The Houseguest

On a Thursday evening five days before Halloween, Julia Ennis walked into her parents’ house and found a man-sized doll sitting at the kitchen table.

She yelped and dropped the book she’d been carrying. It sounded like a thunderclap in the empty house.

They stared at each other, a woman who hadn’t played with dolls in 20 years, and this lifeless pale thing dressed like a car salesman, in a pair of khaki slacks and a green polo shirt.

The doll was leaned forward, its arms were folded across the table top, as if it were listening to a very interesting story. It had grayish skin, like someone had plastered papier-mache over a mannequin.

There was a tag around its wrist. It showed a company logo, the word “TALOS” next to a small black stick figure.

Her phone chimed. Her mom.

“In Chicago! Boarding connecting flight now!”

Julia started typing:

“Hey, what’s this thing in the kitchen?”

Mom: ?????

Then a few minutes later:

“Oh, just something dad bought for home security. To make ppl think someone is home when we go out. Flight to Mexico is boarding. Phones off. CU soon.”

Julia wrote back:

“Security? This thing is freaky!”

A few minutes went by, Julia staring at her phone, the Talos doll staring at her, with no response text.

Frustrated, she punched the call button. It went straight to voicemail.

She knew from past housesitting experiences that Sharon and Rick Ennis were not fond of using their phones while traveling. Her mom had likely shut hers off before boarding.

Julia stood over the doll, hands poised to lift it from its seat.

I’ll move it, she thought. I can stick it in the basement, or put him out in the garage until they get home.

She began to grip the doll under its armpits, but then pulled away. There was something unappealing about putting her hands on this thing.

She considered throwing a blanket over it, but the thought of spending the better part of a week with a shrouded figure was almost as bad as the thought of touching the doll.

Also, the name “Talos” nagged at her, like something stuck in her teeth. But she decided to let it go for the moment.

It was just six days. She’d get in touch with her parents when they landed in Mexico and figure out what to do from there.

But really, her options were limited. With no job, unemployment benefits exhausted and freelance checks still in the mail, she couldn’t afford a hotel. She’d have to live with the doll, at least for a little while.

Anyway, she didn’t have to spend much time in the kitchen. Her parents had left her money (two hundred dollars). She could eat at the little cafe down the road and order takeout.

This wouldn’t be a relaxing break, but it would at least be a change of scenery. She could worry about bills in her childhood bedroom in the suburbs instead of worrying about bills in her cramped city apartment.

And if things didn’t turn around soon, then —

You’ll have to move back home, an imp in the back of her mind whispered

— well, she didn’t like to think about that.

Julia headed upstairs to her old bedroom, remembering halfway up the steps that it wasn’t her old bedroom anymore. Her mom had turned it into a home office a few years back.

“You could always use our bed,” her mother had said, but that felt weird. She’d go with the guest room this week.

It would be her bedroom and her workspace. Her mom’s office was too cluttered, and the kitchen was out of the question.

The house had changed since she’d moved out. It had different smells, different furniture.

There still were pictures of Julia, her brother Adam, their parents, but new ones had joined the fold: her brother’s wedding, her cousin holding a wizened baby, Sharon and Rick outside Buckingham Palace.

The guest room had been Adam’s until he left for college. Flowery blue wallpaper and potpourri had replaced movie posters and teenage funk.

Julia wanted fresh air, so she cracked a window. Two streets away, she saw a small group of people on the sidewalk, medics carrying a stretcher into a ramshackle house. She watched the scene for a bit, then got to work.

It was dark when she took a break for dinner. She ordered some pasta from the Italian place down the road, then checked her phone. No reply from her mom, or even a “We’ve landed!” message.

Twenty minutes later, a delivery driver from DeVito’s pulled into the driveway, and Julia went to pay.

She was taking her food to her room when she stopped short. The kitchen light was on.

Her dad kept a baseball bat near the front door “just in case.” She put down the delivery bag and grabbed the bat, creeping toward the kitchen.

The doll was in the same seat, arms in the same position. The back door was locked, but Julia checked the rest of the house. It was just her and the doll.

She sent off another text.

“I don’t want to sound like the girl in a horror movie, but this thing is really, really bothering me. I don’t understand why you bought it. Pls call/txt!”

She snapped off the kitchen light and began to head back upstairs, then stopped herself.

She found a bag of empty soda cans in the recycling bin and propped them on a chair in the entrance to the kitchen. It wasn’t the most high-tech alarm system, but if someone moved the cans, she’d hear it.

Still thinking about home security, she Googled “Talos security,” but the only thing that came up had to do with cyber security. Nothing about dolls.

But her search reminded her of where she’d heard “Talos” before. In Greek myths, Talos was a giant living statue made of bronze, charged with defending the island of Crete.

It wasn’t quite the same thing as her parents putting a creepy mannequin at the kitchen table. One more thing to ask them about.

Julia sent out a few resumes, then watched a movie. As she got ready for bed, she watched the local news.

It was the same format she remembered, the first five minutes a litany of fires and car crashes from all over northeastern Pennsylvania.

But one story caught her attention. Julia sat on the bed and watched an up-close re-enactment of the scene she had witnessed earlier that day, the medics lifting the stretcher into the shabby house a few blocks away.

“…believe the man was renovating the house when he was attacked by the insects,” the newscaster was saying. “He was pronounced dead at Werner Memorial Hospital earlier tonight.”

They showed the police chief, who had been a patrolman when Julia was a girl, talking in front of the hospital.

“At this point, it appears he broke open a nest, and was stung multiple times.”

“How many times?” someone asked off camera.

“Multiple is all I can tell you.”

Julia shuddered, thinking of all the times she’d walked past that house growing up.

The newscast moved onto national news, and Julia went back to her computer, getting in another 20 minutes of job hunting before drifting off.

She dreamed of the Talos doll towering over the neighborhood, and the buzzing of countless wings.

The phone woke her at 9 a.m. Her mother.

“I am SO sorry,” Sharon Ennis said. “Things got so hectic when we landed that I didn’t turn on my phone until just now. Is everything OK?”

Julia headed downstairs as they talked.

“I’m fine. It was just weird,” she said, “coming here and finding your ‘security system.’”

“What’s so weird?” Sharon said. “It’s just a little box on the wall.”

“Little box?”

“Yeah, by the kitchen door. It turns the lights on after dark.”

Julia froze, staring outside.

“But what about the doll?”

“What doll?” her mother asked.

A clattering noise kept Julia from answering. The soda cans fell to the floor as the doll pushed its way out of the kitchen into the living room in five quick sure-footed steps.

Julia turned and ran for the door in pajamas and socks. Her last glimpse of the doll was of its forehead breaking open. A buzzing came from within the crack.

She ran and ran, the phone in her hand, her mother’s voice saying “Honey? Honey?” three time zones away.

Julia was two blocks away from her parents’ house and still running hard when the thought came to her.

The doll hadn’t been breaking open. It had been hatching.