by Tim Curran
As Ramona watched, filled with revulsion and remorse, it half-crawled and half-hopped over toward the corpse of its mother. It gripped the splayed thighs, trying to force itself back up into her where, perhaps, it saw safety and security from the big bad world. The slopping sound and gushing fluids as it tried to tunnel into Soo-Lee were too much.
Ramona ran over there, moaning in her throat. The beast looked up at her accusingly right before she kicked its head off its shoulders. For the longest time she stood there, feeling strangely exhilarated and strangely guilty. But one look at Soo-Lee’s blood-spattered face was enough to cure her of the latter. For a few seconds there was a gentle whirring from inside the moppet’s trembling body, then it ceased and there was only silence, huge and enveloping.
She moved away toward the door, opening it and stumbling down the corridor. She found the stairs and went down them on rubbery legs, barely able to hold herself up. She could not properly categorize what she was feeling at that moment. It seemed to be some unbelievable combination of grief, guilt, and relief. When she got outside, she distanced herself from the house and made it out into the park, where she collapsed on her knees.
She clicked off the light and just breathed in and out.
I killed it, she thought. Yes, I certainly killed it.
And though she felt that was a necessary thing, it did not make her feel any better because, in its own way, the creature had been a living thing and it had been a child.
After a time, Ramona climbed to her feet and started east again.
48
When Chazz again opened his eyes, he was spread-eagled in midair, hanging twenty feet off the ground in some huge shadowy chamber. He could see skylights far above and pale moonlight washed down over him. He was naked. He could feel a chill against his skin.
His most immediate thought was: If I’m dead, how can I feel the cold?
Which meant that he wasn’t dead at all. His last memory was Lady Peg-leg holding him up by the ankles like a newborn in a room that looked like a Victorian dissection theater. He remembered the bulbous woman. He remembered Lady Peg-leg squeezing his balls…then nothing. Just a blank gray sameness. A sleep without dreams.
With a shudder, he tried to reach down between his legs to see if everything was still there, but he couldn’t move his arm. In fact, he couldn’t move either arm nor his legs or even his body. The best he could do was to crane his head a bit. He was tied up, roped up in the air in that immense moon-washed room.
He began to panic. He was a strong guy, but even he was not strong enough to breaks the bonds that held him. “SOMEBODY!” he shouted out. “SOMEBODY HELP ME! I’M TRAPPED!”
His voice echoed and died and he wondered if it was such a good idea to be calling out and drawing attention to himself. He was quiet after that. He flexed his muscles and made his body move as much as it could, but all that did was make him dangle slightly back and forth. And it was then, as he craned his head, he saw that there were no ropes or cords binding him. No, he was not roped, he was stuck. He was adhered to something that he could not break free from.
What the fuck?
What the fuck indeed, because the moonlight showed him that which he did not want to see. He was in a web. He was in a great web of spun silk that was anchored by strands to the walls and the ceiling high above. Disturbing images paraded through his head of the guy in The Incredible Shrinking Man fighting the immense house spider for dominance in his diminutive world. Except in this case, he knew with rising hysteria, it was not a spider as such but the thing he called the Spider Mother.
Unable to control himself as he went hot and cold, sweating and fighting and straining, he put up an almost superhuman attempt to break free, crying out, sobbing and screaming and finally whimpering.
None of it did him any good.
He had been naïve to think that death and dismemberment at the hands of Lady Peg-leg was the worst possible thing. Now he would know true terror and true horror.
Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop.
His breath would barely come now. He inhaled and exhaled in short, spiky bursts. His flesh was crawling from his belly right up to his throat, his scalp tingling and running with perspiration. She was coming now. She had secreted herself in some dark corner or funnel web and now she was coming. Now that he was awake, it would begin.
Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop.
Louder now. Her hundred legs were rapping against the floor below as she returned to her web and the fat, juicy fly that waited for her there. He fought even more frantically now as she approached, wondering in some insane way if flies heard such sounds as spiders bore down upon them with slavering jaws.
CLIP-CLOP! CLIP-CLOP! CLIP-CLOP!
She was nearing the wall now for her climb up to the web and he knew if he didn’t break free, it was over. There would be no more head games with Lady Peg-leg, no more Stokes, no more anything. The life he had known before would end in the most macabre and grisly way and he actually saw it as panic and madness and absolute dread fused inside of him. In a white thunderbolt that split open with a flash of light, he saw his life. His shitty, desperate childhood and his sadistic stepmother, the dark confines of the closet, the beatings and burnings and threats and hatred. He saw all of that and then saw it lifted like a veil before his eyes as he was a teenager and he got big and fast and strong and excelled at athletics. And that’s what it had always been about. Not rushing for the winning touchdown or banging the ball out of the park or jumping higher or finishing faster…no, that was all candy glaze, it was superficial…what it was really about was putting on the speed so he could run as fast and far away from his horrendous childhood as possible. It was the black specter that haunted him. It was the thing in the darkness with upraised claws. It was the shadow that forever reached out for him.
And now here in this awful place, it was not just a spider thrown together out of doll parts that threatened him, but the darkness of his childhood coming at last to get him, to choke the life out of him and smother him with his own secret terror.
CLIPCLOPCLIPCLOPCLIPCLOPCLIPCLOP!!!
She was coming up the wall now and there couldn’t possibly be a God above because he or she would have stopped this. No, there was no supernatural father figure up in the sky because if there truly was, all those kids wouldn’t have died in the concentration camps or starved to death or been kidnapped and beaten and raped and molested and murdered. There was no God, only chaos. God was created because people needed something to believe in, something that would convince them they weren’t meaningless crawling insects and that there really was some fairy-tale wonderland beyond the pale of death and not formless blackness without end.
Chazz laughed at these realizations, these truths and certainties that had come to him here in his final hour. They could have enriched him and empowered him and sculpted him into a decent, caring person had they come before but they had never been able to break through the wall of fear, arrogance, and frustration that he had built around himself.
“I KNOW NOW!” he cried out. “I REALLY HONESTLY KNOW NOW!”
But by then the Spider Mother had mounted her web and the entire network trembled with oscillating waves, the individual strands sounding like plucked violin strings as she neared him. Plink-plink, plunk-plunk-plink. He saw then that he was not alone in the web. It was strung with dozens and dozens of well-gnawed, well-juiced, and well-stripped carcasses of men, women, and children. He could smell their viscid death-stink and it was like maggoty carrion was rubbed in his face.
The gossamer cables of the web were shaking badly now and he could feel the freezing shadow of the spider horror approaching him, knowing it was the embodiment of man’s primal fears, the seed of the fear of the unknown. This was it.
And then it was hovering over him, an immense abstract sculpture knitted together out of mannequin legs and doll arms and puppet heads, bones and sheaths of silk and dripping spider spit. It whirred and clicked and hissed. Death vapo
rs blew out of its many black mouths that puckered open and closed, ropy tangles of saliva falling from them into his face and burning, God, searing like acid and Chazz screamed as he felt the tissues of his chin and cheeks dissolving.
I won’t go out like this! a voice in his mind bellowed. I will not die like this! I…REFUSE!
The agony of it all made him give one last Herculean effort and he managed to get one hand free that he tore at the Spider Mother with, batting aside crawling snakes of silk and tearing open clusters of bulging egg sacs that burst like water balloons, spilling jellied slime over him.
Still he fought.
He wrenched a grasping doll arm out of its socket, shattered a grinning puppet face and pummeled the Spider Mother until his knuckles bled. She had pushed a dozen hollow-eyed mannequin faces out at him and he punched them, smashing his fist into them, knocking some back, cracking others open and making them open their hinged jaws and scream at him. He was hurting her; he knew that. She was screeching and mewling and shaking.
If only it was enough…
He kept at it, completely out of his head, until his knuckles broke and the skin was sheared from them. And the only thing that really stopped him was the crowding faces that opened their black, dripping mouths and sprayed him with sticky threads of silk that were very much like Silly String. They netted his face and webbed his bloody, broken hand. They were wet and elastic and burning, their tensile strength unbelievable.
She had him.
He had hurt her, but now she had him and he was helpless. One of the mannequin faces hinged open like a clamshell. A fleshy proboscis emerged, horridly phallic and pulsing. The end of it puckered open like a tiny mouth and a surgically fine black needle emerged. She jabbed it into his throat and, as she did so, other mouths produced similar proboscises and likewise jabbed him. Numbed by toxins, Chazz hung there limply as the Spider Mother began to suck his blood with a perfectly ghastly sound of children sucking milk through straws. She siphoned off enough to take the fight out of him and by then he was flaccid and partially cocooned, whimpering out of fright and madness.
“Now, Mr. Man,” she said in a dozen smooth, silky, and blatantly sensual voices. “You’ve been promised to others and it’s my job to dole out your good parts.”
The mannequin heads parted like a sea and a set of mandibles emerged like a set of gigantic scissors. They were chitinous things, snipping open and closed, their inside edges set with razor blades. The Spider Mother took what Lady Peg-leg and the bulbous woman wanted first: his manhood. They darted in and snipped his balls and cock free and Chazz screamed with a high, wailing sound that was amplified in the huge chamber, echoing and coming back at him. His breath came in great gurgling, pained gasps as he screamed and screamed again.
There must have been an audience down there somewhere because he heard what seemed hundreds of voices moan with pleasure: OOOOOOOOOHHHHHH….
The Spider Mother was throbbing with ecstasy by that point, her mouths blowing out hot plumes of steam and things inside her—gears and motors, cogs and red-hot bearings—whirring and whining and squealing.
Chazz was still crying out, though his strength was fast ebbing. As the blood gushed from between his legs, countless swollen pink tongues emerged from the spider’s underside and greedily lapped it up. Still, he continued to thrash in his silken harness, mouth shrieking and head snapping from side to side, his eyes bulging like they were going to blow from their sockets.
She snipped off his left arm and then his right.
AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH, moaned the voices.
By then he was fading fast, hearing the voices and his own screams and feeling his life draining away as she nipped and licked him, drilling him with stingers and opening him with glistening, busy mouth parts like sheaths of surgical knives.
The last thing she took was his still-beating heart, ripping it from his chest like a bulb from black soil, holding its pumping, bloody mass up for all to see before dropping it below to anxious outstretched hands.
By then, Chazz knew no more.
49
Ramona stood on the road, staring up at the factory on the hill and a deep chill settled into her bones. Even if she hadn’t known that this was the evil core of Stokes, she would have felt it. The factory brooded atop the hill like a poison mushroom, seeping toxic juices that blighted the countryside and filled the town below with venom. This was it. This was the malignancy that needed to be cut out, torn up by the roots and burned to ash. This was the nucleus of the tumor itself and she was about to drive right into it like a hot needle.
She was not unexpected.
She knew that much.
Mother Crow did not want her here. In fact, she feared it as Ramona herself feared the idea of coming in the first place. That was what they had in common: fear and rage. Because they both stood ready to fight to the death and neither would back down.
This was endgame.
Resolutely then, Ramona started up the drive to the factory.
And things began to change just as they had in the park. Reality was warping, unzipping itself and she smelled smoke. Yes, the thick, pungent smoke of the burning town. She heard something like a muffled explosion and the factory ahead of her literally split right open, gushing flames and huge rolling clouds of ash.
It started here. The fire started here at the factory and swept down into the town. That’s what happened.
There was no way she could know that, but the certainty remained: it had started here and she was seeing it. Regardless of what Mrs. McGuiness said, it had not started in the town. It had started right here.
The sky above was lit by a red glare and waves of heat rolled down at her. The trees to either side of the road burst into flame. The field was burning. The factory was engulfed in tongues of flame and she could hear people screaming. She looked behind her and watched the town down there burn. It was an amazing conflagration and nothing was spared. It looked like a bonfire. She turned her gaze back to the factory. It was broken and mangled, immense walls of flame rising into the night. There was another explosion and then another from its blazing guts and things began to rain from the sky: slats of burning wood, smoldering bricks, and fiery bits of metal. The factory was giving up its ghost and this is what it vomited up in its death throes.
The heat was enough to roast her, but Ramona pushed on, untouched by any of it. She stepped through smoldering ash four inches deep, moving around pieces of the burning factory, parting sheets of churning smoke. The factory erupted again and more debris rained down into the fields of cinders. She thought they were parts of corpses, but they were not corpses but doll parts and mannequin parts. She saw grinning melted faces and blackened heads, limbs and bodies. Things welded together by the heat, human-shaped armatures whose plastic and wax flesh was bubbling and oozing free. It all continued to burn and she realized the screaming she heard was not that of people, but from the dolls themselves…their charred and blistered mouths were crying out into the night, rising in a single wavering note of agony.
But dolls can’t scream. Mannequins and puppets can’t know pain, a voice of reason informed her. But I’m hearing it. I’m hearing something.
Then…it all began to fade and it was daylight many years later and the factory was in ruins around her. Why was she being shown this? But there were no answers, so she just quit asking questions and let it happen, soaking it all up. The remains were scattered everywhere like bones in a field after a great battle. Bricks were caught in the tangled grass, crumbling walls of them and teetering cairns from which saplings grew. Great crawling shadows were cast by the looming skeleton of the factory itself, gathering in dark pockets and nighted hollows. A spooky, pervasive silence shivered in the air. She could hear a creak of metal in the wind somewhere, maybe an old rain gutter or a loose piece of tin.
Two smokestacks still stood, rising from the blackened wreckage like fleshless fingers, one straight and tall, the other leaning to the side like it might tip over at any
time. Crows held court atop them, spreading their wings and cawing. Scrub brush had grown up everywhere, heaps of debris becoming hills of wild weeds and devil grass. She heard creatures scurrying about, birds calling out.
The closer she got to the factory, the more wreckage there was.
More bricks and rotted planks and old smoke-blackened timbers, but also rusty machine parts, girders, conduits and iron piping in which swallows nested. She stepped around the remains of a third smokestack that had fallen and was netted by weeds. Huge gears rose from the earth like the backs of fossil saurians. The factory had fallen into itself, filling vast pits and cellar-holds below in junk heaps of twisted iron, collapsed walls, and a multitude of tiles that reminded her of flakes of skin.
And yet again, she had to wonder, why am I being shown this?
But the answer was obvious now. Mother Crow had shown her the fire and its aftermath as if to pound into her head that whatever had lived (or existed) in the factory was long gone now. The fire had neutered it and made it harmless. It was all just a memory now and the entire area was a graveyard. There was no danger here. Ramona should go back into the town. That’s where the real threat was.
But Ramona, of course, wasn’t buying it.
She wasn’t buying any of it.
Approaching the hulk of the factory and stepping into its black shadow, she could almost hear it sigh with displeasure.
She opened the door and went in.
Because it was time.
50
Where are you going, doll-face? And what are you going to do when you get there? said a voice of scraping metal. Do you know who you’ll see and what they will say to you?
Creep pressed himself to the wall of this place that could not be but was real enough to touch. He had been escaping a doll thing down a black corridor that should have led into the hub, as he thought of it, but did not lead there…unless it had and he was there because who really knew and nothing made a lick of sense anyway.