On the way
towards the car, in a back alley, it reeked of rain-soaked rot. It clung to the
bricks like old skin—sticky with a thousand invisible insects that gnawed the
edges of memory. Maryanne led, her cross, a cold bite against her chest.
Marietta walked beside Maryanne, fingers twitching at the bone blade's hilt.
Eyes darting to shadows, gasping for air, all the syllables hungry and sharp.
Anne Faith trailed. Pendant humming low. Vibration pressing her skin like being
under water.
Dan is at the end
of the alley, under a sagging awning. Suit loose, but freshly ironed. "Ladies."
Voice threading chemical air. Syllables like twisted red wire. No smile, chin
squared only. Body a promise of secrets unplumbed.
They gathered in
a half-circle. Silence stretched over them, sliding them towards Dan, like the
river's pull.
Maryanne felt it,
a pause before the crushing tide exposes bones. Dan reached into his coat.
Pulled out a Hex-doll. Small and ragged. Stitched with hair not quite human.
Empty buttons for eyes seemed alive. Evil twitched once, Quasi-life pulsing in
the seams—like the Mirror's unholy reflection. Hunger stirring outside
boundaries not yet explored.
"Power," Dan
whispered. No explanation, He gestures: his hands trembling, but still within
eyesight. Air thickening, with stenches too rancid to bear. Ritualistic
memories of Maryanne. Dan asks politely, "Care to join me?" "Yes, but only
because we know you're lying," Marietta said... Dan pricked Marietta's thumb
with a needle, blood welling black. Maryanne said, "Don't you think we'll ever
do this again? I'm only allowing it because they're curious." Dan smeared
Marietta's blood on the doll's heart. Dan's hunger deepened, not absence but
presence. From the ground reality fades as a passing wind, distorted visions
fraying at the edges.
Marietta tasted
it. Sulfur and ash on her tongue. Temptation soft as surrender. "What... does
it mean?" Her voice cracked, hand hovering over her wide mouth.
It means your
blood acts as a mirror to Monique's soul.
Dan's eyes
flicked with seduction. "The doll binds and breaks." Dan held the doll up. The
alleyway exhaled grief. Visions flickered—a diagram of threads unknown. Like a
map on a table with the wrong directions: rows of tangles, columns of wrong
paths. Fractured faces of the past weaved within. "Monique is a widow,
Forty-something," Dan said. Pain and loss etched deep, her eyes hollowed out by
her husband's absence, cancer or accident, didn't matter.
Anne Faith
gripped her pendant; it throbbed—like a heartbeat in a coffin. "Monique's
real." "Not a vision. The Crowned-Deep pressing in, drowned sorrow in her
gaze."
Maryanne nodded,
cross-warming. There it was again, that protective flare in her gut—like for
her unborn children in visions of the past. "Show us, I doubt this is even
real."
Dan chuckles,
"Even doubt takes sides," Dan said. "There's complicity in that..." Words hung
like a jagged double-edged sword.
Dan said, "
Follow me. His fingers were twitching while holding the twisted doll. Dan
interrupts her, he plucks a hair from her head and twists it on the doll;
"Well, that's the last piece to put this old witch out of her misery."
Marietta looks at
him, curious but afraid, gripping her pendant.
Dan twisted her
hair into a thread on the doll's neck. Monique's gasp echoed. A spectral cry in
an alley's bend. Slumped against the wall, her dress stained with vomit. Her
hair wet but brittle, she wishes for the tide to take her. "End it," She
whispered, voice barely audible. Her eyes met Dan's across the void, with a
gaze comfortable with suffering, body sagging low, defeated.
Monique said,
"This is a world of suffering, I wish not to be born." "Not suicidal per se—but
I'm tired of living." Monique's voice turned to scripture, a prayer sharpened
into a lament. "Job Excerpt (KJV)."
After the sun
turns to blood, and the clock ticks away... When reality frays between night
and day, Woe unto you that desire the day of the LORD! What does it profit you?
The day of the LORD is darkness, and not light. As if a woman did flee from a
lion, and a starving bear met her. Monique opened her mouth and cursed her day.
"Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said,
There is a woman child conceived.
Let that day be
darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon
it. Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it;
let the blackness of the day terrify it. As for that night, let darkness seize
upon it; let it not rejoice among the days of the year; let it come not into
the number of the months.
Lo, let that
night be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein. Let them curse it that
curses the day. Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost
when I came out of the belly?
Dread coiled
around them, a ritual tension thickening the air—pressing in like a solid mass.
Smells sharpened: burnt rubber and old sewer. The bloody Hex-doll is mixing
with rot and curse.
Maryanne's palm
gripped her cross tightly and nodded in complicity. Marietta's breath hitched.
The Hex-doll seemed alive, Its Threads like an alternate dimension full of
razor-sharp teeth.
Reality broke
further. Bricks subtly rearranging—whispers from nowhere. Reflections in
puddles move independently, and shadows stretch unnaturally. Puddles are
turning black. Graffiti morphing into warnings. Nearby rats twitching—not
alive, but convulsing.
Time distorted,
Dan pinched the doll's heart. Slowly, and deliberately. In a flash, visions
spanned decades in Monique's mind. Every heartbeat is a hammer on a coffin's
lid that refuses to open. Centuries of grief echoing, looping sequences. Her
husband's face flashing, dissolving into flashes of torment. Lost moments
pressing her deeper onto the floor. Internal terror vivid as a dream, the
weight of all her choices. Lost but too weary to surrender: "This endless
ache... nothing fills it." Psychological drag is pulling her down.
Maryanne
internalized it—Marietta felt ash thicken in her throat. Anne Faith's pendant
throbbed harder— an echo of suffering that had lasted too long.
The Hex-doll let
out an eerie cry. Quasi-life: threads pulsing like veins.
Monique is
crawling, gasping. It mimicked her breaths, feeding on her past choices.
Monique clutched her chest, no scream. Just a loud, weary wheeze wishing to end
her suffering. Her shoulders curling in, Buckling like a melting candle—she
carried within her more suffering than a grieving mother. Horror bloomed
grotesque. Veins pulsing black blood under flesh—visible like graphs of decayed
bones, patterns like bruises spreading in rows.
The cost of
suffering mapped on her arms—forty years, one loss, infinite aches. Skin is dry
and hasn't showered in weeks. Shadows dripping from her eyes. What was once a
happy person now has skeletal outlines pressing against flesh. She dropped to
her knees her in temporary pain. Dan twisted harder. Snap, the thread broke.
A smile flashes,
a relief, almost an escape from the tugging vacancy of her soul.
She gasped and
let out a final plea, "I wish to live, now spare me."
The alley waited.
Dan, smirking,
"Fine, fine.... Have it your way, after all, I can only end what is already
miserable.
Something
twitched.
Clinging to life.
Monique
convulsed. Arching. Then still. Physical and visceral blood pooling beneath.
Red moonlight pierces through as Monique's eyes open. She stares blankly, dead
inside, but spared to live another day. The Doll steamed and boiled with life.
Threads crawling. Print pulsing—each blood drop evaporating, a small hunger
satiated.
Silence fell.
Maryanne felt a weight—psychological, emotional. Like hell's pull. Monique
unintentionally invited a soft surrender to the world's fists and paid the
price. Suspense hung in the air, faded. Marietta's hand trembled, while Anne
Faith's pendant dimmed.
Dan slipped the
doll into his coat. "This is power," he said. His eyes cut through them. "No
more lies." Then he turned, vanishing into the alley's sour breath.
Maryanne pressed
a hand to her chest. "I feel buried alive. Crushed under a sandstorm."
Marietta replied,
"That's a sticky slope, sticky with a thousand invisible insects that gnaw at
memory."
Anne Faith's
fingers clutched her cross. "Mom's right. Curses are real. Thank Jesus Christ,
Dan didn't finish the job."
The ladies pick
up Monique's pain-stricken body and call 911, leaving the problem to the hotel
manager, paying him as they leave.