The Vampire Doll

by Kat Shepherd

  Maggie crowded in the doorway behind Tanya. “Whoa. What’s with all the baby powder?”

  “I get sweaty,” Kira answered.

  “Ooo-kay,” Maggie answered. “Not gonna ask any more about that.” She turned to Tanya. “What do we do?”

  Tanya looked at her watch again. “It’s already past Kira’s bedtime. Let’s just put her to bed, finish cleaning up the kitchen, and then we’ll tackle the bathroom.” She held out her hand. “Come on, Kira.”

  Kira stood up. “Can Mary Rose come?”

  “No way,” Maggie said. “We need to clean her up, too. Now come over here so we can de-powder you.” Careful to stay in the doorway, Maggie and Tanya brushed Kira off as best they could.

  Kira padded into the bedroom, leaving white footprints on the wood floor. “Hang on,” Tanya said. She grabbed a hand towel and wiped down Kira’s feet and the prints she had left. “That’s better.”

  As Kira cuddled under the covers, her pinched face looked worried. “I’m sorry I made a mess,” she said quietly. “Are you mad at me?”

  “I’m not mad,” Tanya replied. “It’s just … I wish you had asked first, or told us you might need help with the powder.”

  Kira’s worried expression turned to a scowl. “But I didn’t need help. I use baby powder all the time.”

  “Really.” Maggie’s voice was light. “And does it always end up all over the bathroom?” Kira turned her head and wouldn’t say anything.

  Tanya sighed. She wished she could have just one nice babysitting day without Kira getting all prickly. “Well, even though we have a lot of mess to clean up, I still had a fun time with you.” She stood up and switched off the hula-girl lamp. Kira didn’t answer, and Tanya and Maggie tiptoed into the hall. Tanya turned back. “Do you want me to leave the door open?”

  “Why? Because I might be scared like some baby?” Kira demanded. “You can shut it. I’m not afraid of the dark.”

  Tanya struggled to keep her patience. “Okay, then. I’ll go ahead and close it.” She pulled the door closed but poked her head in one final time. “Good night, Kira.”

  Just as Tanya was turning away, she heard Kira’s voice softly call out to her, “Good night. Thanks for a fun time.”

  * * *

  Tanya finished wiping down the kitchen countertops and put the pizza box into the recycling bin while Maggie swept the floor. “Okay, now I kind of get what you mean about Kira,” Maggie said quietly. “Is she always so hot-and-cold like that?”

  “Pretty much,” Tanya said. “I think she was a little better with you here. You have more of a sparkly kind of personality than I do, and I think Kira’s a kid who needs someone sparkly to draw her out.”

  Maggie fluttered her eyelashes. “Sparkly? Wow! Nobody’s ever described me as sparkly before.”

  “Oh, come off it,” Tanya said with a laugh. “You know you’re a superstar.”

  “Well, yeah,” Maggie said, “but now I’m a sparkly superstar!” She dumped the contents of the dustpan into the trash. “Should we head upstairs and tackle the bathroom?”

  Tanya checked her watch. “We should have enough time to get it cleaned up before Mrs. Fogelman gets home. But I should probably still tell her what happened so she can talk to Kira about it. I don’t want to be cleaning up a room full of baby powder every time I have to put Kira to bed.”

  “Totally,” Maggie said. “It’s going to take forever. But hey, maybe it won’t be as bad as it looked at first.”

  “Doubtful.”

  They walked upstairs, and Tanya cast a glance at Kira’s closed door. “I should check on her.” She opened the door and peeked inside, the light from the hallway illuminating Kira’s sleeping face. Next to her on the pillow was another, smaller face—white as marble, with wide blue eyes and a dusting of powder dulling the gleam of the flaxen hair.

  “Ugh, are you kidding me?” Tanya whispered. She closed the door. “Kira must have gotten up and brought Mary Rose to bed with her. There’s going to be powder all over the place.”

  She turned back to Maggie and found her face was as white as cheese, her green eyes wide with horror. “Kira didn’t get up and take Mary Rose to bed.”

  “What do you mean? I saw her right in there!”

  “Look.” Maggie pointed at the floor where tiny white footprints trailed down the hallway from Mrs. Fogelman’s room. Footprints the size of a doll’s.

  CHAPTER

  11

  TANYA BARELY SLEPT that night. She kept playing the events over and over in her head, seeing those tiny footprints stark white against the floor. By the time the sun crept over the horizon, she was already counting the minutes until everyone would meet up at Creature Features.

  Rebecca and Clio looked crisp and purposeful when Tanya arrived. They bustled about the shop, setting up the doughnuts, tea, and the cinnamon rolls Rebecca had made earlier that morning. Even Kawanna seemed chipper, eschewing her usual morning pajamas for a teal jumpsuit and gold cuff bracelet. But Maggie looked just as rough as Tanya felt, with dark circles under her eyes, and her outfit lacking its usual flair. She had on a faded Joan Jett T-shirt and a pair of old pink sweats. Ethan came out of the back hallway carrying Kawanna’s jadeite dessert plates and a handful of napkins. He grinned when he saw Tanya. “Hey, how did it go last night?”

  “No talking about it until we’ve all got our doughnuts,” Maggie said. “I need sugar to sustain me.”

  “That bad, huh?” Rebecca popped a pink frosted doughnut on one of the green plates and handed it to Maggie.

  “You are a goddess,” Maggie said, and took a bite, closing her eyes to savor the flavor. Rebecca laughed.

  A few minutes later, everyone was slouched in the beanbag chairs Kawanna had pulled out, and all eyes were on Tanya. “Well, we’ve confirmed that it wasn’t just my imagination like I’d hoped,” she finally said. “That doll is definitely alive. Or possessed. Or something.” Tanya told them about the footprints in the powder, Kira’s strange obsession with Mary Rose, and the mysterious lump Maggie had felt in the doll’s cloth body. The others’ expressions grew grimmer as they listened.

  “Did you find out anything about the Stone family or where they got the doll in the first place?” Tanya asked.

  Ethan passed out a copy of an old newspaper article dated April 17, 1885. The headline said Piper Women’s Club Celebrates New Building with Tea Party for Local Girls. The photo showed several little girls with dolls in their laps, sitting around a tea set on a child-sized table. Tanya immediately recognized Mary Rose in the arms of a thin little girl with light skin and pale eyes. “That must be Elee,” she said, pointing. Elee wore a dress with puffy sleeves and a lacy collar, and her plain hair was pulled back from her face with a ribbon.

  “Elee’s doll gets mentioned in the article, since hers wasn’t store-bought like the others,” Ethan said. “Elee’s mom, Lily, gets a little braggy about it. Listen to this: ‘My husband, Dr. Matthew Stone, commissioned the great Emmanuel Marquis to create Mary Rose especially for Elee’s eighth birthday. This beautiful doll is truly a treasure that will be passed down for many generations to come.’”

  “Who’s Emmanuel Marquis?” Maggie asked. “Is he supposed to be famous or something?” She reached for the breakfast platter and loaded a cinnamon roll onto her plate.

  Rebecca pulled a manila folder out of her bag and opened it up. “Well, Ethan and I did a bit of digging, and it’s kind of a familiar story. Emmanuel Marquis made his start running a small puppet theater on Main Street, and he made all his own puppets.” Rebecca pulled out a copy of an old newspaper ad for the Marquis Puppet Theater. Wonders and Enchantments! it promised in text below a drawing of two grinning marionettes.

  “Okay, no thanks,” Clio said, grimacing at the ad. She shook her head and took a bite of her cinnamon roll.

  “I guess everyone back then agreed with you, because the puppet show failed after just a few months,” Rebecca continued. “Then Marquis went on to work in a pharmacy,
but he got fired after he got caught stealing chemicals.”

  “What kind of chemicals?” Tanya asked.

  “Sulfur, quicksilver, and a bunch of stuff I’ve never heard of,” Rebecca went on. “He totally disappears from the town records for a while after that. Then all of a sudden, he shows up again a few years later. He came back to town to open an art studio. It was an instant success, and he made tons of money. He specialized in portraits and busts, and every rich family in town hired him to paint or sculpt them. You can still see some of his work in the library and town hall. He was a really big deal in Piper.”

  Kawanna took a long sip of her chai. “And that’s why the Stone family decided to hire him to make Mary Rose for Elee?”

  “If you were fancy, he would be the perfect person to hire for a one-of-a-kind doll,” Rebecca said. “After all, he already knew how to make puppets, and once he was a famous artist, buying a doll from him would make anyone the talk of the town.” Rebecca went on. “And Lily Stone was the kind of person who only wanted the best for her daughter, and she wouldn’t take no for an answer, even though she knew that Emmanuel Marquis probably hated her husband.”

  “Why?” Tanya asked.

  “Because Dr. Stone owned the pharmacy where Marquis worked,” Ethan said. “He’s the one who fired him.”

  “And get this,” Rebecca added. “After Marquis sold the doll to the Stones, he closed up shop and left town.”

  “Where did he go?” Tanya asked.

  Rebecca shrugged. “Nobody knows. We can’t find a single record of him anywhere after that.” She closed the folder and handed it to Kawanna, who tucked it away behind the counter.

  “So Mary Rose was created by a chemical-stealing failed puppeteer with a grudge against the family he made her for? No wonder she’s evil,” Maggie said. “Do you think he, like, cursed her or something?”

  “You know I don’t believe in curses,” Tanya said.

  “But you do believe in the Night Queen,” Rebecca said, “and I think this has the Night Queen written all over it. This is practically the same story as that theater guy.”

  “Graham Reynard Faust,” Maggie interjected. “So you think Marquis was one of the Night Queen’s minions, too, and Mary Rose is another of her nasty little creations?” Maggie asked. “Ugh, I thought we were finally done with her!”

  Rebecca shook her head, her lips in a tight line. “We still aren’t sure what the doll is for or what it can do. But the good news is it can’t be that bad, right? After all, it’s been passed down through the Stone family for more than a hundred years, and there were no big tragedies or disasters in the family history at all. No mysterious deaths. Nothing that would indicate the doll has any real power.”

  “Other than the power to come alive, you mean?” Tanya asked. She turned to Clio and Kawanna. “Did you two find anything about it here?”

  “Nothing on Mary Rose,” Kawanna said. “We looked for clues in Miss Pearl’s old papers about the Night Queen. The last of her journals weren’t exactly lucid. She wrote a lot about beacons and vessels, but her writing was so addled at the end that we’re not sure what it means.”

  Clio leaned back and tented her hands. “Obviously the first thought with vessels and beacons is a lighthouse guiding a ship to shore…”

  “Obviously,” Maggie said sarcastically, shooting Tanya a confused look.

  “… but that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, since we’re hours from the coastline, and the river doesn’t have any lighthouses. It must be a metaphor for something, but we aren’t sure what yet.”

  “But in Tales of the Night Queen, we did find a poem that we think is about the mirror,” Kawanna said. She opened up a slim, red volume and slid her finger down to the middle of the page.

  Silver quicks and silver dies

  To forge a glass where darkness lies

  Shatter once and powers fall

  But slivers do the Night Queen call

  Kissed with crimson drops of rain

  They bring the Queen to rise again

  “If that is about the mirror,” Tanya said, “I really don’t like the part about the slivers calling to the queen.”

  “And what’s that line about red rain? Is it like pollution or something?” Maggie asked.

  Suddenly, Tanya paled. “Oh, wait. I think I know what it means.” She bit her lip and squeezed her hands together in her lap. “The poem says that shattering the mirror broke the queen’s power, but the slivers still have a connection with her.”

  “Well, yeah, that was our theory even before we found the poem, right?” Clio said.

  “I’m talking about the other bit. About the crimson drops of rain.” Tanya’s fingertips ran over the thin scar of the cut she had gotten a few weeks earlier. “I accidentally sliced my finger on one of the mirror pieces, and the dreams started right afterward.” She forced herself to meet the eyes of her friends. “I think when I cut myself, I might have opened something up … something that will bring the Night Queen back into our world.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  THERE WAS A long silence as Tanya’s friends took in what she had just told them. “The crimson drops,” Clio said. “You think that’s the blood from when you cut your finger.”

  Tanya nodded. “And the next line says that the blood brings the queen to rise again.”

  “Rise again?” Maggie blanched. “Does that mean she’ll, like, come into our world?” Her green eyes widened, and she clutched Tanya’s arm. “What if it’s already happened? She could be putting together an army of lusus naturae right now to come after us!”

  “Slow down. If she was already here, we’d definitely know by now, so let’s not panic,” Rebecca said.

  “Easy for you to say! You’re not the one who almost got dragged to her doom by rotting, undead corpse arms!”

  “Listen, we don’t know for sure that Tanya’s right about what the poem means,” Clio said. “And there still might be a way to destroy the mirror shards before they can really do anything besides cause bad dreams.” Clio’s eyes narrowed. “When’s the next full moon?”

  “Why do we need to know that?” Ethan asked.

  “Because whenever anything big goes down, it’s always on the full moon,” Clio answered.

  “Ugh. That’s true,” Maggie agreed. “It’s like some kind of Nightmare Realm power source or something.”

  “Let me check the calendar,” Tanya said. She pulled up an app on her phone, and when she spoke again her voice was heavy. “That’s next Sunday.”

  “That gives us just a few days to figure out how to destroy the mirror pieces and stop the queen from rising again.” Rebecca looked at her watch and loaded the extra cinnamon rolls back into the Tupperware she had brought. “The library opens in fifteen minutes. I’ll keep digging over there to see if there’s anything else in the town history records that might help us. Maggie, can you come with me and help?”

  “Do I have to?” Maggie rolled her eyes. Seeing Rebecca’s folded arms, she sighed. “Ugh. Fine. But I won’t like it.”

  “I do love making you suffer,” Rebecca teased. “Clio, did you and Kawanna find any connection between the mirror and the doll? Anything about why the mirror would make Tanya have dreams about Mary Rose? There has to be a link. If Tanya’s blood on the mirror is what woke up Mary Rose, then maybe neutralizing the mirror will deactivate Mary Rose, too.”

  Clio and Kawanna looked at each other. “We’ll keep searching,” Kawanna said.

  Clio put her hand on Tanya’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, though, my auntie can work solo later so I can still come with you when you babysit.”

  “We don’t have time to worry about that right now,” Tanya said, ignoring the anxious roiling in her stomach. “Mary Rose is definitely trouble, but she’s not as dangerous as the mirror could be.” She stood up straighter and forced a smile. “I’m sure I can handle her on my own. The shards are the key. I think you should stay here with your aunt.”


  Ethan gathered up the plates and stacked them neatly on the counter. “I’ll help you, too, Clio. Tanya, do you still have that book I lent you? I think I remember something in there about getting rid of haunted objects.”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot to give it back to you. It’s in my bag,” Tanya reached into her backpack and handed the book over to Ethan. “But the Nightmare Realm is totally different from the Spirit Realm. Do you really think something that works for ghosts would also work for the Night Queen?”

  Ethan shrugged. “I guess there’s only one way to find out.”

  * * *

  Later that afternoon, Tanya’s feet dragged along the sidewalk as she approached the Fogelman house. It was the absolute last place she wanted to be, especially by herself. But Tanya knew her friends were working together to take care of the mirror shards, and that had to be the priority. If the shards really could cause the Night Queen to rise again at the next full moon, the girls were already cutting it close enough as it was; that gave them only a few days to find a solution before it was too late. She only wished she could be there helping instead of heading into another night with Mary Rose.

  As she walked up the steps, Tanya gave herself a pep talk, running Rebecca’s reassuring words back through her mind. Whatever Mary Rose’s power was, it couldn’t be very strong. She might be some kind of possessed doll, but all she really seemed to want to do was hang out with Kira. And what could one doll really do anyway? Tanya was bigger and stronger. If the doll tried anything, Tanya was sure she could stop it if she had to. But it won’t try anything. Not as long as I don’t let it know that I know. It was a strange thought, but she sensed in her gut that it was true. As long as Mary Rose believed that Tanya thought she was an ordinary doll, then Mary Rose would have to act like an ordinary doll.