My Monster by Hell.R.

I can’t move.

My body refuses to comply with the simplest of requests, even the twitch of a single finger seems impossible.

I can’t speak.

My tongue feels like it’s been torn out and replaced with a slab of felt, stitched in place to fool anyone around me that it’s real.

I can’t open my eyes.

My eyelids feel heavy, even getting them to flutter feels like a challenge in itself.

Even with my eyes involuntarily closed I can tell that I’m surrounded by nothing but darkness, I should be led in my bed and sleeping soundly, but this feels like something much deeper.

There are footsteps to my side, shuffling along the floor to my left, accompanied by the sound of a girl muttering and whispering. They don’t sound like the typical kind of footsteps, more like a light scraping as if they had to force their feet along the ground.

The voice doesn’t sound like a young girl, more like an adult mocking a child much younger than them in a crude imitation. It’s almost pantomime like.

Within mere seconds I feel them shift on top of me, legs placed either side of me and hands splayed across my chest.

They’re as light as you’d expect a child to be, but yet I still feel my breathing become restricted. Taking in the smallest amount of air becomes a tremendous task and within moments my lungs are begging me to draw in a deep breath.

Their weight begins to shift in a pattern and it doesn’t take long to figure out that they have started rocking, using me like some kind of toy horse.

“You left us,” she coos in that horribly saturated sweet voice.

I want to respond ‘Us who?’ but still can’t speak, all that comes out sound like slurred grunts of incoherent words.

It transpires that I didn’t need to be able to talk as she mockingly replies. “You know who ‘us’ is.”

I half expected to hear a giggle at the end of that sentence, it feels foreign and almost empty when she doesn’t.

The weight shifts again and I feel strangely textured hands running up my neck and along my cheeks, eventually halting as they rest there with the thumbs pressed against my lips.

With a lot of force I manage to shift my head to the side and try to dislodge the hands from the side of my face, instead she shifts my head back up.

My body is crying out for oxygen and I feel close to panicking.

“We didn’t get to finish our last game.”

I want to push her off but it takes so much will power to simply move one part of my body, after an intense struggle with desperation I feel only my right index finger twitch a little, brushing lightly against her soft leg.

That’s when the giggle finally filled the air and shrouded me with dread, it was a haunting sound as she took glee in my weakness.

I feel two of the fingers shift up to my eyelids and push on them ever so gently, she pushed until my eyes are opened half lidded.

Even in the pitch blackness of the room she seemed to be illuminated in an odd light, one that brought out all her features.

I recognised the grotesque, grey skinned and terribly thin ragdoll of myself, her eyes half lidded and staring into my own. Patchwork marks were strewn across her body leaving the closest thing to scars that could appear on her body, her clothes matched my usual shirt and jeans style except they were much more tattered.

Her head was tilted so her straggly, woollen hair tickled the side of my neck.

Her mouth was stitched into a lopsided smile.

“I missed you,” she whispers in a husky tone.

As if she just realised that she should have no free will her arms collapse from underneath her, she drops limply onto me so her head is resting against mine.

Despite no other signs of life aside from her movement, I can hear her breathing in my ear. Almost like she was bragging about the life she was taking from me.

As she lies with her head resting against mine, the stolen breath wafting over my face rhythmically, she reminds me of a child. Cuddling up to the mother figure for comfort and warmth, waiting for those soft words of protection, she closes her hauntingly dark eyes and lets out a sigh of contentment.

My mind starts racing as breathing becomes impossible, no air was leaving nor entering my body and the world around me was getting hazy. It’s a familiar feeling, one I’ve encountered a few times in my teen years when this monster first reared her head and dragged me away from everything.

I won’t let that happen again.

I was defeated once and overcame it all, as I finally make my right hand move with great difficulty, I vow to myself that I will be sure to fight it again, get my strength back and steal my life from back her once more.

The Ragdoll by Hell.R.

I’m sat in pure darkness; the only source of light is coming from the space underneath the thick wooden door across from me, the smallest slither that barely shone onto the wooden floor.

My back is slumped against the wall as my hands lie lifelessly by my sides, I want to move them but I can’t, I am no longer in control of my own body.

My head is slumped against my right shoulder, I don’t have the strength to hold it up by sheer will power, I tried for so long but gave up a while ago.

My legs are sprawled out in front of me, the limbs covered by long striped socks that do nothing to keep my feet from getting cold.

My dark eyes remain fixed on the door, only half open, waiting for any sign of movement from the other side.

Time means nothing here, I can’t even estimate how long I’ve been in here, days and weeks mean nothing anymore, it has all just become one big blur. The only way to tell the passing of night to day is when the light under the door disappears; it took a while to even figure that out.

I hadn’t seen any of my friends for so long, when had I become so useless to them?

When I couldn’t move to my own accord?

When I lost all free will and could only sit in a room?

Lifeless like a ragdoll.

No one wants to be around someone who can’t keep up with them, who offers no fun and who can only listen and respond when their throat was strong enough to allow this person to speak for a few sentences, before withering away into nothing but a rasp and that all still depended on if their mouth would move to form actual words.

If my voice worked I would be calling out for help, it gets so lonely in here. The only source of entertainment is my imagination but even that runs thin after a while, eventually you simply revert back to your memories of how everything used to be.

The further into the memories you get the more you begin to imagine all the ‘what ifs’, how life could have been had you never become like this. The restrictions of your new life as a ragdoll hit you full force and you begin to miss things you never realised you cared about before, the things you took for granted for years.

I can hear voices on the other side of the door now, gradually getting louder.

Images flashed into my mind of the last visit I had, a group of people in white and blue scrubs had come in and prominently opened my chest up. Something had been removed as a man reassured me that everything would be alright, the whole world was so blurry that I barely remember what happened but I know these people in white visited me often.

A loud click resounds around the room, there’s nothing to cushion the sound as I’m the only thing in this room. There are no decorations, ornaments or any form of personality in the room, just white walls and a dark wood floor.

Light soon floods inside, it’s blinding at first until blurry shadowed figures take up space in the doorway. At first the sudden brightness is blinding and causes my eyes to ache, it’s only a matter of seconds before they adjust to the light and see all too familiar faces decorate the blankness of the shadows.

I feel the corners of my mouth try to twitch into a smile as I stare at my family, my parents and my brothers, each giving me a reassuring smile themselves. Tears visibly pricked at my mum’s eyes as they roamed over my form, slumped against the floor.

In a few large strides my dad and eldest brother had come to either side of me, eagerly pulling me up to stand. They lifted me by the arms and held me there, so my feet lightly touched the floor but I didn’t have to put any weight on my weak legs, for now standing by myself was impossible.

My mum walked over and briskly brushed off the collected dust and dirt with her hand, looking up at me every now and then with a look of relief.

“Don’t worry, everything will be okay,” she said softly, soothingly.

And I knew it would be, with the love and help of my family and friends, I knew that eventually I could become more than a worthless, lifeless ragdoll and could become a real girl again.

Ragdoll Disease

Keeping in tune with the ragdoll theme that started with my review of a book called The Ragdoll yesterday, I feel like posting my own short story of the same name.
Before I do that I will give it a little background in the shortest way I can, it's a rather long story with all the details.
So the short version is that when I was twelve I caught a chest infection that developed into pneumonia and this eventually brought out a recessive neuromuscular condition I was diagnosed with called Myasthenia Gravis.
This is essentially a condition that affects the muscles and weakens them, it's rare that it effects women under the age of forty but anyone can have it and not realise until something brings it out. Some people have a lesser case where it'll just affect their face, others have it more severe where it can affect their whole body.
Unfortunately I had the latter.
Anyway many Prednisolone and Pyridostigmine  doses (among many other medication trials, an operation and a shock test) later my MG went into remission, I was about fourteen or fifteen at the time and I'm doing much better with very few slip ups.
Now Myasthenia Gravis is also known as The Ragdoll disease due to how it affects the muscles, and I always had this penchant for drawing and writing, not meaning I was great at it or anything but I just enjoyed it.
Usually I focus more on horror, myths and legends from around the world (and...Supernatural fanfiction...) but I wanted to do something that was kind of fairytale like but still a general account of my experience, and thus I came up with an idea to write a short story and drew a small picture to go with it.
This eventually led to a longer version with no picture, and I will share both here.
The picture and original story will go on here and I'll make a new post with the new, updated story.

The original ragdoll picture created in 2011:

 

 

The original story (as I know my handwriting is not all that readable!) :

 



There once was a young girl who was loved by many.
Young and innocent, she didn't have a care in the world, but innocence blinded her to the act fate was about to bestow on her.
With a cruel spell the young girl was turned into a ragdoll, although now eternally youthful she had lost all strength and relied on others.
Slowly people began to leave her, finding no use for something that could barely move.
As people left her behind there was nothing she could do but to stay in the dark room they had pushed her into, sitting alone she waits in the dark for someone else to come and play with her once more.

Book Review: The Ragdoll

The Ragdoll by Brenda Bailey.


Synopsis: Life hasn't been easy for the fiery-haired nurse, Jessica Newman. When her beloved grandmother dies, she is left with nothing but an old trailer park, and just the clothes on her back...or so she thinks. After inheriting the trailer park, Jessica is thrown into a world she never knew existed. Her aunt, a sex-mad gold digger, who is on the search for money she thinks is hidden on the park grounds. Her lover Dr. Daniel Newman, not only shares her last name, but pulls Jessica into a secret world of heated sex, mutilated cadavers and undermining a scheming medical director for his own purposes. Dr. William Brooks, her employer, who drowns her in sea of blackmail and betrayal. Now follow that with two punk rock renters, an old woman that delves in the dark world of illegal surgeries and an Oriental hooker that stalks Jessica long after she's dead and buried and you have a crazy world filled with suspense, love and sex and plenty of defaced corpses.

This was a self published book that I bought on Amazon, I will admit this was mostly due to the draw of the cover.
I know it may seem like an odd book to start off with, but hey it was a funny bit of horrorotica and one of the first books in that kind of genre that I have read.
Why did I pick it up?
Honestly? The cover really caught my eye.
Anyone that knows me knows that I have a real thing for Frankenstein style stories from Dead Romance to Frankenweenie, heck my love of stitches and pieced together parts almost made it tempting to watch American Horror Story: Coven....almost.
I know they say don't judge a book by its cover, but sometimes you just can't help it.
The summary of the book seemed promising and I was more than certain that I was going to love it.
So did I?
Let's see.

Pros -

1: The cover - I would scream up and down about the cover, I love it. It instantly draws the eye and it's something that has stuck with me, despite it being years since I finished the book. Now I would share an image of the cover, but seeing as it's a copyrighted image and I'm just starting on this blogging thing I don't wish to get into trouble on my first post for adding something without full consent.
2: The synopsis - There was so much to this story that it could have become a self published masterpiece, there's a depth and darkness in the description that pulls you in and certainly does its job of convincing you to purchase the book.
3: The stitches - I'm a stickler for stitches, so naturally that's going to be a plus for me.

Cons -

1: The story - Sadly for me I can't say that the story lived up to its potential. Despite being offered so much in the summary it doesn't fully deliver, you get little pieces here and there that seem to be leading somewhere promising but then it sadly falls short.
2: The horror - That's just it...there isn't any, at least not in my opinion. Everyone has a different opinion on what makes horror, some believe it's the psychological aspect, others it's the gore and despite being a horrorotica book this didn't offer either in enough quantity to keep me satisfied.
3: The ragdoll - The ragdoll itself isn't there enough for me, the whole premise seemed to be focusing on this ragdoll but there was too much filler and time building up to the reveal that ultimately left me feeling let down.
4: The erotica - Not that it's a reason I bought the book, I would have bought it anyway without the promise of heated passion, but there wasn't much to it.
5: Errors - As to be expected with self published works, this book has its fair share of errors that could have easily been avoided with a little re-read, but it's not something you can't look over. I read fanfiction, this is nothing compared to some of them.

Despite feeling unfulfilled by this book I would say it was a tolerable read, it wasn't fully to my taste but I can see why it may be to someone else's as there are parts there that keep you hooked in.
Would I recommend it to a friend?
Possibly, if they were looking for a paranormal quick read I'd give it a mention, but it wouldn't be the top of my list.