Charlotte hated it when people smiled at her. The pity filled smiles from adults after her parents had died.

*Chop*

The leering grins of teasing children, in the school and the orphanage.

*Chop*

The sweet, caring grins of those teens as they warned her not to tell.

*Chop*

The friendly, inviting smiles of the press as they dogged her every step, trying to get a few words from her.

*Chop*

The worry filled smiles when she told someone about her recurring nightmares.

*Chop*

The friendly smile of Maria, the girl who had tried to burn her doll, the girl she’d had to pretend to be friends with.

*Chop*

Charlotte stood, her spring green dress and blue shrug now coated in blood from Maria’s body as she’d hacked it apart with the orphanage burning before her. The screams of pain and terror had stopped, replaced by sirens and the sound of crackling wood. She put the knife back in her denim bag and ran off. There was a spot in the woods outside of town she could hide, and then she could go back to helping people.

As she ran, a part of her wondered what had led her to her decision. Why had she killed that girl? Wasn’t that a bit extreme?

Then she thought about all the times the other children had teased and bullied her, how the girl had thrown the only thing Charlotte had left of her past into a fire. Her fists clenched as she remembered her purpose. She was going to help people, by getting rid of the people that would hurt them. If there were no people that hurt, then there wouldn’t be any hurting from anyone, and everyone could be happy.

Her little black dress shoes pounded on asphalt and she clutched her doll for strength, whose face she had painted on her own. They were one and the same after all, both fighting to save people that were hurting by killing the people that hurt them. Charlotte felt proud to share a name and a face with her doll, with its dark eyes and mouth, white face, red cheeks, and purple tears.

She was almost there; she could see the bend in the road that would lead her to the special hiding place. A siren came from behind her, and she stopped to look as an officer approached her. He had a kind face that was set in a business-like frown.

“What’re you doing out here all alone this late at night?” She didn’t stop to answer, just ran into the woods right there. She could hear the cop shout, talk into his radio, then come barreling after her, cursing all the way.

She didn’t know where she was. This wasn’t where her hiding place was, and she’d have to lose the policeman before she could double back and keep on her original route. She ducked and dodged branches she could barely see in the dim light. A scream of pain cut the air some distance behind her.

She stopped. That had come from the policeman, but why? Creeping back the way she’d come, Charlotte found him, face down in the dirt with a kitchen knife in his back. She went to grab it, and felt a strange sensation run down her spine as she pulled the bloody blade from the body, like she was being watched. She turned as a branch snapped and saw a boy, no older than seventeen, not ten feet away.

He was pale, ashen really. His eyes were wide open and seemed tinted with madness in the filtered moonlight. His smile was too wide, and it seemed carved into his face. Charlotte wished he would move, blink, anything to let her know this was a person. But when he did, it was even worse, like a mannequin. Something that shouldn’t have been able to move, but did anyways. She turned and ran.

The boy was behind her, running, shouting for her to give him his knife back. She dodged to the side of a tree stump and heard a whistle of cut air as a blade whisked past her ear. Another boy, maybe a year younger than the first, now had his hatchet buried in a nearby tree. The older boy yelled for the younger one to grab her, and she was off again.

She threw the scary teen’s knife to one side, and heard him swerve off, but the other one, the one with the hatchet, still came after her. She saw a pine and dove into its lowest branches. Not low enough by far, but she scrambled upwards until she was near thirty feet off the ground, with room above her to spare should the boys start climbing.

They circled below, talking amongst themselves as they wondered how to get to her. She was scared and reached into her bag. She dug around until she once again grabbed her doll’s arm. She would get out of this. She would get out of this mess and go help other people. She took a deep breath, and something wrapped itself around her, pinning her legs together, her arms to her sides, and it pushed through her mouth and wrapped her head. She felt herself being lifted off the branch as she struggled, before doing the only thing she could do.

She bit hard, desperate to escape. Vile liquid flowed into her mouth, and she swallowed it like she had the gasoline. Harder, and she could feel a piece begin to tear away. The black liquid flowed down her arms, into her bag, and drinking it was making her lightheaded. One last press, and the piece broke off. As with the liquid, she swallowed it without thought as she fell to the ground.

She hit her head on a rock and felt warm liquid trickle down the side of her face as she lay there, unable to move, looking up at the two boys and something she recognized. Her dream monster towered over her and the boys in its black suit, staring down at her with no face. But her sight soon faded from her.

She was still clutching her doll, now soaked in whatever she had drunk. She didn’t want to die here, clutching her doll in fear like she had for a year now. She would not die here. That, she swore.

It had been a month since the orphanage burned, a month since that little girl had run into the woods. Michael and his friends had thought the only evidence of their crime dead and gone. Charlotte was only an eight-year-old girl; she couldn’t have survived more than a few days alone.

But then they’d found Marcus, dead in his own home. The three boys had been having a sleepover, to plan a robbery on the town’s gas station. Jackson had taken the couch in the basement, with Michael and Todd just upstairs. Whatever had killed him had to go by the other two boys first. And the way he’d died…

The police were at a loss: Who would want to kill these upstanding citizens, who had saved Charlotte Jackson’s life when some sickos had forced her to drink gasoline? And in such a horrible fashion? Michael could only think of one person, but she had to be dead. Besides, there was no way Charlotte could do something that horrible.

Even after she had been released from the hospital, Charlotte had been on constant medical watch. Michael had to teach her a lesson for trespassing on his gang’s turf, after all. There was no way she was strong enough to rip a squirrel limb from limb, let alone someone who outweighed her twice over.

But when Todd died the same way, Michael knew. It had to be her. He wasn’t sure how, but Charlotte was killing them off, one by one. The police had ordered him to stay home with his family for his own safety. There was a police car parked in front of his house 24/7, and people at the back of the house too.

He thought nothing of the doll that arrived in the mail for him. The police double checked it to make certain it was safe, but nothing was weird about it except its face. It had a big, black smile, with red lips and cheeks, purple tears running down its face, pitch-black eyes that always seemed to be looking at him, and body stained a black too deep to be natural. A letter that came with the doll said it was from an admirer, so he kept it. He had to keep up the appearance of a good person, otherwise he would have thrown it away without a second thought. He almost did anyway, the thing was so damned creepy.

For two days, the doll creeped him out, especially when it seemed to follow him through the house. Someone, probably his mom, had to have been moving it around to spook him. That hope died the second night the doll was in the house.

He woke to find black and white tentacles wrapped around his ankles and wrists, a gag in his mouth, and a little girl in front of him. She had black hair, and a face that looked almost exactly like his doll, which was now sitting on her shoulder. The tentacles holding him seemed to stem from her back, and Charlotte smiled a little wider as she saw he was awake.

“It’s so good to see you again, old friend,” she purred, stepping closer to him. “Did you like spending time with my doll? She liked spending time with you, she says. She told me all about how much fun it was to scare you. Said you almost threw her away at first.”

To his utter horror, the doll on Charlotte’s shoulder moved its head to stare him dead in the face. Michael tried to scream for help, but the gag stopped his vain attempts. Charlotte clicked her tongue.

“Now, now, we can’t let you yell. There are people sleeping right now, and you wouldn’t want to wake them, would you? A good person wouldn’t do that. But you never were a particularly good person, now, were you?” Michael started trying to free himself, but the tentacles held him fast. He was lowered to eye level with Charlotte.

“Do you know how much it hurt, to swallow all that gasoline? How much it burned? I felt like I was on fire. I tried to beg you to stop, but you wouldn’t. So now, I won’t either.” And Michael’s arm was ripped off, dropped to the floor with a wet thud as blood ran from his shoulder.

Michael screamed into the gag as pain blinded him. Oh, dear Lord, it hurt. It hurt worse than hurting. There was so much pain where his shoulder was, and then nothing below that. He vomited, almost choking on it when it couldn’t get through the gag.

The free tentacle wrapped his torso, and the other three quickly went about ripping the rest of his limbs off. He was delirious from pain and blood loss as he looked up to see Charlotte standing right in front of him. Her black smile was wide as she and her doll stared at him in sadistic glee.

“Don’t worry, Michael. I will put you back together.” A tentacle wrapped around his neck, and Michael felt a pulling sensation at the base that quickly became painful. And then, blessedly, everything stopped.

Charlotte quickly grabbed the sewing kit from her bag and set to work sewing Michael back together, limb by bloody limb. Finally, his head went on, and she sewed his mouth into a smile. Happy with her work, she placed a tape recorder on Michael’s still chest. She’d recorded her testimony on it. She wanted to make certain no one thought these boys died as her heroes. That would be a revenge sweeter than just their death. Everyone would know what they’d done to her.

As she left the room, she made a beckoning motion with her hand. A ball of bright blue light hovered through Michael’s closed lips and into her hand. She popped the ball into her mouth and savored all the memories, the feelings, the beliefs, the hopes, the dreams. Michael’s soul was delicious, something she’d never be able to taste ever again. She hoped she never tasted anything sweeter. Well, her next meal would be even more exquisite, she knew.

As she walked back into the woods, Charlotte thought on how lucky she’d been to meet her dream monster. If she hadn’t drank its blood and eaten a piece of it, she would be dead and unable to help people. If its blood hadn’t soaked her doll, it would not be riding her shoulder now, whispering in her ear. She smiled as she and her doll began to plan how to take their next victim.

The three town heroes were pronounced dead, and a recording of Charlotte Jackson’s recollection of her attack some seven months earlier released to the public. Only family appeared at the boys’ funerals. Some thought they did not even deserve to have even so much as their family mourn them, for what they’d done to Charlotte.

Despite their ill deeds, the boys had still been murdered. The police presumed a serial killer, based on how similar their deaths were. The recorder had held the fingerprints of Charlotte Jackson, and though she had been presumed dead after the orphanage fire, her body had not been recovered and she was the only person at the boys’ times of death that would have hated them enough to kill them so cruelly.

The theory was cemented a few days after Michael’s death, when Kevin Ford, who had run over Charlotte’s parents a little over a year ago, was found dead in the same manner. The only difference was a message left at the scene, saying, “The Nightmarrione doesn’t forgive.”

There were several deaths over the next few months, people that, after death, were proclaimed to be abusers, rapists, bullies. All that died were ripped limb from limb and then sewn back together, often found hanging from the ceiling like a puppet. Every one had the message, “The Nightmarrione doesn’t forgive,” written somewhere in the room. The only suspect was the young girl named Charlotte Jackson, but no one ever saw her, and no one could find where she went.

Rumors started circling in schools, stories being twisted, exaggerated, downplayed, mocked. But everyone was afraid. One high-school victim had kept a diary, and police found a detail that may have been one of the Nightmarrione’s calling cards, and ways of deciding targets.

The girl kept a record of bullying a boy a few years younger than her. Three days before her death, she mentioned having caught sight of a pale girl with black lips and eyes, bright red cheeks, and purple tears, who had been smiling at her. The next day, she had received a doll that she described as horrifying. She had tried to throw it away, then burn it, but it always reappeared on her windowsill, seeming to stare at her.

She wondered if it might have been some sign, and so had apologized to the boy. He had laughed at her request for forgiveness and walked away. That had been the day of her death.

When the story hit the news, a popular narrative for the rumor arose. The police tried to shut it down, to prevent the spread of fear, but it was too widespread by that point. Pretty soon, the news and rumor were statewide.

“Do not hurt others,” the rumor went. “If you do, she will come for you. She will rip you apart and sew you back together to be her puppet. But, if you are lucky enough to see a girl that looks too much like a doll to be alive and too alive to be a doll, take the warning and seek forgiveness from those you have wronged.

“If you see her doll, beg for forgiveness from whoever you have hurt. Your life depends on it. If you are forgiven, the doll will leave you to go find its master again. But, if it doesn’t, there is no hope.

“It does not matter what you have done. She makes no distinctions between murderers and bullies. She was never shown mercy, so she will show none to you when she comes. So don’t harm anyone if you are not harmed first, because she sees, she knows, and the Nightmarrione doesn’t forgive.”