Wax Eyes
Wax Eyes: A Tale of Obsession
Karrae, while searching online for unique experiences in Portland Oregon, finds an obscure advertisement for a Museum of Oddities called the Fantasy Macabre. Visiting the museum she encounters the strange doll-maker, Obscura, who owns and operates the building. The doll-maker has a Lolita appearance that unsettles Karrae, but she finds herself drawn to the demure woman.
The museum is filled with strange artifacts, some medical oddities like preserved cow heads with too many eyes and tongues, severed hands with too many digits. Some are archeological, strange stone talismans with waxy almost soapstone like surfaces. Even more off-putting is the entire wing of the museum dedicated to wax figures and dolls. Oddly enough most of the wax figures are not of historical figures or celebrities but just regular people in terrible and horror-filled scenes. A hyper-realistic horror movie style axe murderer chopping into a scantily clad young adult female, the wax blood a vivid red. A car accident, with the front half of a classic black mustang smashing a man into a brick wall. An attractive woman tied to a pillar surrounded by stacked firewood. Wearing a black dress torn across the chest. Wax villagers crowd holding torches, faces contorted in anger as wax tears sit motionless on the ‘witches’ face. A Dracula adjacent vampire bent over a sleeping man, the sleeping man’s face contorted in an odd expression of pain and ecstasy mixed together. There’s something about each of these figures' eyes though, they’re oddly realistic…
The doll rooms are filled with extremely life-like representations of children and adult creations set up as if they are living normal lives. Eating dinner, watching television, playing in bedrooms. What’s off-putting about the dolls is each and every one has too many eyes. Their faces are odd kaleidoscopes of eyes of different colors, eyes also line the legs and arms. Not just stuck there, but carefully constructed to look as if they are naturally part of the bodies. Obscuru cryptically refers to these as her children.
Karrae leaves the museum feeling unsettled by the entire experience. That night she has terrible nightmares about dolls with too many eyes and a childlike voice taunting her from the dark. The next day she begins to see eyes out of the corner of her vision, watching from shadows and feels as if she is being watched at all time. This happens over the next couple weeks, she also begins to bump into Obscura in random places. The store, outside her work, outside her apartment complex. Despite the unsettling feeling she actually develops a relationship with Obscura. They go on a few dates and eventually sleep together. Obscura is oddly aggressive during this tryst.
Obscura still shows up in random places and Karrae is soon convinced that Obscura is stalking her. With each encounter, the nightmares grow and a sense of doom falls over Karrae. She soon can’t sleep, can’t really bring herself to eat and she stops going out. She calls a friend who offers to visit Obscura, see if they get an uncomfortable feeling and ask Obscura to leave Karrae alone. Karrae doesn’t hear from the friend for days, they don’t answer any calls. When Karrae visits her friend's home, there’s no sign of them having been there for days. Convinced she calls the police, who offer to investigate. During this time, Karrae begins to have waking nightmares of the dolls, standing in random places throughout her life, they vanish whenever she attempts to focus on them.
Eventually, the police say that while they checked out The Fantasy Macabre, there is no sign her friend ever went there and they’ll continue investigating the disappearance but there isn’t any evidence to go off of. Karrae decides to go to the museum to figure this out herself.
She takes a knife with her hiding it in her purse and heads to the museum. Whispers and visions of dolls plaguing her the whole while. Arriving she finds it empty and dark so she breaks into it, she looks around the museum and eventually makes her way to the wax wing. Entering, the lights come on and she finds Obscura there waiting. There is a verbal argument, Obscura denying everything. Then Obscura brings Karrae’s attention to a new exhibit, unfinished. As Karrae looks over at it, she sees her friend. In wax form. The friend is in the motion of stabbing downwards with a butchers knife, dressed in a leather apron. The scene is incomplete as there is no victim. As Karrae turns to flee or attack, Obscura strikes her across the face with the arm of a mannequin. Rendering her unconscious.
The next few chapters go into great detail about the process Obscura takes dismembering Karrae while keeping her alive through some arcane spell work as she does so. Each piece of flesh is cleaned and carefully dipped into a wax mixture and pieced back together. Obscura delights in this process talking to her children. The dolls with too many eyes who watch, unblinking through the whole process. Eventually, Karrae is completed and placed in the same scene as her friend. The book ends with their eyes locked together. Both living wax, unable to move or turn away from each other while Obscura shows another patron the exhibits as the dolls watch on.
