by Tim Curran
He looked over his shoulder.
Lex and Soo-Lee had gone back into the house and the streets were filling with doll people. There was no going back now; they were everywhere. He was alone and he either did what he came to do or—
The doll man came shambling around the car, his mouth opening and closing with a rigid, mechanical sort of movement as if it was wired like the jaws of a puppet. And maybe it was. Creep tried the driver’s-side door. Locked. That brought a jolt of panic. He ran around to the other side, the doll man scarce feet from him. The passenger-side door was locked, too.
But the rear door was open.
He threw himself in there, slamming the door and throwing the lock. He quickly pushed down the other rear lock and breathed a sigh of relief. The doll man was ineffectively slapping at the windows.
Hit them all you want, dipshit. Car windows only break easily in movies.
Now, he would hot-wire this sonofabitch and get the ball rolling. It was going to work out and he knew it. He could almost see it playing out in his mind. That was the only thing that gave him pause, because things never worked out this easily in real life and especially not for him.
What the hell?
He hadn’t really noticed at first, but now he was seeing it: there was no color in the car. It was completely washed out. It wasn’t real easy to tell with nothing but moonlight, but he was seeing it all right—the inside of the car was black-and-white like in an old movie. His hands were a cream color, the car itself varying degrees of gray.
He pulled himself up to hop over the seats, deciding he wasn’t going to be thinking about what that might mean. It was just a trick of the moonlight and he sure as hell didn’t have time to be freaking out about shit like that. There were things to do and he was the only one who could do them.
The keys were in the ignition.
The keys were in the fucking ignition!
Now that was a real break and it made him more paranoid that this entire thing was going to blow up in his face. He started climbing over the seats. There were several doll people out there now, converging on the car. Yeah, well fuck you, he thought.
Then something hit him.
There was no one or nothing in the car with him, yet he felt something like a hand strike him square in the chest and knock him into the backseat. Maybe it wasn’t a hand exactly. Maybe it was something more along the lines of a wave of force. Regardless, it had physical impact.
Creep pulled himself up.
This was how things went bad and he knew it.
Stupid dumbfuck! You knew it was too good to be true but you went for it anyway!
Seized by panic, expecting that invisible force to hit him again, he reached for the door handle…except there was no door handle. It was like the back of a police car, no handles. He tried pulling up the lock but it was fused. He tried the other door. It had no handle either. He peered over the seats. He knew there wouldn’t be any handles up there either because that’s not how it worked. This was a trap. This was a fucking Roach Hotel—Roaches check in, but they don’t check out. It was at this point that he lost it, pounding against the windows, beating on them until his fists ached, knowing he was not going to get out, but like an animal in a cage he was unable to accept it.
The doll people were gathered around the car now.
Dozens and dozens of eyeless white faces were pressed up to the windows, crowding in, more and more of them until he could see nothing but those grim visages, faces of splintered wood and cracked plastic and melting wax and burlap that hung in threads.
They were all grinning.
They were all laughing.
It was then, as tears rolled down his face and his mind seemed to fly apart inside his head, that he heard the keys hanging in the ignition jingle as if they had been grasped. He clearly saw them move. The car started up. The doll people retreated as the sedan pulled away from the curb.
It drove off down the street, Creep beating against the rear window as it disappeared into the night.
30
Standing in the middle of the street, Ramona heard something that made her jump. It wasn’t much of a sound. Just a clattering as if something had been dropped, but in the silence it was big and unexpected and she knew it was but the first stirring of what was going to happen next and the very idea chilled her.
You were raging a minute ago. You were ready to take on the world. Where’s that anger now? Where’s that determination?
She didn’t know. It was just…gone. It dried up inside her, evaporated, leaving her standing there shriveling in her own skin, trapped in this hell zone of a town, this twisted and very fucked-up dream and she honestly did not know what to do about it.
Yes, you do. The east, the east. That’s where this is all coming from. Track it to its source. You know what you have to do.
And, yes, she did.
It was a very simple strategy, of course, but executing it would not be so simple at all and she knew it. She heard another clattering sound and this time it came from above as if something had dropped on a roof up there. She could hear it rolling down and falling. Then something hit the pavement not three feet from her. It landed with a meaty thud and exploded like a pumpkin, spraying her with goo and what appeared to be a stringy sort of tissue.
It was a head.
Not a human head, of course, but a doll head…yet, one that was grotesquely well-fleshed. She screamed and brushed the tissue from her. God, it was warm. This wasn’t something from a doll shop; it was flesh and blood even if the very idea of that was impossible.
Clatter, clatter.
Something else now. A hand. A mannequin hand. It landed three feet away and began to crawl in her direction. Another hand fell and then another. A leg came down and clattered on the sidewalk. Then an arm, another head—this one was empty, rolling like a ball in her direction.
It was raining doll parts.
Still another head came down. A woman’s head with dirty blonde hair. It barely missed her. It rolled over and over, blood exploding from its mouth with a gurgling sound.
But that’s not possible, a voice in Ramona’s head told her. It’s nothing but a mannequin head and mannequins don’t bleed, they’re not real and they can’t bleed because they’re not alive, not alive, not alive—
But it was alive.
The blood-spattered face was moving, the mouth trying to say her name and she knew it.
The doll parts were falling everywhere now. Some were breaking apart upon impact, but most were quite lively. Ramona stood there, hearing them dropping around her, unsure what to do. She had to get out of there, but in what direction should she escape? The longer she hesitated—the entire rain of parts had only been going on less than a minute by that point—the more limbs and heads there were. She was standing on the one spot where nothing was falling, but before long she would be trapped on her little island in an ocean of animate parts.
The heads were screaming her name. Legs hopping in her direction, arms crawling and hands pressing forward like albino spiders.
A woman’s head dropped a few feet away, rolling in her direction. It had bulging white eyes and whipping red locks, its jaws opening and closing. “RAMONA,” it shrieked. “RAMONA! RAMONA! RAMONA! RAMONA!”
Ramona screamed, unable to keep her cool now as the doll parts converged on her and more heads rolled forth crying out her name. Something hit her shoulder and clutched there. A doll hand that was hot and almost flabby. Its fingers dug into her flesh as it crept toward her throat. She pulled it loose and tossed it. Other things fell on her. Smaller things that writhed in her hair like worms. Screaming again, she pulled them free along with locks of her hair—fingers. They were crawling over her scalp, one of them sliding down her neck and creeping down her spine.
She squirmed, tearing the fingers from her hair and slapping away one that tried to worm its way into her mouth. She fought, screeching and hysterical, as another worked its way into the valley between her breasts
and the one tracing down her spine forced its way down the back of her skinny jeans. Down on her knees, oblivious to everything else now, she unzipped her pants and pulled them down, seizing the finger as it attempted to slide up her rectum.
The body parts moved in.
A hand clutched her wrist and another slid up her thigh. More fingers dropped into her hair. One of them pushed itself between her lips and she bit down on it and it went to pulp between her teeth. Gagging, sickened, she spit the remains out as waves of nausea rolled through her.
But there was no time for that.
All the parts were pressing in and there was no time for anything but flight. Juiced with absolute terror, she broke free with manic acceleration, knocking everything out of her way and batting aside a head that came spinning end over end out of the shadows. She tore more fingers from her and threw herself into the first doorway she found, that of a clock shop. The door was open as she knew it would be because nobody locked their doors in Stokes, not in the good old days of 1960.
As she got through the door of the shop, the bell jingling above, a hand grabbed her by the throat and she fought frantically with it as its fingers squeezed her windpipe shut. She stumbled to her knees, tearing at the fingers, finally yanking them free, the nails cutting trenches in her neck. The hand was almost slimy with some hot secretion like sweat.
But it can’t be sweat, you know it fucking can’t sweat, there’s no way it can sweat—
When it continued to move in the moonlight, she stomped it until it came apart, her eyes starting from her head and teeth clenched, her blood boiling with panic.
It stopped moving.
She clung to a glass counter filled with watches, trying to catch her breath, trying to keep her mind from spraying into a fine mist in her skull.
Thump, thump, thump.
Mute with horror, she looked behind her and felt her knees go weak. She stumbled back against the wall. Doll faces. That’s what she was seeing. Dozens and dozens of shining white doll faces hitting the plate glass windows…but not dropping away, hanging on, suckering themselves to the glass with their mouths, like snails clinging to the sides of an aquarium.
They crowded the windows, all with the same sucking lamprey mouths and feral eyes as red as wet cherries, but luminous and bright like tensor lamps. Staring, searching, sweeping the confines of the store with a lewd, diabolic glare, they watched her. The eyes looked to her like the running lights of ghost ships coming at you out of the fog. Noxious and poisoned eyes that fixed her to the wall like a pinned beetle, knotted her insides, making her want to crawl into the darkness within herself and cry.
There were so many faces by that point that they covered the windows, the mouths sucking at the glass with the repulsive, slobbering sounds of babies at teats. All of them were oblong and distorted, made of some white undulant tissue that would not hold its shape. They inflated and deflated, forever shifting and mutating like images in fun-house mirrors. They waited there, watching her, pulsating like jellied ova.
Ramona suppressed a mad desire to start giggling and stumbled back into the shop, through a door and into some kind of workroom. Dizzy, nearly in shock, she hit the floor and lay there, shaking. Hot sweat rolled down her face and her teeth were chattering. This was it. It was just too much now. She was going insane and she welcomed it. There was no point in fighting; better just to accept things and go quietly mad.
Still blackened with soot, sticky with sweat and ashes, her pants unzipped and her coat gone, her shirt torn open and her scalp aching from the hair she’d torn from it, she closed her eyes.
No, Ramona, don’t go to sleep. You can’t go to sleep now.
But it was too late. The exhaustion and trauma had emptied her and she felt her mind dropping into darkness. Bare seconds after she warned herself against it, she was sleeping.
31
As soon as they stepped into the house, Soo-Lee screamed. She felt weak and dizzy, completely overwhelmed by an irrational terror without form. It filled her like black ink and she was utterly powerless to fight against it. She slumped against the wall, white and shivering from head to foot. It took her a moment to realize it wasn’t a wall at all, but the things leaning against it—doll people. They were crowded there and her hand actually sank into one, a cool fluid squirting over her fingers.
She cried out for Lex, but he was not there.
She knew damn well that the archway leading into the living room should have been right in front of her, but it wasn’t. It just wasn’t there. And, worse, neither was Lex. There was a wall where he had been standing like she was in some kind of carnival haunted house complete with sliding doors and hidden passages.
“LEX!” she shouted. “LEX!”
But there was no reply, only her voice coming back to her from what seemed a dozen different locations, forever bouncing and echoing but not losing its volume. Such a thing was not physically possible, but it kept up until she had to cover her ears with her hands.
When it ended and she could think again, she tried to be reasonable, logical. This was just like the diner. What she was seeing was some sort of physical illusion, but that didn’t mean it was necessarily real. Lex was probably close by. She had to let herself see him. Drawing in a deep breath, Soo-Lee reached out again to where she knew he would be in the dark and she touched more doll things. Something like a wet, furry mouth nipped at her finger.
The puppet master is turning up the heat. You are terrified and that is energizing all this. Just try to calm down.
She did try, but to no avail. She could not overcome the vein of hot-white terror that moved through her in waves. To beat it would mean she would have to convince herself that the walls were not lined with waiting doll people and that would mean touching them, thinking through them, and reaching out for what was really there.
Impossible.
Entirely impossible.
She tried again and nearly gagged on her own fear. It filled her throat like warm vomit. No, there was no thinking around something this big, this omnipotent, this starkly real. Meeting it face-to-face was beyond comprehension. She needed to move. Trembling, she began to shuffle forward, following the passage and letting it take her away, hoping that movement and distance would somehow wear this dark fantasy down until reality reinserted itself. The passage seemed to veer from the left and to the right, back and forth, slowly moving ever downward until she was gripped by a crushing claustrophobia.
Ahead, there was light…dim, guttering yellow light but light all the same.
She went to it, moving faster now and when she reached it, she had to put a fist to her mouth so that she did not scream again. The light was coming from the doll people that crowded the walls in some medieval vision of hell. It came from their hollow-socketed eyes—a flickering yellow glow. As she stood there, up and down the passage each set of eyes lit up like Christmas bulbs and the reason for that, she knew, was because it was important she see just how many of them there were so she would realize how weak and insignificant she was by comparison.
Their mouths were all yawning open as if they were screaming…screaming out the pure terror of what they were and maybe what they had once been. The screams were silent. Her ears did not hear them, but in her mind they were high-pitched and hysterical, scraping her nerves raw.
She stumbled along, gasping for breath, her head filled with the shrieks of the dead, damned, and deranged, her eyes rolling in their sockets as they took in all the swarming figures around her bunched together, the screaming faces and surreal, frightening architecture of their bodies: the dangling limbs and skeletal bodies, torsos laid open to reveal the intricate clockwork guts of gears and cogs and wires and pulley systems, the elaborate bone-like armatures. The faces of doll babies were paper skulls, leering and ape-like, bodies like shattered vessels and ossuary baskets.
Something inside Soo-Lee was caught between a laugh and a scream at what she was seeing, at all the leering, jeering, ogling, staring doll faces
that pressed in from every quarter. So many, so very many. Looking upon them evaporated her will and made her heart feel like a swamp that had been drained, leaving nothing but black mud and rotting organic detritus behind. In her mind, she could see her soul leaving her body like a thousand glimmering fireflies exiting her mouth.
It was all subjective, but she was forced deeper into the barren underworld of herself.
You can’t fall apart now. You can’t! Lex is trying to reach you so try to reach him!
Yes, she knew that was important, but knowing it did nothing to lessen her claustrophobia. It increased by the moment. The passage now seemed to be entirely made of doll people. They grew from the walls like piebald mushrooms—lumped, mounded, bulbous, and crowding, synthetic faces pushing out like expanding soap bubbles until there were no walls, only more and more faces of grinning sackcloth, sloughing burlap, carved wood, and vacuum-formed plastic. They seemed to be multiplying around her through some perverse binary fission, faces splitting into more faces that divided yet again into still more. She watched with unblinking, fearful eyes as the face of a smiling mannequin woman cracked open with a rubbery, shearing sound like a soft-shelled egg and four, then five puckering baby doll faces emerged like hungry chicks, oval mouths opening and closing, suctioning like blowholes.
It happened again and again as faces and bodies ripped open to disgorge clusters of puppet babies still glistening with the foul slime of afterbirth.
Soo-Lee fought down the urge again to scream and laugh simultaneously, to vent the gibbering madness inside her. This is what it was like to go insane. It felt like her mind had gone to a warm, melting glop that would drain from her skull or run out of her ears.
The multitude of heads around her seemed to inflate like balloons, alive but inert, animate yet lifeless, their shrill mewling cries reverberating through the passage and pushing her far beyond the boundaries of sanity.