by Tim Curran
We’ve been herded again, Lex thought as he went down the steps into the cellar after Creep. Now they’ve got us right where they want us.
24
Sometime after climbing out of the junkyard and her manic run in the streets, Ramona came to her senses and she was crawling up the sidewalk. Not sprinting or walking or even stumbling, but crawling. Her face blackened with soot, her clothes gray with ash, she was crawling up the sidewalk, completely out of it, laid low by shock and the aftereffects of pure terror.
Finally, she stopped.
Just what in the hell are you doing?
The thing was, she didn’t know. By that point, she really knew nothing. She very badly needed a good solid dose of reality, but reality did not exist in this place and without it she couldn’t seem to get her feet under her. Literally. This was all a dark fantasy, a nightmare, a dream, call it what you want.
All right. Stop right now. Don’t think. Don’t try to make sense. Stand up like a fucking human being. That’s a start.
It took some doing, but she did it.
She stripped off her filthy coat and just breathed.
She leaned up against the brick front of a building and looked across the street. She was expecting to see the same storefronts again, but she didn’t see that at all. Instead, there was a gigantic banner draped over the faces of several edifices that said: WELCOME TO HISTORIC STOKES. If it was meant to inspire fear, it had the opposite effect: she started to giggle. The giggling welled up inside her until it became full-blown laughter and she shook with it, her girlish and manic cackling echoing up and down the empty streets. Now this was funny! This was fucking comedy! This had to prove that the Controller had a very wicked sense of humor.
Historic Stokes, she thought. Historic Stokes. Oh, that’s hilarious!
When she finally calmed down—and it took some time—she fished her cigarettes and lighter out of her pocket and lit up. Dirty and grimy and smudged with ash and smoke, she pulled off her cigarette and had to force herself not to laugh.
Then she saw the van sitting up the street and things quickly became very unfunny.
It was not idling; it was simply parked at the curb. She stood there, stiff from head to foot, waiting for it to rev up and come after her. But it did nothing. She swallowed down her fear, knowing damn well that she was not some shrinking violet and she wasn’t about to become one now. A few deep breaths. A second or two to unclench her muscles. A few drags off her cigarette. There. She was not about to fall apart again like she had in the junkyard. No goddamn way.
You were close before, real close to wearing down the Controller. Then you lost it. Well, find it again and put it to work. Do not allow yourself to be driven. Do not be predictable. Go on instinct. Act irrationally.
The van.
The van was intended to make her run screaming until she was exhausted. But no, she would not allow that. The Controller would expect her to run and hide, to find a safe place that would be, no doubt, conveniently available so she could be trapped in an enclosed space. And there the games would really begin.
Ramona took a final drag off her cigarette and tossed it.
She moved up the sidewalk at a very sneaking pace, keeping to the shadows as if she was trying to avoid being seen. This would be predictable behavior. The Controller would be expecting it. At the last moment, she made as if to run off…and then dashed across the street to the van, grabbing the handle of the driver’s-side door and throwing it open.
The broken man was behind the wheel.
A blade of fear went through her, but vanished quickly enough. He was slumped over in the seat, loose-limbed and limp. He seemed incapable of motion. He was a lifeless window dummy and no more.
Still…she was cautious, very cautious.
She knew how quickly they went from being inert to active.
Common sense told her to get the hell out of there, so she ignored it and did the irrational thing. The thing that was dangerous, but oh-so satisfying. She grabbed the broken man and pulled him out of the van, tossing him to the pavement. He broke into pieces. She kicked his head and it rolled into the gutter.
She waited for him to come to life, but it didn’t happen.
She jumped behind the wheel and started the van up. She was amazed that it ran so smoothly. Did the Controller’s power not extend to internal combustion engines? Or was she—gasp—playing into his/her/its theoretical hands again?
Fuck it.
The last time the alarm sounded it had come from the east and that’s where she was going. The rational thing would be to drive out of town, so she didn’t bother with that. She was going to track this bullshit to its source.
Guess what, Mr. Controller? she thought then. I’m coming for your ass. Goddamn right I am.
25
She was still out there.
She was still waiting for him.
Chazz could not see the Spider Mother. He could not hear her. Yet, he could feel her out there, sense her drawing closer. He was like a streetlight and she was a moth. She was circling him, drawing ever closer, creeping up just out of sight, waiting to pounce.
He was not running now.
He was simply run out. But he refused to stay still for more than a few seconds or a minute at the very outside. Every time he stopped, he threw out feelers, trying to figure out where she might be. Casting for scent like a bloodhound. And each time he did, he thought: You can’t outrun her. You can’t escape. This is her town and she decides where every street leads to.
Now and again, he could almost feel her eyes on him, her many eyes…if she even had eyes at all. It made him break out in a cold sweat. And once, several streets back, he was almost certain he heard the distant thumping of an immense heart. In his mind, he could see it: not the Spider Mother, just a huge, well-muscled heart in an empty lot, flabby and black-red, beating away. Not necessarily her heart but perhaps the heart of the town, the secret black beating heart of it that nourished the body. He could almost imagine the sewers and pipes and conduits beneath the ground being blood-swollen arteries and veins.
You’re thinking crazy. You’re thinking absolutely crazy, he told himself.
It was true and he knew it, but even so he was not convinced of the fact. There had been a time—long ago, it seemed—when he would have rejected such thinking out of hand as any sane person would have. But that time was gone and reality was not such a given anymore. That which once made no sense made all the sense in the world today.
“Move,” he whispered under his breath.
Chazz stood up, looking around. He could not hear the clip-clop of the Spider Mother. Maybe she had given up, but he didn’t believe that for a moment. He moved down the sidewalk, eyeing doorways, unable to decide if they promised sanctuary or danger. He moved on for another ten and then fifteen minutes and saw nothing and heard nothing. He began to stand tall again and not bent over and skulking like some scavenging animal.
He walked with a more confidant stride.
He breathed easier.
His brain became less clouded and he began to think less instinctively and more like a man. He had been running and getting absolutely nowhere. Now that there was not menace around every corner, he began to consider how he might find the others. Because, really, that was the true horror of this entire situation…being alone. The doll people and Lady Peg-leg and the Spider Mother, they were all horrible, of course, but being alone against them made it so much worse.
If he had someone at his side, someone like Ramona for instance, he would fight with her (or him) happily.
Forget Ramona, dumbass. You knocked her aside when that mannequin woman grabbed hold of you. You cracked up. You showed her what you were made of. Maybe muscles and attitude on the outside, but nothing but shivering pudding on the inside.
He refused to think about that.
That’s not the way it was. Yet, the idea that he was a coward haunted him and would not let him go. As much as he tried to sweep it out of
his mind, it clung there like a dust ball, getting bigger, gathering all the debris inside his brain until it pretty much blotted out all else.
He started running again.
He knew he wasn’t running from any real threat but running from himself. He dashed around a corner—good God, the streets were all the same, all the very same—and ran smack dab into one of the doll people. He crashed into it before he could stop himself and they both went down.
It was trapped beneath him.
In those few seconds of shock before he fought himself free, he saw it was Lady Peg-leg. Her white wig was nearly detached from her scalp, hanging off to one side like a rag. Her face was loose and flaccid like latex rubber, the eye sockets filled with a formless blackness.
Chazz screamed and threw himself backward, cracking his head on the edge of a building, seeing stars. The very worst thing was that she came with him. She was stuck to him. He hit her and pushed her away, but she was glued to him. They rolled across the sidewalk together, but he could not throw her. He ended up on his back and she was on top of him, not moving or doing anything, just a dead dummy, a conjoined twin he could not separate himself from.
He screamed again, her gruesome face inches from his own.
It hung in flaps and pouches, a breathing bag of flesh that seemed to inflate and deflate with respiration. Great furrows, crevices, and deep-hewn wrinkles were cut into it. Black suturing ran from the corners of her mouth and up to her forehead where they joined more intricate stitch-work. Her face was like something sewn together out of three or four corpse faces. The suturing was so tight it pulled her lips away from juicy pink gums and peg-like teeth that were all twisted and gnarled.
But the most shocking thing was that even though she wasn’t moving, she was alive. She was breathing and he could feel the dull thudding of her heartbeat.
Wild and hysterical, he fought to be free of her but she clung on tenaciously.
On his feet, he smashed her into the brick face of a building again and again, trying to shatter her, to break her into pieces but she was incredibly tough and resilient. Her head bounced about on her sagging, flabby neck, her face brushing his own, her lips feeling cold and greasy like the entrails of a fish.
Somewhere during the process, she merely slid off him like a sloughed skin.
He did not run.
He went down on his ass, gibbering and mad, drool running from his mouth and tears flowing from his eyes. He did not think and he did not feel. He just waited there for her to wake up.
There seemed to be nothing else left.
26
“They’ve stopped,” Soo-Lee said, trying to regulate her breathing in the dark clamminess of the cellar. “I don’t hear them anymore.”
“It’s not over,” Creep said.
Lex said nothing. He figured they wouldn’t be down in the cellar if it hadn’t been for Creep and he wasn’t too happy about it. Creep had lost his nerve. Lex did not believe that they were in any real danger up there. It was weird and disturbing, but there was no true threat. Not if they kept their heads. Not if they let it play out. He knew from his experience in the diner that they could have gotten out anytime they wanted. Regardless of how the room had rearranged itself, they still could have gotten out because the “real” room was still there even if it wasn’t visible.
Now he wasn’t so sure.
Once again, they had been manipulated, driven to the very place the puppet master wanted them. He had a feeling they were in a momentary lull until that siren went off again.
“There’s something down here,” he said. “Something our host wants us to see or to find.”
Creep trembled next to him. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. But, trust me, nothing is by accident here.”
The three of them were leaning up against a wall at the bottom of the steps. Lex had locked the door to the cellar and the doll people beat and scratched at it for some time before going quiet. He knew they were still out there, but they weren’t doing anything. A lull. That’s all this is. He was thinking the smart thing to do would be to sneak out now while they were inactive. Soon, the siren would sound again and then there would be real trouble.
But it wasn’t going to happen.
He was almost certain there would be a dozen or so of them frozen in the hallway and he did not honestly believe that Creep had the guts to move among them, even if it meant freedom.
So they waited there, shoulder to shoulder, not able to retreat and afraid to go deeper into the cellar itself.
Lex, feeling wicked and frustrated by it all, said, “What do you think, Creep? What do you think we should do?”
“How should I know?”
“You led us down here.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“You could have kept your head.”
“Fuck you.”
“Knock it off,” Soo-Lee said. “The both of you. Since we’re here, let’s see what there is to see.”
Uncommon bravery. Something Creep lacked completely and something Lex wasn’t too sure he had himself.
“It’s pitch-black. Can’t see a damn thing down here.”
“Try using your lighter,” Lex suggested.
Creep, sighing, dug it out. He handed it to Lex, not wanting to be the one to flick it as if he might be punished for the transgression. Lex took it from him and flicked it. The flame was bright and even. They were in a long, narrow corridor. There was a lot of junk piled around against the walls. Everything from stacks of water-stained cardboard boxes to old bicycle frames and a particularly nasty-looking mattress that was nearly black with stains as if someone had bled to death on it long ago.
Amazingly, there was also a candelabra sitting atop an old dresser that lacked drawers. There were three red candles in it half burned down, wax melted down the stems. It was like something out of an old European horror movie
“How convenient,” Soo-Lee said.
Lex just stared at it. “Isn’t it, though?”
But then everything was a little too convenient and a little too coincidental in Stokes. You tended to find what you needed when you needed it, particularly when it had the potential to enhance your uneasiness. On the other hand, if you needed something to get you out or make you feel safer, you’d never find it in a hundred years.
He lit the candles. “There. Now we can pretend we’re a couple of dumbasses in a monster movie.”
Creep giggled, but there was no mirth to it, only a sort of low-key, slow-burning hysteria.
Lex led the way down the corridor, feeling like he was moving down the passage in a Halloween spook house waiting for the ghosties and ghoulies to leap out at him. He didn’t think that was too far off the mark. There was a door at the end, but there were no cobwebs or bloody handprints on it. The knob was old, very old, tarnished and grimy from generations of hands.
He looked back at Soo-Lee in the guttering candle light.
The jumping illumination painted her face in an orange glow, casting shadows under her eyes and cheekbones. It made her Asian features look almost mystical and cruel. But she was neither. He knew that much. She was solid and practical, kindhearted.
He gripped the knob without any Hollywood drama and threw the door open. What he saw in there was almost what he expected to see. Not exactly, of course, because he couldn’t have known, yet it was no surprise.
“Boxes,” Soo-Lee said.
Creep disagreed. “Coffins. Those are coffins.”
Lex and Soo-Lee looked at each other and then back at the boxes. Yes, coffins. But not the modern sort that people cried over, but cheap pine boxes that, again, were like something out of a horror movie. A Hammer movie to be more precise, Lex thought. The Brides of Dracula or The Vampire Lovers. One of those period screamers his mom always watched when he was a kid. There had to have been twelve or fifteen of them piled in an untidy heap as if they had been dropped from above.
“Shut the door,” Creep said. “Just shut it alr
eady.”
But Lex was not so certain it was going to be that easy. What he had in mind was stupid horror movie logic, but he saw no other way. He was almost certain that they needed to open a few of those boxes or they would never be allowed out of there. He told Soo-Lee the same.
“Yes, maybe,” she said. “But if we do that, aren’t we allowing ourselves to be manipulated again?”
“Maybe.”
“No maybes about it,” Creep said.
Yet, when Lex went in there, they followed. When he pried the first lid off, they pressed in closer to see. What he saw was himself. A dummy of himself. It even wore his clothes. It was what he would look like as a doll person: lips pulled in a straight line, eye sockets like deep holes drilled into a smooth and white face, the fingers interlocked over the belly like those of a corpse in a casket. It wasn’t alive in the ordinary sense. More like something that was waiting to live.
It was terrifying…yet oddly intriguing. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off it even though it made him feel like screaming.
Creep had stepped back away from the box. “Put the fucking lid back on, man. I can’t stand looking at it.”
Lex figured that was pretty sage advice.
He clattered the lid back in place, almost certain the thing would wake up at any time. Thankfully, it didn’t.
“We better check the other ones,” Soo-Lee suggested.
“Fuck that,” Creep said. “Just stop, okay? Enough is enough. You two have to learn when to stop.”
They ignored him.
They pulled off two more lids. Soo-Lee found herself looking down at a mannequin of Creep that was nearly identical to him, save the mocking grin on its face and the fact that there was no warmth, no humanity, no good or bad or anything inbetween etched into the features. It had not lived and experience had not seasoned it, given it character.