Doll Bones by Holly Black Read Free Book Online Page A

“It wasn’t like dreaming at all. She was sitting on the end of my bed. Her hair was blond, like the doll’s, but it was tangled and dirty. She was wearing a nightdress smeared with mud. She told me I had to bury her. She said she couldn’t rest until her bones were in her own grave, and if I didn’t help her, she would make me sorry.”
    Poppy paused, as though she was expecting him to say something sarcastic. Alice shifted uncomfortably. Zach was silent for a long moment, arrested by the images Poppy had conjured. He could almost see the girl in her stained nightgown.
    “Her bones ?” he finally echoed.
    “Did you know that bone china has real bones in it?” Poppy said, tapping a porcelain cheek. “Her clay was made from human bones. Little-girl bones. That hair threaded through the scalp is the little girl’s hair. And the body of the doll is filled with her leftover ashes.”
    A shiver ran up his spine. He closed his eyes to keep from looking at the doll in Poppy’s lap. “Okay, this is your idea of a funny prank. I get it. You’re mad at me for not playing the game anymore, so you made up this story to scare me. What’s the punch line? Did one of you rig a sheet outside to flutter from a tree or something?”
    “I told you,” Alice said to Poppy, under her breath.
    “You really did rig a sheet?” Zach frowned, looking out at the trees and the mounds of cans and metal.
    “No, idiot,” said Alice. “I told her that you wouldn’t believe us and that you wouldn’t want to help.”
    He threw up his hands in confusion. “Help with what? Help you bury a doll ? Why would you need to wake me up in the middle of the night to help you do that?”
    Poppy pulled the doll to her chest, and one of the eyes closed and opened, as though it was winking at him. “Eleanor Kerchner is real. That’s the doll-girl’s name. She told me about herself. Her father was some kind of worker for a china manufacturer, designing and decorating pottery, and when Eleanor died, her dad went totally crazy. He couldn’t bear to put her in the ground, so he took her body back to the kilns at his job, chopped her up, and cremated her. He ground up her burnt bones and used them to make a batch of bone china, then poured it into a mold cast from one of Eleanor’s favorite dolls. So her grave stayed empty.”
    Zach tried to swallow, although his throat suddenly felt very dry. It was too easy to imagine the doll moving on her own, fluttering her painted eyelids and turning toward him. Maybe opening her tiny rosebud of a mouth to scream. “She told you that?”
    “Each night she told me a little bit more of her story.” Illuminated by the flashlight, Poppy’s face had become strange. “She’s not going to rest until we bury her. And she’s not going to let us rest either. She promised to make us miserable unless we help her.”

    He looked at Alice. “And you believe it? You believe all of this?”
    “I never believed in ghosts, so not at first,” Alice said. “No offense, Poppy, but it’s a crazy story. And I’m still not totally sure, but show him the thing . It’s pretty convincing.”
    “Show me what?”
    Poppy pulled the doll’s head sharply up from the body. Zach gasped at the sudden violence of it, but all that it revealed was a string-and-rusty-metal-hook apparatus. With a twist, the Queen’s head came entirely off, leaving the hook still attached to the neck, hanging from the cord. Poppy slid her fingers into the body of the doll, feeling around like she was trying to reach something.
    “What are you doing?” He stared at the disembodied head resting on Poppy’s knee. The eyes were closed now.
    Poppy drew out an old burlap bag from the neck cavity. “Here, take this and look inside.”
    He took the rough cloth as she turned the beam of the flashlight on it, revealing letters and a date in blocky print. The bag was full, but Zach couldn’t tell what it was full with.
    “Liverpool?” he read out loud. He