“Still can’t wrap your head around it, can you?” Taryn asked Robert, suddenly pulling him from his thoughts. They were still sitting on the dirt floor after Taryn had given a lengthy talk about what she had kept to herself. He had no clue how to go about it.

“No…” he admitted.

“Then stop thinking about it for ten minutes and look at this.” She held up the notebook. “This was left by June, the reporter.”

He looked at her with confusion. “Okay?”

She gave him an unamused look. “This was left by June, right before she disappeared. It’s what I saw when I touched it.” She looked through the pages. “Some of the notes in this are completely torn out. This was the original notebook that she used when she was alive.”

“So, she anticipated being caught, is what you mean. And she went and placed notes around the mansion as a warning before she died?”

“No, if that were true it would have sun damage from being left for so long, or even destroyed by someone who knew what was going on. I think it’s more likely that June herself took those note scraps and left them after she died.”

He frowned. “How?”

“Some spirits can move objects. Exert enough will and an object can be moved, you often see them in those shows about poltergeists, though a vast majority of them will and have been faked. However, it becomes hard to tell what that message could be; in most cases, it wants someone to leave. With June, she simply left actual messages rather than moving objects.”

“Seems kind of tedious if you ask me.” He glanced at the notebook with slight unease. “So, what was her last entry?”

Taryn flipped to it.

I’m trapped.

Within this underground maze of tunnels, I have no means of escape. If I could find the exit that Miyamori-san told me about I’d be home free. But with the blow to my head, I don’t think that’s even remotely possible. It’s hard enough to write this out as I get even more lost in these damned tunnels. I’d mark my way, but if I do, then I’d risk getting caught. Even now, I still can’t get over what I’ve discovered.

I doubt this will ever be seen by the light of day.

But still, if someone does come across this and they are in the same predicament that I am, the best thing I can say is that I hope what I have proves to be of use to you in some way or another and that you can escape this underground hell.

And I’m sorry.

I’m so, so, so sorry.

No one deserves this…

When Taryn finished translating for Robert, he merely sat in silence for a long while. “Shit, that doesn’t help us at all. Any idea what it was that she discovered? Was it the room that we found? Or something else?”

“No idea, it’s not written.”

“Then, what now what? Keep looking through her notebook?”

She flipped back through a few pages only to stop when something caught her eye. A name to be more précises. The name Chiyoko.

During my search, I uncovered some information about the previous owners of the mansion. Or at least one with any record left, since only one family ever owned the property for generations. The last that I could find was of a woman, Kitsutsuki Chiyoko. Her date of death was around 1871 from pneumonia that was rather sudden. In life, she had a son and daughter, becoming head of the family when her husband died in an accident several years previously.

From what I read in her diary that I took, the eldest son, named Naoki, was a brut and horrible to everyone around him, especially to the female staff and his little sister, but he could never stand up to his mother.

While the young daughter, Nezuko, was the polar opposite, she was kind and sweet to those around her. It seemed that she was rather sickly and would often be confined to her bed.

Chiyoko also adopted a boy into her care around seven years before her death.

Well, I say boy, but this “boy” was pretty much a grown adult by this time, a man around the age of nineteen to twenty. This man was taken in after Chiyoko had made some type of promise, possibly to his mother(?) It’s unclear. I will say it would take guts to adopt him, considering he was a Kagema at the time. To take in a prostitute of all things, I wonder what drove Chiyoko to do so.

However, not even three months after Chiyoko’s death, Nezuko also passed away during a terrible winter storm. The man who was adopted by Chiyoko seemed to just disappear from the records, while Naoki was found dead from being mauled to death by a bear in a small hut in the woods around the same time. The two bodies of men Naoki was known to hang around him constantly were killed by strangulation; rope marks clear on their necks as they were slumped by nearby trees. Yet they were left alone while Naoki’s body had been ripped apart.

Which is odd…

Adding to that, after Naoki’s death, there seems to be no record of anyone taking over the mansion. There had to be more family, right? But it appears to end right there. Were the records destroyed for some reason? This was around the mid to late 1800s, so it is a possibility.

I asked some of the workers about it, feigning historical research for the place to write a book about the village’s history, but they had little to offer. I’m not sure if that was on purpose or have no wherewithal about this family’s history. But that too I find kind of strange. Something about this is wrong.

Someone should know, shouldn’t they? If they’ve worked in the mansion for years, they should know something. It’s frustrating. I had an easier time talking with the Yakuza than with these people.

Maybe if I keep looking, I’ll find more information. And perhaps even this “boy’s” name since it seems to have been stricken from the records.

Taryn frowned; she had seen that name before, it was written on the back of a torn photo of a man with Chiyoko, with the man’s face wholly removed. Was that Naoki or the other man that Chiyoko adopted?

She stood, sitting around for so long and thinking about it would do no good. The moment she had, however, something fell from the notebook’s pages. It was a photograph; as she went to kneel to pick it up, she froze.

Robert noticed this. “Taryn?”

Slowly she picked it up only to have questions mount in her mind the longer she looked at the photo of Chiyoko sitting on the floor on the right, a girl who looked to be in her early to mid-teens in the middle, which must have been the daughter Nezuko, and a man sitting on the left by the girl. A man who looked just like Toya.

Was this Toya’s grandfather?

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

No, that wasn’t right. The date on the photo was 1867; this couldn’t have been Toya’s grandfather unless Toya meant his great-great-grandfather. The sheer likeness, not thinking of the doll itself, he could very well have been Toya’s identical twin.

Taryn knew that such things could happen, sharing the likeness of someone so much to the point of it being uncanny regardless of how many generations apart they were. Much like how she had been told that she held a similar likeness to her great-grandmother Joséphine.

Yet somehow, that line of thinking didn’t seem right either. Her head throbbed, still hurting from all that she had seen back when touching the altar. Even now, she was surprised that her hair hadn’t gone white from the shock.

“Taryn, are you okay?” Robert asked again as she placed the photo back into the notebook. “Did you see something again when you touched that?”

“No, I didn’t. My body’s just stiff. It’ll take a while before I’m able to move normally.”

His body seemed to relax when he heard that. “Just take it slow, okay?”

She smiled at him but said nothing in return. Her gaze looked to June’s notebook before putting it with the others in her pack then the two continued.

Robert found himself looking at Taryn. His mind was still trying to come to terms with what she had told him. The fact that someone who he had known for over four years could see the dead through reflections, among other things, still boggled his mind to a dizzying degree. It did make sense why she’d keep quiet about it; he recalled that during her brother’s funeral, some woman who claimed to be a medium sent Taryn into a rage Robert had never seen before from something this woman had said to her.

Taryn didn’t blow up. She didn’t shout in anger. She merely spoke in a low even tone while her blue eyes held the woman’s complete attention. Her gaze filled with such a deep cold unbridled anger; such a look could freeze anyone on the spot. Even when Isaac became involved, and some Native American woman dressed as a police officer intervened, it did little to deter Taryn’s expression and soft-spoken words.

The way she eyed the woman, like a wild animal threatening to break loose…

When the other woman was quickly removed from the premises, Taryn was still angered by what the woman had said to her; she excused herself as to be alone. Yet her expression in that moment lingered in Robert’s mind. One of such atomicity and hate.

She never looked like that, even to him, when she confronted Robert about his cheating. A look that could snuff out one’s very soul or rip them limb from bloody limb, terrified him. Something Robert never could readily admit, it was the reason he couldn’t bring himself to tell her of his infidelity. As stupid as it was, and it was stupid, he didn’t want to be on the receiving end of such anger, so he kept quiet.

Still, the more Robert thought back on things involving Taryn, the more he put two and two together in regards to how she would react to stuff. Like when they found a locked box when they were in high school together. Back then, he thought that her lack of response was because she was deep in thought while holding it, now though, he knew what she was doing.

She told him only a handful of people knew what she had and preferred it to remain that way. Not even any of her other friends back in Toronto knew about it, which just showed the amount she kept to herself.

The weight of that alone must have been immense. Crushing even. But then Robert never fully grasped it he doubted that he could.

Taryn stopped suddenly, drawing Robert from his thoughts; they were again facing three more tunnels giving no way of knowing which way to go. Robert went to speak, only to stop short when she raised her hand to him. Slowly, Taryn pulled out her compact mirror from her back pocket. He looked at it and then at her as she opened it to look at the glass. He never thought she’d do it in front of him, but given she told him everything, it made sense that she wouldn’t be secretive about it anymore.

Taryn looked into the mirror to see over her shoulder. What she saw was June, but something was different. Her clothes, it wasn’t what Taryn had seen her wear before, what she died in. It was now a dark blue kimono with white lilies with purple butterflies and a matching ivory white obi belt tied with a dark purple cord. She even had white tabi socks and geta, a tradional Japanese sandals on her feet, while her skin was pale and hair no longer tangled. But it wasn’t the clothes that held Taryn’s attention, however.

June was visible, not slightly see-through like all the other times. She was completely there like those of the living. How? Only for Taryn’s confusion and dread to mount even further when she heard a familiar sound as June began to move.

June lifted her right arm and extended her hand, the sound of creaking joints followed as she brought her hand to point towards them. The exit was right in front of them.

But her hand… it… looked like the Doll’s!

“The hell is that?” Robert asked, clearly confused.

Taryn, however, turned, twisting her body fully to avoid hurting her injured neck any further, to look behind them only to be greeted with the dark silence of the tunnel.

A cold sweat began to form along her body as her eyes were wide in horrific realization.

That June had been turned into a doll and was somehow still able to move around as a ghost. Did that mean she was strictly limited to being underground? Were there more people like that? Were there other exceptions in how far they could travel? Did she purposely choose to be down here, still searching for her friend? Or was forced to remain for knowing too much? Why not just kill her?

Those questions and more lapsed over in Taryn’s mind, as much as she wanted to go back to see if June was still somewhere close by, to try and talk to her. The feeling of dread that there would be others, others on the side of the one who did all of this were down here lurking about as well. It remained prominent in her mind.

She did think of that when first going down the well. It just didn’t occur to her that they might have been dolls instead of people. But there had been practically no signs of something following them while they wandered the underground looking for clues.

Quickly she grabbed Robert’s arm and made a run for it through the tunnel June pointed to. They needed to leave, no more looking back.

“H-hey!” Robert protested slightly but followed suit, concern on his face as he looked back, and for the shortest of seconds, he saw what looked to be a woman watching them leave before stepping back into the shadows. Her skin and eyes didn’t look normal.

Shit.

They ran through the tunnel as fast as their legs could carry them. Kept going until reaching a ladder carved from stone, they came to a halt to catch their breath. Hands resting on her knees, Taryn coughed several times, the faint sound of wheezing coming from her as she pulled out her medication and took it.

When he regained his breath, Robert asked. “The fuck… was that?”

“June,” she managed, now switching to her other puffer. “It was June.”

Confusion and shock filled his face. “You said she was dead.”

“She is,” she said to him. “At least, that’s what I thought. What they did to her, I’m not even sure anymore. But I know she was dead… if she weren’t, I wouldn’t be able to see her in any reflections.”

Robert fell silent for a moment, glancing at the blackness of the tunnel before looking to her and asked. “Taryn? What really attacked you? It… it wasn’t a person, was it.”

Taryn visibly hesitated, her shoulders tensed before relaxing faintly. “You sure you want me to tell you? You’ve had to hear some crazy shit from me already.”

He didn’t budge on it. “That was something about you. This is a life-and-death situation. It’s different than what you told me.”

She merely eyed him for a moment, as if to be sure he meant what he said, before pulling out June’s notebook and taking out the old photo and handing it to him.

He took it, and a look of confusion etched into his features before looking to Taryn for answers, answers he wasn’t going to look forward to.

“I was attacked by a human sized doll.” She said in the most matter-of-fact tone she could muster. “That doll looked like the man in the photo.”

“Like Toya?” Robert clarified. “You mean it looked like Toya.”

“Yeah, like Toya. I stabbed it with a knife. Right about here.” She indicated to the left side of her abdomen. “It’s because of that I was able to get away. I haven’t seen it since.” She cleared her throat. “Actually, no, that’s wrong. I saw it again when I picked up June’s notebook. It’s what took her. And… turned her into what we saw.”

Robert, however, was oddly quiet. She stared at his face and noticed how, even in the minimal amount of light, he looked rather pale. Like he saw a ghost of his own.

“Are you okay?”

This snapped him out of it. “Ah, yeah. Yeah, I’m okay, it’s just…” he looked at the old photo. “That’s really fucked up,” he said as he handed it back to her. Robert fell into silence again for a short moment, going over her words in his head. “You said you stabbed it, the doll. Would it be possible if it, I don’t know, somehow remained? The stab wound, I mean.”

“Logically, it should, dolls can’t heal. It should have a gaping hole in it. Unless it’s magic, then I have no idea. My expertise is the dead and history, not magic. I’m not even sure if you can call that magic, or what it could even be called at all. Since that room, where we were in was where those people were probably turned into dolls. Or at least tried to turn them into dolls.”

“Then what about evil?” Robert offered. “These people are kidnapping others and trying to turn them into dolls, which is fucked within itself. Why would they do that to others, and who’s even behind it?”

“No clue,” she frowned faintly. “But I think Toya might know something about it.”

“And that guy eyes you like a hawk,” Robert stated before changing the topic as he looked above. “Here’s hoping this get’s us out.” He indicated to her. “Ladies first.”

“You sure you want me to go first after what I just told you? A regular person would be scrambling like a bat out of hell after just hearing the mention of people turning into dolls.”

He looked unimpressed. “Dude, just start climbing. You’re injured, get going already.”

“Fine, fine, I’m going.” She paused, casting him a look of worry. “Are you sure nothing’s wrong? Be real with me here.”

“Taryn, a lot is going on. Especially after what you just told me about yourself. So yeah, my brain is a bit frazzled, will be for a while. Now, will you start climbing? Please? I’d like us to get out of this potential death pit as quickly as humanly possible.”

She said nothing further, seeing how he kept pressing for her to climb and did so without uttering another word. Robert, however, gave a quick cautious glance from where they came. Lips pressed into a thin line as his mind raced, his hands trembled slightly with worry.

He needed to tell her, but not here, not in this place. Once it was safe, he would.

He had too.

With that thought in mind he quickly following suit.