Page 2 of Cracked Doll

"There she is," he murmurs, thumb sweeping rain — or tears, I can't tell anymore — from my cheek. "Now. Was that so hard?”

Chapter 1

The porcelain doll in my hands has ice-blue eyes.

I turn her gently under the lamplight, working a soft cloth along the curve of her cheek, and for a moment — just a moment — I let myself look. Really look. Black hair, painted in careful ringlets. A rosebud mouth. And those eyes, pale and clear as glass left out in winter.

That's what mine look like, I think, before I can stop myself. I think. I don't actually know anymore.

It's been seven years since I've seen my own eyes on purpose. Seven years of showers taken in the dark, of windows kept curtained, of learning to brush my hair by feel alone. I know the color the way you know a fact you were told once, secondhand, by someone who loved you. Ice blue. Cordelia had them too. Rosalind had them too. We all did. That was rather the point of us.

The doll's glass eyes catch the lamp at exactly the wrong angle, and for one horrible heartbeat I see something move behind them — a pale shape, dark hair, watching me back —

I set her down so fast she nearly tips off the counter. My hand shoots out and catches her before she falls, and I stand there, breathing, staring very hard at the shop wall until my heart stops trying to climb out through my throat.

It's a doll, Ophelia. It's glass. It's not a mirror. It doesn't count.

It never quite stops feeling like it counts.

I set her upright properly among the others — the long shelf of painted faces that have kept me company since I was old enough to reach it — and check the clock above the till. Half four. If I don't leave for supplies soon, Mrs. Aldridge's shop will close before I get there, and then I'll have no wire for the doll joints I'm meant to be repairing this week, and one more thing will simply not get done, the way one more thing never quite gets done in this house.

The bell over the door goes before I can move.

The last customer of the day is a woman I don't recognize, middle-aged, sensible coat, holding up a scuffed 1950s Donald Duck wind-up toy like she's presenting evidence in a trial.

"My Tommy's mad for the old cartoons," she says, setting it on the counter. "Thought he'd love this."

I take it from her without quite meeting her eyes — I never do, not really, not properly, I've gotten very good at looking at people's mouths, their collars, the space just beside their faces where nothing can catch me off guard — and check the little paper tag tied to its foot.

"Twelve pounds," I say.

She pays. I wrap it in brown paper, the way Father taught me before he stopped teaching me anything at all, and hand it back.

She doesn't leave straightaway. I feel her looking — really looking, the way people do here, the way they've done for seven years — and then she says, not unkindly, but not kindly either, "You know, the whole town says you're odd. Now I see they're not wrong."

I don't answer. There's nothing to say to that which hasn't already been said, by someone, at some point, in this exact spot, under this exact bell.

The bell rings again as she goes, and I stand very still until the sound of it fades. Outside, the evening is coming down soft and blue over the rooftops. I watch the street a moment — people walking, laughing, living their unremarkable Tuesday lives — and I let myself cry, just a little, just for a second, the way I allow myself to sometimes when the shop is empty and no one can see.

Cordelia. Rosalind.

Nineteen years old today. Twelve years old, that night. The maths of it never stops being obscene.

Upstairs, something crashes — a bottle, maybe, or a chair — followed by a low, ugly stream of cursing. I wipe my face with the back of my wrist and start closing up.

I know what tonight is. I know what today is. Which means I know exactly what will happen to the till the moment I go upstairs, so before I do, I take most of the day's earnings and tuck them into the lining of my coat, the little slit I sewed there myself for precisely this purpose. It isn't stealing. It's mine. I earned it standing behind that counter for nine hours while people called me odd to my face.

I gather a basket, my coin purse, my hat — wide-brimmed, good for tilting low over my eyes when the world gets to be too much — and I step out into the dusk.

Whitby at evening is, despite everything, beautiful.

The abbey sits up on its cliff above the town like something out of the very stories that made this place famous, black ruins against a sky gone the color of a healing bruise. Cobbled streets wind down toward the harbor, gulls wheeling and crying overhead, gas-lamp-style streetlights flickering on one by one. This is a town that fell in love with its own darkness a hundred years ago and never looked back — Stoker slept here once, they say, and dreamed up a count who cast no reflection, and the town has spent every year since leaning gleefully into the myth of itself. Shopfronts sell crystals and corsets and little tin bats. In more than a fortnight the whole place will be swallowed by Goth Weekend, and for two days a year, half of Whitby will dress exactly like I do the other three hundred and sixty-three.

I am, in other words, wearing the wrong costume for the wrong festival, all year round.

My dress today is a deep wine red, high-collared, the sleeves narrow to the wrist the way they were made for a woman who never had to lift anything heavier than a teacup. It was my mother's, once. Before that, I imagine, someone else's — some other Hansburg woman who had money enough to have dresses made just for her, back before this family fell as far as it's fallen. It doesn't fit me exactly right. Nothing that belonged to a dead woman ever quite does. But it's beautiful, and it's mine, and some mean, stubborn part of me refuses to be ashamed of it, even as I feel every eye on the street find me and hold.

"Look at the state of her," someone murmurs, not bothering to lower their voice much.