His Cemetery Doll (17 page)

How?
He was in a daze.
Has she already come? Would she hurt Shyla after all?

"Shy?" he called out in a hoarse voice, panting from the run. He threw open the door to the house hard enough it banged, making even him jump. "Shy? Where are you?"

"I'm here!"

Her answering voice came from the stairs, and he tracked it until he could see her there, solid and safe, with his own eyes. She stood halfway to the second floor, grasping the banister with white-knuckled tension.

"Dad!" she cried, and scrambled the rest of the way down to meet him. "Oh, God, I didn't know where you'd gone!"

A pang of shame struck him. For the second time, he'd disappeared without warning her, and for the sake of slaking his own needful lusts. He wrapped arms around her, biting his tongue.

"Con? Is it you, man?"

Frowning, he glanced toward the kitchen as Father Frederick appeared in the doorway, steaming mug of coffee in hand. When Conall gave his daughter a questioning gaze, Shyla returned it with a distinctly nervous shrug.

"The Father came by about half an hour ago looking for you," she mumbled. "When you weren't here, he guessed something...well, he guessed the woman took you."

"Half an hour?" Conall repeated, facing the priest. "What're you doing coming by before the sun's even risen?"

"I saw the mists rising," Fred said. His voice came out hushed and very strange. His drawn face and bleary eyes said he'd had no sleep himself. "I...believed she would be here with you."

"She did come," Conall muttered. Keeping his attention on Fred, he sidled Shyla more carefully behind him. He didn't like the hollow cast in his old friend's face. "She's gone, now."

"But Daddy, the vines," Shyla protested. "Our garden up front...they came through it too. It's all ploughed up now. And the fence in back. Dad, they came up all around the house—"

He tugged her closer, putting a steadying arm around her.
Damnit,
how could he leave her alone again?

He hadn't intended to, of course. He hadn't meant to follow the doll—Asya—out of the graveyard at all.

It tore at him. Why would Asya terrorize Shyla? He believed the doll truly had been Shyla's mother, once. She'd spoken with utter sincerity in her ghostly voice when she'd explained her gratitude.

You've cared...for my baby.

You've cared for her when I could not.

Every time Shyla came near her, though, the doll had attacked.

Asya might have been her mother...but Broken Doll couldn't even stand to be close to the girl.

Perhaps wanted to
murder
her.

Why?

"She lured you away again," Father Frederick intoned. "Didn't she?"

"What?"

Conall turned to the man, genuinely startled by the sound of the old priest's quaking voice.

"The creature is a deceiver," Fred answered. "A lying seducer. I warned you she would lead you into her clutches, take you from this child—"

"Priest!" Conall snapped. His arms tightened around Shyla.

"You
fornicated
with the witch, didn't you?" Fred accused. He came out from the doorway, jabbing a finger at Conall. His eyes burned, fever-bright. "The shattered slut spread her legs for you and you
fucked
her, didn't you?"

"Fred!" he roared. The father paused, blinking, as though Conall had caught him by surprise.

"Go upstairs, Shy," Conall hissed. He gave her a tight squeeze to reassure her. "Start packing a suitcase."

His daughter lifted wide, scared eyes to him, but she obeyed. She hugged him back and then scurried up the stairs.

Con turned his attention to Fred. The priest's expression had fallen into one of tormented disbelief.

"I...can
smell
her on you..." he grated. "Her scent...it's all
over
you."

"You're losing your head here, man," Conall said evenly. Taking a step toward Frederick, he reached out a hand. Fred didn't have the look of an indignant, outraged priest, now. The way his voice quavered, the wild flash of his eyes—he raged from betrayal. Covetous, mean betrayal.

"Is it what she's done to you, then, too?" Con asked. The very idea made him uneasy. He recalled Fred telling him,
she is haunting us both.

The priest, though? Had Asya—
his
Asya—made a lover of the
priest
as well?

No,
his mind railed.
He's mistaken. She comes to me. She needs
me.

"Talk to me, Fred," he said. "Tell me what's going on."

A bright flash of alarm—Asya's voice—flared in his brain.

Conall!

He withdrew his hand, nearly too late. A crackling, bony vine lashed out from Fred's sleeve, black thorns scathing the tips of Con's fingers as he stumbled back in shock. A cry escaped him, and his bad leg failed: Conall crashed to the floor, and as he shot a look up at Fred more of them appeared, the same jerking, writhing limbs, slithering in a circle around him. They'd broken their way up from under the damn floorboards, right at the father's feet.

Fred's eyes turned to black pools, vicious and full of a baleful intelligence. The priest advanced on Con, narrowing them as his lips started to move in a low, hate-filled chant.

"Bloody hell!" Conall roared. "Shyla! Get out of the house! Get out and get away from here, hurry!"

"Dad?"

Her voice came in a panic, and then her running footsteps above, her gasp from the top of the stairs. He craned his neck to see her, and at the same time Father Frederick glared up to find her too. Shyla stared, her eyes darting to take in too much information at once.

"
Stay,"
Frederick commanded. "I believe it is time we discussed your future, little girl."

The creaking vines seized Conall by the ankle and wrenched his injured leg. He threw back his head with a shout as long thorns sunk into his skin.

"Stop it!"

Shyla charged halfway down the stairs, but Conall put up a hand.

"Get
out,
Shyla!"

"I wouldn't," Fred warned. "And I should tell you your name is
not
Shyla. It is Esther. After the Biblical queen."

He said it in a haughty sneer, as if Conall's choice of name had been insulting. Shyla froze, peering strangely at the priest.

"What did you say?" she asked.

"I should know," Fred replied. "
I
am the one your mother entrusted with you. Not the gravekeeper."

Conall struggled with the grasping tangle of vines creeping up on him. More began to bulge up from the boards beneath his arms and head, pulling him tightly down to the hard wood. His mind raced, and he searched for some kind of weapon, anything to cleave away the slithering growths.

"My mother?" Shyla asked Fred. She lingered where she stood, one foot half-raised to move backward, if she had to. Conall could see the priest had her rapt attention.

"Shy, don't," he choked. One of the vines tried to wrap around his throat, but he grasped at it, holding it at bay. "He's saying it to lure you. He doesn't have any information about your mother, but I
do.
I
found
her, Shy! She's—"

The vine constricted with incredible force, breaking his grip and pulling tight around his neck, like a noose. His words cut off in a harsh, wet hitch of breath.

"It's truth, child," Frederick said. "She came to us at the convent, nearly ready to birth you. She was an unmarried Russian refugee, fleeing after the bombings in the city. We took her in, tried to care for her."

Conall narrowed his eyes.

There's how the church found me.

Asya had gone mad when he'd said it. She'd fled his touch, thrashed like a frightened animal.

That’s
when she'd changed.

When she'd told him to take Shyla away.

He struggled to pry the vines away, but they'd claimed too much of him, pinning him down. He twisted as much as he could to see Shyla and found her riveted in horror on him.

"Let my dad go," she told the priest.

"I'm afraid I can't," Frederick replied. "He hasn't been the most supportive advocate for me taking you back."

"If you helped my mother at the convent, how did I end up here?" she demanded. Her ferocious tone brought a swell of pride to Con's chest.

"I said we
tried
to care for her. She was very sick, however...the trauma of the bombings, I suspect. It made her paranoid, and she feared herself in danger. In
danger
from a church full of nuns and one simple priest. She confided in me at first—told me her history, about her family...about you. She told me what she wished your name to be and asked me to be sure you grew up in the sanctity of the church. Over a matter of days, though, her sanity began to erode. One night she ran from the convent and managed to find her way here. By the time I found her, however, she'd hidden you away."

"And why haven't you ever told me this before?" Shyla said. "Why didn't you come forward then and tell everyone you had her at your church?"

Fred's eyes narrowed.

"Because," he growled. "Your mother
died.
She died of her
madness,
girl. I didn't expect Conall would want me darkening your early life with such a painful truth."

His tone had gone mean, cold with a note of anger Conall had never heard from his old friend.

"Or would you really have wanted to know your mother was a slattern and a lunatic? She abandoned you in a cold graveyard under a
rock,
child. Doubtless she'd convinced herself you were a wicked thing sewn in her womb by the devil. Would it have done you any good, if I'd told you so before now?"

"He's lying, Shy!" Conall managed to choke out. "She hid you to protect you!
He's
the one she ran from!"

Shyla's eyes gleamed, and she stomped her foot. "Stop it!" she shouted at Fred. "Just stop saying all these horrible things! Let my dad go, and get out of our house!"

The father's frown deepened. He returned to his eerie chant and held out a hand. When he clenched it into a fist, the thorns dug in deeper to Conall's flesh, and the gravedigger arched with a strangled, agonized cry.

"Stop it!" Shyla yelled. "
Stop it!"

"I had hoped you would grow up without having been affected by your mother's madness, little Esther—"

"That’s not my name!" she shrieked at him.

"—which is why I've been so adamant about you coming to the convent. I expected one day you would show your mother's true colors. I'd hoped Conall would have been more judicious with you instead of allowing you to grow up like an untended weed. At this rate you'll be hot on your mother's heels. The sisters will have a
lot
to do, to make you a proper girl."

"
Let him go!"

Conall struggled harder, but he'd started to feel numb where the thorns pressed into him. Worse yet, the vines slowly broke apart the floor under him. The smell of dirt began to waft up from their churning progress.

Father Frederick sneered. He'd expected Shyla to appreciate his offer, Conall supposed. Since she clearly didn't, the priest turned his attention on Con instead.

"You worked out well enough to be her caretaker, for a time," he said. "If any of the town's families had been the ones to manage her, they'd never have given her up again when I chose to take her back.
You,
at least, I believed would be...malleable. Who could have guessed you'd be such a mule about the girl, even with the man who saved your life."

Such venom in those words. Conall glowered up at him.

"
My
girl," he managed. "
My
daughter. Trumps the loony priest any day of the week."

A tic at the corner of Frederick's eye. The priest took a measured step forward and dropped to one knee, looming over Con as the vines threatened to pull the gravekeeper under.

"I told you I'd studied Hitler's occult societies," he murmured, low enough to keep Shyla from hearing. "And what I discovered is, the Fürher's research might not have been as mad as you'd believe. You've seen
my
work, gravekeeper...safe to say, I think, you've sampled its aesthetic beauty for yourself."

"What...are you...gabbing about?" Conall bit out against the pull of the creepers.

Fred's smile dripped with saccharine poison.

"Why, the
doll,
of course."

Conall snarled. "Asya!"

"Yes. She's rather lovely, wouldn't you say?"

The smile turned mean, and the priest kicked him hard, right in his bad leg. Conall let out a yelp of pain, and Shyla bounded down a few more steps. Frederick spun to face her, and she froze.

"The doll," he continued. "I think she's my
favorite
work. One of my most beautiful creations. Certainly better than any of the Thule invokers or the scientists of the Ahnenerbe ever managed. I wanted to...perfect
immortality.
Wouldn't you agree she's perfect, Conall?"

Conall glared daggers at the priest, refusing to answer. Father Frederick pondered his silence a moment, then drove the tip of his boot hard into Conall's side, eliciting another loud grunt of pain.

"If you can
fuck
my pretty doll, you can at least
admit to me
you find her
perfect!"

"Why..."

Conall swallowed hard against the root trying to crush his Adam's apple.

"Why...is her mask...broken?"

This sent the priest into a rage. He spun away from Conall, shoving over a small table and sending a lamp crashing to the floor.

"The
bitch,"
he roared, "is
perfect! I
made her perfect,
I
made her immortal!"

He came back to Conall, this time lifting one foot to plant it cruelly on the gravekeeper's chest.

"I made the slut ballerina
perfect,
" he repeated. He practically frothed at the mouth, spittle flying in his anger. "But she defies me. She
betrays
me, coming here to cuckold me with
you,
a faithless
dog!
I tried to warn you off of her. I imagined if you believed her to be a succubus preying on others, even the men of my church, perhaps you'd stay away. You didn't, though. You understand, Conall, how you've brought this on yourself. I can't have my creation disobeying me...can't have her wandering off to defile her flawless beauty with trash like you. It won't do, not at all...not when she'll soon have a daughter to care for again.
Our
daughter."