The fog clings to the cobblestones, and in the depths of a grim asylum, a most peculiar drama unfolds. Anatoly Moskvin—that wretched soul known to the underworld and the papers as the 'Doll-Maker'—has been granted a mercy: the right to receive a lady who claims to be his betrothed. This woman, one Alexandra of some nine-and-thirty years, has ventured from the distant streets of London to visit the poor devil in his cell.

One can only imagine the scene—the smell of medicinal spirits and stale air, the heavy tread of the wardens. Yet, the romance is tinged with the scent of greed. After one such visitation, Moskvin confided in the asylum staff, trembling with suspicion, that this woman seeks nothing less than his three-room tenement—a legacy left to him by his departed mother. 'Twas in that very dwelling, back in the year 2011, that the constabulary and the detectives stumbled upon a sight to turn the stomach of any honest man: the mummified remains of little girls, stolen from their eternal slumber in the churchyards.

This Alexandra, as the reports say, is no ordinary maiden. It is whispered that she, too, has taken up the macabre art of fashioning dolls—grotesque things without limbs—and fills her albums with photographs of crumbling gravestones. A match made in the pits of perdition, indeed!

Poor Moskvin—a man of letters, a linguist, a student of the dead—lost his mind to a dark fantasy. He did not see corpses, but children. He dressed them in finery, spoke to them as a father speaks to a babe, and played them cartoons, convinced that some miracle would one day breathe life back into their cold flesh.

When the authorities first burst into his home, they found twenty-six such 'dolls' crafted from the soil of the cemetery. The verdict was swift: schizophrenia, and a compulsory stay in the madhouse. It is said that while locked away, the man spent his hours scribbling memoirs of his nocturnal excursions with the dead. The court has seen fit to extend his confinement for another six months, ensuring that the Doll-Maker remains far from the churchyards of the city.