Dolls

This was all she’d ever known. The cold dark room at the bottom of the stairs. Other girls sat around her, still as stone in their pretty dresses. They all wondered the same thing, who would he take next? A single light bulb hung from a wire in the middle of the room and cast their faces in shadow. She shook because it was time. His heavy footsteps above them were the only noise they heard, they pounded in time with her heart. In the yellow light she could see their pretty dresses blanketing the floor, each of them a different color. She could feel her own pink gown bunched in her fists, her palms were sweaty and her head ached from the strain of listening for him.

Their breaths grew heavier as his footsteps grew louder. Nobody wanted to be next. Her scars had just barely healed. Not again, she thought, please not again. That was what they all thought though. None of them wanted to be brought up those stairs. If they weren’t so afraid of him, maybe they would have tried to overthrow him. But then what? There was nothing outside of this house. Nothing but vast, empty fields. They all knew that, they all had tried to escape at one point. He broke them after that, figuratively and literally.

It was a scene she hated to witness. He would make an example of the girl, seating her right under the light bulb and pulling out his tools. A dull pocket knife would find her weakest parts and hack at them. He would prey on the girl’s vulnerability until the rest of the girls were vomiting. As he peeled the runaway apart he would recite the rules of The Dollhouse. There were all of three and he would repeat them all throughout the punishing. No running away was the first, not that any of them ever attempted again after the first time. No talking was the second. And the third was to never even think of harming him. There was one girl who had slapped him and they’d never seen her again.

He was down the stairs now, staring at them with a rare grin on his face. He scratched at his scruff chin as his eyes scanned each of them lying limply on the ground looking ever like the dolls he meant them to be. The man was a collector. They were his collection. They were his dolls. Dressed up and made to look perfect. The only thing wrong was their eyes, where they should have been blank and empty they were broken. He bent towards a girl and brushed a gold curl out of her face. Her eyes turned scared and her hands clenched into fists.

“You look very pretty today Melissa.” He said softly.

The slightest of whimpers left her mouth, so quiet that he didn’t catch it. He pulled his hand away from ‘Melissa’s’ face and moved down the line to her. He gripped her chin with his rough hands and smiled a sadistic smile. Fear gripped her and her stomach tightened. She was the one today, she knew it.

“Sasha,” He breathed, his breath smelled of cigarettes and whiskey and it turned her already upset stomach. “I’ve been thinking about you all day.”

She could feel the other girls down the line relax. She would have done the same thing had it been anyone but her. He yanked her to her feet and she stumbled along behind him and up the stairs. He kept saying her name, Sasha, like it actually meant something. He had given her that name and she knew that it would disgust her for however long she lived. Her real name didn’t matter anymore though. Because she was Sasha now and would be until he decided to kill her.

“You’ve always been my favorite you know.” He chuckled as he shoved her into the room she’d come to know far too well. “But we have to give the other girls some attention don’t you think?”

He was evil. Pure, unadulterated evil. How someone could be so evil, she didn’t know. Her pulse pounded behind her ears as he dug through the drawers of a dresser. He pulled out a pair of handcuffs and handcuffed her to a chair. She was shaking so hard that he had to hold her hands still while he cuffed them. The first few times this happened she screamed and begged for him to stop. But when her words stopped working, she stopped trying. Now she took it. He slid a knife along her collarbone, creating a thin slice, almost like a paper cut.

It stung and she gulped. He considered himself a plastic surgeon creating the perfect race and today it was apparent that he was changing her shoulders. Drops of blood splattered onto the soft pink of her dress. He was fixing his doll, making her as beautiful as possible. She passed out before her mind registered the pain. When she woke up she was back at the bottom of the stairs with the four other girls and in more pain than she had been in since she’d tried to run away. She was in a new dress and she could feel thick makeup on her face. Her body wouldn’t move.

The heavy footsteps came down the stairs to administer another day of horror to one of them. She stared him down as he walked in front of them.

“Kill me.” She Spoke up, her voice raspy from both disuse and screaming.

“Excuse me?” He asked his voice gruff.

She could feel the other girls shock as she spoke, this time more forcefully. “Kill me.”

“Now Sasha, why would you say such a thing?” He smiled like she was joking.

“My name isn’t Sasha.” She growled she was done with his games. She’d rather go to hell than live another day in his Dollhouse. Hell couldn’t be much worse than this. Maybe God would have mercy, take her to heaven because her life on earth was its own version of hell. Either way, the only way out of this was death. No one was going to find them out here.

“Oh, isn’t it though?”

“Go rot in hell.”

She spat at him and he looked down at her with disgust. He drew a knife from somewhere she couldn’t see. Fear gripped her throat but nothing could be worse than what she’d already gone through, not even death. He squatted in front of her and filled her vision. He ran the knife down her cheek, her neck, her collar, till it was hovering just above her heart. With a grunt he shoved the knife down. A hell raising scream echoed through the basement as and all consuming pain wrapped around her. Her vision grew blurry but she could see a sick grin on his face as he said the last words she would ever hear.

“I’ll see you there.”