With a pack of camping gear, John rode buses north to find tunnels and talked to the people living inside them. Showing the trending TikTok video of “Tunnel Woman,” as well as old family photographs, John asked if anyone had seen his aunt. He was certain that Tunnel Woman was his aunt, but he only recognized her eyes in the video. The rest of what he had known was gone. Her once neatly combed hair now ratted and torn in balding patches. Her straight white teeth, broken and darkened. Her soft, plump face and body carved starkly by hunger. “Meth Face,” strangers whispered upon viewing the video as John camped in the tunnels, offering food to the people sleeping there while shining dimmed flashlights on the faces of homeless women.
After a year of searching, he found her cocooned in sleeping bags in a tunnel damp with rot. Shivering in withdrawal, an addict suffering from detoxification, she didn’t know him, until rain falling into the tunnel grates washed the mask of dirt away from his face.
“Johnny,” she said, her voice barely strong enough for him to hear. “Is that you?”
“Yes, it’s me. I’ve been looking for you. Come with me?” he said, cradling her hands, embracing her. She stank of roadkill doused in cheap perfume.
“No.”
“Let me take you home, to live with me?”
“Go away. I’m No One.”
“You’re my aunt!”
“Aunt No One.”
Assuming he might rescue her and convince her to go with him, he needed more time, but winter came early. Invading the tunnel, cold ate into his flesh. He lost consciousness, falling into a fever dream where his aunt was healthy and alive, holding him close as a magnificent woman named Rebecca kissed him more deeply than he had ever been kissed.
“Aunt No One,” John whispered at the hospital. “Aunt No One?”
Rescued by strangers under a bridge in the freezing rain, he was admitted with frozen feet. Two frostbitten toes were amputated before healthcare workers could locate and contact his family.
His mother was reunited with him in the hospital after he had been missing nearly a year, when John was hardly able to move or speak. She argued with surgeons, who wanted to amputate his infected legs. After much physical therapy, John could walk again. Almost as if by unspoken agreement, they never mentioned those days, though his limp was a constant reminder, as was Rebecca, who was not just a dream after all, but a very real woman, having met John in the tunnel where she fed him, marrying him in the hospital as Aunt No One faded into shadows of his garbled memory.
Rebecca and John had a child named Daisy. Loving Daisy and Rebecca made John forget the way people could disappear into architecture, though he still feared his aunt was cocooned in a sleeping bag in that rainy tunnel near the river.
#
Five years later, Aunt No One’s husband petitioned the county courts to declare her legally dead so he could remarry and claim her life insurance. Around that time, a curious object was delivered—a gift addressed to John. A fully automated dollhouse arrived in pieces. John held Daisy so they could watch from the front windows as couriers wheeled crates onto the porch.
Opening the first crate with a rusted crowbar, John discovered a miniature room that functioned like a machine. The painted wooden room hid metal mechanisms. Varnished mahogany paneling and cherry-wood walls concealed an aluminum animatronic frame. Sensitive wired connections aligned with carved slots and pegs. Walls clicked together at the joints.
Little chandeliers lit papered walls in rainbow prisms radiating from tiny crystals. Each bedroom had its own linens and curtains. Elegant scroll paintings offset candles on iron stands, miniature books and leather-winged chairs, exquisite landscapes over fireplaces, white stone statuary, tables of real marble, small violins in cases, and window seats.
Etched inscriptions graced miniature doorways. Prominent pieces of furniture were engraved with words. There was a doorway labeled Truth, and a doorway labeled Time, a room full of flowers labeled Followers. A waterfall labeled Fountain trickled over a porcelain statue of a red-violet serpent labeled Dragon. There was a room of strange silhouettes labeled Grotesques, a bathtub labeled Babylon, and a red room labeled Hades. There were rooms labeled Fruit, Dice, Chains, Beasts, and Deceit. In a hallway labeled Winds, a velvet throne labeled Mercenary overshadowed a humble wooden chair labeled True Cross.
The dollhouse came with warnings in detailed instructions on assembly and care, but also three pairs of gloves—gloves for a mother, a father, and a daughter.
Careful never to touch the wires with his bare skin, John made sure that Rebecca and Daisy put on their white gloves before approaching the dollhouse as he studied the diagrams in the manuals.
John’s hands sweated inside the gloves as he worried the dollhouse might be too big. It threatened to reach the ceiling of their living room. As he added rooms to the dollhouse’s upper floors, the attic, and roof, he stood on a stepladder to reach the chimneys and the motors concealed under roof tiles.
#
John’s phone wouldn’t stop ringing as he assembled the dollhouse. It was always the same man, calling and saying odd things about being homeless now that John had the dollhouse. John didn’t understand the logic of the man’s words but was becoming concerned.
The man claimed to have once lived inside the dollhouse.
“Excuse me,” John said to the man on the phone. “You lived where?”
“Inside the dollhouse,” said the man.
“Inside what?”
“Your dollhouse.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Your aunt used to live with me inside your dollhouse,” said the man, his voice somber. “She didn’t want to leave. Have you seen her?”
“Lately?” said John.
The phone calls began with inquiries about Daisy and the dollhouse, then gradually shifted to personal topics relating to Aunt No One. “I was a friend of the tunnel woman,” the man said. “I’m one of the Faders. We believe in becoming invisible. She’s among us, not dead, and will be coming back to you.”
The man explained that the Faders had a way of disappearing from their homes, their families, their lives, merging into the background—like Aunt No One. By looking carefully, he promised, their families could see signs of the missing people everywhere, hidden, erased more and more each day, camouflaged as trees, ground, buildings, trashcans, shadows under bridges, sleeping inside large empty boxes on the streets and in alleys until they seemed to become empty boxes disintegrating in rain. With Aunt No One, sleeping alone was dangerous, staying warm was staying alive, as newspapers sheltered the Faders in boxes, blankets, and pillows. Using newspaper to stay warm, they stuffed their clothing, skin smudged with ink, graying to shadow. Disappearing into night, eclipsed by towering buildings and bridges, they slept unseen.
“You were once like us.”
Unhoused, John thought, not homeless.
He felt loved by shadows he didn’t know were dreams or people. Birdsong became their soundtrack as they left the tunnel and disappeared into trees to become one with the woods and the mountains. On the road, they had wanted to become the road, to fade into asphalt. Be the highway. When Rebecca once asked him why they couldn’t just live in the wilderness forever, setting up camp with tents and tarps, why they had to fade to survive, he told her there was no wilderness safe to hide in, only tunnels. All the land was owned by people. It was illegal to live in the woods, illegal to take fish or game without permits. Even berries could poison them. He had seen women perish from eating the wrong berries—pretty berries that tasted sweet and harmless.
#
According to the manuals, some of the dolls had the names of the people who had disappeared from his family. For the dolls to awaken and move properly, they would have to be fed within hours after their thawing and initial winding. The winder was made of solid brass, and at the end of it was a skeleton key that fit into the groove on each doll’s back, a hole leading to the inner clock that set each doll into motion.
The winding had to take place soon after the dolls’ release from foil bags and dry ice. Timing was important, if John was to keep the dolls from fading the way his family disappeared, their stuff left in piles near trash in the alley. Sometimes, scavenging for food, looking for anything that might help him survive, he would see unexplained movement in the abandoned blankets and newspapers.
#
Packed away in sleep mode, deflated by reverse windings, frozen, and starved down by reduced feedings, dolls in airtight foil sacks were encased in dry ice for preservation. Like numerous comatose bodies, they would awaken, tiny bodies activated with a golden winder as Daisy watched flames rising inside glass ovens. Airy dough rose. Like sweet sugar cakes filled with poisonous fuel baking, the muffins smelled of vanilla and butter mingling with fragrant fruits.
“Don’t touch the maids,” John said. “They’re hot as fire and will cook your skin. They’ll burn right through your gloves.”
The tiny iron females wore copper skirts and white metal aprons. Their long metal hair of reddish and gold wire was precisely woven into fireproof buns. They blinked, iron eyes winking like sparks when the oven timers went off. Fine aluminum eyelashes, shimmering silver, shaded their lovely irises.
Sugar and dough spilled and burnt on the maids. Their honeyed hair smoked with sizzling molasses. Together, the maids formed lines leading from the sinks to the stoves to the ovens. With magnetic hands, they exchanged pots and pans, spoons and knives, muffin pans, teakettles, and spatulas. The kitchen maids never ate. They were forever baking, cleaning, and rearranging. They cared for the choppers, flour sifters, ranges, refrigerators, and ovens. They washed and stored cookie cutters, knives, nutcrackers, butter curlers, muffin molds, pins, timers, mortars, and pestles. They tested and stored muffins. Their high heels clicked together like copper bells.
#
A cherry-wood chest of drawers opened onto small rectangular chambers. Each cold chamber leaked white steam. John stood back to allow white steam to drift away. Small cylindrical pellets of dry ice topped every drawer. Beneath the dry ice in the chambers were oblong objects sealed in vacuum-packed golden foil bags. The bags hissed as Daisy and Rebecca cut them open with sharp scissors. John dropped pellets of dry ice into the water to watch the smoke.
Hiss, hiss, hiss, the golden foil bags seemed to protest as Rebecca and Daisy snipped away with scissors.
Daisy said, “Mommy, what’s that?”
The women dolls smelled like almonds, honey, and cashews. The male dolls smelled like coffee or toffee with a touch of vanilla and cinnamon sugar. Opening certain golden bags was like opening a box of fresh baklava. The servant dolls were full of the scents of fresh pastry and honey. The tiny children emitted scents of talcum powder and baby shampoo, and babies smelled of bubble gum. The preteens smelled of pineapple or buttered popcorn. The teenagers smelled of lime and beer. The dolls with animal faces smelled of wet fur, sawdust, and fire. Reptilian-faced dolls were scented with mint or lavender.
“Unbelievable,” Rebecca said. A wiggly doll tumbled into her gloved hand. The doll appeared soft and cold like thawing chicken, a hollowed face with prominent cheek bones, a starved expression like her friend who had died of pneumonia and dehydration in an abandoned building.
At first, the dolls were lifeless, shrunken. Cold, soft, and malleable, the frosty flesh began to sweat.
The dolls’ eyes were closed, as if sleeping. As the flesh warmed, the eyes began to open. Pockets of synthetic flesh took on air, pallid skin glowing. Ribcages rose. Glass eyes brightened, lit from behind. The chocolate, violet, royal blue, sky blue, hazel, sea green, emerald, and black irises turned into luminous embers.
Little faces appeared soft, tender. Infants’ skin resembled real baby flesh. The adults’ skin was smooth yet taut, men’s faces sporting stubble, full beards, or moustaches. The elegant stubble seemed prickly. Daisy giggled. Each human-faced knight looked like a real man—a tiny man that could be held in her hand.
The elderly dolls’ skin was too soft, almost fragile, delicate like overripe fruit.
“Oh, my babies! My lovely babies,” Daisy wailed, clasping elderly dolls with withered faces.
“Here,” Rebecca said to John. They both put their faces close to the dolls and realized that the old woman smelled of roses. The old man smelled faintly of spice. Everyone had a certain smell, every doll, just like people who had no access to water for bathing. They were the invisible population. Trying to blend in, their smell could call attention to their presence, giving them away. Wanting to go unseen, to avoid becoming targets, they were often betrayed by their bodies.
Translucent eyelids twitched and fluttered. Arms flapped like wings. Brilliant glass eyes whirled. Some of the dolls frowned. Others winked or smiled. They had different personalities. Once fully wound, the stronger personalities began to make themselves known. Lifeless sleeping faces awakened like clockwork. One face reacted to another. Glass eyes like a chain of dominos falling.
The dolls moved with the aid of motors, magnets, small wheels, rollers embedded in their hands, heels, and knees. Flexible joints glided with powerful magnets hidden inside synthetic flesh. Magnets lining up with ramps and rails propelled the dolls through tracks camouflaged in intricate patterned flooring.
“Look at these,” Rebecca whispered. She stared at the dolls’ faces and told John that she recognized the men, women, and children she had encountered while being homeless.
“Mommy,” Daisy said. “Can the dolls hurt each other?”
Violence bloomed like wildflowers. Bloodshed inspired bloodlust. It did no good to take away the men’s swords, or any of their weapons. Weapons were hidden throughout the dollhouse. Some of the dolls attacked each other with teeth or common household objects while defending their families from those who used swords for sheer aggression.
“Careful!” Rebecca said, reaching for a doll with her mother’s face.
Higher-ranking dolls had masks and disguises. Pearl-bead mouthpieces held masks in place on dolls’ heads. If a fade started, the masks protected the dolls’ faces from disintegration. Wigs could be replaced, if necessary. The dolls’ heads could be shaved in the early stages to aid in healing, preventing aggression from other dolls by disguising signs of sickness.
Rebecca taught Daisy how to feed and cleanse and discipline each doll, tucking each little child into bed, just like in the cult of Faders, where all the children were to sleep in one room, just like dolls inside the dollhouse.
Nurses in the infirmary could patch wounded bodies. Holes in clothes could be mended, but holes in faces were best left alone beneath leather masks. Dolls with damaged bodies could be surgically altered. Just like when she was living in the tunnel, Rebecca was performing surgeries again, but this time on dolls, not people. On the streets, she had stitched up bodies cut by knives, rusted cans, razor blades, broken bottles in dumpsters, jagged window glass, and even bullets. Amazing what one could do with needle and thread, antibacterial ointment, antiseptic solution, pain relievers, whiskey, vodka, and old cloths torn into bandages.
Sleep eyes could be restored with transplant eyes. Heads and bodies could be gently cleansed with soapy water. Disintegrating wigs could be replaced with mohair or extra wigs of human hair locked away in chests. When removing wigs, Rebecca had to watch for wig-pulls. Flakes fell from the heads.
“Careful, Daisy,” Rebecca said.
Daisy knew she had to be careful. More than anything, she didn’t want her parents to know that she had gotten into the dollhouse by accident to speak to the man who kept calling on the phone. She had gone into the dollhouse, and she almost couldn’t find her way out, until the man helped her locate the door that led to her parents’ bedroom, where they were sleeping, unaware that she had ever been away.
#
Inside the dollhouse, Rebecca found a doll that looked just like Daisy and even spoke in Daisy’s voice, saying, “Mommy, is that you?”
Daisy shook dolls to make them purr, growl, howl, or roar. Some of the voice boxes were made of excelsior or silky fibers of kapok. Manual voice boxes incorporated paper bellows, easily damaged by too much shaking. More powerful, intricate, and durable voice boxes were placed inside the human-face dolls –giggling, whispering incoherent words called “secrets” with roars, whimpers, moans.
“The entire dollhouse is a computer,” John said, assuming computer chips were hidden inside the dolls. “AI controls the dolls’ personalities and functions.”
Rebecca wasn’t so sure. She discovered more dolls with faces she remembered, faces of the homeless people she had lived with on the streets, faces of the members of the cult she had escaped.
Dolls that could no longer speak had to be sent to the doll infirmary. Tiny surgeons made of knives did their work behind closed doors. The twin white metal doors locked automatically, but Daisy pried them open to discover vivisected dolls of mohair or rabbit skin with loose eyes of amber or black glass, snouts prominent and clipped. Their teeth and claws were as sharp as the men’s swords. Dissected and dismembered, they would walk, dance, or play games such as foosball, tennis, chess, or poker.
Daisy knew how to make their glass eyes follow her across the room. Each doll’s neck could be unscrewed so that the user could remove the head. If a removed head was not properly reattached in time, the altered doll would begin to move in a sickening manner, like a traumatized animal.
#
John picked up a fading doll. Its metal skull was already rising through the thinning flesh of his father’s face the year he disappeared into the city. Rebecca called him back. Soon, they were fading into each other and into trees and into Daisy with Aunt No One.
The dollhouse tunnel wound through the floor below the metal stairs. The staircase continued behind the wall, carving through dirt above the crypt, smelling of death. The horrid stench of decay led to faded dolls wedged inside. The earthen tunnel, moving through the bowels of the dollhouse, digested tiny bodies. Mutilated doll remains resembled tiny corpses torn apart.
Rebecca moaned when John shone the light into the tunnel.
“No,” said John, spying on the faces of his missing family. He removed the dollhouse basement wall and flooring. The tunnel led to a storage tank full of tiny white sacks. Slowly, John slid the lid off and reached for a white sack full of fluid.
The sack burst, revealing a sparkling miniature metal skeleton, a key.
John slipped his thumb into a jagged hole full of dirt, revealing more of the dollhouse tunnel. He shoved more tiny tiles aside to remove a portion of the dollhouse’s lower wall, so he could see into the tunnel with a small light.
“The control panel must be somewhere,” John said. Numerous wires and cords stretched from switches in the walls to the circuits and generator. Hookups, pipes, and a tank were hidden in the dollhouse garage.
As the manuals instructed, John poured water, aspirin, ammonia, rubbing alcohol, iodine, vodka, coffee grounds, dry tea, lighter fluid, lye, and kerosene into the mixing bins. Liquids flowed into holding tanks beneath the tiles, lids concealing gauges and testers. He refilled designated tanks and vessels in the dollhouse with gasoline, olive oil, motor oil, antifreeze, white flour, food coloring, imitation flavoring, powdered sugar, crystal sugar, brown sugar, vanilla, baking soda, baking powder, yeast, grape juice, bleach, and vinegar. According to schedule, he replenished the dollhouse’s reserves of red and white wine, salt, pepper, cornstarch, witch-hazel, turpentine, and oats.
#
When Daisy squeezed the hungry doll’s stomach, a mechanism caused the doll’s mouth to open, revealing sharp teeth and a delicate tongue. Each doll’s eyes fluttered as it burped “achy.”
The white gloves offered limited protection from bites. The animal-faced dolls seemed to bite more readily than human-faced dolls, but a bite from a human-faced doll was always insidious.
“The dolls are hungry, again,” Daisy whispered over the tiny glistening muffins.
The muffins were bright red, green, yellow, orange, purple, pink, violet, fuchsia, blue, or dazzling silvery white. They were shaped like bananas, pears, pecans, grapes, cranberries, strawberries, carrots, corncobs, walnuts, broccoli, peaches, cherries, pumpkins, lemons, limes, oranges, pineapples, raspberries, or blueberries. They sparkled and glistened with glittery toppings, green-icing stems, and sugary glaze.
Daisy loved to feed the dolls, but the dolls’ food was poison.
#
John began to hope that the missing dolls would remain missing. There was one doll Daisy loved above all others, the doll she called No One, a doll he hadn’t yet found.
“Wait,” Daisy said, touching the keypad, choosing just the right sequence. Glass chambers brightened with amber light. Daisy selected a male doll with dark brown hair. “Look what happens,” she said.
As the chamber opened, the doll clicked into place. The chamber doors closed. Music played. The flame below the chamber began to dance. In the chamber, the doll’s flesh melted and glowed.
“They burn like animals,” Rebecca whispered to John, “and celebrate each other’s suffering like humans.”
The doll writhed on pegs. The chamber filled with colored light. The doll twisted with a high-pitched sound like a teakettle steaming.
The doll’s arms caught first, flames like monarch wings. Vents emptied the glass chamber of black smoke. The doll’s eyes rolled faster. The irises caught in the back of the head. The doll’s mouth opened. Smoke carpeted the tongue, dulling shiny teeth.
“A monarch!” Fire wings grew—orange and black unfurling—as if the doll could fly away. The doll kept burning until the corpse key became a skeleton key. A final swoosh, and the bright orange fire-wings consumed all. Black smoke continued to pour through the chamber vents. The smoke turned gray and white, dying away. A charred metallic skeleton remained.
#
The infant doll flailed beneath the child doll, Daisy with deranged eyes. Rebecca seized her gloves. The girl child doll seemed to be attacking the infant—gnawing its fragile translucent ears. Clumsily, Rebecca pinched the displaced child doll between her thumb and forefinger.
“What are you doing?” John asked.
“I don’t know,” Rebecca answered. The doll felt alive. Twitching, it appeared ill-used.
“The door,” John whispered again, setting down his screwdriver. “The door!” John rummaged through the manuals. “According to the manuals, there’s a torture chamber. An electric chair and a little prison with its own death row. Can you imagine? Some of the bad ones must die in the chair.”
“These can’t!” Rebecca stared down at the child doll in her hand.
#
Holding a viewfinder to different areas of the dollhouse’s interior, John was able to unlock scenes of familiar faces, his lost friends and family fading into dust. The hidden room contained a tiny telescope and a portrait-screen series of a male figure in seven stages—year zero, year ten, year eighteen, year forty, year sixty, year eighty, and year death. The portrait screen moved. John tore the wall down and saw day laborers, cleaning boats and doing other odd jobs.
Opening the infirmary, John discovered that the fading dolls had changed positions. Elderly women dolls were hovering above a doll that looked wounded and ill—a doll that resembled his father, having his father’s face and hair, wearing clothing his father used to wear.
John wanted to remember who his father was before his transitory years, living in parking lots, motel rooms and shelters. Fading with eyes sunken and shocked, the father’s doll expression projected horror, as if searching for pity.
#
Fungus grew beneath the dollhouse basement in a soft delicate pelt in a rainbow of colors—ranging from red to bluish black. Light bright green and white patches carpeted the crypt. Wet oily red and black fungus shaped like tadpoles grew on top of the patches. Other fungi resembled translucent amber worms and royal-blue flowers.
“Like sea creatures,” said Rebecca, running gloved fingers through her scattered hair.
Removing the black box, John scraped away the fungus with a putty knife.
#
Sniffing around the edges of the dollhouse, Rebecca said, “What’s that smell?
John gagged at the stench seeping from a seam where the back wall met the aluminum foundation. “Isn’t that the black box?”
“Where is it? How do we get to it?”
“I don’t know!”
His gaze roamed over the dollhouse.
In the seventh manual, John read the following: When handling the black box and emptying its contents, wear two pairs of gloves—the white gloves and a pair of rubber gloves to protect the white gloves.
“Get my gloves,” John said. “The white gloves. Also, bring a big pair of rubber gloves.”
John consulted the manual that contained information on pipes and vents near the golden chair flanked by two crystal cherubim beneath a golden sign engraved with the words, Mercy Seat. John looked up these words in the manual and found a biblical warning about the Ark of the Covenant: “Neither shall it come to mind: neither shall they remember it; neither shall it be magnified anymore.” (Jeremiah 3:16). Beneath the Mercy Seat was the black box. Slowly, John reached for the golden rings on its sides.
To move the black box, John had to turn the cherubim. The turning made the black box move along the pipes, releasing the rings. The black box clicked on its runners. The pipes retreated. Circular metal covers automatically sealed the holes. The black box dropped, releasing a stench unbearable. John reached for the black box that weighed close to fifteen pounds.
“Mommy!” Daisy called.
John held the black box away from his body.
Rebecca screamed. “Get that thing out of here!”
Daisy put her hand over her nose and breathed through her mouth.
Go to your room, John mouthed to Daisy as he went outside to dump the black box.
Near the garage, shadows moved through the woods. John heard heavy rustling that sounded human, and he feared me, even though he didn’t know what I was.
John opened the black box by pulling on the golden rings. Slimy contents, firmly packed like a block of oily soil, slid into the open trash bag. John tied it off and then wrapped it before pouring bleach into the black box while trying to ignore my shadow in the distant trees.
#
Entering the dollhouse later that night, in the movie theater on a miniature projector, John viewed my last days as captured on TikTok for voyeurs to see my degradation again and again. Contorting to avoid strangers videoing me in the darkness, I was the Tunnel Woman. “No, it wasn’t like that,” said John whenever I had slipped away among the addicts in the tunnel. Drugs had altered my brain, allowing me to enter the dollhouse. It was what I had always wanted, a place to feel at home, a place to be no one, unlike TikTok, where I was someone who I didn’t want to be.
Fifteen seconds of fame as Tunnel Woman was too much. Fifteen minutes was an eternity.
Erase me. Erase my videos, I tried to tell John when he felt his missing toes twitching and imagined me awakening in the darkness and walking out of the tunnel into the light.
