His Cemetery Doll (9 page)

"Conall. This woman you speak of... after my years in the war, I began studying commonly cited species of dark spirits. There are many accounts of this kind of encounter: ghostly women in the night, tempting beauties offering themselves to men. There are many names for them but at the heart of all the myths, one thing is always certain: they are deadly, and merciless, killers."

A vile, green feeling bubbled in Conall's stomach, and a wave of uncomfortable heat spread through his neck and shoulders.

"You think this woman I've seen," he said quietly, "is a...an evil spirit?"

"I...think you may be quite vulnerable. Please, my friend, be honest: have you been tempted?"

Oh, I have...

He grunted, though. "By a stranger styling herself a ghost in my graveyard? Hardly. More like
angered
by her."

"Have you...engaged in any sexual congress with the creature?"

Conall stood and abruptly threw the curtain of the confessional aside, striding back into the main sanctuary.

"I'm sorry, Father...I see now how foolish I've been, to be spooked by a few strange noises in a cemetery. I shouldn't have wasted your time."

"Conall, wait!" Frederick said, following him from the booth. "Con, I want to help you."

Gazing down on his daughter still curled up on the pew, Conall shook his head.

"It's all right, Fred. These visions...they didn't begin until after I hit my head. It's a doctor I need, not confession."

He lifted his daughter up again, resting her against his shoulder, before turning to offer Father Frederick his hand.

"Thanks for listening, anyway."

H
e arranged to visit the doctor three days later, but by then he expected the worst of the visions had stopped. There'd been no more strange happenings at night, no sign of creeping fog or dancing porcelain women. Maya
had
really fallen, though. Now he had the chore of deciding what to do with her, as she lay in pieces. The roots and vines at least became more tolerable in the light of day, and he decided he must have been right about the ground shifting and their ancient winding networks breaking to the surface.

"Hell of a lot of work to clean it up, either way," he'd growled to himself, as he assessed the many things he would now have to do to restore order.

Shyla caught the brusque return of his cynicism and avoided mentioning the doll anymore. She'd come down to see him busily digging up roots and vines, cast a mournful glance at the shattered statue, but then returned to her own chores as usual, beginning each morning early to ride her bike into town and help the alderman with the horses. She came home from school on time in the afternoons and rarely had anything special to share.

He didn't speak with Frederick at all during those three days. The Father had asked Shyla after him, the first and second mornings after their visit to the church, and Shyla dutifully told him her father had been fine. Conall could tell whenever she'd had a conversation with the priest: they annoyed her, apparently, and she prickled when the man came up in conversation.

Maybe she's picked up on my frustration from the morning after the doll's attack. Or maybe she understands Fred's been petitioning for her to leave for the convent.

He remembered Father Frederick's words from the week before.

I'm afraid you may find her spoiled and uncooperative, if you allow her to have an opinion in the matter.

If Shyla had somehow overheard him say so, or if Ora or Toby or either of the Trasks had repeated any such sentiment to her, it would be little wonder she'd balk at dealing with the man.

The doctor, anyway, had little to report after Conall's check-up.

"If you were concussed, your symptoms appear to have subsided quickly enough," he'd said. Conall liked the simple physician from Whitetail Knoll: a stooped, balding man called Whitmore, with a narrow nose and cloudy gray eyes, old before his years but sharp as a whip.

"You should have come to me sooner, and I don't recommend returning to work so quickly. You should be wakened in the night every two hours or so. Can your daughter be trusted to do so?"

"Aye, I think she can," he answered, having no intention to bother with it. If there had been any serious damage, Whitmore would be prescribing more than bedrest and monitoring. Con had the answer he wanted. He intended to return to work all the same. Without the visions or unexplained occurrences plaguing him, he felt confident all would be well.

One lingering trouble stayed with him, though. Especially when he found himself alone, while Shyla worked in town or at the house, and he toiled to restore Maya's ring. Left with ample time for his mind to wander, Con found himself thinking again and again about the doll. He insisted to himself he'd decided not to believe in her, of course, and yet his mind continually returned to her. Soon, it ceased to matter whether or not she'd been real.

What happened to her?

He'd returned to the clearing once, to search for evidence, something to prove to him either he'd gone insane, or there truly existed a phantom dancer moving through his graveyard at night.

No such proof. No sign of broken ground; no scraps of ribbon or shards of porcelain. No footprints either, besides those of himself and his daughter.

What did she want to
tell
me?

Hearing Frederick talk of evil spirits and dark forces, the occult research of the Nazis and nonsense about demon possession, should have been enough to convince Conall to let his mystery go. He'd never believed in such things, not even as a child. He could recall the boys in his hometown telling each other ghost stories of the moors or of abandoned farm houses, trying to spook one another and daring each other to cross over an old crone's grave at midnight. Their mamas would whip them for talking of witchcraft and Satanism if they'd heard. Con, though...Con had not once been moved by their sneaky whispers or their promises of truth.

So why ascribe to it now?

She smelled like winter. She tasted like snow.

Frederick had even asked about it:

Have you...engaged in any sexual congress with the creature?

Pure and utter idiocy. On both their parts, no less.

So he'd decided, giving himself a resolute nod as he finally finished clearing the last of the overgrown roots and moved Maya's pieces beside his shed until he could decide what to do with them. Looking over his restored ring of tombstones, he pronounced it—the work
and
the business of the doll—done with.

***

I
n all the work he'd been required to do in the newer sections of the cemetery, Conall had never finished tending to the graves of the two children in the lower section by the bank of mausoleums. The wild bramble there had taken advantage of his distraction: when he finally returned to the spot, it had grown over the first of the two tombstones and crept maliciously toward the second.

"Bloody hell," he grunted to himself. Seizing up a set of old trimmers, he set to work clearing the obnoxious weed away.

The day unfolded dark and overcast. He'd sent Shyla into town to do the week's grocery shopping; what she couldn't bring back in the basket on her bike, a boy would deliver in the morning. She wouldn't be back for some hours, as Con had given her permission to go riding with Ora, if the Trasks allowed it. Every moment his girl spent away from the cemetery playing with real friends, Conall would be happy to give her.

He didn't notice the fog at first. It crept around his ankles, curling up around the stones while he unraveled clinging branches of bramble. Presently, it caught his eye, already risen nearly to his waist. When the cold of it finally reached him, a wary shudder jerked his shoulders.

Oh, for God's sake...it can't be happening again.

Gingerly, he set the clippers atop the headstone of the boy child. With bated breath, he scanned the area around him. Everything appeared to have turned gray, the whole landscape washing out into a faded photograph of times past.

"Hello?" he finally said.

No sound.

"Hello?" he called a little louder, taking a step forward. Despite his simmering dread, a sense of concern and grasping interest led him on. He couldn't
hear
her...but somehow, he had no doubt she'd come.

It would be easier, this way. No Shyla. No one else for maybe miles. The doll, if she came to him here, came to him alone. Perhaps, without the interference in his mind...

Maybe he could find the explanation for all of this.

He didn't find her in Maya's ring or in the clearing where he'd watched her assailed by the skeletal grasping fingers. He didn't find her in the oldest section of the graveyard either, but one glance at the gate leading down to the river and he became sure he would find her there.

The fog fell thickest under the oak by the water's edge. As Conall came near, he made out the hunched shape of a figure sitting beneath the tree.

Then, mists parting before him, he beheld his doll again.

She sat against the trunk like a marionette with strings cut. Her limbs lay at odd angles, angles which no living person might achieve. Her head lay on her shoulder; her hair obscured her face.

Her ribbons, normally drifting on a ghostly breeze, lay all around her in limp, lifeless coils.

Conall approached with slow steps, watchful.

"Hello? Are you—"

Are you what? Awake? Alive?

He let his words trail off and knelt beside her.

He noticed scuffmarks on her perfect porcelain. Cracks, where there hadn't been any before. Even for a marionette, she lay in a position Conall had to call painful. She'd been...hurt.

Punished...by those grave hands?

Reaching out a hand, he touched one smooth arm. Perfectly cold, but of course she'd been cold every time they touched.

His hand came to her blonde hair, running through it, stroking her with an odd, unexpected affection. She was
broken,
after all. Beautiful...and broken.

And...lifeless.

Conall's brows drew together as he frowned. This creature appeared crafted to perfection, in every way. So what—
who—
would have made her so, and then leave her shattered?

He brushed the hair away from her face, revealing the familiar blindfold. Reaching gently for it, he brushed one perfect white cheek.

The doll jerked to life. Her head snapped round—
much
too far, almost round backward—to meet his gaze. Conall staggered back.

"Bloody hell!" he shouted. "I...I'm sorry! You...I thought you had—"

Her head tilted to the side, inquisitive. With her gaze turned to him at such an angle, it became a hideous motion. Then she turned her gaze down over herself, and in a series of bizarre jerking movements, she appeared to pull her limbs back into arrangement. The scuffs and cracks—all but the ones on her mask—blurred and disappeared, and her ivory flesh gleamed once more. It hadn't been a healing. Instead it appeared she had...
absorbed
the injuries, drawing them deeper to maintain the beauty on the surface.

Finally, she sat quite normally. She faced him, as if to see whether he approved.

"Bloody hell," he huffed again, and wiped vigorously at his eyes. "Damn it all...I...I can't take this, lass. Are you real, or have I honestly lost my mind?"

The doll—moving stiffly—leaned forward until she crouched on hands and knees beside him. She reached out a hand to brush his long hair out of his eyes, and he had the clear sense she searched them, gently studying the depths of his heart.

"
Stop,"
he commanded, brushing her off. "If I can't look into your eyes, why should you be free to look into mine?"

Her hand fell to his. Fingers curled gently around his palm, giving him a squeeze.

"Can you not speak?" he begged. "Can you give me some sign, any sign, to show me I've not gone crazy? Please, tell me...tell me
what
you are."

She dropped her gaze, hiding her face behind blonde mane in an expression of sorrow. She brushed her fingertips against ribbons around her throat almost wistfully. A little stab of guilt struck him, and he sighed.

"You...
can't
tell me," he said. "Can you?"

The doll shook her head. Conall watched her, musing over her, sorry to have shamed her.

"Are you from my graveyard?" he asked next.

Again, the doll shook her head.

"Are you...dead?"

She lifted her face without looking at him, instead gazing out over the water of the river below. After several moments, she moved her head side to side once more...but Conall sensed doubt in the gesture this time.

She didn't know.

Silence stretched along the foggy riverbank for many, many moments. As it had before, the world appeared to crystallize into a single point, this singular moment, cocooned in white mists with the broken doll. The rest of Conall's existence fell away: no graveyard; no Whitetail Knoll or busy neighbors; no Father Frederick or the church, which provided Conall's life here; no Shyla. This instant stood apart, a slice of something utterly strange and unknown.

After a time, he noticed the doll's drifting ribbons beginning to play on their otherworldly breeze. Not as lively as before: merely the tattered ends lifted and teased—whatever force carried them, it could hardly be a breath. The motion meant something, though. He gingerly touched the end of one of the strands.

Without glancing at him, the doll straightened in reaction to his touch upon the silk. He dropped the ribbon, muttering an apology. She held exquisitely motionless for a breath, then met his gaze once more.

Her fingers brushed his lips: smooth, flawless. He took her hand gently, arresting it in its movement, and studied the slender lines and shapes.

Her palm had but one crease: the lifeline. The rest of it, utterly uniform, polished like a pearl. Each delicate finger had been fitted in joints:
far
more exquisite, more complex, than any doll he might have been able to purchase for Shyla, even in the finest dolls shops in Europe.