"Are you crying?" Shyla said. As she stepped closer to the apparition, she slowly, carefully reached out a hand, the way one might approach a wounded animal.
"Can we help you? Can you tell us what is hurting you?"
The doll lifted her gaze to study the girl. Conall recognized the subtle change in her posture, though: she grew tense, and stone still. Her fingers on the wall curled very slightly.
The creature planned to lunge.
"Shyla, get back!" he shouted, leaping forward to pull his daughter away. As he moved, so did the doll, and she made a grab for the girl exactly as she had in the woods. She fought him, incredibly strong this time: stronger than before, and more vicious. He almost failed to restrain her. The sound of her rabid, snapping anger flooded his ears and his head, drowning his mind in senseless fear. Not his fear; hers.
"What is wrong with you?" he demanded, wrestling her back to the wall. He seized her wrists and pinned them up above her head, but her focus remained on Shyla, straining, tugging senselessly at his grip as if completely unaware he held her at all.
"What's she doing?" Shyla asked in a panic. "I—I don't understand, I didn't do anything—"
"It's not you," he said through gritted teeth, wrestling with the specter's impossible power. "Go back to your room, Shyla! Close the door and don't come out until—"
The doll flickered and disappeared under from under his grasp. Conall whirled, but not quickly enough to put himself between her and Shyla. The clawing phantom dove for his daughter, gleaming fingers arced into razor claws, and she swiped them across the girl's neck.
"No!" he bellowed, plunging for her. Then she blinked from sight a third time, reappearing before the hearth.
As he watched, she raised one fist high—and he saw, clutched in her fingers, hung the gold chain and the pendant of Saint Margaret, Father Frederick's gift to Shyla.
In the instant he reached for his daughter and pulled her close, the doll flung the pendant into the fire.
Conall searched Shyla over, checking her throat, her collarbone, then each of her arms, frantic as he found her untouched. He grabbed her in his arms, squeezing her tight to his chest, his heart racing.
"Dad?"
He held her before him, watching her blink wide eyes in a daze.
"She...took my necklace," she said in a stunned voice.
Together, they turned to see the doll. She'd crumpled to the floor, her gray ribbons pooled lifelessly around her as she wept into her hands. Trails of bloody tears ran between her fingers.
"Why?" Conall asked in a fierce whisper. "Why would you...how could you let me think..."
Shyla lay a hand on his arm, quieting him.
"She didn't hurt me," she said. "She could have. She came so close, so fast. But...I didn't even feel her fingers."
Pulling out of his arms, she approached the doll once more.
"It's okay," she soothed. "We won't be mad. We're not mad."
No change in the doll this time. Shyla came up beside her. Conall watched with grim anxiety. To his amazement, his daughter sank down beside the creature, and the doll didn't move.
"Are you better now?" Shyla asked. She touched one porcelain arm—now Conall came closer, too, preparing to intervene again if he had to. The doll remained still. Perfectly, rigidly, inhumanly still. Except for the sound of her weeping—which bore no accompanying movement in her body—she might have been a real china doll, fallen in a heap in the corner and left there. The fog, curling around her, spread its icy cold throughout the room around them. It struck Conall then: his living room had become pale and wan, like the doll herself; like the tombstones in the cemetery below; like the musty mausoleums. He caught the hint of grave dirt, and shivered with the chill of the naked night.
"She's turning this place into a place of the dead," he muttered.
He meant to say it mostly to himself, but Shyla heard him and shot him a scolding glare. It surprised him with its heat. She returned her attention to the doll, though.
"I'm here," she whispered. As Conall crossed the last few steps to stand beside them, his daughter put out her long, skinny arms and wrapped them around the doll's neck.
"It's all right, poor thing," she cooed. "We're here now. We're here."
For a time, quiet settled on them all. Even the doll's soft tears fell into silence. The crackling of the fire became the single testament to passing time. Conall, left with nothing else to do, sank down to his knees on the doll's other side.
"You spoke to me," he said. Shyla gave him a curious glance, but he let it go for the moment, lifting a hand to the doll's drifting blonde hair.
"Can you speak to me now?" he asked.
No answer. His hand fell to one white shoulder. Though she'd never exactly been warm, except when he heated her body with the need and passion of his own, now she'd gone cold and stiff as a corpse.
A corpse with the immaculate, exquisite flesh of stone.
Shyla shook the doll. "Wake up," she said. Conall detected worry in her words.
"Come on...come on, wake up!"
The fog boiled up around her, thicker, condensing over her. It had grown so cold, it burned. Both Con and Shyla gave a little start and pulled away.
Like a fountain of smoke, it enshrouded the doll entirely. When it dissipated...
She had disappeared.
Chapter Sixteen
Shyla fell asleep on his lap, too anxious to return to her bed for the night. He held her, as he had held her when she'd been a baby, and he stared into the slowly dying fire as she snored faintly away.
He couldn't sleep. He'd seen something in the doll tonight. She'd been ferocious. Blind in anger and unstoppable in her aim, regardless his height and strength advantage. He seen the way she descended so quickly into rage.
He'd seen something else too. He'd heard it in her tears and even seen it in the way she'd avoided Shyla's direct gaze. The doll feared Shyla.
She feared Shyla looking upon her broken mask of a face.
Every other time the doll had come to him, she'd offered pleasure and temptation. She'd offered her body to him with no explanation at all: hers had been an intention couched solely in fevered, delicious passion.
Except, thinking back, he wondered if he'd had it right.
The first time she'd come, she'd searched for him in the empty house. She'd been holding one of Shyla's belongings; she clutched a stuffed dog he had made for the girl, holding it close to her chest.
Then, she had given herself over to him. When she had, she'd touched something inside of him, his loneliness. The doll spoke to him with her body, embracing him, allowing him, and welcoming him. She'd given him a woman's body to hold close to his own, someone to cling to.
The second time, he'd found her, collapsed by the riverbank. Had she been injured? Like a puppet with strings cut, when the doll fell to the ground she became no more than a heap of limbs, lifeless, as she'd been tonight. When he'd found her by the water, she'd fallen down in the midst of sorrow. She'd appeared to be in pain.
That time, she'd first spoken to him with words.
Are...you...afraid...
Of me?
What a strange thing to ask. Did she want him to be afraid?
Sometimes he did fear her, for what she might do to his home and to Shy. Regardless of her heat in his arms and the way she moved for him, or the way her soft, voiceless affection endeared him, she remained something alien, supernatural. She wasn't really a woman, but a strange, dark force.
Other times, he cared for nothing but her touch, her softness, the feel of her willing body meeting his. Sometimes, he imagined he could almost touch a small, glimmering—maybe guttering—soul inside her hard, fragile porcelain.
He had begun the seduction the day by the river. She had received him, because...because he had been kind to her, perhaps?
First, an act of giving. Second, an act of thanks.
Both times...connection.
What connection did she seek with his
daughter, though? She appeared drawn to the girl, and yet in close proximity she shied away, fearful. Fearful of a twelve-year-old wisp of a thing, who could never possibly have matched the strength he'd wrestled with in his apparition tonight.
So what made her so afraid?
He pondered the doll for hours into the morning. At times he believed he'd stuck himself in time again, the darkness of the night extending on long past when it should have receded. It gave him the luxury of pensive reflection. As a result, he had no idea how close it might be to sunrise when he finally resolved to move Shyla off his lap, quietly stand, and go out into the graveyard alone.
He made his way directly to Maya's ring. Without the great angelic statue it all appeared so bare—scalped, almost. Empty. No one waited for him there, no doll, no vision of his daughter. The last wisps of ground mist crept along, but he could sense them retreating, settling into dew on the grass.
"I...I think I understand it, now."
His voice fell like a solid weight in the world of quiet night-wind and slowly shifting darkness. It emphasized the abandoned silence of the cemetery; the absence of the angel who had been its motherly guardian. His own meager presence in the shadow of its wide reach.
"You're..."
He swallowed, his throat tight.
"You're her true mother, aren't you?"
When no answer came—and he hadn't expected one anyway—Conall moved from gravestone to gravestone, peering at them as if one might hold the answer, as if he hadn't worked in this graveyard for over a decade and didn't already remember each headstone by heart. As if one of them might be hers...even though none of them were.
"You're the one who left her here under Maya's rock," he said. He was undaunted by the silence.
Who had she really been? Shyla's mother...a peasant? A refugee? What did her ghost say to him? Ribbons and grace, movements as smooth as silk or as awkward and jaunty as a puppet on strings.
"A dancer," he breathed. Pausing at one of the headstones, he stared sightlessly at the engraved name and dates. What would her headstone say? What had been her name?
"Something happened to you. You wouldn't have left her here if you hadn't been afraid. You're afraid now, I can sense it. And...I think...you're afraid for her, aren't you?"
He lay fingers on the cold, uneven roughness of the tombstone.
"You're afraid...I'll hurt her."
The graveyard changed, then. Conall glanced up, recognizing the slightest shift in the atmosphere: the feeling of another's eyes on him.
She had come. Standing between the two mausoleums, half-hidden in their silhouette. She waited.
"Am I right?" he asked. His voice had become hoarse. "Do you think...I would hurt Shyla?"
She remained still, and it agonized him. When she finally moved, she slid behind one of the tombs and disappeared. Then, as he began to lunge to follow her, she re-appeared, gliding out from behind one of the tall oaks. From there, she peered at him. Then, she descended the path down to the oldest graves.
He understood where she meant to lead him. So he followed, anxious.
Her ribbons drifted behind her in the moonlight. Yes, she must have been a dancer, in life: a ballerina. Earlier she had come to them with those jerky, uncoordinated, almost painful movements, but she'd recovered. She appeared to float—maybe she did float—and she carried herself with conscientious elegance.
Did her change in demeanor signify something? As he followed, he frowned to himself at the idea. He'd assumed when she lost her familiar grace, she'd been somehow...less. Less sentient? More animal.
More vengeful phantom.
When she returned to poise and polish, he found her more human. More understandable.
Those had been the moments when she talked.
She waited for him again, standing by the rippling edge of the river, gazing into its depths. Conall hesitated a moment, simply watching her. For the first time, she appeared not like a ceramic construct, a ghostly golem of a china figurine. Perhaps the ribbons wrapped around her in exactly the right way, or perhaps the light hid the seams and joints of her inhuman body, but in one perfect, gleaming instant, he saw a real woman.
Except for the damned blindfold hiding her eyes.
"I'm here," he whispered to her as he drew close. On instinct, he put his hands on her cool shoulders and bent his head to touch his lips to her hair.
"Can you tell me why you keep coming to me like this?"
She slowly turned to face him, tilting her face up to his. He understood, whatever energy it took for her to communicate—either in those whipping, whispered words or the hopeless tears—she wanted to communicate now. He curled a knuckle under her chin.
"Please," he whispered. "Tell me. Tell me anything. I just need to know."
She hesitated. Nodded. Then she closed his hands in hers and her head bowed.
Finally, her voice came to him.
Are...you...afraid?
"I'm not afraid of you," he assured her with a shake of his head. "I want to help you, if I can. Is it what you want?"
She lifted one of his hands to her mask and leaned her cool cheek in his palm.
You...her voice echoed in his mind, are...good.
Conall...you are good.
He gave a little start at the sound of his name in her slow hush.
So why...
...are you afraid?
"I'm not afraid of you," he repeated, this time stressing the last word. "But...what do you want with my...with Shyla?"
She paused in her gentle affections. Tilting her face back up to him, she guided his hand farther.
To the tightly-wrapped ribbons hiding her eyes.
"You won't cringe away?" he asked, though he understood this meant she wanted him to see, finally. She pressed herself to his palm again, and he took careful hold of the blindfold.
He didn't need to tug at the bindings. He didn't even need to untie them. When his fingers brushed the silky gray material, the ribbons simply fell away as if they'd been too loose to begin with, spiraling down to her feet.
Her eyes...
One blue, one green.
Exactly like Shyla's.
Conall sucked in a breath. He cupped her face in both hands, running his thumbs along her cheeks.
"You are her mother," he breathed. "Bloody hell...you are."
Her eyes weren't part of the mask. They were the truly human part of her: real flesh of delicate eyelids, real irises glistening wet with tears. He could see where the porcelain came to its edge and showed a hint of true skin beneath. When his fingers searched for the edge of the disguise along her jaw, by her ears, he found none. The doll's face proved one piece, jointed to the rest of her as everything else. Underneath the holes for eyes, however, he saw the real person, trapped.
Not dead, he imagined. As Shyla had put it...cursed.
He ran on thumb over the cracks on the left side. She flinched, as if it hurt her.
"Sorry, sorry," he murmured. "What did this?"
She touched the uneven cracks. Then, her hand drifted to her chest.
"You? You broke your own mask?"
She blinked—oh, how the simple gesture changed everything about her, true movement, so slight but so real. Next she nodded.
"You broke the mask," he pondered, "to..."
To break free.
Her other hand touched the side of his cheek, slid up to his temple. Conall closed his eyes with a soft sigh. When he opened them again, he beheld her as she must have been thirteen years ago. Her cheeks, pink with the warm rosy glow of life; lips, satin red; her small ears hung with tiny crystal drops, definitely the striking fashion of some faraway stage. Those mismatched eyes glittered with mirth, and instead of sorrowful weeping there came the distant echoing sounds of her laughter on a night breeze, the music of grand parties and the voices and applause of a crowd. The gray shroud of ribbons had been replaced with a sparkling evening gown of white and a silk scarf draped over her arms. She had the smile of a wo
man who could make any man believe himself the only man in the room, and if he kissed her lips he imagined they would taste like sweet champagne.
She linked arms with him and said something in rich, enchanting Russian. Though Conall recognized the language well enough, he'd never learned it for himself. Even so, here in the doll's unfurling visions, he found he understood her perfectly.
"It is so very nice to finally meet you, sir. I have heard so many exciting things...you must walk with me now and tell me all about your life."
This is a memory. He slipped into it with her like donning a tailored suit, and they moved through a strange dichotomy of sound and sight. His riverbank and the woods hadn't disappeared. Underneath the lovely reflection of her living self, Conall could still make out the doll herself, cracked and strange. She conveyed flashes and glimpses at a time and place once all hers, a world in which she had been like a bright evening star. She couldn't transport him completely, but if she couldn't speak for herself, she would tell him her story another way.
"Do you dance, Captain?"
She had a gentle voice in the memory, but underneath, her words came still in the furtive hush of a ghost. Hollow and urgent, uttering secrets in the night.
Standing by the river, they merely continued looking into one another's eyes, her fingers touching his, his hand caressing her cheek. He remained aware of all this, but in the sweeping tapestry of the spell they moved out onto a grand dance floor, and he cordially drew her into a waltz.
"Your name?" he asked her, struck dumb as his dream self took the lead, sure of his steps. She fit in his arms as prettily as though they had been molded together, two figures designed in deliberate, artistic balance. How naturally it fell into place, each step and turn, the easy weight of her body in his hands. No, he didn't speak Russian; he didn't waltz, and he wasn't a Captain. As he moved through her memory, however, he recognized it as easily as any of his own.
Her smile made his heart rate quicken.
"Asya," she said. This time it came definitively in the voice of the doll, not the dancer. It hovered above and apart from the sound of the party and her many admirers. A conversation of its own.
His Cemetery Doll Page 11
