Magic Surgery

For two more months, the whole affair seemed to have died down. We did not speak about the night we saw the ghost, and I dared not move the dolls in the house. I made sure that the ghost and the depiction of Hurry Hendrickson were always outside the house. But I did not feel compelled to move those dolls. Not for those months after that first time. I must confess that I often thought, however, about moving the various dolls depicting into certain situations that were erotic in nature. The voice in my head, usually silent, did speak then: always telling me to remember the story of the muse. Everything, the voice said, has its price.

I took, instead, to watching the dolls as they moved around the house. I began to track the movements, carefully keeping my notes written down in a little notebook with a lock around the cover. The others in the house clearly saw me making my notes and toting the book around and they began to poke fun at my diary. Both males and females remarked on my new, supposedly womanly occupation, of noting down everything around me. I was only noting down what happened with the dolls, but I felt no need to correct them. Besides, when they were all in bed, or out carousing, or otherwise occupied, I would watch the dollhouse and make notes about where they supposedly were. It made it fairly easy for me to find them, and indeed very easy to note when my girlfriend and wife were in bed with each other, or in bed with any of the other men. The first time I noticed this, when I had not placed them in such a situation, tinged me with jealousy. But, being a fairly private person, I kept that rage locked within myself. Something to use for later, I told myself.

Instead, I began to plan out my revenges in my notebook. I began to write down stories, in complete detail, about what would happen if I should use that power that called to me from that dollhouse. I explored all the possible permutations available to me with the inhabitants of the house, and including the ghastly dolls represented both Hurry Hendrickson and his poor, possibly murdered wife. The stories I wrote become increasingly erotic in nature, moving from scaring the residents of the house to incorporating them in a sort of Rabelaisian orgy.

I have since burned that diary, but I remember one example of the sort of pornographic thinking that became the madness that inhabited me as I lived at Nevermore. It began with myself, playing with that little dollhouse, hoping to find some inspiration, hoping indeed that I would suddenly find the great, true new toy, that would begin to allow me to really build an empire. I clutched, in my hand, the doll belonging to Roman, and I took some time to admire his features. I began to think, within the story I was writing, that if I were female in any part, I should not mind allowing such a strikingly classical masculine figure enjoy himself upon my person.

In that story, I then looked down at the other figures, and increasingly at the figure of Miss Gilda. Some idea began to grip at me, and though I could not quite explain what I was doing, I ran to find the tools that helped to carve the new dolls. I dug through darwers and drawers, frantically, throwing things about until Miss GIlda herself came to find men the midst of my search.

“Jeez,” she said. “Are you drunk?”

“No,” I said. “I need something.”

“Well, let me help look--”

“No!”I yelled, and pushed her out of the room. “It’s a private matter.” I closed the door and locked myself in the kitchen, first, until I dug out those tools. I supposed, in the story, that I might have hurt Miss GIlda, because the fictional version of myself that I had written emerged to find her still on the floor: she had reeled backwards, it seemed, with the **** of the push that had sent her sailing from the kitchen, and had fallen onto the stairs. Little rivulets of blood trickled down from the head wound. But this did not seem to faze me.

“I will fix this momentarily,” I murmured to myself, as I ran back to the living room. Suspicious of anyone entering the place, I quickly glanced out the window to find my wife walking arm in arm with Robert. I closed the drapes, shutting them as tightly as possible, and again locked myself into the room.

I then looked down at the dolls. Those representing Robert and Florez were indeed outside of the dollhouse. Roman was in his room. I needed to keep him there for the moment, so I moved the ghosts outside of his door, blocking his progress. I heard a male scream from upstairs, but did not run to help him. I had other ideas: ideas that I thought, at first, could only be expressed through this sort of fiction. It was far more terrifying, later-- but we have not come to that part of the story, yet.

I took the carving tools and, with the precision of a surgeon, began to undress the doll for Miss Gilda, and the Doll for myself. When I moved Miss GIlda’s doll into the living room, through the door was locked, she indeed apparated into the room. Carefully, so very carefully, I made an incision along her breasts, first. I took each one off the doll, and set it down beside her. I dared not look up into the room for fear that what I was doing had caused a grotesque and bloody scene. I promised myself that I would only look when I had finished my operation.

When I had finished with her breasts, though they were only small wooden mounds, I shakily began to cut around her doll’s private parts. For the dolls were, indeed, anatomically correct. before I had truly made my first incision, however, I stopped myself, and thought that it would be best to attempt this operation on something not so sensitive as that area of the body. Such a relief it was, within my story, because I did not have the voice that spoke within me in my real life, always reminding me of the story of the muse, and always reminding me that what I was doing in no way helped myself.

“You should feel bad about this,” the voice said. “It is a criminal action you are writing. And to write it and think it is to wish it done.”

But I shook the voice away, even as it attempted to instruct me to throw myself from the window as a penance. And I continued my writing this strange, terrifying story. At the time I did not see the actions of the characters as anything but erotic. Especially my own representation. Only later, only now, through this reflective retelling of all that happened at the house that was supposed to be my inspirational salvation, can see how the whole story, a microcosm of the outward world in which I then inhabited, worked as some sad, Grand Guignol.

I took even more care with my own doll, which I then turned to. I slice off the breasts. A pain shot through me, but this was not a pain like might happen if I had indeed taken a knife to my own body and removed a major portion. Instead, this pain was deep inside me. Like the ghost of a pain, just remembered. It was like waking up two days after a long ride or exercise and finding all the muscles in the body hurting from their strengthening. I then slipped my own doll’s breasts on the figure representing Miss Gilda. I watched, in astonishment, as my breasts indeed then began to emerge from her body. I had broken my promise to myself not to look up, and I did see something horrifying: her own mammary glands, attached to nothing, sitting on the floor, still functioning. She was breathing, I noted to myself, with some relief, but so was the invisible body attached to her breasts. I quickly picked up the wooden mounds that represented them, and spliced them onto the doll body that represented myself.

I have already written how Miss Gilda’s breasts were proportionate to her frame, which was short and stocky. I was not the same, and so her large breasts, natural on her, seemed extra large when placed upon my body. I cupped them, and attempted to adjust them, but could find no comfort. This was only the first half of my plan, I reminded myself, and sat for a while, thinking about whether I could take a similar pain as that which had occurred when I sliced off my breasts, if I were to slice off my own erogenous zone.

I decide I would indeed take that chance, and with some careful acts of slicing, and the dull remembrance of a large pain that happened not-too-long ago, I switched my private parts with Miss Gilda’s. It was only then, as I watched her grow a penis, that I began to think about the fall she had taken earlier. I was in a world of magic, I told myself, and thus believed-- truly believed-- that I could restore her to life somehow, through some sort of trick. If I only knew how, I thought to myself, and tried to think of something. But nothing came to me. Nothing, that is, until a book happened to fall off the shelf as I was banging it in an attempt to will myself into coming up with something to save my mistress. The book that fell down was a retelling of Egyptian mythology, which I supposed had been purchased by Robert, who preferred those myths to the classical Greco-Roman tales and Spenserian fables that so enthralled myself.