I’m a simple creature. In the end, the woman I described was the same one I always made in the life simulation games. The girl who lives next door type. A little smattering of freckles across the nose. A B-cup. I’m not greedy.
You could pay a little extra to have a chip in her head programmed to say particular phrases and even modulate her voice to sound husky, or sweet and flirty. It took me days to think about what I would want her to say. I didn’t even choose particularly sexual things. I mostly chose conversational things, the things I remembered my ex and I saying to each other after sex.
Once I got her out of the box, the odd smell that pervaded the room when I popped the vacuum sealed bag around her dissipated. I gave her a bath, which felt weird but intimate.
When we went to bed, that first night, I felt shy. Which was crazy, she was a sex doll. I bought her to have something to fuck. It was uncanny though. She looked too real. Instead, I lay beside her in my bed and stroked her side as my body heat slowly warmed her skin and she felt softer and more inviting.
~~~
I woke up in the middle of the night because I thought I heard someone whispering. My apartment was small, but my neighbours worked and were courteous. I wasn’t usually bothered by them. It had been in my ear too. I looked down at Cindy and frowned. I must have pulled onto her back at some point during the night.
I was freaking myself out. I should have bought a fleshlight, I had not put enough thought into what it would actually be like having a 5’6” doll in my bed who never closed her eyes. When I laid back down to sleep, I had my back to her.
In the morning, Cindy’s hand was in mine. I had rolled over during the night again and somehow pulled her against me so we were practically cheek to cheek. Opening my eyes to see her blue glass eyes staring right into my soul did direct damage to my morning wood I’d been hoping would be the kick-start to our relationship, but I was determined to overcome my discomfort.
I was paranoid, it felt like her eyes were following me as I was getting into place. I managed a few perfunctory thrusts before realising I was avoiding eye contact with her. The boobs, although perfect, helped less than I hoped. I was on the verge on giving up altogether and going back to my hand and my favourite video previews on RubHub when I felt something slide over me --inside her.
I froze.
Again, there was the impossible feeling of her eyes on me as the unmistakable feeling of a hand, a firm hand, slick and rough, jerked me off. It was borderline too rough, there was something aggressive about it. Domineering. I finished with a perplexed kind of shout and withdrew with a shamed cringe. There had been nothing in the welcome pack about any kind of automatic weaponised vagina that I remembered reading. I wouldn’t have selected anything with an abrasive hand-job setting.
~~~
She was sitting up in bed when I came home from work, which was just odd. I honestly couldn’t remember what position I’d left her in. I’d planned when I bought her to leave her in a variety of places during the day. Like she was a real girlfriend. Pose her reading by the window or whatever. I didn’t think I’d started yet. The feeling of her eyes following me was so intense while I was having a shower and making dinner, I eventually laid her back down and put the bedsheet over her face.
There was a note written on the pad I kept by my landline. I walked past it several times before noticing. I was walking from the bathroom back to the kitchen when I saw it.
“Iloveyou”
It was not my handwriting, nor anything I would have written. There was a reason I was lonely enough to be buying an incredibly realistic sex doll. I flipped up the page to tear it off only to see there was something written on the next page and the page after that.
“iknowwhereyouroffswitchis”
“sillyboy”
I jumped about a mile high and dropped the pad because the speaker playing my playlist suddenly stopped. It does that when I get a phone call. In the second of silence between the music fading out and the phone’s ringtone cutting in, I could have sworn I heard someone’s voice in my bedroom.
The phone call was from my friend Dan. Dan is the man, I just ride in his wake. He was sceptical, and rightly so, when I answered his query of what was happening in my world with a “Nothing much,” in completely the wrong pitch.
I filled him in on my relationship road bumps with Cindy while pacing in my bedroom door. The bedsheet had fallen to her waist, and she had gotten her arms up and her hands lodged in the slats of my headboard.
“You bought a real girl doll?” Dan asked. He was enjoying this.
“Yeah man, she is super hot but it is not going well.”
“Only you would strike out with a sex doll dude, are you cursed? Is your dick cursed?” Dan’s laughter over the line mixed with the sound of whatever bar he was at. “Come out, I’ll get you a really real girl.”
In a weird way, Dan was making me feel better. I just didn’t know how to work the dumb doll. Maybe there was a faulty mechanism or her battery was swollen.
“Nah man, I’m going to see if I can figure out what’s going on, maybe they sent me the wrong model. It’ll be a pain if I have to send her back.”
~~~
I slunk into the bedroom, feeling ridiculous. Her face was turned away from me, and one leg had slipped out of the bedsheet. She was beautiful, they went all out on the details. I let my hand travel from her ankle up to the soft underside of her knee, to the join of her hip, and then slip inside to the place that had almost mangled me that morning. I couldn’t feel anything inside her now that indicated she had any motorised parts. The only thing that I could discern was that she was hot, literally sweltering inside.
I was puzzling it over when suddenly her head snapped back and her voice programming activated. Instead of what I’d chosen, the sweet nothings and coupley conversation, she just started screaming.
“Help! Someone help me! Oh God, he’s killing me! Help!”
She clamped down on my hand and was gripping my fingers inside her like a vice. I yelped and fell backwards but my hand stayed stuck.
“No! No, Stop! Stop, you can’t! You can’t! Don’t do this!”
There was alarmed shouting out in the hall. A cold sweat broke out across my forehead. I lunged across her, trying to cover her mouth and smother the sound, but the sound wasn’t coming from her mouth. It was playing from a sound box inside of her body. As I flailed around, panicking, her blue glass eyes stared at me the same way as when she pulled me off that morning. The inertia of the moment felt bizarre.
Someone was knocking, then pounding at my door through the sound of Cindy screaming. I tried shouting to them “Everything is fine, there is nothing to worry about,” but her voice shrieked over mine.
“He has me tied up, please don’t let him kill me!”
I stared at her in disbelief, fear, and an irrational feeling of betrayal as the sound of my neighbours breaking down my front door splintered through the apartment.
I was wrenched backwards as someone hauled me off her, the sound of my fingers breaking for a moment the only sound before my shocked bleat. The ambulance had been called for Cindy. When the EMTs arrived and realised, like everyone else, the screaming body in my bed was in fact a sex doll, they were understandably concerned. The EMTs, my neighbours, and the police assumed, and what other conclusion was there to come to, that I had specifically ordered a sex doll that would scream for help.
I was taken in for questioning.
Cindy was confiscated for analysis.
~~~
I sat in the police interview room for what felt like three hours before anyone came to speak to me. My broken fingers were in the splint the EMTs had rigged for me. I had been given an aspirin, but that was about it. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself, wishing I had gone to the pub with Dan the man, when the police officer walked in. He had a coffee cup in hand, but he made it obvious the coffee was for him.
“I’ll get you one once we’ve clarified some things.” He said.
“Sure,” I agreed, eager to please.
“Can you explain to me why you bought a sex doll with the same name as a recently missing woman?”
That, I could not explain.
“Can you explain for me why your sex doll shares many physical aspects with the missing woman?”
I could not explain that either. I was getting more and more nervous. The police officer did not appreciate my fidgeting.
“I thought I made her up,” I blurted out. “I really did. It’s the same kind of basic girl I make in almost all my first-person shooter games, any computer game where you can make a woman, that’s the woman I make. If I have to make a guy, I usually make them like—"
“I don’t see how that is relevant.” The police officer was not impressed with my computer game explanation, but I had not been arrested--yet.
“When I ordered the doll,” I blushed, “The sex doll, you could customise everything, and I told them what I wanted her to say. Can’t you check that?”
“Check what?”
“Check with them? What my order details were. You can find that out from them, I didn’t ask for her to scream. I wanted her to say nice things, and really, I just asked for a woman with blue eyes and brown hair, isn’t that kind of… isn’t that like most of them?”
“Most of who? Women?” The officer looked affronted. “We are already in the process of contacting the company you ordered the doll from and confirming the details of your order.”
There was a knock on the door and a young female officer entered, scuttled across the room to whisper into the officer’s ear then scuttled out again. I didn’t think it was wise to comment that she had brown hair and blue eyes.
“Officer Kipley let me know the company responded. Apparently, there was an issue with a disgruntled staff member deliberately sabotaging doll orders as a political stunt. We’ll follow up on this, naturally. Take some time and consider your options, if you decide to file charges we’ll help with that.” He shuffled some papers with a distinct air of finality and stood to leave.
“Well, I do have two broken fingers.”
He paused, and looked at my hand as if he didn’t see the connection. “Your neighbour broke your fingers?”
“Well yes, but—”
“When they thought you had a woman held captive in your apartment?”
“I know but—”
“Maybe you’d be better off seeking relationships with the real people around you, rather than stoking any more ill feeling with legal action?”
~~~
They returned Cindy to me wrapped in garbage bags with “EVIDENCE” tape wrapped around her. There were red scuff marks around her wrists where her hands were stuck in my headboard. It looked like she’d been tied up. Her hair was messy. She stank like cigarettes and drain water. Where had they been keeping her? I gave her another bath, but there was a layer of grime infused in her silicone skin that wouldn’t come out.
From my couch, I watched TV with the sound turned way up, but I couldn’t relax. I was convinced I could hear sounds in my bedroom--shuffling and crawling. My wardrobe opening and closing repeatedly. A low and monotone voice spoke in a never ending stream of consciousness. I couldn’t go in to check though. I couldn’t make my feet go to the door and open it. Wasn’t this the classic horror movie set up? I’d walk in and see myself in the mirror, and it would turn out that it had been me the whole time, losing my mind?
There wasn’t anything I could do to prove I was watching TV and not a deranged lunatic drooling in my room rattling doors? I got my phone out and scrolled through the numbers. Call it a moment of weakness. Fear and doubt. Loneliness. I don’t know what made me select the number I did, but only God or divine providence made her pick up.
“I told you to never call me again.”
“Becka?” I whispered into the phone.
“Jesus Chris,” she muttered, “What do you want?”
“This is going to sound crazy but you didn’t… you didn’t put a curse on my cock after we broke up?”
“No, not after we broke up anyway,” I could hear Becka’s smirk over the phone. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I’ve heard some weird stuff about you the last few days.”
“What have you heard?”
“That your dick got stuck in a blow-up doll and they had to cut it off.”
“It wasn’t a blow-up doll—”
“Wait, it’s true?”
“No, shut up, I still have a dick, it’s just a bit… God, It just looks like sausage meat at the moment.” I couldn’t help but laugh, even though both my dick and my pride were wounded.
Becka was swearing over the phone in a mixture of horror and fascination. I gave Becka a much more detailed story than I had given Dan, and I could hear her muttering and the click clack of her typing. She was already searching the internet to help me.
“I’m not helping you because we’re, like, friends or anything,” Becka said down the phone to me, still typing “This is just the most bizarre thing I have ever heard of and I want to know more about these screaming sex dolls. Leave it with me, I’ll call you back.”
She hung up without saying goodbye, leaving me with the intense sense memory of the way she used to hang up saying “I love you.”
I cocked my head. Did I say that out loud? Was it in the movie? Someone said I love you. I turned down the TV. The apartment was quiet. Completely quiet. The sounds I thought I’d been hearing in the bedroom were gone.
This night I didn’t immediately put Cindy in bed with me. I put her in the armchair in the corner of my room I usually slung clothes over. I couldn’t get the missing girl thing out of my head. I turned my back on her and tried to sleep.
~~~
I woke nice and slow to the sensation of lips sliding over me. It felt like a nice memory of something that used to happen when I was still with Becka and she would wake me up during the night for some monkey business. I hummed in appreciation and the mouth locked around me moved rhythmically. Maybe not quite so smooth as I remembered. Something nicked me. I flinched.
“Hey babe, no teeth,” I mumbled.
A low growl brought me closer to consciousness. I fumbled down over my stomach to the mop of tacky and wiglike tousled hair.
“Becka?” I sat up on my elbows and squinted down, bleary-eyed, towards the lump hunched over my crotch “Jesus-fuck what?”
There was another growl and the pleasant pressure around me turned harsh and unyielding as the mouth clamped down and locked. I yowled and thrashed my hips to dislodge Cindy, who had become a dead weight on top of me. It was no use. She would not let go. The pain was excruciating. There was something sharp in her mouth. Every time I moved it seemed to be in a different place, it was impossible to avoid. Her mouth was getting wetter and wetter, I was sure it was my blood. It seemed impossible that I was still erect. I could feel myself growing dizzy and faint. I braced myself, with my hands on her shoulders, I prepared to shove her away from me, whatever the cost.
Her voice activation triggered.
She began screaming.
~~~
Arriving for the second time in 48 hours, The EMTs were less sympathetic. It took them a long time to extricate my mangled penis from Cindy’s mouth, at which time I promptly vomited onto one of them.
There was no explanation, from their point of view, where I had not gotten home from an interview with the police about a missing woman and immediately tried to have sex with a corpse-doll that I knew did nothing but scream and beg for its life. What could I say to them? I hadn’t touched her? That she had climbed onto me while I was sleeping?
The doctor gave me a stern lecture about my penis. I was advised to refrain from arousal for 4 weeks. I didn’t mind. I was glad that I was in hospital and safe from Cindy. Good natured and cooperative, I sat while a psychologist talked to me about considering therapy for my sex addiction and unhealthy sexual thoughts regarding women. It all sounded great. I didn’t even want the doll anymore.
I called Dan. “Can I ask a huge favour?”
“Sure man, shoot.”
“I’m in hospital right now, and they’re going to let me out in the next couple of days. Can you go to my apartment and get my doll? Can you get rid of her for me?”
“Whoah man, trouble in paradise?”
“I’ll tell you all about it over a beer later, for now, can you throw her out for me? Not in the dumpster in the street, you gotta do it properly.”
“Don’t want the neighbours to see the evidence of your failed tryst? I getcha,” Dan chuckled. I laughed along relieved he wasn’t busting my ass about it.
~~~
Dan called me back later that night. “What the hell did you do to this doll? She’s been through the wringer.”
“Oh, yeah.” I fidgeted in the hospital bed, “She’s pretty messed up. I got… stuck? The EMTs had to cut her mouth open to get me out and she looks kind of ghoulish now.”
I could hear Dan’s long whistle crackle over the line. He sounded far away, like he was in a tunnel. “Yeah, she looks like she got rode hard and put away wet. Still got great tits though.”
“Maybe it would be better if you did this during the day. Dan?” The line buzzed and crackled, and there was no reply for a long time. “Dan?”
“Yeah bud?” he was back. “Sorry, I thought I heard someone talking in the other room.”
“I’m just saying you should probably do it during the day.”
“I thought you didn’t want anyone to see your secret shame.” Dan laughed.
“It’s not that, it’s not safe.”
“Not safe?” Dan repeated. “Silly boy.”
Silly boy? I remembered the notepad of weird shit Cindy had written on by my telephone.
“Please, get out of there?” I whispered.
The line went dead.
~~~
It was my next door neighbour, the one who broke my fingers trying to save Cindy, that they found first the next day. His body was arranged in the hallway so his feet were at my threshold and his arms were outstretched like he was on a crucifix. He looked like he was ecstatically requesting entrance to my apartment, except that he had been eviscerated. His entrails were in my living room, arranged into some sort of sigil. Police would have put more pressure on me to know what it meant except I was in hospital when it went down.
Dan’s body was on my bedroom floor, spread out, and violated. The room was baking hot and stank. The police showed me pictures to try to make sense of the writing on the walls.
I didn’t understand any of it.
Cindy was on my bed, in her sexy night-time outfit. She looked rough. There was blood around her mouth and between her thighs.
The conclusion was that Dan and the neighbour had argued, possibly about me. I didn’t see how Dan could have it in him to do any of that Satanist bullshit, but the police were convinced from the damage to his hands he had written on the walls before he died.
~~~
The hospital refused to release me with no one to pick me up, especially now that my apartment was an active crime scene. There was only one person I could call. Becka refused at first. She told me if I was going to use this crisis to rebuild fractured relationships I should give my estranged parents or brother a call. She finally relented and admitted she had found out some interesting information about the sex dolls so at least we had something to talk about in the car.
I was shivering in the pick up/drop off zone outside the hospital waiting for Becka when a police car pulled up in front of me instead.
“Oh, here we go,” I muttered to myself as I shuffled over to the passenger window and leaned down to peer into the car.
Inside was a man I had seen in the station while I was being escorted into and out of my interviews, the Captain of the precinct or whatever his rank was. He was the guy who wore the fanciest blues with the nicest hat. He was sitting behind the wheel, hands at ten and two. His mouth was frozen in a rictus spasm of a smile.
“Help you, officer?”
“Good evening, Mr Watts. We have a few questions for you down at the station,” he had not blinked yet. “About your doll, she really is quite remarkable.”
I didn’t want to get in the car. There was a weird smell and the cop was giving off a peculiar vibe, “Sorry officer, I’m waiting for someone.”
“I insist”
“Really, I’d rather not.”
“I have a gun.”
“Oh, well, if you insist.”
He wouldn’t stop humming as he drove. It was tuneless and wandering, and drove me completely mad. Every time I considered saying something, I remembered the gun. When we pulled up at the station, the Captain had to let me out of the back of the cruiser. I recoiled, I couldn’t help it, when he leaned over to grip the door it caused his jacket to gape open. I saw two blooming red discs of blood on the white of his dress shirt at nipple height, blood dribbling down to pool around his waist.
As I followed him into the precinct, I noticed he was walking funny. His pants were wet with blood from the crotch to the ankle. He left a pattering red trail behind him.
“Sir, are you alright?” I asked.
He stopped to look back at me. He didn’t seem aware of the blood he was losing, or didn’t care.
“I’m great, son, never better,” he said.
My phone rang in my pocket. I checked the screen it was Becka, no doubt wondering where the hell I was. She’d be so pissed if she’d driven all the way to the hospital and I wasn’t there. Sure enough, my phone pinged again with a text. The preview was a series of curse words cut off at motherfucker. The Captain beckoned me to follow him. I reluctantly slid the phone into my pocket, feeling the pings continue as I went.
The officer at the front desk was dead. Or I hoped he was. His body was slack in his chair. His eyes had been gouged out. The computer was flickering in a staccato pattern that cast a crazy glare against his washed-out skin. As we walked past, he let out a low, tortured moan. So much for him.
The Captain led me past the interview rooms to the evidence locker. He opened the door with an excessive amount of ceremony, wielding the key as if he were conducting an orchestra. There were other people in the small room, other officers, people they had dragged in from the cells or the waiting room. It was hard to tell how long they’d been dead, but the evidence room had given them plenty of options of what to kill each other with. I assumed the Captain had arranged the bodies carefully around Cindy and painstakingly constructed the shrine made out of her.
As I stepped into the room, the Captain grabbed me by a fistful of hair and dragged me to the centre of the circle of corpses. He forced me to my knees and unbuckled his dress pants. Ecstatic, the Captain arched his back as he unveiled his cock, flayed, adorning a thatch of nails impaling his deflated and purpled scrotum to his crotch.
“Pray!” He cried joyously, cupping my face, as he mashed his mutilated groin against my face. “Pray!” The slick of his red raw meat hit the back of my throat and gave the vomitrising up to meet it nowhere to go but out of my nose. I choked on it and him, but if anything me puking around him gave the Captain greater pleasure and he jacknifed my face. I tore at the nails scratching my chin in desperation, feeling gouts of blood raining down on my hands until finally I hit on one that let out a particularly thick spray and he collapsed to the floor. My mouth full of blood, I let out a ragged breath, and locked that memory right in the vault. I slid the phone out of my pocket, I had several texts from Becka.
What the fuck, where are you?
I drove all that way, you could have said if someone else was going to pick you up?
Do not call me again!
That was exactly what I was going to do. There was no reception in the evidence locker, but there was a landline phone, I suppose it was for officers working in there. I dialed Becka’s number and listened to it ring, worried it would ring out.
“Becka Lansbury, who is… oh shit this better not be you, M—”
“It’s me. Don’t hang up, I’m trapped.”
“Trapped?”
“The police locked me in the evidence locker with the sex doll, I swear it’s cursed or possessed or whatever, they made a fucking shrine for it. Fuck, Cindy, they’re all dead except for the Captain, they're all dead. Except for the Captain. Maybe.”
“Ok, say I believe you.”
“You do?”
“I found out about the doll designer who sabotaged your order. For the others she used her own voice screaming, but she wasn’t getting enough attention, so for yours, she go a real recording of a woman who died being tortured, probably from a court or police contact. I never believed in possession or whatever but you put something that dark in a sex doll, any doll, I don’t know. Maybe it let something in?”
I looked over at the Cindy shrine and shuddered.
“What do I do now?”
“Well, there are manufacturer instructions for how to reset the voice box, but you’re not going to like it.”
“Tell me.”
“The reset switch is inside the doll, and the only access point is… via the simulated anal ingress port? Apparently, if you can reach in deep enough there’s a second, um, valve you push through, and the voice box is in her chest. You push and hold the reset button for thirty seconds and it will delete all customised data. She’ll just be a blank doll again.”
“I have to fist the possessed doll?”
“Do you think you can do it before Captain comes to? I’m heading there now, you’ll be okay??” Becka asked.
“No! It’s not safe. I’ll call you back if it works, ok? I’ll need you to come and let me out, I guess.”
I eased Cindy down from the shrine. I turned her over and bent her legs up so that she was kneeling in a crooked doggy style, and she let out a fart of corpse gas right in my face. I gagged at the smell that rose up. Her realistic skin felt soft and sticky, it was too loose and sagged on the stiffer framework underneath. I hated touching her. I couldn’t even look at the part of her where I was supposed to insert my hand.
“I know where your off switch is,” I muttered.
There was a nauseating resistance, then a slip-slide give as I pushed my hand in up to the wrist. I felt bile rise and burn the back of my throat. The smell was stinging my eyes and nose. I pushed again, sinking my arm up to my elbow, but I still couldn’t feel anything inside her that was a box that I could press a button or a second valve that I could push through. I groped around, blind and sickened, inside her body. She stiffened, and her head jerked back.
I whispered to myself, “Oh God, no”.
She screamed, “No! Please no, don’t do this!”
“Shut up!” I blurted out of a panicked reflex as if she would listen. Oh my God, just shut the fuck up.”
“Please don’t kill me!” The voice inside Cindy wailed.
I heard heavy footsteps thundering down the hall. I threw myself on top of her, and rammed my arm deeper inside her, searching with my hand as hard as I could for the voice box.
“Come on,” I sobbed, my nose was running, I was shaking. I was on the verge of wetting myself. I finally felt it, my fingers felt a tiny hole in the silicone and dug in. I forced my hand through and I was in the open cavern of her hollow torso. The tight ring of silicone was cutting off circulation to my forearm. My muscles throbbed and burned. I could feel something rubbing against me in there, scratching me with razor sharp claws, biting me with pin sharp teeth, trying to make me let go, withdraw my arm. I could feel myself bleeding. I groped for the voice box and found it in the nebulous space inside her, felt for a button and pressed it. I had to hold it. I slipped off, had to find it again, and restart my count. It felt impossible to count to 30 with all of the noise and my own terror, but I had to concede that even I wasn’t that terrible at counting to 30.
The banging at the door was Becka. She was calling my name. It was morning, I had survived. I was still stuck almost to the shoulder inside a sex doll in a police room evidence locker, but I was alive.
“Oh God, I love you,” I whispered.