Chapter 1
Dolly
It was just a lock of hair. How could I have known what he was going to use it for?
As far as I was aware, it was a good deal. The quiet guy who worked in the cubicle next to me wanted a few strands of hair, and he offered me fifty bucks for it. I knew he was into all that astrology stuff, I figured it was so he could determine my ‘wavelength’ or figure out if mercury was in gatorade or something. I didn’t know the stuff he did was real, and I figured fifty bucks was more compensation for having to deal with him being weirdly passive aggressive and annoying, than it was for the hair.
When we both got called in to deal with a late-night emergency with an overseas client, I found out what he wanted it for. It was not worth the fifty bucks, let me tell you.
We met at the door. He had a key, and I didn’t, even though we both had the same job. I wasn’t sure how he’d managed to cajole the boss into giving him one, but I guess that’s why he was on the late shift - nobody else could get in without coming late.
I met him at the door. “Hey.”
“Hi,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder at me as he unlocked the entrance.
“Any idea why this couldn’t just wait until morning? It sounds like a typical paperwork problem. Friday night seems like a helluva time to get called in.”
He shrugged, and I thought I caught his eyes roll, though I couldn’t be certain.
Pushing open the door, we walked inside, finding our way to our respective cubicle desks. While my computer was booting up, I detoured to the break room to turn on the coffee machine and get myself some blessed caffeine, to help keep me powered on through the late night.
When I got back, though, I hesitated. I’d walked past his cubicle entrance, and it didn’t look like he was working. In fact, he was… playing with a doll.
Blinking, I leaned back and glanced in, to ensure I hadn’t mistaken what I’d seen. And no, I hadn’t - he had a little doll about the size of a cabbage patch kid propped up on his desk. It looked handmade, with brown hair that frizzed at the back, green eyes… A tattoo on its arm of the kanji for ‘Hope’...
“Did you make a doll of me?” I asked, blinking and staring, realizing that it was my actual hair that he’d affixed to the doll’s head. “What the fuck?”
He glanced up, nonplussed, his expression saying something to the effect of, ‘Well, duh, what does it look like?’
What was even weirder, though, was that the doll’s clothes somehow matched my own. To a T. The same polo, the same jeans, even the same shoes, which was particularly strange because I’d just bought this pair today. There was no way he could have known what I was going to wear, so unless he’d just pulled out a sewing machine and made the outfit in the five minutes while I made coffee, he had to have had a whole bunch of clothes on hand, and he just dressed the doll to match me.
“Creep,” I said, grimacing, reaching for my phone to take a photo so I could send it to HR. “This is gross.”
He just raised an eyebrow at me, picked up something small and pink off his desk, and slipped it onto the doll’s right hand.
I dropped my phone.
Frowning, I bent to pick it up, but my fingers felt suddenly clumsy and numb, like I was trying to pick something up through several layers of taut cellophane. I tried with my other hand and managed to pick up my phone, holding it up for all of two seconds until he put another whatsit on the doll’s other hand.
“-The hell?” I said, looking up. Looking closer, I could see that he’d put little, fingerless rubber mittens on the doll’s hands.
I stared, and tried to reach for the doll to grab it from him. He gripped the doll tight and shook it vigorously, and-
“W-oah!” I yelped, feeling suddenly dizzy and disoriented. I fell back, landing in a sprawl, confused and at the mercy of my coworker.
“Have you figured it out yet?” he asked me.
I blinked. Clearly, I hadn’t.
He raised the doll for demonstration purposes, flopping it over his hand so that its butt was raised in the air, and with his other hand he gave the doll’s fabric backside a little swat.
“Ow!” I yelped, as I felt the impact of the spank hit me suddenly. “What t- ho- What the how?”
I was confused, okay? I’m not, like, a word forging person.
Setting the doll down on his desk, he continued to smirk at me while taking a long strip of sticky tape and taping the doll down. At the same time, I felt sudden, invisible weight pushing my chest down, as though a giant…
Piece of sticky tape…
Was fastening me to the floor.
“Let me go!” I demanded, but he moved the doll’s hand to its mouth, manipulating it a bit, and as he did I found myself suddenly suckling my thumb, my mouth too full to make any speaking sounds.
“Blessed silence,” he said. “I’ve been looking forward to this, you know. Waiting for the stars to align just right for the curse to go into effect. Of course, you know - curses aren’t real. When you come into work on Monday, nobody will believe that any of this happened. And you know what that means?”
I shook my head, nervously.
“It means I can do whatever I want,” he said. “And you can’t stop me.”
Reaching for his desk, he picked up a pair of scissors. My eyes went wide in terror, thinking he was about to do something gruesome, but instead he just started snipping away at the doll’s clothing, cutting away the stitched fabric miniature of my outfit.
On my body, my clothes seemed to just… break, coming apart at the seams and falling off my body in sheets. My pants, then my shirt, and then my underwear - my shoes stayed on until he just pulled the miniature footwear free of the doll, at which point the real ones just came unlaced and flopped to the ground.
I still couldn’t get up, the sticky tape binding me down as effectively as steel chain and cuffs. I couldn’t speak, drooling over my thumb, and I couldn’t use my other hand, contained as it was by the rubber mitten.
My coworker opened a small desk drawer by his keyboard, and a large filing cabinet drawer behind him, then said, “Now, if you’re a doll, and I’m playing with you… I think the natural choice is to play ‘dress-up’, don’t you think?”
I started to shake my head, until he gripped the doll and made it nod in agreement. I nodded in agreement.
“Good. And I think you’re going to be a baby dolly.” Reaching in the drawer, he pulled out a tiny, fluffy diaper.
Despite all the magic on display, I was still shocked when, out of the filing cabinet, an identical diaper flew up into the air. As he spread the doll’s legs, my own legs spread in equal measure, and when he wrapped the diaper between the doll’s thighs and pulled it snug, taping it down, the full-size equivalent flew to match the motion.
I hadn’t worn diapers since my long term memory developed. All I could do was squirm as the puffy, thick padding taped itself around me, and then came the dress.
Oh god, the dress.
It was a bona-fide doll dress. Not something that a real life person would be caught dead in, except maybe for a little girl in a halloween costume. Too many frills to be real, and of course with a matching tiara, because why not?
He undid the sticky tape, lifted the doll, and pulled the dress over its head.
And, from the filing cabinet, I was suddenly assaulted with a tirade of lace and pink.
It was like a scene out of a disney movie, I think. I couldn’t tell you which one, but I’m pretty sure that having a dress suddenly stitch itself into reality around your body was from one of those films. I squirmed and fought, but he was still holding up my doll, and it was as though I was stuck in place.
At least, in order to dress me, he’d had to take my thumb out of my mouth. “W-why?” I asked.
He looked at me, tilting his head. “Why not?”
Then, taking the last article from his drawer, he stuck a bright pink plastic pacifier into the doll’s mouth, and a real one flew to match it.
Er… except that ‘pacifier’ was an understatement. The bulb was too big to be a real pacifier, even one scaled up for a person. It was more like a gag that just happened to be in a pacifier shape, holding my mouth open uncomfortably and allowing a trickle of drool to run down my chin behind the shield.
He took two more pieces of sticky tape, stuck the doll’s feet to his desk, and then got up and walked away, leaving me helplessly in place. I could stand, or I could sit, but my feet were pinned down and I couldn’t reach the doll to try and remove the tape or free myself.
Unable to turn my body all the way around, I could only listen to whatever he was doing in the break room. I heard the fridge door open, and the cabinet, and then the tap ran…
I swallowed in fear. I didn’t like where this was going.
He came back, holding a measuring pitcher that was full up with two cups of something. I sniffed, and based on the color and the smell, it was brownie batter.
I frowned, puzzling over why he’d have brownie batter.
Unless…
I shook my head, vigorously. No. No no no no no-
“Oh, good, I was hoping you’d guess,” he said, grinning mischievously. “It makes the anticipation so much more fun.
Flipping over the doll, he lifted up its many frilly petticoats, getting access to the back of the diaper and lifting the pitcher of brownie batter. Pulling back the waistband, then, he tipped the pitcher and began to pour.
My bowels suddenly grumbled, like I’d drank twenty pots of coffee instead of half a cup, and before I could so much as squeak in distress, my body worked to make the real me match the doll. Except… what I filled my diaper up with wasn’t brownie batter.
I squirmed and grunted into my pacifier, completely unable to control my own bodily functions. It didn’t even seem physically possible that I could have needed to go this badly, though given everything else, it probably wasn’t. I just kept pushing, adding more weight to the seat of my diaper, feeling it grow heavier and heavier.
He emptied the whole pitcher of batter down the doll’s dress-up diaper, and the fake padding must have had a lot of elastic in it, because it stretched to fill, sagging down so low that even the long, frilly dress wouldn’t hide its ‘accident’.
My body, obligingly, did all the work it could to match this in real life. Magic, maybe, ensured that the diaper didn’t leak - it just swelled, packed up with an impossible amount of smelly, squelching muck that had long since filled every corner of my diaper. It was too heavy for me to even keep standing, and I fell back, my weight sinking into the diaper I couldn’t stop filling.
I was so distracted by the mess I was making that I didn’t even notice when he pulled one last item from his drawer, but I did notice once he turned it on and I heard the buzzing.
The magic wand had three settings, and he skipped the first two, turning it up all the way. Picking up the doll, he sat it on top of the buzzing head, pulled out a couple feet of sticky tape, and wrapped the doll down so tightly that it couldn’t possibly budge off the vibrator without serious intervention.
Bzzzzz-
I moaned into the gag as I finished filling up my diaper, the vibration conveyed into me more intensely than anything I’d felt in my life. It shouldn’t have felt this good. I told myself it was the magic, but…
Well. I told myself it was the magic, and I’m not going to say anything else on that subject.
He just got to his feet, then, pinching his nose. “I didn’t think you’d stink this badly. I’m going to take a break, but I’ll be back in a while to let you up so you can walk home. Or… waddle home, I suppose. I promise I’ll change your diaper before work on Monday, though. Have a nice night, dolly.”
Strolling away, he left me alone in the office, with nothing to do but moan.
