Leoda wondered if this should give her reason for hope. She'd been allowed to stay in the beach-house, hadn't she, close to the beloved ocean, and dangerously close to humanity. She had even made a passing acquaintance with the retired sea captain and the honeymooning couple living on either side of her, but she did nothing to deepen either into friendship, because she knew that there was, in reality, no reason for hope. She knew that this would be a short season of peace and contentment, before a final trip to her room, one she would never return from.
Try as she might, she could not conquer this melodramatic terror. It crept into her dreams and waited patiently at the edge of her consciousness, robbing her of rest at night and pleasure during the day. And she knew, deep in her soul, that behind all the morbid fantasies her mind concocted were malignant germs of truth that would sprout and grow and ultimately consume her - once she saw her room again.
She knew that at this very moment, if he had not already finished, her father was putting in place the final touches of his next "surprise". He had been seen carrying boxes in and out of her room and would not let even his usual workmen see what he was doing. This was, to her, proof positive that what he was doing was definitely wrong, possibly dangerous, possibly even unnatural.
Leoda would sometimes be possessed by the morbidity of her fear and try to imagine what her father had planned for her. She thought of the dolls he'd given her, cloth dolls with plastic faces, over-dressed porcelain dolls, dolls that did everything that any little girl could ever imagine, and some dolls that did things even she had had trouble imagining.
Would she be given a new doll? One that would be her master, possibly even, her doppelganger, to progressively possess her, and finally replace her so that her father would at last have a truly dutiful, obedient daughter? Or would she be turned into a doll herself, coated with plastic, filled with cotton, and placed on the bedroom shelf, to be brought down every evening and propped up at the table for dinner?
She thought of the music-boxes he'd given her. They all played tunes like "Brahm's Lullaby" and "Waltz of the Plowers". Some had little scenes that turned around with the music; some had tiny ballerinas who did ever-lasting pirouettes; one had a pair of ball-room dancers - a bit of false hope, there.
Would she be given a music-box that would have on its top a crystal so finely cut that its reflections would hypnotize her instantly? Or would her entire room be turned into a music-box with gears so large that she would be crushed between them as soon as she entered? Or would she one day be the ballerina at the top of the box, spinning endlessly and pointlessly to some dreary old melody?
She thought of the games he'd given her. All of them had tiny tokens that moved along paths that went nowhere and were divided into colored boxes; the tokens' movements were determined, in a terrible commentary on real life, by the numbers on dice and the writing on little cards. They might've been fun, if only she'd had someone to play them with her. Would she walk into her room one day and find herself on an endless road of colored squares, being constantly impeded by the thundering voice of Jehovah crying, "Go back ten squares!"? No, that would not be her fate - that was already her fate, and the voice of Jehovah was, in reality, her father's.
And it was during one such fatalistic meditation that she heard a knock on the beach-house door, and the door opened to let in her father, grinning with a terrible magnanimity, and saying, "Come, my child. I'm ready for you now."