> "What you confess, she will remember.
What she remembers, she will repeat.
And repetition… is resurrection."
---
I didn't speak the rest of that morning.
Not to my mother on the phone. Not to the mailman. Not even to myself.
Because if I opened my mouth too wide, I felt it.
Something else.
Moving.
Like a cold fish writhing beneath my tongue. Soft and slick, coiling and pulsing like it was mimicking my muscle but not quite matching it.
The second tongue.
I stared into the mirror for what felt like hours. The longer I held my mouth open, the more I was sure. Something was curled behind mine. It twitched whenever I thought of prayer. I tested it—reciting a Hail Mary in my head—and the thing shuddered like it could hear my thoughts.
And worse, it whispered back.
---
That night, I sealed the doll in a wooden box. I wrapped it in the old church scrolls I found in Grandma's trunk. Bound it in duct tape. Put it in the garage freezer.
A part of me wanted to burn it, but I hesitated. There was still something human in that thing—like if I destroyed it, something trapped would be let loose. Or worse—freed.
That night, I didn't dream.
But I did wake up to music.
A music box tune. Old, crackly, slow. One of those waltzes you hear in antique stores, delicate and hollow like porcelain laughter.
It was playing from inside the garage.
When I opened the freezer, the doll was sitting upright.
Unbound.
The scrolls were torn. The tape lay in curls on the floor. The doll's head turned slowly to face me. And then, very clearly:
> "Loqueris. Loqueris iterum."
(You will speak. You will speak again.)
Its lips never moved.
The wires were still stitched in place. But the sound… came from behind them.
Like the voice was no longer coming from the doll at all.
It was coming from inside me.
---
I vomited in the sink before sunrise.
Not food. Not bile. Paper.
Shredded parchment. Latin script scrawled on it in my grandmother's handwriting.
I tried burning it in the sink. The words didn't catch. Not even with gasoline.
---
By day three, I couldn't keep the words out.
Every time I tried to think, to write, to even hum—Latin began threading itself into the corners of my thoughts. I began translating it obsessively, line by line. I filled notebooks with it.
> "The doll is not a vessel.
It is a priest.
A priest for the dead God."
Another line:
> "Those who speak sins near her give up more than guilt.
They give up their names."
Another:
> "The second tongue is a sign.
She has chosen you."
---
At exactly 3:00 AM, I woke with my mouth wide open.
I was sitting up in bed, candlelight flickering across the walls. But I hadn't lit anything.
And at the foot of my bed, sitting in perfect stillness—
The doll.
Not in her dress anymore.
She was wearing my grandmother's funeral veil.
And she spoke again:
> "Ave, peccator. Confessio tua… resurrectio mea."
(Hail, sinner. Your confession… is my resurrection.)
Then, slowly, her hand raised and pointed at my mouth.
That's when the door slammed open.
And my mother stood there.
She stared at me.
Stared at the candle. At the doll. At the veil.
Then she screamed—not in fear. But like someone recognizing something they'd buried long ago.
> "You opened her mouth…"
I blinked. "No. I— I didn't—"
> "YOU OPENED HER MOUTH."
---
She ran straight to the doll and snatched it. Her hands blistered the moment they touched it. Skin cracking, fingernails splitting down the middle. She didn't care.
She took the doll to the bathtub, turned on the faucet, and held it under boiling water. I begged her to stop.
> "It's not her anymore," she cried. "It's your grandmother—what's left of her. She fed it secrets until it became more than a relic. Until it listened back."
I reached to stop her—and saw a face in the water.
Not the doll's.
Mine.
But it was smiling. And it had no eyes.
---
Later that night, I asked my mother what she meant.
She whispered something I'll never forget:
> "Your grandmother had five stillborn children.
She buried each one beneath the church.
And she named the doll after the first."
I swallowed hard.
> "What was the name?"
She looked me in the eye.
> "Leora."