by Tim Curran
Why does a dog vomit something out? Why must it get something out of its belly?
But the answer was simple: a dog—or any other living creature with a stomach—vomited things out that were destructive to it, that would make it ill. Lex proceeded along that line of thought. Okay. Why was he destructive? Partly because of his stubbornness. That made sense. But there was another reason that he was a diseased cell in the body of Stokes.
And the answer to that was obvious.
So obvious it was ridiculous.
Oh, come on. It can’t be that simple.
But maybe it was. He had dug through the walls. He had injured the house and in doing so injured Stokes. It was absolutely insane, yet he almost felt that there was something to it. He didn’t honestly believe the walls of the house were really living tissue. That was a hallucination, an image placed in his mind to scare him or offend him, to revolt him to the point where he wouldn’t think of trying to tear through them. And, perhaps, for the house and for Stokes that was a weak spot. Maybe wherever the illusions were heaviest were the weakest points, places he and the others had to be warned away from.
He couldn’t be sure.
It was all so mixed up. He believed everything in Stokes, including the town itself, was a hallucination, but not necessarily a psychological or mental hallucination but a physical one, if that made any sense. Some things were nothing but illusions, but others were very real. But telling them apart was not easy. They were mixed together, woven into a common skein, perfectly joined.
And all of it was the result of the fucked-up mind or morbid intelligence that brought it together and made it real. Whether that was on purpose or accidental remained to be seen.
Lex got to his feet.
He was going back in the house. Soo-Lee was in there somewhere. Probably crouched in a corner, scared out of her wits. And that was the danger: if she believed what Stokes showed her, it could most certainly harm her or even kill her.
His head feeling screwed on tight again, that dizzy sense of unreality fading fast, Lex walked up the flagstone path to the porch. He didn’t think there was anything that could really stop him, he didn’t believe that—
Whump! Whump! Whump!
A series of explosions blew the windows out of the high, leaning house, a wave of heat hitting him and throwing him five feet as blazing wreckage rained down all around him. The house was on fire. It went up with a series of explosions as if a propane tank or something in the cellar had ignited.
Covering his head with his hands, Lex ran for the street as another wave of heat slammed into him and pitched him to the pavement. Soo-Lee…oh dear God, Soo-Lee, was the only thing that ran through his mind. Brilliant red flames jumped from the windows and licked up the siding. Two attic turrets on the roof blazed up like match heads. Burning shingles, boards, and debris erupted into the air as the roof exploded, vaporizing into a rolling orange cloud that leaped skyward. It all came falling down like a storm of fiery meteorites—lathing and timbers and planks and what appeared to be a smoldering staircase that crashed not ten feet from him in an explosion of flames and sparks.
He hobbled away from the inferno, coughing on clouds of black smoke that filled the streets.
And from all around him, maybe from the other houses and the very town itself, he heard what seemed like hundreds of voices screaming: YAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH! It was much like when he had kicked the TV screen in the house. All those voices, only this time it was the sound of agony.
The entire world around him flickered yellow and orange like a candle guttering in a carved pumpkin. As he looked back, even the trees in the yard were on fire. It was a real three-alarm conflagration and the house looked like some great burning barrel flaming in the night. As he stood there, his arms singed from debris, a section of hair burned from his head, and his face dark with soot, he muttered Soo-Lee’s name and sank to his knees.
How long he kneeled there, sobbing, he did not know.
He only stood up when there was a violent roaring and the house fell into itself in a blazing pyre of glowing orange timbers and a cloud of red sparks rose into the night. The house was gone. It didn’t look like there was anything standing but the blackened fingers of chimneys.
And Soo-Lee was gone with it.
She could not have survived it.
The puppet master did not want you going in there. It did not want you undoing all it had done. It had to keep you from finding out something or hurting the house further in your quest so it…it cut off a thumb to save the hand.
And it used fire. It was always fire at the root of things. Back at the diner, when all else had failed, the corpse dummies had burst into flames. When he and the others saw that old sitcom from hell on the TV, there had been flames flickering outside the windows. Yes, at the root of all this there was fire.
Numb, caught between waking and nightmare, Lex stumbled up the street, just moving blindly with no set destination in mind. Earlier, before the fire, he had thought he could simply walk in the house, grab Soo-Lee, and walk out again, leave Stokes by hurting it enough that he would be expelled.
But now he was not interested in leaving.
He wanted to stay.
He wanted to find the puppet master and destroy him/her/it.
And it was at that very moment as if he had channeled some psychic feed, that he looked east and saw an orange glow on the horizon that slowly died out. He did not think it was a trick. He needed to go there for that was the fountainhead of this nightmare.
Without further ado, going on nothing but intuition, he began to move to the east to meet whoever or whatever was running this show.
40
A flashlight.
Ramona decided she needed one of those more than anything. When she came upon a store whose window read HARDWARE, she let herself in. The door was open. Of course, it was open. Everything was open in Stokes. In Stokes you could trust your neighbors and you didn’t have to worry about things like thieves or city people. She was certain she had not thought that. That it was placed in her head or she picked up on some psychic vibe that was floating around. City people. No, that wasn’t a term she would have used. It was a phrase from someone who’d spent their life in small towns because they liked it that way and they were terrified to leave.
City people. Those rat-infested places are rotten with ‘em. And most of ‘em are dirty, slinking foreigners. Immigrants. Trash from every corner of the world.
She gasped. There it was again. She was beginning to believe it was the voice of the Controller. A narrow, paranoid, xenophobic mind.
Is that what this is all about?
There was no way to know and maybe she was better off not knowing.
Finding the flashlight was easy enough.
In her mind, she had been thinking about some little Tekna LED flashlight, but such things had not yet been invented in Stokes so she had to be satisfied with a heavy stainless steel Ray-O-Vac outfit that needed three D-cell batteries, which were easy to find as well. There was a certain satisfaction to having the flashlight in her hand. It was heavy and solid. Unlike modern ones that would probably shatter if you smacked someone in the head with them, this baby would crack a skull.
Okay then.
Time to move.
She walked randomly, edging steadily east, knowing she was edging east even if the Stokes she saw was repeated endlessly. That was part of the ruse. To confuse you and frustrate you and turn you around, make you doubt yourself. It was a maze, yes, but like any maze there was a path through it if you just used your head.
And then…breakthrough.
I’ll be damned.
Stretching before her was a large park. Just your average small-town park with benches and trees, the shadowy hulk of what she assumed was a war memorial in the distance. She saw a fountain nearby that was silent until she looked at it and then it came to life—sparkling water jetting orange and blue and green, lit by lights from below.
“Very
nice,” she muttered.
Guiding herself with the flashlight, she walked over a little footbridge that spanned a bubbling creek. Frogs chortled among the lily pads. The handrail was carved with the names of lovers. Interesting. She studied them all in the light, checking out the dates carved in there. Not one more recent than 1960. Just as she’d suspected. The great fire had burned this damn place flat and what she was seeing was nothing more than an idealized memory.
Ramona crossed the bridge and was back on the grass again. She kept moving the flashlight beam around in arcs to spot any doll people before they spotted her, if that was possible. But there were none. They had slipped into dormancy again as if the Controller needed to rest now and then. Whoever was doing this must have been spending a lot of energy to maintain the illusion.
She came to an open area with a bandshell and rows of wooden seats bolted to a concrete slab. Ah, just the place to listen to a concert on a summer evening from the city band. She told herself to keep moving, but she was rooted to the spot. There was something here. Something important and she needed to trust her instincts on that.
What? What is it?
She knew she had to shut her mind down and let it happen. This place was speaking to her and she had to hear what it had to say, something she couldn’t do if she cluttered her brain with thoughts. It was like yoga: empty your mind and connect. She wasn’t sure if it was working, but she had the sudden inexplicable urge to walk up to the bandshell, so she followed her instincts and went up there. Between two lush rows of hedges, she sidled up to the stage and placed her hands flat on it.
There was something here.
She could feel it.
Yes, it was gathering around her, nothing exactly negative or even positive, just a flow of energy, of memory, and she went with it like a leaf floating down a creek. In days long past there had been band concerts here every Thursday night. Turning, she could see them in the dark, all the good folks of Stokes sitting there tapping their feet and snapping their fingers as the band behind her played on, brassy and off-key like all small-town bands, but nobody seemed to notice. Out on the green beyond, vendors sold hot dogs and balloons and peanuts and root beer. She noticed that the men wore suits and the ladies wore summer dresses and large floppy hats with flowers on them. Even the children were dressed up.
Was that real?
Is that how it truly was or how the puppet master wanted to remember it?
No thinking. Just feel.
Let it happen.
It was like a weird electricity was running through her, galvanizing her bones and feeding through her arteries and all of it running right up into her head and making her feel dizzy and woozy. Now all the people were gone. It was high summer and the grass was yellow. It was uncut, wild. Weeds had sprouted. The root beer stand was still there—shaped like a root beer barrel, of course—only it was faded from the sun, the service window boarded over. Birds were nesting on its roof. A few warped planks had popped loose and creaked in the breeze. The entire park was overgrown and abandoned. Even the little footbridge in the distance…the railing was splintered, cattails clogging the creek. She shouldn’t have been able to see that from this distance, but she saw it just fine. Just as she saw that on the railing somebody had carved:
FUCK STOKES
The image of that was like a cold shard of glass sliding into her belly. Yes, for the Controller—and these memories belonged to him/her/it—that was pain. It was an insult. It was a slap in the face.
Ramona could very much feel the Controller’s anguish…anguish that verged on rage. She could smell a stink of burning rubber. Yes, over near the creek there was a pile of tires somebody had lit on fire. Teenagers. They were drinking and swearing, openly pissing in the grass. Something had happened here. Something had made picture-perfect, placid, pure-as-the-driven-snow Stokes go belly up.
But what? What the hell was it?
Now Ramona could see an old woman sitting on the edge of the stage, a hunched-over, skeletal thing like a bag of sticks. Despite the summer heat, she was wrapped in some dark shawl that looked old and well-used like herself. Ramona could see her face. It was ancient and puckered like a peach pit, the skin pale and set with fans of wrinkles. She was muttering something. Her teeth were gray, narrow, rotting black at the gums. One eye was dark and glistening, the other blemished white, blanched almost silver.
“I’m here alone,” her voice said. “Do you hear me? Alone.”
Ramona was only a few feet from her. Her own throat was so dry she could barely speak, but she managed one word: “Why?”
“Gone,” said the old woman. Her good eye swept over the park and its ruination and there was something cold and predatory about it, a depthless blackness in it that seemed to reach deep within her and perhaps beyond into some chasm of darkness. The warm summer breeze ruffled her white hair. Her lips were pulled back from gums going brown with age, teeth clenched in uneven rows, black grit packed between them.
“Yes, all gone now,” she said in a voice that was cynical and betrayed. She attempted something like a smile, but it didn’t work—her lips were twisted, brown, and ugly like dead earthworms fused together on a sidewalk.
Ramona was not certain the old lady was aware of her presence, then she craned her neck and looked at her, not so much with the good eye but with the silvery blanched one. At first Ramona thought there was some pale growth covering it like a pterygium, but now it looked as if the eye had been bleached white. The old woman speared Ramona with it and Ramona gasped.
There’s power in that eye. Maybe not in it, but in the deranged mind behind it. Something is there. Maybe something hereditary, something unbelievable.
“They think they can all leave, but I have other plans,” she said, this time directly to Ramona. “I’ve named each and every one, haven’t I? Their names went in the book, my book, and once written there is no deliverance but through me and I am a hard mistress. They’ll know soon the hold it has upon them. Reckon, they will.” There was an almost triumphant glee to her voice, the manic delight of a disturbed mind whose vengeance was nearing.
Ramona stood there, shaking, just sick inside.
I don’t want this shit anymore, she thought. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just want to go now.
But, no, it was not that easy. Not so easy for the residents of Stokes and certainly not easy for her. She had plugged herself into this and until the energy stopped flowing, she was part of the circuit and there was no backing out.
She stood there, still trembling, wanting to run but afraid to move. The old woman’s dead eye impaled her and held her there as easily as a bug on a pin. She was no longer speaking, but Ramona could hear her. It was her thoughts now, all the terrible and unspeakable things echoing up from the snake pit of her subconscious mind.
(Disloyal and unfaithful, that’s what they are. Treacherous, treacherous.)
(They would leave this town, which is my town, the town my family built and cried and bled over, but I won’t let them. This is my town and it belongs to me and they belong to me. Its guts are my guts and its blood flows in my veins and I suffer as it suffers and who do they think they are to turn their back on it? I will take them under my hand and teach them the error of their ways and my hand is a firm hand, an unforgiving hand and as I have made I WILL DESTROY AND AS I DESTROY I WILL REMAKE IN THE IMAGE MY HANDS KNOW BEST!)
Ramona almost fell over. She felt like she had been dipped in freezing water. An icy sweat broke out on her brow and ran down her face. It made her scalp feel greasy. It ran down her spine and dripped between her breasts and beaded her thighs and it was only through the auspices of years of physical training that she was able to stay on her feet.
(NOW IT COMES AND ONCE COMING CANNOT BE PUT DOWN! IT TAKES HOLD OF THEM! IT OWNS THEM! THEY ARE WHAT THEY ARE NOT! THEY ARE REMADE INTO WHAT THEY CANNOT BE!!!)
Ramona clutched her head in her hands because she did not want to hear the words anymore. She did not want them in
her skull, she did not want to feel them burning through her brain and distorting her mind, tearing it open and filling it with a black crawling darkness. Because the images were too strong now; they were devastating. The looming terrible faces and reaching white hands and huge empty eyes like blank windows looking into some black dimension of suffering.
The next thing she knew, she was on her knees in the grass, the world tilting around her. She was gasping for air and shaking, her head hurting and her eyes refusing to open out of fear of what they might see.
“C’mon…” she heard her voice say. “Pull yourself together…”
In the darkness she sat there with the flashlight next to her. It had gone out and she didn’t bother clicking it because she did not want light. She wanted the security of night, of nonentity. She was content to hide in the shadows.
But afterimages still burned in her brain.
She was tortured by them.
The stalking black shapes that were not men and women and yet were not exactly dolls or mannequins but some morbid, awful hybrid. Men, women, and children who were no longer men, women, and children but soulless artificial things that did the bidding of the deranged mind that brought them into existence—
“Enough,” she said under her breath.
Grabbing the flashlight, she stood up and leaned against the stage of the bandshell, trying to catch her breath and trying to bring her world into focus. Slowly, slowly, she pushed the nightmare images from her head, feeling that she knew many things and yet knew nothing at all. Stokes had dried up, it had died and gone to decay, abandoned, deserted, a ghost town of sorts. That had been the beginning of it. Then other things had happened and she did not think the fire was the worst of them.
Ramona stepped away from the stage and walked out near the seats that stood like a silent jury in the moonlight.
That old woman. Her family must have built the town and the town went to shit as small towns sometimes do, only she was not going to allow that. She had a hold on the townspeople. They were hers. She owned them and she would not let them go. She was like a little girl playing dolls…except her dolls were people.