Doll Face (25 page)

“Gone,” said the old woman. Her good eye swept over the park and its ruination and there was something cold and predatory about it, a depthless blackness in it that seemed to reach deep within her and perhaps beyond into some chasm of darkness. The warm summer breeze ruffled her white hair. Her lips were pulled back from gums going brown with age, teeth clenched in uneven rows, black grit packed between them.

“Yes, all gone now,” she said in a voice that was cynical and betrayed. She attempted something like a smile, but it didn’t work—her lips were twisted, brown, and ugly like dead earthworms fused together on a sidewalk.

Ramona was not certain the old lady was aware of her presence, then she craned her neck and looked at her, not so much with the good eye but with the silvery blanched one. At first Ramona thought there was some pale growth covering it like a pterygium, but now it looked as if the eye had been bleached white. The old woman speared Ramona with it and Ramona gasped.

There’s power in that eye. Maybe not in it, but in the deranged mind behind it. Something is there. Maybe something hereditary, something unbelievable.

“They think they can all leave, but I have other plans,” she said, this time directly to Ramona. “I’ve named each and every one, haven’t I? Their names went in the book,
my
book, and once written there is no deliverance but through me and I am a hard mistress. They’ll know soon the hold it has upon them. Reckon, they will.” There was an almost triumphant glee to her voice, the manic delight of a disturbed mind whose vengeance was nearing.

Ramona stood there, shaking, just sick inside.

I don’t want this shit anymore,
she thought.
I didn’t know what I was doing. I just want to go now.

But, no, it was not that easy. Not so easy for the residents of Stokes and certainly not easy for her. She had plugged herself into this and until the energy stopped flowing, she was part of the circuit and there was no backing out.

She stood there, still trembling, wanting to run but afraid to move. The old woman’s dead eye impaled her and held her there as easily as a bug on a pin. She was no longer speaking, but Ramona could hear her. It was her thoughts now, all the terrible and unspeakable things echoing up from the snake pit of her subconscious mind.

(Disloyal and unfaithful, that’s what they are. Treacherous, treacherous.)

(They would leave this town, which is my town, the town my family built and cried and bled over, but I won’t let them. This is my town and it belongs to me and they belong to me. Its guts are my guts and its blood flows in my veins and I suffer as it suffers and who do they think they are to turn their back on it? I will take them under my hand and teach them the error of their ways and my hand is a firm hand, an unforgiving hand and as I have made I WILL DESTROY AND AS I DESTROY I WILL REMAKE IN THE IMAGE MY HANDS KNOW BEST!)

Ramona almost fell over. She felt like she had been dipped in freezing water. An icy sweat broke out on her brow and ran down her face. It made her scalp feel greasy. It ran down her spine and dripped between her breasts and beaded her thighs and it was only through the auspices of years of physical training that she was able to stay on her feet.

(NOW IT COMES AND ONCE COMING CANNOT BE PUT DOWN! IT TAKES HOLD OF THEM! IT OWNS THEM! THEY ARE WHAT THEY ARE NOT! THEY ARE REMADE INTO WHAT THEY CANNOT BE!!!)

Ramona clutched her head in her hands because she did not want to hear the words anymore. She did not want them in her skull, she did not want to feel them burning through her brain and distorting her mind, tearing it open and filling it with a black crawling darkness. Because the images were too strong now; they were devastating. The looming terrible faces and reaching white hands and huge empty eyes like blank windows looking into some black dimension of suffering.

The next thing she knew, she was on her knees in the grass, the world tilting around her. She was gasping for air and shaking, her head hurting and her eyes refusing to open out of fear of what they might see.

“C’mon…” she heard her voice say. “Pull yourself together…”

In the darkness she sat there with the flashlight next to her. It had gone out and she didn’t bother clicking it because she did not want light. She wanted the security of night, of nonentity. She was content to hide in the shadows.

But afterimages still burned in her brain.

She was tortured by them.

The stalking black shapes that were not men and women and yet were not exactly dolls or mannequins but some morbid, awful hybrid. Men, women, and children who were no longer men, women, and children but soulless artificial things that did the bidding of the deranged mind that brought them into existence—

“Enough,” she said under her breath.

Grabbing the flashlight, she stood up and leaned against the stage of the bandshell, trying to catch her breath and trying to bring her world into focus. Slowly, slowly, she pushed the nightmare images from her head, feeling that she knew many things and yet knew nothing at all. Stokes had dried up, it had died and gone to decay, abandoned, deserted, a ghost town of sorts. That had been the beginning of it. Then other things had happened and she did not think the fire was the worst of them.

Ramona stepped away from the stage and walked out near the seats that stood like a silent jury in the moonlight.

That old woman. Her family must have built the town and the town went to shit as small towns sometimes do, only she was not going to allow that. She had a hold on the townspeople. They were hers. She owned them and she would not let them go. She was like a little girl playing dolls…except her dolls were people.

Sighing, Ramona looked to the east, or what her internal navigator told her was the east. As she did, she was nearly overwhelmed by a sense of fear and excitement. It seemed to fill her throat and she nearly choked on it. She was close now and getting closer all the time. The bits and pieces she knew would soon be married to something more that would explain the madness and expose its dark, agonized roots.

Mumbling beneath her breath, she began moving through the park now to the east and knowing that nothing could stop her. Whether it was where she wanted to go or where she was being compelled to go, it didn’t matter. She stumbled along, her mind getting sharper with each passing moment.

When she reached the outer edge of the shadowy park, she paused. “I know things now. I know things.”

And then, behind her, a voice said, “You don’t know anything.”

41

It was a factory.

There was no doubt of that. Though at first sight it had looked like some surreal interpretation of Dracula’s castle as might be seen in an old horror comic, it was indeed a factory. It even had the old multipane windows on the second-floor common to such industrial sites. Yes, Creep knew, something had been made here. Something secret. Something lost and now found again. Something that should not be but was.

He was inside now and it didn’t seem that he had entered so much as was sucked inside. The car had deposited him at the door and driven away, leaving him to stare up at the factory with horror and fascination. It was like some immense dark egg brooding in a nest, just waiting to hatch. That was his first impression. His second was that it looked like a fortress of gray stone block, three-story, flat-roofed, the first-floor windows tall and dark and set with iron bars, giving it the look of a prison or a madhouse more than anything else.

A voice in his head, tittering madly, had said,
You punch in, but you don’t punch out.

He moved through the darkness, bumping into things and threading through shadows that did not seem to be shadows at all. Though he had never been in this place before, he seemed to know that there were three levels of machinery. That it was laid out like a wheel, all sections connected by long corridors that led to a central hub. If there was an epicenter to the place, it was the hub, which was like a hollow cylinder that led from the ground floor to the skylights three stories above.

He didn’t question how he could know these things.

Like the voice in the back of his head that kept asking him just what the hell it was he thought he was doing, he ignored it.

He was here because this is where the car brought him.

He was here because this is where he had to be.

He was in a long, narrow chamber, he knew that much. At the far end was an archway that connected to the corridor that would bring him to the hub. But he was not ready to go there yet. Part of him—a part he desperately tried to bury—was afraid to go there. He would stay here and see what this room had to offer.

You are now in the beast,
a voice in his head informed him.
The beast that the puppet master made.

Creep considered that…and then things started to happen.

The first was that the siren began to whine, cutting through the night with a shrieking, almost painful sound. But where before it was distant, now he was practically at ground zero and it cut right through him.

The siren rang and the beast woke up. It stretched and yawned and began to growl. Except it was not a growling as such, but the noise of the factory as it came alive in the darkness—roaring and clashing and jangling, machinery trembling and gears grinding and wheels meshing. Vats poured out steam and pipes shook and great presses hissed and molds cracked with great heat as belts rumbled and chains clanked. It was a cacophony of noise, of whirring and rumbling, tanks bubbling and levers shrieking with metal fatigue.

It was a ghost factory and he had to cover his ears from the constant hammering noise, though nothing seemed to be moving. All of it was auditory and within seconds it stopped, the factory seizing up again.

Bump.

Creep walked into a table. He stood there, rubbing his hip, thinking and trying not to think, trying not to remember the series of events that had brought him to this place at this time. He could see things on the table before him, which was like some immense industrial workbench. The room was filled with such benches. It was here that things were put together. He knew this even if he really knew nothing else.

In his mind there was a single thought:
touch.

He needed to touch what was on the tables. He needed to explore what was offered with his fingertips even though he knew instinctively it was a very bad idea.

Touch.

You must touch.

You must feel.

By then, he already was. His fingers roamed over disparate objects. Coils, bundles of wire, gears, metal rods…then, then something soft. He did not know what it was but he could not stop touching it. It was flabby and warm and he felt like he was a kid again at a Halloween school carnival, exploring the contents of bowls in the darkness. Weird, squishy things that were supposed to be a dead man’s brain and eyeballs and guts but were actually a sponge soaked in gelatin and grapes in watery brine and great cold globs of spaghetti.

But this…whatever it was he was touching…it was not fake. It was alive and it pulsated beneath his fingers like a living human heart.

He explored further.

Yes, fingers, he found fingers. Fingers that were cold and inert until he touched them, then they came alive, brushing against his own. He found glassy orbs that must have been eyes and a jar of tongues that greedily lapped at his fingertips. Whatever he touched came alive.

He moved to the next bench.

His hand reached out, knowing it must touch what was there. He felt something silky like soft, soft skin. In fact, it felt very much like skin but almost doughy with no tensile strength. He ran his fingers up and down the cool, waxy material until he realized that what he was touching was a woman. There was the button of her navel set in the flat belly and, higher, the expanse of her ribs and two rounded breasts that lacked nipples. He kneaded them, disturbed by the fact that unlike real flesh, the indentations of his fingers stayed. They were like tiny craters. No, no, no! That wouldn’t do. Feverish now, a shrill laughter rattling in his throat, he began to smooth out the indentations, forming the breasts into perfect cones.

Yes, that was better.

His fingers continued to investigate. He found the slight mound of a hairless pubis between the thighs and he rubbed his fingertips over it gently so as not to mar its perfection. His index finger explored its cleft that was cool to the touch but gradually seemed to be warming and moistening as he toyed with it.

No, this isn’t right. This isn’t a woman. It’s a doll.

As if to prove this to himself, his hands discovered that she had no legs and when he explored the sockets of her shoulders, he found she had no arms. There was no head. From the stump of the neck there was a knob with a glassy, smooth ball at the end. There were other things…cords, slender steel rods.

Yes, it was a doll, the beginning of a doll…yet, the very idea of the torso and how it responded to his touch was enormously exciting. He ached with a carnal thrill, growing hard even though he knew it was wrong and completely perverse. Perverse? Hell, it was
aberrant.