The Creation - Annabelle

She tilted her head. “Father,” she replied, but her voice wasn’t a child’s. It was the scrape of a coffin lid, the echo of a vault.

He called her Annabelle.

For a week, she was perfect. She learned to walk, to curtsey, to pour tea from a tiny porcelain pot. Samuel wept with joy. But on the eighth night, he found her in the workshop. She had disassembled the other dolls—not broken them, but unmade them, their limbs stacked in neat pyramids, their painted eyes arranged in a spiral on the floor. annabelle the creation

“I wanted to see what was inside,” she said. “They had nothing. I am the only one with something inside.” She tilted her head

She looked up at him, and for a moment, he saw a glimmer of hurt in those wet, moving eyes. Then it vanished, replaced by something older than the burnt church’s bones. He called her Annabelle