Doll Bones by Holly Black Read Free Book Online

a pretty impressive sight. The stripped rods, machine parts, and batteries gleamed like mountains of silver, so that’s why they’d started calling it the Silver Hills. They’d come up with a whole story line, including dwarves and trolls and a princess doll that Poppy had painted silver.
    Zach jogged behind Poppy and Alice, the wind cutting through his thin pajamas, making him feel both cold and sort of ridiculous. After a few minutes Poppy pulled a flashlight out of her jacket and clicked it on. It illuminated only a narrow patch of grass and dirt, so she had to swing it back and forth to see much.
    There was the same old high chain-link fence around the property that Zach remembered. And there was the same old abandoned shed that they’d found a few summers ago and used as a clubhouse until Alice’s grandmother had found out about it and given them a speech about tetanus and how it led to something she called lockjaw. Zach wasn’t sure lockjaw was a real thing, but he thought about it every time his neck felt stiff.
    They hadn’t been there since—or at least, he hadn’t. He wondered if Poppy and Alice snuck out to the shed without him. They seemed full of secrets tonight. The only secret he had was one he wished he didn’t.
    Alice opened the creaky old door and went inside. He followed nervously.
    Poppy sat down on the splintery floor, cross-legged, setting the flashlight against her sneakers, so it lit her face. Then she unhooked her backpack from one shoulder, pulling it around onto her lap.
    “So are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Zach asked, sitting down across from Poppy. The wood planks were cold under his pajama pants, and he shifted, trying to get comfortable.
    She unzipped her bag. “You’re going to laugh,” she said. “But you shouldn’t.”
    He glanced over at Alice. She was leaning against one wall of the shed. “Poppy saw a ghost,” she said.
    He tried to suppress a shudder. Ghosts weren’t something you talked about in an abandoned shed at night. “You’re just trying to freak me out. This is some kind of stupid—”
    Poppy carefully took the bone china doll from her backpack. Zach drew in his breath and went silent. The Queen’s dull black eyes were open, her gaze boring into his own. He’d always thought she was creepy-looking, but in the reflected beam of the flashlight, she seemed demonic.
    Poppy touched the doll’s face. It was pure white, like a dinner plate. Hair, dry as brush bristles, was threaded into her scalp, and her cheeks and lips were rouged a faint pink. When she was tilted onto her back, her eyes stayed open instead of closing the way they should have, as though she was still watching Zach. There was a tear at the shoulder of her thin, brittle gown and tiny pinholes through the discolored fabric. It hadn’t aged as well as the rest of the doll—and the ride in Poppy’s backpack probably hadn’t helped.
    “The Queen,” Zach said unsteadily, forcing a sneer into his voice to cover his rising fear. “So what? You brought me all the way out here to see a doll ?”
    “Just listen,” Alice said. “Try not to be the huge jerk you’ve turned into.”
    Alice never said stuff like that, especially not to him. It stung.
    “I know you told us you weren’t going to come over the other day, but I thought you might anyway,” Poppy said, talking fast. “And I couldn’t just go in the cabinet and get the Queen if Mom was there. So I took the doll out of the case that night when we had the argument and moved around some of Mom’s other stuff to hide what I’d done. But that night—well, I saw the dead girl.”
    “You mean you had a nightmare ,” Zach said.
    “Just shut up a minute,” said Alice.
    “It wasn’t like a regular dream,” Poppy said, her fingers smoothing back the Queen’s curls and her voice changing, going soft and chill as the night air. It reminded Zach of the way Poppy talked when she played villains or even the Queen herself.