Doll Face (15 page)

As it suffused the room, they saw that they were no longer alone and Lex had to wonder if they ever had been.

Soo-Lee gasped.

Creep made a pained sound.

And Lex just sighed.
What now? What the hell now?

He knew the room he was seeing was not the room they had originally been in. There was no bookcase or antiquated TV set or console stereo. All that was gone. They were in some sort of workroom that looked like it was part doll factory and part Frankenstein’s laboratory. Two of the walls were hung with hairless doll heads and smooth unpainted doll faces, limbs of assorted sizes, the torsos of children right up to the torsos of adults. None of them looked as lifeless as they should have. He sensed movement in the faces…subtle, secretive, impossible…but there, a slow and yet deliberate crawl of facial muscles beneath waxen skins. Even the limbs were shifting, fingers unfurling, the chests of the bodies rising and falling with measured respiration.

The flickering orange light only enhanced this and made Lex’s skin feel like it was going to inch right off his bones.

He held Soo-Lee’s hand tighter and that of Creep, whose own hand felt limp and rubbery.

Don’t lose it,
he warned himself.
This is important. Part horror show and part history lesson.

Another wall was hung with what looked like archaic, well-yellowed anatomy prints. Lex thought he recognized several Da Vinci drawings, elaborately rendered explorations of the human body. There were dozens of them, all crowding for space, many tacked right over the top of others or overlapping one another. They were very old, most ripped and dog-eared, faded from age. There was everything from detailed explorations of the human skull to the musco-skeletal system, nervous system and lymphatics. There were also engineering prints where the organs were replaced by arcane machinery, pullies and wires and unbelievably complex clockwork gears.

There was a table, a sort of workbench.

Seated before it was an old woman whose face was wizened, wrinkles deeply etched, mouth hideously seamed. Her hair was stringy white yarn. She didn’t seem to have eyes. There was a body on the table. The body of a child or a child-like thing and she was stitching it shut, humming a melancholy tune in an off-key voice that sounded positively morbid.

Lex could not say that it was a dead child.

And he could not say it was a doll.

He was almost certain it was some sort of horrid hybrid of the two. Its head was detached, a series of tiny, intricate wires hanging in bunches from the throat. They looked like the fine rootlets of a plant. Its arms and legs were likewise divorced from the body. But it was its face that captured his eye—pale and smooth, framed by luxurious yellow hair, the lips sewn shut, the eyes wide and perfectly blue, perfectly sightless.

A voice in the back of his head said,
Look away, oh Christ, look away! If she finishes putting it together, it will move. It will sit up and look at you with those dead cerulean eyes.

The other wall was taken up by shelving that was likewise crowded with nameless glass jars and bottles that looked to be filled with liquids and powders, vessels of eyes, and overflowing boxes of swivels, sockets, gears, fine steel piping, and spooled wire.

Lex knew without a doubt that he was looking at the puppet master of this awful place.

She was the one.

Hers was the mind that held them here.

He expected her to look up at him and acknowledge the fact that he knew, but she did not. She was far too busy putting together the little boy. Nothing could interfere with her work, her obsession and devotion to her craft. Her hands were in constant motion, practiced and expert. Before she finished stitching the torso shut, she poured something from a jar into her hand that looked pink and alive and stuffed it in there. Then she began to fit the limbs in place with meticulous artistry.

It was at this point that he and the others realized that the woman was not the only one in the room. There were others sitting about in folding chairs like an audience. They were doll people, the men in suits and the women in fine dresses. Their dead white faces emoted like rubber masks, empty eyes fixed on the old woman. Several of them had empty sleeves as if there had not been enough limbs to go around.

“This is insane,” Creep said under his breath. “This is all fucking insane.”

His voice boomed in the silence where the only sounds were those of the old woman and her fingers moving deftly at her creation. It was like a scream in church. The effect was instantaneous: the old woman stopped what she was doing. Snips in one hand and a surgical knife in the other, she looked up with eyes that were purple-red in flayed sockets. The doll people all turned their heads and looked in Creep’s direction.

One by one, they stood up.

Creep panicked and ran.

As the doll people began to move in their direction, he dashed through a doorway and down the hall. Lex and Soo-Lee had no choice but to go after him. There were several doors and he opened each one, crying out as he did so. From each doorway, another doll person emerged, reaching out to him with soft, puffy hands. He went to the doorway at the end. He threw it open and disappeared into it.

Lex and Soo-Lee went after him, just avoiding the reaching hands themselves. By the time they got through the door and slammed it shut behind them, the hallway was filled with animate dolls.

We’ve been herded again,
Lex thought as he went down the steps into the cellar after Creep.
Now they’ve got us right where they want us.

24

Sometime after climbing out of the junkyard and her manic run in the streets, Ramona came to her senses and she was crawling up the sidewalk. Not sprinting or walking or even stumbling, but
crawling.
Her face blackened with soot, her clothes gray with ash, she was crawling up the sidewalk, completely out of it, laid low by shock and the aftereffects of pure terror.

Finally, she stopped.

Just what in the hell are you doing?

The thing was, she didn’t know. By that point, she really knew nothing. She very badly needed a good solid dose of reality, but reality did not exist in this place and without it she couldn’t seem to get her feet under her. Literally. This was all a dark fantasy, a nightmare, a dream, call it what you want.

All right. Stop right now. Don’t think. Don’t try to make sense. Stand up like a fucking human being. That’s a start.

It took some doing, but she did it.

She stripped off her filthy coat and just breathed.

She leaned up against the brick front of a building and looked across the street. She was expecting to see the same storefronts again, but she didn’t see that at all. Instead, there was a gigantic banner draped over the faces of several edifices that said: WELCOME TO HISTORIC STOKES. If it was meant to inspire fear, it had the opposite effect: she started to giggle. The giggling welled up inside her until it became full-blown laughter and she shook with it, her girlish and manic cackling echoing up and down the empty streets. Now this was funny! This was fucking comedy! This had to prove that the Controller had a very wicked sense of humor.

Historic Stokes,
she thought.
Historic Stokes. Oh, that’s hilarious!

When she finally calmed down—and it took some time—she fished her cigarettes and lighter out of her pocket and lit up. Dirty and grimy and smudged with ash and smoke, she pulled off her cigarette and had to force herself not to laugh.

Then she saw the van sitting up the street and things quickly became very unfunny.

It was not idling; it was simply parked at the curb. She stood there, stiff from head to foot, waiting for it to rev up and come after her. But it did nothing. She swallowed down her fear, knowing damn well that she was not some shrinking violet and she wasn’t about to become one now. A few deep breaths. A second or two to unclench her muscles. A few drags off her cigarette. There. She was not about to fall apart again like she had in the junkyard. No goddamn way.

You were close before, real close to wearing down the Controller. Then you lost it. Well, find it again and put it to work. Do not allow yourself to be driven. Do not be predictable. Go on instinct. Act irrationally.

The van.

The van was intended to make her run screaming until she was exhausted. But no, she would not allow that. The Controller would expect her to run and hide, to find a safe place that would be, no doubt, conveniently available so she could be trapped in an enclosed space. And there the games would really begin.

Ramona took a final drag off her cigarette and tossed it.

She moved up the sidewalk at a very sneaking pace, keeping to the shadows as if she was trying to avoid being seen. This would be predictable behavior. The Controller would be expecting it. At the last moment, she made as if to run off…and then dashed across the street to the van, grabbing the handle of the driver’s-side door and throwing it open.

The broken man was behind the wheel.

A blade of fear went through her, but vanished quickly enough. He was slumped over in the seat, loose-limbed and limp. He seemed incapable of motion. He was a lifeless window dummy and no more.

Still…she was cautious, very cautious.

She knew how quickly they went from being inert to active.

Common sense told her to get the hell out of there, so she ignored it and did the irrational thing. The thing that was dangerous, but oh-so satisfying. She grabbed the broken man and pulled him out of the van, tossing him to the pavement. He broke into pieces. She kicked his head and it rolled into the gutter.

She waited for him to come to life, but it didn’t happen.

She jumped behind the wheel and started the van up. She was amazed that it ran so smoothly. Did the Controller’s power not extend to internal combustion engines? Or was she—gasp—playing into his/her/its theoretical hands again?

Fuck it.

The last time the alarm sounded it had come from the east and that’s where she was going. The rational thing would be to drive out of town, so she didn’t bother with that. She was going to track this bullshit to its source.

Guess what, Mr. Controller?
she thought then.
I’m coming for your ass. Goddamn right I am.

25

She was still out there.

She was still waiting for him.

Chazz could not see the Spider Mother. He could not hear her. Yet, he could feel her out there, sense her drawing closer. He was like a streetlight and she was a moth. She was circling him, drawing ever closer, creeping up just out of sight, waiting to pounce.

He was not running now.

He was simply run out. But he refused to stay still for more than a few seconds or a minute at the very outside. Every time he stopped, he threw out feelers, trying to figure out where she might be. Casting for scent like a bloodhound. And each time he did, he thought:
You can’t outrun her. You can’t escape. This is her town and she decides where every street leads to.

Now and again, he could almost feel her eyes on him, her
many
eyes…if she even had eyes at all. It made him break out in a cold sweat. And once, several streets back, he was almost certain he heard the distant thumping of an immense heart. In his mind, he could see it: not the Spider Mother, just a huge, well-muscled heart in an empty lot, flabby and black-red, beating away. Not necessarily her heart but perhaps the heart of the town, the secret black beating heart of it that nourished the body. He could almost imagine the sewers and pipes and conduits beneath the ground being blood-swollen arteries and veins.

You’re thinking crazy. You’re thinking absolutely crazy,
he told himself.

It was true and he knew it, but even so he was not convinced of the fact. There had been a time—long ago, it seemed—when he would have rejected such thinking out of hand as any sane person would have. But that time was gone and reality was not such a given anymore. That which once made no sense made all the sense in the world today.

“Move,” he whispered under his breath.

Chazz stood up, looking around. He could not hear the
clip-clop
of the Spider Mother. Maybe she had given up, but he didn’t believe that for a moment. He moved down the sidewalk, eyeing doorways, unable to decide if they promised sanctuary or danger. He moved on for another ten and then fifteen minutes and saw nothing and heard nothing. He began to stand tall again and not bent over and skulking like some scavenging animal.

He walked with a more confidant stride.

He breathed easier.

His brain became less clouded and he began to think less instinctively and more like a man. He had been running and getting absolutely nowhere. Now that there was not menace around every corner, he began to consider how he might find the others. Because, really, that was the true horror of this entire situation…being alone. The doll people and Lady Peg-leg and the Spider Mother, they were all horrible, of course, but being alone against them made it so much worse.