> "They buried her mouth for a reason. And you just gave her back her voice."
---
I had never liked the smell of my grandmother's house.
It was this stiff blend of dried roses, mothballs, old Bible leather, and something that always lingered just behind it—something like damp stone. She used to say it was "the smell of God's shadow," whatever that meant.
Now that she was gone, it smelled even stronger. It was as if the house was holding its breath, waiting for her return, decaying beneath layers of silence.
I stood in her bedroom with a flashlight trembling in my hand. The funeral had been that morning—dry-eyed, plain, and sparsely attended. No photos, no eulogies, just a sealed coffin and Father Reuben mumbling Latin no one understood. He never opened the casket.
No one had seen her face.
Not even me.
Grandma had left me the house in her will. No one else wanted it. Everyone said she'd gone mad in her final years. Mumbling to herself, covering mirrors, lighting incense every evening at 3:00 AM like it was a ritual. One neighbor told me she'd once heard my grandmother scream at a porcelain doll for hours.
And now that doll was mine.
I found it in a trunk.
An old one—iron-braced oak, sealed with a rusted latch, wedged at the foot of her bed like a coffin too small to bury a child. I wouldn't have found the key if I hadn't noticed the lump sewn into the hem of her old nightgown. The thread had been thick and coarse, like twine.
Inside the trunk were three things:
1. A stack of yellowed parchment and Latin scrolls, tied with red silk.
2. A silver rosary, its crucifix burnt black.
3. The doll.
She was small, about the length of my forearm. Porcelain face, cracked at the left cheek like a tiny bolt of lightning. Her dress was hand-stitched—lace embroidered with symbols I didn't recognize. Crosses, yes—but some were upside down, and others were drawn with eyes instead of thorns.
She had no hair. No name tag.
But her face—
Her eyes were shut. Sealed. Literally. Thin black wire had been threaded across each eyelid, stitched with surgical precision. Her mouth, too, was wired shut in a tight crisscross pattern, almost like it had been done in haste.
Worst of all was the note tied to her small hand.
Written in my grandmother's handwriting, crooked and jagged:
> "DO NOT PRAY IN FRONT OF HER.
DO NOT SPEAK SIN.
DO NOT LET HER MOUTH OPEN."
I laughed.
It wasn't real laughter, not exactly. More like the kind that tumbles out when you're not sure whether you're in a joke or a nightmare.
I was seventeen. A skeptic. I didn't believe in curses or demons or haunted dolls. I believed in grief. In guilt. In bad dreams and worse memories.
So I set the doll on the shelf above the fireplace. A trophy from a mad woman.
That night, I dreamt of whispering.
---
It came from inside the walls. A whisper, soft and steady, like someone reading from a very old book. I didn't understand the language—Latin, maybe—but the cadence was sharp, mechanical, relentless. Like a metronome chewing on scripture.
I woke to my bedroom freezing. My breath fogged the air. The heater was still on.
And the doll was gone from the fireplace.
I found her the next morning sitting on my dresser—facing the bed.
Same stitched eyes. Same wired mouth.
Same burned rosary now wrapped around her own neck.
I didn't scream.
But my heart didn't stop racing for three hours.
---
I called my mother. She told me to throw the thing out. "She always said that doll would be her undoing," Mom said over the phone. "I thought she was just losing it. She used to say the doll had a voice. That it remembered things no one should remember."
I didn't throw it out.
I should have.
But instead, I did what every idiot in a horror story does:
I spoke to it.
That night, I lit a single candle in the living room, sat in front of the doll, and whispered:
> "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…"
A joke. A dare.
I chuckled and turned to blow out the candle.
And that's when I heard it—
> "Benedicite, Pater, quia peccavi…"
The voice was high. Porcelain-thin. But it wasn't mine.
I froze. The candle flickered violently. The doll hadn't moved—but the wire around her mouth was slightly undone, like one loop had unthreaded itself.
I stared.
> "Benedicite, Pater…"
Then came a tearing sound. Sharp and wet.
Blood trickled from the doll's lips.
Not red. Black.
The room stank of incense and rot.
I stumbled back. The flame snuffed out.
And from the darkness, a final whisper:
> "…mater mea… linguam eius…"
(My mother… her tongue…)
---
In the morning, the doll was back on the mantle. Her mouth fully stitched again.
But the rosary was gone.
And in the bathroom mirror—
Where my tongue should've been—
I saw a second one, trying to move behind mine.