Rot Seeks Doll

(once, long ago, there was an Empty Spaces Anthology   . This was the longer of my two stories in it.)

There is a type of rot that breeds in silences, a moist decay that drips through the cracks in your life and softens your thoughts with its insidious warmth. It’s the sort of thing that lingers long after it was first welcomed in, that never quite leaves—

“Miss,” the doll’s plaintive voice echoes through the bedroom door, “are you in there?”

For a moment she tries to answer it, but there’s something in her throat, some soft prickly thing that fills her nose with a sweet and bloody stench every time she breathes; she just can’t.

The best she can manage is to pull her blankets a bit tighter around her aching body, tearing scraps of skin away where oozing pustules have begun to merge with the fabric, drawing a pained moan from scabbed lips—

“Miss, this one is coming in, okay? It, it needs to …”

The door doesn’t creak as it opens; the wood is too soft for that, the hinges too drenched in oily condensation. For a moment the doll thinks that it’s not going to give, that even its hands’ steady pressure will tear the house’s bones to shreds—

Light spills in.

“Oh goddess, miss—” It cuts itself off with a theatrical gagging noise, throat filling with acid as the room’s smell crawls into its nose. It’s such a layered thing, that smell, full of moist forgotten things; it’s the smell of a unpowered refrigerator ignored for weeks in the depths of burning summer, the aching ooze of forgotten fruit and the sharp acidic notes of bile abandoned on a never-cleaned restroom floor. It’s practically a living thing as it rubs itself against the doll, leaving its oily touch smeared across its neat dress and dripping across its skin in a way that makes it wonder if it will ever feel clean again—and only then does the doll taste the room’s heart, the sickly-sweet musk spreading out from where its witch is curled up at the center of her waterlogged bed—

“M-miss, why …” The doll slaps itself, a sudden focusing pain. “Miss, you need to come with this one!”

“… don’t want to …”

“But, but you need to. You can’t stay here!”

She shrugs beneath her blanket, the motion tearing another few pieces of meat free from her moldy bones. Her mask betrays none of the pain she feels, and perhaps she feels nothing at all, but the doll hears even so—

“… miss, what was that noise?”

“… my body breaking, I guess. It’s what I deserve.”

“No, but … why?”

“Because I’m a worthless pile of trash who can’t do anything right.”

The doll sighs.

“Miss, this one can’t come in to get you. The smell …”

“I know, I stink. Just leave me alone.”

“That’s not what this one—gah! Just wait here, miss!”

The doll storms off in something very much like a huff, though it’s careful to close the door as it goes; it wouldn’t do to let her stink pollute the rest of the house. Even with it confined to a single room it’s going to be a nightmare to clean up.

Its witch doesn’t bother wondering where the doll thought that she might go; she doesn’t think much of anything at all. It’s so hard to think in the rot, so hard to set her mind to anything—and when she does think it’s soaked in self-hatred, in the clinging slime oozing from every hateful cranny and disgusted recess. Her mind is where thoughts go to die.

And it’s just what she deserves.

It’s what she is.

It’s all she will ever—

The door bursts open as the doll returns, the drama of the moment absolutely ruined by the way the wall creaks and burbles against its hinges. For a long moment the doll flinches, sure that something awful is about to happen; perhaps the house will collapse, or the door will fall from its hinges, or, or—

Nothing happens.

The doll’s relieved sigh is muffled by its gas mask, and its progress into the room is rather impeded by the oversized rubber boots which rise nearly to the top of its legs, but it does its best even so. It can’t smell a thing through its mask’s oversized filters, though as it nears the bed they’re already beginning to drip with an oily, faintly fuzz slime: the fungal spores which fill the room spurred into heightened growth by its witch’s despair.

It grabs the reeking, soaked blanket with gloved hands: a hard task for a doll, but it does its best, just as it always does—

“Hey, what are you—let go of me! That hurts!”

“You! Need! To! Get! Up!” It punctuates each of its words with another pull, fingers wrapped around its witch’s arms, heedless of the way her flesh smears and tears beneath its grip—pulling and pulling until it finds a place to hold which does not give way, gloved fingers anchored in the bones beneath, pulling its witch free of her bed and out across the room’s floor and down the stairs and out the door. She protests all the while, each step leaving scraps of flesh and spreading rot lingering on the good wood floor behind her, but finally, finally—!

In the sunlight she’s a walking corpse, with none of the vitality the doll remembers.

“There!”

“… so now I’m outside. Was this so important?”

“Don’t you feel better, miss?”

“Not really.”

“… oh.” The doll slumps down onto the ground next to its witch. “Then this one is sorry, miss. It, it shouldn’t have—”

“It’s no worse out here, at least,” she says with a shrug. “Just different.”

“Oh …”

Neither of them say anything after that, and after a while the doll gets up to clean up the house (a task that it knows she would want it to do, even if she hasn’t told it to yet). As it leaves it notes that the reeking decay hasn’t followed its witch, though elegantly gilled mushrooms sprout at her feet and from the ruins of her body; a small shift. Not a solution, but perhaps a sign of another cycle yet to come.