"Okay, squirt, it's time to go to bed," Jack says, ruffling the young girl's hair affectionately. She giggles, burrowing into the teen's side.
"Come on, Jackie, just one more movie?" Morgan says, looking up at him with the puppy dog eyes that she knows is his weak spot.
But Jack doesn't budge. She's used them way too many times on him tonight, and he's not going to let it happen again. It's the one downside to babysitting Kim's younger sister; she pulls out those eyes and gets whatever she wants… but not this time. "Nuh-uh, no more movies. You gotta be tired by now, aren't you?"
"No!" the little girl protests, completely contradicting her own point by releasing a loud yawn.
"Yeah, yeah," Jack responds. He decides to go with a compromise. "How about this; you go to bed now, and we can watch a movie after breakfast tomorrow?"
"Okay!" Morgan chirps, her disappointment immediately disappearing. She promptly gets up from the couch and runs to the bathroom. He can hear the sounds of her turning on the water and quickly brushing her teeth (not spending as much time as she should have) and then running off to her bed room. Jack starts to relax, only to leap up when he hears the girl scream.
He runs to her room, a giant list of not-good possibilities running through his head. Nothing could have prepared him for what he sees.
A giant clown doll.
After shoving down his own urge to scream, he scoops up the petrified girl and carries her out of the room.
"Momma s-said… she got me a n-new doll, b-but… th-that's not…"
"Shh, it's alright," he says, patting her head and hoping to calm her down. She's never gotten this upset around him before, and he doesn't know how to handle it. He sits down with her around the corner from her room. After she quiets a bit, she quietly announces that she wants ice cream, so he lets her go while peeking back around the corner.
The moonlight streaming in through the window casts an eerie light on the life-size doll. But, that's all it is. A doll. (That doesn't make it any less terrifying. The memories are already flooding back…)
He decides to call Kim, hoping he's not interrupting her cheerleading session.
"Hello?" Jack can hear someone calling her name in the background, and feels guilty, before realizing that she probably wouldn't pick up the phone if she was doing something important.
"Hey, Kim. Um, Morgan's pretty freaked out right now… she's getting ice cream, but how do I calm her down?"
"What? What do you mean by freaked out? You didn't let her watch some scary movie, did you?"
"No, of course not. That doll in her room just really scared her."
"What doll?"
"The life-size clown doll that I really would have appreciated knowing about beforehand."
"Jack, what are you talking about? There's no life-size clown doll in Morgan's room."
"Uh, what? No, there is," he says, peeking back in to her room. "Right at the foot of her…"
The clown is gone.