Doll Face

42

Chazz was not entirely sure what was dream and what was reality, he only knew he had found a safe, dark place and he was never going to leave it. He could remember being dragged away by Lady Peg-leg to a dark and spooky place and then getting free somehow, retreating into this hidey-hole where he knew he was perfectly safe. As long as he did not move and made no sounds, he would be safe here. It was like when he was a child and had done something bad. His stepmother would lock him in the closet because she thought it terrified him, but it did not terrify him. It only made him feel warm, enclosed, and secure.

His hidey-hole was like that.

It was a tunnel. Very dark, very safe. It was warm and soft in there and no one could get him. It was the place he often visited in his dreams, a prenatal memory of comfort and sanctuary.

Lady Peg-leg was near.

He knew that much. She was seeking him out but she would never find him. She droned on and on and if he concentrated, he could shut out her awful voice, which was a thousand forks dragged over a thousand blackboards.

Don’t listen to her! Don’t let that voice in your head or she’ll find you and punish you and you don’t want that!

No, he didn’t want that. When his stepmother punished him—her burning cigarette was the worst—he had always known if he just took it, it would be over eventually. She would get bored with her own sadism and turn her twisted mind to new endeavors. But Lady Peg-leg wasn’t like that because she wasn’t really human and things that were not human had an amazing capacity for patience. They could wait like bricks in a wall or cracks in a sidewalk. Ten minutes or ten years meant nothing to them.

“Go ahead, little boy, hide up inside your mama’s rotten fuck-hole, fester between her legs and worm your way deep into her dirty cock wallet!” said the voice. “Explore that well-worn, well-plumbed, well-bagged slunk tunnel! Squat in there, you little wart, in the depths where filthy men blew their cream and chowder! A fine place for you!”

The voice echoed in his hidey-hole and he told himself he must not listen because if he listened, she would know that he was listening and she would track him down, follow him to his source in his mother’s ultra-secret wellspring. He must shut it out because if he shut it out, then it did not exist and he could not let it exist because if it existed, then he soon would not. And although he tried so desperately to be quiet, so very quiet as he had done in the closet when he was a boy with black eyes and purple belt marks on his ass and cigarette burns on his legs, he could not stop the low, frightened whimpering that came from his mouth.

“A-ha! A-HA!” said Lady Peg-leg with unwholesome, slavering delight. “I hear you, bad little boy! Don’t think you can hide from Teacher because Teacher will find you as Teacher ALWAYS finds bad little boys! I’ll pull you out, my darling little cockswallow, and then I’ll lunch on your balls! Tender and sweet, are they? Soft to the tooth? Why, like fuzzy delicate little apricots that I’ll bite until the juice runs down my chin!”

Chazz stuffed his hand into his mouth so he would not scream as he had screamed when he was a little boy and his stepmother touched a lit cigarette to the tip of his little boy penis. He stuffed his hand in as far as it would go because he must make no more sounds or that witch would have him and make a fine meaty stew of his balls in her boiling black cauldron whose sides were greased with the remains of manhood boiled like prunes. He tried to do anything but listen to the voice and slowly, slowly, it all started coming back to him about the concert and the drinking and the van and Stokes and Ramona, dear hot little Ramona with her greedy hole and busy mouth, who would do anything to keep a man happy because her own manic OCD maintained that she was always at fault regardless of what happened and that meant she must work harder and give more to make things right. And Chazz had never really realized that’s what it was always about with her, but he knew it now and it sickened him because he knew something in him had recognized that immediately and exploited it to its fullest. Poor, dear Ramona. He had used her and preyed upon the one chink in her armor, utilizing her inadequacies the very way his stepmother had once utilized his own. If you don’t do what I say, then your father will be angry and he’ll send you to a foster home and we’ll go away to sunny Florida and we’ll never think about you again, you miserable little shit. And as Chazz realized this, he realized how fucked-up he was and how fucked-up he had always been since his mother’s death and his stepmother’s abuse. The latter much more than the former had sculpted him into the selfish piece of shit he was and the idea of that brought great pain. Dear God, he would make it up to the people he wronged. He would make it up to Ramona because she was the only good and decent thing he had ever known in his twenty-two years of struggle, disappointment, and abject misery—

But… it was getting lighter in the tunnel only it was not the tunnel that was doing it but him. Yes, he was sliding down it into the cold, cruel, and wicked world once again and he did not want to enter its heartless environs now any more than he had wanted to twenty-two years before. He was sliding down, down, and there was nothing to slow him or break his fall as the malevolent world of Stokes waited for him, smiling monstrously and grinding its yellow ball-shearing teeth together.

The tunnel was rejecting him.

More so, it was expelling him like something harmful that did not belong and perhaps had never belonged. The placental membrane had broken and the water had run and his safe hidey-hole was forever gone and never again would he know its safety as things got brighter and a twisted yellow claw reached up and grabbed him by the ankles.

“Breached little bastard, are we?” said Lady Peg-leg as she pulled him out and held him up by the ankles like an infant that needed life slapped into it by a firm and ready hand. “Ready to enter the world on your feet? Not you, young master! On your hands and knees with offerings to the lady who waits!”

Screaming and twisting in her grip, Chazz could see the room he was in taking shape around him with infinite slowness. Going from a dim gray blur to a sharp clarity so that he could see the walls that were hung with doll parts—faceless heads and arms, legs and torsos and hands. He saw jars of glass eyes, hinged jaws, numerous blank faces hanging from hooks. Among them were tacked yellowed anatomy prints and racks of gleaming instruments: knives, saws, probes. He had been brought here, he knew, not just to be de-balled, but to be taken apart carefully and meticulously.

And the worst part of it, the very worst part was that he had an audience.

There were several dozen doll people in grim attendance, gathered in seats like medical students preparing to watch the dissection of a cadaver. They were all chatting away in some unintelligible tongue, many of them calling out and holding up white hands as if they were at an auction.

“They’re bartering for you,” Lady Peg-leg said, leering at him with the patchwork mask of her face. “You have so many fine, fine parts. Your heart and balls are already mine. There will be no discussion of that, young master. But… oh, your legs, your arms, your eyes and face… oh so many wonderful goodies! Eh, what’s that? The fine lady over there would like your manhood and she shall have it!”

Chazz could see the lady in question.

She was a dreadful thing slumped in a chair, a swollen collection of animate parts like some fat, overfed infant that jiggled with rolls and bulges and deep-hewn crevices. Her flesh was pulsating. She was naked and lacked arms. Her body was horridly bulbous and rounded like a collection of smooth pink medicine balls married into a common whole, the offered gash between her legs like an axe cut that ran from her pubis to her belly. Her breasts were immense breathing spheres with juicy cherries in place of her nipples. Red juice had bled from them and stained her plump, uniform pinkness. He could barely see her face behind those bloated mammaries, but he saw enough of it to turn his guts to sauce. Her head was topped by wavy wheat-yellow hair set with bright blue bows, her plump lips a garish red and her eyes—set in pink blubbery sockets—were faded white marbles like the eyes of a waterlogged corpse.

Lady Peg-leg giggled and stomped her peg upon the floor. “She’s most anxious for what you have!”

By this point, Chazz was insane and he didn’t bother screaming or crying out. It was simpler to just titter with the others and grin maliciously when Lady Peg-leg reached down between his legs and grasped what was there in her hand, fondling and squeezing it roughly.

The bulbous woman shuddered with delight, shivering and rolling, the gash between her legs widening into a black cleft that could have swallowed him whole.