Setting

So, the dolls.

I had had enough of watching the slurry of emotions wash through my vision over and over, and over and over and over and over, going endlessly into the walls like a sadistic ghost's thralls, and I knew I needed to move my body around and see some new stimulus.

I walked. I limped, a bit, as my legs were now accustomed to long periods of rest (and I have a history of leg problems beyond that, though there was once a time when I would walk for hours and only want to keep walking!), I kept an unsteady pace and left my "house," left my "neighborhood," left my "courtyard." I think I was looking for trees, or leaves, or dirt, or water. I must have been thirsty. I can't place how I wouldn't have been thirsty... Had I been drinking this entire time? Had these mansions contained sustenance? There were pipes carrying something; there were more pipes than rooms, which is to be expected! And there were so many rooms.

There were so many rooms... many of which housed furniture, mostly chairs, boxes, counters, tables, surfaces. Some rooms had divots in the walls where one might put a lamp, some knickknacks, a painting. Were there paintings in that mansion? Yes, I remember seeing lots, arranged with no consistent frequency. Some of them may not have been paintings at all but instead windows. Maybe some of them were paintings whose contents moved according to eyesight, to give the illusion of a window. In the entire courtyard (and neighboring houses) where my "home" was, there was only one painting which contained anything humanoid. It was in a corner house far from where I slept; I did not like looking at it or being anywhere near it. It wasn't even all that focused; the humanoid figure was, I think, in the background somewhere? I still felt anxious seeing it. But other courtyards, other blocks, had more frequent instances of paintings featuring a humanoid subject. Only very rarely did more than one painting seem to represent the same subject. I am being careful, of course, not to outright say "human," as I refuse to presume. They didn't strike me as monstrous either, mind you. Some of them were shadowy, but often they had details that were clearly some kind of flesh. And, anyway, more often the paintings were strictly abstract-- uh, I presume-- with.. shapes, tones, textures, structures. I didn't think much of the paintings, even when words came to me. In that place, I just took them to fit in with the overall theme of "resembling familiar interiors." Paintings are furniture more often than they are art.

Speaking of furniture I glossed over as fitting the theme, this is actually where the dolls first come in. I did not pay them much attention. On my explorations, I did occasionally see dolls in some rooms, and I was thankful that they generally had no eyes, as that would certainly have startled me. They were infrequent enough to be reasonably figured along the lines of those aforementioned chairs, lamps, tables. Just... things, in a setting consisting of things. Perhaps if I had made a point to keep track of these dolls, I would have been less surprised later on, but of course I didn't, as these were still early days with sluggish thoughts.

Mostly I remember the sounds. The ticking of paint chipping off the walls, the thud that's a type of creak as architecture settles, pitter-patter in the distance that reminded me of small animals but was far too frequent to be anything other than pipes. There was a sporadic noise that rushed through the mansion, resembled a thick wind but moved very slowly, came across more like a large sheer object being dragged along walls-- and, of course, there was no wind in that mansion anyway. I can only speculate on what all these sounds were, and they did alarm me for a while in the early days, but they never seemed connected to anything alarming, so they just became the background mood of memories.