by Tim Curran
Then he saw something coming down the stairs and in his fevered mind it could be nothing but a giant, leggy spider. It had sighted him and decided he was its prey.
Clip-clop-clip-clop, went its many legs.
Chazz crawled away toward the door, thumping into it and on the other side, the voice said, “Now you have to make a choice, doll-face…me or it.”
13
Danielle’s world felt compressed.
It was tight and suffocating like a small black box. It consisted of these streets and buildings, thoroughfares and houses, all the little details that made up a town called Stokes that she knew existed only in nightmares and perhaps at the very perimeter of hell itself.
She was suffocating.
Waiting there, up against the window of some nameless shop, she was suffocating. Creep was standing there, nervous, agitated, moving this way and that, unable to sit still. Lex and Soo-Lee were in the street, glancing fearfully behind them at the darkened diner. They had gone in and then came out. They must have turned off the lights after they left.
Danielle realized that she had to use her entire body to draw in a breath.
She had to actually lift herself with the motion of her diaphragm to get any air in her lungs. When she tried to tell Creep that, her voice simply would not come because there was not enough oxygen to power it.
There was something wrong here.
Something bad.
The air was gone. She had to find a place where there was air or she was going to asphyxiate. She started walking, stumbling along really in the direction they had come from.
“Hey,” Creep said. “What are you doing?”
He reached out to grab her and she shrugged him aside and then she started running. Gasping for breath, seeking air she could breathe, she ran down the street and around the corner and the faster she went, the better the air was until she was no longer gasping.
Creep was running after her, calling out her name, demanding to know what in the hell it was she thought she was doing and, oh, had there been the time, she would have told him and then he would have understood.
She came around another corner and there was somebody standing there.
It was a man. A big man.
He moved with a clicking, whirring sound of gears and cogs.
Danielle skidded to a halt inches from him, backing up frantically. The moonlight showed her that he was not really a man, but another doll that only looked like a man. He was grinning at her and she saw that he had teeth.
“Is that you, doll-face?” he asked.
And then there was a silvery flash as he swung something at her.
She had enough time to let out a small cry as something thudded against her head, the impact driving her to her knees and then to the sidewalk, where she knew no more.
14
Goddamn idiot.
This is what went through Creep’s mind as he chased after Danielle, who was surprisingly fast and agile. She had the long legs of a gazelle and he figured she was some kind of jock to pour on speed like that. A runner or a soccer player. Maybe she played lacrosse and swam competitively like Ramona or raced mountain bikes like Soo-Lee. Regardless, that girl had game.
And for Creep, whose major sports consisted of marathon sessions of Resident Evil, she was simply out of his league.
He called out to Lex and Soo-Lee, but they were already on the way.
Man, this was just great. Like they didn’t have enough problems already trying to stay alive and keep sane, now they had to babysit this psycho bimbette while she showed them how she ate the turf in the 100-yard dash.
He saw her disappear around a corner ahead and, damn, she did not break stride at all. She leaned into it and zipped around it with incredible grace. The sort of grace that would have put Creep himself right on his ass and twisted an ankle to boot.
He made the corner finally, but he had to slow way down and even so, Christ, he nearly tripped over his own feet like a geriatric monkey. But there she was. Just ahead and pouring on the speed again.
He followed her, hearing Lex and Soo-Lee gaining on him.
He had a feeling they would overtake him any second.
He saw Danielle round another corner and by that point he was starting to think she wasn’t even fucking human. He was ready to give up, call it a day and hang up his cleats, but something pushed him on. He was not the bravest guy in the world—outside of X-box 360, where he was nearly a legend—but he knew that if he didn’t stop her, something really bad would happen to her. Something that might have already happened to Chazz and, gulp, Ramona.
He came around the corner at the precise moment that Danielle skidded to a halt like a sprinting wildebeest that had just run smack dab into a hungry lion.
Only, in this case, a lion would have been preferable.
Creep saw the doll man standing there and he stopped, too. This guy—thing, whatever it was—was a huge form that towered above her like a graveyard angel. It wore a huge dark coat that looked like a moldering tarp. It hobbled closer to her with a see-sawing side to side gait, dragging one leg behind it. Its face was like a fright mask made of burlap or pale gray sackcloth, but yet it was flesh because as it spoke, the thin-lipped, crooked mouth moved as if muscles beneath were in motion.
Creep heard what it said: “Is that you, doll-face?”
Then it swung what it held in one narrow, long-fingered hand…a hatchet. The blade caught Danielle right at the crown of her skull, splitting her head like moist green wood. The sound it made reminded Creep of a cleaved gourd. He was hit by a wet spray of blood and brains and went right down to his knees with a broken cry.
The hulking thing began to drag itself in his direction, stepping over the still-shuddering corpse of Danielle.
Creep just waited for it.
He was speechless and stunned, his mouth hanging open, fingers numbly pawing at the blood and gray matter on his face, which had the consistency of greasy gelatin from a canned ham. He was struck dumb and motionless. It felt like his own blood had drained down into his feet and he was in danger of pitching over face-first to the sidewalk.
The moonlight made the hatchet man’s face look almost luminous.
There were tufts of white hair jutting from his malformed head, the face itself seamed and sutured, one empty eye socket set lower than the other, both filled with the formless blackness of endless nighted catacombs. He had no nose and his mouth was distorted from the stitching that held it together.
Again, Creep was struck by the impression that it was a mask…but as the thing approached him, it grinned with a lopsided, mocking smile. “Is that you, doll-face?” it asked, raising its hatchet to strike. Gore dropped from the blade. Tissue and hair were clotted on it.
Creep waited for it, but then Lex grabbed him and pulled him away, half dragging him and half carrying him out of range of the monster.
“Run!” Soo-Lee said. “Run!”
She was leading them and Creep found his feet and ran at Lex’s side, feeling suddenly that he could have run ten miles if that’s what it took. His fear and horror became vigor and he put it to work.
Behind them, the hatchet man followed.
15
In the brooding silence, Ramona moved up the sidewalk, doing her best to keep out of the direct moonlight and beneath the shadows thrown by the awnings positioned over the storefronts. Each one was striped. Each one antique. Each one out of place and time like the whole goddamn town.
She knew that in the greater scheme of things, or at least the greater scheme of the town specifically, that it meant something if she could only figure out what. Her head was just too full of shit to figure it out. Too much anxiety and stress and terror and apprehension.
It was all masking her ability to think clearly, to reason.
This place was a box, a big black box, but there was a key that opened it if only she could find it and recognize it for what it was.
The alarm had sounded again and that was tr
ouble.
The last time it had sounded, the broken man had come to life and that other thing in the van had attacked Chazz, poor, worthless Chazz. In her way of thinking, that meant if there were other mannequin people around, the alarm probably had activated them.
She had no real proof of that, but she believed it.
For now, she had to find the others.
They had to be here somewhere. But that seemed to be part of the problem. Every street seemed to look alike. The business sections were like repetitions of one another as were the residential districts. She swore she saw the same storefronts, the same houses again and again. That was impossible, of course, because she was moving in a straight line, yet the feeling persisted.
It not only persisted, but it haunted her.
She stopped there beneath one of the awnings, one of the same striped awnings, trying to make sense of things. Yes, reality was distorted here, but just because it was, that did not necessarily mean there wasn’t a rhyme and a reason behind it all.
Oh, quit trying to fucking rationalize everything. Don’t you get tired of it all?
But she didn’t because that’s who and what she was. She had spent her life looking for signs and portents, the systematics and mechanisms behind perfectly ordinary events. Take Chazz, for example. She had known for some time he had been screwing around on her, but she didn’t leave him. She didn’t even broach the subject or sink to his level like many other women might have and start sleeping around. No, not her. She looked for vague clues and hints in conversations and daily activities with him that should have tipped her off that his infidelity was inevitable and wondering what she had done wrong, what she had failed to recognize, and how she must be on guard against minor infractions in their relationship that led to major problems.
And she was doing that now.
She waited there, smoking a cigarette, knowing she had to quit before swim season started…but tonight was just not the night.
She was thinking about that alarm or siren or whatever it had been. She knew the general direction it came from—the east—and she was very tempted to track it to its source because she felt deep inside that if she could do that, she might be able to shut it down, and if she shut it down, she might just shut this whole town down with it.
But that was foolish and dangerous.
The reasonable thing was to give up looking and backtrack to where the van had been. That was the point of entry into this madhouse and probably the escape route.
She turned around, moving faster now in the direction she had come.
The same storefronts, the same houses, the same everything.
She walked and walked and walked and it seemed she was still no closer to where she had been, wherever that was and wherever it could be in the greater scheme of this lunacy.
Bullshit, this is all bullshit, all a cheap fucking game and this town is nothing but a cheap fucking carnival. That’s all it is. That’s all it can be.
She walked faster, refusing to give in and refusing to accept the grim inevitability that she was going nowhere, that she might as well have been running on a treadmill. Same storefronts, same houses, same trees, same boulevards…God, it went on and on.
But so did Ramona.
Because anyone that had ever known her discovered one thing sooner or later: she had a stubborn streak a mile wide and she refused, simply refused, to give up or give in. She would not be beaten by this nightmare. She would exhaust it, she would wear it down, she would make it spend itself until it was simply out of breath and the walls of perception ran thin…then she’d be out, she’d be free.
But she was the one that ran out of breath.
Scared, but mostly angry and irritated at everything, she stopped, catching her breath and making herself think. There had to be an answer here. There had to be a way out. Christ, she was starting to feel like a hamster run to death on a wheel.
Swearing, she started walking again.
Since moving in a linear fashion was getting her absolutely nowhere, she changed her tactics. She moved completely by instinct. She walked this way, turned on her heel and cut down an avenue, then down a street, up a boulevard. Her navigation was haphazard, it was random as hell. She did not think about what she was going to do, she just did it, guiding herself with pure animal sense. Her point was that this was all controlled somehow and she was going to break down the Controller one way or another, force him or her or it to show itself and reveal its hand.
She walked faster and faster, listening to her footsteps echoing off the faces of buildings and houses.
Then she stopped dead, knowing that she had struck a nerve with her theoretical controller.
Listen, listen to that.
Though she was no longer walking, she still heard footsteps.
She turned and there was no one there…at least, no one she could see. But the footsteps were approaching and it was not merely one set, but many sets. They made the slapping sound of bare feet, yet they had an almost hollow little echo to them.
She heard a low whispering.
What might have been the giggling of a child.
She felt the fine hairs at the back of her neck rise up, a chill moving upwards and over her scalp. She was being stalked by things she could not see and they were getting closer and closer.
Maybe it worked, maybe I wore it down, maybe I’m forcing its hand.
But there was no satisfaction in that because she was quite literally terrified of something—many things—she could not see. They were coming for her. The whispering grew in volume until it seemed like maybe it was a dozen children out there, hissing and piping and gibbering with a low and eerie sibilance that seemed to fill her head and echo around in her skull.
She ran.
She ran as fast as she could and every time she paused, it seemed that they were closer still. They were going to run her to the point of exhaustion. As she passed store windows, she clearly saw display mannequins turn their heads and watch her progress. Finally, she stopped and turned.
“Show yourselves already,” she said, her anger rising above her fear.
One of them stepped from the shadows—a naked girl or an imitation of the same, to be more precise. She was a little thing with a matted mop of blonde hair, her face the color of frost and the texture of silken spiderwebs, her eyes like ragged holes looking into a dark and empty room. From chest to hips, she was open as if there hadn’t been enough flesh to cover her. Inside…there was nothing. Just a metal framework that was narrow and spoking like the bones of jackals.
There was no machinery.
No electronics.
Nothing that could make her work, yet she moved, she was alive. Ramona heard an insane laughter in the back of her head. She was insane. She had to be completely insane.
“It’s Ramona,” the girl said in a perfectly shrill, scraping voice that was many miles from what a girl’s voice should have sounded like. “Ramona, Ramona, Ramona, Ramona.”
The others began to appear now, stepping out to chant her name.
Dozens of them.
Many of them were unfinished, their heads like swollen, nodding toadstools. An army of Raggedy Ann dolls from hell, faces stitched and spliced, carved and slapped together out of papier-mâché that grinned and moved like living tissue. Effigies cut from fissured deadwood and dry rot, scarecrows with pipestem legs and spidery tree branches for hands, animate sculptures of mortuary pipes and rib cage baskets. Some lacked limbs and a few lacked heads, one of them was little more than a walking armature waiting to be fleshed out, another was a set of legs with a post-like spine and a cracked open, hairless head but nothing else.
They called her name, whispering it, seeming to like the sound of it: “Ramona, Ramona, Ramona, Ramona,” they chanted, gathering volume and intensity until their voices were a whispering, shrilling cacophony: “RAMONA, RAMONA, RAMONA, RAMONA, RAMONA—”
It grew louder and louder until she couldn’t take it anymore and she vent
ed her horror in a high, whining scream. She stumbled back and away from the dolls, tripping over her own feet, silvered by pale moonlight.
They closed it on her, reaching for her.
One of them kicked its head before it on the sidewalk. It rolled over like a ball, orange locks splaying out over the cement. It righted itself, turning to look at her with empty eye sockets that could see nothing. Its mouth opened and it screamed at her, perfectly mocking her own cry again and again, cycling higher with each piercing shriek.
Ramona, as close to madness as she’d ever been, dropped to her knees, her flesh crawling and her mind sucking into some black crevice of numbing child-like terror. One last shred of adult reason broke through like a beacon and she shouted: “I DON’T BELIEVE IN YOU! YOU’RE NOT REAL! YOU HEAR ME? YOU’RE NOT REAL!”
But they kept coming.
She knew there was only one thing to do. Only one possible way to break the spell of madness. Her instinct warned her away from it, but her rational mind demanded it because if she did not fight them here and now, did not put this hallucination down, then it would never, ever stop until her mind was completely gone.
With a cry of rage and violence, she stormed at them, vaulting right into their midst and she felt their cold little fingers scratch her face and their mouths bite into her arms, but it did not slow her down. She fought and clawed and kicked and bowled them over and fell away from them.
The street was littered with doll parts—heads and arms, torsos and legs and hands, tangled cords and pulleys and gears…what amounted to the guts of the things. She knew she hadn’t hit them that hard. Not hard enough to break them into pieces.
But they were in pieces.
She stumbled back, blinking her eyes, waiting for them to reassemble themselves as the mannequin woman had. But they were nothing but parts, inert and inactive, completely incapable of anything like motion. It looked like someone had dumped out the bargain bin from a puppet shop.
Do you see? Do you see? They are nothing and they never were nothing! They couldn’t be anything but what they are—wood and wax, steel rods and sackclothing, plastic and papier-mâché, glue and rubber hoses and gears…don’t you see? Don’t you fucking see?