Chapter Text
Up in a box, a tin dancer stood
high on a pedestal carved out of wood
her arms outreached in a warm embrace
with elegant skin, forged fake with grace
around this slim and graceful guard
laid necklaces, of jewels hard
a bright and iridescent heap
these jewels, as miss dancer’s keep.
When a doll built to dance begins, it can never stop. As such, it became only fate that once the metallic Nikola Orsinov began its beckoning to its entity, the ritual only barrelled forward from its starting point. Uncanny clay faces were propped all around the wax museum walls, each plastered and mounted on the museum’s poor choice of wallpaper: a gaudy red and mauve-striped worn-down monstrosity. If Nikola were capable of having feelings towards the decor, it would have considered the colors to be quite pleasant. But in Nikola’s lifeless eyes, the location was simply a vessel for what would now be a reckoning to what the world was always meant to be.
Alongside twisted wax works, more of Nikola’s excellent foresight had come to fruition. The emptied-out corpses of once-living humans filled the seats of the wax museum’s auditorium, where Nikola was about to make its grand appearance. Their glassy, terrified eyes filled the doll with excitement, and it felt the power of their fear urge it to begin to dance.
First beginning to hum to itself, then the humming replaced with the sharp, tinny sound of circus organ music, Nikola Orsinov was putting on a show.
The corpses, as if pulled to their feet in unison by ropes like those of a puppeteer, began to flail and sway along to the calliope’s jarring music. Filling up the rows between the seats of the audience, they all began to join the dancing doll onstage. It greeted them with open arms, and the crowd assembled itself into rows and circles of hypnotizing movement.
Nikola felt the energy of the crowd fill it up with joy, waltzed to the marvellous tune that rang and bounced off the walls, and accepted all those to dance alongside it as one happy family.
It took time to observe each dancer, holding their heavy hands and ebbing them along to the dance. Although filled with sawdust instead of organs and blood, the smiles on the corpse’s faces only grew with each move and step; their faces contorted into looks of sheer amazement.
As the doll spun and commenced the dance with all its kin, everything going as it should be, it began to hear the sound of an uninvited group beginning to get lost in its mystifying show.