by Ella Ford
Elise brushed past me into the darkened room, blinking to adjust her eyes to the light. As she stepped through the doorway, she gasped audibly and touched her pretty fingers lightly to her mouth. I watched her face as she blinked multiple times, her lips hanging open as she surveyed the room before her. But she didn’t say anything, made no reaction beyond her initial gasp. Behind the shock in her eyes, I sensed something deeper. The visceral realization of a professional journalist that a story is suddenly considerably bigger and massively different to what she first thought.
And who can blame her? I thought to myself as I gazed around the Viewing Room, satisfied that Elise’s initial reaction was exactly in line with my expectations.
The Viewing Room was large, the exact mirror of the living room on the other side of the hall. I’d pulled the drapes shut, blocking out the early evening sunshine and casting the space in an unnatural darkness that was punctuated only by the flickering light of many candles. It gave the room a warm, welcoming feel, but one that was opposed by the eerie dance of shadows on the walls. The space was empty of furniture, and lightly decorated with several indulgent paintings and tapestries hanging on the wood-clad walls.
But the focus of the Viewing Room was my collection, and it was this that had shocked Elise into stunned silence. Around the room, spaced equidistantly, was a series of onyx plinths. Polished cylinders, approximately eighteen inches tall and eighteen inches in diameter. There were six such plinths, pushed back against the walls like pieces in a museum. On each plinth stood a young girl, perfectly still and posed exquisitely - my dolls.
Elise finally breathed out, her eyes flicking around the room, unable to settle on a single place for more than a second. “What the fuck…” she breathed rhetorically.
I reached behind me and pushed the double doors shut quietly, sealing us in the room. Elise gasped again as the doors clicked into place, but she made no move to leave. As I expected.
Instead, she continued to survey the six motionless girls. Each one was frozen in a different stance, each one dressed differently, but all perfectly motionless, their blank expressions those of mannequins rather than living humans.
To our left, a tall blonde with full breasts and long legs, wearing only black stockings and strappy, heels, her hands placed defiantly on her hips and her chin held upwards. An avatar of sexual empowerment, she projected lust to all who gazed upon her.
Beside the blonde was a petite brunette, similar in stature to Elise - lithe and short, with a pretty, soft face that looked younger than her years. Her tresses of dark curls tumbled over her naked shoulders to rest on her pert, small breasts. This one was posed as the embodiment of innocence. Draped in delicate white lingerie with flat shoes. Her face was angled downwards, her eyes large and pleading. While the blonde to her left exuded control and dominance, the brunette screamed submission and docility.
Around the room, Elise’s gaze wandered, lingering on each girl in turn, taking in every feminine detail. A pretty redhead, totally naked, her arms crossed behind her back, head bowed and eyes closed - the perfect slave. Opposite her, another blonde, wearing a scant bikini that barely covered her ponderous breasts. Her face was beaming, her hands held out before her in an expression of friendly welcome. Across the room, an Asian girl, dressed as a maid, albeit a highly sexualized stereotype of a maid. She held a feather duster before her, her body bent at the waist, thrusting her shapely rear behind her and revealing the lace tops of her stockings beneath the exaggerated frill of her too-short uniform.
Finally, posed in the center of the row of plinths to our right, was Beth. Sweet, innocent Beth. Beth stood motionless with her hands to her side, her eyes gazing forwards with the blank expression that she knew I loved. She wore white stockings, with plain, white high-heeled pumps and an elaborate garter belt. Her feet were placed apart slightly, revealing the space between her legs. Her pussy was shaved bald, as it always was, an immaculate expanse of smooth flesh, interrupted only by the neat line of her labia that disappeared between her thighs. I felt my heartbeat quicken and a familiar heat rise between my own legs. I loved each of my collection dearly, but I felt a special fondness for Beth. She was my first, she showed me what I was and what I wanted. When she gave herself to me, she opened up my world and made all that I have possible.
I looked away from Beth back to Elise. The reporter remained as stationary as my dolls, gazing at the Viewing Room with dumbstruck fascination and … something else, perhaps?
Satisfied that the interview was going exactly as planned, I allowed my mind to wander. Back to that first night, that hot night in Vegas and the crowded bar...
Before
I don’t know why I went to Vegas that weekend. I guess it’s just what people in my position do.
I was thirty and alone. For the first time in my adult life, I was alone. My husband, Jeremy, had recently died, the victim of a congenital heart defect that had somehow gone undetected despite the very best medical care that Jeremy’s fortune had provided. One day, mid-backhand, his weekly tennis game and his life had been cut tragically short when his heart simply stopped beating. His vacated body had crumpled to the floor as his horrified opponent had watched. I’m told he won the point, so it wasn’t all terrible.
I suppose you think I’m going to paint a picture of me as the distraught widow, cast adrift into life without her beloved soulmate? I wish that were the case. Jeremy was an ass. A dishonest, lying, abusive ass who made my short life a misery from the very moment we tied the knot at the tender age of nineteen. He’d been my first, a classic high-school sweetheart. And, as I slipped reluctantly from my twenties to my thirties, he’d been my only.
But I wasn’t Jeremy’s only. No, not by a long shot. Jeremy liked to fuck, and did so with an almost callous disregard for the consequences. I knew about his mistress in Portland, the hookers on his long weekends at conferences. I knew about the girls in the bars, and that fling he’d had with his best friend’s underage niece - a sordid encounter that would have landed him in jail, had he not been able to buy his way out of it.
And then there was me. Claudia Ross née Duval. Class president, homecoming queen, head cheerleader, and born on the wrong side of the tracks. My marriage to Jeremy was a fairytale that became a nightmare, a decade of denying and wishing, of being paraded around like a prized possession, a doll to be dressed and posed and presented to friends as the perfect Stepford wife. And all the while I suffered the cheating, the lying, the humiliation.
Then Jeremy died, and I didn’t mourn. Oh, don’t get me wrong, in public I donned the black garb of the inconsolable and I forced bitter tears to spill from my eyes as they lowered his diseased carcass into the Earth. It wasn’t Jeremy I cried for though. It was my life, my youth, my best years, squandered on a sham marriage.
But behind closed doors, I allowed myself to feel something I hadn’t felt in a decade - hope. Possibility. Potential.
I was fantastically rich, beyond my wildest dreams. Jeremy was morally reprehensible, but he was financially fastidious. His sizable insurance payout ensured that I would never have to work a day in my life. I had a huge house, investments, cars, artworks. And I allowed myself to become immersed in that opulence. Spending wildly, never making more than the slightest dent in the fortune that I possessed.
But that extravagance didn’t last, and I found myself yearning for something. Something that I couldn’t identify, something that was not yet a fully formed urge in my mind.
---
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, I thought as I studied the crowded hotel bar in which I found myself. I wasn’t sure what brought me to Vegas, but I certainly knew why I’d come to the bar that night. Why I’d poured myself into the slinkiest, figure hugging mini-dress that I owned. Why I’d chosen heels that were an inch too high and a degree too sexy. Why I’d lifted my honey blonde hair off my slender neck, revealing my bare shoulders and the creamy expanse of my cleavage.
I glanced across the bar and
caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror opposite me. A painted whore, indistinguishable from the countless identical women around me. Dressed in the uniform of our mutual intent, an invitation to fuck and be fucked.
My eyes flicked across the mirror and surveyed the room behind me. My attire was attracting the attention of the hotel guests - mostly middle-aged businessmen, conference goers who would try their hand at the roulette wheel of the bar patrons before cutting their losses and dialing one of the numbers from the gaudy leaflets that saturated this sleazy city with promises of companionship.
I shuddered at the sight of them leering at me. Fat, balding, unshaven, with ill-fitting suits and ties that were one iteration behind the curve. I saw Jeremy in each and every one of them, a future that would not come to pass, a destiny unfulfilled. My eyes fell away from the mirror down to my drink before me. It was gaudy and extravagant, like everything in Vegas.
What am I doing? I thought to myself, this isn’t me.
From across the bar, there was a sudden burst of noise. A loud whooping and hollering, the ritual cries of camaraderie of men together. I glanced around and located the commotion. A table of perhaps eight people - six men and two women. They were drinking heavily, with glasses held aloft and voices raised. The men were dressed in the identical trappings of business, though their smartness was diminished by the progress of the alcohol, causing their shirts to crumple and their ties to loosen. The two women were crisply dressed and masculine, aping their male cohorts with their mannerisms and behaviour, crying out with voices that wanted to belong, to be accepted as one of the boys. They were clearly colleagues, celebrating some fleeting conference victory - a deal done or contract signed. Or perhaps they were simply relishing the freedom of the Vegas fantasy, a momentary escape from the mundanity of their lives.
One of the men in the party slumped back in his chair and collapsed against the sofa behind him. As he did so, he revealed a hidden member of their group. A ninth person whom I had not noticed previously.
Another woman, this one seemed small and timid compared to her brash sisters. Shrinking back into the corner of the table, gazing down at her drink with a stricken look on her face. She was petite and attractive, in an understated way. Her skin was pale and delicate, her face framed by an elfin bob, the darkness of her hair offsetting her light skin with an intriguing contrast. She seemed out of place and nervous, an intern perhaps? Dragged along to this strange world that she was not yet ready for.
I felt myself strangely drawn to the girl, unable to take my eyes from her.
Suddenly, she glanced up, her eyes looking in my direction, as though she could feel my scrutiny. I realized that I was staring at her, and quickly averted my gaze back to my drink and the bar before me. After several minutes, I glanced around again and the girl was still looking in my direction, a look of distant concentration on her face. “Rescue me,” her expression seemed to say.
I flashed her a smile, and she smiled back delicately, then looked away, flushing with embarrassment. I turned back to my drink, lost in thought.
At once, I knew what I wanted, why I’d come to the bar that night. Why I’d come to Vegas. The thought rose in my mind, unbidden and unexpected, but it found immediate traction, settling into my psyche with no resistance or surprise.
I reached forwards and took a napkin from the stack on the bar, then picked up a pen from the Kino station and began writing.
I’m in room 714. Meet me there in fifteen minutes.
I gazed at the note before me, turned it over in my hands and suppressed a fleeting urge to rip it up and forget the whole crazy idea. Instead, I folded it once and signaled the bartender.
“Yes ma’am,” asked the elderly gentleman in the crisp hotel uniform.
“Do you see the girl over there on that table? The slight brunette who looks as though she wishes she were somewhere else?”
The bartender followed my gesture and nodded, smiling. “Looks like she ain’t enjoying herself,” he grinned.
“I’d like you to take her a drink, put it on my tab. And pass her this note while you’re at it,” I said, scarcely able to believe what I was doing.
The bartender smirked knowingly at me, his eyes flicking over my painted face and ample cleavage. But he made no comment. This was obviously not his first rodeo. “Yes ma’am. Room 714 wasn’t it?”
I smiled warmly. “Yes, and here’s something for you.” I reached into my purse and slid a crisp twenty across the bar.
The bartender flicked his forehead. “Much obliged ma’am,” he nodded and turned to pour the drink. A gin and tonic, to match the one that sat untouched before the girl.
I waited a minute, and took a final sip of my own drink as the bartender delivered the drink, then turned to leave. As I was stepping across the bar, I glimpsed at the girl. She was staring down at the unfolded note in her hands, a look of wide-eyed surprise on her face. As I passed, she looked up in my direction and I flashed her a confident smile. Her expression of surprise evaporated in an instant and was replaced by something else: acceptance.
Chapter 2: Acceptance
Now
The silence in the Viewing Room hung heavily between us and I waited patiently for Elise to react. When she finally broke free of the awestruck stupor that she had fallen into, she turned to me and narrowed her eyes.
“What the hell is happening here lady? Who are these girls?” she asked, a look of horrified revulsion sweeping across her face.
I reached out a hand and touched her shoulder, intending to reassure her but instead causing her to recoil from me and back slowly into the room.
“Are they drugged? Some kind of brainwashing?” she said accusingly as walked backwards away from me. Her gaze fell to her right and settled on the tall blonde, Christa.
I attempted to smile warmly, but inside I was feeling a little nervous that bringing Elise here would backfire on me. “Elise, I want you to calm down and take a hold of yourself,” I said with as much command and confidence as I could muster.
To my surprise, Elise stopped backing away from me. Her gaze returned to mine. “Wh-what do you want from me?”
I felt myself relax. The change in Elise was palpable, an instant reaction to my commanding tone. I began to entertain the notion that my assessment of this girl was correct.
“You know why you’re here Elise. I want you to see my collection,” I replied.
Elise didn’t seem to hear me. Instead, she turned to face the virginal brunette to her right, the girl who I knew only as Sarah. She took two tentative steps forwards and stopped beside the motionless girl, then she turned her eyes to me and an unspoken question flashed between us. Anticipating her intent, I nodded.
Elise turned back to Sarah and studied her, then reached out her trembling hand and lightly brushed her fingertips over Sarah’s pale thigh. I heard the audible sound of a sigh as Elise quickly pulled back her hand in shock, perhaps expecting the lifeless plastic of a mannequin rather than the soft flesh of a living person.
“To answer your question,” I said, stepping over to stand beside Elise, “they are neither drugged nor brainwashed.” I paused, caressing Sarah’s soft thigh in the same place that Elise had touched her. I glanced up at Sarah’s pretty face, studying her for signs of a reaction, but she remained completely blank, seemingly oblivious to my presence and my touch. Good girl. “They are simply trained to do my bidding.”
Elise lifted her hand above her head and waved her fingers about in front of Sarah’s face, attempting to elicit a reaction. Then she stepped back and hurried across the room to stand before Beth. Once again, she reached out and traced her fingertips over Beth’s thigh, touching the smooth material of the frozen girl’s white stockings, lingering on the elaborate lace top.
“C-can they hear us? Do they know we’re here?” she asked, her voice little more than a whisper, as though afraid to disturb the motionless girls.
“Yes Elise, the girls can hear us,” I said with a hint of amu
sement in my voice. “Can’t you girls?” I added, speaking loudly to the wider room.
Suddenly, the frozen girls came to life and they responded as one. “Yes mistress!” came the reply, then each girl instantly returned to her previous pose.
Elise stepped back in shock, her breathing suddenly quick and urgent. “This is too weird,” she whispered, to herself as much as anyone else. “Who are these girls?” she asked, turning to face me.
“They’re my collection.”
“Are they employees? Do they work for you? Are they slaves?” she asked, a note of urgency spreading through her voice. I realized that I had to get on top of Elise’s rising panic, but perhaps it was simply easier to rip the bandaid off quickly?
“They’re mine. They belong to me. I told you I collected dolls, and I wasn’t attempting to mislead you. Each of these girls belongs to me in the same way that a doll would belong to me.”
“But that’s… you can’t…” Elise stammered, her eyes flicking around the room as she struggled to confront the strange reality that she now found herself in.
“Can’t what?” I asked, leaning my head to one side and keeping my voice low and calm.
“You can’t just own someone. Have you kidnapped them?” she demanded. “Are you kidnapping me?” she added, her voice becoming shrill and high. It was time to calm her down.
“Elise!” I snapped and her head flicked around to face me, her mouth hanging open. “None of these girls are here against their will, they are all here because they want to be. I own them because they want to be owned.”
Elise shook her head, but the fight was going out of her. “But you can’t… why would…”
I raised my hand and she fell silent. Then I turned to face my collection. “Girls. You are free to leave. I relinquish my hold over you, there will be no recrimination or attempt to retrieve you. You simply need to walk through those doors and collect your belongings. I wish you well.”
