by Tim Curran
The thing was to think about how to get out of this.
He breathed in and out deeply until he calmed. He often used breathing exercises before a big game when his nerves were a little on edge. Coach had taught him that. God, he wished Coach were here now. Like Ramona, he would know what to do.
“Just stop being a pussy,” he whispered there in the darkness.
Yeah, that was the thing. On the good side, he hadn’t really run anyone down, just some kind of dummy that looked like a man but wasn’t really a man, maybe a robot or some kind of big windup toy. The idea of that made him want to giggle, but he was afraid to giggle. He had the most awful feeling that once he started he would not be able to stop.
Regardless, it hadn’t been a man he had hit…just a thing.
And there were more than one of them in this damn town so he had to be careful. The way he saw it, there were really only a couple things he could do. He either backtracked—if such a thing was even possible by this point—and found the others or he tried to find the van. Other than that, he could knock on some doors and try to find some help.
Or keys. If I can find some keys and a car, I’ll fucking steal it.
Either way, he wasn’t going to accomplish anything sitting here shaking in his shoes.
Carefully, he stood up.
He took inventory of himself head to toe. He was a big guy. He was fast. He was strong. He felt his own power and it calmed him, gave him strength, brought some of that old arrogance back. If anybody could get this done, it was him, because he had the tools.
Letting out a breath, he moved through the shadows of the yard.
Everything was so unbelievably silent out there. There was not so much as the sound of a truck in the distance or a dog barking. It just wasn’t fucking natural. The moon had come up now, big and bright, frosting rooftops and lawns. But for all the light it brought, it also increased the shadows.
He walked around to the front of the house, still staying in the shadows of a big old oak in the side yard. He was tense and expectant. He looked down the street. He saw the direction he had come from. He either retraced his steps or he started doing some knocking.
And why did the very idea of that terrify him?
But he knew. If he made noise, he could be heard and he was afraid of being heard. If there were more of those things out there, they’d know exactly where he was.
Just as he edged nearer to the sidewalk, he retreated back under the tree.
Something, instinct maybe, made him go back. He didn’t like the idea of being out on the sidewalk or in the street where he could be seen. It was better to sneak through backyards. That made him feel more relaxed. He liked the idea of camouflage.
He vaulted hedges and fences, dropping into yards, hiding in pockets of shadow until he felt it was safe to move again. The farther he went, the more confident he became.
He slipped over another fence, scanning the yard between the house and the garage that flanked the alley. It looked all right. In fact, it—
Shit.
He heard a sound and everything inside him was instantly reduced to a cool, slopping jelly. He crouched just inside the fence, his hand gripping one of the posts and listened.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap.
What the hell was that?
It was coming from the alley and Chazz was far beyond the point where he could believe that it was anything perfectly ordinary or perfectly harmless. He waited there, his entire body trembling.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap.
He could see a moonlit stretch of alley from where he was. A shape came hobbling into view and his heart dropped south of his stomach. It was another one of those mannequin things. Oh yes, there was no doubt about it. It moved with an uneasy, hobbling gait and that was because it only had one real leg, the other being a peg-leg like a pirate in an old movie.
It kept coming.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap.
Then it paused as if it had heard something.
It looked like a woman, an old woman with a bent back. He could see her clearly in the glow of the moon. She was dressed in ragged clothes like a bag lady, a sack slung over one shoulder. She had a wild shock of white hair that was long and stringy, but patchy on the skull itself. Her scalp seemed to shine. And her face…he couldn’t see it too well, but it was grotesque and hanging like a grinning gunnysack.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap.
She went on her way and Chazz did not relax until he heard her tapping peg-leg fade into the distance. Even then, he was shaking and sweating.
He crept through the yard, moving even more carefully now, frightened of every shadow and bunched dark shape. They could have been all around him for all he knew. One of them could have been reaching out for him. No…no, he couldn’t let himself think things like that. It just wasn’t acceptable. He was on the verge of hysteria and he knew it. He was thinking like an animal again. He wanted to run, to flee, to find a new hiding place.
What he really needed was the van or another car.
And a weapon. Not a gun or a knife but something like a good Louisville Slugger. Something he could shatter those things with if they got too close. That had to be his priority.
He sidled along a house, studying its dark windows, praying that nothing would move behind them. He was going to chance it and run across the street. It was the only way. He had to put some distance between himself and Lady Peg-leg.
A sound.
Oh God, no.
It was getting louder and coming closer and he was locked down with fear, frozen with it. He couldn’t even get his body to respond. His brain was filled with white noise and he wanted to scream his head off.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap.
She was coming again. She had paused in the alley, sensing that he was near and now she was coming back to find him. She would not stop until she did and Chazz knew this deep in the black beating drum of his heart.
He made his body move.
She was slow, he was fast. He had to keep that in mind.
He moved out toward the sidewalk, then, with a burst of manic speed, he crossed the street into the shadows of the houses across the way. He stood by a porch, panting not so much out of exertion but of numbing fear. He waited and, Jesus, that tapping was coming again.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap.
She was not in the alley anymore. No, no, no. She had found the yard he had hid in and she was coming up the flagstone walk that led to the front porch. He saw her hobbling shape begin to emerge from the shadows. Raw panic breaking loose inside him, he made ready to run.
Then he saw an open window.
It was there toward the back of the house like it was waiting for him and something inside him was almost sure that it was. But he would not acknowledge that. He could not acknowledge that. He needed a place to hide. Lady Peg-leg wasn’t fast, but she was relentless and she would keep coming and coming until she ran him to death.
Chazz wasn’t going to let that happen.
He snuck over to the window and with an easy flex of muscles he slipped through into a darkened room. Murky shapes were all around him. He listened and waited, but nothing moved.
Quietly as possible, he slid the window down until it was only open an inch or two.
Then he waited.
Lady Peg-leg was crossing the street.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap.
10
Even though the van had passed by and its taillights winked out in the distance, Ramona knew she was still in the shit. In fact, she was barely keeping her head above it. She thought for certain when she ducked into the recess between the two buildings that the van—and the horror that drove it—would find her.
But off it went.
And off she had to go.
The others had to be somewhere. Unless, of course, those doll people had gotten them. She’d already encountered two of them and she wasn’t quite so naïve to believe that there were not more.
But what
was this place?
What was its point?
It wasn’t Stokes. She knew that much now. She didn’t know where they were but it sure as hell was not Stokes because Stokes didn’t exist. Stokes had burned down in the 1960s. Either they had all suffered some collective nervous breakdown and were drooling in separate padded rooms or what she had seen and what she had experienced thus far was real.
You know it’s real. You damn well know it.
But that made it all worse, didn’t it?
It meant reality as she knew it had split wide open and they had fallen through the cracks. They had to be somewhere. As she looked up and down the streets, she was disturbed by what she saw. It was all so…fake. So perfectly arranged. So very artificial. It was like a small town you saw in an old Warner Brothers movie. The neighborhoods of nice little houses separated by squared-off hedges and fronted by narrow streets, rows of big elms and oaks. All the houses were older two-story jobs, but very well kept. There was not a single ranch house to be seen or any other evidence of post-World War II architecture. Even the street lights—none of which were lit—weren’t modern. They were more along the line of street lamps.
Creepy didn’t begin to describe it.
And the storefronts she had passed, all the little Main Street-type businesses lined up—barbershops, cafés, drugstores, offices—looked like a Hollywood director’s idea of small-town America, something envisioned by Frank Capra.
Ramona had grown up in a small town; she had lived in several, passed through dozens and dozens in her life getting from point A to point B. Some were quaint, some were ugly, some were pretty, some run-down, but they all had personality.
Stokes had none.
It was sterile and synthetic, like it had been kept in a box. Small towns came together in bits and pieces through the years, but Stokes looked like it had been built according to a very specific plan and that was to emphasize its small town-ness, if that made any sense.
This place was an imitation.
But there had to be a point to it all.
Just as there had to be a reason why they were drawn into it in the first place.
Funny, too, how there had been a near-torrential rainfall when they’d entered the valley and now not a drop of rain. Even the streets were dry as if it hadn’t rained in weeks. Interesting.
She stepped out into the street and listened. Nothing. No approaching sirens. Not so much as a car passing in the distance. No cars, no people, no life. Stokes was like a fucking doll house.
She walked calmly as possible up the sidewalk.
She would go in the direction the others had run. She would check out two or three more streets looking for a sign of them, then she was fucking getting out.
If she could get out at all.
11
“I suppose we should go over there and have a look,” Lex said. “I rather doubt those lights came on purely by accident.”
But Creep didn’t like the idea. “Fuck that. It’s a trap. I know it’s a trap. It’s like…like…like…”
“Bait?” Soo-Lee said.
“Yeah! That’s it, Lex. It’s bait to draw us in. When we get there, something’s going to happen and I know it. Those things’ll be in there, waiting for us.”
“Maybe that’s exactly why we should go over there.”
“Are you nuts?”
Lex shrugged. “Something’s going on here and I got a real nasty feeling that we’re not leaving until we figure out what. In fact, if we don’t figure it out, we may never get out.”
“I’m all for walking right out of here.”
“It’s not going to be that easy.”
“How do you know?”
The thing was, Lex wasn’t sure. He just had a very bad feeling that all of this was not by accident. That it was on purpose. That this town existed for a specific reason and they were drawn into it for a purpose. “Listen,” he said, “here’s what we’ll do. I’ll go check it out. You wait here. You went to look for Chazz and Ramona, now it’s my turn.”
Creep shrugged. It was obvious he still didn’t like it, but the idea of there being no personal danger involved bolstered him some. “All right.”
“I’m going, too,” Soo-Lee said.
Creep sighed. “And I babysit the psycho.”
Lex ignored that and led Soo-Lee across the street.
Creep was right, of course. Maybe it wasn’t a trap exactly—or maybe it was—but there was something very weird about it just like there was something very weird about this town, which, presumably, did not exist in the first place. There were no lights on anywhere and now one just happened to come on. Now wasn’t that interesting?
But, honestly, he didn’t think it was interesting at all.
He thought it was downright disturbing.
With Soo-Lee right behind him, he moved cautiously up the sidewalk until he got to the diner. Looking through the plate glass windows, he could see tables and booths, a counter with round stools.
But no people.
Somebody must have turned the lights on.
“This is creepy,” Soo-Lee whispered.
Yes, it was at that.
What was also creepy was that the word DINER was lettered in each window. No name other than that, just DINER. Not the DOWNTOWN DINER or the DO-DROP-IN DINER or JIMMY’S HASH HOUSE or BOBBIE’S BURGER BARN. It was all very generic just like the town itself, which made him realize that every shop and store he had seen were like that—GROCERIES and INSURANCE, BARBERSHOP and DENTIST, but none of them with any more specific titles.
It reminded him of the elaborate train set he had put together with his dad when he was in grade school. There had been depots and mountains, trees and roundhouses, and a little town where every storefront had a very generic title just like in Stokes.
This is everytown, he thought. It’s bits and pieces of every town everyone has ever seen from every old movie, every old TV show, every fucking Norman Rockwell calendar. There’s a reason for that and you better figure out what it is.
“I’m going in,” he told her. “Maybe you should wait out here.”
“No thanks.”
He pulled open the door and it jingled. He stepped inside. And what was weird in the first place only got that much weirder. His first impression on coming through the door was that the place smelled old, empty, and musty…but that changed when he was three feet inside. It was like the diner suddenly came to life. He could smell hot coffee and burgers, pie and french fries. It all smelled exactly the way he thought a diner should smell, as if his own memories and expectations had been hijacked.
There was food set out everywhere.
Lex blinked and then blinked again because he was certain it was a hallucination of some sort. It had to be a hallucination. Nothing else could possibly explain it. On the counter, he saw cups of coffee that were still steaming. A cheeseburger on a plate with a bite out of it, a fry dipped in ketchup. A slice of blueberry pie with ice cream that was not even melted yet. It was the same at the booths and tables: bowls of hot soup, malteds in icy metal cups, BLTs and grilled cheese sandwiches. The soups were barely touched, malteds barely sipped, the sandwiches all with the requisite one or two bites from them as if to emphasize the fact that the diners had all just left…perhaps seconds ago.
“What the heck is all this?” Soo-Lee asked.
But he didn’t know.
Together, they stepped behind the counter, moving very slowly and carefully as if they expected to find a tripwire. There were no booby traps, just pots of hot coffee and a large, freshly poured Coke in a cup. A chalkboard announced the day’s specials: HAMBURGER PLATE .79¢ CHICKEN NOODLE SOUP .50¢, CHICKEN FRIED STEAK $1.00.
“Can’t beat the prices,” Soo-Lee said.
No, you can’t, Lex thought. And when was the last time you could get food that cheap? The 1960s? The 1950s?
Everything was fucked-up and out of whack.
They peered through the archway into the kitchen. Burgers a
nd bacon were frying on a big, greasy range.
Lex went back out into the dining area. He picked up a fry and examined it closely.
“You’re not going to eat that?” Soo-Lee said.
But that’s exactly what he was going to do. He doubted the physical reality of what he was seeing so he was putting it to the test. It felt like a fry. The weight and texture were perfect…but it had no odor and he was willing to bet it had no taste.
He looked around. Incredible. This place was like the Mary Celeste of diners. All the patrons had been mysteriously snatched away into thin air. Oooo-weee-oooo. Except that it was all bullshit, a carefully constructed ruse. There had never been people here.
He dropped the fry back onto its plate. “It’s fake,” he said. “All this food is fake. It’s like that plastic food little kids play with. And I bet that’s exactly how it tastes.”
The words had no more than left his lips when he felt a subtle shift in the atmosphere of the diner. It was quick and inexplicable. He no longer smelled good things to eat and drink. No, now he smelled mildew and rot.
“Lex,” Soo-Lee said, grabbing his arm.
But he saw, all right. There were mice running around on the floor. A rat was on a table gnawing at a club sandwich that looked like it had been sitting there for weeks. The bread was green with mold. There were flies everywhere. A beetle crawled out of a malted cup. A burger was writhing with maggots.
Yes, it had happened everywhere.
Everywhere.
The walls were dingy, the plate glass windows dirty, the counter and tables filthy with rat droppings and food scraps gone black. The red vinyl booth cushions were torn open, stuffing hanging out. There was three inches of dust on the floors. Ceiling tiles above were water-stained, some missing entirely.
“Let’s get out of here,” Soo-Lee said.
Yes, that was a good idea. A very good idea because he had the most appalling feeling that the diner was decaying and if they did not get out, they would decay with it like worms trapped in a rotting apple. Beyond the grimy counters, the chalkboard had changed now.