Doll Face

by Tim Curran

  Yes, there was a logic in that he could appreciate.

  He plucked more of the vermin free, searching through clumps of hair for their hiding places. He could almost sense them before he found them. With deft, practiced fingers, he seized them as they emerged from the scalp and made short work of them. He was not tossing them away now; he was crushing them like squirming little berries, feeling a rising excitement as he squeezed them into pulp, into clots of cold jelly that dripped from his fingers. They did not like to be killed, but he had to kill them because they infested the scalp.

  Though he still could not see the mysterious other on the seat next to him, he could hear her cooing her delight. Sometimes her limbs made rustling sounds like tree branches scraping against roofs and sometimes she made low slithering sounds that were disturbing but strangely enticing.

  “You’re making me feel so much better,” the voice said to him, nearly breathless with pleasure. “When you’re done, I’ll make you feel better. I’ll do things for you, you only dreamed of. You’ll never want another after me. I know things. Secret things. And I want to show them to you. Do you want to learn?”

  “Yes,” he muttered. “Oh yes.”

  After all the bullshit he’d been through tonight, much of it bad enough to break any man, he was finally catching a break. He had finally found a friend that he could trust and care for that would trust and care for him. She was beautiful. He knew that much. He could only judge by the feel of her hair—ecstasy—and her voice, which was pure desire. He still did not know her name, but that didn’t seem to matter. Such things were trivial. He continued cleaning the vermin from her hair until it seemed there were no more and she made a high, whining sound in her throat like the song of a cicada.

  “Feel the seats,” she said. “Do you see?”

  Creep hadn’t really noticed, but sometime during his grooming of her the car had stopped rotting and stopped spilling blood. Like him, it was whole again. It was solid and safe. The odor was gone, too.

  “You helped me and I’m helping you,” she said, her voice now deliciously throaty and seductive. “Now you need to relax.”

  She pushed him back on the seat and he was only too willing to lie back and let her do things for him now. She grasped his hand with fingers that were very cold and pressed it to her chest. Her skin was very smooth. His hand was between her breasts and he could feel the excited throbbing of her heart.

  “I’m alive like you are,” she said as if there had ever been any doubt. “Do you want to see me?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  Straddling him, she took shape there in the backseat and it seemed that long before he actually saw her he was seeing her in his mind. Her hair was long and dark. The moonlight made it gleam. Her face narrow, the cheekbones high, her eye sockets huge and empty. Her lips were full and as she smiled he could see that her teeth were long and sharp like those of a viper and he knew she wanted to impale him with them. No, that wasn’t right, that wasn’t what he had expected at all.

  “Get off me,” he said. “Get the fuck off me!”

  Her legs were scissored around his hips and she was not letting go. Her hair was graying now, bunching up on her head like a withered bush. Her face was set with fissures and cracks, the skin flaking away like old wallpaper, falling away and revealing a shriveled visage below that was like a soft, rotten plum. Her breath stank of rotting fruit and cider gone bad as her face moved in closer. His dream lover looked like an old lady three months in the tomb. Her hair was crawling with termites that burrowed into her scalp like the bark of a dead tree. They crawled over her face and winged from her eyes.

  “I told you I was broken,” she said. “Now you’ll be broken, too…”

  Creep let out a cry and fought against the thing holding him down, not knowing if it was real or if any of it was real, only knowing she would do horrendous, unspeakable things to him if he did not stop her now. As insects flew in his face and her breath went to black rot, he tried to throw her and pull her arms from him. One of them had a sort of flesh on it that crumbled under his fingertips and the other was little more than a mechanical armature. And her fingers, as they gripped his throat, were not fingers but the talons of a wild beast.

  Pressing herself hard against his groin, her cracked doll face came in close to his own. And though it was a dead thing, an animate mask and little more, the pink tongue that wriggled between the doll lips and sought his own was very much alive.

  37

  When Chazz broke free of Lady Peg-leg’s grip, he knew he would pay for it. He knew he would not be allowed to simply escape. That wasn’t part of the game and he knew it. He ran away from her, putting on great speed, and then something hit him in the back. It punched into him with the force of a battering ram, throwing him six feet before he went facedown on the ground.

  Then he could hear her coming for him.

  She moved up the sidewalk with the casual stride of an old woman who is in no hurry and knows she will get where she is going in the end. Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap, went her peg as she closed in on him. He lay there, numb and senseless, his limbs tingling.

  What did I tell you about bad boys? she said inside his head. What did I tell you?

  She tapped her peg on the sidewalk to emphasize this. Though his brain was half in dream, he remembered very well what she had said. Good boys will be rewarded. Bad boys will be punished. Yes, that was exactly what she had said and now she was going to punish him.

  Chazz knew he had to move, he had to motivate (as Coach had once said) or the game was lost. Rescue would not be coming. There was no one to save his ass but himself. But he had to want it and if he wanted it bad enough, he could achieve it. Dozens of inspirational speeches echoed through his head and he forced himself up onto his hands and knees. That was the first step. Then he would get to his feet and then…and then—

  Owwwww…Jesus.

  Lady Peg-leg kicked him. She had kicked him with her peg right between the legs, giving the old jewels a good hammering. Chazz clenched his teeth and went down again. The bitch! The filthy fucking bitch! The pain cleared his head as it always did and anger eclipsed fear and indecision. He rolled away before she could kick him again.

  BAD BOY! she shrieked in his skull. BAD BAD BOY! YOU WILL BE PUNISHED! YOU WILL BE EMASCULATED! I’LL TEAR OFF YOUR LITTLE BALLS WITH MY TEETH AND SPIT THEM IN YOUR FACE! DO YOU HEAR ME?

  And Chazz heard her all right.

  He bounded to his feet and when she reached out to grasp him with a hand like a scaly and withered bird’s claw, he punched her right in the face, giving her the kind of pile-driver that he had decked Joey McCawber with in 10th grade. But Lady Peg-leg did not go down. Her head snapped back and for one insane moment he thought it might pop up like in Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots, but it didn’t. She stood there, trembling, a strange whirring sound coming from inside her. Her head had snapped back to the extent that she was staring straight up at the moon overhead, then there was a creaking noise and a crackling like dry twigs and her head righted itself. Her black eye sockets looked out at him, her sagging face hanging in pockets and loose folds. He had popped some of the intricate suturing of her face and blood that was black like crude oil seeped down her cheeks.

  You do not hit Teacher! she screamed in his head. You never, ever strike Teacher! You will be brought to the Principal, the Maker and Un-maker! There you shall be laid at Her feet!

  Chazz stepped back so she could not seize him, because he knew if she did, she would never let him go again. She stood there, staring at him. Her gray lips had split open and shriveled back away from fissured pink gums and gnarled yellow teeth. She licked them with a mottled tongue.

  Now your hand, boy! Give Teacher your hand!

  Chazz, delirious with it all, made to swing on her again. As he did so, something—it felt like a hot wave of force—hit him in the face and with such power, he heard the cartilage in his nose split like a walnut and he was pitched to the ground, blood seeping from
his mangled nostrils.

  That’s how punishment starts, Lady Peg-leg informed him. Soon you’ll see how it finishes with a bad little boy with broken balls, a bad little boy de-nutted and de-boned and castrated, laid prostrate before She who Makes and Unmakes!

  Before he could do much but moan at the pain of his nose, she gripped his hair with one scaly claw and dragged him down the sidewalk by it as her peg went tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap, and she pulled him off toward the east where he would be sorted out.

  It didn’t matter how much he fought, her hand would not release him and her strength was irresistible. All his defiance got him was a guttural growling from her and a tightening of her fist, which nearly pulled his hair out by the roots. He tried to pull her hand away and it was soft, almost slimy with some secretion that felt like petroleum jelly.

  “Please,” he panted. “Please…just let me go.”

  But she continued dragging him off. Yes, bad little boys always beg in the end. But your begging has only just begun! Better to save your voice for when the real pain begins, you miserable little shit!

  Limp and sobbing, Chazz was drawn toward his ultimate destiny.

  38

  Even though it was coming for her, Soo-Lee did not scream because she had no voice. The scream was inside her, echoing through her skull, but she could not let it vent. Her throat was constricted, her lips pressed tight, her jaws locked. She would die silently now and in great agony and there was very little she could do about it. All that had come before was merely to soften her up for this terrible moment. As the grinning horror shambled in her direction, she realized she had been meat being tenderized and now she would feel the teeth.

  As she backed away from the thing with the flayed face, she was almost certain she had seen it before somewhere. Wasn’t it the haunter of her childhood nightmares? A grim shape that stalked the ebon byways of her subconscious mind? Maybe, maybe not. All she could be sure of was that it was not alive in the generally accepted sense of the term—it was a zombie armature, an animate articulated puppet sewn with something that was not exactly flesh and not exactly cloth.

  There were too many thoughts and emotions in her mind, all of them sharpened and made deadly by a fear that was so huge inside her that it was nearly incapacitating. The thing seemed to know this, suckling it, growing fat on her terror. She could practically hear the hollow thumping of its heart. It stopped about four feet from her, fixing her with eyes that were not eyes but deep black sockets. “Is that you, doll-face?” it said and that brought the scream cycling out of her, practically ejecting from deep in her guts.

  It was a walking carcass, overstuffed, lumpy and disfigured, rawboned limbs standing out at right angles from the body, fingers stiff and splayed. The face was at once some sloughing bladder of putty and a deflated mask-like balloon, a grotesque jigsaw puzzle that was stretched and pulled by crude suturing not of gut or thread but of some heavy string like packing twine that had been stitched in and out of the flesh in grisly intersecting lines that created bulging pockets of flyblown tissue.

  Knowing that it offended her, it grinned with a hacked mouth that made her knees feel weak. There were no lips, just a ragged hole as if it had chewed away its own mouth in a feeding frenzy. Its slat-like gray teeth looked capable of just about anything.

  Soo-Lee did not move away fast enough, though God knew the will to do so was most definitely there. It reached out for her and grasped one of her arms in a hand that was like a loose glove, the fingers digging in painfully. The creature whispered something to her, but in her state of abject terror she could make no sense of the garbled words or the scraping puppet voice that spoke them.

  It spoke again and this time she heard what it said all too clearly: You will be my beautiful bride, doll-face. And upon our marriage bed, I will know you.

  No, not an it, not exactly, but a he and his intentions were obvious.

  Soo-Lee screamed and fell back, tripping over her legs and hitting the floor on her ass. She scrambled away, finding her feet, as the scarecrow man got closer and closer still.

  He was grinning…if that lopsided, cadaverous grimace could indeed be called such a thing. Loose ends of stitching twine dangled like yarn from his face, which, up close, was yellow and white and gray, corrugated and cracked open like dry clay. It was in constant motion as if there was something beneath it that badly wanted out.

  The scarecrow man seized her again with a speed that seemed impossible.

  She reacted immediately this time, peeling its fingers away from her arm. They were strong, their grip like iron…yet they were hideously spongy. She managed to peel them free, one of them squishing with a hot spray of slime like a swollen, juicy caterpillar. With a cry of disgust, she turned away and felt the scarecrow man groping for her. Guided by sheer instinct, she clawed out at him with her nails, catching him in the face. Her pinkie snared a loop of twine and she heard it pull free with a sound like thread yanked through a buttonhole. He let out a cry that was half-anguish and half-rage.

  Before she could make good on her escape, one of his hands grabbed her by her swinging ponytail and dragged her back. With what seemed little effort, he swung her around and launched her directly at the bed. Her head cracked against one of the posts. She recovered, but not very easily. She climbed to her feet, dazed and sluggish, clawing out at him again but missing entirely.

  For godsake, run! If he catches you, he’ll rape you!

  Somewhere in the depths of her brain, a voice that was not hers tittered at the very idea. A mannequin raping a woman? A dummy exhibiting physical love? A horny puppet? Yes, the mind certainly boggled and it made no sense whatsoever, yet there was no doubt in her mind that he was going to force himself on her and if he was successful, she would go mad. There would be no alternative. She would go stark-raving mad.

  As she tried to escape, her head gradually clearing, her legs ready to move, he seized her again. He battered her head against the bedpost until she went limp. She felt fingers like hooks rake across her back, tearing her shirt open and scraping against her spine. The pain was bright and energizing, but when she tried to fight, he slammed her face into the bedpost again.

  When she came to, she was on the bed and he was on top of her, pressing himself down. His face was badly unraveled, the entire left side sagging like a wet paper sack. She could feel the dark sweet stink of his breath blowing in her face as he panted excitedly, the black sockets of his eyes like ragged holes. His entire face was inflating and deflating as he breathed, a sloughing expanse of stitches and seams and loose flaps.

  She screamed and threw him, sliding off the bed and hitting the floor on her knees. Her head hurt and there was blood all over her face. But the truly frightening thing was that she was naked. He had meticulously stripped her and she was crawling across the floor, nearly out of her mind.

  The lights went out.

  The darkness was absolute and unbroken.

  Soo-Lee got to her feet and stumbled about, bumping into things and upsetting other things that thumped to the floor or shattered at her feet. She could hear him breathing. Was it to the left? The right? Just behind her? She had to find the door. Her outstretched fingers brushed against a leathery mask and she screamed again. She whirled, moving this way and that, trying to find the door and trying to keep away from him as he stalked her silently.

  Something touched the nape of her neck.

  She clawed out at it.

  Something clutched one of her breasts and she knocked it aside.

  She circled, started, stopped, searching, feeling her way around and knowing that she would never find the door because that wasn’t part of the game. Sobbing and terrified, nearly in shock, she tried once more and he grabbed her by the throat. “Is that you, doll-face?” he asked as his other hand roughly kneaded her left breast. She fought and clawed and kicked, but it was no good. His breath was hot and searing now like the air from a blast furnace. His excitement was making him burn from the inside out.
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  “Please,” she heard her voice whimper. “Oh…please…”

  “No need to beg, doll-face,” he breathed. “No need at all…”

  She clawed out at him in defiance one last time, fingers tearing into him, and he came apart in moth-eaten rags and mildewed shifts, dusty wrappings like those of an Egyptian mummy. But none of the damage she did cooled the fire that burned in him.

  The next thing she knew she was on the bed and something rough and knobbed like a rawhide bone was pressing into her and she screamed one last time, venting her horror and madness and violation…at least until his mouth closed over her own in a flaccid and rubbery pouch.

  39

  By that point, Lex had no idea where he was or what the hell was even going on. He remembered the eyes, the many eyes, how they crawled like insects and then digging into the walls that held him that felt like living tissue. And then, and then—

  Then he couldn’t be sure because everything was twisted up and turned inside out. He tried to make sense of it, to apply logic, but even his fine and reasoning brain could not explain any of this. He recalled the car that had taken Creep away, then getting separated from Soo-Lee and what followed.

  Jesus, had that just happened?

  His sense of time was distorted, stretched like taffy until minutes seemed hours and days seemed seconds. He had to get a grip. He had to put this in some kind of perspective. He had to find Soo-Lee. The amazing thing was that he was outside. He was sitting on his ass in the cool grass outside the house. He had no memory after he began trying to dig his way out. Somehow…the house had ejected him.

  Ejected?

  No, he had a sense that it had been more along the lines of vomiting. Like a dog that couldn’t keep something down, it had regurgitated him. And why was that? Because he was refusing to accept any of it and refusing to buy into it? Was that it? Maybe. Yet, he felt there was more to it than that. Hell, something in him was certain there was more to it than that.