Perhaps it was our growing contentment with each other, with our lives, that allowed Gloria to tolerate my fascination with the Haynes case. Sometimes I would do research on the Internet at home, typing in “Eros, Ltd” in a search engine to see what came up. Nothing ever did. Or I would stop at one of the many sex shops along Harbor Boulevard in Orange County, or Sunset, or Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles and browse, noting the novelties, especially the sex dolls. I would ask the proprietors if they had ever heard of a doll called “Dream Girl” or an outfit called Eros, Ltd, and they would shake their heads. Likewise, I would sometimes purchase the raunchiest of the adult magazines by the bundle and go through each one carefully in the privacy of my office while Gloria was engaged in another household activity, looking for any mention of the company or the doll. I saw neither. And on a few occasions I’d sit at my desk, an issue of Chic or D-Cup lying on my desk, feeling I was chasing an urban legend, the paranoid fantasy of a genuine schizophrenic and Gloria would come in, approaching me from behind to kiss the top of my head, and she’d see the open magazines. “Still obsessed with that case, José?”
I would nod. “Yeah, I don’t know why I keep doing this, but—“
“It doesn’t bother me,” Gloria would say, looking at the graphic photos. Her hand would stray down to my crotch or slide beneath my shirt, her fingers tracing lightly over my nipples. “In fact, looking at these magazines gives me some ideas of what we should do for the rest of the day.”
And that’s how it went for almost two years. Gloria and I enjoyed our retirement. We went through a sexual rebirth in which it felt like we were rediscovering each other again, and in my spare time whenever I thought of my last case I did a little research.
Then the nightmare arrived: Gloria was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Our world collapsed.
The pains actually started a week or so before we left for a trip to Colorado and had persisted throughout our little vacation. Gloria called her doctor to arrange an appointment at my urging, and she was already dismissing the pains as indigestion. She had her appointment the day after our return, and the test results came back a day later.
All my focus centered on Gloria at that moment.
I tried to make her as comfortable as possible. She took the news like a trooper. She refused to let the cancer thwart her lifestyle, and she continued her social life and gardening, but I could tell that the strain was working on her. The doctors tried everything—the chemotherapy zapped much of her energy, and there were days when she could barely move. I would wait on her hand and foot, tending to her every need. Our children—Frank and Jessica—stopped by more frequently and spent every weekend with us either at the house or the hospital where Gloria was undergoing treatment. I tried to remain strong but it was difficult. Many times I couldn’t take it and would collapse in a crying fit, the sudden emotion overwhelming me. I was losing the only woman I had ever loved, the woman I desired over all others. I did not know what I would do without her, and during the few moments of lucidity we had together I would tell her this and she would smile and whisper, “You’ll do fine without me, José. You are a strong man. You will get through this.”
Meaningless words meant to soothe my troubled soul, but they were no use. I clung to their false sense of hope to no avail. On the morning of June 16, 2000, on the fifth floor of the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Baldwin Park, with our children and grandchildren gathered around her bedside, my beloved wife slipped away quietly and peacefully.
I fell apart.
For the first time in my life I was lonely. Sure, I had my children, my grandchildren, and my many friends. But I was missing my soul’s mate, my best friend, my lover and companion. Gloria was such an important piece in my life that with her gone it was like I was missing something.
I kept her alive in my dreams, in my heart...
In my desire for her...
I coped the best I could. I joined support groups for widowers; I became active in my church. My friends and family kept me busy. But there was still something missing. Things just weren’t the same without Gloria.
I suppose that’s how I got through it. I coped, I continued living. And eventually I wandered back to that old case, the last one I worked on before I retired.
I must admit it didn’t fascinate me the way it had before. One night I found the files on my computer and read through them, trying to rekindle that old spark. I still found the case interesting, still thought there was something unexplainable worth looking into, but I couldn’t get motivated enough to go chasing down leads.
I suppose in a way the only reason I continued my research was because it was something to do, something to occupy my time so I wouldn’t have to think about Gloria. Before I knew it, I was back where I’d started. I began delving deeper into some of the underground sex clubs on the Internet and made inquiries to the people I met there. I asked them about the doll and struck out every time.
I found better luck with the adult novelty stores. I found twenty-eight cases across the country dating back twenty some odd years in which a sex doll was sold to a customer and the customer eventually committed murder. Coincidence? Perhaps. In all the cases a motive was always explained, usually a crime of passion or a murder for profit scheme. In only a few instances was the perpetrator judged to be mentally unfit. There was no common thread to connect any of these cases except for their possession of a sex doll that was always dismissed by the original investigators.
I backtracked through the cases and found out the doll purchased was one not normally kept in inventory, that the proprietors could not remember stocking, or one they did remember stocking but could not find again due to the company that manufactured it going out of business. I tracked down all these leads relentlessly. I found as many of the witnesses, victim’s families, and investigators that would talk to me as I could. Most of them couldn’t tell me much; the passing of time had eroded many memories. Others told me pretty much what I’ve already related here. When I put all this together I saw a pattern, but it was a pattern of a sinister sort.
The more I pursued this, the more obsessed I became. I began hearing rumors of the object of my search in whispered terms, like it was an urban legend. The stories were the same everywhere: the doll was known as Dream Girl; it came in a black box from an east coast company that remained elusive. The people who bought the dolls were mostly men, but there had been a few women that bought it and later killed unsuspecting boyfriends or husbands and, in one case, an entire family. And when I spread the data I’d uncovered out on my desk for analysis I saw that the earliest case occurred in 1956, the latest a mere two months ago.
Then there’s my own case.
I don’t know what compelled me to go into the shop on Harbor Boulevard in Santa Ana. The shop itself—Carl’s Adult Toys and Videos—was the last American-owned establishment in that section of Orange County that had turned into Little Saigon. I’d been there before and didn’t think much of it. So when I walked into Carl’s that afternoon on my way home from seeing my daughter and her husband, I knew I wasn’t going to spend much time in the shop. The sexually explicit videos and DVDs didn’t interest me, nor did the glossy-coated magazines piled on the racks. I went straight to the back of the store where the blow-up dolls were stocked and immediately saw it on a high shelf.
With trembling hands, I reached up and brought it down.
I felt such a sense of dread, such a strong emotion of fear, that I almost put the box back where I’d found it. But another part of me demanded to follow through with the path I had chosen, to follow my investigative instinct. So I took the box to the counter and asked the clerk what it was and where it had come from.
“Don’t remember where this come from,” the clerk said. He was Vietnamese and spoke in broken English.
“How much?”
The clerk checked the tag on the side of the box. “Seven hundred dollar.”
“What’s it called?”
/> “Dream Girl.”
Along with the sense of dread was a feeling of excitement. I wasn’t buying this doll to partake in some kinky sex the way those other men had. I had no desire to fuck a blow up doll and pretend it was somebody else. That settled it for me. I pulled out my wallet. “I’ll take it.”
When I got home, everything that I learned in the past five years flashed through my mind. I set the box on the living room floor, thinking about all I’d learned about this particular novelty; how the doll appeared as the woman of the buyer’s sexual fantasy, how it comes with blonde or black hair, or large breasts, or how it’s skinny or fat; how after the initial coupling it turns into a human being, the woman of that particular man’s dreams; how the sex with it is fantastic, and that she does everything for the man, everything he desires, further ensnaring him. Most of all I thought of how all the men in question later killed loved ones—girlfriends, wives, families—all claiming they’d been told to by a woman whom the police could never identify, a woman that was claimed to have once been a blow-up doll come to life. I thought of all this and told myself I was going to get to the bottom of it. If this thing had power, I was immune to it. I had no intention of using the doll as a proxy lover.
I opened the box with shaky hands.
And heaved a sigh of relief.
The doll inside the box was so generic-looking it was almost funny. It was so obviously fake. I think I laughed when I saw it for the first time.
I took it out and laid it on the floor. Sure enough, it was very phony looking. After all, it was only an inflatable blow-up doll with the requisite squeeze bulb attached to it.
I did notice the fake hair that had been affixed to its head was black with streaks of gray, but I didn’t pay it any mind at first. I examined the doll’s facial features, which were crudely rendered. The doll’s mouth was a red ‘O’ for the obvious. I examined the deflated doll and the box it came in, noting that there were no instructions, just the clear decal that had come affixed to the box saying this was my ‘dream girl’, and that she could be ‘anybody I desired’.
Figuring I had nothing to lose, I found an air compressor and began to pump the doll up.
With the compressor humming, I stepped away briefly for a beer. When I came back Gloria was waiting for me in the living room.
She was naked.
I stood in the threshold of the living room in shock. My wife Gloria was really there. She was standing in the center of the living room smiling at me. The black box was where I’d left it on the floor.
“José...” she whispered.
It was her. It was really her. I could see her, I could smell her.
I went to her.
She held me and I’m afraid I wept in her arms.
I was with her that evening and it was the most erotic sex I ever had.
Her caresses were gentle and teasing. Her lips were sweet, her skin was warm, her nipples hard. When I entered her she moaned, cradling my face in her hands and kissing me as I moved inside her, crying her name over and over. She stayed hot and wet and excited all night, and surprisingly I stayed hard. While our sexual relations had exploded in the months following our joint retirement, that evening it was more than explosive; it was orgasmic.
We even tried things we normally wouldn’t have tried earlier; different positions, ones I never imagined existed. Each thrust, each caress, each kiss, was like touching an electrifying orgasm.
Some time later we lay together on our king-sized mattress and I tried to catch my breath. My senses were on full alert and my skin tingled. I wasn’t imagining things or hallucinating. I’d just had incredible sex with my dead wife, Gloria, who wasn’t dead. She had returned to me as she had been in the months prior to her getting cancer. When I told you earlier that Gloria was the only woman I’d ever desired, I hope you see what I now knew to be the Dream Girl doll’s power: it took the mental image of every man’s fantasy woman and brought them to life. When the men who bought the Dream Girl doll had sex with it, their fantasies brought that woman, the dream girl in their mind, to life. This had happened to me, too. Because Gloria was the only woman I had ever fantasized about, the doll brought her back.
I thought about this as we lay in bed. I turned to Gloria and touched her. She was real, my fingers touched sweaty skin. Gloria turned to me, her eyes ablaze with passion and desire. She smiled. “I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you, too.” We kissed. Pleasures of sensation shivered up and down my spine, brought me back to life.
“I want to stay with you forever,” Gloria said, settling into my embrace. “I don’t ever want to have to be away from you again.”
I turned to her. “You want to be with me forever?”
“Of course I do!” Gloria said, turning to me. She kissed my neck. “I’ve always wanted this; to be together, just you and me all the time. Forever.”
“You’re here now. Why can’t you just stay?”
She paused, and I sensed tension. “You know it’s not that easy.”
She turned to me and I read sorrow in her eyes. Sadness. My heart wept. In all the years of our marriage, I’d only seen Gloria look so saddened once. That was in 1969, when she miscarried our third child. The doctors told us after that we would be unable to bear any more children, so to avoid further pain and suffering, I had undergone a vasectomy.
Now that beautiful, regal face bore that same look of impending hurt and I immediately wanted to comfort her, to make that hurt go away. “Talk to me,” I said.
“I can’t stay,” she said, her voice trembling. Her eyes brimmed with tears. “I want to stay...more than anything I want to. I don’t want to go back. I don’t ever want to go back in that dark hole I just came from. But...I can stay if you...do something that will help me stay.”
“I’ll do anything so you can stay,” I blurted out before realizing it.
“Will you?” Her eyes lit up and she clutched at me, like a drowning woman clinging to a life preserver in treacherous seas. She was like a little girl, defenseless, and hadn’t I always vowed to protect her?
“Yes,” I said, holding her close and kissing her.
Then she brought her lips to my ear and whispered what I had to do for us to be together.
And that’s what has led me to my present predicament. When she whispered those awful words in my ear, I knew that I was damned either way. If I did what she asked I was damned, and if I ignored her I would be even worse off.
I fought her. I tried to get rid of her but she wouldn’t go. Fighting her was useless. She always appealed to my base emotions and fleshly desires in the end. That weakened me.
I called the shop where I’d bought her, and when I asked to speak to the clerk who had sold me the doll he claimed to not know what I was talking about. I reminded him that I’d spent seven hundred dollars on the doll and he claimed he didn’t remember. Then he hung up on me.
Through it all Gloria waited for me in our bedroom, calling to me.
And oh God, I couldn’t control myself. I couldn’t resist her.
I couldn’t help going to her and coupling with her, losing myself inside her.
The sex got better all the time.
And my strength and resolve weakened each and every time.
I'M LEFT HERE writing this all down as evidence. I have been struggling between following my desire and doing what is right. I know it will be hard for those of you who read this to understand, but think of what I am going through as what a heroin addict feels when they cannot resist the allure of the needle, the sense of calm that pervades their being when they ride the spike. Their body craves it just not to feel sick. This is the way it is with me now regarding Gloria; the more I try to resist her, the sicker I feel. Being with her makes me feel alive and whole, and when I think about the rest of my life with her it is like glimpsing an oasis of beauty and sensuality in which we can reside together forever.
That is what she is promising me, and on some level I believe thi
s can happen if I go about it the right way and am not caught. I can plan—I have the means and the ability to arrange for a new identification, and can easily slip out of the country, taking all my money with me. I can settle us somewhere down in Mexico, Baja perhaps. I probably have a better chance of evading capture if I plan methodically.
The problem is, I can’t do it. I cannot bring myself to do what Gloria asks of me.
If I don’t follow through with what she wants I know what will happen. My children and grandchildren will be tainted forever with the knowledge that their grandfather and father was a madman, a necrophile.
You see, the longer I wait to make my decision and carry out what Gloria wants me to do for us to be together, the more Gloria has begun to deteriorate.
Somehow, she manages to change back when we make love. She is lovely, whole, healthy, and beautiful. She’d have to be. I am not a necrophile, have never been attracted to the dead, and the few times I’ve even thought about the rotting thing I’ve been seeing the past few days when we aren’t making love has been enough to drive the desire right out of me. Gloria always has the antidote to that; she always appeals to my pleasures, presses the right buttons, and then I’m hers again and she is no longer the wretched thing she turns into. She is the Gloria I knew and loved before the cancer got her.
I know this is happening because I am stalling, and I know that the smell will soon attract the neighbors. I haven’t left the house in over a week, and I’m afraid that if I steal outside now for a quick trip to the store for bread and milk people will look at me funny. Perhaps somebody will grow suspicious and send the police to my house.
When the Darkness Falls Page 2