by Tim Curran
“No…stay away from me. I won’t let you touch me.”
“You’re ruining it all, Chazz. You’re going to make it ugly. You’re going to make it hurt real, real bad.”
And, yes, he knew that he was, but he wasn’t about to let that thing get him. He could not allow it. He had to fight; he couldn’t just give in. And with that, the phone slid from his hand and he ran out into the street, not knowing which way to go because all ways looked exactly the same. And maybe they were. Maybe it wouldn’t matter which way he went because all roads led deeper into the heart of this nightmare where she waited for him, waited to make him suckle from her so that he was hers forever. His legs would be her legs and his arms her arms and his beating heart would bring the blood that would make her strong and deathless—
Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop.
She was coming.
She knew where he was and she was coming now.
Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop.
The sound of her many marching legs was echoing through the streets now, bouncing off the faces of buildings, getting louder and louder, filling his head and filling his world and if he did not run right now, he would see her coming for him any moment now, rushing out of the dark to seize him the way a funnel-web spider might seize a fly.
But she was not coming down the streets.
She was coming from above.
She was creeping over roofs.
He looked up and saw her legs coming over the cornice of a three-story building directly across the street. He dashed off, choosing a direction purely at random, not thinking, just knowing he needed to get away before she trapped him. Because, sooner or later, she would.
21
Soo-Lee became aware of two things in rapid succession: the smell and the darkness. The smell came literally out of nowhere, thickening and growing rank, filling her stomach with waves of warm nausea. Spoiled meat, she thought. That’s what it smells like. Like a truck full of meat that went bad.
Which, of course, made no sense whatsoever.
Even had there been real food in the house—something she seriously doubted after her experience at the diner—it would gradually go bad as things always gradually went bad. Nothing rotted this fast, in a matter of seconds.
The second thing was the darkness.
It had been dark before, yes, but not this dark. Something had happened. There was not even any moonlight coming in through the windows. There was nothing. It was as if some giant cover was dropped over the house like the sort that was used for birdcages at night.
Whatever’s happening, this is how it starts.
“Keep together,” Lex said, reaching out and taking her hand as she reached out and took Creep’s.
The stink grew worse and Soo-Lee heard Creep make a gagging sound. The air was nearly unbreathable. The dark was more than dark, it was absolute blackness. It enveloped them like an ebon mist. It was as if the three of them were zipped inside a body bag; light no longer existed.
“C’mon,” Creep breathed. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“No,” Soo-Lee told him. “That’s exactly what we can’t do. It’s exactly what is expected of us. We can’t run anymore. We face this and overcome it.”
Lex gave her hand a squeeze while Creep’s seemed to go that much more limp. He was not with them on this. He understood the basic idea of what they wanted to do, but he had no real faith in it, no belief that it would work. But it would, Soo-Lee knew. If only he would stand with them. Their belief was important to the puppet master of this place. She was certain that he/she/it depended upon it.
Something touched her face.
It was a light touch, almost like a fly had brushed against one cheek. But she knew it was no fly. Even though she could not see a thing, she could feel something substantial hovering in the air right before her face. It brushed her cheek again and though she wanted badly to cry out, she did not. She just sat there, trembling slightly.
Just like in the diner, the puppet master is turning up the heat. It’s kicking up things a notch. The smell and the darkness are not getting us to move, so it’s trying something else. And it’ll keep on trying.
Something brushed against the back of her hand.
It felt like a finger.
Someone or something was standing in the dark right in front of her. She was nearly certain of it. She made herself be calm. She was not going to break, not going to cry out. Its physical presence was almost crushing. The finger or whatever it was touched her nose, then her lips. It drew a line from her chin down her neck to her breastbone and hesitated there.
Still, she did not move.
“There’s something here,” Creep said, as if that needed saying at all.
Neither she nor Lex commented on what they already knew. They waited. They steeled themselves. Soo-Lee resisted the instinctive need to kick out at whatever was there. A bead of sweat ran down one temple. Her mouth was so dry she could’ve spit dust. Whatever was in front of her had not left. No, it had drawn in ever closer. Now its face was inches from her own. She could feel its breath hot against her face. It was not foul, not exactly. There was a distinctively musty smell to it that she acquainted with closed-up trunks moldering away in cellar damps.
You have to resist it. Your belief fuels it.
And yes, God knew it sounded great in theory, but in practice it was something else again. She was barely breathing, afraid that it would hear her, that her rising fear would charge it like a battery and she was bound and determined not to give it anything to work with.
Next to her, Creep was fidgeting, making moaning sounds in his throat.
The breathing thing was so close to her face now that its exhaled air filled her space and made it hard to suck in so much as a breath. It couldn’t have been more than an inch away. Fingers brushed her neck, drew slowly down her bare arms. One of them brushed against her left breast.
I can do this, she thought frantically. I will not break.
Then the thing, as if sensing this, slid a hand up between her legs at the same time its cold, wooden lips were pressed to her own. All of which was bad enough, but what was even worse is that she felt its tongue slide into her mouth, only it was not a tongue but something like a leggy, segmented worm.
It was then and only then that she screamed.
22
Just before Soo-Lee screamed, Creep felt something in the air around him, too. Almost like energy that moved over the backs of his arms in prickling waves like static electricity. Whatever it was, it was building, moving toward some critical mass and that’s what he feared the most: what form it might take and if he’d be able to withstand it because he was right on the edge of a full-blown panic attack and he knew it.
Something dropped into his lap and he flicked it nervously away with his free hand.
Something else fell.
It hit his head and tumbled onto the back of his hand. With a small cry, he swatted at it, feeling a bulbous body about the size of a marble smash beneath his palm with an eruption of goo that felt hot against his skin. He wiped it off on his jeans. His entire body was oily with sweat by this time. Another object dropped onto his knee and when he made to swat it, it ran over his arm on tiny, bristly legs before dropping to the floor. He immediately drew his feet up, his left hand gripping Soo-Lee’s in a crushing embrace.
You know what they are, he told himself. You know damn well what they are.
Yes, they were spiders. The one thing he was completely terrified of and, of course, whatever ruled this graveyard of a town knew it. Spiders. He knew it made no earthly sense. There were no bugs in Stokes. There was no anything. Everything was meticulously sterile like a town kept preserved under a glass dome in a museum. Insects and other crawly things were not allowed. He’d noticed it earlier. It was a warm summer night and there was not so much as a mosquito to be found. Even when the lights went on at the diner, no moths were drawn to them. They should have been crawling ov
er the glass and circling in crazy loops as they did.
But there had been nothing.
And there are no spiders either. Believe that. There are no spiders.
But belief did not come easily. His phobia eclipsed it. There were more spiders now. They were dropping on him and he squirmed and thrashed and knocked them away. He wanted to get up and get away, but Soo-Lee held tightly to his hand. It was like a séance, he thought, where people weren’t supposed to break the circle, even if theirs was more of a line than a circle. But there was power to it and he knew it. He could feel it. If he pulled his hand away, it would be like unplugging himself from them and he was afraid to do that.
No more spiders dropped on him.
But he could hear them moving around him, hanging on tiny threads and rubbing their many legs together. And something more: a high, barely audible squeaking that he knew were the sounds they made when they communicated with each other. Ordinary spiders probably didn’t do such things, but these were not ordinary and the squeaking noises he heard were their voices.
They’re plotting and you know it. They’re discussing you and what they will do to make you let go of Soo-Lee’s hand. They will cover you. They will bite you. They will do whatever it takes because they know you’re afraid of them.
Next to him, Soo-Lee tensed and screamed.
It was unbearably loud and felt like a needle piercing his ear. She was going through something, too, but he doubted it was spiders. One of them dropped into his hair and he cried out. Another crept down the back of his neck and got inside his shirt. Others dropped onto his arms. He felt tiny creeping legs move over his face and a smooth, round body settle at his lips, trying to force itself into his mouth.
He screamed, too, as they began biting him and more dropped down on him. He jumped up, scratching and swatting them, crying out with disgust as their swollen bodies went to mush under his hands and smeared him with their oozing guts. He crawled along the floor, nearly out of his head, and fought at them, rolling and slapping at his own skin. He tore and pawed at himself. Given time, he would have scratched off his own skin such was his mania.
Then something grabbed him.
He felt hands take him and throw him flat against the floor and with such force, the wind was knocked out of him. Fingers like cables pinned him. He tried to fight, to squirm away, but it was no good. He clawed at the face of what held him and he felt his fingers slide into it. It was like breaking the skin of a soft brown apple. As he pushed out at it, hitting it, he realized the face itself was not soft…but what was attached to it: dozens and dozens of pulpous, bulging growths that broke apart under his hands, spilling rank fluid into his eyes.
The growths were alive.
He could feel their tiny wiggling legs.
The thing that held him was parasitized with egg sacs, spider ova that were hatching. He destroyed many with his thrashing hands, but many more were born, tearing free of the sacs and dropping on him until he was covered in the wriggling spiderlings that were biting him, sucking his blood, trying to force their way into his mouth and up his nostrils, more and more crowding all the time until he could not breathe.
Until he could do nothing but scream his mind away.
23
Lex took hold of him and yanked him to his feet.
Creep fought him like an animal, hitting and kicking and clawing, and Lex finally slapped him across the face and with enough force to put him right back down. Though he could not see Creep, he could feel him cowering at his feet, moaning and sobbing, utterly broken by whatever the puppet master had thrown at him, which must have been considerable.
“We need to stay calm,” Lex said, channeling some B-movie hero and knowing exactly how foolish he sounded.
Soo-Lee was at his side, practically clinging to him and Creep was shivering at his feet. They had both gone through something, but he had been aware of only the utter blackness and things moving in it. Then Soo-Lee screamed like she was being skinned alive and Creep had hit the floor, crying out and squirming, unable to even speak.
So now what? Lex asked himself. Now what? You seem to think you’re the guiding light here, so what next?
He almost laughed at that. If he was the guiding light then he had a very weak bulb. Soo-Lee helped him get Creep to his feet. Lex put questions to both of them and the answers were barely coherent.
“All right,” he said. “We stand together and we fight together.”
More B-movie wisdom, but he had no other frame of reference for something like this. They held hands in the darkness and waited for what came next and when it did, it was not what any of them expected. The lights began to come on. Not in a flash, but very slowly like mood lighting. The glow was orange like that of candles, dim and wavering, slowly brightening.
As it suffused the room, they saw that they were no longer alone and Lex had to wonder if they ever had been.
Soo-Lee gasped.
Creep made a pained sound.
And Lex just sighed. What now? What the hell now?
He knew the room he was seeing was not the room they had originally been in. There was no bookcase or antiquated TV set or console stereo. All that was gone. They were in some sort of workroom that looked like it was part doll factory and part Frankenstein’s laboratory. Two of the walls were hung with hairless doll heads and smooth unpainted doll faces, limbs of assorted sizes, the torsos of children right up to the torsos of adults. None of them looked as lifeless as they should have. He sensed movement in the faces…subtle, secretive, impossible…but there, a slow and yet deliberate crawl of facial muscles beneath waxen skins. Even the limbs were shifting, fingers unfurling, the chests of the bodies rising and falling with measured respiration.
The flickering orange light only enhanced this and made Lex’s skin feel like it was going to inch right off his bones.
He held Soo-Lee’s hand tighter and that of Creep, whose own hand felt limp and rubbery.
Don’t lose it, he warned himself. This is important. Part horror show and part history lesson.
Another wall was hung with what looked like archaic, well-yellowed anatomy prints. Lex thought he recognized several Da Vinci drawings, elaborately rendered explorations of the human body. There were dozens of them, all crowding for space, many tacked right over the top of others or overlapping one another. They were very old, most ripped and dog-eared, faded from age. There was everything from detailed explorations of the human skull to the musco-skeletal system, nervous system and lymphatics. There were also engineering prints where the organs were replaced by arcane machinery, pullies and wires and unbelievably complex clockwork gears.
There was a table, a sort of workbench.
Seated before it was an old woman whose face was wizened, wrinkles deeply etched, mouth hideously seamed. Her hair was stringy white yarn. She didn’t seem to have eyes. There was a body on the table. The body of a child or a child-like thing and she was stitching it shut, humming a melancholy tune in an off-key voice that sounded positively morbid.
Lex could not say that it was a dead child.
And he could not say it was a doll.
He was almost certain it was some sort of horrid hybrid of the two. Its head was detached, a series of tiny, intricate wires hanging in bunches from the throat. They looked like the fine rootlets of a plant. Its arms and legs were likewise divorced from the body. But it was its face that captured his eye—pale and smooth, framed by luxurious yellow hair, the lips sewn shut, the eyes wide and perfectly blue, perfectly sightless.
A voice in the back of his head said, Look away, oh Christ, look away! If she finishes putting it together, it will move. It will sit up and look at you with those dead cerulean eyes.
The other wall was taken up by shelving that was likewise crowded with nameless glass jars and bottles that looked to be filled with liquids and powders, vessels of eyes, and overflowing boxes of swivels, sockets, gears, fine steel piping, and spooled wire.
Lex knew without a dou
bt that he was looking at the puppet master of this awful place.
She was the one.
Hers was the mind that held them here.
He expected her to look up at him and acknowledge the fact that he knew, but she did not. She was far too busy putting together the little boy. Nothing could interfere with her work, her obsession and devotion to her craft. Her hands were in constant motion, practiced and expert. Before she finished stitching the torso shut, she poured something from a jar into her hand that looked pink and alive and stuffed it in there. Then she began to fit the limbs in place with meticulous artistry.
It was at this point that he and the others realized that the woman was not the only one in the room. There were others sitting about in folding chairs like an audience. They were doll people, the men in suits and the women in fine dresses. Their dead white faces emoted like rubber masks, empty eyes fixed on the old woman. Several of them had empty sleeves as if there had not been enough limbs to go around.
“This is insane,” Creep said under his breath. “This is all fucking insane.”
His voice boomed in the silence where the only sounds were those of the old woman and her fingers moving deftly at her creation. It was like a scream in church. The effect was instantaneous: the old woman stopped what she was doing. Snips in one hand and a surgical knife in the other, she looked up with eyes that were purple-red in flayed sockets. The doll people all turned their heads and looked in Creep’s direction.
One by one, they stood up.
Creep panicked and ran.
As the doll people began to move in their direction, he dashed through a doorway and down the hall. Lex and Soo-Lee had no choice but to go after him. There were several doors and he opened each one, crying out as he did so. From each doorway, another doll person emerged, reaching out to him with soft, puffy hands. He went to the doorway at the end. He threw it open and disappeared into it.
Lex and Soo-Lee went after him, just avoiding the reaching hands themselves. By the time they got through the door and slammed it shut behind them, the hallway was filled with animate dolls.