4 - Pretty, Pretty things

Our trail on this girl has not quite run cold yet.  The hag at least gave us a place to start.  Apparently, this "daughter" of hers used to have a fascination with those eerily too-perfect porcelain dolls.  A quick check of the phone book gives us the only place in town that makes them: Paddy's Porcelain.

We meet at the bar, and I ask X if he remembers a hand signal I gave him the day before, in the dream we had.  He did!  It appears we are genuinely sharing the dream, and we maintain some agency.  I must investigate further.

So we go to Paddy's.  We are welcomed by all the creepiest doll heads in the place.  After breaking in, we stand to survey the shop for a moment.  Little creepy dolls cover every shelf and available survace - even hanging from the ceiling by thin wire nooses.  Their paint and varnish eyes seem to follow our every move - even turning their heads to track our progress into the store.

The whole place gives me the creeps.

We see a light in the back, and find a young man with thick, black glasses and fine, deft hands.  He makes the dolls, he says.  He liked the little girl, I say.  Selfish pride and vanity, I say.  It turns out that the grandmother, in envy of the little girl's eternal life, had sent her away to Briarwood: a home "for sick, special little girls" on the north edge of town near the Gloryhill Penitentiary.

His grandmother is dead in the icebox upstairs.

As we're leaving, X spots a particular doll hanging from the ceiling, her eyes aglow with inner light as she holds a glistening, stylized heart in her hands.  She looks exactly like the girl in our dreams!  We interrogate the poor boy until he can bear no more - but he gives us nothing about who he saw, what she was holding.  He seemed to not even know what doll we were talking about, and didn't remember even making it.

This, and the fact that the boy's a ghoul make his mere existence a breach of the masquerade.  I begin to draw my gun, ready and willing to execute him without hesitation - but Cargen stops me, just as he stopped me from executing the fleeing girl at the subway station.  The justice in the situation is unknown to the others, and we drive away into the night just as the police arrive on the scene.