Haunted (39 page)

To Whom It May Concern:

If you are reading this letter, it means that you have found that which I have attempted to hide--the dolls of Christabel Baudey. I would have burned these creations of the devil, but to destroy them would mean disaster, for the living and the dead.

I am Naval Commodore Maxwell Patton, Retired, and I inherited this cursed house upon the passing of Elizabeth Baudey, my godchild. During her last tortured days on this earth, she explained many things to me and begged me to do as I have done with the dolls.

I must first tell you that, despite her profession, Elizabeth was a fine woman who gave the ladies who chose to work for her every advantage she could. She took in many young women who were otherwise homeless and she never forced any to work as ladies of pleasure. She found jobs in town for those who desired them, so that they might save enough to make their own way in the world. She let others do housekeeping and gardening in exchange for room and board and tuition fees while they bettered their education. Many of the ladies who worked as prostitutes later used their considerable earnings to finance new lives and careers for themselves.

Elizabeth did have a remarkable appreciation for the physical world, it is true, but she was also a fine, fine woman who never deserved to be cursed by that inhuman evil, Christabel.

When Ezra Wilder, the son of my good friend Rear Admiral Joseph Wilder, God rest his soul, agreed to detour his ship the Golden Horde to the island where Elizabeth and her child were reported to be living, to bring them to their inheritance, I was joyful. I did not know of the heartache and untimely death I would cause this fine young man.

I had not known if Elizabeth was even alive until she sent a letter to me some years ago, telling me of the hurricane that claimed her father and of her rescue from the water by a village voodoo practitioner. That letter, as well as the handful that followed over the next six years, claimed that she was happily married to that same priest--a man of mixed birth whose background is an utter mystery except for three facts: he had been educated for a time in England; he had come to this village claiming to be sent by the loa, the voodoo spirits of the land; and he was utterly, completely charming. Alarmingly so.

I met Christabel shortly after she and her mother arrived at Baudey House and was immediately struck by the girl's beauty, which surpassed even that of her mother. She took after her father, I am told, for she had raven black hair, a milky complexion, and large, dark eyes that betrayed a trace of Asian blood. Her heart-shaped lips, full and red, were the only feature she had in common with her mother.

Christabel's beauty, as well as her attitude, was that of a grown woman, but where Elizabeth's soul came from heaven, her daughter's clearly came from hell.

She was expelled from school after school. At one, it was said she killed a small dog and ate its heart, raw; at another, she was caught in the act of raping another girl with a hairbrush. I don't know if these things happened, but I would not be at all surprised to find that they were true.

At thirteen, the girl suddenly blossomed into a full-grown woman, and by that time, Elizabeth was teaching her at home, and trying to keep her out of the business. Prior to realizing the futility of her efforts to properly socialize her daughter, Elizabeth confided to me one day that she had instructed Christabel in the art of doll-making and that the girl excelled at the craft. Her mother had high hopes that, at last, the child would settle down into normalcy.

Elizabeth and Ezra Wilder had fallen in love and, at this time, Ezra proposed. Elizabeth accepted and plans were made to sell the house and move to Florida. Full of hope and joy, she told her daughter, who said she did not wish to move. Elizabeth refused to back down and, soon after, Christabel, who had begun behaving in a charming fashion, created a doll of Captain Wilder. She asked him sweetly for snips of his hair to make it more perfect, and he gladly gave her some.

Two weeks later, she twisted the head off the doll and, the next night, Ezra was found beheaded in the lighthouse. It was not a clean severing, but ragged and horrible, as if it had been twisted off by some great force.

Elizabeth was heartbroken, but found solace in her friends and in her own doll-making. Christabel began to insist on being allowed into the business, but Elizabeth refused and was appalled at the way men would look longingly at the girl as she passed by. She was even more appalled at the way Christabel returned their stares.

In her fourteenth year, Christabel began seducing men behind her mother's back. She liked to take them up to a small room on the third floor where no one would catch her, though once, Elizabeth walked into the room and found her daughter had imprisoned a man. She had tied him so that he could not escape and had whipped most of the skin off his back with a cat-o'-nine-tails. Christabel was furious with her mother for stopping her. The man later said, as did many of his fellows, that he was bewitched by Christabel and could refuse her nothing.

Elizabeth began to realize that Christabel, who had now created many dolls, complete with obscenely vile sexual anatomy, was evidently using them not only as black magic fetishes to control men, as well as women, causing them to perform perverse acts with her, but also to kill people. More customers, all sailors unknown in these parts, died mysteriously, as did one of the working ladies, a woman known to have argued with Christabel a short time before her death.

In 1915, Elizabeth discovered the exact secret of the dolls. Christabel, who worshiped the goddess Erzuli, had voodoo powers that exceeded even her father's. She had learned the secret of soul stealing and was using it to increase her power and to insure that she had slaves to do her bidding. ·

What she did to the dolls to empower them, I do not know, but I do know, for Elizabeth told me, that they were created to store the souls of those she killed. These souls would remain chained to Christabel, and to the land here, for as long as the young woman held power.

Elizabeth suspected this horrible truth, but believed it was fact only when she found an effigy of herself. Horrified, she scratched the arm of the doll. At that instant, her own flesh-and-blood arm began to bleed profusely. She confronted her daughter, who responded with gleeful threats: if Elizabeth continued to refuse to let her do as she pleased, then she would be sorry, very sorry indeed.

And so, before much time had passed, Elizabeth was sorry. One day a few weeks later, as Elizabeth rose from a chair, one of her ankles shattered--snapped, just like that. She fell to the floor, crying out in horrible pain, and her daughter entered the room holding her mother's effigy up so that Elizabeth could see the broken leg on the doll.

Then, Christabel laid the doll down and took a small silver nutcracker from her pocket. She placed the doll's other leg between its teeth. Slowly, she squeezed the handles together, and the pain of it was more than Elizabeth could bear. Finally, the porcelain cracked, as did her mother's other leg. Christabel seemed sorry the process was over so soon.

After that, she did as she pleased because Elizabeth was an invalid. Her legs would not heal properly, and she spent most of her time in a wheelchair, always in great pain. After a while, with effort, she could walk using a pair of canes.

In times past, Elizabeth had made use of the stone cellar beneath the house as a sort of opulent pleasure den where a man might be manacled in velvet and tickled with feathers, a sweet torture that many men desired. The chamber entrances were kept secret, the customers were blindfolded, and only the women knew how to open the doorways.

Though her employees were too frightened to say so, Elizabeth suspected that Christabel had turned the den into a true chamber of horrors, and was killing people down there. One day, she managed to go down and see for herself. Her daughter had done away with the feathers and velvet, turning the place into a hellish pit ruled with iron manacles, a rack, stocks, and pillories that had perverted sexual uses that Elizabeth would not describe.

That evening, she secreted herself in a dark corner of the room and watched Christabel as she brought several men down and proceeded to degrade them in the most unimaginable ways. The men offered no protest. Rather, they seemed hypnotized by her, willing to let her do anything--anything--to them. Before she let each one go, she sliced his nipple with a small blade and sucked blood from the wound.

As the night progressed, Christabel seemed to Elizabeth almost to glow with a diabolical inner light. At last, she brought down a strong-willed working girl named Jenny. Jenny was in the same hypnotic state of thrall as the men had been and she willingly did as Christabel ordered, undressing and allowing herself to be manacled to an X-shaped torture device mounted on one wall.

After taking her pleasure with the poor girl, in ways so horrifying that even my blunt-spoken Elizabeth could not repeat them, Christabel produced a doll that was Jenny's perfect double.

She undressed it and, as she called upon her dark goddess Erzuli to accept her sacrifice, she plunged a hatpin into the doll's breast. The needle entered the effigy as if it were made of flesh rather than fired porcelain. Imprisoned upon the cross, the real Jenny's eyes suddenly opened wide and she screamed in agony. For a few brief moments, a hole appeared in her left breast, just over her heart, a bleeding red wound, then, as Jenny's screams died and her breathing stuttered to a halt, the wound disappeared, fading to nothing as if it had never been there.

The doll, Elizabeth saw, had a single ruby drop of blood upon its breast. Christabel extended her tongue and licked it clean. She held it up and admired it, then put her nail to its belly and scratched it. Elizabeth almost cried out when she saw the blood well from the little china body.

Christabel again licked it clean, then ran her hand over it while repeating an incantation. When she lifted her hand, the scratch was gone. She redressed the doll and locked it carefully away in a cabinet that contained other dolls, and though Elizabeth could not see them well enough to identify any, she suspected that they represented other missing people.

What the girl then did to Jenny's body was so vile, so foul, that Elizabeth would not speak of it, except to say that Christabel devoured poor Jenny's heart.

The next day, Elizabeth sent for me. It took me some weeks to arrive and when I did, Elizabeth seemed a ghost of her former self. Her physical and emotional pain showed in her eyes, in the way she held her mouth, drawn and tight, and occasionally in the timbre of her voice, yet she never complained.

At her insistence, I carried her outdoors and took her for a ride in her charming little one-horse surrey. She directed me to go to end of Byron's Finger, all the way to Widow's Peak, and even though it was obvious to me that each bump and rut in the path caused her more pain, she insisted we go on and would not speak of anything important until we sat looking out to sea, all alone, where we could not possibly be overheard.

It was then that she told me those things of which I have written here. Those things, and more. In the weeks that passed before I arrived, Lizzie found Christabel's book of spells and now knew exactly how the dolls worked.

Christabel could use them in the typical voodoo way to torture people who angered her, as she did by breaking Elizabeth's legs. Then, when she tired of that, if she desired she could use them to kill the person and store the soul in the doll. The soul became her slave and each soul she acquired increased her power. According to her grimoire, there had to exist an effigy of Erzuli somewhere. It would be a squat, fecund-looking, primitive doll. This would be Christabel's own house should she lose her physical body during her transformation.

The transformation, as Elizabeth understood it, was a death and resurrection ritual similar to those in many countries and religions (such as those of our own Red Indians). Once she acquired enough souls--enough power--this ritual would allow Christabel to live eternally, always with her slaves to do her bidding.

Elizabeth believed that the only way to stop Christabel and to save the souls she had entrapped, was to destroy both her daughters physical body and the Erzuli doll. Then she would only be a spirit, incapable of doing real harm or of controlling her fellow souls.

If her physical self but not the doll were destroyed, Christabel's spirit would be free to roam, returning to the doll as it pleased. The Erzuli doll would be her safe refuge, a place for her to go to restore her power by drawing it from the stolen souls stored in the other dolls.

If one of those other dolls was broken, totally smashed, the imprisoned soul would be free to manifest within Christabel's realm, though it could not leave as long as she remained, nor could it do anything she did not wish. If she did not want a soul to manifest in the house--such as, I believe, she wished for poor Ezra's spirit--it could not, even though in places it was not forbidden, anyone with a sensitivity to such things might perceive it.

Imprisoned in a doll, a soul manifested simply as a ghost, a chill breeze on a summer wind, something a few people sensed but not others.

Christabel, were her physical body destroyed, would be far more powerful than all of these poor spirits combined, and she would also be able to possess bodies for her own use. Elizabeth thought that as long as the Erzuli doll existed, if Christabel lost her own body and when she found one she wanted to keep, she could oust the rightful soul entirely. She had to be stopped.