On the way towards the car, in a back alley it reeked of rain-soaked rot. It clung to the bricks like old skin—sticky with a thousand invisible insects that gnawed the edges of memory. Maryanne led, cross a cold bite against her chest. Marietta walked besides Maryanne, fingers twitching at the bone blade's hilt. Eyes darting to shadows gasping for air, all the syllables hungry and sharp. Anne Faith trailed. Pendant humming low. Vibration pressing her skin like being under water.
Dan is at the end of the alley, under a sagging awning. Suit loose, but freshly ironed. "Ladies." Voice threading chemical air. Syllables like twisted red wire. No smile, chin squared only. Body a promise of secrets unplumbed.
They gathered, in a half-circle. Silence stretching over them, sliding them towards Dan, like the river's pull.
Maryanne felt it, a pause before the crushing tide exposes bones. Dan reached into his coat. Pulled out a Hex-doll. Small, and ragged. Stitched with hair not quite human. Empty buttons for eyes, seemed alive. Evil twitched once, Quasi-life pulsing in the seams—like the Mirror's unholy reflection. Hunger stirring outside boundaries not yet explored.
"Power," Dan whispered. No explanation, He gestures: his hands trembling, but still upon eyesight. Air thickening, with stenches too rancid for noses, ritualistic memories for Maryanne. Dan asks politely "Care to join me?" "Yes but only because we know your lying," Marietta said... Dan pricked Marietta's thumb with a needle, blood welling black. Maryanne said, "Don't you think we'll ever do this again, I'm only allowing it because their curious." Dan smeared Marietta's blood on the doll's heart. Dan's hunger deepened, not absence but presence. From the ground reality fades as a passing wind, distorted visions fraying at the edges.
Marietta tasted it. Sulfur and ash on her tongue. Temptation soft as surrender. "What... does it mean?" Her voice cracked, hand hovering over her wide mouth.
It means your blood acts as a mirror to Monique's soul.
Dan's eyes flicked with seduction. " The doll binds and breaks." Dan held the doll up. The alleyway exhaled grief. Visions flickered—a diagram of threads unknown. Like a map on a table with the wrong directions: rows of tangles, columns of wrong paths. Fractured faces of the past weaved within. "Monique a widow, Forty-something," Dan said. Pain and loss etched deep, her eyes hollowed out by her husband's absence, cancer or accident, didn't matter.
Anne Faith gripped her pendant, it throbbed—like a heartbeat in a coffin. "Monique's real." "Not a vision. The Crowned-Deep pressing in, drowned sorrow in her gaze."
Maryanne nodded, cross warming. There it was again that protective flare in her gut—like for her unborn children in visions pasts. "Show us, I doubt this is even real.
Dan Chuckles, "Even doubt takes sides," Dan said. "There's complicity in that..." Words hung like a jagged double edged sword.
Dan said follow me. His fingers twitching holding the twisted doll. Dan interrupts her, he plucks a hair from her head and twists it on the doll; "Well that's the last piece to put this old witch out of her misery."
Marietta looks at him curious but afraid gripping her pendant.
Dan twisted her hair to a thread on the doll's neck. Monique's gasp echoed. A spectral cry in an alley's bend. Slumped against the wall, her dress stained with vomit. Her hair wet but brittle, she wishes for the tide to take her. "End it" She whispered, voice barely audible. Her eyes meeting Dan's across the void, with a gaze comfortable with suffering, body sagging low, defeated.
Monique said, "This is a world of suffering, I wish not to be born." "Not suicidal per se—but I'm tired of living." Monique's voice turned to scripture, a prayer sharpened into a lament. "Job Excerpt (KJV)."
After the sun turns to blood, and the clock ticks away... When reality frays between night and day, Woe unto you that desire the day of the LORD! What does it profit you? The day of the LORD is darkness, and not light. As if a woman did flee from a lion, and a starving bear met her. Monique opened her mouth, and cursed her day. "Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a woman child conceived.
Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it. As for that night, let darkness seize upon it; let it not rejoice among the days of the year; let it come not into the number of the months.
Lo, let that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein. Let them curse it that curse the day. Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?
Dread coiled around them, a rituals tension thickening the air—pressing in like solid mass. Smells sharpened: burnt rubber and old sewer. The bloody Hex-doll mixing with rot and curse.
Maryanne's palm gripped her cross tightly and nodded in complicity. Marietta's breath hitched. The Hex-doll seemed alive, Its Threads like an alternate dimension full of razor-sharp teeth.
Reality broke further. Bricks subtly rearranging—whispers from nowhere. Reflections in puddles moving independently and shadows-stretching unnaturally. Puddles turning black. Graffiti morphing into warnings. Nearby rats twitching—not alive, but convulsing.
Time distorted, Dan pinched the doll's heart. Slowly, and deliberately. In a flash visions spanned decades in Monique's mind. Every heartbeat a hammer on a coffin's lid, that refused to open. Centuries of grief echoing, looping sequences. Her husband's face flashing, dissolving into flashes of torment. Lost moments pressing her deeper onto the floor. Internal terror vivid as a dream, the weight of all her choices. Lost but too weary to surrender: "This endless ache... nothing fills it." Psychological drag pulling her down.
Maryanne internalized it—Marietta felt ash thicken in her throat. Anne Faith's pendant throbbed harder— an echo of suffering that had lasted too long.
The Hex-doll let out an eerie cry. Quasi-life: threads pulsing like veins.
Monique crawling, gasping. It mimicked her breaths, feeding on her past choices. Monique clutched her chest, no scream. Just a loud weary wheeze wishing to end her suffering. Her shoulders curling in, Buckling like a melting candle—she carried within her more suffering then a grieving mother. Horror bloomed grotesque. Veins pulsing black blood under flesh—visible like graphs of decayed bones, patterns like bruises spreading in rows.
The cost of suffering mapped on her arms—forty years, one loss, infinite aches. Skin dry and hasn't showered in weeks. Shadows dripping from her eyes. What was once a happy person, now has skeletal outlines pressing against flesh. She dropped to her knees her in temporary pain. Dan twisted harder. Snap, the thread broke
A smile flashes, a relief, almost an escape from the tugging vacancy of her soul.
She gasped, and let out a final plea "I wish to live, now spare me."
The alley waited.
Dan smirking "Fine, fine.... Have it your way, after all I can only end what is already miserable.
Something twitched.
Clinging to life.
Monique convulsed. Arching. Then still. Physical and visceral blood pooling beneath. Red moonlight pierces through, as Monique's eyes open. She stares blankly, dead inside, but spared to live another day. The Doll steamed and boiled with life. Threads crawling. Print pulsing—each blood drop evaporating, a small hunger satiated.
Silence fell. Maryanne felt weight—psychological, emotional. Like hell's pull. Monique unintentionally invited a soft surrender to the world's fists, and paid the price. Suspense hung in the air faded. Marietta's hand trembled, while Anne Faith's pendant dimmed.
Dan slipped the doll into his coat. "This is power," he said. His eyes cut through them. "No more lies." Then he turned, vanishing into the alley's sour breath.
Maryanne pressed a hand to her chest. "I feel buried alive. Crushed under a sandstorm."
Marietta replied, "That's a sticky slope, sticky with a thousand invisible insects that gnaw at memory."
Anne Faith's fingers clutched her cross. "Mom's right. Curses are real. Thank Jesus Christ Dan didn't finish the job.
The ladies pick up Monique's pain-stricken body and call 911, leaving the problem to the hotel manager, paying him as they left.