by Tim Curran
He waited, thinking, I should escape it before it finds me.
But escape where? That was the question. The voice was inside his head, yes, but it was also in front of him and behind him and to all sides, it seemed.
Don’t you worry and don’t you fret, little doll-face, because you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, the voice said, giggling.
That’s when the lights started coming on. Not good clean electric lights, of course, but wavering orange-yellow lights like those of huge antique tapers. The sort that threw greasy shadows and created pockets of writhing darkness. But light was light and Creep was content with anything he could get. The corridor was more along the lines of a circular industrial tunnel, he saw now, set with aluminum conduits bolted to the walls that must have held electric lines or steam piping, something of that sort, heavy ducts overhead.
Not knowing what else to do, he moved on and soon the tunnel widened and he began to see…at first he did not know what they were only that there were many of them crowded along the walls. He looked closer to all sides and saw that they were molds, casting molds of the sort that were used to thermoform plastic parts. They were all hinged like clamshells, standing open. He saw molds for hands and feet, legs and torsos, arms and heads, a variety of faces all carefully machined or carved from aluminum. They looked like death mask impressions. He saw others, molds taller than he was, that were full-body molds—one section had a perfect hollow of a mannequin back and the other that closed over it, a hollow of the mannequin front. When the thing was closed, hot plastic or some other material would be injected into it and, when it cooled, it could be opened and there would be a perfect life-size doll.
As he walked along, he saw dozens of these.
Some for men, others for women and even children. Looking at them and thinking about what they might turn out, Creep began to shiver, and then he began to sweat. Though he was hot and feverish, the sweat that rolled down his face was cool to the touch. It had a foul yellow smell to it that sickened him. This was the odor of the human machine poisoned out by the bile of its own fright, dementia, and horror. This is the stuff that ran from you, he knew, when all hope was gone and you were fundamentally fucked in every conceivable way. Men who walked to the gallows or the electric chair probably sweated out corruption like that. He had never smelled anything like it before and he supposed most people only did once—right before they died.
C’mon, doll-face, stop thinking. You’re no good at it. And, besides, you’re almost there, you’re getting real close to who you came to meet.
The voice kept taunting him, but Creep stumbled on almost blindly, obediently. He saw no reason now to argue his fate or try to run from it. Who he had been his entire life, he was not now. He would go where the voice suggested and he would see what waited there, because there really was no alternative.
As he walked and the molds became more numerous, piled against one another in heaps until he could no longer see the walls themselves, he heard the voice telling him how close he was. Then he saw the owner of the voice. Even though he trembled with terror, he was not really surprised.
Danielle was hanging from the wall.
Not really Danielle, but the same horror he’d seen on the TV at that house, Danielle remade as a doll—a pallid and naked thing, her limbs swiveled at the joints, her smallish breasts like pert mounds with nipples that were shiny pearls. The gash between her legs seemed to throb with vitality, swollen and juicy like a ripe peach. Her flesh was textured burlap, formfitting, but not lying on what was below quite right as if she were a snake gradually sloughing its skin. Her chest rose and fell as if she really needed to breathe.
Look at me, doll-face, she said, her hinged jaw mocking speech. As I am, you will soon be.
Her blonde hair was lustrous and shining, but like a wig it seemed to be coming loose from the white scalp beneath, shifting off to the side. One eye was a black pit, the other gleamed like a moonstone, opalescent and milky. It was recessed from the mask-like face, blank yet hideously alive.
Creep thought of running. It was purely instinctive, but it was the only thing he could think of doing.
No, no, not now, the Danielle-thing hissed. Not when you’ve come so far.
It writhed on the hook that suspended it, straight waxen lips pulling back from tiny teeth that were like jagged kernels of corn. She kept squirming, something inside her wriggling obscenely like a Slinky in a sock. If he did not obey her, Creep knew, she would climb down and show him exactly what was beneath her skin. Maybe she would make him touch it and he did not want that, oh God, anything but that.
Go see who waits for you, doll-face, Danielle said, but by then, he was already doing so. Tears spilled from his eyes and his teeth chattered, his hands shaking so badly he had to press them to his sides to hold them still. His eyes felt dry and scratchy, but he did not dare blink. In the blink of an eye, the most malign things could happen in this place.
Go, doll-face, show her what you’re made of…she’ll like that.
“No!” he hollered, some last fragment of free will and survival instinct kicking up its heels inside him. “I won’t go and there’s nothing you can do that will make me!”
He felt good saying that. Hell, he felt empowered and determined and resilient in the face of this god-awful nightmare…but he was still walking forward. Maybe there was a last struggling fragment of defiance in his mind, but nobody had told his body about it and onward it went to keep a meeting with revelation and doom.
The perfectly disturbing part about it all was that he could not stop.
His body would not respond. His somatic nervous system had been hijacked and he was no longer in charge of his own body. He was just a rider now like a man on a bus. He no longer had control…yet, he could speak, he could move his lips, his head, his arms, he just could not stop the forward progression of his feet.
It was insane.
Desperate now, he slapped himself in the face with one hand after the other until his cheeks were red and burning, until pain and confusion made tears run. But none of it shocked him out of it and there didn’t seem to be a damn thing he could do about that.
There comes a time, the Danielle-thing informed him, when all choices are made for us and happy we are for it.
Creep had a powerful need to tell her to shut the fuck up because she wasn’t even human anymore. She hadn’t been much before, but she was even less now and he wanted to find a nice five-pound ball-peen hammer and smash her to pieces. God, it was crazy, but the idea of pulverizing her was almost sexually exciting…not that any of that really mattered because he was still moving down the tunnel to his fate and the realization of that made everything else seem pretty damn insignificant.
The tunnel was gradually widening.
And it was getting warm.
Creep was perspiring freely now. Some of that was fear and anxiety, but not all of it. The heat was palpable, rising a few degrees at a time. The air felt hot in his throat, difficult to breathe. It was about then, as sweat began to drip off the end of his nose, that he heard a sort of rushing/roaring sound like hot water gurgling through a high-pressure pipe and the entire tunnel began to quake. The rushing noise got louder. The tunnel felt like it was in motion.
What the fuck?
Now it was filling with a churning white steam like the sort of thing that a whistling teakettle blows out. It came on in a hissing, rolling cloud. And even if Creep had been able to turn and flee, he would never have escaped it. The steam hit him, engulfed him, and the pain of being seared was instantaneous. He hit the floor and bounced off the walls, hurting and gagging, but knowing that as painful as it was, it was not lethal.
The steam was not enough to kill him.
He heard a thrumming sound and something came out of the tunnel, which had grown quite large now. Whatever it was—and he could see very little of it—it came charging out at him like a phantom from the fog, grim and hulking and horribly industrial, bringing heat and noise and the h
ot pig iron smell of a foundry. It was a machine becoming flesh or flesh becoming machine. A deranged biomechanical thing that was assembled from yellowed rungs and knobs of bone that protruded from a riveted shell of discolored canvas-like skins, a machine of corpses and wriggling doll parts set with hissing vacuum lines and bulging pneumatic hoses, a great steel bear trap of a mouth that was a 5,000-psi cutting ram.
And above it, like a hag broken on a wheel, he saw a mummy with whipping white hair, a living death mask grinning and cackling.
These were the things Creep thought he saw as it seized him and pulled him into itself, as his hands and feet were impaled by spiked drive chains that carried him into a core of boiling smoke where an immense buzz saw split him from his crotch to the crown of his head in a gushing baptism of his own blood and meat.
51
Lex heard Chazz’s final death-scream, though he did not know who it was. The scream echoed and faded, but there was no doubt which direction it came from and that was exactly where he went: to seek its source. He felt his way along the walls, knowing that at any moment a pair of gnarled puppet hands might reach out for him, but he didn’t think they would. Not just yet. He was being drawn into this place to meet the puppet master and he would not be denied that.
He made it to the hub, which was partially lit by moonlight streaming in through skylights some three stories above. He couldn’t see too much as his eyes adjusted. Just enough to see lots of gleaming machinery and to recognize that the hub was like a cylinder that went up and up. It was an immense chamber and he knew it was the puppet master’s lair. There was a hot, charnel stench in the air that was sickening.
Now pale blue phosphorescence began to illuminate his surroundings.
The walls were set with a veritable industrialized maze of tubing and dirty gray conduits, metal ductwork and what looked like spiraled ribs jutting forth that seemed to be in slow clockwise and counterclockwise motion like gears of some sort…and gears they indeed were because he saw that he was in the heart of what seemed to be a clock. It was insane, but he was seeing it. How much was real and how much was subjective, he couldn’t be sure. He only knew that he was inside the puppet master now.
Stokes was just a physical reality she or it had created, an idealized homage to a town that probably never really existed in the first place, at least not in the way Lex had seen it tonight. The town was a physical projection of psychic or mental energy, but the factory…well, that was the flesh and blood of the puppet master. If the town was its mind, then this was its body…and this chamber was its heart.
A clock.
Why not? The doll people seemed to operate in some way or another like clockwork toys, so why not the puppet master as well?
Sighing among the eerie and abnormal grandeur of it all, Lex shook his head. He could sit here and speculate for hours, but the truth, the real truth of all this would probably be denied to him. He had come for a reason and he had to see that through.
Yet…this place was fascinating. A living machine. The spiraling ribs that made up the walls were rotating slowly but constantly, kept in perpetual motion by the immense mainspring and swinging collection of pendulums high above, which in turn moved the immense toothed escape wheels of the clock train, pinions, levers, and ratcheting mechanisms. Minute wheels and hour wheels were in precise calibration, keeping the biorhythms of the machine in perfect balance. And everywhere, the elaborate gear trains clicking and grinding and meshing—driver gears and worm gears and spur gears. Like the anatomy of a flesh-and-blood organism, none of it ever stopped, ever rested, ever even slightly varied in sequence or the result would be total chaos and the end of the machine that powered Stokes and the puppet master who lorded over all.
Destroy it, Lex thought, and you destroy the puppet master.
He edged farther into the room, stepping over tangled electrical lines and steam hoses that moved against one another with sliding, slithery sounds like mating pythons. He ducked beneath revolving cylinders and around hydraulic rams, his ears humming with the clanking of gear boxes, red-hot bearings, spiked drive chains, and thrumming generator shafts. He kept moving, but moving carefully because it was a dangerous place, a surreal nightmare of a factory in which everything slammed and hissed and whirred, hungry toothed and razored chains anxious to pull the unwary beneath presses where they could be processed properly. High-voltage lines sparked, vats bubbled, steam pissed out through cracks in hoses, and great jagged hooks swung through the air, seeking flesh to impale.
The heat of it all was nearly unbearable. A mist of oil and grease rained in the air that was clogged with smoke and nearly unbreathable. Beyond the odors of lubricants, hot iron, wax and melted plastic, there was a darker odor, an ever-present slaughterhouse stench of well-marbled meat, blood and marrow and burned hair.
Then he saw the machine.
Maybe it was what he had been looking for the entire time.
But was it real? Was any of this real? Yes, it all had physical dimensions and all of it could slash you open, crush you, scald you, electrocute you, or boil the skin from your bones, but that did not make it real.
And the machine not twenty feet from him could not possibly be real.
It was forty feet long at least, machined out of some black metal that was knobbed and ribbed, gaping with chasms and spiraling protrusions. At the back end of it he saw men, women, and children lined up like stock. One by one, they gave themselves to the machine and grinding spiked wheels pierced their hands and fed them into its labyrinthine depths. Through mesh fine as wires, he could see spinning saws slicing them open and dragging the bloodied halves into a boiling vat where they were rendered to a superheated liquid that was fed by transparent arteries into a great aluminum press that smoldered and whined with gouts of escaping gas. The mold was cooled and when it opened at the other end with billowing clouds of steam, a doll person stepped out and joined ranks of other synthetic people that stood around like gape-jawed mummies in a Mexican catacomb.
Lex blinked his eyes again and again.
He didn’t believe for a moment that this was how they were made, but something wanted him to and he had to fight against an impulse to join the others at the feeder end.
It was then he looked straight up through dissipating clouds of hot vapor and saw an immense web up there, a spider’s web, but made of some pink silk that looked oddly like needle-thin sections of human skin. A man was crucified up there. He was dismembered, but all parts of his anatomy were arranged in comparative relation to one another.
Lex knew it was Chazz.
And as some immense spidery horror of wriggling doll parts hovered over the dismembered man and jabbed him with needles, he was certain of it. He could even hear his voice: “God…God…God…help me…oh please let me die…”
Lex was speechless, struck dumb by such an atrocity.
At least, until his own mouth opened and he heard his voice say, “You’re being pulled into this…you’re making this dark fantasy real…you’re getting weak…”
Yes, he blinked it away and concentrated and it was only then that he noticed something that had escaped him thus far—everything in the factory maze was connected with gossamer web-like filaments. Every piece of machinery, every gear, wheel, and press was connected to something that was coming out of the darkness now, racing out of it, an immense black shape connected to what seemed millions of white filaments like a gruesome puppet with a thousand strings.
It was time to meet the master of the maze.
52
Close now, so goddamn close.
Ramona was nearing the axis of chaos and she could feel the dark magnetism of it pulling her in just as it simultaneously tried to force her away. She was afraid of it and it was afraid of her, only she did not know why and she feared she would die before she found out. In the distance there were the loud industrious sounds of a foundry—clanking and gnashing, snapping and popping, metal grinding against metal and an ever-present hissing of hot
gases.
The corridor would lead her there.
Step by step, she was closer.
Thoughts scurried through her head, things she did not want to be thinking about but kept sprouting like weeds nonetheless. This night had been endless. It might have been going on for hours or days now. Time had lost all meaning here in the devil’s playground. She knew the fate of Soo-Lee, and Creep was probably dead, too. Same for Danielle. But she wondered about Lex. She even wondered about Chazz. She still had feelings for him—struggling, fleeting things though they were—and she wondered if he was still alive.
But a voice in her head said simply, No. He was physically strong but mentally weak and morally corrupt. Once you stripped away his muscles and good looks, there wasn’t anything beneath but a frightened whiny little boy and you know it. Easy prey for Mother Crow.
Ramona wasn’t going to think about him anymore.
He was gone. He had to be gone.
And what they had, had been gone even longer.
She scanned the corridor with her light. She was heading in the right direction; her instincts assured her of this. The floor was messy, unlike the rest of the town. Did that mean anything? Where was the precision, the sterility, the obsessive neatness you saw in the streets? Underfoot was a carpet of leaves, cigarette butts, candy wrappers, metal shavings, wood splinters, and an extremely aged water-stained copy of Playboy. There were gray doors set in the walls. One said PRODUCTION SUPERVISOR and another PLANT MANAGER. Something brown and crusty like old shit had been rubbed on them. Maybe it was blood.
At the very end there was a large six-paneled oak door. Very elegant compared to the others. It was shiny, well-waxed and polished. It gleamed like a table in a Pledge commercial. There was a plaque on the door. It read:
MOTHER CROW