Chapter 1
Every childhood memory, every last horror I suffered over the years held one object in common: a stuffed white rabbit. The snowy toy sat on a shelf above my reach, high atop the nursery’s sprigged walls. I had many playthings I was not allowed to touch lining that shelf, the china faces of dolls with golden ringlets like mine in plenty. I expressly recall my mother telling me to only look, never touch—that like me, these dolls were expected to remain immaculate and beautiful.
There were many rules in the nursery: I was not permitted to dirty my frock or pinafore, nor was I ever allowed to muss my hair. I was to be always clean, starched, crimped, and expressionless—my overlarge blue eyes lowered in a demure position should someone address me. It was never phrased so bluntly, but even as a small child I understood that, like the jewels of my nursery, my purpose was to serve as a pretty item for others to enjoy.
Often, I was put on display.
When Mama and Papa would throw their soirees, our house transformed into a fairyland—flowers, exotic foods, extra staff bustling about our London brownstone. After dark, the magic of music would seep upstairs, above the crowds of gentlemen in their dress coats and ladies stuffed in taffeta and ribbons. My nanny would spend the entire day preparing me to be seen for five minutes.
In a fresh dress, scratchy lace at my throat and spilling from cuffs of my sleeves, she’d take my hand and lead me down the twisting staircase to where my proud parents waited.
If it were near Christmas or my birthday, all eyes on me, mother would give me a new doll to add to the collection on the shelf. Like clockwork, my arms would reach out and the new toy lain upon them. Always I would thank her for her generosity, tuck the doll carefully under my arm, and then to be sent right back upstairs.
The doll with its cold china face would be taken from me the moment I was restored to the nursery, and placed upon the shelf with its myriad counterparts. I never minded the loss of the bauble. My favorite toys were my miniature porcelain tea set and the worn rocking horse at the foot of my bed.
Though I’d smiled as expected when my mother handed me the cursed thing, truth was the dolls’ fixed expressions frightened me.
They judged me.
They had no compassion.
For if they had, why did they permit the stuffed white rabbit to nestle within their ranks?
Right there, at the end of the polished shelf, it lay in wait.
I could not tell you how long it had been up there, or who had given it to me. I could tell you nothing about it.
But I could tell you this—the dolls with their dead stares could be ignored. I could pretend they were not there. The same could not be said of that snowy furred rabbit. Black glass eyes followed me wherever I played, when I napped, dressed, did my toilette. I was always watched... and there was no getting rid of it.
One autumn morning, I had scrounged up the courage to climb atop my bureau and reach for the cursed thing. I threw it in the fire before my nanny might notice, and I watched it burn.
That afternoon, for the first time in my life, I had felt whole. I had not been afraid of the glass eyes or what they would bring when the house was asleep.
But, when I had returned to my nursery after the daily, elegant tea with my parents, my short-lived bravery died. In fact, I think a part of me died, sank right out from my toes and into the floorboards. The drip, drip, drip of my soul slipping all the way down into the musty root cellar to be lost in the dirt forever.
The rabbit was back, on the shelf innocently sitting, tucked between the dolls that looked like me. The white of its fur was pristine. There was no soot or rips. The glass eyes had not melted; they shone under the lamplight, glowering at me in malice.
One look at the thing, and I had screamed my head off. My nanny had come running, and in the end, I’d earned a whipping for my noise. Like all good children, I was to be seen and never heard.
For the hundredth time, I’d begged her to take the white rabbit away.
My pleas fell on deaf ears.
Every few years, months, weeks... I would pluck up and again try to make my move against the rabbit. I had thrown it out my window and into the street to be run over by carriages and made dirty by the dust and shuffling of strangers. Other times, I had hidden it someplace else in the house: locked it in cabinets, buried it in the attic, set it upon the bed in the surly maid’s room. The rabbit always came back.
I don’t know why. I never know the why of anything.
Night after night that rabbit would infect my little nursery with evil. Tucked into my bed, alone, the house would be soundless save the ticking of the grandfather clock downstairs: tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, louder and louder. No steam engine could have roared through the halls as furiously as that screaming timepiece.
Covers to my chin, wide blue eyes would dart to and fro. Though the noise was wretched, I longed for it to continue into eternity. I would rather feel it vibrate through my bones than face what came when silence cut that screaming racket like a knife. When evil came, that cranking cog of noise vanished, leaving the ears ringing and sense unhinged. Then I would be trapped in deafening silence, with only the sound of blood racing through my veins to warn me danger had arrived.
Silence was unsafe.
The dark was a living thing, monstrous. The thin slice of moonlight cutting through the curtains offering no succor. Casting the shape of my window’s panes against the papered wall, that scant light illuminated a single horrid thing.
If I let my gaze stray, peeked just a little to the right, I would see something that should not be.
The rabbit’s stitched head had turned, those flat glass eyes staring right at me. And then they would come.
The first time I’d seen her grace my nursery, I had been very little—so very young. The apparition was naked, slender—a young woman, her shoulders hunched forward in the shadows. Long hair, tangled and matted, hung messy to her waist. Every bit of her bared body was covered in dripping blood. Before her, she’d rub her slippery hands together, pacing back and forth, a terrible clicking coming from her throat.
One sight of her, and I had wet the bed.
Hours stretched by, her dark eyes shining behind the wet tangles of blood drenched hair, watching me, waiting. The monster’s prowl endless, I cowered in sodden covers, tracking her every step.
In my heart I knew that to place even a toe from that bed, to consider running for my nanny, would be the end
of me. I didn’t dare breathe. I knew that naked, bloody woman wanted badly to hurt me.
At daybreak, when my nanny arrived to prepare me for the day she scolded me soundly for dirtying the sheets. I was marched in my soiled nightdress before my parents, intruding upon their private breakfast so that they too might echo the castigations.
I had tried to tell them that there had been someone in my room. I tried to make them hear me. My father had scowled, his waxed mustache twitching in anger.