Dead Silence

Jamie Ashen and his wife Lisa receive an anonymous package at their apartment: a ventriloquist dummy named Billy, blank-eyed and grinning, with no explanation of who sent it. Jamie goes out for food. When he returns, Lisa is dead — her tongue torn out at the root, her face frozen in an expression of pure terror. Detective Jim Lipton arrives, suspects Jamie, and makes no secret of it.

Jamie travels to Ravens Fair, the decaying river town he left behind, to bury Lisa and look for answers. The town is perpetually overcast, half-empty, carrying the particular quiet of a place that has been afraid for a long time. The local funeral director, Henry Walker, speaks the name Mary Shaw with practiced unease and recites the rhyme that has been passed down through generations: beware her stare, she had no children only dolls, and if you see her in your dreams, don't ever, ever scream.

The legend: Mary Shaw was Ravens Fair's most celebrated entertainer in her time, a ventriloquist whose act was unnervingly convincing — her dummies moved like things that had their own opinions. When a boy named Michael Ashen publicly accused her of making another child disappear, the townspeople turned on her. They killed her, cut out her tongue as punishment for her ventriloquism, and buried her with all her dolls. Before she died, she swore revenge on every Ashen bloodline.

Jamie digs into the history and finds a pattern: members of his family and anyone connected to them have been dying for decades, each corpse found with the tongue removed. The dolls are the key — Mary Shaw's collection is massive, and each one seems connected to a victim. She can move through them, see through them, use them as instruments. The curse is specific: she comes for those who scream in fear. Silence is the only protection, which makes it nearly impossible to survive.

Jamie visits his estranged father Edward, who is wheelchair-bound and nearly catatonic in the family estate, tended to by his young wife Ella. The reunion is cold. Edward seems hollowed out, barely present. Ella is warm and attentive in an unsettling way — too smooth, too composed, slightly off in ways that are hard to articulate. Something in the house feels performative.