The Vampire Doll
Page 9
Tanya read the next line of the poem and grinned when she saw Clio unscrew a large mason jar. Using a wooden spoon, Tanya helped pour the honey and mirror pieces into the jar. “Now I see how we’re going to trap the mist,” she said.
Clio waded into the river, careful to keep the water level below the tops of her Union Jack Wellingtons, and swooped the jar through the mist around her. She clapped the lid back down and screwed it on tightly. She came back to the group and held up the jar. The mist was already condensing into beads of water along the sides. “Trapped that flowing water mist like a champ,” she said. “Step two is done.” She fist-bumped Ethan and put the jar on the ground.
“Next we just need to bury it here,” Ethan said, pointing to the hole they had dug. “This is a rowan tree. Locally we call them mountain ash, but rowan trees have a long link with magic and mythology. In the UK, they believed the rowan protected against witchcraft, and the Vikings used its wood to make their rune staves, which were kind of like talismans.”
“Now do you see why I got kinda bored last night?” Maggie said into Tanya’s ear.
“I heard that,” Clio said.
“I know,” Maggie said, her eyes sparkling impishly. “Let’s pick up the pace, Ethan. Some of us have shows to binge-watch later.”
“Take your time, Ethan,” Tanya said. “We really need this to work.”
“It’s gonna work,” Maggie answered. “It always does. Seriously. When has one of these things ever not worked?”
“Be careful what you say,” Rebecca chastised. “There’s a first time for everything, and we don’t want this to be our first screw-up.”
Ethan nestled the jar in the hole between the tree’s roots, and the five of them filled the cavity with dirt. “Now what?” Tanya looked up from the notes she was scribbling in her notebook. “How will we know we’re successful? Do we need to come back and check on it?”
“We should know right away,” Ethan said. “Watch this.” He unburied the jar and held it up, squinting. Tanya gasped. Collected in the condensation on the sides were three droplets of blood. “May I return your blood to you, madam?” he asked in a goofy voice.
Maggie snickered, and Ethan blushed and shot a quick glance at Clio before looking away again.
Tanya pulled off her gloves and carefully unscrewed the jar lid. The three drops trembled onto her finger and disappeared. “That is unbelievable,” she whispered. “I would give anything to understand the science behind this.” She screwed the jar shut again. She jotted a few things down in her notebook, her mind already working through possible explanations.
“I know you’re hoping we’ll let you keep that jar to study, but we just can’t risk it. Putting it back under the tree roots seems like the safest idea,” Clio said. “If rowan trees offer protection against magic, then I can’t think of a better place to keep those mirror bits out of harm’s way.” They reburied the jar, and Rebecca passed out wipes to clean their hands.
Tanya was surprised at how much lighter she felt. She took a deep breath and relaxed her shoulders.
“Feel better?” Clio asked.
Tanya nodded. “It’s amazing how accidentally almost bringing an undead queen back to take over the earth can really stress a person out.”
Clio laughed. “You think?” She and the others gathered up their things and headed back to the park entrance.
“Is this the part where we go out for waffles?” Maggie asked. “I was promised waffles.”
“A waffle break is definitely in order,” Rebecca said. “But then we have to get back to work. There’s still the doll to deal with.”
“But if Tanya’s blood on the mirror really is what activated Mary Rose, then didn’t we just deactivate her?” Maggie asked.
“I hope so,” Tanya said. But she wished there was some kind of controlled experiment they could do to know for sure. Hey, not every hypothesis can be perfectly tested, she told herself. Even gravity is just a theory. Maybe a theory would be enough this time. What a relief it would be not to spend every waking moment worrying about Kira and Mary Rose, and the way Kira grew frailer and weaker as the doll seemed to grow more powerful.
Rebecca shook her head. “Hoping isn’t enough. We need to find a way to be sure we shut her down for good. And that’s gonna take a lot more research.”
Maggie groaned. “More research? Way to make me lose my appetite, Becks!”
Rebecca put her arm around her friend’s shoulder. “Poor baby! Don’t worry. If you lost your appetite, we can totally skip the waffles.”
“Don’t you dare!” Maggie cried.
“Uh-huh. That’s what I thought,” Rebecca teased, and Maggie laughed along with the others. The sun peeped through a break in the clouds, making the dew on the grass glitter like tiny gems. Hope soared in Tanya’s heart. With her friends by her side, she was sure that stopping Mary Rose would be a piece of cake.
CHAPTER
14
A FEW HOURS later, Tanya looked up from the mound of books and the open laptop in front of her. Her eyes were dry and sandy, and her back and neck ached from hunching over for so long. But she felt the same thrill she felt after conducting a difficult experiment. It was the thrill of discovery. “I think I found something.”
Clio looked up from her beanbag chair. “Is it about the doll?”
“No, but it answers another question I’ve been wondering about,” Tanya answered. “It’s related to alchemy.”
“Say what, now?” Maggie asked.
Tanya held up a dark brown book titled Alchemy and the Art of Crossing Realms. “Alchemy was this false belief that with the right chemicals, people could turn other metals into gold. It was scientifically debunked, obviously, since gold is an element, and you can’t make elements out of other elements. Well, unless we’re talking about radioactive half-lives or something…”
“Already bored. Get to the point,” Maggie said.
“Sorry. Anyway, not every person interested in alchemy was trying to make gold. The word originated in ancient Egypt, and its earliest followers were interested not in gold, but in immortality.”
“Still bored,” Maggie said.
“Ugh. Fine. Basically, some alchemists believed that the right combination of chemical elements could give them special powers. Like the ability to travel to other realms.”
Ethan perked up from his spot in the corner. “The spirit hole!”
“That’s right,” Tanya said. “Remember what you said to me? ‘Iron closes, but gold opens.’ Basically, different chemical elements have different properties and powers. I knew there had to be some connection between science and the supernatural.”
“Yay for you,” Maggie said. “But how does this help us stop the Night Queen?”
“Well, one of the things that’s been bothering me is that the Night Queen has power over certain objects, right? And then there’s other stuff that she doesn’t. Like why could she control this one mirror, but not any other mirror? One clock, but not all the clocks?”
“That’s easy,” Maggie said. “Because a bunch of weirdos made stuff like the mirror and the clock especially for her. They, like, waved their hands over it or added a unicorn hair or whatever, and then Boom! It belonged to the Night Queen.”
“I always suspected there must be some kind of chemical reason for it. Something the objects have in common.” Tanya grinned. “And I think I found it.” She held up the book. A woodcut illustration showed a muscular man with a toga and curly hair. He wore winged sandals. Next to him was an old man with a long beard hunched over a bubbling cauldron. Smoke from the cauldron curled up into the sky, where a face was framed in rays like the sun.
“That’s Hermes,” Clio said, pointing to the man in the toga. “The messenger of the gods.”
“It is,” Tanya said. “And what’s his Roman name?”
“Mercury!” Clio cried. “The first line of the poem: ‘Silver quicks and silver dies.’ Quicksilver is another name for mercury.”
Maggie cocked her head and thought a moment. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think I actually get it.” Her mouth quirked. “But what does that have to do with the doll?”
Tanya sighed. “Nothing.” She closed the book and pushed it aside. “But I was happy just to find something, even if it’s not actually useful.”
Rebecca pushed her bangs out of her eyes. “Hey, that’s totally useful. Knowing what has mercury in it could help us figure out where the Night Queen might strike next. We may have stopped her this time with the mirror shards, but that doesn’t mean she won’t try again.”
“Yeah, but that still doesn’t explain Mary Rose,” Tanya said. “It’s not like people run around putting mercury in dolls. That stuff is seriously poisonous. So if Mary Rose isn’t some Night Queen minion, then what is she?” She threw up her hands in frustration. “Why can’t we find anything?”
Ethan’s eyes widened behind his glasses. “Maybe we’re just looking in the wrong place.” He bent down and frantically started leafing through a book. “Clio, what was that stuff you and Kawanna found the other day about vessels and beacons? Do you remember what it said?”
Clio and Kawanna sorted through the stacks of rumpled journals and yellowed papers spread out on the counter. “Here it is,” Kawanna finally said. She held up a dog-eared old notebook with a stained black cover and turned to a page near the end. Over her shoulder, Tanya could just make out Miss Pearl’s jagged, spidery handwriting in ink that had faded to sepia brown. Tanya held up the book and started reading: “The beacon calls to her in the light of the moon, and the vessel carries her back. Without the beacon, the vessel is rudderless, a hollow husk doomed to wait and wander. But the beacon guides the vessel’s heart. And once she returns, she will rule both realms with fists of blood and silver.”
“Ooo-kaaay,” Maggie said. “That sounds like something I would say when I had a high fever.”
“We’ve been looking for something about a doll, right?” Ethan said. “Maybe we haven’t found anything because Mary Rose wasn’t made to be a doll.”
“What do you mean?” Rebecca asked. “What was she made to be?”
Ethan held up the green Object Possession book in his hand. “In this book, the haunted objects weren’t just spooky stuff that went flying around the room. They were kind of like homes for the spirits that lived in them. They were vessels.” He flipped through the pages until he found an ink drawing of a ship at sea, manned by ghosts. “This is a drawing of the Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship supposedly sailed by an entire crew of spirits.” He put the book down. “What if Mary Rose is like that? What if she’s the vessel?”
“A vessel for what?” Rebecca asked.
“The Night Queen,” Ethan answered. “What if Mary Rose was built as a means to bring the Night Queen back? Maybe there was a way that the queen’s spirit could possess the doll, and then once this beacon thing turns on or whatever, she can come back for real and take over.”
Tanya looked at the words in the journal again. “So let’s say Ethan’s right.” She pulled out her notebook and a pencil and started jotting down her thoughts as she spoke. “If the Night Queen has possessed Mary Rose, then it means she’s looking for a way to come back for real, in her true form. But to do that, she needs at least two things: moonlight—which obviously means the full moon—and whatever this beacon is. As long as we destroy the beacon, then the Night Queen still has no way to come back.”
Maggie sighed. “I’m so tired of finding and destroying things. Aren’t we done with all that?”
“I don’t know,” Rebecca said. “But I think we might be.” She flipped to a page in the red Tales of the Night Queen book. There was a detailed drawing of a bubble-like sphere with a grandfather clock and a gilded frame mirror inside of it; lines like rays of light surrounded the picture. The Night Queen’s face was faintly visible in the background. “I think maybe the mirror and the clock were the beacons.”
“And both of those were already destroyed, right?” Tanya asked excitedly. “Are you telling me we already beat her?”
“Pretty much,” Rebecca answered. “But I don’t think the Night Queen knows that yet.”
“So instead of trying to stop the Night Queen at her most powerful, all we have to do is deal with one eensy-weensy doll?” Maggie asked. “That’s easy! We can just tie it in a bag and throw it in the river or something.”
Tanya toyed with her pencil. “Actually, it’s not that easy. Kira’s going through a hard time, and she’s gotten really attached to Mary Rose. Plus the doll has been a treasured family heirloom for, like, a hundred years. Both Kira and Mrs. Fogelman would be devastated if we just got rid of it.” She doodled in the margins of her notebook. “I think we have to find a way to make sure we deactivate Mary Rose and turn her back into a normal doll. For good.”
“But she’s not a normal doll!” Maggie protested. “She’s evil! You said so yourself!” She turned to Rebecca and Ethan. “And what about the guy who made her? He was a total creeper with a grudge against the family! You know he put all kinds of nasty stuff in there.”
Tanya shook her head firmly. “I don’t care. I’m not destroying a little girl’s favorite doll. It would be like taking away her best friend.” She folded her arms across her chest.
“I can’t believe this!” Maggie cried. “If we get rid of the doll, then we get rid of the Night Queen’s last chance to come into our world. We can save the day! Forever! And you won’t do it?” She looked around at the others to gather support, but no one spoke. “Come on, guys. Be real for a second. None of you really thinks we can finally defeat the Night Queen without destroying Mary Rose, do you?”
Tanya was resolute. “Then we just have to find another way.”
CHAPTER
15
TANYA LAY IN bed the next morning looking over the list she had started.
WAYS TO UN-POSSESS MARY ROSE:
Smoke from burning sage?
Holy water?
Feed her something besides blood? Milk? Angel food cake?
She tore the list out of her notebook and crumpled it up in frustration. None of these had any scientific basis, and some of them were simply ideas from old movies Maggie had made her watch. The beacons had already been destroyed anyway. Maybe Mary Rose really was just a normal doll again. Maybe they were just worrying over nothing.
Tanya thought again of the words Kawanna had read from the old journal: Without the beacon, the vessel is rudderless, a hollow husk doomed to wait and wander. They had to make sure that the Night Queen wasn’t still possessing Mary Rose. Otherwise she could be stuck inside the doll forever, growing angrier and angrier. Tanya remembered the broken egg and the nasty little scuttling sounds in Mrs. Fogelman’s house. Maybe the queen couldn’t take her true form and come back to earth anymore, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t still cause mischief or hurt someone. Even a doll could get revenge.
Tanya sighed. Maybe Maggie was right. Maybe they should just destroy Mary Rose and pretend it was an accident. But then Tanya thought about Kira, so lonely and homesick, and how much she relied on the doll. If only Mrs. Fogelman would finish her creepy sculpture and focus on helping Kira when the little girl needed her most! Of course it wasn’t that simple, though, and Tanya knew it. She may not understand much about the reasons why adults did things, but she was pretty sure the sculpture was Mrs. Fogelman’s way of dealing with losing Eli.
Tanya flopped back on her pillow and stared at the ceiling. It was all just so sad. And after school, she would be over there again. But at least she wouldn’t be alone this time
. She reached for her phone and texted Clio.
Tanya quickly switched over to check the text chain between her friends and Kawanna. Ethan had sent a screenshot of a torn page, yellowed and crumpled. The words Freeing the Vessel were written in elegant script at the top of the page. Tanya felt a grin begin to spread as she read through the exchange. They had found it! A way to make Mary Rose a normal doll without destroying her. And it was easy! The only hard part would be to convince Kira to give up Mary Rose for a little while, but Tanya was sure they could figure out something. Finally, things were looking up.
* * *
Mrs. Fogelman seemed different when she let the four girls into her house. She had bags under her eyes, and her curls hung limply around her face. Her lips were bare, and her olive skin looked chalky. Even her clothing was subdued, and Tanya noticed the usual cloud of sandalwood perfume was absent. Tanya introduced her friends and then waited for the artist to make her typical beeline for the studio. But instead, Mrs. Fogelman gestured to the living room sofa, inviting them to take a seat. She sank down into a green-striped armchair across from them. “I’m glad you’re all here.”
“Thanks.” Tanya perched nervously on the chair, waiting for Mrs. Fogelman to say something. When she didn’t, Tanya finally ventured a question. “So,” she said, “what’s up?”
“I finished my sculpture,” Mrs. Fogelman answered. “And it is truly a masterpiece.”
“Wow,” Tanya said. “That’s great. How do you feel?”
Mrs. Fogelman rubbed her face in her hands. “Wrung out,” she said at last. “Spent. I am but an empty husk of a woman.”
“Oh,” Tanya said. She snuck a furtive look at the others, who were just as nonplussed as she was.
“Such is the nature of the work,” Mrs. Fogelman intoned. “But I must admit I’m a bit more enervated than usual. I always give myself over to my work, but this piece seemed to drain a part of my soul.” She swept her hair out of her face and knotted it loosely on top of her head. Her cheekbones looked sharp and angular, and her eyes had a feverish cast. “I’ll be spending the rest of the day at a yoga retreat. I should be home no later than seven.”