Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel

15: The Puppet And The Puppet Master

Doll Face

Real name: Unknown

Powers: Mental manipulation and torture via organic probes (possibly neural cell bundles), enhanced reflexes.

Notes: Likely insane, though never captured for long enough to receive psychoanalysis. He has allegedly murdered several hundred people, including many women and children. Despite his insanity, experts agree his mental capacity is far above most normal humans, and he is able to process hundreds of memories, identities, and sensations simultaneously. Presumed dead following a military raid in Ukraine.

—Notes on selected metahumans [Entry #0398]

***

Sam woke to the sound of footsteps approaching his cell. His heart instantly took up a snare drum beat in response, and he jerked up from the mattress, his throat closing.

It’s him, he thought. He’s come for me again. God, no. The creature that called himself Doll Face had visited his cell twice more since that first terrible meeting. Each time he’d yammer his psychotic ramblings, occasionally poking Sam with the point of a kitchen knife. And it only got worse from there.

The footsteps drew closer, and Sam shrank down on his mattress, knowing it wouldn’t do him any good. There was no escape from the pain and the fear and the sickness.

He couldn’t explain what Doll Face did to him. God, he didn’t even want to think about it, but it wouldn’t leave him alone. It never stopped haunting him. When the strings touched his mind, he was nothing but Doll Face’s plaything. The creature probed his mind, testing things, searching. Every now and then a rush of agony would go through him, and some new energy would bloom inside him for a moment before being locked away. He felt like Doll Face was preparing his mind for something, sweeping away everything that made him who he was and laying down new foundations. He couldn’t explain it. All he knew was that there was nothing he could hide from Doll Face.

The creature showed him things, showed him what he’d done to others. The children he’d made eat their own faces. The games he played, the people he’d forced to hunt each other through twisted mazes, like rats armed with daggers. And it wasn’t just visions, either. He could taste the blood in his mouth. He could smell the rancid flesh, the burning organs, feel the texture of the maggots as they crawled into his eyes. And above it all was the giggling.

It wasn’t just Doll Face’s crimes he saw, either. Through the hazy, twisted mind of the creature he saw huge explosions that obliterated hundreds of thousands of lives in an instant. He saw a man with metal skin punch a hole through a soldier. In another vision, a man in a grey costume passed through a wall like a ghost and slit someone’s throat with a long silver dagger. He saw men in blue tunics raping women in cells not unlike his own. He felt the loneliness of the world dripping through him. And he saw his father—he knew it was him instinctively—standing over bodies snapped clean in two.

He saw fear, and it smelled like blood.

I’m going to break, he knew. The hallucinations didn’t let up now. He’d wake up with a hundred cockroaches burrowing into his arms, but when he tried to pick them out, they crumbled to dust and vanished. His arms and legs were streaked with blood and dying flesh where he scratched in his sleep.

He was going to break, and now Doll Face was coming again. His stomach heaved, and he lurched to the side and retched. The pitiful contents of his stomach spilled onto the concrete floor. His throat burned and his guts tried to force their way out through his eyes again, but only clear liquid came now.