His Cemetery Doll (14 page)

The gesture disturbed him deeply. He instantly remembered the way she'd fought to get to Shyla the night of the toppled statue—the way those delicate hands turned to grasping claws and the creature had wept in wretched desperation to get to the girl. Not like a human being...like a hungry, desperate animal.

"Don't come any closer to her," he warned his daughter. "I can't be sure she won't try and attack you."

"I don't believe she'll attack," Shyla whispered. Her eyes fixed on the doll. "She...she doesn't seem dangerous..."

"Remember how quickly she changed in the woods," he said, slowly approaching the doll from the side. She didn't even appear to notice him as he drew closer.

"I...I think she wants me to come to her."

Shyla took another step down, and a curious thing happened: the doll drew back and threw up a hand in defense.

"No?" Shyla asked her. "You don't want me to come down?"

The doll's head tilted again, and Conall recognized confusion.

Confusion? Or...apprehension?

"Do you have a name?" Shyla asked. She very, very slowly made another attempt to come down, and the doll moved back in equal measure.

"You don't have to be afraid of me."

Her words shook the apparition, visibly. The creature glanced aside, turning her face away in shame. Conall sucked in a breath as the sound of weeping rose up, seeming to come from all around the doll, in so many voices.

"You came here to see my daughter?" he asked, moving closer to her as well. She glanced up—yes, more tears on her face. A cold shiver slipped through his chest, then: they were more than simple tears. Tracks of gleaming ruby blood stained her cheeks, running into the channels of the cracks on the right side.

"You wanted to see Shyla?" he asked. The doll gave another stiff jerk of her head—something he believed might be a nod.

"But...now you
don't
want to?"

She appeared to flicker in place then, like the flame of a candle starting to gutter out. He'd never seen her defy substantiality before: there'd been no floating through walls or anything of the sort. Now, though, she briefly disappeared, and when she reappeared, she and the heady cloud of fog crossed the living room to the hearth, and she peered over a small set of photographs he'd kept there.

Photos of Shyla. One from her eighth birthday, which Alderman Trask's wife arranged for her, and Conall attended in awkward self-consciousness. One from the school, a picture of the whole class, where Shyla stood off to the left nearest the teacher. And the third, from when Shyla first arrived—a picture taken a few short days after he'd decided he would, indeed, raise her himself. Again, Mrs. Trask could be thanked for the photo: she'd snapped the shot one evening after Conall passed out holding the newborn, sleeping in a chair at the tavern with the little one in his arms.

The doll hesitated longest over this picture. As she hovered there in silence, Shyla descended the rest of the steps to stand by Conall's side.

"What's she doing?" she asked.

"I...think she's fascinated with the pictures," he murmured back. Pictures of his daughter. Pictures of her as she grew up.

A creeping sense of unwelcome
déjà vu
traveled up the back of his neck like cold fingers.

"Are you all right, ma'am?" Shyla asked, venturing a step closer.

The doll shrank back as if Shyla had come at her with a raised torch. She pressed herself to the wall, hands splayed across the bricks, face hidden against one shoulder. The sweeping sound of sorrow tripped through the room around all three of them.

"Are you crying?" Shyla said. As she stepped closer to the apparition, she slowly, carefully reached out a hand, the way one might approach a wounded animal.

"Can we help you? Can you tell us what is hurting you?"

The doll lifted her gaze to study the girl. Conall recognized the subtle change in her posture, though: she grew tense, and stone still. Her fingers on the wall curled very slightly.

The creature planned to lunge.

"Shyla, get back!" he shouted, leaping forward to pull his daughter away. As he moved, so did the doll, and she made a grab for the girl exactly as she had in the woods. She fought him, incredibly strong this time: stronger than before, and more vicious. He almost failed to restrain her. The sound of her rabid, snapping anger flooded his ears and his head, drowning his mind in senseless fear. Not
his
fear;
hers.

"What is wrong with you?" he demanded, wrestling her back to the wall. He seized her wrists and pinned them up above her head, but her focus remained on Shyla, straining, tugging senselessly at his grip as if completely unaware he held her at all.

"What's she doing?" Shyla asked in a panic. "I—I don't understand, I didn't do anything—"

"It's not you," he said through gritted teeth, wrestling with the specter's impossible power. "Go back to your room, Shyla! Close the door and don't come out until—"

The doll flickered and disappeared under from under his grasp. Conall whirled, but not quickly enough to put himself between her and Shyla. The clawing phantom dove for his daughter, gleaming fingers arced into razor claws, and she swiped them across the girl's neck.

"
No!
" he bellowed, plunging for her. Then she blinked from sight a third time, reappearing before the hearth.

As he watched, she raised one fist high—and he saw, clutched in her fingers, hung the gold chain and the pendant of Saint Margaret, Father Frederick's gift to Shyla.

In the instant he reached for his daughter and pulled her close, the doll flung the pendant into the fire.

Conall searched Shyla over, checking her throat, her collarbone, then each of her arms, frantic as he found her untouched. He grabbed her in his arms, squeezing her tight to his chest, his heart racing.

"Dad?"

He held her before him, watching her blink wide eyes in a daze.

"She...took my necklace," she said in a stunned voice.

Together, they turned to see the doll. She'd crumpled to the floor, her gray ribbons pooled lifelessly around her as she wept into her hands. Trails of bloody tears ran between her fingers.

"Why?" Conall asked in a fierce whisper. "Why would you...how could you let me think..."

Shyla lay a hand on his arm, quieting him.

"She didn't hurt me," she said. "She could have. She came so close, so fast. But...I didn't even feel her fingers."

Pulling out of his arms, she approached the doll once more.

"It's okay," she soothed. "We won't be mad. We're not mad."

No change in the doll this time. Shyla came up beside her. Conall watched with grim anxiety. To his amazement, his daughter sank down beside the creature, and the doll didn't move.

"Are you better now?" Shyla asked. She touched one porcelain arm—now Conall came closer, too, preparing to intervene again if he had to. The doll remained still. Perfectly, rigidly, inhumanly still. Except for the sound of her weeping—which bore no accompanying movement in her body—she might have been a real china doll, fallen in a heap in the corner and left there. The fog, curling around her, spread its icy cold throughout the room around them. It struck Conall then: his living room had become pale and wan, like the doll herself; like the tombstones in the cemetery below; like the musty mausoleums. He caught the hint of grave dirt, and shivered with the chill of the naked night.

"She's turning this place into a place of the dead," he muttered.

He meant to say it mostly to himself, but Shyla heard him and shot him a scolding glare. It surprised him with its heat. She returned her attention to the doll, though.

"I'm here," she whispered. As Conall crossed the last few steps to stand beside them, his daughter put out her long, skinny arms and wrapped them around the doll's neck.

"It's all right, poor thing," she cooed. "We're here now. We're here."

For a time, quiet settled on them all. Even the doll's soft tears fell into silence. The crackling of the fire became the single testament to passing time. Conall, left with nothing else to do, sank down to his knees on the doll's other side.

"You spoke to me," he said. Shyla gave him a curious glance, but he let it go for the moment, lifting a hand to the doll's drifting blonde hair.

"Can you speak to me now?" he asked.

No answer. His hand fell to one white shoulder. Though she'd never exactly been warm, except when he heated her body with the need and passion of his own, now she'd gone cold and stiff as a corpse.

A corpse with the immaculate, exquisite flesh of stone.

Shyla shook the doll. "Wake up," she said. Conall detected worry in her words.

"Come on...come on, wake up!"

The fog boiled up around her, thicker, condensing over her. It had grown so cold, it burned. Both Con and Shyla gave a little start and pulled away.

Like a fountain of smoke, it enshrouded the doll entirely. When it dissipated...

She had disappeared.

S
hyla fell asleep on his lap, too anxious to return to her bed for the night. He held her, as he had held her when she'd been a baby, and he stared into the slowly dying fire as she snored faintly away.

He couldn't sleep. He'd seen something in the doll tonight. She'd been ferocious. Blind in anger and unstoppable in her aim, regardless his height and strength advantage. He seen the way she descended so quickly into rage.

He'd seen something else too. He'd heard it in her tears and even seen it in the way she'd avoided Shyla's direct gaze. The doll
feared
Shyla.

She feared Shyla looking upon her broken mask of a face.

Every other time the doll had come to him, she'd offered pleasure and temptation. She'd offered her body to him with no explanation at all: hers had been an intention couched solely in fevered, delicious passion.

Except, thinking back, he wondered if he'd had it right.

The first time she'd come, she'd searched for him in the empty house. She'd been holding one of Shyla's belongings; she clutched a stuffed dog he had made for the girl, holding it close to her chest.

Then,
she had given herself over to him. When she had, she'd touched something inside of him, his loneliness. The doll spoke to him with her body, embracing him, allowing him, and welcoming him. She'd given him a woman's body to hold close to his own, someone to cling to.

The second time, he'd found her, collapsed by the riverbank. Had she been injured? Like a puppet with strings cut, when the doll fell to the ground she became no more than a heap of limbs, lifeless, as she'd been tonight. When he'd found her by the water, she'd fallen down in the midst of sorrow. She'd appeared to be in pain.

That time, she'd first spoken to him with words.

Are...you...afraid...

Of me?

What a strange thing to ask. Did she want him to be afraid?

Sometimes he did fear her, for what she might do to his home and to Shy. Regardless of her heat in his arms and the way she moved for him, or the way her soft, voiceless affection endeared him, she remained something alien, supernatural. She wasn't really a woman, but a strange, dark force.

Other times, he cared for nothing but her touch, her softness, the feel of her willing body meeting his. Sometimes, he imagined he could almost touch a small, glimmering—maybe guttering—soul inside her hard, fragile porcelain.

He
had begun the seduction the day by the river. She had received him, because...because he had been kind to her, perhaps?

First, an act of giving. Second, an act of thanks.

Both times...
connection.

What connection did she seek with his daughter, though? She appeared drawn to the girl, and yet in close proximity she shied away, fearful. Fearful of a twelve-year-old wisp of a thing, who could never possibly have matched the strength he'd wrestled with in his apparition tonight.

So what made her so afraid?

He pondered the doll for hours into the morning. At times he believed he'd stuck himself in time again, the darkness of the night extending on long past when it should have receded. It gave him the luxury of pensive reflection. As a result, he had no idea how close it might be to sunrise when he finally resolved to move Shyla off his lap, quietly stand, and go out into the graveyard alone.

He made his way directly to Maya's ring. Without the great angelic statue it all appeared so bare—scalped, almost. Empty. No one waited for him there, no doll, no vision of his daughter. The last wisps of ground mist crept along, but he could sense them retreating, settling into dew on the grass.

"I...I think I understand it, now."

His voice fell like a solid weight in the world of quiet night-wind and slowly shifting darkness. It emphasized the abandoned silence of the cemetery; the absence of the angel who had been its motherly guardian. His own meager presence in the shadow of its wide reach.

"You're..."

He swallowed, his throat tight.

"You're her true mother, aren't you?"

When no answer came—and he hadn't expected one anyway—Conall moved from gravestone to gravestone, peering at them as if one might hold the answer, as if he hadn't worked in this graveyard for over a decade and didn't already remember each headstone by heart. As if one of them might be hers...even though none of them were.

"You're the one who left her here under Maya's rock," he said. He was undaunted by the silence.

Who had she really been? Shyla's mother...a peasant? A refugee? What did her ghost say to him? Ribbons and grace, movements as smooth as silk or as awkward and jaunty as a puppet on strings.

"A dancer," he breathed. Pausing at one of the headstones, he stared sightlessly at the engraved name and dates. What
would
her headstone say? What had been her name?

"Something happened to you. You wouldn't have left her here if you hadn't been afraid. You're afraid now, I can sense it. And...I think...you're afraid for her, aren't you?"

He lay fingers on the cold, uneven roughness of the tombstone.