She was pleasantly surprised, at first, to find she couldn't move. She really was hypnotized – he really had hypnotized her – and now, as promised, he was turning her into a statue. She stood stock-still as she watched him at the work table, his nimble hands molding the clay into the semblance of a human figure, her figure.
"Can you move at all?" His voice was sly. She could imagine the look in his eyes but, when she attempted to look up at them, her neck proved stiff and useless. Her head was too heavy. She couldn't look away from his hands on the little model.
She strained a little, but it was no use. Her body was locked in place, and, the more she made conscious attempts to move it, the less capable of movement it became.
"No," she said, "can't move." It came out in a difficult gasp.
Her body was getting stiffer and stiffer and stiffer as the model slowly took shape. Now he did something to the head of the model and her head tilted back, the astonished smile that had been frozen on her face fading into blankness.
"Good. Can you speak, anymore?"
She tried to, and could not. Her next instinct was to shake her head, but she couldn't do that, either. She could see his grin, floating above the model, and it said "Good."
She felt strange as he continued to shape the model, strange beyond the sensation of hypnotic paralysis he'd created in her mind. Her arms were fastened to her sides, straight and stiff, but as he shaped the clay and drew the model's arms out to either side they began to float away from her hips, instantly mimicking the pose of the model. As he manipulated the arms, slowly and smoothly, hers followed, drifting out in front of her body, hands pointed forward like a sleepwalker. She could not move her arms, but he could make them move.
Her arms were drifting up, now, up over her head, high into the air. He shaped the clay as he went, bending the arms backwards, and hers followed. Slowly, smoothly, until her hands crossed over the nape of her neck.
She realized what the strange feeling was, aside from the simple helplessness of not being able to move: her body was not merely out of her control. It was under control.
She was under control. His control. He was controlling her. Variations of this thought repeated themselves in her head as she watched his hands work on the model, and in her head they sounded in a dull monotone that seemed fitting for a deeply-hypnotized girl being turned into a statue.
She felt that now, that she was being transformed, in her legs first, as they got stiffer and stiffer. Her legs became heavy, numb, hardening into dense, white marble that could not move. Her legs were stone, and could not move, not ever again. She could see the model starting to harden, the quick-drying clay growing darker and rigid as the sculptor's warm hands moved away, up her body. He was finished with her legs, and now they had begun to set.
Anxiety welled up in her breast; she was becoming a statue, not merely a paralyzed hypnotized person, but a statue carved and shaped out of clay, out of stone, a frozen human form like the shapes reclining in their poses all around the studio. The other statues were shadows in the peripheral vision of eyes that would not, could not move, that could see nothing now but his hands on the clay, everything else dim and fuzzy.
Behind her sculpted expression of tranquility she was becoming desperate, trying as hard as she could to move as she watched the model continue to dry. But movement was impossible, and, to her horror, she felt herself ceasing to even try, even though she wanted to, her muscles growing limp and unresponsive as her body grew stiffer, grew numb.
He was finishing her torso now, pressing it outwards so her breasts were thrust out, hands behind her head, putting her shapely chest on display. And, with that, the model was done. He took his hands from the clay, a motion that looked impossibly easy to her fixed, immobile eyes, and brushed them together. Then he walked away.
He said goodbye over his shoulder, beyond the reach of her narrowing vision. Now she was alone, watching the model dry. Watching and stiffening, stiffening, stiffening into a statue. She could not move, could not even try to move, because it was impossible for a statue to move. She was no longer desperate to move, desperate for the freedom of her body. Statues did not move. She no longer thought about moving, or about the model as she watched it dry. Her thoughts were growing stiffer and stiffer and stiffer; growing rigid and numb, like her body. She was a statue.
Her vision was blurring. She could no longer see the model, for her eyes were wide, blank orbs, carved out of marble. Like her long, rigid white arms. Like her chiseled legs. Formed from the stone. A statue.
One train of thought blossomed again in her empty mind. It began to play in a loop, for it seemed appropriate that her frozen, stony brains should contain but one thing: the purpose for her creation, the reason she had been formed, shaped out of lifeless clay.
She was under control. Was being controlled. She was controlled. Completely controlled. She was completely controlled. Completely controlled. She was completely controlled. Completely controlled. . . .