"If you don't take her away," she hissed. "I will."
Chapter Eighteen
Panicked, Conall rushed back to the graveyard and his home. The cold threat of the doll's voice grated on him like tinfoil between his teeth. He ignored the wailing complaint of his injured leg, his mind burning with urgency.
If you don't take her away...
I will.
The ghost's voice carried cold, sharp malice, but even more pressing had been the chilling, feral note of derangement. She'd changed. Everything in her had changed. The soft Russian ballerina disappeared like a paper lantern set ablaze, leaving warped and broken wicker framework behind. Another side of her, with its own vicious, hungry identity.
Broken Doll.
He caught sight of the cemetery gates ahead, gilded with the first light of sunrise. He limped on, fast as he could manage. What could the doll have meant? Would she simply take his daughter?
Would she...kill her?
I never want to see her again.
The flat heat of adrenaline rushed down his limbs as he came closer to the iron bars. Tendrils of black, thorny growth wound up around the metal lattice. Jointed into awkward, manic angles, they could have been the many grasping legs of enormous black spiders clambering toward him. Beyond the gates the mist crept along the ground, but in the orange light of dawn it simmered with rusty, ugly meanness. The whole graveyard loomed unfamiliar and unfriendly, like a suspicious beast.
How? He was in a daze. Has she already come? Would she hurt Shyla after all?
"Shy?" he called out in a hoarse voice, panting from the run. He threw open the door to the house hard enough it banged, making even him jump. "Shy? Where are you?"
"I'm here!"
Her answering voice came from the stairs, and he tracked it until he could see her there, solid and safe, with his own eyes. She stood halfway to the second floor, grasping the banister with white-knuckled tension.
"Dad!" she cried, and scrambled the rest of the way down to meet him. "Oh, God, I didn't know where you'd gone!"
A pang of shame struck him. For the second time, he'd disappeared without warning her, and for the sake of slaking his own needful lusts. He wrapped arms around her, biting his tongue.
"Con? Is it you, man?"
Frowning, he glanced toward the kitchen as Father Frederick appeared in the doorway, steaming mug of coffee in hand. When Conall gave his daughter a questioning gaze, Shyla returned it with a distinctly nervous shrug.
"The Father came by about half an hour ago looking for you," she mumbled. "When you weren't here, he guessed something...well, he guessed the woman took you."
"Half an hour?" Conall repeated, facing the priest. "What're you doing coming by before the sun's even risen?"
"I saw the mists rising," Fred said. His voice came out hushed and very strange. His drawn face and bleary eyes said he'd had no sleep himself. "I...believed she would be here with you."
"She did come," Conall muttered. Keeping his attention on Fred, he sidled Shyla more carefully behind him. He didn't like the hollow cast in his old friend's face. "She's gone, now."
"But Daddy, the vines," Shyla protested. "Our garden up front...they came through it too. It's all ploughed up now. And the fence in back. Dad, they came up all around the house—"
He tugged her closer, putting a steadying arm around her. Damnit, how could he leave her alone again?
He hadn't intended to, of course. He hadn't meant to follow the doll—Asya—out of the graveyard at all.
It tore at him. Why would Asya terrorize Shyla? He believed the doll truly had been Shyla's mother, once. She'd spoken with utter sincerity in her ghostly voice when she'd explained her gratitude.
You've cared...for my baby.
You've cared for her when I could not.
Every time Shyla came near her, though, the doll had attacked.
Asya might have been her mother...but Broken Doll couldn't even stand to be close to the girl.
Perhaps wanted to murder her.
Why?
"She lured you away again," Father Frederick intoned. "Didn't she?"
"What?"
Conall turned to the man, genuinely startled by the sound of the old priest's quaking voice.
"The creature is a deceiver," Fred answered. "A lying seducer. I warned you she would lead you into her clutches, take you from this child—"
"Priest!" Conall snapped. His arms tightened around Shyla.
"You fornicated with the witch, didn't you?" Fred accused. He came out from the doorway, jabbing a finger at Conall. His eyes burned, fever-bright. "The shattered slut spread her legs for you and you fucked her, didn't you?"
"Fred!" he roared. The father paused, blinking, as though Conall had caught him by surprise.
"Go upstairs, Shy," Conall hissed. He gave her a tight squeeze to reassure her. "Start packing a suitcase."
His daughter lifted wide, scared eyes to him, but she obeyed. She hugged him back and then scurried up the stairs.
Con turned his attention to Fred. The priest's expression had fallen into one of tormented disbelief.
"I...can smell her on you..." he grated. "Her scent...it's all over you."
"You're losing your head here, man," Conall said evenly. Taking a step toward Frederick, he reached out a hand. Fred didn't have the look of an indignant, outraged priest, now. The way his voice quavered, the wild flash of his eyes—he raged from betrayal. Covetous, mean betrayal.
"Is it what she's done to you, then, too?" Con asked. The very idea made him uneasy. He recalled Fred telling him, she is haunting us both.
The priest, though? Had Asya—his Asya—made a lover of the priest as well?
No, his mind railed. He's mistaken. She comes to me. She needs me.
"Talk to me, Fred," he said. "Tell me what's going on."
A bright flash of alarm—Asya's voice—flared in his brain.
Conall!
He withdrew his hand, nearly too late. A crackling, bony vine lashed out from Fred's sleeve, black thorns scathing the tips of Con's fingers as he stumbled back in shock. A cry escaped him, and his bad leg failed: Conall crashed to the floor, and as he shot a look up at Fred more of them appeared, the same jerking, writhing limbs, slithering in a circle around him. They'd broken their way up from under the damn floorboards, right at the father's feet.
Fred's eyes turned to black pools, vicious and full of a baleful intelligence. The priest advanced on Con, narrowing them as his lips started to move in a low, hate-filled chant.
"Bloody hell!" Conall roared. "Shyla! Get out of the house! Get out and get away from here, hurry!"
"Dad?"
Her voice came in a panic, and then her running footsteps above, her gasp from the top of the stairs. He craned his neck to see her, and at the same time Father Frederick glared up to find her too. Shyla stared, her eyes darting to take in too much information at once.
"Stay," Frederick commanded. "I believe it is time we discussed your future, little girl."
The creaking vines seized Conall by the ankle and wrenched his injured leg. He threw back his head with a shout as long thorns sunk into his skin.
"Stop it!"
Shyla charged halfway down the stairs, but Conall put up a hand.
"Get out, Shyla!"
"I wouldn't," Fred warned. "And I should tell you your name is not Shyla. It is Esther. After the Biblical queen."
He said it in a haughty sneer, as if Conall's choice of name had been insulting. Shyla froze, peering strangely at the priest.
"What did you say?" she asked.
"I should know," Fred replied. "I am the one your mother entrusted with you. Not the gravekeeper."
Conall struggled with the grasping tangle of vines creeping up on him. More began to bulge up from the boards beneath his arms and head, pulling him tightly down to the hard wood. His mind raced, and he searched for some kind of weapon, anything to cleave away the slithering growths.
"My mother?" Shyla asked
Fred. She lingered where she stood, one foot half-raised to move backward, if she had to. Conall could see the priest had her rapt attention.
"Shy, don't," he choked. One of the vines tried to wrap around his throat, but he grasped at it, holding it at bay. "He's saying it to lure you. He doesn't have any information about your mother, but I do. I found her, Shy! She's—"
The vine constricted with incredible force, breaking his grip and pulling tight around his neck, like a noose. His words cut off in a harsh, wet hitch of breath.
"It's truth, child," Frederick said. "She came to us at the convent, nearly ready to birth you. She was an unmarried Russian refugee, fleeing after the bombings in the city. We took her in, tried to care for her."
Conall narrowed his eyes.
There's how the church found me.
Asya had gone mad when he'd said it. She'd fled his touch, thrashed like a frightened animal.
That’s when she'd changed.
When she'd told him to take Shyla away.
He struggled to pry the vines away, but they'd claimed too much of him, pinning him down. He twisted as much as he could to see Shyla and found her riveted in horror on him.
"Let my dad go," she told the priest.
"I'm afraid I can't," Frederick replied. "He hasn't been the most supportive advocate for me taking you back."
"If you helped my mother at the convent, how did I end up here?" she demanded. Her ferocious tone brought a swell of pride to Con's chest.
"I said we tried to care for her. She was very sick, however...the trauma of the bombings, I suspect. It made her paranoid, and she feared herself in danger. In danger from a church full of nuns and one simple priest. She confided in me at first—told me her history, about her family...about you. She told me what she wished your name to be and asked me to be sure you grew up in the sanctity of the church. Over a matter of days, though, her sanity began to erode. One night she ran from the convent and managed to find her way here. By the time I found her, however, she'd hidden you away."
"And why haven't you ever told me this before?" Shyla said. "Why didn't you come forward then and tell everyone you had her at your church?"
Fred's eyes narrowed.
"Because," he growled. "Your mother died. She died of her madness, girl. I didn't expect Conall would want me darkening your early life with such a painful truth."
His tone had gone mean, cold with a note of anger Conall had never heard from his old friend.
"Or would you really have wanted to know your mother was a slattern and a lunatic? She abandoned you in a cold graveyard under a rock, child. Doubtless she'd convinced herself you were a wicked thing sewn in her womb by the devil. Would it have done you any good, if I'd told you so before now?"
"He's lying, Shy!" Conall managed to choke out. "She hid you to protect you! He's the one she ran from!"
Shyla's eyes gleamed, and she stomped her foot. "Stop it!" she shouted at Fred. "Just stop saying all these horrible things! Let my dad go, and get out of our house!"
The father's frown deepened. He returned to his eerie chant and held out a hand. When he clenched it into a fist, the thorns dug in deeper to Conall's flesh, and the gravedigger arched with a strangled, agonized cry.
"Stop it!" Shyla yelled. "Stop it!"
"I had hoped you would grow up without having been affected by your mother's madness, little Esther—"
"That’s not my name!" she shrieked at him.
"—which is why I've been so adamant about you coming to the convent. I expected one day you would show your mother's true colors. I'd hoped Conall would have been more judicious with you instead of allowing you to grow up like an untended weed. At this rate you'll be hot on your mother's heels. The sisters will have a lot to do, to make you a proper girl."
"Let him go!"
Conall struggled harder, but he'd started to feel numb where the thorns pressed into him. Worse yet, the vines slowly broke apart the floor under him. The smell of dirt began to waft up from their churning progress.
Father Frederick sneered. He'd expected Shyla to appreciate his offer, Conall supposed. Since she clearly didn't, the priest turned his attention on Con instead.
"You worked out well enough to be her caretaker, for a time," he said. "If any of the town's families had been the ones to manage her, they'd never have given her up again when I chose to take her back. You, at least, I believed would be...malleable. Who could have guessed you'd be such a mule about the girl, even with the man who saved your life."
Such venom in those words. Conall glowered up at him.
"My girl," he managed. "My daughter. Trumps the loony priest any day of the week."
A tic at the corner of Frederick's eye. The priest took a measured step forward and dropped to one knee, looming over Con as the vines threatened to pull the gravekeeper under.
"I told you I'd studied Hitler's occult societies," he murmured, low enough to keep Shyla from hearing. "And what I discovered is, the Fürher's research might not have been as mad as you'd believe. You've seen my work, gravekeeper...safe to say, I think, you've sampled its aesthetic beauty for yourself."
"What...are you...gabbing about?" Conall bit out against the pull of the creepers.
Fred's smile dripped with saccharine poison.
"Why, the doll, of course."
Conall snarled. "Asya!"
"Yes. She's rather lovely, wouldn't you say?"
The smile turned mean, and the priest kicked him hard, right in his bad leg. Conall let out a yelp of pain, and Shyla bounded down a few more steps. Frederick spun to face her, and she froze.
"The doll," he continued. "I think she's my favorite work. One of my most beautiful creations. Certainly better than any of the Thule invokers or the scientists of the Ahnenerbe ever managed. I wanted to...perfect immortality. Wouldn't you agree she's perfect, Conall?"
Conall glared daggers at the priest, refusing to answer. Father Frederick pondered his silence a moment, then drove the tip of his boot hard into Conall's side, eliciting another loud grunt of pain.
"If you can fuck my pretty doll, you can at least admit to me you find her perfect!"
"Why..."
Conall swallowed hard against the root trying to crush his Adam's apple.
"Why...is her mask...broken?"
This sent the priest into a rage. He spun away from Conall, shoving over a small table and sending a lamp crashing to the floor.
"The bitch," he roared, "is perfect! I made her perfect, I made her immortal!"
He came back to Conall, this time lifting one foot to plant it cruelly on the gravekeeper's chest.
"I made the slut ballerina perfect," he repeated. He practically frothed at the mouth, spittle flying in his anger. "But she defies me. She betrays me, coming here to cuckold me with you, a faithless dog! I tried to warn you off of her. I imagined if you believed her to be a succubus preying on others, even the men of my church, perhaps you'd stay away. You didn't, though. You understand, Conall, how you've brought this on yourself. I can't have my creation disobeying me...can't have her wandering off to defile her flawless beauty with trash like you. It won't do, not at all...not when she'll soon have a daughter to care for again. Our daughter."
Conall's eyes flew wide, and he redoubled his efforts to wrench free of the vines. Shyla, unable to hide her fear, lunged forward to try and offer help.
Father Frederick snatched her by the arm and dragged her beside him. Conall could see the stark white tension of his knuckles standing out as he dug fingers into her flesh.
"Goodbye, Conall," Frederick sneered. With one vicious thrust of his foot, he broke the last support of floorboards under Conall's body, and the vines immediately constricted the gravekeeper down into the earth.
"Try not to worry too much. Esther is going to be with her family again. The Little Sisters and I will take care of everything. Soon, she'll be exactly like her mother: immortal...and perfect, forever."
Conall roared in protest, thrashing wild
ly, straining even though the thorns dug deeper, stinging, burning him deep in his veins.
As he continued to struggle, they started to pull him down...
Down...
The last thing he saw was Shyla's terrified expression, as the graveyard soil devoured him.
Chapter Nineteen
Underground. Buried, in his own graveyard.
Buried...alive.
Conall fought to move, but movement proved practically impossible. His leg screamed with pain; so did his neck, and his limbs where thorns had pierced through clothing and into flesh.
His mind became a riot. How could any of this be happening?
He has Shyla. I don't understand why, but he has her. He's taking her away.
Fred had been stationed in a secret war on the occult. Somewhere, though...somehow, he'd not rooted out the dark magicians of Hitler's orders but adopted them, converted to their ways. Taken on their search for the secrets of dark power and imaginings.
I wanted to perfect immortality.
If Asya—half-mad, imprisoned, and full of voiceless, wailing sorrow—stood as Fred's idea of perfection...
He has Shyla!
He would make Con's daughter into his next living, porcelain doll.
Trap her...as he had trapped her mother.
Con thrashed harder, but it merely brought deeper agony as reward. He tried to scream, but dirt filled his mouth. Quickly his rage became blind terror: he would soon be unable to breathe.
It pressed down on him. His graveyard. The earth he'd tended. The roots he'd grown. The soil and the trees and the dead embraced him, and he choked on the stark white knowledge he would die like this.
Still, none of it broke him away from that one singular thought.
He has Shyla!
His chest tightened, burning for air. He scraped and scrabbled in the blackness, prying at the dirt, but he succeeded only in bloodying his fingers.
Finally, exhausting his air, Conall gave a choked, agonizing sob.
Shyla...my girl...my little girl...
His mind filled with pictures of her. The tiny baby he'd found tucked in the crevice of the rock; the beautiful cherub of a girl she'd been as they celebrated her early birthdays and Christmases. The days when he would find her on the back porch engrossed in a new book; the sight of her sitting on one of the gravestones, conscientiously swinging her feet and never letting them accidentally hit the gray surface. He clenched his teeth against the unbearable weight of sorrow rushing down on him.
His Cemetery Doll Page 13