By way of introduction, E. W. Farnsworth is widely published online and in print. His horror collections include "The Black Marble Griffon" and Other Disturbing Tales and "Firstborn" and Other Stories and Poems of Horror. For further information about the author and his works, please see http://www.ewfarnsworth.com.
THE PORCELAIN BABE
by
E. W. Farnsworth
The 2024 New Year party in New York City witnessed the normal quotient of horror to ring in the new while finessing the old. Numerous murders, robberies and missing persons rung in the new. As for the old, chief among the overlooked and unpleasant aspects was a single, forlorn and cracked porcelain doll, abandoned curbside on Fifth Avenue. At half to five AM, the municipal cleaning crew found the sordid relic--and precisely then, according to Letty Syndrome, the string of really bad luck began.
Letty's recorded testimony was compelling: "Unaccountably, the traffic monitoring system for the city winked out, along with the tricolor signals for all bridges, tunnels and street corners. The 911 capability registered "overloaded" for the first time in history. The hospitals were suddenly flooded past capacity by infants stricken by one or more lethal respiratory diseases. As if attracted by the potential for mayhem, huge rats crawled up out of the sewers and roamed unchecked."
To corroborate the poor woman's claims, unheard alarms about the rats' ravenous attacks on the homeless seemed an uncanny completion of the four horsemen theme as Revelation's themes rolled out in drums of thunder and forks of lightning.
She took the matter to her supervisor, but her boss had never seen the young woman so terrified before. "What do you suggest that we do to stop the pandemonium?"
From under her patched coat, the woman extracted the porcelain doll as if it were a scorpion and laid it carefully on the big man's desk. Instantly the desk lost its footing and crashed to the floor. She said, "We must deal with this doll before it deals with everyone in the city."
The bad news continued to come to the Mayor's command center by messenger with cell phone pictures of the devastation. Now the sewage and water systems were cross-connecting. Shortly afterwards, reports and pictures of congestion and traffic accidents poured in. The city's waste systems were spewing their effluent into the streets in spouts and geysers.
While Letty's supervisor stood paralyzed behind his crumbled desk, the porcelain doll began to tremble as if it were suffering from a cerebral stroke. The doll seemed to be suffering from the same malady it was inflicting on the humans. Right before Letty's eyes, the porcelain doll's head swelled and exploded, and then only shreds and scraps of its former self remained.
"Well, Letty, the doll seems to have solved our problem in spite of our inaction."
The woman said, "We shall see, Sir!"
Now from the Port Authority came runners with tales of cephalopods rising from the offshore waters. Baby octopuses were appearing everywhere on sidewalks, along window ledges and on rooftops.
"Did things just get better? Or worse?" the woman asked her boss, but he was heading down the stairs for the street.
He no longer trusted the reports he was receiving. He knew for certain the porcelain doll had self-destructed. His desertion of his post in the emergency went unregarded except by Letty, but her corpse was discovered in the same place she had discovered the porcelain doll earlier that morning. The cause of her death was ruled "sheer terror," but the City coroner would not venture a guess as to the cause.