'Ember'

She was never on the employee log. Never mentioned in any official documentation. And yet, every generation of workers at Hollings & Doyle knew her - the doll with the faint smile and painted lashes, always perched somewhere new: atop the boiler, behind spools of thread, or watching silently from the catwalks above the looms.

Some said she had been left behind by the daughter of a seamstress who died in the mill’s earliest days, when a broken belt snapped and took half the floor with it. Others whispered she’d always been there, before the walls even went up, long before the company changed names. Whatever the truth, no one dared move her. Workers simply let her be - a silent relic of soot and silence, coated in decades of factory dust.

When the fire came in the spring of 1927, it devoured everything. Wood, steel, cloth, and glass-all buckled and blackened under the flames. But when the ash settled, Ember was still there. Not in any of her usual spots, but seated right in the center of the collapsed main floor, hair partially scorched and eyes somehow gleaming. The pale paint on her face had cracked, revealing jagged streaks beneath, the color of molten glass or dried blood. Some say that was her real skin showing through. Some say she kept the fire away from the workers. Others won’t say anything at all-they’ve seen her turn up in their dreams.

And still no one knows where she came from.