to his forehead. There was something creepy in the way he stood like every nerve in his body was stretched to snapping, and he was daring the world to pull first.

“Stay away from me,” I whispered.

But I didn’t move.

His eyes dragged down my body like a touch.

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