My bedroom door burst open and I was blinded by the light. Aunt Victoria’s silhouette moved into the doorway, temporarily blocking most of the glare.
The groom doll! Did the darkness and bed shield him from her line of sight? I couldn’t be sure. Positioning myself between the bedside table and the doorway, I lurched forward, moving a little closer to Aunt Victoria.
“Is there a fire?” I cried, blinking back sleep.
“That’s not the fire alarm.” Aunt Victoria moved swiftly to my side. “It’s the burglar alarm.”
I felt a little sick from forcing my exhausted body to get up too quickly. Realizing this, Aunt Victoria took hold of my elbow and helped me out into the hall. I closed my eyes against the slicing pain of too much light too fast. Aunt Victoria moved us both to the west wing door. The alarm grew louder as we approached. Aunt Victoria put out a hand and touched the dead bolt. Still locked.
“That’s a good sign,” Aunt Victoria muttered under her breath. She put her hand into the pocket of her bathrobe and pulled out a cell phone that she must have slipped in there before coming to get me.
“Are you calling the police?” I asked.
As if on cue, the cell phone began playing “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.” My aunt hit the answer button and put it to her ear.
“Richard, what’s the situation?” Aunt Victoria asked in a no-nonsense tone. She listened for a moment then glanced at me, running a distracted hand through her mass of sleep tangled hair. “Wren’s with me. We’re both fine. I’ve checked the west wing door. It doesn’t look like it’s been tampered with.”
The effort of keeping myself upright caused my legs to shake ever so slightly. I hoped Aunt Victoria would be too distracted to notice. She listened in grim silence as Richard talked on the other end of the line. I couldn’t hear what he was saying over the sound of the alarm.
“I see,” Aunt Victoria said, glancing again at the locked door in front of us.
There was a barely perceptible tremor in my voice. I didn’t know if it was caused by fear, adrenaline, or a large combination of both. “Did someone break into the museum?”
Things were pretty bad if I thought a desperate criminal was the best case in this scenario. I didn’t even want to think about what else it might be.
“He’s checking around, trying to see if anything has been—” Aunt Victoria broke off, listening to whatever it was Richard had to report as he went along. An excruciating amount of time passed as he checked the place over, room by room. Minutes went by and I wished Aunt Victoria would put him on speaker phone so I could hear what he was saying too.
“What if the intruder is still hiding in the house?” I hissed under my breath.
Like a possessed doll on a rampage, perhaps?
Aunt Victoria shook her head, then put up one hand motioning for me to be quiet so she could hear Richard on the other end of the line. The buzz of Richard’s voice rose suddenly, talking loud and fast. Aunt Victoria’s face turned pasty white as she listened. Something was seriously wrong.
Aunt Victoria let go of me. Without a word, she drew back the bolt, threw open the west wing door, and rushed out onto the upstairs landing. I hurried to follow her as fast as my exhausted body would allow. Aunt Victoria took the stairs two at a time and hit the first floor at a jog. I was only halfway down the grand staircase by the time she disappeared somewhere off into the west end of the museum. The alarm suddenly stopped—plunging the museum into eerie stillness.
It took me much too long to navigate my way down the stairs. I stopped at the bottom for a few moments, using Fiona to help steady me, then continued to wobble through the many dimly lit halls and corridors of the museum. I felt like an old-fashioned film projector caught in slow motion, dragging myself painfully through each and every scratched and grainy frame.
When I finally reached the Margaret Kensington Historical Doll Room, I found both Aunt Victoria and Richard waiting there. Like a group of shell-shocked victims, the three of us sat for several minutes staring helplessly at what was left of the Wedding Party display in stunned silence. The glass in front of the case was completely shattered. A million jagged shards of glittering glass littered the floor as if the display had exploded from the inside out. The dolls themselves lay in a twisted heap at the bottom, their arms and legs a tangle of fine suits and satin. Other than that, they seemed to be undamaged. I took a quick mental inventory. The dolls were all there—except, of course—
“The bride doll,” my voice was flat with acceptance of the inevitable. “She’s gone.”
Aunt Victoria put out a trembling hand toward the pile of dolls.
“Don’t touch anything,” Richard’s sharp tone caused Aunt Victoria to jerk back in surprise. “I just called the police. We need to wait until they get here. If the bride doll has been stolen, this is a crime scene.”
“All those newspaper articles and television reports,” Aunt Victoria said in a daze. “Everyone in the county knew the Wedding Party was in the museum for the grand opening tomorrow.”
“But why take only the bride doll?” Richard said, throwing up his hands in confusion. “The rest of the collection was right in front of the thief. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Oh, but it did. Especially if the bride doll had broken herself out of the display. Now she was out and continuing her frenzied hunt for her groom through the halls of this museum. In a sickening flash, I realized that in our rush Aunt Victoria and I had left the west wing door standing wide open.
Panic ridden adrenaline buzzed through my veins, lancing through my body’s pain and exhaustion with horrifying speed. I started backing from the room as quickly as I could without drawing attention to myself.
“The alarm must have frightened them away before they could take the rest,” Aunt Victoria said, completely oblivious to everything but the broken display before her. “The bride would have been worth the most money.”
Reaching the doorway, I turned and ran, lurching drunkenly through rooms filled with dead-eyed dolls. It was in the Victorian and Edwardian Doll Room that the creepiness began. All at once, the dolls began to move—their eyes and heads turning slowly toward the front of the house. I froze, listening to the creaking and scraping of their many porcelain bodies as they moved together, their lifeless attention drawn by some irresistible force.
The bride doll was close. I had to reach the groom before she found him.
I bolted in the direction the dolls were looking and skidded out into the main entry hall. Even Fiona was caught in the bride doll’s ghostly spell. The life-sized doll had her head cocked at an unnatural angle, her glass eyes turned so far upward they were mostly white.
Upstairs!
A pounding knock at the door gave me a violent start. The police had arrived.
I didn’t stop to let them in. Panting and trembling, I dragged myself up the stairs, blind terror lending me temporary inhuman strength.
Don’t let it be too late! Let me get there in time!
The open west wing door was a gaping black hole in the darkness. I stumbled through it, rushed down the hall, and burst into my bedroom, flipping on the light switch as I came breathlessly in.
The groom doll sat on the bedside table, right where I’d left him.
After my headlong dash upstairs, I felt more than a little ill. I hunched over a moment, taking deep breaths in an attempt to drive back the nausea. Over the sound of my own ragged breathing, I could hear deep voices talking downstairs. Aunt Victoria or Richard must have let the police in. A brand-new fear seized me.
The police would search the house. What if someone found Xavier’s doll in my room and started asking questions that I didn’t have any answers for?
I quietly shut my bedroom door, wishing uselessly for the thousandth time that Matt had already replaced my lock. But preparations for the Wedding Party’s public debut had taken precedence over everything else.
Moving to the bedside table, I carefully picked up the groom doll, c
radling him tenderly in my arms. As long as his doll was safe, Xavier was safe. But where could I hide him? My eyes fell on my violin still propped against the vanity where I’d last left it.
The violin case!
I went over to the closet and pulled out the empty case. Opening it, I took hold of the molded velvet lining and ripped it mercilessly from its casing. I then laid the groom doll gently inside its bare—but roomier—interior. It fit the doll like a coffin.
I shivered a moment, then closed the violin case and latched it tight before slipping it into the back of my closet, carefully covering it with some of my clothes first. Shutting the closet door, I breathed a sigh of relief. I had to get back downstairs as quickly as possible. Before anyone noticed I was missing and got suspicious. I headed for the door.
Flipping off the light, I found myself suddenly plunged into darkness. In my rush to get to the groom doll in time, I hadn’t bothered to turn on the hall lights. I shut the bedroom door behind me and moved toward the downstairs’ lights which illuminated a little of the hallway and landing outside the open west wing door. I shivered a moment as the icy cold air from outside rolled over me. Had someone left the front doors open? Groping my way down the dark hall, I made my way toward the sound of the authoritative voices now coming from the first floor.
My lower leg brushed against something soft but solid in the darkness. I froze, my wide eyes searching the shadows.
What was that?
I tentatively put out my foot feeling around for the item. There was nothing there. I must have knocked the thing over when I bumped against it. Now that my eyes had adjusted a bit, I could see that there was indeed a small pale object on the floor about one yard away from my right foot. I squinted down at it trying to make out what it was. It had an odd, Christmas tree shape, larger at the bottom and smaller at the top. Aunt Victoria must have dropped a pillow while hurrying from her room earlier. I took a step forward, reaching out to pick it up.
My fingers tingled as waves of biting cold air rolled off the object. Then, with a soft rustle, it backed deliberately away from my outstretched hand.
Dread trickled down through my body, paralyzing me to the spot with horror. Eyes dilated and unblinking, I watched the ghostly white object, now standing perfectly still before me. The too-familiar scent of stale smoke and dead ashes lingered within the hall.
A scream edged its way up my throat, even as instinct held me frozen in place like a terrified mouse hiding in the shadows. As my eyes finished their adjustment, I found myself able to pick out more details of the object—the impossibly small human figure, its tiny arms, and even some of the basic features of its face.
The bride doll.
The doll looked up at me, face tilted back. Even as I watched, she cocked her head to one side, studying me with careful deliberation. I could see her glittering glass eyes watching me. My ragged breathing filled the quiet hallway as I tried to gain control of my panic.
It might have been just a trick of the shadows that enshrouded her, but there was something about the doll’s expression that seemed—off. Even as I watched, the bride’s pretty little mouth sagged open, and her lower eyelids winced upward, almost as if the doll was in pain.
The bride put out a hand, reaching out her tiny fingers toward me like a blind man feeling his way in the dark. She took a tiny step and then another. The doll moved like a wooden puppet, stiff and awkward, jerking inhumanly with each stride. Every clenched muscle in my body screamed for me to run—to get as far away from the terrifying doll as possible. Yet I could not make myself move. I could only stand there and watch her come closer.
“Rosalyn?” I whispered the name through numb lips—a last defense against the panic threatening to overwhelm me.
The bride doll froze, her pale hand still stretched out before her. Her eyes widened into unnaturally large proportions, giving her an air of horrified dismay.
“Rosalyn? Is that you?” Fear caused my voice to quaver. I had to know whose tortured soul was caught inside that doll. I had to understand why they were there.
“I want to help you.” My desperate words echoed softly within the dark confines of the shadowy hallway.
But the doll had other ideas.
It backed clumsily away from me. Its head swung limply on its neck, shaking from side to side as it retreated. The message was clear. No, it did not want my help.
The doll turned and ran, scuttling into the darkness so fast its clumsy, but inhuman speed startled me. I stared unblinkingly into the all-encompassing darkness, my ears straining to catch any audible sound. There was a rustle of satin and tiny footsteps—then deathly silence.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Early the next morning after the police had gone, I sat at the bottom of the grand staircase and attempted to gather what was left of my meager strength. Kat burst through the front doors and hurried over to me.
“Ms. Cooke is outside turning away all our customers. There are reporters swarming all over the parking lot! Is it true? Someone stole the entire Wedding Party?” Kat’s voice rose in horror as she fiddled at the strands of her blue hair with distracted fingers.
I stared silently at Fiona only a few feet away from us. The doll’s eyes and head were back in their normal positions, but that didn’t stop a shudder from passing through my body as I looked at her. “It’s only the bride doll that’s missing,” I said in a voice of terrible calm.
Kat stared, blinking rapidly in disbelief. “Why would someone break into a museum just to steal one doll?”
“The police think the alarm scared them so bad they grabbed the most expensive item and ran,” I spoke like one repeating a memorize speech. There was no thief, but I couldn’t tell Kat that.
“How’d they break in?” Kat demanded.
“The officers aren’t sure. They searched the whole house top to bottom, but couldn’t find a point of entry or exit,” I said slowly, knowing where this conversation would lead. I didn’t want to go there, but Kat had to know the rest of what happened last night. I forced myself to continue. “They didn’t find a thief, but they did discover some vandalism.”
“What vandalism?” Kat asked.
I got heavily to my feet and motioned limply for Kat to follow me. Feeling a little sick to my stomach, I led her to the back of the house and opened the door to the basement. Earlier, the place had been crawling with police and officials taking photographs of the crime scene. The place was now eerily empty. I flipped on the light switch at the top of the stairs and pointed down into the cordoned off basement below.
Kat took a couple of steps down. She looked at the state of the room below us and gasped.
The cabinet filled with creepy dolls stood open. The fake groom dolls—or what was left of them—had spilled out of the open cabinet onto the floor. The doll’s themselves were shredded, ripped into jagged bits and pieces, their fluffy white guts strewn about the floor in every direction. The pure violence of destruction that lay mangled across the basement floor was more than unsettling. It was downright disturbing.
Last night the bride doll had reached toward me with her outstretched hand. The very same hand that had torn these poor dolls to shreds.
Kat clutched at her shirt as if trying to stop her heart from thundering out of her chest. I looked down at the massacre below in grim silence. The creepy dolls were only fakes. Hastily made decoys meant to confuse and deceive. Judging by the mass of destruction spread out before us, the bride was not happy about the trick. She wanted the real groom doll—and she wanted him bad.
I thought of the violent wind that Xavier sent bursting through my room when I first told him about the bride doll. The ghost imprisoned inside Rosalyn’s doll was dangerous, and Xavier knew it.
Margaret must have known it, too. I could only imagine the years of anxiety and stress she must have suffered while trying to thwart the possessed bride doll and keep Xavier’s spirit anchor safe. Even going so far as to create a hidden closet to hide the doll in
. Then, somehow, the bride got into the walls of the house. Margaret would have heard her crawling around in there, day in and day out. It would have been enough to drive anyone mad.
Thanks to me, the bride doll was now out of those walls.
The police had made a thorough search of the house last night. I’d half expected one of them to come screaming through the halls with a creepy, living doll attached to his back. It never happened. They didn’t find any sign of the bride. Which meant she was still somewhere in the house. Hidden away, waiting to climb back out under the cover of darkness and begin her inexhaustible search for her groom once more.
Footsteps approached. Kat and I tore our gazes from the horrific scene below as Gabrielle appeared at the top of the stairs.
“I thought I heard voices,” Gabrielle said, scanning our stunned faces with concern. “I’m glad the two of you didn’t go all the way down. The police have asked us not to disturb anything just yet.”
Kat’s face was sickly white, and I could see real fear lurking behind her dark eyes. “Whoever did this is messed up.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “This is like something out of a horror movie.”
“Okay, I think we’ve seen enough.” Gabrielle walked past me to collect Kat. When the blue-haired girl continued to stare down at the mangled dolls, Gabrielle laid her arm gently across her shoulders and maneuvered her back up the stairs. I followed sluggishly behind. As we moved toward the front of the house, I watched in amazement as Gabrielle and Kat began what had to be their first civil conversation.
“We’re closing the museum for today,” Gabrielle said. “If you’d like to head home for the day, Kat, it would be fine.”
“No, I’ll stay. When Ms. Sarah gets tired, I can help with crowd control outside.”
“Your assistance would be greatly appreciated.” Gabrielle slowed her steps a moment as they approached the main entry hall. “Speaking of Sarah, who is that she’s talking to?” Gabrielle lowered her voice with sudden interest.
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