by Tim Curran
Lex found Soo-Lee’s doll copy.
It was even more intriguing than his own. The porcelain-white face framed by long black hair was flawless, the cheekbones high, the lips full. Unlike his own imitation, this one had eyes. Not human eyes exactly, but more like gelid orbs of pooled dark liquid that seemed to watch him. She looked very good as a doll. There was no getting around it. The copy was perfect, even more physically perfect than Soo-Lee herself. He touched its face and it was not plastic or wood or wax, but something very soft almost like silk. There was a tactile pleasure associated with it and he did not want to draw his hand away. He had the strongest desire to run his hand over the swell of the breasts.
“What are you doing?” Soo-Lee asked him.
“It feels almost alive,” he told her.
He could not seem to pull his hand away. The touching was pleasurable, erotic even, like the very act was flooding his brain with endorphins. He needed to put both hands on her and touch her, feel every curve, run his hands up and down her.
Then Soo-Lee pulled him back.
And for one moment, he felt rage, uncontrollable rage. He wanted to hit her. It was like she had unplugged him from the greatest joy he had ever known. Then it passed and he was just confused.
“It moved,” Creep said in a haunted voice. “When she pulled you away, the doll moved its hand.”
It had me and it didn’t want to break contact, Lex thought. Somehow it must have been feeding on me, drawing something from me.
Soo-Lee, practical and determined, put the lid back on and then did the same with the other box. Out of sight, out of mind.
“We need to get out of here,” she said. “We don’t have much time, so don’t waste any of it. Let’s go.”
She led them away and up the stairs, unlocking the cellar door and holding the candelabra out before her. The hallway was empty. There were no doll people anywhere. Nobody stopped to consider what that might mean. Soo-Lee was in charge now and she was all business. She towed Lex by the hand and he dragged Creep along. The workroom was gone. Now it was just the living room that was a snapshot from 1960, an ad from a Sears & Roebuck catalog fifty years out of date.
Soo-Lee got them to the front door, set the candelabra aside, and stepped out into the night. Lex and Creep followed. Together they stood at the foot of the steps.
“Now what?” Creep said.
“Now we get out of here,” Soo-Lee told him with an authority that could not be argued with.
They had made it to the street when the siren began to sound, wailing in the night like a warning.
27
It was raining ash.
Ramona had the wipers working madly on the windshield of the van, but still she could not clear it. It was like being lost in a black snowstorm. The ash flew thick and heavy, filling the headlights and then simply covering the windshield until she was forced to bring the van to a stop where it promptly died.
There was nothing she could do but wait it out.
She sat there, pulling her shirt up over her face so she did not breathe any of it in. Even inside the van, the ash was everywhere. It drifted in a haze, covering the seats and dashboard and steering wheel, settling over the floor like deep sea silt. Within ten minutes, Ramona was coated in it, too. But even so, it was still much better within the van than without where it flew like a black blizzard.
She waited.
And waited.
What if it was to go on for hours? For days? You’d be buried alive in the stuff, she thought.
True, but she knew it wouldn’t last too long. It couldn’t. The Controller was expending a great deal of energy to create this illusion. Oh, it was real enough—you could touch the ash, feel it, breathe it in and asphyxiate on it, but it was still an illusion. A physical illusion. It would play itself out given time. She wondered if her theoretical Controller was even doing this on purpose or it was sort of a subconscious thing, if that even made any sense.
She huddled there on her seat, breathing through her shirt, wearing her sunglasses so the stuff wouldn’t get in her eyes. The temperature in the van had risen at least twenty degrees in the last fifteen minutes and already she was beginning to perspire, her clothes clinging to her like damp rags. She wiped sweat from her face and it left a greasy residue of ash and moisture that she could feel.
It was disgusting.
If this ever ended, she would need to soak in a bath for hours.
She waited there, listening to the ash brushing against the outside of the van like sand. It seemed to go on and on and she felt increasingly claustrophobic, the van feeling more and more like a coffin she was slowly being buried alive in, a crate sinking into the black depths of quicksand. Even when it ended and she was not sure that it ever would, she would be interred beneath many feet of black ash and if she got the sliding door of the van open, she would drown in a moving and shifting mountain of it.
But that was imagination and she could not afford it.
Even now, it was ceasing. She could barely hear it brushing up against the van now. She waited another ten minutes or so until it was deathly silent out there, knowing it could only mean one of two things: either the van was indeed buried or the ash storm had finally ended.
She unrolled her window an inch and ash fell in, covering her in black soot.
She unrolled it a few inches more.
She was not buried.
Good then. She opened the door and stepped out into a world painted black. The ashes came up to her calves. She moved through them, casting clouds of soot with each step as she moved away from the van into a weird, blackened world. Stokes lay gutted and burned around her. It looked like a plastic model a boy had gotten bored with, doused in lighter fluid and set aflame. This was the aftermath.
Gone was the Mayberry RFD illusion of Stokes.
What she was seeing was the town after the fire that had destroyed it.
The sky seemed to be dark with soot, the moonlight filled with smoke and blowing ash. The neighborhoods were burned out, houses reduced to foundations or black hulks. In some cases there was nothing but a standing sooty chimney or two, limbless trees like black stakes that witches had been roasted upon. She saw the remains of incinerated cars in the streets that looked like the dried-out, mangled carapaces of insects you might find on the windowsills of deserted houses. There were heaps of smoldering bricks and burning boards rising from the ash, telephone poles that had fallen over, and stands of bushes that had not caught fire but merely withered in the blazing heat.
It was a terrible mess.
The thing that caught her eye and held it was what appeared to be the collapsing wreck of a factory or mill on a hilltop that overlooked the town itself. From her vantage point, it looked much like the aftermath of a funeral pyre or a bonfire that had burned down—a collection of blackened sticks and stumps.
Then, as quickly as it had appeared, it was gone.
Stokes was pristine and pure again, not violated and broken. The streets were clean, the windows gleaming with moonlight, the air fresh and the walks swept.
The only evidence that anything had happened at all was Ramona herself, who was black from head to foot, her hair full of ashes. She breathed in the clean air, neither shocked nor surprised at the transformation of the town.
She plodded on.
Light.
She saw flickering blue light.
It was from down the street. The TVs in the window of a shop were all operating. Again, it was like something from an old movie. She half-expected to see a crowd gathered on the walks, staring through the glass. She went down there because obviously it was for her benefit. She stood before the window. Six or seven archaic TVs were showing the same program—a black-and-white newscast that was grainy, the picture rolling from time to time. The news anchor with his austere suit and bow tie, hair shiny with Brylcream, was holding a sheaf of papers, a bulky chrome-plated Unidyne microphone set on the desk before him.
The picture changed. Now
it was showing footage of a horrendous fire, houses and buildings engulfed in flame, black smoke churning into the sky. The anchor came back on, commenting on it. Then the picture changed again. Block letters on the screen read:
AMONG THE MISSING
This was followed by blurry black-and-white photos that she could tell were herself and Chazz, Creep and Danielle, Lex and Soo-Lee. The images kept repeating. It was designed, she knew, to fill her with terror and it was doing a pretty good job at it. The most disturbing part was that they were not photos taken in life, but in death. Each of them was laid out naked on slabs like Old West gunfighters that had been cut down. Their faces looked flaccid, their eyes sunken.
Ramona turned away.
The fear inside her ran dark until it became a poison that made her hate, made her lust for revenge. She was angry, really angry, and she knew damn well that when she got like this, she was not only irrational but relentless in her need for payback.
She heard the siren begin to shrill, which meant things were going to start heating up again. Tensed, standing out in the middle of the street, she waited for it.
She didn’t honestly think, bring it on, but in every fiber of her being, she was almost daring the Controller to do just that.
28
When the alarm shrieked, Lady Peg-leg woke up…at least, she once again was a living entity of some type. Chazz could see it happening. It was like some kind of 3-D hallucinatory special-effects mindfuck, only that was fantasy and this was real. No CGI could touch this because it was so unbearably subtle, so gradual that it simply happened as you watched and was so smooth and fluid you were not sure anything had happened at all.
Is it? Is it? Is it really happening? Am I actually seeing this shit?
Granted, his brain was not actually working real well of late. It was missing on more than one cylinder, his mind filled with dust and cobwebs and narrow spaces. Hell, there were no high, sunlit places up there anymore where he could walk tall and proud, just dim, dirty crawl spaces where he had to creep on his belly to get from point A to point B.
Yes, that was certainly true.
But…but this was something else again.
Lady Peg-leg had been lying there in an untidy heap like a discarded marionette, limbs going this way and that, head hanging off to the side, hands splayed, mouth hanging open like it was waiting for a sparrow to nest in it.
Then—
Then things started to happen. With a rattling sound like sticks and marbles shifting in a box, she stood up facing him. She was hunched over with a twisted old-lady spine, her head resting on one shoulder. She balanced there on one foot and the peg-leg itself, wavering slightly like she might fall down any second. A life force took her inch by inch, making what had looked essentially like a wooden puppet moments before into something animate and possibly organic. She filled with life like a balloon filling with air.
By the time Chazz was aware of the fact that it was really happening, it was already done.
A voice in the back of his head that sounded very distant, said, this would be the point where you run if you have any sense left.
But he wasn’t running.
In fact, he wasn’t doing anything. He was just watching her, feeling helpless and hopeless, a dreamlike sense of self-preservation trying to take form in his head but never really coming together. Lady Peg-leg had made no threatening moves and he could not take his eyes off her. She was watching him—even though she had no eyes—and he was watching her. He felt like prey. Once, when he was in tenth grade Bio 2, he had watched Mr. Berry drop a mouse into the cage of a pet rat snake named Herman. The mouse had been very excited at first to be out of the cramped little cardboard box it had made the trip from the pet store in. It jumped and frolicked with the pure joy of freedom…then it saw Herman. It squeezed itself into a corner of the cage, shivering with pure terror as Herman slowly, relentlessly moved in its direction.
Chazz felt just like the mouse.
Maybe Lady Peg-leg had no eyes as such, but there was something alive in the holes of her face and it was directed at him. She was watching him like Herman watched the mouse, preparing to strike.
Chazz knew he should do something, anything.
Get up off his ass at the very least and face this threat with the only tools he had, his strength and speed. But he wasn’t doing that or anything else because he was simply wrung out. He felt like one of those dingy rags his stepmom would hang out on the line after she gave the kitchen floor a serious scrubbing. He was limp and sodden and incapable of action.
Lady Peg-leg stood there, filled with menace but making no moves. She was dressed in some kind of moldering smock or shift, a raggedy black thing that reminded him of crow feathers, shiny and well-plucked. It draped from her in tattered scarves and bolts.
Good boys will be rewarded, she said, her voice echoing only in his mind. Bad boys will be punished.
She took a few steps in his direction, then a few more, and he watched her come. Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap, went her peg. She stepped fully into the moonlight and he got a real look at the bag of her face, at the deep crevices and gnarled pockets of tissue, the ruts and suturing, the discolored gums and overlapping yellow teeth, the lips like dried onion peelings. It wasn’t tissue, he knew, it was some kind of material like burlap, finely woven yet alive. It was flaking, coming apart, threads and ribbons of it hanging down like locks of hair. A trail of dried blood had seeped from one of the sutures.
Do you want to see your friends? Lady Peg-leg asked in his head, knowing it was what he wanted the most of all. Yes? Well, there is only one way to find them and that is through me. I can take you to them. I can join you to them. I can make you all whole again. All you have to do is take my hand and I’ll take you away from the fear and into the light. I’ll introduce you to she who makes and unmakes and she who rewards those who don’t run like scared little boys. Just take my hand…
His own voice in his head told him with finality that this was it, he either came to his senses and came to them very quickly or he took her hand and sank deeper into the mire of this nightmare until his lungs filled with black silt and his heart filled with black terror and he sank like a brick. This was it. This was the defining moment.
Lady Peg-leg held out her hand to him, palm upwards. He could see metal rods or bones straining just beneath the flesh.
He stood up.
He knew what he was going to do.
He was going to bowl this window dummy straight over, cut right through the line and into the end zone and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to stop him. That was his intention. So nobody was more surprised than he when he reached out and took her spongy hand in his and felt her wriggling fingers engulf his hand like tentacles that would never let go.
He screamed with one last act of desperation.
But it was too late by then.
Far too late.
29
The doll people were coming.
Not one or two, but groups of them from every direction, moving like metal filings, following lines of force to a central magnet. And that magnet was the house. Soo-Lee, Creep, and Lex watched them coming, hobbling and weaving and dragging themselves forward, but never veering from their set path.
We’ll drown in them, Creep thought. There’s so goddamn many that we’ll be buried alive in them.
“We better get back inside,” Lex said. “This looks like a siege.”
But Creep didn’t like the idea. “Fuck that! Let’s run for it!”
“We can’t run for it. There’s nowhere to run to,” Soo-Lee reminded him.
She was right. He knew she was right. They were trapped and, once again, their decisions were being made for them and they were reacting rather than acting just as she and Lex had said earlier.
“C’mon,” Soo-Lee said. “Back into the house. It’s all we can do.”
Lex started backing up with her, but Creep didn’t follow because he saw a way out. At last, a way out.<
br />
“Creep,” she said. “Let’s go.”
But he shook his head vehemently. Obviously, they weren’t seeing it or they’d be thinking what he was thinking. “Look!” he said. “Over there!”
They still weren’t seeing it.
Their faces were blank, practically bovine in the bright moonlight. They didn’t see it and they weren’t getting it. Christ, it was right there! Just up the street! A fucking car! How could they not be seeing it? The beauty of it was that it was an old sedan from the days before steering wheel locks. It would be no big deal to hot-wire an old car like that. He had a pocket-knife with him and that’s all he would need.
“The car!” he cried. “Right over there! Look!”
But they’d already seen it and it was obvious they didn’t like the idea of it. He knew what they were thinking: it was a setup. The puppet master (as Lex liked to call him or her or it) had put the car there so they would foolishly jump into it. Creep knew there was a certain amount of sense to that…particularly in this place where there were no cars, but fuck it, he was scared and he couldn’t think straight anymore. He needed to get out. The way he was figuring things, even if he had to fight a couple doll people for it, then it was still worth it.
Beat the hell out of holing up in that damn house and trying to survive through some Night of the Living Dead scenario.
He took off, running to it.
Lex and Soo-Lee called out to him, but by then the doll people were closing from every quarter and they didn’t chance coming after him. Which was good, because he wasn’t going to hide in that fucking house, waiting for those things to get him.
Behind him, Lex and Soo-Lee were still calling out.
They were going to feel real stupid when he rolled up out front with the car and got them the hell out of there. As he approached it, he saw one of the doll people rise up from behind it like a gas-filled balloon. It was a man whose face ran like white greasepaint as if he were under a hot lamp. He had no eyes, but that didn’t stop him from looking right at Creep and it sure as hell didn’t stop Creep from letting out a little cry.