A Gift

This terrible story happened to a good friend of mine. He married young (at 19) to a girl he'd loved since fifth grade. Their relationship had everything typical of young couples, and nothing cast a shadow over it more than the girl's mother. However, I would visit them occasionally, and she seemed like a rather nice woman to me.

Soon, my friend and his wife decided to have a child—that's where it all started. For some reason, his mother-in-law was strongly opposed, but despite this, they eventually gave birth to a healthy baby boy. He and his mother-in-law have practically stopped communicating since then; the baby grew quickly, was rarely sick, and wasn't a whiner.

Then one day, the young family's mother-in-law came to visit, said they'd had enough of fighting, it was time to make peace, and as a sign of reconciliation, she gave the child a doll. From then on, it was as if the baby had changed—he began to waste away, cry, almost stopped eating, and barely slept at night. Sometimes, his friend would wake up at night to a rustling sound—each time thinking it was the baby coming toward them, but when he got up, no one was in the room.

Soon, his friend was sent on a business trip, and he was gone for several weeks. A week later, he received a call informing him that the baby and his mother-in-law were dead, and his wife was in pretrial detention. At first, he didn't believe it, but then he rushed home.

During a meeting with his wife, she told him that when she went to check on the baby in his room, he was dead, and the doll was clutching his neck. She realized who was behind this—after all, her mother, when her daughter was little, had practiced witchcraft. Realizing this, the girl rushed to her mother's house...

The outcome of this story is tragic: two are in the cemetery, one is in prison, and my friend is in a psychiatric hospital (though he's already recovering, and I visit him regularly), and only the doll still remains in that apartment...