Mercy
"I'm your problem now." Did I arrive on your doorstep? It's time to play.
Discovery Notes
St. Agnes Infirmary, Upstate New York Date of Containment: 1957
Warning Issued
If you choose to keep Mercy, treat her as both patient and mourner. Keep her away from children’s rooms and mirrors. Never take her to hospitals or funerals. She will follow the sound of mourning, and once she stands beside the casket, she does not leave until another name is called. If you pass her on, make sure her shawl is fastened tight and offer her a frozen washcloth to ease her fever by placing it next to her for the night. You may move her on at sunrise so she may care for another.
Last Known Account
đź“– What Mercy Hears
The doll known as Mercy was recovered from the ruins of St. Agnes Infirmary after the outbreak of the Crimson Pox—a mutated strain of measles that swept through the county in the mid-1950s. Most children perished within days. Only a handful survived—those whose parents had rushed to try the new vaccine, still experimental at the time.
Mercy belonged to a seven-year-old named Clara Wren, one of the first to succumb. Her mother said the doll had been “her nurse and her comforter,” always tucked beneath her arm, always damp with tears. When Clara’s fever finally broke, it wasn’t because she recovered—it was because she stopped breathing.
When the nurses entered the room, they found the doll sitting upright beside the bed, its porcelain cheeks mottled red as if it, too, had taken on Clara’s rash. The child’s bouquet of wildflowers—picked for a friend’s funeral the week before—was now clutched tightly in the doll’s hands, petals pressed flat and dried as bone.
After the infirmary closed, families who took Mercy home began to notice strange patterns. She’d vanish for days, only to be found beside the sickbeds of neighbors—or, more often, at funerals, her hands full of fresh blossoms that no one had placed there. Those who left her unattended for too long awoke to find small, scarlet spots blooming on their own arms, fading only when the doll was returned to her glass case.
Some say she carries what she absorbed from Clara—grief and fever, mercy and contagion, bound into one.
Never allow her near the sick, the grieving, or hospital wards. Her presence brings comfort first, fever second. If she begins to hum nursery tunes, open every window in the room and whisper:
“The fever’s broken, Mercy. The child can rest.”
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