Chapter
3 – Eyes Forced Open
As a light begins to hit her eyes,
Elena wakes up in her bed. She looks around the room to see that she’s back
home.
“Is this real?” she asks herself as
she struggles to remember where she was before.
Her mom and dad enter the room with
a bowl of soup and a glass of water.
“Mom? Dad?”
“Hello, Elena. We’ve brought you
some food to help you feel better,” her dad says.
“Your friend came over to see how
you were doing,” her mom says as Mia enters the room.
“Mia?”
“Hey, Elena. I told your parents everything
about what happened, even the parts you missed.”
“What did I miss?”
“A doll managed to make to the third
floor and helped be free from the mansion that we were trapped in. It was all
thanks to you.”
“Thanks to me? What did I do?”
“You triggered a trap that the
other doll was going to walk into. Don’t you feel anything?”
Elena looks at her legs and arms to
see that they’re cracked. She’s barely able to move them though she has more
movement in her arms.
“Take it easy. We’re going to
properly put you back together, so you don’t lose your original arms and legs.
Once you’re all better, we’ll throw a big party.”
“Doesn’t that sound great, Elena?” her
mom asks.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, well. I’ll let you rest for
now so you can get better quicker. See you later. Elena!”
“See you.”
Elena’s dad puts the tray of food
on Elena’s lap.
“Eat slowly, honey,” her dad says.
Her mom and dad sit by her bedside
and hold her.
“We’re sorry if we scared you,” her
mom says.
“We promise not to anymore. We’ll
be gentle with you even when you mess up,” her dad reassures.
Despite the warming feeling, Elena feels
that something is off. Her eyes feel a tingling in them as if they’re telling
her things aren’t how they should be. She moves her arms around and pushes her
head forward only to hit an invisible wall.
“I knew it,” Elena says.
“I can’t fool you anymore, can I?” a
feminine voice says.
The illusion of her home fades as
Elena begins to see that’s she’s in a box that collectible dolls in except this
one is her size and her hands, legs, and head are strapped to keep her from
moving. She sees that she’s on top of a shell with other dolls who are in the
same position. In front of her is the same eyeless doll that she saw before
that Mia said was the adult’s lapdog except, she appears normal with eyes where
they should be and her mouth not in a permanent smile.
“You’re that girl Mia told me about.”
“What did she say? That I’m a
lapdog?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, do you believe her?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Why did you try to
come up to the third floor if you don’t know?”
“Because I want to try to talk to
you and the adult to set us free.”
“Really? What were you going to
tell us? Do you have a big speech for us?”
“No.”
“So, you were just going to wing
it?”
“Kind of.”
“Do you know that no one has been
able to reach us on the third floor?”
“No.”
“Hmm. Are you still going to try in
spite of what I told you?”
“Yes.”
“Ha! You were going to just go up
to us without a plan?”
“Yes. I want to go home to my
parents.”
“So, you don’t hate your parents?”
“No. I love them.”
“Huh. That’s a first. Every other
doll that I talked to hates their parents because their parents hurt or abused
them.”
“Why does this place attract those
kinds of dolls?”
“It’s Mia’s doing. She’s the real villain
here. She believes that her parents abused her and she thinks that she can use
the other dolls to help her get to them.”
“How? Didn’t you and the adult set
up these traps for us?”
“No. Mia did it or rather, she set
up the ground floor and third floor’s traps, while we made the first and second
floor’s trap.”
“Why?”
“To stall until Mia’s powers exhaust
themselves. Take a look at this.”
A vision enters Elena’s mind of Mia
with two mature dolls who she assumes are her parents. She watches as Mia’s mom
hits her then apologizing. Mia runs away from her parents in tears before
running back and morphing them into the same body. Her parents count Mia’s magic
with magic of their own that causes an explosion.
Once the vision clears, Elena asks,
“What happened there and after that?”
“Look, I can’t explain everything here.
That’s the best that her parents could give me to give other dolls like you. You’ll
have to trust me especially when you get to the third floor, okay?”
“Okay. You can trust me.”
“I hope so.”
“I’ll show you that you can.”
The box that she’s trapped in falls
off the large shelf and onto the ground. Elena’s strings are gone and the box
she’s in is opened. Once she crawls out of the box, she looks up at the high heights
that she fell off and survives without a scratch. Looking up, she can see that
a least a hundred dolls are trapped on the shelves in a disillusion.
“Is this supposed to be convincing?
Well, at least they aren’t being hurt or having nightmares,” Elena says aloud.
She looks around the room for an exit
and sees only two doors behind her. One leads back down while the other leads up.
In the room with the staircase that goes up, Elena finds another door.
Wondering what the door leads to, she opens it to see a room where Mia is
playing with the other dolls. Mia sees
Elena and runs over to the door.
“Hey, Elena! You made it past the
trap on the second floor!”
“I wasn’t really a trap like the
ground floor. Neither was the one on the first floor.”
“There are other kinds of traps
than the ones that hurt you. The traps on the first and second floors are meant
to pacify you. To make you want to stay in the mansion and to trust the evil
people keeping us here.”
“Oh. What about the third floor?”
“The lapdog told you that I set
that trap, right? And the ground floor one too?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s funny she thinks that because
I have no clue what’s on the third floor. You’d think that if I was the real villain,
I would know what it is, but everyone who comes back from that floor says
something different. Isn’t that right?”
Several dolls tell Elena differing tales
of the kinds of things on the third floor such as a monster, a maze with all dead
ends, and a freezing cold that would somehow make pieces of them fall off.
“I see.”
“Be brave, Elena, because a bad attitude
will get you nowhere.”
The dolls cheer on Elena as she nervously
walks up the stairs bracing herself for whatever comes next.
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