Temptation flared inside Desdemona, and there were pangs of jealousy, too. It pulled her body like a magnetic force. She stepped up onto the dais and stared hard into the face of her sister. Celeste locked eyes with her for just an instant before turning her focus back to the wooden cauldron.

Desdemona followed her sister’s example.

The bottom of the bowl was lined with a bed of ashes. Upon these ashes there lay a small sarcophagus, its surface vibrantly painted, its edges rounded. The face that stared up at the girls from the sarcophagus lid was jolly; cheeks rosy, a moon-like head crowned with lively-looking daisies.

“I didn’t know they made coffins this tiny,” Celeste breathlessly declared.

“It’s not a coffin,” Desdemona replied. She reached fearlessly into the hollow of the cauldron and removed the grinning lid. She set it down on a little ash dune. “It’s a matryoshka, Russian nesting dolls.”

“Just like Mother had when she was small like me!”

Desdemona nodded. “I always wanted one of these.” Desdemona’s tone was pained, sorrowful.

“Look! The next one’s a man!” whispered Celeste. “Wait, I mean a king!”

Nestled within the slightly larger base of the first doll beamed the lid of the second: a man with wild eyes and woolly beard and a crown of yellow spikes. The king’s mouth was open to an impossible degree, and in its cave-like gape there stood a golden ram with piercing eyes.

“Let’s see the others!”

Thus began the sequence of unveilings. The king birthed a smaller shell that depicted a weighing scale with stars gleaming on its plates. From this, conjoined twins with distended heads and ossified frames. Deeper and deeper the girls went, each doll growing not only smaller but more gruesome. When Celeste uncovered the ninth, they could not even identify it as a human likeness. It was something shrivelled, crooked.

“Is that it?” Celeste asked.

“No,” said Desdemona. “There’s one more, I think.”

“What are you waiting for? Open it!”

“I…I can’t.”

“I’ll do it then!”

And before Desdemona could protest, Celeste had pulled herself up on the heavy bowl and reached down to fiddle with the tiny matryoshka. Her fingers pressed and twisted at it. Finally, the foetal lump split in two.

The halved doll emitted a noise; something near to a gasp, a keen wisp of breath. It froze Desdemona’s blood in her veins. It was, to her mind, the single worst sound she had ever heard.

Until the deathly silence of the morning was shattered by an agonised scream. Another immediately followed. The cries came tearing across the land from somewhere near, somewhere beyond the family vault.

“We have to…” Desdemona began, but the words dissipated before she could even organise her thoughts completely. She looked at Celeste. The child’s expression was a broken one. She was sobbing.

Another scream, this one nearer.