His Cemetery Doll (18 page)

Conall's eyes flew wide, and he redoubled his efforts to wrench free of the vines. Shyla, unable to hide her fear, lunged forward to try and offer help.

Father Frederick snatched her by the arm and dragged her beside him. Conall could see the stark white tension of his knuckles standing out as he dug fingers into her flesh.

"Goodbye, Conall," Frederick sneered. With one vicious thrust of his foot, he broke the last support of floorboards under Conall's body, and the vines immediately constricted the gravekeeper down into the earth.

"Try not to worry too much. Esther is going to be with her family again. The Little Sisters and I will take care of everything. Soon, she'll be exactly like her mother: immortal...and
perfect,
forever."

Conall roared in protest, thrashing wildly, straining even though the thorns dug deeper, stinging, burning him deep in his veins.

As he continued to struggle, they started to pull him down...

Down...

The last thing he saw was Shyla's terrified expression, as the graveyard soil devoured him.

U
nderground. Buried, in his own graveyard.

Buried...
alive.

Conall fought to move, but movement proved practically impossible. His leg screamed with pain; so did his neck, and his limbs where thorns had pierced through clothing and into flesh.

His mind became a riot. How could
any
of this be happening?

He has Shyla. I don't understand why, but he has her. He's taking her away.

Fred had been stationed in a secret war on the occult. Somewhere, though...somehow, he'd not
rooted out
the dark magicians of Hitler's orders but adopted them,
converted to
their ways. Taken on their search for the secrets of dark power and imaginings.

I wanted to perfect immortality.

If Asya—half-mad, imprisoned, and full of voiceless, wailing sorrow—stood as Fred's idea of perfection...

He has
Shyla!

He would make Con's daughter into his next living, porcelain doll.

Trap her...as he had trapped her mother.

Con thrashed harder, but it merely brought deeper agony as reward. He tried to scream, but dirt filled his mouth. Quickly his rage became blind terror: he would soon be unable to breathe.

It pressed down on him. His graveyard. The earth he'd tended. The roots he'd grown. The soil and the trees and the dead embraced him, and he choked on the stark white knowledge he would
die
like this.

Still, none of it broke him away from that one singular thought.

He
has
Shyla!

His chest tightened, burning for air. He scraped and scrabbled in the blackness, prying at the dirt, but he succeeded only in bloodying his fingers.

Finally, exhausting his air, Conall gave a choked, agonizing sob.

Shyla...my girl...my little girl...

His mind filled with pictures of her. The tiny baby he'd found tucked in the crevice of the rock; the beautiful cherub of a girl she'd been as they celebrated her early birthdays and Christmases. The days when he would find her on the back porch engrossed in a new book; the sight of her sitting on one of the gravestones, conscientiously swinging her feet and never letting them accidentally hit the gray surface. He clenched his teeth against the unbearable weight of sorrow rushing down on him.

Not Shyla...please, Fred. You can't.

Not my Shyla.

Something slithered around his arm. The vines, twisting tighter, pulling him down.

Except...no thorns?

Another movement around his other arm. Still no grinding needles.

He might have been hallucinating. His lungs screamed and his head pounded, so why trust a desperate mind? Winding coils constricted, though, and a sound reached his ears.

Digging?

Yes. Hands at the earth. Furious scrabbling in small, tiny movements. The roots—or whatever they were—tugged at him, drawing him up, out—

Light. He saw the first light of the surface again. The white hands; jointed fingers. He caught a glimpse of his cemetery doll's cracked mask—

Conall heaved in an agonizing gulp of air, finally. Dizziness swallowed him then, plunging him into another, safer darkness.

***

N
ight had fallen when Conall finally resurfaced from fevered, restless dreams. When he opened his eyes, he beheld the blue ceiling of his own room. The tender weight of his doll nestled against him, cool to the touch. He tilted his face toward the hint of snow and evergreens.

Ribbons—dirtied and some a little ragged—still twined around his arms and even around his torso. Those had been the things tugging at him in the ground, then. They yet clutched him, as though she remained afraid to let go.

Conall groaned. He still felt the dull, stinging ache of the thorns where they'd pierced him. An ugly heat throbbed beneath his flesh.

His leg would be hurting for days after the abuse as well. He shut his eyes with a weary sense of defeat. How could he go after Father Frederick now?

Asya lay motionless beside him. The marionette with cut strings. Before falling dormant, she'd evidently tucked herself up as close as she could to him, curling into a tight ball.

She looks like Shyla
.
When Shyla was little...curling up next to me when she had a nightmare.

Immediately, he recalled the expression of fear on Shyla's face when Fred had grabbed her hours ago. Conall clenched his fist, grinding his teeth on the urge to scream with frustration. Her eyes—the helpless
panic—

"Asya," he whispered, bending to whisper into the soft curtain of her hair. He had no way of knowing if she remained dormant or if she could hear him begging. "Please...you have to tell me...
what
did he do?"

For several moments, the doll remained lifeless. A heap of silent porcelain parts. He'd decided to slip away from her and rise—find
some
way to get to Fred—when the ribbons stirred, and Asya lifted her head. She didn't turn her face toward him, but he had the sense she peered at him from the corner of her unseen eyes.

"Please," he beseeched her. "Please, tell me."

She glanced away in a childlike gesture of shame. Presently, the last of the ribbons unwound from his body, and she rolled to climb atop him, straddling his flat belly.

Conall stared as, very, very slowly, the ribbons loosened from around her body. They fell away in graceful, sensual loops, revealing first her hips and belly, gradually bearing more of her flawless white flesh up, and up. As he watched, her ivory skin began to flicker and crack—it almost appeared to be a trick of the light, like a candle flame cast strange shadows all over her. He had no candle in the room, though...no light at all. The light came from
her.

At first, he didn't understand what it meant. Each small glimpse showed him lines and contours he couldn't reconcile. Then, after several moments, he started to understand. She showed him
scars.

Surgical scars. Heavy stitches.
Dissection.
It came to him in a patchwork image, hidden under the beautiful veneer of ceramic perfection.

The doll,
Fred had said.
I think she's my favorite work. One of my most beautiful creations.

Wouldn't you agree she's perfect, Conall?

He lifted a hand to a spot on the soft round of her stomach. Under his fingertips, he watched the image of her skin flicker from flawless white to bruised, ugly gray, criss-crossed with sutures. No detectable change to his touch. Utter horror, however, unfolded in his mind.

"This," he said, running a thumb over the spot. "This...is where your...your..."

No change in the doll's expression. She didn't
have
to give any response: Conall recognized the surgery which must have resulted in these wounds.

"Christ," he said. "The man's a
priest.
A fucking
priest.
And he did this to you?"

She tilted her head to the side. Then she lifted her chin up, exposing her throat. The ribbons adorning it like a lovely choker remained still. Conall had never seen
those
silvery-gray strips fall loose. Even when Asya had allowed him finally to see her eyes...the ribbons around her throat had never come away. They wrapped tight around the smooth pillar of her ivory throat.

Conall reached up and tugged at the silk. At first, they held fast—if Asya had been flesh still, he imagined the ties would be painful, perhaps strangling. Finally, he found purchase. It took stubborn strength to pry them away, but then he saw it. Underneath the wrappings, Asya wore a
real
choker.

No,
he thought.
A collar.

The pendant of Saint Margaret.

Conall sat up, wincing but ignoring the ache. He reached out to touch the flat bronze disc with the image of the saint embossed upon it.

"This is the same one he gave to Shyla."

Not exactly. On Asya's pendant—Asya's
collar
—a cultish symbol had been hastily engraved over the image of the saint. Conall had little knowledge of faith or of the occult, but he could recognize the jaunty, hieroglyphic nature of the mark. The lines of it appeared rusty too, dark with some sort of—

His lips parted.

"He used...your blood?"

The doll nodded.

"It
is
a curse, then," he murmured. "He cursed you into this form?"

She bowed her head, and he felt a subtle quiver shake her pristine form. As though she cried, trembling with little, silent sobs.

"You never meant to hurt Shyla," he said. "When you lunged...I thought you wanted to...to
do
something to her, to attack her. But you wanted to get at the pendant he'd given her, didn't you?"

Another nod. This time the gesture turned into a gentle nuzzle as she leaned forward to touch his cheek with her own.

"It's why you threw it into the fire."

He wrapped one arm around her and held her close. Her trembling grew worse, in a sharp, hitching sort of way. When he held her away from him, bloody tracks ran from under her blindfold, and when he carefully nudged the tight mask of ribbons away, she let him. He beheld those beautiful parti-colored eyes,
real
eyes, reddened with tears.

In one hand he still fingered the flat pendant of Saint Margaret. Fred had always recounted Margaret as patron saint of the dying. As with most saints, of course, Margaret held multiple meanings for parishioners, and she also stood as the saint of pregnant women. Childbirth. The downtrodden and the outcast. Fred, though...Fred had
always
evoked her as Saint of the Dying.

The Saint of Death.

"How did he do this to you?" Conall asked again, running one thumb across the cracked lines of her cheek.

I wanted to perfect immortality.

Immortality...through death?

Conall's frown turned into a low, angry sneer. He closed his fingers around the pendant and its ugly defacement, and gripping hard, he yanked it from the collar around Asya's throat.

As soon as the chain linking the pendant snapped, Asya jerked. Her lips parted enough for her to draw in a shocked, somewhat pained gasp, and her fingers dug into the flesh of his arms. Soon, the tension in her passed, though, and she met his gaze. Tender surprise shone in her eyes.

"There," he said. "Now you don't belong to his twisted version of a Saint anymore."

Asya tilted her head. Her expression wavered: awe, then sorrow; confusion, then relief. Finally she collapsed against his chest, curling up to him, lacing her arms behind his neck and pressing close.

Hiding with him, from a nightmare which had held her too, too long.

"Show me," he whispered in her ear. He stroked her hair, cradling her to him. "Show me what happened to you, Asya."

The ribbons moved, slithering around him. They laced up his arms, around his throat and up, threading in his hair. They didn't tighten, didn't threaten to choke him: they settled close to him, gently caressing his skin.

The silvery mist rose up once more—though it might have risen only in his mind. It kissed his skin, spreading cool, sweet relief over his aches and wounds. As her ribbons gentled him and her hands caressed his rough, unshaven cheeks, Conall found himself falling once more into his cemetery doll's lonesome memories.

Her first thoughts came scathed with heat and smoke. Details defied his grasp, but Conall understood the scent of sulfur and choking dust. She'd been in one of the bombings.
Directly.
Asya's memory filled the room around them in shadows of debris, flickering light, and the muffled cries of other nearby victims.

"This is when you were hit," he murmured. Eyes somber, locked on his, she nodded.

"Yes...the home my captain kept for me. Destroyed."

Her echoing whisper carried the sound of time and memory.

The doll's voice faded, allowing Con to hear the voice of Asya, her living voice from before Fred's evil manipulations. He saw beneath the spectre's mask the face of the unspoiled ballerina, stark with fright as she shouted down on him. He was the Captain once more, in her reenactment. And the Captain was dead.

"When he died, I had no one to turn to. He had not told his family of me. I knew no one else in this country. All our possessions, destroyed...any money I might have had, out of my reach because of the war. My baby, already on the way."

Her hands fell to his, and she guided them to her belly as though to underscore the last. As his palms caressed the smooth, flat plane of her abdomen, she showed him scenes of tenderness, and courage brought on by the promise within the child. Trailworn Asya, seeking temporary refuge in boarding houses...sitting in humble rooms after a day of work to pay for her stay. She spoke to the baby, smiled for it, and drew out the one possession she still had—a tiny music box, with a delicate porcelain ballerina turning in graceful pirouette—to fall asleep while it played them both a lullaby.