Clockwork Sex Doll
By Charlotte Mistry
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 Charlotte Mistry
Discover other titles by Charlotte Mistry at http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/charlottemistry
Cover stock source by tristin_stock, used under Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0
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The first time Frederick Bray sees Ennie Saa, he falls in love.
He doesn’t know her name then, of course. He doesn’t even know that it’s love, only that he has to stop and stare. She’s standing in a shop window. At first he takes her for a woman. When she doesn’t move he thinks that maybe she’s a mannequin, but that isn’t right, either.
He stands and stares at her on that London street as steam-driven carriages rumble by behind him, and ladies in their high-bustled dresses pass by with the sound of rustling cotton. What is she, if not flesh?
She’s standing in the window of a second-hand shop. Junk lies in piles around her, an untidy mountain of brass lamps, pots and pans and battered furniture. Frederick steps closer to the window. He sees the matte glow of her skin and a fine, almost invisible network of seams.
She’s an automaton. A life-size clockwork doll, exquisitely crafted.
She’s fine-boned and realistic, her face a sculpted metal-and-porcelain masterpiece. Her fingers are tapered and perfectly formed, and tipped with fingernails of beaten silver. Her cascading black hair is very likely of human origin.
He’s met few enough of them in his time, and spoken to fewer still- for they can speak, if properly maintained. This clockwork girl is worth a king’s ransom, worth more than he could make in a year. What he can’t figure out is what she’s doing in a junk shop.
On a second look, though, she’s worn. Her dress is threadbare, her hair hangs in tangled strands and she has a spiderweb of cracks on her right arm. The glossy pink veneer on her lips is chipping and flaking. She stands at an odd angle like she was pushed into place, and her blue glass eyes stare through him blindly, unblinking.
Unsettled, Frederick continues his walk.
He leaves her behind, but her wide eyes haunt him. She sticks in his mind even as he knows he’ll never be able to afford her.
Frederic’s fortunes are his own, grown from a small inheritance left by his parents. He’s is a businessman but not a wealthy one, and he earns enough to live well. Enough to buy fine suits- one or two, at least- and enough that with careful spending he can appear wealthier than he is to prospective clients.
This is a useful thing indeed, especially when dealing with the upper class. They throw money around with a carelessness that staggers him; to ingratiate himself into their circles, he must pretend to do the same thing.
He’s in the shipping business. He makes his living on imports and exports, buying up the curiosities that arrive every morning at the dockyards and selling them to the idle rich. His days are full of paperwork, ledgers and accounts. Normally he finds he has no trouble concentrating on his work, but today is different. Today, his mind keeps drifting to the clockwork girl in the window.
He wonders if he could buy her, but no, surely not. Not on his income.
But, then again, what is she doing in a junk shop? She seems intact, undamaged but for superficial wear that surely accounts for little in the grand scheme of things. Even second-hand and already imprinted with a personality, clockwork dolls fetch a handsome price.
Maybe this one really is damaged, and maybe it’s in some way that he can’t see but can fix? Maybe the shop’s owner doesn’t know what they have? It doesn’t seem possible, but stranger things have happened.
Owning a clockwork girl will make him seem right at home among the rich, a voice inside him whispers, it’ll be an in. A good business decision.
He’s rationalizing, he realizes, and curses himself.
Still, that evening he walks back by the same shop. The girl is still in the window, exactly the same as before. Frederick spends a long few minutes just standing there staring.
He finds himself overcome by the most intense urge. A want to caress the cool curve of her cheek, to run his hands through the length of her hair, to replace her careworn dress with finery and her chunky, cheap costume jewelry with the real thing.
He walks into the shop.
A bell jingles as the door shuts, alerting someone to his presence, but afterwards the shop is silent. He can smell dust. All he can hear is the lethargic tick-tick-tick of a clock keeping not-quite-accurate time.
“Hello?”
There’s no response even after he waits, and so he goes to investigate the clockwork girl for himself. She’s even more beautiful up close. A work of art. Her hair is not, in fact, human, but fine-spun metal. Her lips are lacquered pink, her face framed in gilt edging. Her joints are so finely crafted that Frederick can barely see them.
He wants to kiss those lips, he realizes with a start, and steps back. That’s not only beyond the bounds of propriety, it’s plain odd.
“You like?” Says a voice at his elbow, and Frederick jumps.
It’s an elderly Chinese woman, stooped and bent and barely four and a half feet tall. Her hair is drawn back into a white-lined bun and she peers at him from behind half-moon spectacles. Even through the obstruction, Frederick can see the gleam of a shark-like saleswoman in her eyes.
“Very beautiful, yes? Good for home, cooks, cleans, does-“ her expression turns shrewd, “-other things. You like? You buy?”
“I don’t know.” Frederick’s not quite recovered from the shock, but his eyes are back on the girl.
“Ah. Well, maybe a small discount. Only for you, you understand.”
Frederick knows a rush sale when he sees one, and he’s no easy mark. Still, he can’t see anything obviously wrong with her except surface flaws. He frowns. “This isn’t exactly the kind of thing that goes on sale, ever. What’s the catch?”
“Her name is Ennie.” The old woman pats the clockwork girl, and Frederick wonders if she means Annie. The woman doesn’t give him the room to ask. “Ennie Saa. Very fine model. Very sturdy. Very pretty on your arm too, I think.”
“But what-”
“See, fine work.” The old woman points out Ennie’s delicate seams, her sculpted features, the rows of tiny sapphires studding the rims of her ears. She lifts Ennie’s skirts with a flourish. The clockwork girl has no underthings on.
Frederick winces and feels blood rush to his face. “Good god, woman!”
“Full service!” The old woman shows off Ennie’s alabaster legs and points out a pussy between them that’s just as delicately sculpted as the rest of her, but looks… Softer.
Frederick chokes. “Stop that!”
He grabs the skirts and pushes them back down. He’s so hideously embarrassed that he can barely string a thought together, and the damnable woman just keeps smiling at him. He has half a mind to walk out the door and never come back, because this is something he can barely deal with.
But the clockwork girl.
“What’s wrong with her?” He says, finally, and when the old woman opens her mouth to answer he just keeps talking. “I mean really. Tell me, or you’ll never be selling this thing.”
The woman frowns, but sighs, and acquiesces. “Is broken,” her voice is reluctant, “well- not broken, but does not go.”
“Does not… Go,” Frederick frowns, because that sounds as good as broken to him. “Then what-?”
She seems to know what he’s thinking. “No, no! Is not broken, only does not go. Few pieces missing, winding mechanism damaged. Is all. Can be fixed, yes?”
He doesn’t believe it. “If that’s all, why don’t you fix it yourself and command a higher price?”
“Me?” she holds out her gnarled fingers. “With these hands? I am much too old, boy. Easier to sell without fixing. You get parts, you fix her yourself. She more yours, then, see?”
He doesn’t, really, but a discount does sound attractive. Buying a half-functional clockwork girl is the difference between it costing him an arm and a leg and it costing him the world. Either way, he wonders if he can indeed fix her.
He knows a man who can get supplies, but he’s no watchmaker. Then again, he supposes, it’s not the gears that are broken. Only the winding mechanism, maybe the attached springs. He could hire someone to get around that, surely?
“How much?”
The old woman nods sharply, as if she’d known all along that Frederick was a sure thing. “Five hundred.”
“Five hundred pounds?” Frederick feels his eyes bugging out of his head. A brand-new model would cost twice that, true, but it’s a king’s ransom. Even the rich men he deals with every day might hesitate at that- it’s several months’ pay for him, and for the poorest of the city… Best not even to guess.
“Take or leave it.”
Frederick sputters a protest and the old woman just shakes her head.
“I say five hundred. Is good deal. You will not find cheaper. Just look.” She takes hold of Ennie’s arm and pulls. It unfolds, graceful as a bird’s wing. Then she grabs Frederick’s hand and sets it in Ennie’s.
It feels smooth. Cool, but not as cold as he’s been expecting. Instead, her touch is the comfort of a cool hand on a warm day, her fingers hard but smooth, like an ivory statue. This is the moment where Frederick knows he’s lost; even though Ennie still stands immobile, even though she’s still staring blankly into the middle distance, for all the world no more than porcelain and metal, Frederick can’t look away.
The old woman’s voice fades into a background blur. The only real thing in the world is Ennie’s hand in his.
“I’ll take her,” he says without thinking, without even considering where the money’s going to come from. He only knows that she is his, and that this is something that was always meant to be.
He doesn’t carry her home, of course. That would be impossible. With her metal workings and steel skeleton she outweighs him by half again. Instead, Ennie Saa is delivered to his home by shipping crate and unloaded by two burly workers in Frederick’s front room.