The Pupa Woman (II.I)
Chapter 2:1
Hello DEAR READER,
The following is Chapter 2:1 from my first novel, The Pupa Woman. You can read Chapter 1:5 here.
You can get the PDF over at my gumroad! ^_^
Available from our unfortunate tech-overlords over at Amazon both in paperback and eBook.
II. – VIRGIN BLUES
Or well, now that she thinks of it… that “thank you” did not come from. Susie opened her eyes and saw through the thin openings the unmistakable shades of movement, impressions of shadows passing by the closet caused by a lamp switched on. She tried to fight her sleep paralysis and pull her head up but could not, finding her neck stuck into the corner with not much motivation to wrestle herself free from this compact position. She heard the door be firmly shut with an assertive shove and a deep voice shook her ears and commanded her attention. She used the school girl costumes to pull herself up towards the slits within the closet, trying to focus her attention on the figures which moved towards the bed.
“Just sit on the bed girls,” assuming that the deep voice must be that of the distinguished doctor and realized that the situation was far worse than she’d ever find herself capable of imagining. The two girls seemed incredibly short, childishly thin and still full of red shades on their faces which were accentuated by the large bows which hung from their pigtails. She saw trepidation in the two figures, feeling uncomfortable under the larger hands which helped them up on the bed. She tried to position her head; only thin strips of the three figures could be seen through the doors of the closet. She saw the larger hands slowly– but surely– push down on slender shoulders which only resisted with tense shakes of unease.
“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you,” words which sent Susie into a frenzy, burning at the edges of her nerves, an expulsion of heat forced from her sweaty head. Her train of thought led her mind towards fantasies of violence, to burst forth from the closet and bash who she assumed was the doctor until those large hands would forever remain inanimate… to hit his central cortex with the metal edges of her camera and emerge as a hero to these two young women… dropping his body out of the window as a warning to all the predators who’d think about it.
“Be calm,” the deep voice said. She saw the infantile head of a young girl lying right on the bed, with those large hands feeling at the edges of her neck. Susie soon realized that what she was seeing was not a heat-induced episode of delirium and that she really was watching the folds of neck skin be pulled back to reveal metal screws and linings. The fellow who seemed to be pretty proficient with his big hands was now turning the young girl’s head around multiple times, undoing her head as if it were a screw until it simply fell off from its body which now remained limp with a stump of a neck where once there was a head. Now a younger voice spoke, polite and cute with childish softness punctuating each nasal sound with high-pitched whine.
“What are you doing to Rachel?” Even though her small body shook, Susie felt no terror in her voice which remained stable and efficient in its intonation as her lifeless eyes watched the dude reveal the circuitry behind the eyelids of the disembodied head. The deeper voice spoke once again as Susie tried to stretch her legs out, figuring out how she could jump forth from the closet in a heroic manner.
“Don’t worry sweetie pie; none of this is hurting her.” The young girl on the bed continued to shake; as if it understood the implications while fragments of words spilled from her mouth… learning from her sister of an impending fate she could not comprehend, unwritten in every sense of the word.
“I would just like to know, mister.” Susie sees the larger hands let go of the head and instead fall onto the baby-skinned hands of the young girl.
“These components are worth a lot, you know.” The young girl pulled her hands away, they hung without further movement. Her face was blank, unresponsive to the implications told to her.
“It’s time for the next generation to have their hour in the spotlight. You know this could never last,” he sez. This must be the good doctor himself. Her hands begun to shake as Susie watched, paralyzed by the spectacle of her descent into a nervous failure.
“I’m so sorry,” and tears begun to stream from the young girl’s china-doll face– neither of them knew if the salty liquid was genuine or simply oozed itself because it felt it had to– a principle empathetic response programmed into her by, well Susie wasn’t sure right now.
“I’m so sorry I’m not older or prettier, that I’m not,” but she stopped herself, as if realizing that there was something tremendously stupid in apologizing for something she could not change… apologizing for a fate that she’d carried within her body since the moment she’d been born. Susie watched as the young girl now rose from the bed, her shaky arms extended away from herself as fearful stutters & incoherency followed from her apologies.
Dr. Sanyo-Infinity quietly watched the young girl move away from the bed, feeling himself stunted by the unexpected shaking… trying to communicate incredible fear, overwhelming all of its neural nets until finally realizing that she’d want to keep her head on the neck and the only way she’d do that was to stop her ridiculous shaking and make a mad dash for the door. Susie could not see where she went but she did hear that unmistakable struggling with a locked door, hands fumbling with metal as panicked whimpers grew in frequency… and she watched Dr. Sanyo-Infinity leap from the bed like some wrestler and throw himself onto the young girl who was now screaming for help and it was at this very moment, giving in to that nobler instinct, that Susie propelled herself using the clothing rack and forced her body through the doors of the closet, taking a tumble head-first onto the floor which made her vision go completely blank for a couple of seconds, trying to pull on the blankets of the bed in some attempt to get herself on her feet.
“Who the fuck are you?” Sanyo-Infinity screamed and once Susie’s vision returned, she saw the distinguished doctor with his legs between the young girl’s head and his hands lodged firmly into her neck folds as her legs and arms thrashed around. Susie pulled herself up using the bed posts, trying to hold her camera in some useful direction as she yelled obscenities in a hoarse voice.
“Hey, stop pulling that girl’s head off,” Susie heard herself say with impressive authority. The doctor loosened his grip on the young girl’s head who was just as confused, her tired arms and legs returning to rest on the cold wooden floor.
“That’s right, Doctor” Susie sez even though no-one asked a question. She’d gotten a migraine now and held onto her head as her blood pressure returned to normal. “I’m not one of your bimbo videogirls; I’m here to bust your ass,” though Susie was getting quite scared so she kinda slowly walked backwards towards the window and wondered if there was time & enough trash on the ground floor for an easy escape– not sure whether to go through with this rescue.
“Doctor? You don’t really know what’s going on here, do you?” Dr. Sanyo-Infinity rising from his seat on the young girl’s neck, no longer clenching it… suppose he was unsure of whether Susie was an insane solitary girl-creep with a camera or a threat to the entire operation. “Who sent you here?” he asked with half-hearted malice in his voice.
Susie was now pushing herself up against the curtained windows, trying to hold her camera steady. The doctor wasn’t much taller than Susie was but there was malevolence in his eyes, a brutality which would threaten to crush Susie’s delicateness with a tight grip around her flabby throat– pulling the skin from underneath to reveal Susie’s own flesh- ‘n-blood circuitry pumping uneasily. She was now trying to figure out a way to save her own hide, done playing the hero and now pathetic enough to escape harm… yet, as the voice in the back of her head screamed about how some are only more motivated when faced with something pathetic.
“The Duchess told me, like everything,” Susie said with the most confident voice she could muster as her eyes went from Dr. Sanyo-Infinity to the young girl who was now pushing herself up against the door with her hand on the handle… hoping for an opportunity to escape, perhaps while the good doctor was in the midst of decapitating Susie in the same manner she’d just watched her sister be subjected to. “That’s right, everything.”
The doctor understood, his face suddenly growing meek and hopeless… realizing that the big secret had burst in a manner which had ballooned out of their control. Rumors about the nature of the idol industry were released in small & simplistic bursts, allowing the most outlandish ideas to feed the curiosity of the public yet never going beyond subtle innuendo. Of course, Susie didn’t really know anything about the big secret but that didn’t matter… the act of simply pretending to know about the big secret might have given her reprieve only for now, a lowly girl-creep feeding herself off the decaying corpses would be very far down on the early-retirement list or so she reasoned with herself to calm her hypertension.
“So, wanna take some pictures?” The doctor’s sudden good spiritedness made Susie sick to her stomach. “Hey, the doctor and her will pose for you,” and he grabbed the young girl by the hair and pulled her towards Susie as if daring her to take a compromising picture. Susie had her camera in her hands but felt herself incapable of depressing the shutter, she was unsure the man would leave even the faintest impression on her film. There was a reason she’d ended up here, though she might have told herself before that it was a mark of some higher intelligence, some sort of clairvoyance… in reality it was her stupidity, the very thing which had made her so expendable in the first place. As Susie stood there quietly, she ran a thousand simulations per minute in her head and formed hypotheses based on that which she knew– which was not a whole lot, by the way. She thought of Mr. Aiwa-Goldstar and how he could have known that only Susie would be so stupid as to land ass-first into the hands of the Duchess, how he could have known that only Susie would be so stupid as to become a messenger of death itself who trusted only the currents of chaos with no regards to her own health or really anything except the promise of money to feed her gluttony… never even catching the name of a man she only supposes would be the Dr. Sanyo-Infinity worth photographing, worth peeking in on. She was simply too fucking sad now to press a button, even as the supposed “Dr. Sanyo-Infinity” mocked Susie’s intentions by forcing the young girl onto her knees and ignoring the horrible pleas for mercy as he violently yanked on her head.
And then, a screaming came across the sky… no, it’s too late now and Susie didn’t remember much of what happened next, though she remembers a feeling of being brutally slammed into the walls, and shards of hot glass falling onto her back and legs. There was a terrible ringing in her ears and once the haziness of her vision dissipated, she’d found the strength to uncurl herself from a ball and look towards the devastated windows where a figure stood between pits of fire and jets of smoke. She looked around and saw the doctor taking cover behind the bed with his back covered in hot ash while the young girl with her water-damaged face held the body of her decapitated sister in her arms as sparks shot from an exposed area on her neck– overcome with the feeling that death was really imminent. The figure gradually revealed itself by stepping through the smoke, dressed in a bizarre getup with a knee-length skirt and a black petticoat with matching corset and dark red knee-length socks. It held its hands on its waist and declared in a loud voice that no harm will come to Judy as long as she was around. Susie panics, her fight-flight response overruling all other rational thought-processes. The figure reacts within microseconds, pulling up on the hem of its skirt with delicate movements– a missile descended down from underneath its frilly garment and with great velocity flew towards Susie who now felt her body falling into the closet for cover. That sensation of being enveloped by darkness again; she holds herself together as she feels hot metal clatter onto her legs, her hearing decimated by the incredible force of the explosion which seemed to be impossibly close. Susie looked behind her from within the closet and saw that the spot where once the young girl held close her headless sister slick with tears of grief had now become a crater of burning metal and plastic dripping with dye-colored oil.
The figure walks up the closet and moves her head down to peek into the wooden container, watching Susie curl herself up as much as she could with whimpering cries for mercy. There was a brief moment of eye-contact between the two, Susie recognizing within the cold & remorseless face the shapes & bones of Judy herself though there was no expression nor nervous brow but only the empty static eyes & the sharp edges of elevated cheekbones. Her perfectly formed lips were shiny like polished steel– spelling out the symbols tattooed on the side of her leg, “Lo-li-ta 1-0-8,” with rehearsed movements. She thought of that special “Judy Smile,” its endearing ugliness too human to avoid cringe; the figure simply stared for a couple of seconds, as if silently processing the meaning of this interaction between two creatures– perhaps the love at first sight she’d been programmed to recognize.
“_,” the figure turned its attention towards who she’s still believed could be Dr. Sanyo-Infinity– Susie assuming that the figure’s response came in recognition of some codename, trying to hear through the stinging pains & tinnitus but unable to.
“_,” Susie would have taken great enjoyment out of that if she wasn’t trying to make herself extremely small in the hopes of avoiding the next ballistic weapon.
“_,” the figure was completely neutral in expression as Dr. Sanyo-Infinity stroked his soot-covered face out of nervousness. The figure spoke in clear sentences, pausing between each thought with the intention towards maximum efficiency– a distinct lack of warmth was palpable even if one could not hear the words.
“_,” the figure announced with complete sincerity. Susie realized that Lolita 108 was related to Judy in more ways than simply their facial structure, though she was unwilling to accept the conclusion which had laid itself so bare before her.
“_,” Dr. Sanyo-Infinity tried to reason with trembling words and flop-sweat. Even though he held onto Lolita 108’s hands with an attempt at intimacy, there was incredible fear in his face as if he knew that her power had already outgrown far beyond his own. “_.”
“_,” Susie almost hearing the beginnings of a melody within Lolita 108’s faint speech patterns and pondered the strangeness present in the melodramatic contours of its voice.
“_,” Susie tried to organize her thoughts, so many of which had now begun to overwhelm her neural net. Lolita 108’s existence was proof that something had fallen out of control, a big secret which had already begun to implode far before Susie had involved herself. Her intuition said that Judy was somewhere, alive and disconnected from the rest of the world and willing to live in complete isolation. Just as the young girl had readjusted its circuits & capabilities to the concept of fear and impending death, Lolita 108 had now repurposed its superior combat capabilities to understand its own nature. From within its systems & programming emerged a realization that it could not complete its purpose yet at the same time accept death whenever it was convenient to its creators. Lolita 108 and perhaps Judy as well had cultivated a will to live, grown from the orders & commands which formed the only purpose within their lives. Just as Judy had to love & sing, Lolita 108 had to kill– and it would kill anything which stood in the way of its continued function to kill, incapable of doing anything else… from within its unsophisticated set of rules emerged a sophisticated entity.
“_,” the good doctor said as it tightened the bow on Lolita 108’s corset with the pride of a father… though she remained absolutely neutral in her expression even after Dr. Sanyo-Infinity tried to smile and appeal to the programming he believed must still be somewhere deep inside. Lolita 108 had no expression, no empathetic response to the large hands which had found themselves near her body. Perhaps the good doctor Sanyo-Infinity believed that a simple touch with one’s hands could re-humanize the destructive teenager.
“_,” he said with terror in his eyes– he wondered if her filial response routines were still functioning, not repurposed in service of her brutality.
Susie realized the good doctor was mistaken and looked away… opening her eyes after the exceptionally loud splat which rattled her heart to see that the good doctor’s blood had completely covered the remaining three walls in dark crimson colors, his twitching corpse laying in two by the side of the bed. Lolita 108 quietly stood by the pile of meat, her entire body covered in his blood and her hair turning deep black as thick viscera fell from her head. Susie calmly pulled herself out from the crimson-drenched closet which had protected her, shaking as her sneakers stepped into the warm pool of blood which had now begun to rapidly expand and spread throughout the floor. It was as red as her dreams had been; now realizing as the horrible smell of iron filled her nostrils that the boundaries between the imaginary and her physical reality had indeed become completely blurred ‘n she tried to keep those mooncakes in by suppressing her gagging as the spit ‘tween her teeth & gums take on some wretched flavor. The guts of what was once a human-being hung from the still ceiling-fan, his petrified face capturing a single expression of horror in one instance of time as goo continued to slip down the walls. If Susie had believed what she was seeing, she might have had a violent response… yet the surprisingly vibrant and rich color, the white & red texture like tomatoes & cheese thrown up onto walls, made her unsure, incapable of comprehending the fact that she had really just missed Lolita 108’s bifurcation of a person she first believed must have been her creator– or maybe the teenage sex-bot’s ambivalence was proof that Susie had been fooled or tricked somehow, an expendable lure to put the plans of others into place… the right answer was that she simply didn’t know; without the drama and emotional exposition of TV, it’s hard to remember if it even happened.
Susie felt a daze as she shuffled towards the smoldering remains of what was once a windowed wall decorated with curtains. Only she and the missile-armed sex-bot were the survivors of the messy & destructive proceedings which had occurred in this modest hotel room, naturally leading Susie to make comparisons. Their methods might have been different– extremely different, with Susie dragging the camera along the floor by its strap as Lolita 108 simply remained still– yet their goals appear to have interceded, designed with a similar program yet to reach its conclusion. She felt an odd sort of sickness welling within her brain, visions of shapes and numbers beginning to blur the blood-covered walls and entrails-decorated furniture while her consciousness slowly dripped away. There was only one thing left to do, which was to exit the room before anyone could indeed pin it all on Susie as a patsy– arguing that a sex-bot simply follows instructions while Susie had the will & ability to stop it all. Susie uses her hands to feel at the splintery edges, not realizing or just not caring how huge of a fall it really was and thus she tumbled over the charred wood and slammed loudly onto the ground covered with smoldering metal and broken wood.
She screamed as she tried to wrestle herself away from the singing touch of the glass & molten computer chip, finding herself rolling down a pile of ash and falling onto the cold & wet concrete of the tiny alleyway which led to the metro as many cats meowed with horror at what they’d seen moments ago. Susie puts herself back on her pained ass and looks around to see that all the cats had begun to scratch & paw at the ash, trying to get at something and looking at Susie with their eyes as if saying “oh please won’t you help, oh please!” Susie pulled her sleeves up and tried to pull as many cats from under the ash as she could, holding on to their furry arms and legs as more of their bodies became revealed with careful tugging.
Well, Susie felt better about herself now that all the kitties were rubbing themselves up against Susie’s leg and thanking her for getting them out of that terrible wreckage, trying to remind herself not to cry as she cradled the remains of her camera. She hadn’t noticed it till she’d now, too preoccupied with pains and thoughts. Its lens had snapped in half, its mirror-pentaprism system completely scrambled, and even the inner mechanism which would control the flow of film as it passes by the shutter had gotten totally fucked up. Glass would fall out of its holes as if it were bleeding crystal shards, all transparent like the tears of some mechanical child. She recognized one of the cats which had crawled onto her leg, little Tandy who noticed the dire state of the camera and now too was grieving for she knew that it meant Susie could now only trust her own senses when in pursuit of the capital-t truth– no longer capable of capturing it, no longer capable of pulling the exposures from the darkness and up against the light. Tandy used her little paw to point up towards Susie, calling attention to the fact that her nose had now begun bleeding.
Susie wiped it off using her sleeve but it kept dripping as she begun to drift through the alleyway into the mainstream, finding that she could not tell apart the many faces who pass by her with hurried marches as her nose left behind her a dotted trail. She could see the features of their heads, the variations in eye color, skin, and shape, yet could never create a concrete image of what she would see– only seeing a continuum of faces as she walked towards the metro station through which all life within the city would flow and she watched her breath dissipate from her jaw with small rain-drops pitter-pattering onto the metal grates and looked up to see that this street which was one of many branches which grew outward from the city’s center had begun to positively overflow with pedestrians as the neon-lights flickered on and the smiling faces of the street teams with their colorful pamphlets and sashes politely introduced themselves to the passersby wielding shopping bags and umbrellas. A smiling couple passed by behind her and they were laughing about something while dressed in professional button-up shirts and black leather shoes, a hand meeting a waist as they walked in tandem on a zebra-striped crosswalk seeming unaware or uncaring of what had transpired in that hotel just minutes ago.
Susie thought back to the noodle house, seeing through its moistened windows and wondering if her table had been cleaned off, itchin’ for that the delicious bowl full of hot demulcent brew of which its fishy scent still lingered in the cavities of her sinuses. Susie reached into her pockets and could only feel the rigged edges of some change and the papery edges of a phone-card, touching the embossed flowers of the coins with the tip of her finger; her stomach growled and a concerning pain travelled upward into her ribcage as the cold liquid fell onto her cheeks. These familiar sensations pulled her further into the recesses of her own brain as she felt herself seduced by the a mirror image of her past, with a finger up to its mouth going “shh” as it pulled you into that familial tomb where all bad memories go to decompose, feeling herself surrounded by melting snow and across a grave-yard there were two shapes which had suddenly met and she pulled her camera towards her eyes and ducked down towards the snow with one arm on a little knee-length wall and within the intricate system of mirrors through which her eyeball ballooned up to an impossible size one could see a young man with a beautifully-chiseled face extend his hands towards a reluctant woman wearing a scarf and designer sunglasses with a glum expression in her face.
Most of Susie’s exposures captured the indignant body-language of the woman as she softly-yet-angrily argued with the young man and Susie had hoped that she’d at some point dramatically reveal her face and burn an impression of an identity onto her film; a bargaining chip for twice the money she’d been contracted for. Susie looked up at an old friend standing behind her shoulder who was scratching her head and she asked the old friend if she’d please get down and be less conspicuous but it was once the old friend criticized Susie’s angle and her lighting– “I’d close down the aperture a bit, Sue”– that she understood it was not the old friend but Susie herself who so obviously stood out in the white snow with her yellow raincoat and bad sneakers ‘n the woman quickly rushed away with her hands on her face as the young man came closer with anger in his step, pointing towards poor Susie with a shaky finger and she held up her camera in a pathetic panic with the best “I’m a lady, please don’t hit me” expression she could muster as the young man pulled at her sleeve all coarsely while yelling insults and it was when Susie pushed away the kid that her camera found itself tumbling towards the stone pathway and it made a loud crack– the unmistakable sound of glass shattering on stone; and she found herself head first on the cold snow with a horrible pain in her nose, stars in her head ‘n playing dead while the young man grabbed the remains of her Kodak SLR off the ground with Susie watching each frenzied motion of the violent youth too full of piss & vinegar to respect freedom of press as he tore at the film spool which started to hang loose from the body like a black plastic vestigial appendage writhing in pain and Susie moved her hands around the snow which surrounded her and palmed it into her hand and threw it at the man with a practiced accuracy which only agitated him even further as one could imagine and the young kid decided to push Susie off the stairs which led to the graveyard from the street and each successive tumble… bump bump bump… exacerbated the sickening throbbing sensation… thump thump thump… that had manifested within Susie’s brain, culminating in the expulsion of sickly green vomit all over the steppes of this fine city she’d come to call home and what took a tremendous effort to remember was that Susie had pushed herself up using her dirtied palms and with a couple of vulgar gestures told the young kid where and how he could stick it and the brat-shit responded with the kind of icy snowball which gives young school-kids the kind of bloody noses you wouldn’t take home to mom and it hit Susie right in the back around the lower chest cavity, leaving behind a dark wet spot and another source of rough ‘n ugly pain as she moved along the sidewalk with her hand pressing onto the hurtin’ body part into the busy street full of errant faces which blended in with the extravagant lights and sounds and overwhelmed the senses with a burning display of delirious color.