There are stories that survive because no one is foolish enough to test them. This is one of them.
Dollfea is nothing more than a doll stitched together from dried straw, discarded clothes, and coarse burlap twine. It usually stands at the edge of a cornfield, where the road dissolves into darkness.
The rule in the village is simple.
If you walk past the field and hear straw rustling on a windless night, Dollfea has turned its head toward you.
No one ever explains what happens next.
Liorana is walking home through an ordinary neighborhood in an ordinary city. It's just after eleven, and the streets are almost empty. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barks once.
Then the silence settles in.
That's when she feels it.
The unmistakable sensation of being watched.
She stops.
When she turns around, a figure is standing about thirty feet behind her.
She can't make out its face. Only its outline—tall, unnaturally thin, its shoulders slightly raised as though invisible strings are holding it upright. Its head is tilted to one side.
Listening.
Waiting.
It doesn't move.
It doesn't even seem to breathe.
"It's just a man," she tells herself. "Someone drunk. Someone who's lost."
The lie comforts her for only a second.
She has felt that stare before.
As a child, she used to wake in the middle of the night and look into the backyard. There was always a shadow standing between the trees.
Except there were no trees.
That impossible memory has followed her for years, carrying with it the words her grandfather whispered long before she was old enough to understand them.
"Everything that belongs to the dark is watching you."
"And everything that belongs to the dark wants your light."
Back then, she'd assumed he was talking about boys, bad decisions, drinking, the ordinary dangers adults warned children about.
He wasn't.
He was talking about the moment you look back.
The moment curiosity overrules instinct.
The moment you choose to see instead of run.
Curiosity is a beautiful thing in daylight.
At night, it's a door that opens only one way.
Liorana keeps walking. She cuts through side streets, changes direction twice, even crosses the avenue to convince herself she's imagining it.
Each time she looks back, the figure is still there.
Always the same distance away.
Always perfectly still.
Watching.
As though it has nowhere else to be.
Then, for the first time, she forces herself not to look again.
She fixes her eyes on the sidewalk ahead and keeps walking.
Behind her, the silence breaks.
A soft rustle.
Dry straw brushing against dry straw.
There isn't a cornfield for miles.