A/N: Written for the Mega Prompts Challenge, Sentence Prompt #004 – "He nodded and lowered his gaze in shame." It's the second line/paragraph here.

The Poor Little Miss in a Buried Doll

'So the little miss is dead?'

He nodded and lowered his gaze in shame.

'Oh, that poor little miss.' She hid a sob in her handkerchief. 'Followed her parents, she has.'

Perhaps a kinder fate, after everything that had been taken away from her, he thought. And he had helped. Buying that doll for her, collecting her possessions, by her order, one by one, and finally…

He looked up at the pat on his arm. The old maid smiled at him, her eyes brimming with tears. 'Don't lay such heavy burdens on yourself,' she said. 'The poor little miss is in happy, everlasting dreams, now.'

The poor little miss was indeed: in an eternal sleep inside that dream giving doll. But the servants were another matter. They had watched, as the girl grew happier and more deluded to her dreams. They had watched as she stripped herself of every possession she could call her own – and then her cat and her own body parts when there was nothing more. Murder, mutilation, suicide – those were the words used to describe such actions…and yet she who had such a kind heart did not attribute them. She only thought of her dreams by that point: about that happy dream she never wanted to end.

And now they were at this point. That girl should never have lost her family, nor sunk so deeply into dreams and despair. And the irony was that he'd brought that doll to cheer her up: brought it on a whim that the reminder of the magic in the old fairy tales the little miss had so enjoyed in her more youthful and innocent days would give her some relief.

But the magic had turned out to be real, and her savoir and undoing.

And not only was he the one who had first brought the doll to her, but he was the one who had put into her handless embrace at the end.

'I killed her.'

The old maid's eyes widened, and she wildly shook her head. 'No, no.' She mumbled something else, then added, more clearly: 'We servants all have our part to play. But the little miss is happy. That's the most important thing.' Her hands wrung the apron she wore.

He would like to believe it. Really, he would, but that twisting, that repetition, told him the old maid didn't believe in her own words. And he couldn't believe them either, despite how much he wanted to. Because when he closed his eyes that night, and the night after, and the night after that, all he saw were nightmares.

Nightmares of that doll swallowing their little miss, and blood stained on its mouth and his hands.

And he'd wake up gasping for air and searching wildly for that doll. It wouldn't be near, of course. In the end they'd buried it in place of the little miss, because to destroy it meant destroying their little miss as well. But it was a sad, barren grave. The other servants might not blame him, or blame him aloud, but the doll shouldered the liability from all of them.

But still, his searching feet would carry him there, to look at the sad, untouched, grave.

And then one day he couldn't take it anymore and he found himself digging into the soft mud, unearthing the box and the doll that lay all innocent looking beneath it.

'Take away these nightmares,' he cried. 'Give back the little miss.'

The doll's eyes gleamed in the moonlight, demanding its payment.