Mary Ellen Ramey was a perfectly lovely teenager who, excepting her love of shopping, was quite the average 15-year-old girl. She was proud of her waist length blonde hair and ashamed of her over-sized nose. She was okay at math and terrible at history. She played soccer and lacrosse, and had a large group of friend who were just as unremarkable as she was.

She was with these friends on a trip to the mall, where the 10 or 11 of them were trying on clothes, buying little toys for their siblings, and giggling at every guy over the age of 12. She was watching an especially attractive college student when she heard her name."Mary!" called her friend -- not her best friend, she had no best friend. They were all equal to Mary Ellen. If asked, she would not be able to pick out her favorite friend because each and every one of them was interchangeable -- Terra. "Come on, we're going to go downstairs, Krista says there's a sale at Penny's she wants to check out."

"Right!" she said quickly, gathering her thoughts. "Um...I think I forgot to look for a gift, it's almost Mother's Day. I'll meet up with you!"

"'Kay, but hurry up!" Mary Ellen looked casually around for the guy, who looked to her like a "Joe" with his curly hair and semi-jock apperance. No! Joe was leaving already? She saw him heading toward the exit of the mall-- stairs from the second story led into a hallway, outside of which the parking lot was located. Well, she'd watch him from the window elevator, then. It was technically for handicapped people but, well, if there was a handicapped person she's let him on.

Of course, there wasn't, and the elevator opened when she pressed the "First Floor" button. Cool. She thought It's never ready just like that. She dashed inside and yes, there was Joe! She watched him dreamily, vaguely fantasizing about having him for a boyfriend. Then he was gone-- in a sports car, no less-- and Mary Ellen turned to the clear elevator's doors. Except she wasn't moving anymore.

"No way!" she screamed out loud. "It can't be stuck! Come on!" she looked around for some sort of explanation but there was nothing to do. Oh no. What if..what if the cable is stuck on something? What if..what if it's breaking right now? The little steel threads snapping one by one until the elevator falls into the ground floor and I-- No. She was being stupid, she firmly told herself. Mary Ellen pressed the "emergency" button. She felt a nervous, anticipating thrill as she did, she had never pressed one of those buttons before. What was supposed to happen? Did a bell go off? She thought maybe one did.

Instead, a low, controlled female voice spoke through the small intercom/radio on the ceiling of the elevator. "Hello?"

"Um..yeah! Hi!" Mary Ellen answered, feeling stupid. What if intercom lady didn't hear her? But she did.

"The elevator is stuck. You'll get out in just a minute."

"Umm...okay..." that seemed strange to her. Why had the mall picked such a nasty sounding lady? It would be nicer to have someone sweet ask what was the matter, and say hang on, darling, we'll get you out of there.

The elvator lurched, or the blonde girl thought it did. Oh lord. The cable. It's really going to snap in two, isn't it? She sat down, swearing not to move at all. Surely, if she moved, the 135 pounds that made her up would cause the cable to break all the faster. So she held still, staring at her short green skirt and the trembling hands clutching it. It's just an elevator. Get it together, girl.

The elevator moved suddenly, jerking up and then down, with Mary Ellen shrieking in a blind panic the whole time. And just as suddenly it stopped, the doors sliding slently open.

"Where is this?" she whispered, aware that she sounded like a cliched movie's heroine. She did not care. The place before her was no part of the mall-- it was dark, deep purple and reds serving as the light in what was otherwise a velvety black void. It was eerie and cold, she decided as she stepped out nervously (What choice did she have? Wait in the elevator?) but it was pretty, too. She screamed and jumped as something touched her back.

"Oh! No, I'm sorry!" gasped what turned out to be a big, old lady. "Poor child, I didn't mean to scare you!" "I-It's alright." gasped the terrified Mary Ellen. "Miss, I'm sorry..where is the mall?"

"Miss? Oh no, darling! And the mall, well, I know where it is. Come with me sweetheart, and by the way, I'm Shelby Sorken." Mary Ellen grinned, glad that there was something normal about this. Hey, maybe this was the backroom of Penny's, they were having a sale. Thhat must be it. Mrs. Sorkan walked with her, but slowed down soon. "I'm right behind you, dear! Just have to walk slowly!"

"It's no problem" she replied, feeling much more cheerful. It was just a sale theme, she had decided. Illogical, maybe, but hey! The Mall lived by it's own rules, after all.

There was something in front of her, and as she got closer she saw it was a small, old fashioned bed. The frame was a fancy, but rusting, iron, and it held a twin-size mattress which seemed old but clean with its prim white sheets and small pillow. And there was something on each post of the bed, wasn't there? She leaned in to look at what it was, curious in a normal way, when again she felt Mrs. Sorken's hand on her back, this time pushing her forward onto the little bed.

"Mrs. Sork--" she choked out, trying to recover herself after being pushed face-first on a bed with a decidedly thin mattress. She turned around surprised, hoping the sweet old lady had merely tripped. But the woman's eyes were all of a sudden blank and unfocused.

Then Mary Ellen realized something quite terrifying and to her teenage mind, "wrong". Bands of metal had closed over her ankles and were dragging them to the foot of the bed-- her skirt rising awkwardly up her legs, and her wrists were undergoing a similar thing. "What the hell is this?!" she screamed, terrified, as she kicked and writhed her arms in their bindings.

"Be quiet." ordered a familiar female voice. Intercom lady.

Mary Ellen's head jerked sharply toward the voice, which was coming from the poster of the bed. And to her absolute horror, she saw the things on the posters of the beds-- heads. The disembodied heads of four eerie ventriloquist dummies, their painted eyes and smiles focused in on her. Three were male, but the one she was gaping at was female, with long blonde hair and bright red paint-- lipstick-- on her thick plastic mouth. The head was frowning-- could that mouth frown? It seemd it shouldn't, because it was a hard plastic face that should be smiling-- and staring directly at her, then swerved itself towards Mrs. Sorken. "Get your brothers." It ordered, the tone of voice never changing. "And cover yourself." Thge woman nodded silently, and produced a mask from her pocket. It was the face of a clown, painted white with huge red lips frozen in a frighting sneer and dark holes where eyes should have been-- all complemented by a bright-red nose that was almost normal, but not. It was somehow crooked, one nostril was larger then the other, to an effect that was somewhere between comical and frightening. "Mrs. SORK--" screamed Mary, pleadingly, and was again cut off. "Silence." Mrs. Sorken had vanished into the darkness.

The head to Mary Ellen's upper left spoke-- an old man, it sounded like, though it was painted to be a young man with waxy hair (It's only plastic, Mary Ellen thought to herself) and a stupid, fixed grin. "Young lady. Mary Ellen Ramey. What a tiring name. Tiring person. Well. It'll only be a little while we'll have to endure each other." The two heads at the bottom gibbered excitedly, their painted eyes racing up and down Mary Ellen's body. "Stop that!" she cried, embarrassed. "Yes. Do so." said the dummy on the upper left again. "Heeeeheee, Samuel, you look too, ahaha! Little slut, little bitch, Lookit what she's showing us, you can see it too, hahaha!" "No!" snapped Intercom Lady. "Both of you. Stop. There are more important things to do with Mary Ellen Ramey." The terrible fake black eyes were staring at her again. Intercom Dummy Head's hair was a coarse blonde wig, and it scared Mary Ellen, along with the rest of her. "Who are you?" she whispered. "Where are my friends? Send me back, please, please." The head took no notice.

"You are here for a reson, of course. For my-- for our--" Samuel was glaring at her. "project, we are going to take your soul for our use." The teen jerked frantically at the bonds. "What does that mean? You're going to kill me?" This was really serious, wasn't it. She wasn't dreaming-- it was too surreal-- these dolls meant to kill her, really do so. "NO!! LET ME GO!!! YOU'VE GOT NO RIGHT TO--ARGHH!!" A furious, burning pain shot through her leg.

Mrs. Sorken--whatever she was-- was back, along with three thuggish men, all in exquisitely grotesque clown masks. One of them had buried a sharp, triangular steak-knife midway in Mary Ellen's leg. The sight of her own blood flowing freely down her calf and onto the no longer pure white sheets caused her to scream out, and she tried desepretely to cover the wound, to make the blood stop oozing out from around that terrible hole in her leg. Her hands wouldn't moved so she settled for crying and rocking  back and forth, feeling faint.

"Gruschen, you fool!" spat out the female head. "We might have needed that leg!"

"Ah, shut up, Dolores." drawled Lower Right. "Blood is all right, ahahaha! Spurting all over the bed, it's damned hot is what I mean to say." Lower Left was gibbering in an excited sort of disgusting way.

"Well." said Dolores. "It doesn't matter. We don't need it." "And she's quiet." chimed in Samuel, looking at the gasping, near hysterical girl in boredom. "Continue on."

Dolores frowned-- or  did she? "Of course you've got to die. Taking a soul isn't like you see on TV, when there's a flashy light and people fall down in a faint. Oh no. The soul doesn't want to leave the body, see. But when the body dies, it's got to. It runs away  to heaven or hell or to where ever it can land, but it goes much too fast. Far too fast. But there's this place, fortunately. You can't get out unless we let you. And your soul can't either. It won't want to come out here so it will just sit in your body-- until we take it out."

And Dolored the Dummy's Head giggled, and that giggle turned into a high, frenzied, gibber that the other three picked up, and even the clowns seemed to be gibbering behind their terrible false frozen faces. Mary Ellen was screaming louder then she ever had before.

Finally, it stopped, and Samuel Upper Left spoke this time. "Sorken. Kill her body." "NOOOO! Mrs. SORKEN!! Please, please, don't do this! I don't want to die, it isn't fair!" The fat old clown lady had produced a syringe-- filled with air. "IT IS FAIR." came Dolores' voice. She was not screaming, she was merely louder. "YOU ARE USELESS AND YOU ARE BORING. THERE IS NOTHING THAT ANYONE NEEDS IN YOU."

"But there is!!" cried Mary Ellen, desperete now as she tried to twist her arm away. "I-- I'm--" "WHAT? YOU'RE AVERAGE AND DULL AND COMMON." "There's nothing wrong with that!" choked the girl, crying as she felt the thin metal needle slide smoothly into her vein. "I can't help--AAAAH!" The air that had been injected into her bloodstream came all at once. There was great pain in her neck, and there was nothing.

But not quite nothing. Mary Ellen tried to move the mouth. It would not move-- it was dead. She stared at the heads, all gibbering again, through dead eyes. And the oddest sensation had come over her. She could no longer feel, for the first time ever.

Everyone feels something at all times. The bedsheets or a chair beneath you. Even if you were walking, you felt the clothes on your back and the ground below your feet. Even if someone went outside and danced naked in some sort of ritualistic moon dance, there would be cold night air and damp grass beneath your feet. But Mary Ellen Ramey did not feel her skirt or the thin mattress. Even the pain in her leg-- the leg-- was gone. She could see it, from dead green eyes-- a bloody, oozing gap, but the leg was dead, wasn't it? But why was she still--

"You are a soul, now." intoned Samuel. "And better off that way. Your sad little self isn't attached to the body any longer. It's merely  in it, rotting until we remove it. You see?"

Mary Ellen did not want to see. She wanted out-- to rejoin her friends and leave the thing she was huddled in, but she could not, dared not move. She would not survive in this strange, velvety void without some sort of protection, some sort of case-- a case like a body, but a living one, and there were no living bodies here.

"Now then." Dolores continued, her calm voice back to it's natural low volume. "What do we need from her?"

"The ass." sniggered Lower Right. "The tits." agreed Lower Left.

No. thought Mary Ellen. They're dead. Don't take my body. I couldn't take it. I'm still here. I'm still...

"No. We already have those, you fools. Tell me, what looks as though it could be useful for our child?"

"The spine." intoned Samuel, deeply. "Gruschen, open the mouth. See if the teeth are acceptable." Gruschen, his mask featuring yellow stars over the eyes and a twisted, (bloodstained) painted mouth, opened Mary Ellen's corpse's mouth, and grunted piggishly.

"Very well. Turn her over, Gruschen. Morgin, you help." The two somehow magicked the bonds away-- Mary Ellen trapped within her own dead body-- and turned her on her stomach. Morgin took a small, oval-shaped piece of metal, one end a handle and the other a neat, semi-circle blade. "Stupid, stupid!" cackled Lower Right. "Old shit! You've got to strip the girl, not gonna get anything out of her like that!"

Mary Ellen (Mary Ellen's soul, though she would not think of herself as that) felt  humiliation as the body was stripped naked and lay exposed to the eyes of four heads, the lower ones gibbering all the louder. They really will do it. she said, though the noise did not leave the body.

The scalpel-thing was pressed to the end of the body's spine, right above the ass. But nothing "wrong" in the teenage girl sense of the word happened. The metal cut into the skin, and then, it was pulled up along the spine. Straight up, leaving two thin cuts on either side of the vertebres, until it reached the middle of the neck. The skin was cut here, half-moon blade rounding the dead flesh off neatly. With a smooth motion, the big clown man worked his fingers under this little circle of skin, and pulled it back slowly, as though trying to be gentle. Don't even worry about it said Mary Ellen I'm dead so why do you care, motherfucker? She had never said that word before, but if there was any grouf of fuckers it was these strange, frighting people right here..she bit back a sob, even though it wouldn't have been heard anyway. Was she really boring? Would no one care about her now that she was dead? No..motherfucking bitch had no right to say that...

The skin was removed, and the blood slid slowly down the body's back and sides. It wasn't spurting, but it was flowing steadly just the same, exposing the white, sticky spine. "Yes." muttered Dolores. "That's it. Our baby's backbone. Take the ribs, too." Morgin and Gruschen first held up the long, bloody strip of skin questioningly. "Ah. Throw that to our dog."

It wasn't any sort of dog that Mary Ellen's soul saw materilize. Oh, the body was right, but it did not have paw, it had two small, outward-facing, gray, shriveled human hands and a smaller, deformed pair of human feet that faced inward. And the face-- it was almost like a baby, but it could not have been. It was shaped like a baby's head, but the forehead was much too big for the chin, and the eyes and mouth were shriveled up, rotting and flat against the impossibly-proportioned face. The nose was not quite formed, there were thin bones pushed against the even thinner skin of the face. Mary Ellen had been pro-choice because all her friends had been, but seeing this small, aborted, ruined creature called for opinions to be firm, or for the opinion to break entirely.

The skin was tossed to it and the lipless, toothless mouth smacked over it, eating it and making a terrible, sucking sort of noise, like a vacuum cleaner with a little child's doll caught up it. No. Is that what they'll do? Take out my back and feed it to this ba-- this monster? No, no, it's my body, they can't!

Meanwhile, (the soul never aware of the body's suffering) the spine had begun to be pulled out, the dummies watching with a morbid fascination. Even the Lowers had stopped their frenzied yammering to watch as the bone, rips cling to it, was lifted out of Mary Ellen's body's back. It came out slowly, the shiny wet blood running down the clowns' fingernails and into the crocks of their elbows, not wanting to be seperated from it's home, from the smooth protection of it's case of skin. The ribs stayed attached to the longer bone, coming away with bits of torn organs stuck to them. Finally, with a sickening shluck noise, it came loose, and was held before the head. "Clean it." whispered Dolores, sounding awestruck. It was held before the (baby) dog, and a long, unnaturally thick tongue slid from the mouth. It was gray, and dripping with drool as it cleaned over the bones, sucking the blood and the fluids until all that was left was a clean, damp backbone with it's perfect sets of ribs.

"Take it, now. Take it to her." ordered Samuel, attention back on the body before him. "The teeth now, take out her teeth."

The corpse was rolled onto its back, the sheets stained beyond repair. The mouth was delicately opened, and the same impossibly coordinated fingers reached in, popping out the individual teeth with ease. There were no roots left on the tooth, not even blood. "'Zzist it all?" muttered Morgin, stupidely. "Take un sourl, zzirz?" "Yes." said Samuel, but was cut off.

"No, not yet!" protested Dolores. "I want her face." Samuel looked incredulous inspire of his grin. "It's not very good." "Not the eyes or the nose, the skin of the face! Look, it's nice and clean and acceptable." "You're right. Take that, too."

Mary Ellen was crying louder then ever inside herself. Her face, it was going to be ruined worse then the little dog's. No one would know her now. She wished only to be free of this terrible, maimed body. She wanted to go home. She wanted to watch Joe with her friends and giggle and waste time trying on clothes. She only wanted to live and now she was dead.

The scalpel cut a line under her chin, cut a smooth break in the skin. Her face was lifted off, slowly. The lips were left behind. The nose, without skin to cover it, fell over, the insides sliding across the bloody cheekbones. And the eyes were left too, simple green orbs focused on the nothingness of the ceiling. The right eyes was slipping, oozing white gunk over the red muscles of the face. Ellen could see through that eye, but realized that she could see through any part of her body. She did not want to watch her eye sliding down her cheek and so she watched from her forehead, peering up at her murderers through the tissues.

"We're done." said a very satisfied Lower Right. "Take 'er soul." Lower Left was talking excitedly to himself as Mary Ellen's body floated upwards, floated all on its own, with a sickened and fascinated Mary Ellen watching as the bed directly below her swelled, circled, and opened a pit inside of it. And in that pit-- two swirling blades, running eagerly around each other.

Mary Ellen understood. Her body was to be fed to those blades, and her ruined face would no longer matter to anyone. She scrabbled inside herself as her toes approached the whirling blades, pulling her soul up and away from the metal that would certainly tear all of her apart. She screamed as her feet went, it was too horrifying to watch. But where, where could she go? Not into the dark, oh no, no. She pulled her fingers away from her body's fingers, losing a human form as she pulled herself into a smaller, tighter ball in the brain. But it was too fast and it was already up to her neck-- the eyeball had fallen away completely. Pus was squirting from the socket and the babydog ate it as it splattered over it.

Mary Ellen Ramey had nowhere to go but out. And she did, pulling away from her skull into the death of the black world. But she did not die. Mrs. Shelby Sorken, whatever sort of ghostmonster she was, had a glass jar waiting. Mary Ellen entered it gratefully, and the lid was sealed. She heard nothing. She saw black. Soon, there had never been a Mary Ellen Ramey, and only a cloudy haze in an old jar. There was nothing.



The elevator had crashed. The cable split and the old box fell through to the sub-terrain parking lot. The 10 or 11 girls were clustered around, crying, watching the police shift through the rubble. "Little girl, they said. Can't of made it--eh?" Something was moving in the pile of glass and steel. A hand reached up, and a girl stood up. She looked beyond the onlookers, to where the exit ramp above showed light. She smiled, and took a faltering step towards the light. "Young lady! Are you hurt?!"

"No." she answered, dreamily, staring at the world through green dead eyes. Her red hair shone, and her little teeth glittered. "You're not Mary! Where is she?"

"I don't care." her voice was beautiful and haunting, and it sounded like it had been borrowed or stolen from another time and place. "But it's lovely today."