Uncanny Valley

  Uncanny Valley

  A Trio of Disquieting Stories

  JEFFREY THOMAS

  The Jeffrey Thomas Chapbook Series

  #4

  Copyright © 2019 Jeffrey Thomas

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Joe Therasakdhi/Shutterstock.com.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  Uncanny Valley first appeared in the anthology Darker Companions, PS Publishing, 2017.

  Stranger in the House first appeared in the anthology Looming Low, Dim Shores, 2017.

  Sliced Bread first appeared in the anthology Adam’s Ladder, Written Backwards, 2017.

  CONTENTS

  1. UNCANNY VALLEY

  2. STRANGER IN THE HOUSE

  3. SLICED BREAD

  4. About the Author

  UNCANNY VALLEY

  Pegler noted that the town seal for San Marcos, California called it the “Valley of Discovery,” but his own discovery was that he found the place oppressively dismal. It was not that the town crowded upon him gloomily, but rather the opposite: that it was too open and too bright, with oases of civilization widely scattered throughout a parched desolation, like someplace that had waited too long to become filled in and given up hope of it. Like an apartment with too little furniture and too few pictures on its walls, or an infantile scalp with two few hairs plugged into it. Well, the apartment he had taken upon his divorce, back in Liverpool, was like that, and so was his scalp, but he didn’t feel keen about those things either.

  He’d been picked up at San Diego airport and driven to the company; a ride of only about forty minutes, but he was glad he hadn’t rented a car. He feared he would never have found his way in or out of the bland maze of little side streets fronted with the interchangeable white blocks of businesses, of which the smallish building containing Galatea Creations was but one. There was no sign identifying the company outside, and Pegler thought of the discreet unmarked packaging that often shielded potentially embarrassing objects of titillation.

  “And here we are, David,” chirped the woman who had picked Pegler up at the airport, pulling into a spot in front of the bone-like white box. She twisted toward him as she unbuckled her seatbelt. “We’ll keep the tour quick today – I’m sure you must be jetlagged after your trip. I bet you can’t wait to hit your hotel.”

  “I’m fine,” Pegler reassured her, smiling bravely and he hoped charmingly. Didn’t American women find British men charming, even when they were decades older than themselves? “This is what I’m here for, isn’t it?” But she was right, of course. The only part she was leaving out was that he wished she wouldn’t just drop him off at his hotel this evening, but accompany him to his room for the night. The woman, Maria Garza, was in her late twenties or early thirties, he estimated, with long hair that he envisioned spilling blackly like oil down her bare brown skin. For forty minutes he’d been darting looks at her legs, dipped in black pantyhose, where they emerged from her black skirt. He’d never been with a woman of other than European heritage. In fact, he hadn’t been with a woman other than his former wife of many, too many, years.

  They disembarked from the car and walked toward the building’s entrance. “Great,” Maria said brightly. “Then we’ll start with our showroom.”

  This was only Pegler’s second visit to the US. The first time, last January, had been when he and a colleague from the sales department – representing his employer, Sellacious LLC – had attended the Adult Novelty Manufacturers Expo in Los Angeles. It was there that he and his colleague had first connected with the people behind Galatea Creations, an encounter that had led to Sellacious LLC becoming an affiliate of Galatea and the sole distributor of its Love Mates line throughout the UK and Ireland. Galatea’s bond with its former UK affiliate had dissolved upon the recent death of that company’s owner, who had had no partners or heirs to carry on the business, his only sibling – a sister – having perished in a fire decades earlier.

  Pegler had first met Maria at the Expo, and the Galatea people and Sellacious people had dined together and later gone for drinks, but despite his attraction to her Pegler had never managed to speak with the woman privately. His younger colleague, Baker, had cornered her briefly, obviously fueled by the same fantasies Pegler entertained, but had admitted to the older salesman later that he hadn’t gotten far with her, much to Pegler’s satisfaction. He could never understand the unselfconscious audaciousness, the sheer confidence, of bastards like Baker. And here was Baker with a pretty young wife, to top it off.

  The showroom Maria Garza ushered him into was really more of a smallish reception area, in which five young women and two young men stood about as if in whispered conversation, or lounged upon furniture, but of course these were a variety of fully clothed Love Mate dolls. One female figure sat behind a desk, and Pegler flinched when her head looked around a computer monitor to speak in greeting to Maria, proving herself to be the receptionist. Pegler was reminded of the time his beloved mother, now deceased but then young and beautiful, had taken him to the Madame Tussauds museum. Outside the Chamber of Horrors, a security guard whom Pegler had thought to be a wax effigy, so straight and immobile was he standing, finally turned his head slightly in the boy’s direction as if to intentionally give him a shudder.

  Maria discussed the dolls with him, boasting about their hair, which to Pegler looked too glittery and perfectly styled, and other of their features. He had already seen such specimens at the Expo and naturally he was impressed with the workmanship, though most of the females with their bloated lips and overly made-up eyes reminded him of transvestites trying too hard to look feminine. Not that he would express such an opinion aloud. He smiled, he praised. After all, he was here to determine specifically which standard configuration models should be offered through the UK outlet, and what quantities of those should be ordered to have on hand, for starters. Of course, customized models would be shipped singly upon completion, as the Sellacious website – like Galatea’s parent site – would offer customers numerous choices in everything from eye color to skin tone to breast size.

  The receptionist had summoned the director of Galatea, Jude Loew, who remembered Pegler from the Expo and shook his hand warmly. Loew was Pegler’s age but leaner, tanner, with hair almost as long as some of the female mannequins arrayed around them. After Loew had asked about Pegler’s flight, and whether Pegler’s people back in the UK were eager to get things going in earnest with the Love Mates line, he gestured toward an inner door and said, “So let’s go see where the magic happens.”

  Maria accompanied the two men onto the production floor, which was mostly just one large room without windows. The smell here was overpowering, a chemical miasma, but the sights were more distressing and again brought Pegler back to the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds. Rows of naked women hung from chains attached to a high track system, all in a kind of crouching stance as if clenched with rigor mortis, varying in height and skin tone and breast size: everything from large to gigantic. Some of these hanging bodies were headless, showing only a black chute in the throat, but others further along in assembly wore a hard white skull piece with black sockets for the eyes and mouth, making these figures look less like dolls awaiting the application of soft mask-like faces and more like murder victims who had had their faces flayed off.

  “When my father began Galatea, back in the seventies,” Loew explained, “the Love Mates didn’t even have faces...just a blank, hairless head.”

  “Yes,” Pegler said. He was intimately aware o
f that.

  “Not that I’m disparaging my Dad’s work. The skin was soft and realistic even then, and the figures were already posable – and it’s because of these revolutionary features that the line survived and evolved to where we are today – but we’ve really come so far, and we’re always improving. My dream is to someday create a real sexbot that can talk and interact with my customers, and maybe even move around independently.”

  “Who’ll need real women then, huh?” Maria joked, feigning annoyance and nudging Pegler with her elbow.

  Pegler had heard there were Japanese brothels that offered love dolls instead of live prostitutes. The idea secretly appalled him. All those lovely exotic prostitutes in that country and there were men who preferred the artificial, instead of merely settling for it?

  Only seven workers manufactured the dolls from start to finish: two men and five women. Pegler was shown hanging articulated skeletons, looking like decapitated robots, and the sarcophagus-like upright molds in which the silicone bodies were cast. He saw faces stretched over those white skulls, eyeballs popped into sockets. It was like watching a dissection in reverse. Excess mold debris was snipped off the suspended bodies with scissors, toenails were delicately painted, and pubic hair glued in place for those who didn’t select the shaved option.

  Loew reached out to a dangling simulacrum and slapped a rounded buttock. The sharp sound reminded Pegler of the time he had playfully swatted the bare rump of his wife Victoria, when they had still been newlyweds in their twenties, hoping it would lead to her allowing him to spank her...not only then, but thereafter. Instead she had cried out and pushed him away, her resentful expression a sign post to the years ahead.

  The doll’s soft buttock jiggled and Loew grinned at him. Pegler became even more aware of the nearness of Maria Garza to him. Without willing it he flicked his gaze down at her backside, curved out against her black skirt. He had a mental flash of him spreading her pliable cheeks in his grasp and pressing his nose and lips between them.

  Still smiling, watching him as if observing his thoughts, Loew asked, “Would you be interested in trying out one of our dolls for yourself, David? We could send one over to your hotel tonight, discreetly. We have a girl we reserve for sampling. Don’t worry, though – we keep her squeaky clean, just like we recommend to our customers that they shower their girls from time to time.”

  Pegler stared at his host in horror. He was certain his face had flushed crimson. He couldn’t even conceive of looking over at Maria, whose eyes were surely on his face.

  Before he could stammer something in the way of declining, Loew made an exaggerated grimace and said, “Sorry, David...didn’t mean to embarrass you. I guess I’m so familiar with my products by now that I forget how awkward other people might feel about them. But I’ll be frank and tell you that I try them out myself on a regular basis...always have. How else can I be sure they’ll function like they should? Right? That the sensations my customers experience will be as realistic as possible.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Pegler managed to get out.

  “Again...my apologies,” Loew said, clapping Pegler’s arm as if they were old college pals. Ah, Americans. So affable, so crude.

  By the time the tour was over the smell of liquid silicone and paint had given him a headache that caused him to feel as though his own eyes were hard glass orbs in their sockets.

  ***

  Maria Garza drove him to his hotel early that evening, and once through its doors they walked past a tableau of attractive Californians with pretty hair, poised about in the lobby by their suitcases or seated on the furniture. Pegler glanced back over his shoulder at them as if in recognition.

  Maria saw him to the registration desk. When he’d received his key card and sensed Galatea’s spokesperson was about to step away and draw breath to utter her goodnight, he turned to her and asked in a low voice, lest the counter person overhear him, “Would you care to join me in the bar for a drink before you go, Maria?”

  There...he’d got it out. That actually surprised him. He’d done it. And yet he was not at all surprised by her reaction. Of course it wasn’t the startled, angry look Victoria had given him the time he had slapped her bottom, but there was a touch of sudden alarmed wariness in her eyes, wasn’t there? Her smile twitched like the badly calibrated mouth of an animatronic figure, and she said, “I’m sorry, David, but I should really be on my way home. Jude will be waiting for me. He’s my fiancé, by the way.”

  “Oh,” Pegler said, “I had no idea.”

  “It’s a recent development.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful – congratulations.” He wondered sourly if it was Loew himself who had implanted the silicone into the breasts that strained the white material of her blouse.

  “Jude wants to take you to lunch tomorrow before we return to Galatea to work out more details in our partnership. Would it be okay to meet you here in the lobby at noon?”

  “Perfect,” Pegler said with a smile, employing his own synthetic charms.

  “Great. See you then, David.”

  He watched Maria walk away, her damned bottom rocking in her tight skirt.

  ***

  His flight and the tour immediately on its heels caught up with him the moment he shed his jacket and hung it in the closet of his room. He shed his shoes, too, and otherwise fully clothed stretched out on a mattress so vast and alien in its contours he imagined it contained secreted within it the bodies of the last dozen occupants of the room. Nevertheless he was asleep within several minutes.

  He dreamed he was on the flight back home, his window looking down upon the wrinkled gray Atlantic. The person in the seat to his left appeared to be sleeping: a woman with bleached blond hair wearing big dark glasses, her laser red lips parted open. He looked past her at the stewardess, who stood with her back to him as if in conversation with a passenger in the middle rows, but he didn’t hear their voices. For a few moments he admired the stewardess’s shapely calves, but soon cast his gaze about more widely and became increasingly unsettled. All the passengers sat silently and unmoving, but they were not asleep. Their eyes were all open, unblinking, too blue or too green in color. Their hair too shiny, too perfectly styled. All young faces, with no wrinkles, and most of them women.

  Pegler scrambled up from his seat and over the legs of the woman beside him. He accidentally brushed the sunglasses from her face and the eyes beneath them stared fixedly ahead. He hastened down the aisle toward the front of the aircraft, past the buxom stewardess, who did not turn or acknowledge him. He ducked through the curtain into first class, and on to the door to the cockpit. It stood open, and he saw the pilot and copilot seated at the controls. Seen from behind they looked identical except for the color of their gleaming hair. Their hands were unmoving at the controls, and he saw the Atlantic rushing up toward the cockpit window like a looming tidal wave.

  Pegler awoke with a little gasp to find himself in utter darkness. For a moment he thought he lay trapped inside a plane resting on the ocean floor, until he recalled where he was, sat up and felt about for the lamp beside him. By the clock radio he saw it was nine thirty at night.

  His headache had intensified, and he knew that was more from hunger now than the reek of the mad scientist’s alchemy inside Galatea. He needed to get something downstairs in the bar, and while an accompanying drink or three wouldn’t ease his pain he didn’t expect it could make it much worse. He slipped on his shoes, relieved himself in the bathroom, patted at his remaining hair in the mirror, trying not to dwell on the sagging, time-battered flesh of the face that confronted him. He snatched his jacket and ventured out.

  The hallway that stretched off before him, lined with its receding blank doors, was so muted in stillness he felt as though he were the hotel’s sole guest. He couldn’t at first recall in which direction lay the elevators, started in the wrong one, reversed and tried the other way, finally came to a turn that brought him to two facing pairs. A blond woman stood
waiting before him, her head a little downcast as if she might be looking at her phone, though he couldn’t see around her body to confirm this. She hadn’t summoned the elevator yet, however, its buttons unlit. After stealing a glimpse of the shapely posterior outlined within her red dress he leaned past her to jab the call button. A ding, and one of the two doors drew back. He expected the woman to precede him into the cabin but she didn’t move, presumably still occupied by her phone. He entered the elevator and held the door back for her with his forearm, but when he saw that her eyes were shielded behind dark glasses and that she held no phone he withdrew his arm sharply and let the door close. As the elevator descended he decided the woman had only been drunk, or lost in thought. After all, his ambition was to achieve the same state soon enough.

  The bar was just as he’d hoped: dark and sparsely populated. One lone Asian woman sat at the far end of the bar, and a young couple leaned toward each other over a table at the room’s furthest end. Pegler asked when the place closed and the bartender told him eleven. He ordered a roast beef sandwich and a dirty martini. Gin, not vodka.

  While he munched the olive from his drink he glanced around at the bar’s other few occupants again. There was no doubt that intimate young couple would be romping in bed tonight. Meanwhile, he himself hadn’t had sex with another human being for five years; well before his divorce from Victoria.

  Sometimes his company required him to attend auctions when other adult shops had closed, and shortly after his divorce he’d attended an estate sale, the deceased – who had committed suicide – having been an avid collector of pornography. Within this man’s collection there was an original, vintage Love Mate doll, still sealed in its plastic shroud and folded into a narrow cardboard coffin. Pegler had acquired this item, quietly, for himself. Just as Loew had said, the thing had no hair and not the barest suggestion of a face. Its body was still fairly supple, though the flesh was a bit stiff and split around the joints when he unfolded it. He had lubricated its front opening, and later its rear opening, to make the old thing more accommodating. Still, lying upon it that first time he had felt humiliated, pathetic, and had struggled to wring a climax out of himself. Finally, after superimposing with his imagination his teenage niece’s face over the blank before him – and when that failed, the face of his mother when she had been young and beautiful – he was able to achieve a shuddering, tormented release.