‘Hey, you’re into weird shit, right? Check this video out - it doesn’t even have a hundred views yet!’
Elliot dismissed the alert and returned his gaze to the professor. He knew better than to check out anything Marcus might send him somewhere in public.
At least, he thought he did. He should have certainly, but as he tried to refocus on Dr. Roseinstein’s lecture on the Reconstruction Era of the Civil War, he found it basically impossible. He wasn’t the only one, of course. Half of his university class was surreptitiously doing something on their phones while they pretended to pay attention.
His resistance lasted almost thirty seconds before he gave in to the urge for novelty. He desperately needed a distraction from this mind-numbing history class.
So, he muted his phone just in case Marcus had sent him yet another rickroll or something obnoxious, as he did sometimes. After that, he opened the message and clicked the link, taking him to YouTube.
The video was hardly worth sharing, though. It was just a girl… no, a woman, in a very girly room playing with her dolls. At least, he thought it was a woman? She was wearing an oversized pink hoodie that covered her face, and she refused to face the camera. Instead, she looked down at what she was playing with or away from the camera when she got up to grab something.
Even though he couldn’t hear what she was saying, her love for her dolls was obvious. They were everywhere: on the floor, the desk, the shelves behind her, and even the dollhouse that dominated one corner of the room. It was strange, of course, but not exactly interesting, and he wasn’t really sure why Marcus needed to share it.
He flipped on the closed captioning just to see what she had to say, but it wasn’t any more interesting. It was just someone talking about why she liked the doll she was playing with. He was about to click off when she suddenly looked up at him for the first time.
“Wait, please don’t go,” she said silently, “I’m so lonely. I don’t have many friends…”
Everything was disturbing about that moment. Either she’d timed this moment perfectly for when people tended to lose interest, or this was some weird AI experiment pretending to be a YouTube video. As strange as both of those options were, looking at her face made it impossible to think about them.
The woman in the video wore a mask that made her look just like a doll. No, not wearing, he realized as he watched her skin move as she spoke. If she was wearing it, then it was glued to her face. He looked closer, trying to determine if the plaintive expression was the result of makeup or plastic surgery. Just how much did this girl love—
“Mister Broderick,” the teacher said loudly, “Why don’t you tell us what you think the long-term consequences of General Sherman’s march to the sea were on Atlanta?”
“It was… bad?” he guessed as he quickly put away from his phone.
A few students laughed at his expense, but he ignored that, focusing on the whiteboard instead. It was full of notes that hadn’t been there just a second ago, and he had no idea how that happened. Then he noticed that class was almost over. He had no idea how that was possible, of course. He’d only been looking at that video for less than a minute, hadn’t he?
. . .
Elliot spent the rest of the day studiously ignoring that mystery, along with his homework. The closest he got to exploring that doll-filled rabbit hole again was to message Marcus, ‘What the hell was that channel? Got any lore for me on it?’
However, Marcus never answered the message, and Elliot quickly forgot about it. It was only just before bed after he turned off his games and lay down in bed, that he decided to give that video a second look. It was boring, of course, but something about how alien the girl’s face was compelled him. He just had to know what was going on there.
He opened it up to the same place he’d left off last time from his history, but she was no longer looking at the camera. He scrubbed the video back and forth several times, but now she never looked up.
Could a different video have been uploaded since class? Elliot wondered?
He had no idea, but when he browsed to the channel information, it wasn’t inspiring. The channel itself was uncreatively named ‘The Doll House,’ and there were hundreds of videos listed. They went back for years.
Some seemed dedicated to specific toys and had titles like “Playing with Franklin” or “Donald Wants to Say Hi,” but the rest were more task-focused. “Decorating the Living Room,” “Redoing the Kitchen,” and “Trying on New Outfits” seemed to be her most popular videos with only a couple hundred views. That had to be because they showed off the woman’s slender body wearing a pretty dress even if she was still facing away from the camera.
Elliot rolled his eyes at how predictable guys were and instead clicked “Real Girl Makeup Tutorial” because he was fairly sure that one would at least show her face. He skipped to the halfway mark and regretted it almost instantly as it dispelled the mystery completely.
For whatever reason, she still wasn’t showing the camera her face. Instead, it was somewhere behind her, showing her coarse black hair as it hung lankly down her back while she gave a makeup tutorial with her face in the mirror. The result was pretty boring.
It had never been his thing, but he’d seen several ASMR videos. This seemed to be more of that, with pretty poor production values. The woman had a strange, whispery voice, and she kept making weird creaking and clicking sounds as she talked about her favorite brand of eyeshadow and whatever else.
She wasn’t especially pretty, though; more importantly, she no longer looked like a strangely realistic doll. She was just someone who wanted to be an influencer and never got off the ground, so she lived in denial and kept putting out video after video that no one ever watched.
It wasn’t the first time he’d seen it. He’d run across speed runners and Sonic superfans who dedicated literally years of their lives to streaming videos that no one watched. It was certainly rarer to find a pretty girl languishing away in obscurity. Usually, they’d be able to find at least a few simps to tell them how pretty they were.
He swiped up to close out of the video, but nothing happened. Well - nothing on his phone anyway. Suddenly, she turned halfway toward the camera, giving him the scare of his life. “Please don’t leave me,” she said again sadly. “Please like and subscribe to my video. I’m so lonely.”
The fact that he couldn’t close the app was disturbing, but it was less disturbing than her face. He could see the right half of her doll face with makeup crudely smearing across it now; at the same time, he could see the very human-looking left side of her face reflected in the mirror. It was… Elliot didn’t know what it was, but he knew that he didn’t want to experience the mental dissonance it was causing anymore, and he hit the power button on his phone.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
That didn’t do any more good than his attempt to close out the app had. Instead, the phone stayed on as she turned completely to face the camera now and started moving closer to it until it took up his whole screen.
“Please? Just one little follow? Please?!” she begged while he stared in horror at the creases her plastic but not plastic skin made around her mouth when she talked and the way her teeth seemed to be cast from a single piece of white plastic rather than being individual enamel protrusions. “I know you’re busy, but if you could just give me one little follow, I promise I’ll let you go to bed. I just—”
Elliot did the only thing he could do. He tapped the subscribe button and tried to close the app again. This time, it worked, and he turned the power off and tossed it across the room in the laundry hamper like a hand grenade.
“What the actual fuck was that?!” he gasped as he lay awake in the dark, waiting for something terrible to happen.
It didn’t, though. He lay awake for hours thinking about what had happened.
In the morning, he was sure he’d imagined the whole thing, and the only reminder that it had ever been the case was the low battery he had to nurse along the rest of the day.
He hated going to class with a low battery, but that, at least, was enough to keep him off his phone when he was supposed to be concentrating. Somehow, though, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched.
He sent several messages to hit up Marcus so that he could talk to the guy about it, but none of his texts were getting read, deepening the mystery. After school, Elliot even swung by the man’s dorm room before taking the bus home, but there was no answer.
On the bus ride, he finally started watching more of the Doll-girl’s videos. Somehow, it felt safer to do it in public, where people were watching. She wasn’t hiding her face anymore, giving him all the time in the world to study her fake teeth and dead eyes. Was she so devoted to this she got plastic surgery? He asked himself. Is this one of those special effects tuber skins?
It seemed too real to be digital but too fake to be real, and he was so intent on trying to figure out how the bizarre girl could talk like that that he almost missed his stop. At home, he talked about whatever it was his parents wanted to talk about, but his mind was only on the Doll House. It nagged at him, and once he was finally alone in his room, he skipped Minecraft and started googling for answers.
“Someone has to know something about this girl,” he muttered as he found nothing and resorted to reverse image searches.
There was nothing, though. Just weird spam sites fishing off keywords and fetish sites that he clicked away from immediately. He tried posting about it on /x/, but his post drifted into obscurity without garnering a single answer. He tried posting the question on Reddit, too. He even got an alert that he had a response to that one. ‘You really need to be careful with the dollfaced girl…’ it started, but when he clicked on it to read the full response, he only saw a note that it had been banned for spam.
That was when he got the first pop-up for some dolls. It wasn’t too strange, considering the keywords he’d been searching for the last hour, but the fact that it had been the one to make it past his ad blocker struck him as a little odd. There were another couple after that, but soon, that trickle became a flood. Dolls. Doll clothes. Dollhouses. Videos to doll-related sites. Then the first pictures of the dollfaced girl appeared.
Elliot closed his web browser after that, but even when he brought up his email program to type out a message to his friends about what was going on, he found a draft email already open. ‘Elliot, why are you ignoring me? I miss you. I miss your views. Please watch my channel, Elliot.’
He shut the program, powered the machine off, and slowly returned to his bed. The phone lay on the nightstand, but every time he looked at it, it vibrated again with more alerts. Channel updates. Text messages. It was terrifying. It was like he had an obsessive stalker girlfriend he’d never even met.
Elliot picked up the phone and swiped away the storm of alerts before opening up YouTube. As soon as he managed to do that, he opened up the channel that was stalking him and unfollowed it, bringing the follower count back to zero. At least he tried to. There was pop-up after pop-up that tried to prevent him.
‘Are you sure you wish to unsubscribe from this channel?’
‘Are you really sure? I’ll miss you.’
‘Please don’t go!’
He pushed past them, and when he was done, he blocked the channel for good measure to end the insanity. That was when his bed started to shake. No - the whole house. He could hear the windows rattling. Then his computer started to turn itself back on. Elliot saw the familiar Windows logo and ran to the wall, pulling the cord out.
The monitor winked out, letting him breathe a sigh of relief as he sat there on the floor, wondering what the hell was going on. Then it came back on, showing a video of the girly room that was The Doll House.
“Today on The Doll House, we’re going to talk about my broken heart,” she said sadly, in the voice that made his skin crawl. “And see if we can find some new friends. If you don’t help me. I might just have to pay you a visit.”
As she approached the screen, he slowly backed away, sure she was about to crawl through it just like that one horror movie. She didn’t, though. Instead, his phone buzzed in his pocket, startling him enough to give him a heart attack since he was sure he hadn’t put it there.
‘Who would you like to share my site with?’ the pop-up asked.
He instantly understood why Marcus had sent him that link now and briefly worried about why he wasn’t responding. He closed it. He wasn’t going to be that guy. He was going to figure out how to—
Elliot’s mind froze as a cold plastic hand gripped his arm. “If you won’t help me find new friends, then I’ll never be able to let you go…” that dreaded voice whispered.
He raised the phone with a shaking hand and reluctantly began to type out someone’s email address. Still, when he finished, she whispered, “I’m sorry, I already have Roger and Marcus on my shelf. Maybe Luke or Ryan can help you keep from joining them.”
With his heart hammering in his chest, Elliot typed up a message to two of his remaining friends, well aware of what he was about to do. That horrific knowledge wasn’t enough to stop him from typing a quick note and hitting send, though.
“God boy,” she whispered in his ear.
Then, just like that, she was gone, and he was left alone in a dark room like it had never happened. At dinner, he discovered no one else had felt the shaking floor or seen the flickering lights. No one else had seen the strange ads either. He tried to explain it to his dad but couldn’t make anything strange happen again. So, he was quickly dismissed and told not to watch so much TV.
It wasn’t until two days later he got another pop-up. This time he’d been in the bath, and the reflection of the dollfaced girl in the water was more than enough to make him send Jose and Andi a message. Neither seemed to satisfy the monster hiding inside his phone, though. He had to send three more names before Sarah was enough to make the looming shadow of evil vanish.
This went on day after day, and slowly, his list of friends dwindled to nothing. Elliot felt the constant need to warn them or to respond to the texts they sent him, but he couldn’t bring himself to. He was too ashamed.
He knew this would all end terribly somehow, but he couldn’t have guessed it would be the day after tomorrow. It was a Wednesday, almost a week from when he’d gotten that first message that he ran out of names. He tried eight, but she already had most of them.
When she began to crawl out of his monitor, he had nothing left to give the dollfaced girl.
“Please…” he whispered, shivering from her touch. “Just one more text. I can find you other people to play with. I can help you find more friends. I can…”
“That won’t work anymore,” she whispered, stroking his face. “You don’t have any friends left to share me with. From now on, we’ll be together forever.”
She smiled then. He couldn’t see it, but he could hear the plastic of her face creek with the effort, making him shudder. He wanted to run or fight, but the terror that her touch inspired was an oppressive avalanche that made breathing difficult and disobedience impossible. Instead, he looked down in defeat.
That was when he noticed his hands. They had that same matte shine as Dollface’s skin did. It was terrifying to realize what was happening, as she picked him up without any effort, but he still didn’t believe it. Not even when he balled up his fist and saw the strange joints in action. His skin no longer stretched and moved. Instead, each motion revealed the articulated joints that shouldn’t have existed.
“Shhhhh,” she whispered. “Don’t worry. Now we can play together whenever we want.”
Elliot tried to open his mouth to protest, but there was no longer a mouth to open. Instead, his face had become a seamless plastic mask. Somehow, he couldn’t even muster the strength to reach up and touch it as she walked back into the monitor and took him with her.