by Tim Curran
Sighing, Ramona looked to the east, or what her internal navigator told her was the east. As she did, she was nearly overwhelmed by a sense of fear and excitement. It seemed to fill her throat and she nearly choked on it. She was close now and getting closer all the time. The bits and pieces she knew would soon be married to something more that would explain the madness and expose its dark, agonized roots.
Mumbling beneath her breath, she began moving through the park now to the east and knowing that nothing could stop her. Whether it was where she wanted to go or where she was being compelled to go, it didn’t matter. She stumbled along, her mind getting sharper with each passing moment.
When she reached the outer edge of the shadowy park, she paused. “I know things now. I know things.”
And then, behind her, a voice said, “You don’t know anything.”
41
It was a factory.
There was no doubt of that. Though at first sight it had looked like some surreal interpretation of Dracula’s castle as might be seen in an old horror comic, it was indeed a factory. It even had the old multipane windows on the second-floor common to such industrial sites. Yes, Creep knew, something had been made here. Something secret. Something lost and now found again. Something that should not be but was.
He was inside now and it didn’t seem that he had entered so much as was sucked inside. The car had deposited him at the door and driven away, leaving him to stare up at the factory with horror and fascination. It was like some immense dark egg brooding in a nest, just waiting to hatch. That was his first impression. His second was that it looked like a fortress of gray stone block, three-story, flat-roofed, the first-floor windows tall and dark and set with iron bars, giving it the look of a prison or a madhouse more than anything else.
A voice in his head, tittering madly, had said, You punch in, but you don’t punch out.
He moved through the darkness, bumping into things and threading through shadows that did not seem to be shadows at all. Though he had never been in this place before, he seemed to know that there were three levels of machinery. That it was laid out like a wheel, all sections connected by long corridors that led to a central hub. If there was an epicenter to the place, it was the hub, which was like a hollow cylinder that led from the ground floor to the skylights three stories above.
He didn’t question how he could know these things.
Like the voice in the back of his head that kept asking him just what the hell it was he thought he was doing, he ignored it.
He was here because this is where the car brought him.
He was here because this is where he had to be.
He was in a long, narrow chamber, he knew that much. At the far end was an archway that connected to the corridor that would bring him to the hub. But he was not ready to go there yet. Part of him—a part he desperately tried to bury—was afraid to go there. He would stay here and see what this room had to offer.
You are now in the beast, a voice in his head informed him. The beast that the puppet master made.
Creep considered that…and then things started to happen.
The first was that the siren began to whine, cutting through the night with a shrieking, almost painful sound. But where before it was distant, now he was practically at ground zero and it cut right through him.
The siren rang and the beast woke up. It stretched and yawned and began to growl. Except it was not a growling as such, but the noise of the factory as it came alive in the darkness—roaring and clashing and jangling, machinery trembling and gears grinding and wheels meshing. Vats poured out steam and pipes shook and great presses hissed and molds cracked with great heat as belts rumbled and chains clanked. It was a cacophony of noise, of whirring and rumbling, tanks bubbling and levers shrieking with metal fatigue.
It was a ghost factory and he had to cover his ears from the constant hammering noise, though nothing seemed to be moving. All of it was auditory and within seconds it stopped, the factory seizing up again.
Bump.
Creep walked into a table. He stood there, rubbing his hip, thinking and trying not to think, trying not to remember the series of events that had brought him to this place at this time. He could see things on the table before him, which was like some immense industrial workbench. The room was filled with such benches. It was here that things were put together. He knew this even if he really knew nothing else.
In his mind there was a single thought: touch.
He needed to touch what was on the tables. He needed to explore what was offered with his fingertips even though he knew instinctively it was a very bad idea.
Touch.
You must touch.
You must feel.
By then, he already was. His fingers roamed over disparate objects. Coils, bundles of wire, gears, metal rods…then, then something soft. He did not know what it was but he could not stop touching it. It was flabby and warm and he felt like he was a kid again at a Halloween school carnival, exploring the contents of bowls in the darkness. Weird, squishy things that were supposed to be a dead man’s brain and eyeballs and guts but were actually a sponge soaked in gelatin and grapes in watery brine and great cold globs of spaghetti.
But this…whatever it was he was touching…it was not fake. It was alive and it pulsated beneath his fingers like a living human heart.
He explored further.
Yes, fingers, he found fingers. Fingers that were cold and inert until he touched them, then they came alive, brushing against his own. He found glassy orbs that must have been eyes and a jar of tongues that greedily lapped at his fingertips. Whatever he touched came alive.
He moved to the next bench.
His hand reached out, knowing it must touch what was there. He felt something silky like soft, soft skin. In fact, it felt very much like skin but almost doughy with no tensile strength. He ran his fingers up and down the cool, waxy material until he realized that what he was touching was a woman. There was the button of her navel set in the flat belly and, higher, the expanse of her ribs and two rounded breasts that lacked nipples. He kneaded them, disturbed by the fact that unlike real flesh, the indentations of his fingers stayed. They were like tiny craters. No, no, no! That wouldn’t do. Feverish now, a shrill laughter rattling in his throat, he began to smooth out the indentations, forming the breasts into perfect cones.
Yes, that was better.
His fingers continued to investigate. He found the slight mound of a hairless pubis between the thighs and he rubbed his fingertips over it gently so as not to mar its perfection. His index finger explored its cleft that was cool to the touch but gradually seemed to be warming and moistening as he toyed with it.
No, this isn’t right. This isn’t a woman. It’s a doll.
As if to prove this to himself, his hands discovered that she had no legs and when he explored the sockets of her shoulders, he found she had no arms. There was no head. From the stump of the neck there was a knob with a glassy, smooth ball at the end. There were other things…cords, slender steel rods.
Yes, it was a doll, the beginning of a doll…yet, the very idea of the torso and how it responded to his touch was enormously exciting. He ached with a carnal thrill, growing hard even though he knew it was wrong and completely perverse. Perverse? Hell, it was aberrant.
But he couldn’t stop himself.
He had both hands on the torso now and sweat thick as olive oil ran down his face as he shook with desire, trying to fight the perfectly obscene urge to climb up on the table and mount what lay there. Even now it was warming to his touch. The skin felt more like skin and he was certain he could feel tiny goosebumps. And, yes, the breasts had nipples now and they were hard under his fingers. One of them exuded a tiny squirt of milk that was burning hot against his hand. He could hear moaning, impassioned female moaning…but the torso could not moan, it had no head.
But he could see now, not just the torso but other things on the table and one of them was a face. Not a h
ead, but more like half a head, the front half with a face attached to it as if it had been cleaved from a skull. The face had no eyes, but its mouth was grinning, the lips formed into a perfect circle, moaning with pleasure. There was a clicking sound and he saw a severed hand, its knuckles clicking as its fingers drummed the table in anticipation. Another hand reached out and grasped his wrist, sliding its thumb back and forth against his palm.
Creep realized he was crazy.
He was crazy with terror and crazy with lust and he couldn’t seem to break the spell the woman had over him…or her parts had.
Do it! Stop this! Pull away or she’ll put herself together and then she’ll be the thing in the car!
One of her detached legs—which was finely muscled and sleek and very feminine—began to move. It rose up, its foot brushing against the side of his face and he found himself licking the toes as the other leg wrapped around him, clutching him tightly. One of the hands was unzipping him, freeing him, stroking his cock with firm, frenzied motions. The torso moved in closer until the head of his penis was pressed against its synthetic vulva.
Obscenity! Vile, disgusting, perverse obscenity! he heard a voice cry out in his head.
The torso pressed against him and he met it, pushing until he felt the head of his penis slide into the torso, which visibly trembled with shuddering waves of pleasure. He probed deeper into the silken, hot chasm as together they rode the rising spike of pleasure and were made one by the act. Creep was moaning. The face was gasping, its teeth locked together, its breath coming in short, sharp bursts. The legs held him in a vise-like grip now that was practically crushing. The hands gripped the edges of the table. The torso arched its back as it could feel release coming, getting nearer, building into a white-hot climax and—
Creep screamed and pulled out, peeling the legs from him.
He barely had the strength to do it, but he managed it, his flesh rippling and his cock pulsating, but some deep-set, inborn revulsion of what he was doing and who he was doing it with finally greased his skids enough that he not only slid out, but stumbled back five or six feet with absolute skin-crawling self-loathing.
The face screamed with cheated hatred.
The torso thumped against the table.
The hands balled into fists and drummed alongside it.
And in Creep’s head, it sounded like a thousand rusty hinges screeched at the same time, filling his mind with noise, which was the hysterical, insane cry of the torso and its attendant parts at being denied not just their oncoming orgasm but the seed he would have given them that they not just wanted but needed. They needed his life to pump up their own.
The screeching continued, rising higher, a shrilling that sent his nervous system haywire and filled him with cold-hot bolts of electricity as if he had just pissed on a downed power line. It jolted through him and he stumbled away, losing his balance, vomiting and chattering his teeth as he went to his knees, quaking and pissing himself. His eyes rolled in their sockets. His nose ran. Vomit and bile oozed down his chin. He was gone, completely out of it.
Pull out of it! Pull out of it! You don’t have much time!
He got to his feet as the noise in his skull died out and he heard, with a rising note of terror, the sound of the thing on the bench trying to hastily assemble itself into a being of wrath. He could no longer see anything. The darkness was thick and enclosing and that made it all only that much worse.
He had to find a door, he had to find a way out.
If he went back, it meant running into the thing that was even now refitting itself…but if he went forward, that would lead him to the hub that was the black, diseased heart of this industrial madhouse. He moved blindly forward, bumping into things and tripping, barking his knee and smacking his head. But he didn’t slow down. He would bull his way through here.
He charged faster and ran right into another bench, his hands going down to stop him from pancaking face-first onto its surface and what it held. He sank right up to his elbows into something that was surely a dead man, probably several of them. They were soft with decay, worms threading through them and maggots crawling over the back of his hands when he pulled them free. And the stink…dear God, foul beyond measure.
Creep did not know what the bodies were there for. In his fevered mind, he could not even imagine. He moved away, trying to suppress the giggling in his throat, and ran smack into a wall. He felt along it until he found the archway that led into the corridor. The air seeping out from it was cooler as if it led to a tomb.
Behind him, he heard something step off one of the benches and a voice like a knife blade scraped over a rusty barrel: “Is that you, doll-face?”
42
Chazz was not entirely sure what was dream and what was reality, he only knew he had found a safe, dark place and he was never going to leave it. He could remember being dragged away by Lady Peg-leg to a dark and spooky place and then getting free somehow, retreating into this hidey-hole where he knew he was perfectly safe. As long as he did not move and made no sounds, he would be safe here. It was like when he was a child and had done something bad. His stepmother would lock him in the closet because she thought it terrified him, but it did not terrify him. It only made him feel warm, enclosed, and secure.
His hidey-hole was like that.
It was a tunnel. Very dark, very safe. It was warm and soft in there and no one could get him. It was the place he often visited in his dreams, a prenatal memory of comfort and sanctuary.
Lady Peg-leg was near.
He knew that much. She was seeking him out but she would never find him. She droned on and on and if he concentrated, he could shut out her awful voice, which was a thousand forks dragged over a thousand blackboards.
Don’t listen to her! Don’t let that voice in your head or she’ll find you and punish you and you don’t want that!
No, he didn’t want that. When his stepmother punished him—her burning cigarette was the worst—he had always known if he just took it, it would be over eventually. She would get bored with her own sadism and turn her twisted mind to new endeavors. But Lady Peg-leg wasn’t like that because she wasn’t really human and things that were not human had an amazing capacity for patience. They could wait like bricks in a wall or cracks in a sidewalk. Ten minutes or ten years meant nothing to them.
“Go ahead, little boy, hide up inside your mama’s rotten fuck-hole, fester between her legs and worm your way deep into her dirty cock wallet!” said the voice. “Explore that well-worn, well-plumbed, well-bagged slunk tunnel! Squat in there, you little wart, in the depths where filthy men blew their cream and chowder! A fine place for you!”
The voice echoed in his hidey-hole and he told himself he must not listen because if he listened, she would know that he was listening and she would track him down, follow him to his source in his mother’s ultra-secret wellspring. He must shut it out because if he shut it out, then it did not exist and he could not let it exist because if it existed, then he soon would not. And although he tried so desperately to be quiet, so very quiet as he had done in the closet when he was a boy with black eyes and purple belt marks on his ass and cigarette burns on his legs, he could not stop the low, frightened whimpering that came from his mouth.
“A-ha! A-HA!” said Lady Peg-leg with unwholesome, slavering delight. “I hear you, bad little boy! Don’t think you can hide from Teacher because Teacher will find you as Teacher ALWAYS finds bad little boys! I’ll pull you out, my darling little cockswallow, and then I’ll lunch on your balls! Tender and sweet, are they? Soft to the tooth? Why, like fuzzy delicate little apricots that I’ll bite until the juice runs down my chin!”
Chazz stuffed his hand into his mouth so he would not scream as he had screamed when he was a little boy and his stepmother touched a lit cigarette to the tip of his little boy penis. He stuffed his hand in as far as it would go because he must make no more sounds or that witch would have him and make a fine meaty stew of his balls in her boiling black ca
uldron whose sides were greased with the remains of manhood boiled like prunes. He tried to do anything but listen to the voice and slowly, slowly, it all started coming back to him about the concert and the drinking and the van and Stokes and Ramona, dear hot little Ramona with her greedy hole and busy mouth, who would do anything to keep a man happy because her own manic OCD maintained that she was always at fault regardless of what happened and that meant she must work harder and give more to make things right. And Chazz had never really realized that’s what it was always about with her, but he knew it now and it sickened him because he knew something in him had recognized that immediately and exploited it to its fullest. Poor, dear Ramona. He had used her and preyed upon the one chink in her armor, utilizing her inadequacies the very way his stepmother had once utilized his own. If you don’t do what I say, then your father will be angry and he’ll send you to a foster home and we’ll go away to sunny Florida and we’ll never think about you again, you miserable little shit. And as Chazz realized this, he realized how fucked-up he was and how fucked-up he had always been since his mother’s death and his stepmother’s abuse. The latter much more than the former had sculpted him into the selfish piece of shit he was and the idea of that brought great pain. Dear God, he would make it up to the people he wronged. He would make it up to Ramona because she was the only good and decent thing he had ever known in his twenty-two years of struggle, disappointment, and abject misery—
But…it was getting lighter in the tunnel only it was not the tunnel that was doing it but him. Yes, he was sliding down it into the cold, cruel, and wicked world once again and he did not want to enter its heartless environs now any more than he had wanted to twenty-two years before. He was sliding down, down, and there was nothing to slow him or break his fall as the malevolent world of Stokes waited for him, smiling monstrously and grinding its yellow ball-shearing teeth together.