Chapters Dollhood: A Woman's Choice Book 4 Chapter 36
When I awoke, my eyes blinked open as they always did; suddenly and unforgivingly. The steady, familiar, automated blinking began — and yet they ached with sudden brightness! I… I could still see!
Out of focus, it took me a moment to understand what was before me, but the creamy white plaster ceiling of my Doll Room at John’s home became unmistakable — therefore, I knew I was still dreaming. Jack allowed so few sleeping moments, and fewer deep enough to enter the place of my fantasies, but when I wasn’t chasing my sister through the halls of the Hodgkinson Estate, I was most commonly here in the safety of this room of lace and filigree and pink and lavender! But that just wasn’t possible. With those moments of sweet release so few and far between, dreams became real and the real became dream-like. This was all normal. I just needed to enjoy it before I would inevitably awaken.
I blinked again… and again… and again… and yet I did not return to reality. I laid here staring at the ceiling of a place I couldn’t be, turning the possibilities of what had happened. What was reality for me at this moment? The carriage! We had crashed into something… was this the afterlife? Had God provided me a heaven even after my sin? Or was I still on his earth? Had I made it to Great Ormond Street unconscious, my senses taken from me, and this was my clockwork providing something comforting in the silent darkness?
Another, stranger idea came to me as I blinked, staring at that same ceiling texture which I had been left to admire by a malfunctioning maid all those months ago. Was this perchance not a dream, but my waking life? Had the dream been instead the life in Jack’s penthouse, masquerading as my twin sister for a sadistic terror? Had I only just fallen after kicking my broken helper, knocking my head on the floor? When I pondered it further, I did find it hard to remember specifics of my time with Jack for long stretches; gaps which I had attributed to lack of sleep. But perhaps I had been resting while dreaming of never being given rest, perhaps I—
“HOPE?”
I blinked. Is that—?
“Hope!” John called from the doorway before rushing in, cradling my cheek, staring into the eyes that could not meet his. “Are you alright? Are you hurt? Oh, dear!” He checked me all over before looking at my legs, for my right thigh to tense and lift just enough to signal ‘yes’, I was okay.
But I didn’t know what was going on. This all felt so… familiar, and yet…
“It’s alright… W-w-we… you’re home, you’re safe. Hope, it’s over.”
Lifting me up to sit on the chesterfield, unkempt locks of golden hair fell around my view, and my head ached dearly, but John held me tightly with his strong arms, and inside I… was still so confused. To hear my name said aloud was like music to my ears! To feel his attentions on me, his focus, and recognition… it was over?
But how could this be? How had my transformation been avoided? For the past four months, every ounce of effort to escape my destiny had been met by equal or greater punishment. I had resigned myself. I had been entirely doomed, but— The sound of glass crashing around me ricocheted through my memory, and I realised John… saved me!
My legs shivered with excitement and relief and I practically threw myself into him — which did not amount to much, but he held me all the same. A torrent of relief — its volume and intensity indescribable in words — coursed through me and in that moment I felt truly inhuman in my inability to hug him and look him in the eye and thank him. Instead I just thrust my soft breasts firmer into him, in silent beseechment to hold me tighter. Tight as my corset, so I would truly feel it.
And he did. John understood and wrapped his strong arms around my tiny little frame, hands meeting my empty shoulders from behind… he kissed my cheek and my neck and — after brushing some specks of glass from my hair — he kissed my head.
“My dear Hope. I find myself in utter contempt of our marriage.” He whispered to me, like saying it any louder would resonate and fracture the ring on his finger. “What’s more, I feel an utter fool. After my self-pitying monologue yesterday evening… my inaction on your plight, my inability to see you for the woman I wed; even as you faced unimaginable changes, your generous spirit leant over to comfort me.” He was smiling in the most bitter way. “And it still took me until dawn to see the light. When I— I mean, I raced! I simply had to get to you before your appointment at the hospital. I saw Father’s carriage pulling out, and I just—”
He embraced me even tighter, fresh out of words. So it had indeed been him, the timid scientist whom I loved had come to save me! I admit at the time I could not understand what struck his memory, but with some rest I remembered: the silly way of asking for a kiss on our first courting, sitting in the garden and leaning over! A simple gesture between a young man and a doll with no way to reach out and beg — for either sex or salvation. I had simply cuddled closer and spurned some change in the world that chained me so tightly…
What I understood then, but couldn’t articulate, was that I could never let that be my only method of communication ever again. Living like a flower petal in the breeze, being blown around as the winds changed; I could never feel secure again.
Dear Reader, sometimes I still don’t.
Regardless, I needed to believe that there was a way for us Dolls to speak and not be spoken for. I needed to talk to John, and if my wilfulness soured our union — as I had worried when we married — his rash and heroic action saving my life only instilled in me confidence that he was not so fragile as I had once feared.
Truth be told, it was untenable; this rigid body designed for hollow idealism and carnality. With every curvy pliant muscle left in me, I needed to speak! I had hundreds of questions, all left stale and useless upon my twisting tongue, but the frantic squeezing of my thighs couldn’t really ask them, not without assistance. He noticed this time, thankfully.
“I admit… I p-p-put the letterboard away. Your sister didn’t take to it. I should have known— I have to go look in my study, but I will be back in just a moment, I promise.” He said with a kiss. “I need to know how this… how he stole you…”
I wanted to beg him not to leave, even just to bring me with him so I could be close; but if I was to explain what had happened — or indeed ask for a voice — I needed that old letterboard I had once spurned. Besides, I could not hold onto him or ask him to stay. John left me with a shake of his head, a Doll in a Doll’s room, and other than the bustle of the city out the window, the room became silent. I was left alone with fineries and the now-repaired vibrator stand in the corner.
Then I heard a click behind me.
At first fearful to move, the click repeated and I slowly recalled that John did not enforce those same strict protocols for his women as Jack or Father. There were no punishments just for shifting my seating or moving from where I had been set. Regardless, I remained in place for quite some time, mustering the courage just to turn around. I had been trained thoroughly, without hesitation, and each lapse in proper form was seared in my memory.
The click repeated.
I slowly moved my weak legs — feeling new aches and bruises from the crash — turning my vision by mere degrees until… there she was. My identical twin sister, perched on the other settee, vaguely facing me: prim and proper and dressed in the violets I had always been accustomed to, before. Of course she was here, this had been ‘her room’ for many months, but now — even dressed in my colour — she was at best a guest. Her face pouted and blinked at me blankly, with a deep blush to the cheeks on either side of the stopper filling her mouth. Across her forehead was a strip of off-white paper tape, scrawled with words I could not immediately discern: “NOT HOPE, DO NOT TRUST.”
“Shame on you.” I thought, responding with a little stamp of my heel. “How could you let this go so far?”
I wanted to ask John when he returned to put her somewhere else, out of my sight… but we were not in a country estate. John’s flat was posh but small. It only had a half-dozen rooms! Such was appropriate for a young man still making a name for himself, surely, but this was the ‘Doll’s Room’, and that is what we were. There was no better closet to stuff her inside, and I convinced myself out of my request even before he returned.
Dear Reader, when you are rendered voiceless for such a long time — even without education in stillness and passivity, I reckon — you find ways to convince yourself it was never necessary to have one… I was beginning to see this as I argued with myself.
Regardless, as angry at this traitor as I was, a trace of my resignation and acceptance from the prior evening still held true. Yet as I shivered and shook, the reality of how close I had come to annihilation still reverberated through me, making my stomach turn. I had to believe that my sister hadn’t had such an escape… that she ceased to be; that Jack excised her womanhood underneath the telly, like he said he had. Or that he drowned her in so much Society doctrine to snuff out any individuality left inside. I was left to assume that what sat across from me was the shell we had both once striven to become, and that which I now feared most. To think otherwise… I couldn’t ponder such betrayal.
And yet I did. I sat there and she clicked her heel and I stamped mine and it meant nothing and I couldn’t help but be furious with how she had resolved to be Jack’s pawn even in the safety of my home. With my name. With John’s ring hanging from her neck. With his cock thrusting in and out of her wicked nethers whenever he needed relief from a difficult equation…
I leant forward subtly, and heard the familiar steps of a maid coming in to lift me to my feet. I shuddered as those familiar hands of unforgiving clockwork gripped my waist and held me up, this time supporting me in my weak little mincing steps, not directing them; hopefully not stopping me when my goal was to inflict just a modicum of the pain I suffered under her husband. I felt furious and wilful and quite unlike the polite girl who curtseyed away her womanhood over a year before. Several steps was all it would take to bridge the gap before I could kick my sister and hurt her and—
The maid stopped me within a single step from my goal, and a hand reached out to grab the tape from her forehead and stick it to mine.
No no no no! Not again! I screamed inside my own head. With every ounce of strength left in this useless, ornamental body, I twisted my legs to wrestle myself from the maid’s grip! I stamped and struggled, but I could do almost nothing to push against the faceless automaton which had enforced my every move — made sure I was leisurely and proper — for the past three years. Something in its clockwork was making it do this, but I couldn’t ask and it couldn’t tell. There was no debating an automaid, it just made you comply. Either through gentler means, like a suggestive touch toward the right way to sit; or the strictness of school, gripping and forcing and reporting every minor infraction; or indeed the torturous jailor routine Jack had employed, almost caning for caning’s sake as long as the marks remained hidden from view.
In the futile struggles, my gag slipped out of my mouth and tumbled to the floor. Loose strings of lubricating drool splattered about as I blinked calmly, fighting for my life! I can’t go back! I can’t go back!
But the maid’s faintly whirring joints, if not quick, were iron in their inflexibility. Once it had two inert hands on my shoulders, gripping me on the symbols of my helplessness, I knew that I had lost. Any further kicking or jerking only sent my breasts flopping out of their measly cups in my half-torn dress. I began to silently sob again and felt my legs shaking and giving way under me—
And then an arm wrapped around my corseted waist from behind, whilst another — a woman’s arm with glove and all — reached past me and touched a particular spot on the back of my faceless servant’s neck, and it immediately released its grip, wavered, then collapsed, splayed out on the floor. Smitten with surprise, I could only blink at the open air where that malicious actor had stood mere moments ago, wondering who was holding me, saving me, putting me down on the settee next to my sister.
The woman didn’t say a word, and she didn’t let go either. She sat with me and held me until my fleur-de-cou had ceased its fluttering and my chest returned to a steady but shallow pace of breath. I felt her modest chest pressing against my side, and her soothing presence too, and I longed to turn my head to see, but—
John came rushing in, “Wha— oh, Priscilla, I thought you were studying! W-w-what happened?!”
The house remained silent and no one answered. Of course, I had to remind myself: This was Pris! She was still beholden to the Songbird collar, and neither I nor my sister could make a peep, either. John was the lone voice in his home — as the Society would have approved of.
Some deep-seated assumption in me shook loose, an understanding that wasn’t so understood. It was as if I was now conscious of that part of me, explaining… Well, who needs a voice when he can plainly see the automaid on the floor, with the tape label in one hand and our two lockets pouring out of its apron pocket… or, more succinctly, What needs explaining when I have a Man to take care of my every need?
But even as obvious as it seemed, as red handed as my automaid was, as brilliant of a mind John had as a fizzycist; he looked at me, then at Priscilla holding his emotional wreck of a Doll, and said, “So I p-p-presume we need a new automaid.”
No! I breathed, a fresh string of drool spilling from my bottom lip. My subtle shake was communicative enough, and Priscilla stood up — still dressed in meagre fashions, counterbalanced with a unique confidence I had never commanded — and wagged her finger at my husband. What followed was an elaborate game of charades, using every gestural trick and facial expression left to her — all the body language I lacked — to tell him what had just happened.
“The maids swapped out the lockets… and it was their doing all along? Oh, of course… the incident… the technician Father hired!” John stroked his chin. “He must have given them a new instruction-set whilst I was— oh my carelessness! That snake! Yes we will get a new one and start with a clean slate. How I will afford such an expense I cannot fathom but we can—”
Priscilla hit his forehead lightly with the heel of her palm, and I would’ve yelped in surprise if I could’ve. “She didn’t!” To treat a man with such irreverence, well, it wasn’t only impossible for me, it was unthinkable!
But the fierce woman’s face said it all, her ever-furrowed brow and free arms akimbo: John was being more than a bit unimaginative. She pointed at me and then crossed her arms as if she were cold— no, scared. A gesture to the appliance on the floor then me, then a slice across the throat: “How do you not see? One of those automatons forced your wife to submit to your wretched father for months, and you still think she will feel safe with one caring for her?”
He looked at me then at his feet. “Yes… I see what you mean,” and then gesticulated with the letterboard, “but these girls— they can’t even feed themselves, Pris. They need a carer.”
The woman who had once scorned my way of life now raised her hand, then pointed to herself. “I will.”
I so dearly wanted to hug her at that moment.
“You?! Pris, what about our work? I have grown used to— you’re an essential part of my laboratory, even if no one knows it. And you don’t need the money, what with the stipend—”
Priscilla grabbed his hand and held a finger to her neck, a gesture I admit would’ve been too intimate for my tastes if John hadn’t recoiled at the implications himself. She touched mine, feeling for a pulse, and then gestured back and forth. After a moment of him feeling the rhythm of her heartbeat, the message was clear: “Hope needs a person to care for her, with flesh and blood. A person.” She pointed to the mass of plastic, metal, and finery on the floor, and made a gesture of separation. “If not, dolls beget dolls. She will never recover.” Her hands flew to her chest, her heart, to reiterate, “I will do it.”
The ‘H’ calligraphed across my maid’s white face seemed to have lost some lustre, and I swung out a heel to kick it just for good measure.
The two adults in the room couldn’t help but straighten up and laugh at that — remembering they weren’t alone in this — and John knelt before me. “Well Hope. What do you think?”
He placed his hands on my thighs, and said, “Right for Yes, Left for No,” as if I had forgotten; as if I hadn’t been waiting for this opportunity for months. He was asking me for what thoughts were hidden behind this simple, blank expression. He saw me.
The Lady in me recoiled, like it had the last time he asked me… so long ago… but that loose brick in the foundation of my sense of Dollhood and self, it fractured and came unmortared. I finally saw something Priscilla already knew: I wasn’t ever going to be a Doll again, not like I had once wanted, or expected to be. I had been treated too harshly and without recourse for far too long to ever trust again. Even John — looking at me with his empathetic, querying eyes — I couldn’t even fully trust him after his blindness to my suffering. It pained me to admit this, but it was true.
I squeezed my thigh, over and over, a signal to him I had more to say. John almost looked giddy to hold the letterboard up again and start scanning the alphabet like we had practised back then.
“T-H-A-N— Thank you, P-R-I— Priscilla.” he finished for me.
My new caretaker sat beside me, patting my shoulder gently in acknowledgement, and tried pointing to the letters on the alphabet board before me, but within moments her hands were clenching and touching her throat until a little cough escaped her. Quiet, but loud with implications.
John intervened. “Pris has to speak with her b-b-body, in a way you cannot. Any time she tries to communicate in codes and letters… her collar… it seems to know.”
Priscilla recovered and put her hand on my lap reassuredly, close to John’s, and I wondered for not the first or last time if they had grown intimate in my absence. But that was not an urgent matter.
I signalled again, and John translated.
“I-M-I-S-S— missed? Y-O— me?” His face grew ashen as he realised, with untold guilt, that he could not say the same. “I… truly worried after you when you— no, when Chastity shut down in your stead. Before, I could feel you on the verge of opening up to me. With Chas, there was just… nothing. Priscilla told me not to bother, but I couldn’t let you go. I kept trying with the letterboard, day after day, but… I admit your sister has spent little time outside of this room in recent weeks. I still cannot fathom what Father did to her… and to you too—” Priscilla seemed to bristle and John stopped his train of thought. “Right. What matters is… I still love you, Hope. You never ceased being my wife, and you still are, regardless of what happened.”
To say a weight fell off my delicate shoulders, well… such was doomed to understatement. In my abduction, with every thrust of Jack’s cock deeper into my holes, with every vibration around his gifts; I had agonised about my sinful spoiling for my true husband. I had been bedded out of wedlock countless times, and I was undoubtedly an adulteress in some form of the word. My willingness was irrelevant in that regard, but what was worse; to say I never desired it after weeks of denial would have been a lie.
It was complicated, messy, in a society that viewed virginity and purity in very black and white terms.
Now that my survival was ensured… with an honest man and the luxury of morals, I couldn’t help but remember I was still the girl who had rubbed her own nethers on the floor in his presence! He hadn’t yet, it seemed, but I could hardly live with myself; with my actions and the actions taken on me! With this stain inside me! All the sensual skills I had been taught or compelled into for my husband’s use had been perverted and abused by Jack. I could see now on John’s face: he wasn’t comfortable with the knowledge his father had lain with and used his Doll… but he also wasn’t disowning me. He was touching me gingerly, not like a spent and soiled object, but with the intention of healing; moving forward.
But what of Jack? Had he been injured in the crash? He would certainly not abide by being left wife-less! Did Father know of my plight? What were we to do with Chastity? There were far too many questions for this simple panel with letters being recited one-by-one…
I jostled my knees and he began again. “I-N-E-E— you need? What do you need? You need me? That is hardly love— why, we— ” I stomped my feet and furiously cut him off, a tantrum I hadn’t allowed myself for… a long while. I needed so many things… I needed comfort, safety, love. I needed to be of service to him and used regularly to fulfil my role. I need to be— yes, I still needed to be a Doll, of sorts. But after so many years of others speaking for me, completing my sentences, assuming my approval, and taking without a care for what I thought of it: this was exactly the point I was trying to make!
With a reproachful glare from Pris, he waited for my legs to settle, and apologised to his blank little dolly. “I’m sorry, dear. Let’s try again. ‘I need… A-V-O-I-C-E.’” This time he didn’t cut me off, or guess. He just nodded. “Yes, Hope. I think that’s long overdue.”