by Tim Curran
He stood up and went over to the window.
He saw nothing out there, but that didn’t mean anything.
Inside, he was bunched up tight, just waiting for the air raid siren or whatever in the hell it was because that’s when it would start. Soo-Lee said it was about to happen and he did not doubt that at all. The thing that scared him is what form it would take.
“I wonder if Ramona and Chazz are still alive,” he said.
“If anyone is still alive, it would be Ramona,” Soo-Lee said. “She’s always been a major dynamo. If she is, she’s probably thinking what we’re thinking.”
“And it won’t be easy killing Chazz. He won’t go down quietly.”
Creep didn’t really care about Chazz. He didn’t want him dead or anything, but his thoughts were of Ramona.
They were in the living room of a house that looked pretty much like every house on the block. An average clapboard two-story. They hadn’t been upstairs yet or down into the basement and there was no point in nosing around in those places and looking for trouble.
Trouble will find us just fine without any help.
He took out his lighter and flicked it, the jumping flame lighting up the room and giving him a look at things. It was all very typical. A couch, two wingback chairs with accompanying lamps. A coffee table. A bookcase. A big old console stereo. And a TV that looked like something from a museum—a massive cabinet that sat on four legs with huge, bulbous channel and volume knobs and a bubble screen, obligatory rabbit ears up on top.
The lighter started burning his fingers and he killed it. “Notice how everything’s old? There’s dinosaur shit all over this stuff,” he said. “No technology newer than the 1960s. No cells or computers. Not even a VHS player for chrissake. Even my gramma had one of those.”
“It fits,” Lex said. “This figurative other we’re talking about is remembering the good old days of 1960. It can’t be too much more recent than that. I bet if you go over to that bookshelf, you’re going to see nothing copyrighted after 1965. Just a guess.”
Creep went over there. He flicked his lighter. “A shitload of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Let’s see…To Kill a Mockingbird…The Agony and the Ecstasy…Franny and Zooey. Yeah, all old shit. The stuff they make you read in English class.”
“I love To kill a Mockingbird,” Soo-Lee said. She was an English major; of course she would say that.
Lex grunted. “I had to read Franny and Zooey in tenth grade. Our teacher was obsessed with Salinger.”
“Aren’t all lit teachers?” Soo-Lee said.
“Most, except for my eleventh-grade English teacher. Mr. Spreeg. He was big on Faulkner. Just the mention of Faulkner’s name gives me narcolepsy now.”
Creep ignored them. He wasn’t interested in debating fucking books. The thing that was intriguing him was that old TV set. He very badly wanted to take it apart and get at the tubes. When he was a kid, his uncle Frank had collected vintage TV sets and he had an amazing collection of old tubes. Creep loved looking at them. He wanted to open this one up and paw through its guts until he found those tubes like a diver digging through an oyster for a pearl.
The world lost something when they invented solid-state circuitry, he thought. There’s just something about old vacuum tubes.
Which was quite an admission from a techie like him.
In the dark, he kept staring at the murky shape of the TV and the funny thing was that he did not seem to be able to look away. He knew they were in a rough spot here, a truly horrible situation, but it was like Soo-Lee and Lex were not even in the room. His eyes were fixed on the dead TV and his mind could think of nothing else.
It was strange.
It was more than strange.
In his mind, he began to see black-and-white images of the shows that TV must have pulled in with its rabbit ears back in the good old days…grainy, fluttering images of things he had never seen and never really wanted to. The men smoked pipes and read newspapers; the women always had aprons on and slaved away in the kitchen; the children were unrebellious, well-mannered, and well-dressed. It was an age he did not understand. But the images captivated him and it was like he was really watching that old set.
What the hell is going on here? he asked himself, but there were no answers in his head. Nothing that made any kind of sense anyway.
A tiny white dot appeared on the screen.
And he wasn’t the only one seeing it because Soo-Lee gasped.
“What the hell?” Lex said.
The pictures were gone from Creep’s head now. He, like the others, was staring at the tiny white dot in the center of the bubble screen. It was growing. It went from the size of a pin to the size of a quarter, gradually expanding. Now the screen came on and there was static, a field of snow, and wiggly horizontal lines.
Nobody said anything.
Soo-Lee said earlier that she could feel something beginning and this had to be it or, at the very least, the prelude. A picture was coming up on the screen, but it was still rolling and bleached out. It was hard to say at first what they were looking at, but Creep knew it was coming. Those old tubes took time to warm up. The image would never be HD, but it would come. In its own way and time, it would come…and maybe this was what he feared the most.
He waited there with the others, wringing his sweaty palms.
The image stabilized. It was still grainy and not exactly sharp, but it was certainly clearer and they could see exactly what was going on. It showed a family sitting around a dinner table. A 1950s family by the looks of it. A mother and father and two boys having an animated conversation. There was no sound, but a canned laugh track was almost a given. As the peas and chicken were passed, the boys got very excited. They apparently were launching some sort of scheme that made the mother look comically overwhelmed and the father exasperated with a clear oh-boy-here-we-go-again kind of look.
“It looks familiar somehow,” Soo-Lee said.
Lex swallowed. “Yes…I think it’s The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. We had to watch it once in Mass Media in high school.”
“When is it from?” Soo-Lee asked. “The fifties? The sixties?”
“It ran a long time, as I recall, from the fifties into the sixties. But their sons are small here and judging from the furnishings, I’m going to say this episode is from sometime before 1960.”
“And why does that matter?” Creep asked.
“Because, again, our theoretical other is creating a physical image of the good old days before the social upheaval of the 1960s. This whole nightmare we’re trapped in has something to do with that, with some incident that happened back then.” He shrugged. “Maybe our other is trying to recreate a world before something happened.”
“What?” Soo-Lee said.
“A tragedy? Something that happened to the town or them personally. I don’t know.”
“You’re guessing,” Creep said.
“Of course I am,” Lex admitted.
The sitcom played on and Creep sat there, tensely, the images filling the room with flickering light. Soo-Lee’s and Lex’s faces were painted with a dull blue glow. What was the point of this? Was it somebody’s favorite show back in the good old days or was it kind of like Lex intimated, a frame of reference for a simpler time before some horrendous tragedy? Creep didn’t really care. He just wanted out. It all made him panicky because he knew it was leading up to something bad.
The camera panned away from the joyfully arguing family and focused in on an archway behind them that presumably led into a very standard 1950s living room. They saw a shadowy gray form sitting near the wall. It was ghost-like, out of focus, somehow contorted as if it had been put together wrong. There was a table before it with a body on it. A woman.
Creep was almost certain it was Danielle.
It was too dim and shadowy to be certain, but he had the feeling it was. The certainty was like a blade of ice in his heart. The shadowy figure—it was one of those doll people, he realiz
ed—was doing things to the body. It opened the corpse up, pulling things out, plucking off limbs like the wings of flies, carefully replacing everything with items he could not be sure of other than what appeared to be prosthetic arms and legs, a bundle of gears and cogs like the guts of a clock that were stuffed into the body cavity. Then the doll person was doing something to the face, peeling and slicing, then cutting and finally sewing. Stitching up what it had made with black gut that looked like fence wire.
“Shut it off,” Soo-Lee said. “Please shut it off.”
Creep was more than happy to oblige. He tried turning the on/off knob, but it did no good. The TV wasn’t even on and it wasn’t plugged into anything.
“It won’t do any good,” Lex said.
Creep knew it wouldn’t, but he tried anyway. He had the feeling that even if he had a hammer in his hand he could not have broken the bubble screen. It was not part of the plan, part of the game that was being played on them.
Now the Nelsons were gone along with their sons.
The camera had pulled away from the weird anatomical plunderings in the living room and was panning over the dining table, revealing the half-eaten food on the plates, the glasses of milk half-drank, the chicken and vegetables that still steamed on their serving trays. It showed them this, then it showed them the chairs pulled away from the table. One of them was tipped over, as if someone had left in a great hurry.
The camera passed by a single window quickly and light flickered out there beyond the curtains, the jumping light of a bonfire. But the camera didn’t waste too much time with that. It pulled back now and they could see the shadowy doll figure standing in the corner, head hanging to one side as if its neck was broken. It looked like some kind of mannequin leaning there, something incapable of movement.
The body was no longer on the table.
Creep felt an icy/hot fear-sweat run down his face. What had been on the table was shambling in the direction of the camera that seemed to be fixed now as if it was sitting on a tripod. The figure came closer, moving with an uneasy limping, seesawing sort of locomotion. One of its arms swung back and forth with pendulum strokes, a limp and dead thing, the other was missing.
“That’s Danielle,” Soo-Lee said, something breaking in her voice.
The figure got closer. It was still blurry and out of focus, but there was no mistaking that it was Danielle…or that it had been Danielle. Her long blonde hair was pulled over to one side of her head, gathered at one shoulder in snake-like tresses. Her face was pallid, grotesque, made of something that was not skin exactly, one eye a black fissure, the other staring out at them with a cataleptic glaze…but set back as if she was looking through the eyehole of a rubber mask. It rolled in its socket like a marble
She was trying to speak.
The cloth-like material of her face moved like it was alive. Her mouth was horribly lopsided. One side of it opened to speak, but the other side remained fused as if it was sewn shut.
“TURN IT OFF!” Soo-Lee said, sitting up. “TURN THAT FUCKING THING OFF!”
Creep just sat there, unable to move.
Danielle’s single eye had been looking at him, now it was looking right at Soo-Lee and there was no mistaking it despite the fuzzy, wavering image. She continued to speak and Soo-Lee clasped her hands to either side of her head like she was trying to keep it from flying apart. She had taken more than she could stand and she was very close to a breakdown.
Lex jumped up and the Danielle-thing tracked him with her eye.
He ran at the TV and kicked the screen with everything he had.
Creep was sure it would never break because that’s how things worked in places like this that were sculpted from the bits and pieces of nightmare. He was surprised when a crack appeared in the crystal. Danielle was slowly shaking her head from side to side as if she was disappointed. By then, Lex had kicked the TV two more times and just before the screen went black, Creep saw Danielle open her horribly synthetic mouth and scream. Though there was no sound, he could hear it echoing around inside his skull until he thought that he would be the one to have a breakdown.
Then the screen went black.
There was a tiny white dot that gradually faded. But before it did, at the very moment Lex gave it his last and most powerful kick, a sound rushed through the house that seemed to be carried on a moaning wind of burning air: OOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. The chilling, sibilant sighing of what seemed to be hundreds of voices that cycled through the rooms and died out below them, somewhere in the vicinity of the cellar.
And that’s when things started to happen.
19
Ramona stood there, watching the doll parts moving on the ground as if some sinister life-spark were circulating through them. Hands trembled, torsos thumped, and legs kicked. Heads opened and closed their mouths, whispering with needling, strident voices.
She started breathing in and out very quickly, nearly hyperventilating.
An ice-cold sweat ran down her spine.
The parts continued to move as if a wind were blowing through them, making them rattle and click and tremble. As she watched, one, then two and three and four torsos rose up into the air, the others following suit as if they were being worked by invisible wires from above. Dozens of them spun around in some kind of storm and then they came together with heat and motion and impact, fusing into a common whole that danced up and down before her, swaying and gyrating to some unheard melody. Then the legs stood up. Those whose feet had broken loose reattached themselves.
She let out a tiny, strangled cry.
The legs were hopping around, pale and oddly fleshy, their ball joints shining in the moonlight. She was waiting for them to walk over to her, but that didn’t happen. They jumped up into the air, spinning around the common torso and then they, too, were sucked into its mass, gluing themselves to it. The mass continued to move and sway as before, but now it floated about with countless bare kicking mannequin legs that made it look like some horrible spider composed of human parts. Hands were joined with arms that clattered on the pavement and then they, too, flew up in the air, rising as if on a hot column of gas. They circled the mass of legs and torsos and were sucked into the mass, becoming part of it, arms flexing and fingers wiggling as this new and strange accumulated horror accustomed itself to its new environment.
Then the whispering heads.
They bounced up into the air, many of them fastening themselves at odd angles atop the many bunched and stacked torsos. Other heads adhered themselves to the bellies and breasts like gruesome ornaments.
Then this new and nearly indescribable mutation settled back down to the pavement, hissing and clicking and whirring. It approached Ramona with the marching of innumerable feet.
She ran.
Beyond terror, completely irrational with fear, she ran, sprinting down the street and up the sidewalk and around a corner. Pausing there, pressed up against the face of a building, adrenaline pumping through her, she made herself wait and listen. For a few seconds there was nothing and the buzz of fear inside her mellowed slightly. Listening to her own breathing, she stared at the blank faces of little shops across the street. The moonlight was bright, impossibly bright. She saw FLORIST, ICE CREAM PARLOR, and, at the very end, SUNDRIES. Yes, all very generic as before.
When was the last time there were stores called Sundries? Even if this is some weird 3-D representation of Stokes from the 1960s, things like that had to have been something of an oddity even then. A holdover from a much earlier time.
She heard the doll-thing coming again with an echoing click-clack of what sounded like a hundred feet marching forward in hot pursuit.
She ran.
Down the street, around another corner, cutting through an alley and across a little park that she had not seen before. When she got to the other side, she found another street and ran down it, racing around yet another corner and pausing again, her lungs gasping for breath and sweat beading her face.
Click-clack
, click-clack, click-clack, click-clack, CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK—
God, it was getting closer.
It wasn’t possible.
That immense gangling thing could not be getting closer, but it was. The sound of its marching feet was echoing in her head like the cacophonous ticking of some gigantic clock, getting louder and louder and louder. And it was as she realized this, that she looked across the street and saw it again: SUNDRIES. Next to it, ICE CREAM PARLOR, and next to that, FLORIST.
I couldn’t have gone in a fucking circle. I couldn’t have.
She hadn’t. She knew she hadn’t. Either this whole goddamn town was one big loop or, yet again, she was being led, pushed in a certain direction by whoever ran this place. It wanted to break her with fear. That was important somehow to the Controller. She had to be broken. It wanted to run her to death like a dog.
Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack, click-clack—
It was getting closer now like it had before when it was just a collection of malevolent doll children. Closer and closer. As before, Ramona knew there was only one possible way to break the spell. She could not run from it; she had to run at it. It was the only way, regardless of how unbearably frightening the idea was.
CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK!
Jesus, it was almost on her.
She could see its shadow coming around the corner, an impossibly massive and undulant thing with marching legs, wavering arms, and nodding heads.
Sucking in a slow breath, she went to meet it before she had time to reconsider the foolishness of what she was about to do. I won’t be run to death, I refuse. She saw it bearing down, maybe forty feet from her, its shadow already touching her and feeling cold, dreadfully cold, like the air from a freezer. She ran right at it and it chanted her name and waited for her, its many arms open wide like it wanted to hug her, crush her in its multi-limbed embrace.