Claymation
A short horror story of art and obsession — isn't imitation the sincerest form of flattery?
My cell phone pinged on the nightstand, the all-too-familiar sound of my email jolting me from my dreams. I clumsily grabbed for the phone. The charger wire stretched like an umbilical cord as I brought the bright light to my face.
One new email from Joan. The notification turned my stomach. I sighed and locked the screen, blanketing the room back into darkness. It was a little after 11 and a weeknight. I shouldn’t even be awake, let alone checking emails.
It was her third message this week. Joan, the incessant sender, was a friend I had back in art school.
“Friend” was probably too generous. She was just always around. My real friends would jokingly call her my shadow — always clamoring to sit next to me in class and inviting me to sleep over at her apartment off campus.
One time, I said yes.
The apartment was half an hour away, in a not-so-great part of town, on a trash-lined street. The inside was worse.
It bordered on a hoarder’s house, with trash on every available surface. Joan liked to use “refurbished” goods in her artwork. Among her favorite materials were amputated doll parts, animal bones, and every type of discarded paper — newspapers, magazines, even receipts were just everywhere.
She was giving me the grand tour of these items when I cut her off, asking to use her bathroom so I could collect myself. She pointed down a dark hallway.
In the bathroom was a single light bulb with a chain, like you’d see in an old attic. I pulled it, but the bulb only flickered defiantly. I tugged the chain until the light finally clicked on, sending shadows skittering across the dingy bathroom as the metallic beads swung back and forth.
The walls were papered in a peeling pea green. A curtain hung limply in the corner, concealing a small stand-up shower. I could see Joan’s black hair clogging the drain in my mind’s eye and shuddered against the thought.
I studied my nervous eyes in the mirror, weighing my options as I peeled my shoes off the sticky vinyl floor again and again.
Deciding I’d invent some fake emergency to get out of there, I made to leave the room, but something compelled me to stay — the urge to peel back the mirror from the wall and see what was behind it.
I followed the intrusive impulse, opening the mirrored door to the medicine cabinet with a light click. My mirrored reflection disappeared from view, and the inside was revealed: three rows of shelves carved out of cream-colored plastic.
And my face in a photograph, looking back at me. The photo was taped on the wall in the center of the cabinet. In it, I sat on a brown couch, smiling off into the distance. I tried to recall where it might have been taken but was distracted by a shining object to its right, a golden locket on a chain.
I gasped, hand instinctively rising to cup my neck. Was this the locket I’d lost? As if it had fallen off into a dream world, I woke to find it missing from my body a few months back on a cold October morning. I searched everywhere, pointing a flashlight under my twin bed, but it was nowhere to be found amongst the dust.
My eyes rapidly scanned the rest of the cabinet. There was a glass vial of reddish liquid, a crumpled and burnt piece of paper, a five-pointed star, rimmed in a circle, drawn crudely onto the back wall of the cabinet in black charcoal. A lock of blonde hair was beside it, tied together with a white bow.
With one trembling hand, I smoothed the back of my blonde head. With the other, I plucked the gold heart off the shelf and brought it to my face. Engraved on the front was a familiar looping letter R.
It was a gift from my Grandpa for my 13th birthday. I ran my thumb over the smooth surface and slid my nail into the crack to pop it open. I’d expected to see my grandfather, whose sepia-toned photo I placed there once I grew out of putting my crush's photos inside. Instead, Joan’s cold eyes stared back.
BANG. A slammed cabinet from the kitchen broke my trance. I snapped Joan back into the locket and hastily placed it back where I found it, hoping it looked undisturbed.
It pained me to leave it behind, but I couldn’t let her know what I’d seen.
I closed the mirrored door, careful not to make a sound. Jumping at the sight of my own reflection, I seized that momentum and ran out of the apartment, throwing my excuse over my shoulder but not daring to wait for an answer.
I distanced myself from Joan after that.
But I never told anyone. I didn’t want to open myself up to their theories, preferring to believe the story that would help me sleep at night — that it was just some strange art piece of hers. Creepy, but hopefully innocent.
My friends would barely stifle their laughs when she walked into class.
“Here comes your twin,” they’d say as I shushed them. More often than not, she’d be wearing something almost identical to whatever I’d worn the day before. I just stared ahead at the blackboard.
As time passed, the emotional charge of the incident faded, and I fully convinced myself that she was just an art school oddball, like so many of us were at the Pratt Institute back then.
In fact, it began to feel like a badge of honor. Joan was weird, but she was a true artist. I saw her strangeness was a testament to that fact. I’d find myself up late at night, scrolling through her social media pages where she documented her work and wrote lengthy poetic captions about the plight of a starving honest.
After I graduated, moved back home to Pasadena, and became the Ceramics teacher at my old high school, I felt increasingly like an imposter. My art degree still hangs on my classroom wall almost ten years later, but I try not to make eye contact.
Just as Joan started to feel like a strange dream, she popped back into my life through my inbox.
The point of her messages was seemingly to show me her latest art piece, though since I never replied, I had no idea why she continued to send them.
“She sent me another email,” I groaned, looking over my shoulder to see if my husband, Max, was still awake.
He mumbled a laugh and picked his head up from the pillow.
“More of her so-called artwork?” he asked.
The bed creaked as he turned to face me.
“Yes,” I sighed. “When is she going to get the hint?”
Max wrapped his heavy arm around my waist, sitting up slightly so his voice was in my ear when he asked, “What does she have for you this time?”
I forced out a laugh. I still didn’t want to make fun of Joan since her mental state had clearly not improved with the passing years. But sometimes, joking about the situation seemed like the only way to make light of it.
I clicked on my phone, sending spots across my vision until my eyes adjusted to its brightness, the only source of light in our dark bedroom. The subject line read: Claymation.
“I don’t know how she’s going to top those creepy undead baby dolls,” I joked, earning a laugh from Max as my eyes scanned the email. It read:
Dear Becs,
I hope this email finds you well! I had to share my most recent work since you were so heavily my muse. You’ll see what I mean. I hope it sticks with you like it stuck with me!
~ Joanie
It ended with a Dropbox link.
I swallowed the growing lump in my throat. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see another artwork I’d inspired. I considered hitting delete and going to sleep.
“What if she painted me nude or something?” I whined.
“Well, then we have to see it!” Max said, reaching for my phone.
I laughed and swatted his hand away. “Okay, okay.”
I opened the link.
It was a gallery of photos, hundreds of them. My thumb found the first one and tapped it open.
It slowly loaded to reveal Joan, staring straight into the camera. Her pale face was gaunt, jutting out her cheekbones and carving gray circles under her light blue eyes, which were devoid of expression. Her pale pink mouth held a slight smile. Her jet black hair looked thin and unwashed, lying limply past her shoulders, baby bangs pressed to her high forehead. She wore a plain white tank top with thin straps.
“Starting strong with a selfie!” Max said in a loud reverb, making me jump.
I forced out another laugh and took a deep breath.
Why had a simple photo of Joan sent my heart racing? It had been a while since I’d seen her face. Now it was staring up at me, just like the photo in the locket.
I had the same urge I had back then to get it out of my sight. To never let her know that I’d seen it. Something about it was too intimate. Like, I shouldn’t be looking. As if by doing so, we were sharing some kind of agreement. Like I was granting her permission to look back at me through the screen, straight into my bedroom.
I swiped to get her eyes off of me, but the next photo was identical. It was just Joan, staring at the camera.
I scanned the photo's background, trying to determine where she might be. But the frame gave nothing away. A strip of cement floor and fluorescent lighting were the only clues.
Maybe she worked in a garage-turned-studio like I did. Or rather, like I’d been meaning to. I shook my head, trying not to think about my Ceramic Wheel gathering dust in the garage, and continued studying the photo.
Her arms rested at her sides, so I knew she must have set up a tripod for this strange endeavor.
“Is it nothing but selfies?” I asked as I started to speed-swipe through the identical photos.
By the seventh photo in the gallery, something finally caught my eye.
Joan appeared to have a growth bursting up from her right shoulder.
“What the fuck?” I mumbled, zooming in on the shoulder as my stomach tumbled.
There was definitely something protruding out of it.
I gulped down the sickening taste in my mouth and zoomed away, swiping to the next photo. It still featured the growth, only slightly larger.
As I swiped, the thing grew in stop motion until Joan had to cock her head to the side to make room for the lumpy flesh-colored mass.
With every new photo, my heart beat faster. Each nerve in my body was telling me to look away, that I wasn’t meant to see this. Something bad was going to pop up any second and terrify me, but I couldn’t tear my eyes from the screen.
I paused my swiping to zoom in on the lump again and noticed the string of her white tank top had now been cut away, presumably to make more room for the growing mass.
“What even is that?” Max asked, sounding as disgusted as I felt.
“I think it’s clay. I mean, it must be, right?” I sounded desperate.
Clay was my medium. I should have been able to identify the substance with no hesitancy. But something about the mass gave me pause. It had an organic quality that I’d never seen before.
A cold sweat broke out over my body as I continued to swipe until the mass had grown to nearly the size of Joan’s head.
With every new photo, I hoped for something different. But Joan and the mass were unceasingly in frame.
I was relieved when it seemed to stop growing, but a few swipes later, the lump started to take shape, filling me with despair.
She was forming it into a face. Sunken holes for eyes got deeper with every progression. A nose was growing, flat at first, but taking shape. A horizontal crevasse opened in place of a mouth.
I breathed in sharply through my nose as my eyes went back and forth from the clay face to Joan’s. Her smile had widened, now revealing just a hint of her teeth. In addition to being cocked to the left, she now leaned her head forward, toward the camera so that the whites of her round eyes were fully exposed under her pale irises.
She’s watching me, I felt suddenly sure — studying me as I studied her. I felt exposed in my thin silk nightdress, goosebumps marching up and down my skin. My phone felt impossibly hot, gripped tightly in my sweaty palm.
I tried to settle myself with logic. Joan obviously couldn’t see me. She didn’t even know where I lived. And even if she did, she’s just a weird artist; she wasn’t dangerous, right?
My body clearly thought otherwise, having gone rigid against the rapid beating of my heart. I fought against the freeze response, willing my thumb to move again, to continue its swiping so I could get this over with.
In each frame, the head’s features became more pronounced. When beady glass eyes suddenly appeared, pressed hard into the wet, gooey face, I gasped and tore my own eyes away, positioning the phone screen out of my sight.
“Jesus, she’s really off her rocker this time,” Max said.
I jumped at his abrupt presence. I’d forgotten he was right behind me. The whole room had fallen away while I was looking at the photos, and now it had snapped jarringly back into place, making me feel dizzy. I closed my eyes against the onslaught but saw the clay face in my mind, staring at me with its brand-new yet somehow familiar eyes. I snapped mine back open.
“Rebecca, you’re shaking,” he said, his words tickling my ear.
With effort, I sat up and turned on the bedside lamp. My body felt sore, like I hadn’t moved for hours. I tore my phone from its cord, throwing it toward the foot of the bed, where it landed with a soft thump.
Pressing my feet into the creaky wood floors, I buried my face in my hands. The bed shifted as Max rose behind me and placed an ice-cold hand on my shoulder.
“Hey, it’s okay,” he said softly.
I let out a long exhale. How could I tell him the way the photos made me feel? Like I was staring straight into someone else’s nightmare. Like I’d been forcibly cast into a freakish play, an unwilling participant, watching in horror as the plot unfolded around me.
“I didn’t like that,” I choked from my dry throat.
“Yeah, me neither. It was fucking creepy,” he said, a laugh threatening to break free at the edge of his voice. “Maybe you finally decide to block her email? Or better yet, forward it to your school’s IT department. This has got to be breaking some kind of code.”
His words weren’t making any sense, trapped outside of my perception. He was speaking about the photos in terms of reality when they were clearly a portal into something else. Some dark dimension that didn’t speak this language.
I shook my head hard. What the fuck am I saying?
I turned to face him in the dim yellow light. Concern crinkled the corners of his eyes. He was real. I was real. There wasn’t any gateway into a nightmare. It was just a weird art piece. I nodded, forcing a smile.
He patted my shoulder and got up, saying something about heading to the kitchen as he left the room, but I was no longer listening. I was staring at the foot of my bed, at my phone's reflective black screen. I could almost hear Joan’s voice murmuring from within and another voice, a voice with a thick, bubbling quality. The voice of the head.
Swallowing down the terrible chalky taste in my mouth, I picked the phone back up and swiped up on the screen. Joan and her second head careened back into view. The photo was number 57 of 176.
Steeling myself, I continued swiping fast, my thumb possessed. I knew I just had to make it to the end. Just had to watch the progression. Then, I could stop.
The second head was a hideous, crude depiction. Its neck was inhumanely thick, growing straight out of Joan’s shoulder with little definition to separate the neck from the head. Its eyes were dark glass beads in shadowy pits. The skin’s texture and color were all wrong, grayish, grotesquely misshapen, as though something was boiling just under the surface. Its nostrils were uneven and far too wide. And the mouth was maybe the worst part, lipless, hanging open as if stuck in an endless groan.
I hunched over the screen, madly swiping. Just when I thought the head couldn’t possibly get more disgusting, it seemed to purse its mouth, and sharp cream-colored pieces jutted out from within. It was growing teeth.
A whine escaped my lips as I looked away from the mouth, anywhere but the mouth. But what was happening on its head was no reprieve. It started as little pinprick holes along the skull that grew larger and larger. Then, hairs burst from within as I swiped faster and faster.
While the stringy strands grew, I stopped to wonder for the first time how Joan was even accomplishing this. She seemed not to move from her position the entire time. There was no smudge of clay, no off-center photo to indicate that she’d been building the head between takes.
That’s because it’s not an art piece, I thought. It’s real.
“No!” I shouted against the insanity.
Joan seemed to respond in the photo, baring a wide, toothy grin, her bloodshot eyes utterly deranged.
The head was now fully formed. Its hair was light blonde and reached its shoulders, just like mine.
I could feel tears stabbing at my eyes, threatening to spill over. I hadn’t wanted to notice this part, this prediction that had been urgently whispered from deep in the recesses of my mind.
The head was me.
I kept on swiping, fighting back nausea as each iteration took on more of my likeness. The nose thinned and lengthened; arched eyebrows framed the dark brown eyes; cheekbones were carved out high on the face.
The image swam before my eyes as they filled with hot tears. Through my blurred vision, the head resembled me even more.
I let out a shaky sigh, trying to force myself to feel relief. This was the big reveal I’d been waiting for, right? I could handle this. Joan was obsessed with me. She made this creepy art piece in my honor. Fine!
But there were still 30 photos to go.
I swiped on. Suddenly, a flash of silver appeared in the photo’s bottom corner. Joan gripped a large kitchen knife in her small fist, looking unsteady on her thin, veiny wrist. She leaned her head as far as she could from the me she created and began to carve at my trunk-like neck.
My breath grew more shallow with every cut, coming out in bits and starts until I couldn’t breathe at all.
The photos seemed to swipe on their own as I gasped for air. Red exploded across the frame, creating a river of blood that continued to flow as she severed my head from her shoulder.
I forced in a desperate breath as my head fell out of the frame. Without realizing it, I’d been clutching at my own throat, severing my airway. I unleashed my neck, staring at my shaking hand in disbelief.
I rubbed my face hard, smearing tears across my features as if trying to erase my face like a blackboard. I opened my eyes through my fingers. Joan stared at me, holding my gaze with a mischievous look in her wild eyes until she dipped out of the frame.
The empty room was revealed only for an instant, but it was long enough for me to recognize the back window panes. It was my garage-turned-studio. My stomach fell to the floor.
Joan was suddenly back in frame, holding my head in her hands. Her dirty fingers dug into the soft sides of the skull, sending stabbing pains through my own as I watched helplessly.
Lifting it high above her head, Joan looked almost regal as she soaked herself in the blood that continued to rain from my sawed-off neck.
She lowered it, putting it on like a crown. Rather than collapsing into her as any clay piece should, it went over her head like a mask, fusing with her until our two faces became one.
It was like looking at a monstrous life-sized doll of myself. A sick doppelganger, an uncanny mirror image that by some curse, some dark magic, had come to life, or some twisted form of it.
I could feel more than see Joan’s eyes behind mine, staring through the mask. I tried to swipe the photo away, but it remained locked in place.
It was the last photo in the gallery.
Fear twisted with rage from deep inside of me.
“What is this, a threat? You want to be me, want to take my fucking life or something? You can’t have it!” I screamed at the phone, feeling all logic wither away as I shouted at the unbelievable image of me before me.
Through the sound of my thumping heart, I thought I heard her say something back, too faint to hear. I pressed the phone into my ear, scanning my shadowed surroundings frantically.
The sound wasn’t coming from the phone. It was coming from downstairs. I focused until I could make the voices out.
Max. He was talking to someone, a woman.
Joan.
I dropped the phone and burst from the bedroom, following the voices that tinkled just faint enough so I couldn’t make them out.
Reaching the top of the staircase, the sight of them stopped me in my tracks. I caught myself on the railing before I could go careening down the steps, heaving garbled breaths.
They were in the kitchen, glowing in the dim light of the refrigerator. Max stood there, arm balanced limply against the fridge door, quietly talking to… me.
She had my hair and face. She wore my clothes and my locket around her neck.
But I could spot the poor imitation from here. Poor craftsmanship. The eyes were slightly too bright and deranged. The skin had a thickness, a clay-like quality. How could Max not see it?
I tried to call his name, to reveal to this imposter, but through the thick blockage that had lodged in my throat, it came out as only a sickening gurgle.
His eyes followed the sound and filled with shock and recognition.
“How did you get in here?” he shouted, stepping toward me with clenched fists.
Before I could try to speak again, she called out.
“Joan?!”
No, no, no. My hands flew up to my face and came away covered in a thick, wet clay.
I ran toward the hall bathroom and flicked on the light, assaulted with the image of Joan in my reflection. Joan’s dark hair, Joan’s light eyes, Joan’s face masked over my own.
I forced out a hollow sob. I could hear Joan and Max shouting, saying something about calling the police. But it was as if they were miles underground.
I clawed at the mask, nails sinking deep into my thick skin, searing with pain. Chunks of clay and skin fell away into the sink. Beaded eyes skittered down with a clink. Teeth circled the drain, swimming in red.
I stared at the clay covering my hands. It felt familiar, nostalgic in a way. This wasn’t just an art piece. It was a real art piece.
It was the last thought I had before my vision went black, and I collapsed, sinking into the floor.