Left the Forest Lost Sleep Tight (The end)

The man was as bare and stark as the undressed mattress that he sat on. His head was nodding forward, and Anna made the mistake of eagerly seizing onto his shoulder, trying to shake him. As his head lolled back, Anna dropped the man's unnaturally cold shoulder and screamed. Although he was unnaturally pale, the man looked otherwise fine, as though nothing were the matter with him, except for the fact that his eye sockets were empty, carved into grotesque, perfect squares.

An ambulance was called, and the body was taken away to have the mystery of his disappearance – and his death – to be discovered. Anna was taken out of the house and her husband was called to come and pick her up, and the senior officer was left in the bedroom, alone, with the puzzle of what the had happened to solve. After a quick search of the room, he found that a drawer in a cabinet in the room had been left opened.

Inside of the drawer was an odd journal that had been rendered completely illegible. It looked as though the thing had been soaked with some kind of a black, staining liquid. The pages rippled like ones in an old manuscript, and were difficult to manipulate. What could be seen in the pages appeared to the senior officer to be odd sketches that made no sense to him whatsoever – running the gamete from a carefully, amazingly drawn rendition of a small girl turning to look over at her shoulder to a terrible, crude drawing of what looked like a fire, with large, crazed swirls depicting smoke. What few sentences he picked out from between ruined stains did not make sense from one to the next. It was this lack of correlation between the words in the journal that rubbed him the wrong way, what worried him immensely.

As he shut the journal, grateful to be done with it, he nearly dropped the thing on the ground when he saw what had been carved into the back cover. Carved into it at a violent, sideways slant were the words,“left the forest lost - sleep tight”.

An autopsy at the police station revealed that aside from the loose eyeballs, there was no sign on his body of how he had died. It only appeared that his heart had given out.

A week later, the doctor's funeral was a packed one – people flooded the town, filling the only hotel in town and then offering money to locals to rent rooms for the day of the event – and the found notebook ended up in the hands of the youngest of the local police force, who turned the whole thing into a book that got pretty famous. Well, pretty famous for the humble town.

The notebook itself disappeared less than three days of the cop having written the rough draft of his book. This corresponded, oddly, with the disappearance of the author himself, his wife, and their three sons, who seemed to have left one Sunday, leaving whatever they were doing following their return from one of the local churches infinitely uncompleted.

The only thing left to debate about the whole thing among the locals, usually after the loosening of alcohol or sex, is whether or not the town is somehow safer following the doctor's death. The locals are worried enough to leave any large grouping of trees surrounding the town alone. Well, most of them, any way.

The only real way to determine whether or not things are better would be to take into consideration the amount of freak disappearances and mysterious deaths that take place in the county, and that itself is hard to figure. With more people leaving the lonesome places in town and in the countryside alone, or traveling through them only with company, it does seem odd and out of place that the number of disappearances and what can be deemed as “out of place” deaths seem to have stayed the same, and it seems almost impossible to not become such a number if one becomes an adventurous -and unfortunate - traveler.

Nobody brings up the “spider man” any longer, not even jokingly, and there have been rare cases of someone beginning the preparations for their own funeral, following a walk through a woods that seems to have gone awry. Coffins do seem to be the only thing that is a good business to be in lately, as people have taken to escaping town in one fashion or another.

Left the Forest Lost Sleep Tight (Part Five)

The oldest officer had the others go around the house to try to find a sign of whoever it was that had managed to cause such a change in the living room, while he approached the coffee table and the bundle of papers.

Approaching the bundle, he pulled his pocket knife out and tore the string from off around the papers, letting string fall over the coffee table.

Unlike the paper that had been in the room before, all of the pages were in near-perfect condition, save for the fact that they had been used to write pages upon pages of words in a shaking hand. Although anxious to see how the other two officers were doing, the senior officer began to read the first page on top of the stack, and he shuddered as he read the bizarre description.

“A Spider man?”

The officer paused after he spoke aloud, and became suddenly very aware of the fact that he was now alone in the house. He had heard what sounded then like the other two men leaving the house through the back sliding glass door, slamming the panel shut as they raced out of the kitchen.

Uneasily, the officer continued to flip through the pile of papers. As he read a few lines from a page written like it had been a part of a diary, scrawled in shaky hand writing, the man realized that he knew what the “spider man” was.

The urban legend of the naked thing had existed in the fabric of the town's dialogue since before the police officer's parents had been born. It was something that barely anyone in town even mentioned any longer; it was such a part of the town that talking about it was like talking about the lonesome farms that existed on the fringes of the town, left to the elements.

The officer was then left with his own thoughts on what he held in his hands and how it coincided with what they were in the house for. The questions, and the only answers that he could come up with, left a nasty feeling spreading through him like the start of a cold.

Finally seceding to his fear, the officer left the collection of papers on the coffee table and went off in search of the younger men outside. It was difficult talking the two men, eager to find whoever it was that had turned the living room into what it now was, but he managed to get them back to their cars, however reluctant they were to do so.

Back at the station, the police officers all agreed that there was something definitely wrong with whatever had happened to the doctor. They all wished that they could do something about the odd phenomena that they experienced – the notes and the sudden cleanliness of the living room – but they had to reluctantly give up their active investigation.

Despite the fact that the police were forced to give up their search, the missing man's close neighbors and former clinicians felt pity for the man – no one had come to his aid when he had gone missing; no friends, no family, and no one that he could have been seeing. Nobody came to look for the man who had successfully made a hermit out of himself prior to disappearing, and many people who had known him or had seen him previously began to take up the search for him.

It happened on one icy day that the doctor's receptionist, Anna, returned with a police officer to the abandoned home, agreeing to keep some of the doctor's belongings, but secretly hoping to find something that the police may have missed. Although there had been more searching done in the house after the initial journey into the home, the week that the receptionist was adamant that she would look through the house marked the week before people were to be coming into the house and throwing away the man's belongings. It made everybody in town cringe to think of the man's belongings ending up in a dumpster, and so it was not very hard for the receptionist to talk a police officer into taking her over to the man's house to gather a few things that looked as though they were important to the missing man.

Anna had decided to begin looking for her old boss' valuables in the master bedroom. As she walked into the room, with the officer following behind her, she jumped as she became aware that her missing employer was sitting on the bed.

Left the Forest Lost Sleep Tight (Part Four)

The three men walked into the house and were immediately taken aback by the smell of rot that emanated from inside of the house. It did nothing but add to the awful sense of gloom that hung in the atmosphere of the mud room. The men walked, hesitantly, further into the house.

The oldest of the men realized, as they began to walk to the left of the staircase that opened up from the entrance, that he had forgotten to yell for Paul. The shock of the awful smell must have made him to forget that they were there to find Paul – hopefully alive. Although he had begun to very seriously doubt that they would actually find the missing man, he began to yell for Paul, and he instructed the other men to do the same.

Walking first into the living room, the men had to be careful where they stepped – papers were scattered everywhere on the ground, as well as all over any surface that was available in the sparsely decorated room. The youngest man in the group was trailing behind the other two, and he happened to glance over at a sketch that sat, immersed in a pile of balled-up papers. The sketch was drawn in a heavy hand, with thick black lines, which made the pale inner body of the Thing all the more ghastly pale. Almost as soon as the man recognized what he was looking at as being as awful as it was, he threw his gaze from off of it and fixed it ahead of him. His hands shook, and worried that the two senior officers would see how shocked he was, he buried his hands into his coat's pockets, not thinking for a moment that horror had already settled on his features.

They moved from the living room, glancing around for any obvious clues, shining lights around to fight through the heavy miasma of darkness and awful stench, before eagerly moving onto the adjacent hallway.

They tromped into the kitchen, where they finally got an idea of where the stench was coming from.

The kitchen itself was clean – spotless, in fact – but on the stove was a large stock pot. Grimacing, the younger of the senior officers gestured for the novice officer to look into the stock pot. Groaning loudly in dismay, the youngest man did as he was instructed, trying to stop thinking about the sketch that was still imprinted on his mind.

Looking into the pot, the man had to step away from the stove and clamp his hand over his face, over his nose and his mouth. Even then, he had to bend at his knees, nearly collapsing on the ground, from the strength of the stench so up close.

One of the other officers shook his shoulder, and answering hoarsely, he said, “There's a lotta... It looked like fuckin' stew. God -” Although he had been fighting to keep his composure, he could not stop himself from dry heaving on the ground. As he tried to straighten himself up, he strove to gain control of what he wanted to say. “... Ugh, I can't even guess about how long that had to of been here. There's a lot of it in there – are you guys sure that he lives alone, that he don't have any friends?”

The senior officer happened to glance over into the large sink next to him. “Well,” He said, gesturing towards the sink. “Based on all of those dirty bowls in there, I'd say he's been livin' off of this for a while. Must've not had much time to cook for himself.”

The three men abandoned the room, relieved that they did not have to remain in it for long. They walked back out into the hallway, where they made a quick search of the three nearly empty rooms that they came to agree that the doctor must have been using for storage.

Coming out of the hallway, they walked back through the living room and up to the stairs. Upstairs there seemed to be much more evidence of an everyday life than the first floor had. A basket overflowed with the doctor's clothes in the short hallway that lead to the two rooms on the second floor. They glanced into the bathroom and found nothing unusual about the room, save for the fact that the room looked almost obsessively clean, compared to the rest of the house that they had seen. They walked into the bedroom, and began to walk around in it, looking for any sign of the doctor, dreading that they would find who they were looking for, lying in bed with his head blown off from a shotgun.

They found nothing in the bedroom, and they left, walking down the stairs and preparing to leave the house. As they came from off of the stairs, the youngest of the officers happened to glance over at the living room. He stopped the others with a near-shout, his heart feeling as though it was bursting out of his chest.

All of the mess that had been in the living room was gone, the furniture in the room had been moved dramatically, with everything, save for the coffee table, pressed up against the walls of the living room. The overhead light in the room was on now, casting a yellowed, discomforting light on the room, and made the neat pile of papers, wrapped in string on the coffee table, only more ominous.

Left the Forest Lost Sleep Tight (Part Three)

The writing that he had collected began to grow connectivity, and each account that Paul had decided as being true seemed to lock together into a wondrous pattern.

The pattern emerged alongside the account of an elderly woman whose friend has seen the creature and had promptly died in her house during the winter, the heat in her house shorting out one night, along well as the story of a young boy who had seen the thing and had soon after died of an awful snake bite.

The pattern was a remarkable thing in Paul's mind, as real as the skin covering his arms were. He compulsively returned to his Masterpiece, the imprint on his mind which made living in it worth while. One day, while returning to this macabre creation, Paul's heart stilled dead in his chest as he realized that the pattern that he had been weaving was no meaningless enterprise.

He knew, with all of the certainty that existed within him, where the creature lived.

Paul was ashamed of how he had not seen the obvious tying factor in all of the stories that was the large, mostly still wild forest that all of the people who had seen the thing had had their encounters with it in.

Although excited, to the degree that people asked him at work if he had met someone the night before, Paul swore that he would not act quickly to this discovery. He thought about what to do with his realization for a day before he decided to put his personal fear aside and to go into the forest.

He entered the woods through an alleyway next to his house. It was a path that lead to a small outcropping of the forest. He resolved that he would begin searching, in earnest, when he reached a far enough distance in the forest that he would not have to worry about being found by somebody.

It was an hour past the time that the doctor was supposed to show up to the clinic the next day that the people working in the clinic tried to contact Paul. It was easy to shrug off Paul's disappearance, as everyone seemed to attribute his non attendance at work to the fact that he was new to town. There also existed the possibility, to everyone, that he may have skipped town, not being able to handle his new found responsibilities.

Eventually someone from the clinic was sent to the doctor's house on behalf of the other staff members. One of the receptionists, named Anna, had a bitter loathing for the doctor, and was adamant that she was going to ransack his house until she found him or a clue about just where he had gone, leaving her and everyone else clutching at their jobs in fear. As she came up to his front door, however, she lost her earlier anger and resentment, beginning to notice the obvious signs of neglect that laid around Paul's front porch. A large collection of mail almost poured from the upright mailbox that sat next to his door and there was a multitude of newspapers that littered the front steps. She began to feel a bad chill, as though something were seriously wrong.

Feeling grateful that the only thing that she had to do there was to slip a letter imploring the doctor to come back to work under the front door, the woman did just that, and barely suppressed the urge to run as fast as she could back to her car.

The next day, when no news came about the missing doctor, the man who rented out the office that the clinic used came to visit Paul's house. He stayed on the front step of the house, knocking incessantly and yelling at the door until he stood there for a good ten minutes in uncomfortable silence. He didn't like waiting for the man who had rented his building out, but he began to feel a deep, unexplainable feeling of dread fill him then. He could not put a finger on it, but he did not like what he felt as he stood on the entrance to the house. It felt to be too still, even for an empty house.

After two more days, even the man's neighbors had become worried that something had happened to the quiet man who lived next to them for two seasons. Paul had never before failed to go to work every day that the clinic was opened, even walking the ten blocks between his home and the place in the drenching rain.

Calls were made constantly to the police, and all efforts were made to push the local police to break into the house.

The three police officers who arrived at Paul's home were surprised to find that the front door was unlocked. They were so surprised that none of them moved to open the door after discovering that it was not locked, and stood there in mutual silence. One of them eventually grew annoyed and rapped his fist, hard, against the door. After knocking failed to elicit a response, one of the other officers pushed the other one aside and opened the front door.

Left the Forest Lost Sleep Tight (Part Two)

It was a ratty, big thing, one that had been written halfway through before he had come to town. He had had it for when he could remember the scarce dream, here and there, in the desert of his dreamless nights. This bothered him deeply, as he could remember a time in which he was quite skillful at lucid dreaming, which once broke him from the awfulness of his dull, lifeless practice, but that had waned without warning one day, years ago. They were replaced with an outbreak of nightmares, which were, in turn, caused by anything that frightened him. Dr. Paul was brave during the day, and to some he was even harsh, but at night, he wished he knew someone romantically, so that she could wake him from the awful things.

The dream diary was more of a way to try to keep the fear away from his sleep than to memorize the happy ones, as they simply ceased to happen. If it worked to keep the fear away during the night, he did not know, and he clung to it, hopelessly, like it were his only sanctuary.

He grew to hate the drunkard that had come into his practice on his first day of work, as the human spider had caused him a lack of much sleep, even weeks after hearing about the abomination. In his dream journal there was entry after entry involving pale, scarcely clothed corpses scuttling after him as he walked home past some dark, empty graveyard, or something grabbing one of his ankles from behind him while he tried to ascend the stairs from his empty basement.

It got worse for him, much worse, when he happened to flip through some of the earliest occurrences of his nightmares that he had managed to record, back when he first received the journal. At some point he had described something comprising of a grotesque head that looked entirely broken from its neck, entirely gray skin, and was naked, save for what looked to be like far too loose men's black trousers hanging like elephant's skin from around its waist. He described how it moved, the clicking noise it made as it dashed madly about, only moving quickly when its presence was discovered, and otherwise how it slunk deplorably low to its knees, to its disfigured elbows. Its eyes were the worst, shaped weirdly, almost perfectly rectangular, as though they had been carved to perfectly match each other.

Paul locked the journal up in an unused drawer and decided to go about trying to cure his nightmares without the use of his writing.

Things only got worse – going from night terrors into the light of Paul's daily life. His manner around everyone, not only in his personal life, but also at work, deteriorated into rubbish. His growing phobia soon translated into an obsession with learning about everything dealing with the local legend. He pulled out his old dream journal, threw out all of the pages that he had written in before, and he started to keep a collection, loose only at first, of everything he heard about the human spider.

Things began to come together, to synchronize, into a coherent story that seemed to happen again and again.

One of the stories he collected went like this: A woman who lived alone at the edge of town was walking alone after she had gone fishing. She was in a good mood as she walked home, enjoying the sun and the shade from the trees' canopies, the way the leaves left pretty speckled shadows on everything in the forest path.

She heard a noise, turned around to look at where it had come from, and screamed, dropping her fishing equipment where she left it until she and her neighbor got it the next afternoon. There was nothing more that was particularly interesting about her story, save that two weeks after the incident a serious fire burnt down her home while she was held up in the grocery store. She said that she felt that if she had not had trouble in the store, and had come home those extra ten minutes early, she would have been trapped in her house.

The other interesting thing about the woman, her story, was that she was later found, unconscious, next to the same spot where she had dropped her fishing equipment. She was taken to the hospital, where she lived for a day before she died.

In Paul's estimation, nearly everyone who saw the thing was going to die, but if they didn't die the first time that their stroke of “bad luck” kicked in, then they died in a more excruciating way somewhere a little further down the line. They never lasted past a month to the day that they escaped death. Paul became more than a little afraid of going outside after hearing of the fishing woman's story, and he began to find ways to stay inside as often as he could. To him being outside was what brought the human spider to its victim.

Paul convulsively gathered more and more information, never discounting any story that he ever heard of that rang of the same elements of all of the others. He stopped taking pride in his work professionally, finding perverse pride in his mastery of the thing of his nightmares, in the cataloging of its habits, its anatomy, and its secrets.

He tried to perfect a drawing of it, the first attempt at its sketch falling apart when the number of erasing that had been done on the paper tore holes through the work. He ripped the ruined page out of the journal and continued to sketch on a fresh sheet, trying to discover the fearful perfection that made up its eyes.

Left the Forest Lost Sleep Tight (Part One)

Paul had heard about the thing on the day that he came to live in town. News of it had come to him while he was in his office. As a foot specialist, he was being kept busy on his first day at work, caused in no small part by the facts that the town had had no local podiatrist for the last ten years as well as the fact that he had begun unpacking that day as well.

The first patient of the day had been a backwoods local who had told the nurse that he had “broke his foot real bad” and who had an impromptu brace attached to the injured leg. He said he had to do it himself, because he had to drive himself to the clinic.

He was taken into the examination room huffing in pain, and in his haste to go into the room he ended up whacking the harmed leg against the door frame. Howling, he nearly crumpled to his knees in pain, and then waved Paul off of him when he came to help him up, stuttering out, “Sorry, sorry, new on this thing.”

Trouble continued from there, as the man refused Paul's help in hopping onto the examination cot, taking a full minute in doing it himself. Paul would wonder, four weeks after this meeting, if it had perhaps been the man's bull-headedness or his clumsiness that had contributed to his falling down a steep hill, resulting in him cracking his head open on those train tracks they would later find him on. After he managed to get the brace off of the man's leg, Paul was able to see the extent of damage that he had sustained.

“You hurt your ankle and shin pretty badly. How'd you manage it?”

The man was silent for a moment, looking as though he was struggling with what to tell Paul, then muttering, “I was runnin'.”

“A relay race?”

The man grimaces. “That's for high schoolers. I was runnin' from something.”

“What kind of a something?”

The man looked away before speaking in a voice frank in its fear. “Something I never seen in those woods before.”

“Why'd you run from it?”

The man turned to look at Paul then, his eyes surprising him with the amount of unbridled fear in them. “Youda run, if you saw it.”

Paul, thinking of how often the good 'ol boys in town must drink, suppressed the urge to chuckle at this assertion. “Well, what did it look like?”

Looking down at his hands, the man said, “I couldn't actually see it – I thank God almighty for that – but I know that it was a body.”

“Body? Like, what kind of a body?”

“Like a body, in a graveyard.”

Paul, unable to help himself, started to grin. “So, a zombie, then?”

The man bristled in anger, his voice tight as he spoke. “No, I wasn't that drunk... It crawled all around, like a spider, or a crab. Except it looked like a person, but... different.”

The words weighed eerily on Paul's mind, and he hurried through the rest of the initial examination before rushing the man into the x-ray room to get his foot scanned.

The words stayed with him – like a cuckoo dropping its egg into a doomed sparrow's nest. It didn't help that the daily doldrum of the town only increased its growth in his mind, and it kept crawling back to Paul.

The memory of the hick's recounting of the human spider came back into Paul's dreams, and, subsequently, into his dream journal.

The Changeling (Story of Id) - Part Five (The Finale)

Rising to Its feet, the Thing knew that Its twin was aware of what It planned to do to her. She had begun to drag herself, pitifully, as though looking for an escape.

The clay thing marched towards her, Its will strengthened by the certainty that it must complete this, that it was Fate's doing that brought this all into being.

The twin seemed to stare at It, horribly transfixed by Its approach, gun raised and pointed, a demand, a promise. Her mouth opened wide in a scream, offering the nearly blind clay-thing a target to shoot. The scream rang off of the walls, before dying slowly.

The clay-thing stood still expectantly, and when nothing happened, It turned and said, “You... lied... to... meee...”

“The effect should occur soon – for both of our sakes, I hope it happens soon.”

“R-r-ramific... ramifications... what are the... ramifications... of... killing... her?”

“If her identity doesn't take to you, we'll be punished. We'll have hell to pay for what we both just did.”

“We'll be... punish-”

The clay-thing gasped and lurched forward. Spasms shook It, and it opened Its mouth to scream. Instead of a scream, a dry rattle poured from Its mouth.

Muse walked over to It, looking down at the shaking thing.

She kicked it.

It seemed to re-animate after a period of short stillness, Its body writhing in small motions, as though insects crawled through it, and had responded to some kind of powerful stimuli. Movement in the Thing amplified, and Its skin formed large, boil-like cysts, spreading to cover It. They then began to crack apart, sloughing off into large piles around It. It was difficult to see at first, but Muse could see that under the splitting was the form that she knew existed. New flesh was exposed from the chaffing of the old.

Muse bent to her knees and pushed the thing on Its side, searching for the first sign of a return to its cognitive abilities. After pushing failed to elicit a response, she slapped the Thing's freshly burst face. As soon as the blow landed, the Thing's new true mouth fell open, and a clear liquid oozed from Its thin lips.

Muse leapt back and hissed angrily, fixing her eyes on Its face, looking for any signs of a return to life.

The Thing drooled more, the liquid now pouring out steadily, a puddle forming around it, beginning to encompass It. As the liquid touched different parts of Its body, the skin began to move, seemingly containing a sentience of its own. And then the body under the broken skin moved, not in a mindless seizure, but slowly, deliberately, like a fetus moving for the first time.

Muse walked next to It, her eyes locked on the bizarre sight at her feet. She reached for the Thing's head, and a very human groan emerged from it. An almost warm smile spread on Muse's lips.

The smile faded from her lips as violent shaking overtook the membranous walls of the chamber and the lights in the already darkened chamber dimmed further.

Panicked, Muse reached under the shedded clay and grabbed for a hand, pulling it up. She tried to lift It with all of her might, but It must have grown extra weight through Its transformation, and the clay-thing did not so much as twitch in response to her attempts at raising It to Its feet.

“Get up, right now!” Muse shrieked, slapping and pulling at Its arm. “Get up! We'll be thrown into the Deep unless you get up! Oh, I should have forced you to kill her, before you saw what you were; your self-awareness is taking too much time, lengthening your growth time. We don't have time for this!”

The Thing finally groaned in response to her shrieking, and It came into consciousness, It tested Its limbs slowly, almost drowsily, and Muse drew away from It, allowing It to struggle to Its feet on Its own.

Bent, feebily, at Its knees, It began to straighten Its back, standing as upright as It could manage. Looking at Muse with new eyes that could now read every distinct line on her face, It tried to speak, and only managed to speak in gurgled nonsense before being nearly sent back down to ground with the strength of the tremors that shook the chamber surrounding them.

Muse seemed to act cautiously, speaking and acting in the most genuine way that she had ever done with It. She stepped forward, pressing her full weight down on Its shoulders with her hands. “You're going to forget about all of this, anyway, so I feel like I can say this; the only reason I care about this whole debacle is because I need for my work to go out into the world. You had better be stronger than the original one, or-”

A huge groan reverberated through the chamber, and the whole room shook as everything was dashed about in the chamber. The air was momentarily knocked out of the clay-thing when It felt something strike Its back, hard, and It tumbled over, falling. Getting back up, It realized that the corpse of Its twin had hit It, and lolled, rag-doll like, on the ground next to It.

It felt Itself being pushed by Muse into a particular direction. It cooperated, walking limply with Muse's support, and It lifted Its head in time to see that It was walking towards a gaping hole.

It tried, weakly, to fight Muse off. Muse seemed to know what the Thing would try to fight, as she shoved and held onto It with painful strength, increasing the speed of their walking.

The Thing groaned weakly, pressing with all of Its pitiful strength against Muse, so that Its head was pressed fully against the heavy folds of Its captor's dress. It comforted Itself with keeping Its eyes from off of the horrible portal, with the denying of, at least, this eventuality.

Eyes shut tightly, It shouted fearfully when It felt a sucking sensation at Its feet, pulling It rapidly into yet another tunnel. It tried to yank Its feet free of the pulling folds, but felt the tunnel squeeze more tightly in response.

Muse shoved the rest of It in, roughly pushing Its hands away when It attempted to tug at her dress. She looked down at the Thing's transformed eyes for one last time, and she allowed her disgust to show on her face for the first time at the sight of the Thing's fear, which turned Its already ugly features into something yet more hideous.

It cried out, frightened, as Its head was swallowed by the tunnel of thick flesh, and in the chamber the lights completely fell, allowing Muse to assume Its own true form, becoming one with the dark.

The Changeling (Story of Id) - Part Four

It rose to its feet, keeping its eyes locked on the terrible thing reflected in the mirror. It didn't know why it began to panic, but It did then, flailing and running. It tried to scream, silently, Its head filling with insane noise.

It was unaware of Muse's protests, orders, and threats, as It begins to tear at its face, ripping a large hole in its face. It did not feel the pain immediately, but when It did, It screams in genuine, unending pain. Even to Its own ears, Its screaming sounded like an insect's dying screeching.

Muse and the woman on the floor watched Its spectacle as It sank to Its knees, pressing Its terribly injured face to the scarce comfort of the reflective floor. Blood and clay formed in a pool around Its head, and It could not care.

Croakingly, It slowly asked, “What am I, Muse?”

Muse remained speechless, and It gratified Itself with heaving, shuddering in the painful aftershocks of the damage It had done to Itself.

Finally, she said, “The Inner Eye. You see, but when you're exposed, you're nothing, save for Consciousness.”

The clay-thing groaned. “I am... I am... I-”

“You're not. You have her memories, in the clearest view. I do not blame you for wishing to be her, but you're not. You are not her.”

“Then... what... can... I-”

“Kill her. Do it now. What will happen here will not be a murder. Not really. There will be no one missing, you will simply take her place, as ruler of this Vessel. She has damned us both to die in this funeral pyre with her, but I resolve not to go with her. Is that fair to me? Was it to be fair to you?”

A realization came to the clay-thing, but it felt empty, although It acknowledged it. “You... care... nothing... for... me.”

“No, I don't. I care for myself, my fate. She meant for me to walk with her through her own self-imposed servitude to grief, when I was meant to lead her through the path to greatness. She betrayed me. She betrayed you, as well. I care only for you because you are the closest to being able to become her. I am not about to offer you nothing, however; I am content with offering you the same that I once offered to her. Whatever will make you happy, I can show you to.”

“You speak... as though... there... are... others. Are... we... not... alone?”

Muse paused, then spoke with unrestrained coldness. “They were weak, like her. Some are already dead, some dying, and some may make it over the crossing of consciousness. Don't think of them, now, think of us. Of her betrayal.”

The clay-thing shuddered, feeling the lack of goodness that emanated from this being. It knew that she was no she; no more than It was a she. The clay-thing felt as though she was no different from It – except that maybe she was uglier than It was – and the only real difference between them was that she knew how to lie. It was not surprised to realize that everything that she had said to It, prior, was likely to be a coldly calculated untruth.

Am I to be her puppet?

Did it matter?

“You'll... help... me?”

Muse walked over to the clay-thing, waiting for It to raise Its head, and silently handed It the gun. As It took the gun from her hand, she said, “I'll be your friend.”

The Changeling (Story of Id) - Part Three

A young woman laid bare on the floor, shivering erratically. For the longest moment, all that she could do was stare down at the woman, and feel as though she were looking down at herself.

The woman looked up from where she lay, her eyes widened, and she screamed as she looked behind her twin. Turning around, her twin saw that Muse stood only a few feet behind her, brandishing a gun. Confused, the twin took a step back.

Muse gestured for her to take the gun from her. The woman took another step backwards. Muse glared at her. “You must. There is no time to debate this – and you have no mouth to do so, even if we did have the time. She's not you; she nothing. She's an It.”

Behind her, her twin groans, and turning around, she saw that she was convulsing from head to toe, her eyes fully exposed to the point that they nearly popped free from their sockets. Horror filled her to bursting, and she turned to face Muse once more, shaking her head erratically.

Anger blossomed red in Muse's cheeks, and for a moment, she can see something deep, beyond her adversary's composure – something hideous – hiding. “You do not want the knowledge that I possess. I can do great damage to you with it. It will be far more painful than it will be shooting yourself with this. Kill that pitiful creature, now.”

Although frightened, she shaked her head again, and Muse ran with frightening speed and grasped her, roughly. Glancing over to where Muse had grabbed her upper arm, she saw that what was once a beautiful hand is now a black, reptilian claw.

Shocked, she is in no place to fight back when Muse wrests her to the ground. She lays there, in a daze, as Muse strengthens her position over her. “Open your eyes,” Muse hisses into her ear. “The ground is reflective, now.”

She opens her eyes, and sees her own reflection. She also sees why she cannot speak, and cannot feel any mouth on her face.

The skin covering her looked sunken, bloated, and grey, like fresh clay. Looking back at her were eyes like shined rocks, that looked as though they had been shoved into her grotesque face. Hair grew sparse, thin, white, on her head in patches. She was lip-less, and where her mouth and nose should have been there was a smooth expanse on her badly formed face.

Feeling sick, she rose her arms up, and her reflection showed them to be pitiful sticks, tipped with crude versions of fingers. She flexed her fingers. The thing in the mirror flexed its.

The thing was unaware of the fact that Muse had let go of her. It didn't care.

The Changeling (Story of Id) - Part Two

Unlike the membranous walls that she had been trapped in, the ground that she dropped to was not so forgiving, so soft. She lay on the ground, dazed and horribly bruised, until a curt, authoritative voice spoke up.

“I apologize for the entrance. There was no other way, let me assure you of that.”

It was dark in the room – so dark that her eyes ached as she tried to read vague shapes out of it. For a moment, she could only see the vague outline of the speaker. For a few scarce moments, as she adjusted accordingly to the dark, she believed that what she was seeing was partly caused by the blow she had taken when she had fallen.

No; what she saw was, indeed, real, she realized as she saw the features of the vague outline. The speaker was a woman in flowing, red-velvet robes that did not seem to give an air of holiness, but instead one of decadence. Looking at her, she felt woefully inadequate and childlike next to the woman.

“I've already slowed time; this sanctum allows for the rule of time to be momentarily waived. It does not, however, stall time indefinitely. We have but little time and resource to take back Our life before its destruction.”

She tried to open her mouth to speak, but she realizes, then, that she has no mouth which which to speak with. Frightened, she begins to scream, futility, against the thick skin that takes the place of where her mouth should be.

“Yes, yes, I know that it's frightening. Keep focused, I need you paying attention.” The woman waited for her to stop ripping at where her mouth should be before she continued to speak. “Good. I knew you were reasonable. I will introduce msyelf to you, now, but you have no need to introduce yourself. I know who you are. I am Muse.”

The woman was beguiling, difficult to not give her full attention to. Her name meant nothing to her, so she nodded dumbly.

The woman seemed to relax a bit, her frown lessening. “I had to pull you out of the outside world. I don't know if you remember what happened – DO you remember what occurred?”

Puzzled, she begins to shake her head from side to side. And then it hits her. The unrelenting feeling of contempt, of regret, of depression, and then, finally, the feeling of something gagging her, something wrapped thoughtlessly around her thin neck, and she is flying in her room, suspended by the ceiling-

“You almost went full way through it. I pulled you here, to explain to you the repercussions of your actions. You need to listen to me. Do you understand me?”

It was too much for her, then, as she stared up at the cold face of Muse. She felt her body spilling to her knees. She sat, pitifully, on the floor, and began to sob, weeping so that her tears fell onto the ground.

Muse's voice rang out, then, sharp, cold, commanding. “Get to your feet, there is no time for this. Now!”

She rose to her feet when she felt something sharp hit her side, which turned out to be one of Muse's shoes. Dazed with pain, she tried to groan, ignorant, momentarily, of the fact that she had no mouth to cry out with.

She is at the closest that she has ever been to Muse, and she can now see her face, and see the cold indifference and cruelty that lay in her eyes. In that moment, as she made close eye contact with her, she felt, deeply, that this woman truly held nothing but contempt for her. Truthfully, she could not blame Muse for loathing her.

“You need to fix what's happened. We need to work together to change this, so that we can live with a situation that will work for the both of us. I will put you in a position of power, over even me, but only with one concession for me – I need you to swear that you will never betray us again, but I need you to vow this of your own free will. Do you understand me?”

It was far too confusing for her, and she began to weep anew. Muse smiled a chilling smile – fearful in its pleasure – and spoke again. “You must trust me. This is of utmost impotence, because you must kill your false twin.”

She wanted to scream in frustration, in fearful confusion, and she scrabbled once more at her sealed mouth until Muse roughly tore her hands away from her face. When she turned her full attention to the meaningful silence of Muse, she took note of the direction in which she pointed.

Humped up against one of the inflating and deflating walls was what she initially thought was a pile of filthy clothing. As she focused on it, however, she saw vague, weak movements emerge from the shape. A hand pushed out from under the veil of clothing, pale.

She looked up to Muse, and saw that she was nodding, encouraging her to walk over to the shape. Reluctantly, she walked over to the shape and pulled the cover of clothing from off of the shape.

The Changeling (The Story of Id) - Part One

The Changeling (The Story of Id)

She wasn't certain about how she had come to be compressed in so tiny a space. As she had come to, she was aware of walls surrounding her.

It felt warm, abnormally so, and the compression and the warmth calmed some of the panic that filled her. As she forced herself to remain calm, she thought that she could feel a pulsing sensation ripple through the forgiving material that encased her. Small movements also gave her the impression of a thick substance – a type of mucus? - covering the walls of her chamber.

She recoiled from the feeling of the substance clinging to her, disgusted. She tried not to move, mindful of the sensation of it sticking to her.

What was she to do but wait? She felt a disinclination to move, to feel the walls press against her in protest of her movement, to feel the wetness leak onto her, disrupting the radiating warmth that soothed her.

She waited in the dark, barely keeping herself conscious, when a bright light bathed her curled-up legs, cutting through some of the darkness and her shut eyes.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the new source of light, but when hers did, she realized that where she was was a membranous chamber that was dripping wet.

She thrashed, hard, trying to push the flesh back and away from her, trying, in a panic, to minimize contact with the walls. As she became resigned to the fact that the walls were not retreating, and to the contrary, they seemed to contract tighter around her, she fell into forced calm, stilling her body so that the walls would not suffocate or drown her in the sticky liquid. As she stilled, and the walls began to ease up on her, and she became aware that the light that had been shining had grown in strength. It now shown brightly, so that her eyes, used the the perfect dark, had to shut for the shock of it.

She began to try to twist her body, so that she could turn around to face the direction of the light. This endeavor proved to be problematic, as she felt the tunnel grip her in a strong spasm, squeezing her more roughly with each movement. As she tried – and failed – to turn her body around, she succeeded only in feeling the walls compress themselves to a painful degree all around her. Struggle as she might like to try, the walls had tightened so that she was completely immobilized by the space.

She felt faint – awful, beaten down, frightened, and confused – and she was also vaguely aware of movement, as though the walls were contracting purposefully around her, pushing her towards her feet.

Finally her feet were freed of the tunnel, and they dangled freely. The walls contracted, nearly crushing her, and she felt herself being hurridly pushed from the tunnel, till it was only from her elbows up that she was trapped. She spilled over the edge of the hole, flopping futilily as she tried to ease the excruciating pain as it was only her neck that was trapped. She winced in pain, scrabbling at the edge of the thing, trying to force her head free from the tunnel.

The walls contracted one last time, and she fell loose from the lip of the tunnel, falling, falling, falling down.

Pinocchio (One Last Kiln Firing) - Part Five (Finale)

The old woman was rough on his scalp, as she always was when she sheared her ugly, gangly sheep. Gole was nervous, and despite how he tried to calm himself, he ended up with the wrath of the impatient shop owner, and she almost seemed to jab him in the ear and in the scalp more than once when he made the occasional, unfortunate movement.

His hair came off of his head, and was gathered with more care than Gole's haircut had been handled. He was told that they would begin to implant his locks into the doll tomorrow, and so Gole was directed back to the kiln room. He was told that tonight would mark the last firing for the doll.

Dread filled Gole's mind, and every step he made towards the back door felt as though it were filled with thick liquid. Since the night before, he had taken the doll's insistence that he go into the kiln with it more seriously. He had also reminded himself of the strange voice that he had heard from the doll when she was newly born. The voice that reminded him, somewhere deep in the darkest part of his mind, of a corpse that he had once seen in the first weeks of spring, locked in time by the ice that had a hold on it, but made material and mortal by the rising heat that had allowed maggots and decay to take it. Black, his face had had a burnt look to it, but looking back, Gole guessed that the corpse had belonged to a transient, who went through the worst of the cold winter.

That was what the voice – the doll – had begun to remind him of.

She was waiting for him, like he knew that she would be.

“Why can't you lie down, and look like a normal doll?” Gole asked it angrily.

The doll didn't answer him, and Gole didn't expect her to. He busied himself with readying all of his instruments and trying to appear annoyed with the doll, and not absolutely frightened of it. As he worked, picking up the pile of wood and putting it under the kiln, putting the furniture in the correct place, Gole was relieved that the doll hadn't optioned to talk. As he came to the understanding that he would have to pick the doll up, and as he turned to look at it, the doll finally spoke.

Your hair... was it cut? Goal was silent, staring at the doll, until it began to speak again. Our time together is ending, isn't it? Isn't it?

Despite his resolve not to, Gole could not help but say something to the doll who looked so beseechingly up to him. “We're going to finish this up, and this'll be the end of it.”

Gole expected a strong reaction from the doll, but instead he got silence. And then, suddenly, the doll wasn't standing anymore, and it was lying on its back, on the ground.

For awhile, all that Gole could do to not start feeling like he could yell was stare blankly at the doll. He could not fathom what, exactly, it was doing, and why it was doing it. Finally, however, he got sick of staring at it – and, secretly, a slow fear began to spread through him – and so he moved towards the doll.

He stopped walking as he stood over the doll. He waited, looking down at it, and decided to reach down and pick it up. Touching the doll, it felt cool, entirely normal and solid in his hands. He couldn't think of a reason to not have believed the doll to be normal in all ways that a doll would, but for some reason, he had expected it to have a different feel to it, a vastly different weight than it had.

He stared into the doll's face. The face was lacking in any of the livelihood that had so characterized it before, and it looked no different than any of the other dolls that were made in the shop. Gole began to shiver involuntarily, fearful of what the lack of livelihood in the doll could mean.

Gole, beginning to panic, started to shout. “Stop playing around with me – hey! Listen to me. I'm sorry, but I can't go in with you, so please... Will you please talk to me?!”

Gole continued to stare at the doll, waiting for it to react. When no reaction came, Gole sank to the floor, careless with the doll, not caring if he knocked it or dropped it. His fingers (a gift from a biological father that he would never know, a man who became a master artisan and whose elegant, long fingers showed his natural leaning for the job) wrapped around the thing loosely. He stared at everything in the room, and at nothing, seeing only himself, a great albino spider that had worked so joyously in the room for the past few days. It had been the happiest that he had ever been in his life.

Silent in the room, a silence that deeply frightened Gole, and caused him to shake more violently. He was so cold, and it only seemed logical that he should begin the process of beginning the kiln firing. To be done with the whole mess would be the next step in this necessary progression. He had to complete the doll, to finish the task he had been given.

He picked the doll up, and his fingers happened to graze the thing's smooth head. He felt his empty hand reach up to caress the equally as smooth expanse of his scalp. He bit back a tear, and was resolved to not look at the thing's face as he walked it to the kiln and placed it in its place, after shutting the heavy slab over the hole.

He gathered the wood up into its correct position under the kiln, and felt numb by the end of it. Cold, depressed, and lonesome. As he went about his work, he came about the idea that he felt more lonesome in the kiln room than he had ever felt before. He had never had a friend before, and oh, how his body ached more after he felt the acknowledgment and the encouragement arrive and then leave him, used up.

He began to weep loudly then, and he reflected on the sorrow he had experienced, as the doll had cried out for him to join her when he had before refused to. His tears were happier then than now, as he trembled, nearly so weak that he could not accomplish this act he wanted so desperately to complete.

He didn't know when, precisely, he began to cry out for the doll to talk to him, begging for it to forgive him, but he began to. He dropped to his knees and crawled over to the kiln, pressing his face against its cold belly, where it sat inside, as cool and cruel as it deserved to be with him.

As he sat, his head pressed against the kiln, Gole heard someone tell him what to do next. He was certain that it came from his mind, but he could not comfortably feel that it had not come from the kiln. He didn't care, whether it came as perfect knowledge from himself, or from somewhere else.

He nearly drooled in anticipation as he readied the fire under the kiln. He built it up proudly, wanting it to be the best that he had ever made. He wanted to do his best at everything that he could, and he stacked the firewood up as prettily as he wanted, and only then did he coddle a fire into its bosom.

He was giddy as he pushed the slab out of the way. He did not think of how he would put it back on when he was finished – it would prove to be almost impossible to pull back when he had finally settled into the kiln, but with a rushed eagerness to pull it back into place, he did it, and he crouched in the complete darkness, a happiness swelling in him so deep and so large that he thought that he would fall apart for the strength of it.

In the dark he became aware of the swelling of his penis, and he felt comfortable – proud to – pull it from out of his shabby, too-loose work pants. With his other hand he groped for the doll, and he pulled her up to him in a gripping, loving, tender embrace. He pressed her against his chest as he stroked himself, hard, rough, and eager, his mouth hanging agape as he felt immersed in the perfection of the moment.

He took longer to orgasm than he ever had before, and he was grateful for that. It was to be his finale, his last defining moment, and why shouldn't it end in such a manner?

In the near-silence of the too-small, too-dark chamber, he heard the wet sound as he hit the ground between his splayed knees mingle with the sound of the fire building under the floor of the kiln. A grateful smile flew across his thin lips, and he sank so that he lied flat on the ground of the kiln, his arms wrapped around her.

She still didn't speak to him, but he could sense her spirit during the last act. It was good enough for him, and he knew then that it had always meant to be all that he would deserve. He ignored the feeling of the sticky wet spot on the ground as it stuck to his shirt, figuring that it would dry, and then warm, shortly.

Pinocchio (One Last Kiln Firing) - Part Four

That night was Gole's night to clean his hair. Water was boiled, a special soap mixture was prepared, and Gole was made to lean into the bucket of boiling water and harmful soap mixture so that all of his hair could soak. He tried to minimize the closeness of his skin to the searing heat and to the caustic chemicals, so he ended up leaning over the edge of the bucket, pitched forward so that he had nothing to look at but the unsettlingly crystalline blue water that his hair was in.

He stayed in that position for a while, until his bones ached, and he had to turn over. Carefully maneuvring, Gole flipped onto his side, wincing as his sore neck protested to the awful added weight of his wet, long hair and to the feeling of the bucket pressing against it.

Gole contented himself with staring into space – looking blankly at the blank expressions on the store's dolls that surrounded him. He recalled how he had felt the first time he was propositioned to work in the boutique.

Dolls? When he started working, he had no particular fondness for the extravagant little creatures, and up until he met the doll, he had started to loathe them all. Truth be told, he was frankly more than a little unsettled by their eternally youthful little faces, and seeing the spinsters of the store – the ones who were unlikely to ever find a little girl to belong to – he found their spider-webbed little bodies disturbing. It somehow made it so much worse, when he took into consideration that the black-haired ones had his own essence in them.

Thinking about the doll's dark little collection of his own cuttings only succeeded in worrying him in the near-dark of the abandoned shop, so he tried to glance around a little more, trying to find something pleasing to rest his gaze on.

From their different positions, the dolls, stared idily at Gole, mocking him in their hand-made little dresses, perfectly pale skin, and overlarge, angelic eyes. Gole scanned over them, until he had to turn over onto his other side, his neck becoming too sore. Turning, he nearly missed the sight of the naked, partially made doll that stood next to the normal dolls.

A strong reaction seized Gole then, as he felt a liking so powerful for the imperfect little doll that he could very well have believed it to be his first exposure to love. They both stared at each other, until Gole goth the courage up to speak to the doll.

“What do you want?” Gole challenged, trying to put off an air of bravery, despite the awful stutter that his heart had.

I was just watching to see what you were doing. The doll said softly. Maybe it was the near-dark of the shop making it appear so, but her eyes seemed to glisten, so like those of a real girl's.

“You could've said something.” Despite his best efforts, Gole's voice came out sounding defensive, childish.

“Your hair will be taken?

“...Yes. It'll be woven into your head, once you're finished.”

The doll was so silent for so long that Gole thought that it had fallen asleep, or whatever it is that the doll did as a way of sleep. Finally, though, it spoke back up. Will I be put into the kiln again?

Gole was silent then, at a loss for what was the right thing to say.

The doll began to climb down the table, and it began to walk awkwardly over to him, looking far too real, and at the same time, unreal. It walked over to the bucket and rested its hands against the bucket's outside wall. I'll be lonely again. Will you come with me this time?

Gole looked away, breaking his gaze into her eyes. “I'll be burned alive, if I do that. You care about me, like how I care about you, right?”

Gole was surprised at the strength of the doll's tantrum. And with its strength, as it nearly ripped the bucket of rapidly cooling water and lye up, if not for Gole's grip on the bucket. It howled in rage, throwing itself to the ground, and refused Gole's hands as he tried to comfort it.

The doll cried for a long while, and Gole was left to wonder – and hope for – an end to the tantrum. His ears and his heart ached as he heard it carry on, but the only thing he could do was to occasionally look over at the doll, and feel lucky that it had no real lungs in its body, as its endless weeping worried Gole that the doll would run herself out of breath.

Eventually, the doll stopped, right around the time that the water in the bucket had grown unbearably cold. It made a very feminine sniffle, and when it lifted its head up to look up at Gole's, he was shocked to see a return of the reddened, raw face that he had first seen when the doll had broken through its first “face”. Its eyes had lost their luster, instead looking then like ugly, beady black spots.

You must come with me. She said to him, with a surprising amount of authority.

“I'm a human, I'll burn and die in the kiln.”

It was silent, staring up at him with its awful, uncertain features, until it made its way back to the back room.

Pinocchio (One Last Kiln Firing) - Part Three

It murmured a calm, sweet response, and it reached one of its cold, hard hands out to touch the hand that Gole was holding the hammer in. It stared deeply into Gole's eyes, and Gole felt as though he were unsure of what it was that he was looking at. Was it truly a horrible monstrosity, or was it, no matter what it looked like, simply a scared creature?

The answer, no matter what it was, left a sick feeling in the pit of Gole's stomach. If it was a monster, it would no doubt continue its masquerade, even as Gole beat the unholy life from out of it. And if he didn't murder it, then what could it later grow, and what would its plan for him be?

He raised the hammer, thinking like the child that he still was, despite how his deformed body made him appear. He wanted it dead, the source of his disgust and stress.

Be gentle, please, Gole.

Looking down at the thing's eyes was a mistake, be it a good one or not. Looking down at its face, he became aware that, grotesque or not, its eyes held a humanity that made him suck in all of the air that was in his lungs in horror of what he had planned to do to it.

Gole took a more gentler grip onto the hammer and in a low voice, asked it where it wanted him to strike.

The old man had been surprised- even outwardly impressed - by the handiwork that Gole presented him with. The doll was only in its second stage, but it already looked so close to being done that the man was wondering if Gole had attempted to impress him by going forward with another firing without telling him.

Deciding that, either way, Gole had managed to make a good doll, the old man gave it back to the tall boy and left him to finish the doll by the end of the week. Although it would normally be barely enough time to complete a spartan-style doll, with cheap paint work and faux-hair, the old man was surprised to believe that the boy that was considered the dumbest of all of the children was making something that could very well be a spectacular piece of work.

Gole didn't care about the praise that had slipped out of the man's mouth in a rush of awe; his approval meant that he could stay with the doll for as long as it took for it to be complete.

The doll was quickly becoming the one thing that Gole was looking forward to when he got time to himself. Alone, he could talk to it; the doll was much too sweet and one-of-a-kind to talk to just anybody, so Gole was more than pleased to be its sole friend.

He often kept to himself in the kiln room, sleeping in there and away from the other children. He wanted to stay with the doll, even if it meant sleeping o the cold floor of the room. It had been three days since he had revealed its face from under the fragile bisque, and although he had not made any mention of the inevitable, when the doll would be taken away from him, he had managed to make her understand that there was a dead line in which it would be finished.

On the third night, while they were alone in the kiln room, it began to ask him how they would go about changing how it looked.

At first Gole tried to get away from the question, talking about the pretty dress that the old woman had made specially for the doll to wear, and that it would have wonderful hand-made shoes which it could wear, but the doll would not stop relentlessly asking him. Eventually, Gole cleared his throat of the sour taste that was in his mouth, and said, "We're going tp have to put you in the kiln one last time, this time for a shorter time and at a lower heat..."

The small thing screamed, throwing a tantrum so loud that Gole had to cover its mouth and restrain it. Finally, when the doll was calmed enough to settle still, he let go of its mouth, and it said, I don't want to, Gole, I don't want to.

Slowly, Gole said, "You were alright when you came out of it the first time. And you were so brave..."

In a voice that Gole could scarcely believe was its, the doll said, I love you,Gole, but if you make me go, I won't like you anymore.

Gole had no choice other than to ignore what it said. It was capable of amazing things, but the doll needed to reach the correct consistency of pale color and hardness before they could allow her to be sold. Gole could not imagine being allowed to keep her, even if she became what was considered an "unsellable doll". They would throw her out, after breaking her, to punish him failing to create a doll with the expensive materials that they had given him.

After a while, their conversation had grown away from the business of the eventual firing, and Gole had brought up that he would get to paint her more delicate features before it would be placed into the kiln. Frankly, at the mention of the kiln, he had expected the girl-like thing to begin another tantrum, but as was the case with it, the doll surprised him.

I understand that you have to do this, and even though I'm scared, I want you to know that I didn't mean what I said before about you.

Gole hung his head and wanted to commend her for the bravery that she possessed that he clearly did not.

The next night was deemed the "firing" night, and before it was to be set on the drying board, Gole did the best he could to redeem himself, by painting in the doll's delicate features, imagining the most beautiful female that he could and conveying that as best he could with paint.

When he finished, he was loathed to admit it, partially because he was embarrassed by the crude work that he felt he had done for its dear, dear face, and also because he knew what would soon accompany his work. When he told it that he was done, the doll demanded that he find it a reflective surface to see itself in.

You did it beautifully! It said, its face warm with glee.

Gole had to leave her to wait for her hard shell to dry alone, as he was called for to help cleaning the area behind a doll cabinet that had its cleaning day a long time coming. Afterwards he had to help the other children clean the muck pit that was near the modified stable that they all called home, and he was shocked, when they all finished, to discover that it was well past the hour that he had thought it would take to finish the two chores. The sun had set, and all of the children were off to their sparse beds, most of which gave him a look of disdain as they passed him.

The doll greeted him in a pouting voice that, to him, seemed to barely hide the fear and sadness that it must have been truly feeling. I thought you were going to spend more time with me before I had to go in, It said, its soft eyes showing a depth of emotion that Gole could frankly not remember seeing the day before.

He murmured an apology and went over to it, picking her up and gently hugging her, stopping when he finally felt the tiny arms attempting to hold him back. He suggested that they wait a little longer to begin the process, so that the doll could feel that they had spent more time together.

No, I want to have this over with, now that I am dry and ready for it.

Gole honored her wish, adding less firewood beneath the kiln than he had the last time they had visited the large contraption.

When at last he had to pick the doll up and place her in the kiln, he had the overwhelming feeling that he was lowering it into a tomb, and it took all of his courage to lower her onto the furniture in the kiln and to shut the slab over the hole. Even though it took all of his strength to light that wood, Gole nevertheless felt cowardly, even despicable; how was the doll NOT like a girl, besides what it was made of?

How could he ask it to do something that he could not- and would not- do? By all means, if he was any kind of man, he should crawl into the kiln and calmed the doll as the heat tore through them both.

He had to shake his head a little to shove that thought from his mind, because even though he was in a disturbed state, he knew that thinking of doing something like that to himself was wrong and a sign of sickness. He had decided, when he had first taken the small hammer to the doll's face, that he was not ill, and that what he was witnessing was a phenomenon. Perhaps even a sign that he was capable of being loved.

He crept up so that his back was against the kiln and winced as he felt the searing pain of the heated cylinder pressing against the nearly bare flesh of his back. As he heard the doll begin sobbing, Gole felt his own tears and body-wracking cries. He hoped as hard as he could hope for anything that it was crying from fright and not from pain, and he pressed his back harder into the kiln's wall. As he did it, he felt a momentary reprieve from the emotions that warred in him and he threw back his head, his eyes so wide they nearly bulged out of their sockets, as he allowed his nerves to be consumed by the cruel heat.

By the time the heat died down, Gole felt giddy, drunk with the power of what he had done to the curse that was his body as well as the fact that the doll's own torment soon over with. He finally allowed himself to slump forward, his back ripping away from the surface that had nearly melded with it.

There was no longer any pain, and Gole felt, somewhere in the back of his clouded mind, grateful that there no longer was any to be had. He slowly got to his feet and turned around to look at the kiln with a skeletal grin on his face. He burned his hands as he shoved the kiln's slab as far as he could, getting a hot blast of air to his face.

He barely acknowledged that the doll was crying for him to stop, that he was going to hurt himself as he extracted it from the furniture. As he did it, he could not stop himself from wincing as he touched the doll's bare skin. It was partially immaterial, and where he held the doll - below its chest – it was closer to a liquid than a solid. He was aware, vaguely, that the doll was yelling at him to put it down, that he was ruining its skin and body.

Gole dropped it on the side table and sat down in front of the table, where he sat until he was awakened by the old woman who ran the store by a rude kick in the side.

When she asked what was wrong with him - she remarked that his back looked as though someone had branded him with what had to be a nightmarish hot poker and that his hands looked as though he had been handling hot coals - Gole mumbled something about an accident with some burning firewood, and that was that.

That day he had to keep away from the doll, working in the front of the shop, because there was a festival that was taking place that day in that part of the city. Gole could only muster a slight amount of surprise at the fact that he had utterly forgotten about the large festival that everyone else had been planning for. When the festival had drawn in enough people and their children for people not to notice his departure, Gole slunk into the back room and sat down with the doll in his lap.

“I've been missing you, since I woke up this morning...”

Gole waited, listening carefully so as to discern the difference from the doll's voice and the loud noise outside from the shop, and grew agitated when he heard no sound coming from the doll.

Taking in shuddery breaths, Gole imagined what it would mean if the voice he had heard from the doll were no more real than his own good looks.

Although he did not want to do it, he was trapped in the awful thought that he had imagined everything leading up to that moment with the doll, as the doll refused to answer any of Gole's questions. At some point, up until he was roused, guiltily, out of it by a loud rap on the door, Gole began to cry and he rocked the doll in his arms as he, himself, rocked back and forth on the dirt floor.

Pinocchio (One Last Kiln Firing) - Part Two

Gole was tempted to shove the slab as far back as he could from the kiln and to peer into the pit to see what was talking. What frightened him most was the thought that what was in the structure was a small child, perhaps one that was only playing a prank on him with some of the others. He couldn't afford to kill a child; where would he go, if he went through with their prank and ended up burning what they wanted to make him think was some sort of abomination?

He had to of imagined the doll, still somewhat pliant, despite the drying process that it had undergone, squirming worm-like in his hand, like a creature trying to escape his grasp. He had to of imagined that; it was unthinkable otherwise.

Are we playing a game, Gole-y? You're not going to light it on fire, are you? I'm scared. Where are you?

Gole located the flint despite the panic that rose in his stomach. He turned to face the kiln like it was an enemy. The small voice returned, and Gole felt rage and fear build up inside of him, until he screamed out, "Shut up, shut up! If you're trying to trick me, you'd better stop it now, damn it. I'm going to light the fire, so if you're just trying to trick me, you had better make some sort of noise or say something before I light it!"

Gole crouched at the feet of the kiln and readied the flint, waiting first for any sort of sign from whatever was in the vessel. A voice came through the kiln, sounding all the more scared and sad than it had before.

Please, please, if I have to do this, please come in with me!

Gole shouted out, "Last chance! Knock on the lid if you don't want to burn!"

Nothing came, and Gole readied to light the fire on the stack of wood. As he stretched his arm out to light the center of the stack of wood on fire, he had been expecting a change in the voice in the kiln. He was correct to expect a change in voice, but it was nevertheless one that he wouldn't have ever wanted to hear.

A strange, distorted voice arose from the kiln, this time in a frighteningly clear tone, free of any of the bizarre distortion that reminded him of a well, filled with water.

Come in the kiln with me, Gentrrryy... the voice faded out on the sound of the name that Gole hadn't been called in a year, then it picked up, the strange voice dropping in lieu of the voice of the scared girl who sounded as though she was speaking from a far-away place.

I love you Gole, I want to be with you. Don't you want to be with me?

The sound of her crying broke Gole, and he shakingly lit the fire wood under the kiln, shutting his eyes when he heard the screaming from inside of the kiln. For a moment, during the screaming, Gole was certain that he had heard a difference in the child-like voice as it screamed wordlessly; it was a voice that, for as short a period as it rang through the small back room of the shop, made Gole think of something horrible and ageless. Something rotten.

After a few minutes, which Gole spent rocking back and forth on the hot dirt floor, his arms wrapped tight around his legs, the screaming stopped, giving away to the gentle hush of the fire beating against the floor of the kiln.

Gole awoke the next morning when the old woman who owned the shop jabbed him repeatedly in the side and asked him why the kiln was still warm if he had actually doused the fire when he was supposed to the night before. Gole removed the lid of the kiln, fearing what would be inside. He was relieved, and shocked, when he saw that the bisque doll had baked perfectly, despite the fact that, for the kiln to still be warm, the doll should have been burnt to a mess.

Once the thing cooled down, Gole removed the doll, and was only too happy when the old woman wrenched it from him, telling him that she would never allow him to be a part of the process of making dolls, and that he would do well to go to his own bed and sleep until one of the other children would come for him.

Gole was later surprised to be awakened by the small child who leaned over him, shaking his shoulders to wake him. He couldn't believe that he had actually fallen asleep, remembering the voices that had earlier come from the kiln.

He went into the store and was told by the old man that despite what the old owner of the shop had said, they were too behind with doll orders for man to take care of the doll himself. Despite this assertion, the old man seemed suspicious of Gole and acted as though he did not want to give control of the making of the doll back to Gole.

Gole seized onto this fact, and, remembering the night before, asked the old man if he could possibly work on another doll instead. When the man told him to not be superstitious, Gole asked why he was the only one of the children who was assisting with the making of dolls. The man was incensed by this question, and told Gole that he was the oldest of the children, and had lately been frightening customers when he worked in the shop itself. If he wanted to stay - and be fed - he would stop acting as though he wasn't a worker.

Gole accepted it, as he was always wont to, but he took it with a deep feeling of fear and dark resignation. He was brought to the kiln room and was left with the doll and the tools he would use to paint the first part of her features.

As the door shut, allowing the owners, customers, and the children to be in the shop without the truly gloomy kiln room to be seen by passers-by, Gole wondered if the events from the night before would come back to haunt him.

He clutched the thin-bristled paint brush and nestled the vague doll-shaped form in his lap, reclining it back so that he could get a good look at where its face was to be.

Dabbing paint on the bristles, he looked back at the doll, and realized that the head was turning of its own accord, moving in a manner that sickly reminded Gole of the way a blind creature attempts to get a bead on an object of interest.

The voice came, as Gole somehow knew it would, sounding, as it had before, somehow like a parody of a frightened little girl. I can't see you, Gole, where are my eyes, I can't see.

Gole bit his bottom lip and tightened one of his hands around the thing's head to steady it. The voice disappeared, and was replaced by the sound of panicked breathing. Gole, what are you doooiiinnnnnnggg-

Although he had clutched the head as hard as he could without breaking the near-brittle bisque, the thing managed to squirm as he tried to draw a delicate set of lips on the doll's face. The paint ended up smeared on the doll's cheek, and Godel clutched the doll's head harder, causing the the thing to shriek shrilly. He found an old work cloth and began to rub furiously at the paint, and was only partially relieved when all of the paint came off the blank face.

Gole, let go, let go, don't squeeze so hard... My face is under this bisque, if you let me show you it, will that make you stop? Please, Gole-y, let me have something with a small, heavy end to it.

Gole wanted the thing to just shut up, so he laid the doll against the bench and handed the outstretched hand of the blank doll to do what it wanted with his heavy knife. Slowly, the thing turned the knife around so that the blunt end of the knife was facing it. It stood in its legs and Gole as unable to look away from the doll as it moved, slowly, trying not to wobble as it pulled the blunt end away from its face and then abruptly smashed the end of the knife against its face.

What emerged from under the smashed bisque was something that was reminiscent of an aborted fetus, its eyes not seeming to be fully developed beyond small rolling pin pricks. Gole launched himself backwards, finally falling out from the thrall that the thing had had him in. He bit his hand to keep from screaming, afraid of what would happen if the thing were to turn around and to look at him with those under-developed eyes.

It dropped the knife and looked over at Gole, extending its arms up and towards him.

Can you clean me up? I need some help, cracking this shell around me...

Gole fell on his back as he felt himself lose control of his legs. He wanted desperately to run... but what would be waiting for him, if he decided to run and talk about the creature that looked so earnestly at him, as though it wanted him to come to it and hold it?

Looking back at the door, Gole imagined the reaction he would receive, bursting into the shop, panting. Would they even listen to him, such a sight he would be to whoever was unfortunate enough to be the one he could hear then, talking beyond the door as he fell into the room? No; it was more than likely that he would be thrown out on the street on sight, even before they had a chance to see the horrible creature for themselves.

He looked at the doll, where it remained, waiting for him with its little arms extended towards him. He had to kill it, he realized instinctively. He could not allow a thing like it to continue, in whatever existence it had.

He located the small box of tools that sat near the bench, where in it lied the ball peen hammer that he would use to ruin its body, which did not have any right to exist, as nightmarish as it was.

"I'll help..." Gole vaguely thought that he murmured as he readied the hammer and crawled over to the bench. Although it was grotesque, and he could not be altogether sure, Gole believed that he could see a look of relief pass on the thing's face.