Mulciber's Dollhouse

Prologue: Lizzie

Go to the closet and put on the red dress-

Elizabeth or Lizzie as she had been known by her friends when she had had friends, had been sitting in the armchair in her room when the command came. Walking past her four poster bed to the closet she opened the door and found in it half a dozen dresses, which if she noticed such things she would have known that they were all tailored to fit her exactly, with the red one in the center. Immediately she reached for it and pulled it on over her naked body, zipping herself tightly into the form fitting cocktail dress. And then she stood there, waiting. The little gremlin creature in the tea-cozy entered the room an hour later and fixed her long brown hair and applied makeup to accent her grey eyes as she stood. After that there was no movement in the room for three hours.

Come to the foyer-

Elizabeth turned around then and walked out her door. Once out the door she entered onto a balcony lined with twenty rooms all exactly the same which another girl had come out of, all dressed in formal or party wear (though none of the others wore red), and one room that had appeared since the last time obviously intended for someone new. In two orderly lines the girls descended the stairs and came to a stop in perfect formation two feet apart facing the center of the room. With a pop a tall handsome man with medium brown hair appeared in the house leading a slight blonde girl with enormous blue eyes. Wordlessly the girl handed over a stick of wood to the man, who put it into his pocket then nodded. The girl climbed the stairs and went straight to the empty room. After her door was closed the man was joined in the foyer by a group of sixteen men and one woman, all with one hand on a walking stick, all of whom appeared familiar with the house and unsurprised with the girls. Fourteen of the men walked around the room appraising the other girls, but not her. Not when she was wearing the red dress. The girl in the red dress was always reserved for Bella and Dolph, who signaled the gremlin thing to bring them a bottle of the red wine that they always shared before indulging. The first man, the one with the brown hair, approached the remaining member of their party, a tall thin man with sallow skin and curtains of black hair obscuring his face.

"Why don't you join us tonight, Sev," the man said. "You can have any girl you like. I seem to recall you like red-heads." Here he pointed at the girl directly Elizabeth's opposite, a tall curvy girl with red hair and blue eyes wearing a pale yellow sundress today. "Or maybe you want to try a more Latin feel today," he said walking towards a girl with curly black hair and olive skin in a green ball gown. "Or something more exotic," pointing at a young Indian girl in a purple maxi-dress. "I'll even let you have my personal favorite, Tina here," he winked at a buxom brunette wearing a leather mini-dress that was scandalously short.

"I am not interested in playing with your dolls Darren," the other man replied (was that that rude Seth boy from her party?) impatiently. "The Dark Lord has said that he had need of one of your pets soon and I am merely here to see that they are all in one piece and under control after ensuring safe delivery of the Ollivander girl."

"Mulciber, you know our little Sevvy doesn't like to have fun," the woman said, now walking straight towards her. She lazily dragged her finger down Elizabeth's cleavage, hunger evident in her eyes. "I think we'll take you little pet now. She looks delectable," she said turning to the red haired man who came with her and pulling a long knife out of her boot (run, run I should run). "I've even brought toys."

"We'll just transfer the curse then, on three," he said. "One, two, three-" he flicked his wand and Lizzie felt a surge of hatred and fear, preparing to scream but the witch then said "Imperio".

~break~

Something was very wrong, Lizzie thought through as light threatened to break through her eyelids. She had expected to be hung-over, having gone through a bottle of Champagne and then several vodka shooters over the course of the night, but that was only to be expected. A roaring headache from the bachelorette party was to be expected, but it shouldn't be this bad before she woke up to marry her John. Whatever had she done to have this pain coursing all through her body except her left leg which she couldn't feel at all. It was only drinking. And dancing, dancing with the young men who had been sitting in the corner booth, one tall and striking with red hair and freckles (Evan… Evan Rosy?), another tall with brown hair and brown hair who was so nice and so sweet and quite a good dancer (that was Darren, she'd wanted to introduce him to her bridesmaid Candace), the blonde who was very shy and seemed more interested in the waiter than in any of her mates (Sean Avery) and the rude one who was certainly no looker and could do no better than make snide remarks and try to get them to leave just as the party started (Seth, the one with the awful nose). Last she remembered she'd been downing her 10th shot when Darren pulled out a strange stick and muttered something about empires.

"What the hell were you doing last night?" Seth's rude voice came, interrupting her memory.

"None of your business, Snape," came another voice that she sought to place. "Just fix up Mulciber's pretty little plaything, then leave."

"If I'm going to fix her up, I'd like to know how she's broken, Lestrange," Seth said, and she could actually see his sneer through her eyelids.

"She's just a muggle, if you can't fix her up Darren's got plenty of other dolls," he said. There was the sound of boots leaving the room.

And that was when the memories started flooding. This was not the next day, rather just one of many to be spent in a room staring blankly at the wall until she heard Darren's voice. Eating only when the gremlins came to deliver the meals, and only then when Darren told her to, there had been a number of meals the gremlins had delivered that she had never been told to eat and so she didn't. The cold and the nakedness, because Darren didn't want her dressed unless there was company. And then there was the company, whose intense attentions were worse than the dullness of Darren's inattention. The groping, the kissing, the touching, the shear violation of it all. She was unsure of how many of his friends she had been given to, certainly Darren himself and Evan back when he still came and the blonde named Luscious and Crabbe and Goyle and Nott and Karkaroff. She had lost count of the men and the days but it must have been at least a year since the day that should have been her wedding. And then there were the red dress days, each worse than the last. Bella and Dolph got pleasure from pain and the more pain that happened while pleasuring the better their night.

She forced her eyes open and saw Seth kneeling beside her, chanting over her and waving one of their wooden sticks over her torso. She saw that her left leg was lying off to the side in a decidedly unnatural angle, and lifted her hands only to see them drenched in blood with deep cuts running diagonally across her palms.

"I'd ask where it hurts, but it looks like it must hurt everywhere," Seth said disinterestedly. Seth had never been interested, he hadn't wanted to dance or drink and he had never taken one of the girls in the house either. He was the only person in the room and she was sure that the others were expecting him to be controlling her like they always controlled her. "I can either patch you up and give you back to them," he said, reaching into his pocket and digging out a vial of green liquid, "or I could give you mercy and make the pain go away. Your choice."

Lizzie cried then. She knew she would never see John again; never see Candace or her mum or even her job as a secretary in the office where she hadn't liked anyone. She'd be doomed to this room and these men and Darren's games and his guests' perversions and the horror of red dress days. "Mercy, please, mercy."

While she drank her death the house-elves delivered twenty bowls of porridge to twenty rooms with twenty girls sitting naked in twenty chairs and twenty pairs of eyes staring blankly at the wall.

Eat your porridge.

As one twenty spoons descended into twenty bowls and were raised to twenty mouths.

~finis~

Author's note: Hah, I told you that I might write something light for my next story and instead I write a disturbing little thing like this that has got to be my first M rating. I also said that I would only post finished stories because I have a non-completion problem but as I finished it I thought that it would work as a one-shot if I never got around to the rest of the story, so this gets posted. Please state in your reviews whether you'd rather I save up future chapters so I can post in one big bang or if you'd rather have them as they are written (bearing in mind that this could mean never).

Disclaimer: JKRowling owns Mulciber and Snape and Bella and Dolph and the whole rotten bunch of them.