by Tim Curran
It no longer offered the day’s specials. Now it read:
LEX FONTAINE
SOO-LEE CHANG
CHAZZ ACKELY
RAMONA LAKE
CREEP RODGERS
DANIELLE LECARR
† REST IN PEACE †
A white fear opening up inside him, Lex grabbed Soo-Lee and they raced for the door…only there was no door. It was not simply missing, it was like it had never been there in the first place. There were only the plate glass windows with their lower fringe of curtains hanging like dingy rags, but no aperture where a door might have been placed.
Soo-Lee was shaking.
So was he.
“What…what is this?” she said, maybe more to herself than to him.
But without a doubt it was an excellent question: what exactly was this? What sort of mind game was it and what was the fucking point of it all? Who was running it? If they wanted Lex and Soo-Lee to be unnerved and scared, well they had been successful. Lex’s skin was crawling. It felt like something inside his head wanted to fly apart. He felt helpless and trapped like a fly in a web.
Christ, he felt like he was buried alive.
But he had to think. He knew that much. He couldn’t lose it because whatever puppet master was running this show wanted him to. The only real weapon he’d ever had in his life was his mind and he couldn’t let all this dull its edge now.
Think.
Yes, yes. The image of the diner had been offered to them with flawless diner perfection: the smells, the sights, even the sounds of the soft drink bubblers and coffee percolating. But he had turned his nose up at it. He had been suspicious. He had refused to accept the simple joy of what was offered, so it was made worse. He was being punished.
“Well,” he said, very loudly, “I’m not buying this either, so you better fucking try again.”
This time, the atmospheric shift was not so subtle.
He felt a wave of force pass through the room. It was actually tangible and had enough intensity to nearly knock the both of them down. It made him feel woozy and dizzy and he wondered if it had been such a good idea to challenge the puppet master of this not-so-little nightmare.
The room shifted.
The air seemed to crack open like an egg.
Lex’s vision went blurry. He held on to Soo-Lee, who was having trouble staying on her feet. When they got a hold of themselves and their vision cleared—it was almost like the room had gone misty or out of focus—they looked around and saw there was more than decay and filth to contend with.
They saw bodies.
Corpses.
Soo-Lee gasped and Lex felt his stomach contents bubble up the back of his throat. For one second he thought the room was filled with mannequin people, but it wasn’t that at all. It was worse. Oh yes, it was much worse. The corpses were arranged at the tables and in the booths, at the stools lining the counter. They were all pale and shrunken-looking, desiccated like scarecrows. Their faces were bloodless, their hands—skeletal white claws—were resting on tables and gripping coffee cups and holding spoons and forks.
But the worst part was that their throats were all slit.
A sharp knife, Lex found himself thinking. It must have been done by a very sharp knife.
The gashes were neat and bloodless, almost surgical. And that was enhanced by the fact that they were all sutured shut with black catgut. Their lips were likewise sewn shut with an X-pattern stitching, giving them the look of fairground shrunken heads. Their eyes were missing, too, neatly replaced by black shoe buttons. The entire effect was like someone had turned them into voodoo dolls.
But not true voodoo dolls (if there was such a thing), but the way you might imagine a voodoo doll should look. The sort of programmed image, it occurred to Lex, that existed in everyone’s head from living in a culture saturated by cheap horror imagery.
To say it was grisly and frightening would be to minimize the absolute horror of it. There had to have been twenty of them in the diner. And not just men and women, but children, too…even an infant in a blue bunting cradled in his zombie-like mother’s arms, stitched-up like a sock puppet.
Lex just stood there.
He didn’t know what to do or what to say. Soo-Lee was shaking, speechless, and wide-eyed. Her hand held his in a crushing embrace. He was pretty certain she was very close to going into shock.
But there was nothing he could do for her.
And nothing he could do for himself.
The other phenomena was generalized. A Mary Celeste-type diner emptied of people. Disturbing. Then it began to decay. Even more disturbing. But what was written on the chalkboard was beyond all that: personal and shocking.
These corpses weren’t like the mannequin things. These were of a different species, but it meant something. Within the microcosm of this haunted little town, it meant something.
“All right,” he said to Soo-Lee, “we walked in here, we can walk out. Physics is physics.”
She nodded quickly.
“The door was right there. It must still be there, only someone or something won’t let us see it.”
That was his logic and it was culled mostly from TV shows, paperback novels, and movies. But it gained ground in his head. What would they have called something like this on The X-Files or The Outer Limits? A mind screen? A hallucinogenic screen? Something like that. Maybe that was bullshit, but it gave him an unwavering frame of reference in his mind and, dear God, how he needed that because it felt like his world had just ripped out the seat of its pants.
Clutching Soo-Lee to him, he walked to the plate glass windows.
“Right there,” he said, under his breath. “It was right there.”
He waved his arm to get Creep’s attention across the street and the glass instantly steamed like a mirror in a bathhouse.
Got that covered, too, do you?
“That door is still there,” he said.
Soo-Lee nodded quickly again. If he said it, it must be true. She had been brought down to the level of simple child-like reasoning now. The fear owned her. She belonged to it.
Lex figured the logical and rational thing to do was to walk right at the window where he knew the door had been and, hopefully, still was. Maybe his reasoning was shit, but it was time for the acid test.
Then behind him, the sound of a spoon dropping.
The sound of a stool creaking.
I don’t want to see, I don’t want to fucking see this.
Soo-Lee was stiff as a post. Her hand was chilled as if she had been handling an ice pack.
His mouth dry as soot, Lex turned very slowly and looked upon what the diner wanted him to see. He nearly screamed. Soo-Lee certainly would have if her voice wasn’t gone and there was sufficient air in her lungs to propel it.
The voodoo doll people were alive and moving.
They weren’t doing anything menacing. No horror show creeping or any of that. They were simply going through the motions of being diners, imitating what they might have done in life. They were bringing sandwiches and spoons of soup and cups of coffee to their mouths in some kind of mockery of eating and drinking, something they were incapable of with their lips being stitched shut. One of them was even reading a newspaper and two others were face-to-face in an animated, yet silent, conversation. Cups rattled and forks were set down. Coffee was poured and chicken fried steak cut into. It was like some bizarre parody of the living condition. They were mimes and nothing more. It might have been darkly comic if it weren’t for how they looked and the very nature of this place.
Silently, Lex and Soo-Lee watched them.
It seemed there was very little else they could do.
“I think we can go through that door whether it’s there or not,” Lex said. “C’mon, let’s try. It’s crazy, but if we believe it’s there, it just might be.”
Soo-Lee was just beyond herself. It was obvious she didn’t know what to think about anything, but it was also obvious that she had absolute faith
in him. He could see that much and it gave him a sort of strength.
They turned together and reached out for the plate glass window, believing and yet not believing at all.
Behind them…things went quiet.
Shit.
They turned and the voodoo doll diners had stopped what they were doing. The playacting was over, apparently. They were all completely frozen in place. Coffee cups were held in midair, same for spoons and forks. A guy in one of the booths held an uneaten hamburger to his mouth. When it fell from his fingers, he didn’t seem to notice.
Lex didn’t like it.
Something was about to happen.
Something bad.
And then, as if the diner knew he was expecting it, the voodoo doll people all slowly swiveled their heads until they were all staring out at Lex and Soo-Lee with those shiny button eyes. It was very unnerving.
“Fuck this,” Lex said.
He turned his back on them and went over to the plate glass windows. Reaching out with his hand, he pressed his fingertips to the window and saw them stop at the glass. Yet, even though he saw them stop, he felt the door that he could not see give an inch or two.
There was a rustling and he saw that all the diners were on their feet now.
In a group, they were coming.
He chanced one more look behind him and, yes, they were indeed coming…except they were all on fire. Not just on fire, but melting like wax dummies as they blazed. Eyes steamed and bubbled, oozing from sockets. Noses and lips slid from faces. Faces became skulls glistening with dripping flesh wax. They all stood there as their skin superheated and dripped off in clots, revealing the bones beneath, hair flaming up like burning wigs.
The stink was unbearable.
Lex pushed and went through the door and out into the night, dragging Soo-Lee with him. He moved quickly and did not stop until they were in the street. Then he dared to turn, expecting to see a mob of button-eyed people in hot pursuit.
But there was nothing.
The diner was completely dark. There was no indication that the lights had ever been on or that any of it had happened in the first place. He went up to the plate glass windows. Cupping his hands like binoculars to cut the glare of the moon high above, he peered in there.
It was completely empty.
“This is fucking crazy,” he said.
Then the alarm began to sound again.
12
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap.
It felt like Chazz’s skin was crawling with thousands of tiny insects that were skittering over his arms and up his legs, down his spine and over the nape of his neck. The sensation was so very real that he scratched at his skin until it hurt. But there were no bugs, there was only fear and it was making his skin prickle.
He was watching Lady Peg-leg.
She had paused now in the middle of the street. She was just standing there, not moving, not doing anything at all. He studied her and realized that she had gone inanimate. She was just a dummy now. She had no more life than a mannequin in a store window.
What now?
He didn’t find this latest development very comforting. In fact, he almost liked it better when she was moving. At least he knew what she was up to. It was like she was waiting there, plotting, thinking, playing head games with him. Trying to jack up his unease and apprehension. If that was the case, she was doing a very good job of it.
Now was the time to get away, to do something, but he was as stiff as she was.
She waited.
He waited.
He wasn’t really sure what for, other than he knew down deep that he was essentially too scared to move. All of it was too much and something in him had simply shut down. It wanted to crawl into a corner and hide and suggested he join it. Again, he wished Ramona were there.
He wished anyone were there.
He had never been very good at being alone. Even as a kid, he was not the sort that could amuse himself building model cars or reading comic books or playing video games. He was a social creature (he liked to think) and he needed others around. The truth was that he needed people to justify his own existence, people to marvel over him and his athletic grace, his good looks, and easy manner. He needed the worship. Alone, he was empty and wanting and unsure. Alone, he had no confidence. Alone, he seemed not to exist or to be on the verge of dissipating.
And right now, he was not sure of anything other than the fact that he was certain he was losing his mind and there was no one around to tell him that he was not.
So get the fuck out of here, dumbass. Climb back out the window and go find the others. Do what you do best: run, gobble up some yardage.
And he knew that’s what needed doing. He could almost hear Coach yelling at him, motivating him, driving him, telling him that he had the tools and he had the skills but he lacked motivation.
Oh, he was so right, so very right—
The alarm.
It started again, droning on and on. Like Ramona earlier, it reminded him of some primordial beast pulling itself up from a Mesozoic lake and shrieking out its rage and hunger. It went right up his spine and seemed to make the fillings in his molars actually ache. The windows rattled. The world echoed with the grim noise. Then about the time he thought he might start screaming from the sound of it, it cut out and faded in the distance.
At that very moment, as if on cue, he felt something skitter over his shoe and he kicked out at it. He figured it was a mouse. He didn’t like crawly little furry things, but most of his old fears seemed pretty minor league now. Fucking mouse. So what? He could live with mice.
Then it started crawling up his leg.
It was no mouse.
It was a rat.
With a cry, he reached down and felt his hand brush against a greasy pelt that almost seemed to palpitate with the verminous life within. Goddamn thing was no bush league sewer rat, it was a monster the size of a cat and if he doubted its intentions before, there was no mistaking them as it bit into his leg and brought a hot, needling pain to his calf.
Chazz grabbed at it, clutching a thick rope of tail that squirmed in his hand like an especially unpleasant snake. He ripped the rat away from his pants, feeling its claws tearing at the material as they tried to maintain their hold. He had no idea what he had in mind other than peeling that son-of-a-bitch free, but he found himself swinging it around in loose circles, seeming to enjoy the power he held over it. Once he had picked up the necessary velocity, he let it fly.
It hit a patch of moonlit wall with the sort of force that should have injured it and made it bleed. But it left no blood splotch. In fact, as it hit the wall, it simply fell apart…it broke into pieces.
Chazz let out a muffled cry.
It wasn’t real. Like everything in this place, it just wasn’t real.
In the moonlight, he could see it there on the floor. Its head was hairless like that of a possum, detached from its body, the jaws still trying to bite. Two of its legs had fallen off and they were still moving, still trying to claw. But the very worst thing was that its body had broken open and he could see what looked like whirring gears inside it, spindles and springs.
There was no end to this shit.
The rat was like some windup toy.
And as this settled into Chazz’s mind, mixing up in there with the rest of it and making him more confused and pushing him that much closer to complete lunacy, he heard another sound.
Creak, creak.
He looked around. It was Lady Peg-leg again, it had to be Lady Peg-leg again…but no, as he peered out the window, he saw that she was no longer in the street. He couldn’t see her anywhere.
Creak, creak, creak.
And besides, this sound was in the room with him.
Yes, over there beyond what he thought was a couch, he could make out a dim figure. It was sitting in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth, back and forth.
Creak, creak, creak.
“Who…who’s there?”
; And a voice, feminine in caliber, throaty and breathless, said, “It’s me, doll-face. And I’ve been here a long, long time.”
A woman, another doll woman.
He nearly started cackling hysterically at the idea of it.
“Stay away from me! You come by me and I’ll kill you!”
The voice giggled in its throat. “Oh, you don’t have to worry about me, doll-face. It’s the old lady who wants you. The peg-leg lady. She wants your heart. You have a nice, strong heart and she doesn’t have one at all. She wants yours.”
“Fuck you!” Chazz shouted.
The chair stopped creaking. “You only had to ask, doll-face. You only had to ask.”
The doll woman had risen from the chair now and was coming with that same clicking sound as the doll man in the street. She moved with a shambling gait, painfully and slowly as if one leg was longer than the other. He could see her reaching out with sharp fingers, long hair sweeping from side to side as she got closer.
With a scream, Chazz vaulted across the room to where he had seen a door.
He barely got through it. Her fingers dragged through his hair and then he slammed it shut behind him and he could hear her nails scraping at the other side as if they were not nails at all, but claws.
The door had a lock and he set it.
She continued to claw at the other side. “When I find you, doll-face, I’ll fuck you.”
Chazz threw himself backward, his skin crawling again.
He stumbled over a chair and fell into a pool of moonlight that made his fingers look ashen and almost phosphorescent like the petals of night-blooming orchids. He was shaking, drooling, chattering his teeth. Tears ran from his eyes and he could not throw together a single coherent thought.
There were a set of stairs before him, climbing to the second floor.
When he could think, he considered going up there and hiding in a room, but, no, he could not bear the idea of being in the same house as that thing in the other room. No, he had to run. He needed to escape. He needed to put some distance between himself and this place.
And this is exactly what he was going to do.