Control and Surrender Are All Mixed Up

“I wonder if I could switch the parts around,” I said. But they had all read my story, and protested that they could not bear such pain. as I watched Robert and Roman continue I realised that I needed to find my own release. The power that I had swelled my own cock immensely, and I looked to the women for my satisfaction. I also needed to ensure that my own sexual prowess was not in question. Again, in the height of my cruelty, evil grin plastered across my face, I grabbed the Roman doll. I simply remarked “too bad Roman is rather premature,” and tore the two male dolls apart.

As my two women began to service me, Roman let out a great cry, and pulled away from Robert. Robert backed up, crying, angry at what he had done, wiping his mouth. And Roman, too, rather ashamedly ran to the opposite corner of the room. It was at that moment that I noticed the constant voice that had reminded me about the muse, that had urged me to play with the dolls, had not spoken at all since the night previous, when I had ran off to attend to matters at my toy factory.

“I own you,” I said to everyone in the room. I had begun to think of them all as my slaves. But the voice began to ring through my ears again.

“The muse,” it said. “The muse. You do not own anyone or anything. We own you now.”

“Whose we?” I asked.

“The spirits of this household,” the voice said. “We have taken many forms over the years. We have bred and multiplied with everything strange and evil that happens in this house. You had been fighting us, I think, in your way, trying not to use the dollhouse, the little model that proved a perfect vessel for our control.”

“I’m in control,” I said, But the voice just laughed. It was the same sort of evil laugh that I had just emitted when confronted by my friends. While my wife and mistress serviced me, I could not feel the satisfaction of the pleasure coursing through my body. I was, at that same time, in deep debate with the voice that flowed through my head.

I looked up at Robert, and then at Roman. Each of their faces was not the sadness and anger I had expected at what I had just **** them to do. Instead, there was the look of someone who has just seen or heard something that cannot be placed as real within our understanding of this world. It was Robert who spoke first, looking up at an empty space above me that seemed to be filled with a shadowy, non-visible presence. I looked up to see it too-- or rather, to not see it, but to perceive the shape.

It took the form of Hurry Hendrickson, but it seemed to be shifting, changing into various different forms all at once. As if someone took an infinite amount of perspectives of an infinite amount of persons and laid them all on top of each other-- something more cubist and strange than any Georges Braque or Pablo Picasso painting. That old rhyme came swimming back into my head, on perpetual loop, echoing over itself:

As I was going up the stairs,

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today.

Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

He, this Hurry Hendrickson shade, looked like other things as well. He looked like all the shadow-people I had imagined hiding in the drops of rain. And sounded like all of their babbling, too. And he looked like something else, a person I could not put a finger on, until Robert spoke, pointing at the nothingness above my head and shouting “Rabbie!”

I saw it too. This was the evil shadow friend of Robert’s childhood. This was all the shadows and all the fears I had ever had about something invisible controlling my fate all wrapped up into one absence of light. I tried to reaffirm my control.

“I am in control!” I shouted. But then I noticed, with one sidelong glance to the dollhouse, that there was a doll missing. The doll representing Memoria was gone. But, suspended in the air, was a hybrid doll of both Hurry Hendrickson and his wife. And there were other things grafted onto the doll as well. There was a sword, which looked Civil War era. And some hat that the doll wore looked now much less like a gentleman magician’s chapeau than the kind of straw assemblage that a yeoman farmer might wear.

“You will never be in control,” the voice said. And with that a bolt of lightning struck a tree outside, as a kind of punctuation.

“We’ll fight--” I started to say, and then the boom-clap of the thunder interrupted my defiance.

“You cannot fight something you have already surrendered to,” said the voice. “This place is a darkness and you chose to embrace it. Every time you scribbled your desire to control the world you lost a little more of your handle on reality. Every move, every word you write is not truly something you have thought. It is what we have put in your head in order to own you.”

“There is always hope, there is always a chance at freedom,” I said. “I just need something with which to fight back.”

Laughter, lightning bolts, and thunder surrounded and invaded the household. I tried to think of something that could fight back against the darkness. Nothing came to me.

“You cannot think. You can only do, and only what we tell you to, Emperor of Nothing!” The words echoed through me more than just in the air. They sounded like something I had heard before. Something that might help the situation. But I couldn’t quite place it. I tried to reach up and touch the ghost. But it had moved. It was bending over the dollhouse, arranging things.

“Let’s live out one of your fantasies,” the ghost said. It placed me in a compromising position between Roman and Robert, readying to enjoy their penises. Once again this position had something to do with the power level of different persons, more so than the actual enjoyment of the act.

“You really want to be helpless,” the voice said. “That’s why you want to puppet master everything. You wanted a rebellion. You want to be taken.”

“No, I said. I’ve never liked me.”

“That’s not what the journal said,” Robert pointed out.

“Those were fantasies.”

“Guess they come true,” the voice said. I tried to prevent it, but the invisible **** around me, the same **** that had controlled the others, pushed me to the ground.

“I’m not sure I want to stop this,” said Robert. “I mean, you just did this to me… it’s almost like ****.”

“I’d rather you did it than that… that shadow-man,” I screamed. But it was too late. Both men had their pants unzipped and their boxers down. They stuffed their penises into my mouth with ****. I nearly vomited. My fear of vomiting, however, was far more than my disgust at the position I found myself in. And, if I am completely truthful, I cannot deny that there was some quality of that position I enjoyed. I imagined myself as each of the women: first as Miss Gilda, then as my wife, in that same position.