Hollow Dolls, The (8 page)

Winnie
wasn’t answering. She’d been gone almost two days.

After
work, Mel went over and let herself in. On the doormat there was some straw.
Must have been from Fiona’s. Winnie should have swept up since they were out
there. The ‘C’ perfume lit her nose up.

Mel
checked their shared journal on Winnie’s laptop, and as she flipped through the
entries the name Alejandra popped from one written last Tuesday, the day before
Mel came over and found Winnie in a wreck:

The Man-Rabbit LW-1

“Give me your tongue.”

Winnie's shoulders were pressed onto the straw bed. The
Domme lowered her ass onto Winnie's face and moved around, pleasured and
pleased herself. They’d had spa treatments in the afternoon including high
enemas and anal bleaching, Winnie’s favorite. The Domme lifted up and looked at
her submissive’s face.

"How much do you want to please me?"

"So, so, much Mistress."

She whipped the crop across Winnie's legs. “I told
you to call me Alejandra!”

"Alejandra!!"

She stood and moved Winnie’s body around.

“This is how you like it, isn’t it, Winnifred?
Doggie style. Should I get the white running shoes and socks?”

She snapped the crop on each cheek. Winnie panted
and asked for more. In position, with nipple clamps. Six strokes. Ten minutes.
Again.

Mel smiled. Took a drink of dark rum and then went
to the bathroom.
Six
strokes. Usually they did five. Hmm... Maybe it was
a code. A Winnie message. She was a little trickster sometimes. She splashed
her face and patted it with a towel looking in the mirror at her long, dark
hair, then went back and finished reading.

Alejandra took some of Winnie’s blood from her
cheeks and touched it on her own bleached ring. She squatted, forced Winnie to
‘toss her salad’. Alejandra came buckets, squirting on Winnie’s face. Then she turned
three sixty. "Kiss my rings,” she said.

Winnie woke in darkness. A crack of light came in
through the opening. Poo smell everywhere. A week ago Alejandra had forced her
way into Winnie’s flat, knocked the wind out of her. She’d been drugged; something
strange she’d never felt before. That’s when Alejandra introduced her real elf assistant,
Phoenia.

“I will kill Mel if you breathe a word.” Even so, Winnie
was becoming fond of Alejandra. She didn’t want any of it to stop.

The big door opened and horses stirred from the
sound. She sat up. It was Phoenia again. She gripped Winnie’s forearm and
injected her.

“Are you really an elf?” said Winnie.

Phoenia was nicer than Alejandra, by a lot.

Next thing, Winnie was home in bed. She got up and
saw blood on the sheets from her bum wounds. She licked a sliver in her hand. She
liked it when she was bleeding. In the mirror, she pulled bits of straw from
her hair.

The whole thing had gone too far. Winnie was so many
things to Mel. Whatever she was now—wounded child, prostitute, saboteur—the
archetype didn’t matter. In fact, fuck Jung! Winnie’s archetype didn’t exist.  Perhaps
Winnie was getting creative with her non-fiction. Squirting? They’d agreed to
do the memoir
hun percent accurate
. A few variations didn’t matter that
much. Then it struck. Of course! It was Winnie, topping from the bottom. Trying
to get her way for next time they were together. Something still niggled from
between the lines. A stranger. A foreigner touching Winnie. Mel felt her back
straighten. She looked around the room.

Back in the folder marked ‘memoir’, Mel scrolled to
the most recent file coded LW2 which was dated one day ago. She opened it.

Approaching Broadmoor Special Hospital on the road,
you come face to face with a twelve-foot red brick wall that disappears in both
directions. Held inside these walls was Lauren Hayes, an attractive woman who
used her wit to rip flesh, just like the Greeks of yore. She also used knives
and forks to eat flesh—human flesh. Lauren was educated at Harvard Medical
School and had worked at a hospital for years. It made sense, considering her
anatomical predilections. A butcher needed to know where to put the knife, what
to eat and what not after all.

All the crazies inside and Winnie was walking into
one of the most murderous insane places on the planet sporting a lady boner. After
clearing security, she was led to a common visitation room where Lauren sat
looking out a bank of windows. It was late afternoon and the mild overcast
North window light gave her the look of a demure, gracefully aged Hollywood
star waiting for that one last interview along with a glamorous photo spread.

“Hello Mother. Thanks for seeing me.”

Play nice.

She sat across from her at a small round table. Out
of biting range.

“Hello, my dear.”

She hated that. ‘My dear.’

“I’ll come right to the point. The woman I told you
about—this opportunity for the both of us. Her name is Alejandra and her father
is a Russian military official. High up. Alejandra has become a private
contractor for the Russian government, finding subjects for medical studies. We
are both suitable candidates.”

“And you said they are willing to spring me from
this...hell hole?”

“Yes, Mother, on July first.”

Winnie had Lauren’s hair and eyes only Lauren’s face
was slimmer, longer. And she had spider fingers that danced. She’d lift one or
two of them every once in a while and tap them on the table. Winnie kept
expecting them to detach at the wrist and run across the table like little spider
sentinels. Out into the world to bring back flesh.

“What sort of government agency?”

“They’re the sort that pay a lot of money. We have
special DNA characteristics Mother, abilities that the government is interested
in studying.”

Lauren eyed her daughter’s body slowly like she was marking
her for incisions.

“Stop it.” Her mother had an ability to enable heat
to register through her eyes in thermo-graphic colors. Winnie held a food tray
up to block whatever she might be ‘aiming’ at her. Security stepped closer. Winnie
put the tray down.

“There’s nothing to fear, my dear, I don’t have
x-ray eyes,” said Lauren. “Look, whatever one finds amusing, I suppose. I don’t
know why they are interested and frankly, I just want out. The people here bore
me to death.”

“The arrangement is for both of us to be handed over
July first,” said Winnie. “The officials here believe it’s permanent. Truth is,
we will be free to do as we choose in six months.”

Lauren’s voice faded away as Winnie looked at her
hands and fiddled with her silver friendship ring from Mel. She looked up. Broadmoor
closed in. Lauren’s eyes. Her lips moved as she talked exposing her teeth.
Blood leaked from her gums over the yellowed enamel. Winnie turned away. The other
patients were zombies.

“Now do you see, Winnie?”

“I see.” she said quickly.

Winnie turned on the chair about to leave, then
paused.

“What made you do it?”

They’d never talked about Lauren’s crime. Or what
was inside her. Lauren’s face set like marble.

“Everyone asks me that...and I tell them, I don’t
know.”

Lauren seemed content with that. It would have to
do. She was about to leave again and Lauren’s eyes changed.

“That’s the answer for the ordinary folks,” said
Lauren. “The ones who
need
the ordinary answers.”

Lauren laughed again, tilting her head back. Then
she looked back at Winnie with her mad eyes.

 “You’re not one of them, Winnie.” She leaned
closer, lower to the table. “I could come up for reassessment talking this way...”
She looked around the room. “I needed to put his light in my darkness. It was
the only way,” she said. Lauren looked at Winnie as if to say,
See! Now you
understand
,
and then put her spidery hand on Winnie’s. “Our
darkness,” said Lauren. Winnie pulled her hand away.

She was trying to make some kind of tryst out of
this,
thought
Winnie.
Perfect! Her mother had no idea what was really going on.
Now Winnie
knew—Lauren was a Lian.

“We need to contain
all
the light,” whispered
Lauren.

She rose and looked at her mother. “I’ll come for
you.”

As she left, a woman grasped Winnie’s jacket sleeve
and held on. Her old body kinked over, shaking with Parkinson’s. Mossy, grey
hair swayed. She turned her head sideways to try to come in range of Winnie’s
ear. An orderly took the woman by the arm.

“Come now, Mrs. Proctor, let’s go sit over here.”

The woman gripped Winnie’s arm even tighter, eyes drooping.
“No, no!” she gargled, exposing her few remaining teeth. “I’m so lonely,” she
said to the orderly.

Then the woman broke away from the orderly, using what
looked like a subtle ancient Kung Fu move. She moved quickly the three or four
steps over to Winnie’s side, gently brushed her withered cheek against Winnie’s
youthful skin.

“Don’t let them steal your light,” she whispered.

“Alejandra
is after my friend,” said Mel.

“Stop
playing your game, Mel, it’s not funny.”

Cara
didn’t look up.

Mel
persisted. “Do you know Alejandra?”

Cara
turned, rotating her chair and  put her elbows on her knees. She bowed her head.
When she looked back up she said, “Alejandra is a boss, too, with Lilly. Okay? Are
you satisfied. Now I’ll be in shit, so don’t talk about this to anyone.
Alejandra is my half-sister.”

“So
you’re a part owner all this time?”

“No,
Alejandra brought me from Florida. I had no choice. Same as you.”

“Me?
Is this like...the mafia—this slave business with Phillip?”

“Don’t,
Mel.”

Cara
wheeled her chair closer.

“She
used to be in the Russian military. Don’t get up in her business, or Phillip’s.
And quit playing your stupid games with Fi and Hattie out at the stables. That
game of being her with Winnie. Alejandra is furious.”

“Why
didn’t you tell me about her before? She’s your sister!”

“Mel.
Not a word to Lilly, she will totally freak on me.”

Cara
went back to working on the schedule.

Mel
sat shocked, staring at Cara. She’d done one of her ‘everything’s settled’
moves.

Mel’s
phone buzzed and she saw Winnie’s avatar.

“Are
you at home?” said Mel.

“Uh
huh.”

“Wait
for me there.”

Caught
in her own fable, Mel rushed out of the club, anxious to get to Winnie, and
still confused by Cara’s betrayal. If that’s what it was.

As
she walked down Drury Lane she drank back a water and everything felt like it belonged.
The maples flustered their leaves. The breezes blushed through her thighs. It
was a broadcast; a telepathic melancholy. Hers and Winnie’s. She felt she
needed to be with her right away. Every moment that passed beckoned her
stronger toward her dark princess.

The
Caldwych Theatre marquis flashed painted colored popsicles across the street onto
the windows. Mel had been looking for answers with Cara, then one landed on her
shoulder. She had her head down and as she tried to squeeze by a man beside the
theatre. He pressed her against the window.

“Don’t
tell me, you have tickets to the opera,” she said.

“Time
to get to know each other better,” said Phillip.

He
was drunk again. This time she
kissed him back. She was feeling reckless,
vindictive. Here, little bird. She was like a hummingbird feeder.

Phillip
talked as they walked to his Porsche around the corner. Mel looked at Winnie’s
pink Cooper S with a passing glance. As they drove, Mel watched the movements
of the musculature in his face with curiosity. He talked about himself
continuously. His calling card was a polaroid of a teenage girl with her name
scribbled at the bottom. It was taken before, when she was fun and innocent.
Phillip, the salesman bragging about his line of goods.

“Where
is Oksana?”
said
Mel,
interrupting
him.

“She’s
been placed, nothing to be concerned about.”

He
continued talking, and she interrupted him again.

“Placed?
Sounds like a maid service.”

“Exactly,”
he said. “She is a maid now.”

“Who?”
said Mel, open-endedly.

“Who?”
said Phillip, exasperated.

She
was shaking him already.

“Who
did you sell her to?” she said.

He
put his hand on her leg and began to slide it up her skirt.

Mel
stopped him.

“Me-el,”
said Phillip with a little boy voice. “Where the girls are placed is private
business.”

She
pulled his hand
away. “So is this.”

“Okay,
what!” he said, waving his hand around. “She’s in the South, near Devon,” he
complied angrily. “Why do you care?”

“She’s
a human being Phillip. A little one. I was like her once.”

Phillip
looked stern; his face began to go mean. The bad wolf eyes flashed. That’s when
she knew for sure. “I just took a liking to her,” said Mel. “I was worried for
her, that’s all.” She put her hand on his and invited it back to her leg to
diffuse the situation.

“Not
to worry, not to worry.” Phillip translated a phrase from his youth, something
his mother used to say. He felt better now.

He
talked on and on about his ‘maid’ service and how rich he was becoming, playing
under Mel’s skirt until they arrived at Phillip’s in Kensington.
As
soon as the door closed, the Man-Rabbit appeared in the corner of the room.

Mel went into the kitchen while Phillip hung the coats.

“Ahh, Beaujolais Nouveau!”

 She pulled the cork and poured two glasses. Phillip came up
behind. Kissed her neck.
She
turned and handed him a glass.

“Cheers.”

“Salut.”

“Where’s the bedroom?” she said.

“Right this way.” He sounded like a game show host.

 There was a tiny elevator off the kitchen, of all places, and it
looked like an elongated dumb waiter.

“Going down,” he said. They squeezed inside. The space was like a
coffin, probably enough room for three if everyone was small. As it was,
Phillip hummed, put his arm around her waist, and smelled her hair.

 When the door opened, she knew this was the spot. It wasn’t a
bedroom at all. A copper color seemed to permeate everything. Bronze etched
mirrors on the walls, burgundy enamel tiled floors. Mel stepped around the room
and sipped the rest of her wine. There was a drain in the floor beside a potted
fig tree.

Phillip showed her a bed of black marble. Not a bed, it looked
more like some kind of altar. Mel placed her hand on the top. It was heated.
She turned and
smiled, then quickly drove a closed fist with full
strength into his Adam’s apple. He dropped his wine and fell over, struggling
to breathe. Collapsed trachea, she guessed.
Mel
dragged him unconscious, over to the altar. The Man-Rabbit stood nearby,
watching.

Soon she had Phillip bound, gagged, and naked. She didn’t want to
hear him beg. It was enough that he would know. She sat on the edge of the
black marble, the bottle in one hand, her glass in the other, sipping wine.
Phillip came to.

Show time.

When she touched his naked chest it felt unreal. She smacked his
belly skin four times very hard. It was to bring herself to attention as much
as him. Crouching down close, she saw the skin begin to welt, and it rose in
the shape of her hand. The real thing. She smelled him. Her own chemical
factory piped pheromones like little smokestacks as she undressed. She examined
him closely as he breathed—it seemed his trachea would hold out long enough for
what she had in mind.

Up onto the altar, with one foot either side, she squatted down
and rubbed herself on him. It was a motion she’d done a thousand times on stage
at
the
club
. Phillip’s cock became surprisingly erect for someone in such
dire circumstances. Perhaps he thought it was a game and she would stop short
of doing him any real harm. She hovered over his naked body with only his cock
inside her. Nothing else touched. In the balance, like that, her and Nigreda
were at a pinnacle, some place of achievement. Mel flashed on Winnie, wishing
she were there. Mel, Melanie, Nigreda, all of them. It was simply correct.

While Phillip had been out cold, Mel discovered an array of
torturous glimmering tools in a drawer under the altar. Now they were fanned
out beside Phillip, carefully placed on the black marble. These were the tools
of his trade. He was a torture expert, but he had no Spetsnaz training like
Hattie, or she’d never have taken him down so easily.

Mel picked up a long, curved, stainless blade and tapped it on the
marble beside his leg. It made a true steel ping. Phillip sputtered objections
into his gag and his chest tried to expand against his tight bindings. His face
had gone vanilla, his body finally rested as still as the marble. Everything
about Phillip had a darkly polished rich-boy finish. He had the markings of a
bad wolf.

Mel had been studying where the veins and arteries were on the
human body. She ran the blade gently along the side of his temple, opening the
skin and severing a superficial temporal vein. The blood streamed freely onto
the marble, leaving a deep red glisten on the blackness. His cock was still
hard.

“What did he feel inside now, this bad wolf?” they all wondered.

She tapped the tip of the blade on his ball gag, which made him
blink. “Nervous?” she said, and cut a tiny slit into the corner of his nose.

Phillip groaned and again tried unsuccessfully to generate a bit
more freedom of movement out of his bound predicament. Mel
lifted her hips
up, careful not to let him slip out. She r
an the
knife edge gently along his inner thigh, opening the skin to a shallow depth.
As she crossed his belly with the blade, blood trickled down his abdomen and over
his testicles. She pushed the sac to one side with enough pressure to open the
sagging skin. A testicle popped out like an eyeball.

“Phillip, your tools are nice and sharp,” she said.

Soon Phillip had lost enough blood to become unconscious. Mel
pulled the gag out of his mouth. His comatose lips slowly closed. The curved
knife slipped easily through the skin on his neck severing the carotid. Blood
gushed. She dipped her finger into the flow and painted a smile. Now she was
the little man inside the machine, handing them out to the plastic dolls. Candy
smiles. She smudged his blood all over her legs and hips, belly and breasts, as
she sat on him. He’d gone all soft now. Massaging her hood ring, his cum and
blood mixed on her fingers. The stickiness triggered them into a three way
orgasm. They walked around the room, each in their own way released. There
would be no turning back from their mission now.

In the full length bathroom mirror Mel gazed at a horror movie
image. She was a naked poster girl; blood smeared everywhere on her pale white
skin. The seriousness of what she’d just done came over her.

 It was time to clean up.

Mel showered, then gathered plastic gloves and a spray bottle
filled with some watered-down bleach. She covered her tracks, cleaned
everything she’d touched.

The Xanax
she
’d taken that stuck to the back of her tongue came loose as
she
guzzled the last of the nouveau. The colorful
trailing stars she saw through the living room window told her
she
was spun again. In his photo stash, some of the girls were
so hideously carved up, they resembled slaughterhouse beef.

“Note to self,” she said. “Quit being so easy on these fuckers.”

On his cell phone were dozens of girls’ pictures. Mel shook her
head looking at Oksana’s. She’d only met her by chance in the club because Jugi
got too high. Her first clue of what was really going on around her. Now,
reluctant to admit that she hadn’t seen any of it, Mel blamed Melanie for
dragging her into an infatuation with Cara.

“Stupid little cunt.”

Melanie often made her angry, and the little brat knew she was in
the wrong. Although it wasn’t totally true. Mel had been the one who trusted
Cara, who cared for her so much. But Melanie quickly disrespected Cara verbally
to Mel. Cara had entranced Melanie. She took the blame and for allowing Cara to
make her feel like a sister and begged Mel’s forgiveness. Cara was losing
appeal now for both of them, since they’d learned of her betrayal. A common
enemy. They’d never been able to share this directly. Mel confessed to Melanie
that she’d been too quick to let some girls in the past know too much about both
of them. She told Melanie it is was a weakness of hers. They felt better having
shared.

Mel
placed
the folder and phone on the passenger’s seat after
she climbed into Winnie’s car.
She had the slave-girl’s photos and names
, plus the addresses of all the buyers, where they’d been placed
around London and beyond. She started up the Cooper and pulled away. On the
road to Winnie’s, she tossed the cell phone’s GPS chip out the window. Melanie
and Nigreda both joined her in a smile as they drove, celebrating their first
kill together.