By LC von Hessen
Sidney Tench worries the brim of his hat with both hands as the clown-man unfurls a bolt of tender flesh.
“Yesss, chumley, you may touch. Eeheehee,” says the clown-man, his fixed grin rigid over mottled gums. His name is Pindleybotz and he is a salesman, of a fashion.
Like a monarch’s tailor presenting a swatch of imported brocade, Pindleybotz proudly hoists a pulsing rectangle with the approximate dimensions of a washroom mirror. Tench’s trembling fingers reach out to stroke the sample. Perfectly smooth, slightly convex, pale pink, just above lukewarm. He finds he must curb his excitement.
Tench detests the sordidness of the transaction’s environs. Would that it were in an intimate waiting room with walls painted neutral tones and a glass-walled cubby hosting a well-groomed receptionist who would announce in a soothing voice: Here, Mr. Tench, we shall gladly meet your needs. Instead his nostrils are assailed by years of stale greasepaint and the cheap dyes of unwashed theatrical costumes crammed among termite-ridden rafters. Dust motes waft unevenly in the yellow-gold light of makeup-smeared bulbs like a murmuration of demented starlings diving beak-first to their doom. About the tidiest things in this decrepit former dressing room are the garish printed banners hanging behind Pindleybotz.
The clown-man stands before Tench in a soiled and tattered Pierrot costume. Once a creamy white satin, its owner attempting to dye it a musty saffron from his bodily effluvia alone. His lips are painted violet-black atop his maggot pallor, the same hue artificially deepening his eye sockets and shearing off the tip of his nose, as though the latter had wasted away from syphilis or several decades of death. One would think he’d take better care of his appearance in his particular grey-market business, but there was no telling with carnival people.
Tench pokes an index finger into the swath of flesh and presses down until he can feel resistance. Its inner workings are the consistency of firm gelatin, not spongy as he had feared. Pindleybotz smacks his hand like a schoolmaster.
“Psssh! You’ll bruise it!” His grin improbably widens. “You can bruise it all you like within the confines of your dwellings! Eeeheehee! Ohoho!”
He must be a sexual pervert, thinks Tench. Only a pervert laughs like that. And such yellow teeth. Repulsive.
“Must it feed?” he asks. “Must it, er…” He meant to say excrete, but Pindleybotz intrudes.
“—Piss and shit? Nay, fellow!” A jocular elbow-jostle to his ribs connects like the jab of a dull bayonet. “It nourishes itself, as well. And never you mind how!”
Tench glances skeptically at the banners depicting the finished product. He lowers his voice, as if the flesh itself could hear.
“And what if I don’t like the face?”
“Caveat emptor, sirrah! You know how to tie a knot, mister grown-up adult man? Tie a sack about its head! Eeeheehee!” Tench does not care for the image of a hanged cadaver in his room. He would frankly prefer the thing not grow a face at all, but perhaps he’ll get lucky.
Feeling his ears redden, Tench consents to the sale. He presses a stack of bills into the clown-man’s bony hand and hurries out of the abandoned theatre, flinching from the fallen string of bunting that grazes his cheek and shoulder.
“Must hie back before currrfew! Eeeeeheeheehee!” the clown-man cackles in his wake.
Tench dearly hopes he hasn’t been scammed. He isn’t terribly comfortable with Pindleybotz cohort knowing his address, either, but he daren’t risk any further delving into the old amusement district. His business colleagues cannot see him here, like this, even should their hypothetical presence in this district also implicate themselves. He still wears the sequined and feathered mask of a Circusian, a pro-carnival partisan, to conceal his nondescript features, having told the man at the pawn shop that he intended to burn it. He wishes this hadn’t been a lie.
The trolley still hasn’t been repaired and Tench has to walk home in the filth and chill. It has rained lately, painting all surfaces a dark cast, bringing forth a wet stench of human and building detritus and the constant squelch of mud and grit beneath his heels. Inside his suit, a clammy sweat coats his skin. He dodges a dog carcass on the pavement, jagged spikes of wet matted fur on a desiccated frame, its eyes bulging as if strangled. Under eaves and folded in alleys, his ears catch ratlike whispers and shufflings from dealers of opiates and arcane curios, disguising their trade with Circusian facepaint. Even the ragged gangs of semi-feral children do not come through here.
One wall of a nearby tenement has collapsed entirely, from chimney to cellar, and the storeys stand open like a giant’s dollhouse. Its sole tenant is a squinting, toothless old man whose bald skull is wreathed in a lint-like frizz. He sits on the edge of the second-highest floor, stick-thin grey-white legs dangling back and forth in filmy slippers.
“Deedle-de-dee, deedle-de-dee,” the old man sings. “Mrs. Beetle is restless, she.” He squints down at Tench, pointing a yellow-nailed finger at him with a harpy’s laugh. Tench lowers his head, turtles his neck into his lapels, thrusts his hands into his coat pockets, and strides onward.
The old man’s ramblings bring to mind a playground rhyme from Tench’s boyhood, delivered in the grating off-key half-shouting that constitutes little children’s singing voices:
The carrr-ni-val is dead and gone
Dead and gone
Dead and gone
Ell-lephant and mastodon
Are dead and dead and gooone
He thinks on this as he passes the burnt circus. The weed-ridden vacant lot on which it once stood spans the better part of a block. All these years later, scraps of shredded tarpaulin from a big-top tent can still be found staked into the dirt and gravel: purple-black and dirty white, as if Pindleybotz had grown to enormous size and been flayed for the purpose. On the corner sits a rough stone circle hosting the ashes of a bonfire where a pile of clown dolls were burnt in effigy. He was not present for the occasion but can only imagine the unbearable stench of artificial wig hair.
Once the streets are empty and he borders a district that is not explicitly disreputable but simply impoverished, Tench ducks into an alley to dispose of his mask. He tries to rip it apart by hand first, because that’ll show them, but the material is too tough or his strength is ineffectual, so he ends up trampling on it twice before kicking it under a clump of used prophylactics. Even then, a single garishly dyed feather clings to his rain-dampened wingtip.
“Dash it all!” he mutters, shaking the damned thing free.
He arrives at his residence shortly after dusk, up three flights to his cramped, narrow attic flat. Its ceiling converges in a sharp steepled point above a single long, gothic-arched window, like a chapel for dolls. He has considered blocking the window with his wardrobe.
Sitting on his bachelor mattress while eating a late supper of bread and beans, Tench hears the tolling dirge-drone of the municipal curfew bell. He automatically reaches out to pull the government-issued blackout curtain over his window and turns down the light in his bedside lantern. Alas, his radio is broken; he cannot drown out the sounds tonight. After what he spent in the amusement district today, he cannot afford to have it fixed for several paychecks.
He doesn’t dare, would never dare, to peek at what untold creatures roam the streets at night. It was nauseating enough to hear the scampering of bare feet on concrete and tar, the pads of hands or paws gripping the bricks of buildings to scramble up for some unknown, terrible purpose. The soft fumblings and bumpings and gropings of whatever is out there whisper nightmares to his fitfully sleeping brain.
He dreams of bones, fangs, antlers in the streets below. Claws rend and jawbones clack. A cavalry of skeletal beasts, mounted by bony soldiers in cuirasses and pikestaffs hoisting banners purple-black and dirty white, rearing and galloping through scorched bricks and heaps of asbestos under the bruise-blue sky.
* * *
Tench’s former position at the rotary fan factory had two notable advantages.
One was the presence of his handsome, epicurean, and proudly promiscuous former co-worker, Niles Davenport. He was a bit offended Niles had never tried it on with him—was he ugly? Was he insufficiently slim or muscular? Did he wear too much pomatum, too little?—but then, the end result would have entailed the very acts of overt flesh that discomfited him so. The smells, the heat, the moisture, the mess: those beastly mammalian matters he wished to circumvent.
And the other advantage was the fact that his former office space had at least been partitioned off into a rat-maze of particle board, whereas his current company is a business warehouse with a vast open grid of identical desks. Thus, Tench is frequently distracted from his job duties by the staccato clacking of typewriter keys, the sighs and grumblings of Miss Grieves, the coughs and sneezes of Mr. Bolch, the jangling of the company’s half-dozen telephones, the vacuum suck of the pneumatic tubes, the clanking and shuddering of the exhaust ducts overhead clamped onto the bare high ceiling like massive leeches of commerce. “A company is a family,” opined his executive supervisor, Mr. Rusk. “And in a family, one should not keep secrets.”
Mr. Rusk, of course, has his own private office. Tench sits there now in an uncomfortable ergonomic chair as his executive supervisor lectures him on why he cannot, as requested, be moved to a small, enclosed space to aid his concentration: not his own separate office necessarily, but even an unused supply closet of adequate light and space would suffice. Mr. Rusk, with his prominent Adam’s apple and unflattering trendy haircut and piebald brush-bristle attempt at a moustache. He stares down at Tench from behind a broad wooden desk with a brass nameplate designating Mister Gimble Rusk and Tench wonders why Mr. has been redundantly spelled out.
“Now, Tench. Sidney,” Mr. Rusk says, crouching forward with a condescending smile. Tench rankles at the paternalism. The man was only a decade his senior.“Progress requires bustle! Only the backwards hermit demands silence and isolation in his profession! If we all wanted that, we would never have emerged from the caves and would remain uncivilized heathens! Surely you don’t wish to regress into some babbling ape, Sidney.” He chuckles and doesn’t wait for a response.
“Progress means people, Sidney. The higher one stands in society, the more people surround one at all times. Remember the kings who held court in their crowded bedrooms? How pleased a duke would be for the privilege of handing him a stocking? The delight at being deemed Master of the Chamber Pot?
“Now, if you are bothered by the noise, you must only imagine a scenic vista. Retreat inwardly to a seaside beach, at the height of summer, perhaps.”
Tench has only seen beaches in grey-and-white films at the picture house and they look like places where people go to die in anonymity. Swallowed up by sand and tide forever.
Mr. Rusk spreads his hands dramatically. “Picture within your mind a field of sunflowers.”
Tench dislikes sunflowers. They’re ugly and too tall, and they hold a disproportionate level of seeds.
And is this field of flowers, he thinks, also trampled-upon by the brogues and heels of businesspersons?
Later, as his fingers, still sooty with graphite, twist the knob into his building’s topmost hallway, he finds what can only be his purchase from the clown-man resting unlabeled before the door of his flat. This is far too small, he thinks, dismayed: the sealed bag on his doorstep seems the approximate size of a bowling ball or a human skull. Still Tench picks up the bag, its fabric a sticky, tacky texture, unpleasant to touch. He unzips it once inside to see just how badly he has been cheated.
Immediately a rubbery sliver of pale pink pushes through the gap. The bag’s contents unfold and unfurl themselves as if inflating, and Tench curls up on the bed to watch in fascination.
He draws the blackout curtain early tonight.
Soon a doll lies flat on his floorboards, naked. Uniform pink flesh coats an approximation of a head, a torso, and four limbs. Yet it is sexless, hairless, featureless. Warm and soft, without the glands and bumps and follicles of a human body. Enclosed, neither entrances nor exits. No troubling mucous membranes or invasive protuberances. No hard bones. No gurgling viscera. No teeth or fingernails to abrade. As it rises on its haunches it appears a comforting head shorter than himself, yet neither short nor slight enough to be mistaken for a child. Its mittenlike cupped hand reaches out to gently pat his shoulder, his tie, his cheek, and he wonders how much it can sense, can think. And its skin is delightfully pliant, as he learns after squeezing its wrist: when he withdraws his hand, he has left a palm-sized reddish mark. It does not flinch or otherwise protest. Can it be hurt, can it bruise? Was the effect purely cosmetic, or does it experience pain?
This is his fleshdoll, his alone. It is fully, delightfully blank.
He would have to be quiet with his new roommate. His landlady, a former brothel madam who lived on the ground floor, forbade any visitors who were neither family nor strictly and verifiably platonic, as she looked askance at “the client type” and did not want them in her house.
As Tench tries to sleep, the fleshdoll silently, carefully clambers into the narrow bed next to him. It snuggles close to him, face-to-hypothetical-face, its skin clinging and affixing to his own, even through the thin material of his pajamas; yet it feels comforting and comfortable, not like those humid months when his scrotum glues itself to his inner thigh.
He is untroubled by dreams. In the morning, he finds he was also untroubled by nocturnal emissions, his sheets and pajama bottoms delightfully free of dampness or crust.
* * *
The carnival is dead and gone
Dead and gone
Dead and gone
Keep your bloody trousers on
The carnival is gone
* * *
Sidney Tench faced his life’s greatest shame as a lad of 14, when he was packed off to school in a distant town after being caught in a compromising position with a dressmaker’s dummy and a bag of ground meat. For all the ensuing furor, he might as well have been caught with the seamstress-maid herself. The bag of meat was unopened, for heaven’s sake; it could still have been eaten, by someone else of course, and he had meant to replace it discreetly in the family kitchen afterwards.
An alienist might consider this event the cause of his aversions, yet Tench knows it was merely a symptom for which his doll has been the cure. He thinks of the doll, yearning for the cling of its immaculate flesh, while sitting at his desk already distracted. He is attempting to ignore the susurration of whispers two desks down between a temp and a secretary, the former planning to visit someone called Hobbledehoy, the latter hissing Oh, you fiend!
Mr. Rusk walks the floor, feigning comradeship with his peons. “Clackity-clackity!” he notes to Miss Grieves with approval, like a small boy watching a locomotive.
Tench has recently sent him a petition in writing curled up in a pneumatic tube canister, a shipwrecked sailor’s desperate message in a bottle, with the request to keep a modest glass of water on his desk during office hours, since he has often felt dehydrated lately and fears developing kidney stones. Coming upon Tench now, Mr. Rusk’s false smile drops. Leaning down, eyes black and beady as a shark’s, Mr. Rusk speaks, low and stern, into his ear:
“Sun. Flowers.”
Tench does picture a field of sunflowers, but headed by Mr. Rusk as an ineffectual scarecrow with pecked-out eyes full of sunflower seeds. He pictures a seaside vista, but with a beachfront carnival game booth wherein the winner receives Mr. Rusk’s deflated body folded into a filmy bag, disgusting them with the unexpected hair and gristle and bone. He thinks about his purchase from the clown-man.
They, the fleshdolls, used to be carnival prizes for the elite, so the legend goes; restricted to unrigged games in secret, private tents, the sort of places where one might pay to scrape powder from the horn of a rhinoceros boy, or slowly thrust a dull-edged sword into a passive young lady. Some used to cut custom holes in the dolls, or seat them in front of photographs of a cinema starlet or comely co-worker to imprint specific features or press them into molds to develop proper appendages. Tench would never be so gauche.
He has given it no name, since this might influence a future face: it is simply “his doll.” He has assigned it no sex, though he thought of it as nominally feminine, for he favored softness and curves. He dreams of a breast to cup and squeeze without the puckered glower of the nipple to stay his hand, let alone the threat of milk.
Among the scant instructions included with his doll were to clap his hands three times for it to dance. He prefers not to do this. The dance is unpleasant. It moves like a balloon, slow and airy, with its knees and neck bending and limp hands rising such that it seems to be waiting for marionette strings to loop down and lift it offstage.
Methodically grasping, prodding, pinching its flesh—but not enough to split the skin; never that!—he delights in the many-colored bruises that shift and ripple through its body in ensuing days, like concentric rings of water broken by a stone.
One thing does trouble him, though: the increasingly distinct contours of its head indicate a face is developing, and this after merely a month. Its hands have already split into fingers and palms. Really? So soon? He often touches the nascent face: the firm, slight protrusion of a nose and curves of ears, through what inner substance of the doll imitated cartilage. The twin bumps of closed eyes, a darkening shade, like plague buboes.
He dreams, ever more frequently, of faceless fleshdolls wandering naked through the town, an army prowling the city streets at night on hands and knees and the pads of their rudimentary feet. There is menace, somehow, to their featureless heads and softly groping hands. They scuttle forward and bend their heads to absorb sewer water: they draw back on an empty gutter, bone-dry. They absorb a cockroach: they leave a paper-thin carapace. They absorb a stray rat: they leave a mummy.
* * *
The carnival is dead and gone
Dead and gone
Dead and gone
Great qliphothic eidolon
Shall knell the new aeon
* * *
Tonight he returns home with a spring in his step, striding past his landlady’s suspicious glare, for Tench is not the sort of man who smiles.
He squeezes the doll’s shoulder in greeting, and it turns to face him.
To face him.
During his routine grind at the office, his fleshdoll has sprouted a face. A full face, and a thoroughly unwelcome face. With dots for nostrils, a broad painted-on grin, and unnaturally large, round, staring eyes, emphasized by bruise-markings that have migrated and coagulated, the doll’s new face is disturbingly reminiscent of a clown.
Oh no. No, this won’t do at all. He doesn’t want to be reminded of teeth. He doesn’t want to be scrutinized by vitreous orbs, even if they’re merely sightless imitation markings. And he is not going to tie a vulgar sack over its head. This one is tainted, perhaps even secondhand. The truth is quite literally staring at him.
Staring at him.
And how long, now, have they been staring at each other?
Tench barely hears the mesmeric tolling of the curfew bell. He barely hears the metallic shick of the heavy curtain’s rungs as the doll draws it fully back from the window. And quiet as they are, he barely hears the Circusian legions, naked and blank, smooth and pink, as they point their faces at his window and mass together against the arched glass until it breaks forth to crawl inside and surround him and strip off his suit and press their skin against his orifices his mouth his pores his nostrils to suck out his fluids and even now their own faces are forming among skin skin everywhere skin.
End.
LC von Hessen is a writer of horror, weird fiction, and various unpleasantness, as well as a noise musician, multidisciplinary artist/ performer, and former Morbid Anatomy Museum docent. Their work has appeared in such publications as Bury Your Gays, Seize the Press, Bound in Flesh, The Book of Queer Saints I and II, Tenebrous Antiquities, The Pinworm Factory, Stories of the Eye, Your Body is Not Your Body, Uncertainties VI, and multiple volumes of Nightscript and Vastarien. Their story “Transmasc of the Red Death” is a 2023 Brave New Weird Award winner and their debut collection will be released in late 2024 through Grimscribe Press. An ex-Midwesterner, von Hessen lives in Brooklyn with a talkative orange cat.