Doll Face

by Tim Curran

  But she did not give in.

  Soaked with its vomit and its burning yellow blood that continued to squirt free in noisome loops, she was pressed up against the revolting tumescent flesh of the thing as it tried to bury her alive in itself, in its hot plastic skin, the gummy infected soup of tissue, which even then webbed over her and snaked around her in waxy, sodden ropes.

  Still, she fought.

  She tore at the mass of Frankendoll, digging into it, tearing out its flesh in spongy cobs and pulpous clots as its discharge flooded over her and engulfed her and she felt its many hands pulling at her limbs, making ready to dismember her and add her biology to its morbid collection. But it was also at that moment that she heard something throbbing inside and knew it must be its heart. Machines did not have hearts but this thing was not exactly a machine any more than it was a living thing, more of a biomechanical interface.

  With her last ounce of strength, she plunged her hands deep into it, tearing her knuckles on gears and cogs and spinning wheels and felt her hands grip a fleshy beating mass that felt about the size and general shape of a football. She yanked with everything she had and tore it out by its coiling roots, falling back with it, free of the monstrosity that wailed and screamed, blistering and dissolving and swimming in a fountain of its own doll waste.

  She held the heart of the thing over her head.

  “NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!” the voices boomed, seeming to make the room shake. Vessels shattered and the walls cracked open and dust was shaken from the ceiling overhead.

  The heart was enormously slimy, dangling with fibrous pink tendrils that coiled and snapped. It was like some rotten, swollen black tomato pulsing in her hands.

  THUMP-THUMP! THUMP-THUMP! THUMP-THUMP!

  She tried to rend it with her fingers but it was rubbery and slick, palpitating wildly with what seemed conflicting arrhythmic beats like it was trying to jump free.

  THUMP-THUMP! THUMP-THUMP! THUMPATHUMPATHUMPA THUMP—

  As the hissing, bubbling mass of Frankendoll came at her, she threw the heart to the floor and picked up the axe. The voices screamed one last time before the blade came down and bisected the quivering muscle that sloshed like an overfilled water balloon. It erupted with an explosion of yellow juice that flooded over the floor and Frankendoll screamed, coming after Ramona again, but staggering and clumsy, smashing into things and tripping over wreckage. She grabbed her Ray-O-Vac and axe and went through the hole it had made where the door had once been.

  It followed, but not for long.

  It tripped over ribbons of its own flesh and sloughing limbs, leaving smears of tissue on the walls that squirmed with fingers and mashed faces as it put out clouds of boiling fumes and its flesh went liquid and pooled on the floor.

  And then she was out of range of its death throes and before her, the hub and who she had come to meet.

  53

  Lex had seconds.

  Amid the deadly clockwork that was the surreal machinery of the puppet master’s mind, he knew that the only way to stop all this was to stop the machine itself. It had to be unplugged, yanked out by the roots like a parasitic weed or its wheels would never stop turning. It was the only way. It was the only possible way.

  As he felt the puppet master coming for him, he searched for something, anything that could be used to start smashing things.

  There had to be something.

  Then he saw there was.

  A huge four-foot torque wrench that had to weigh thirty pounds. It would have been child’s play for Chazz to swing something like that around, but for Lex, who had always been a thin, wiry sort of guy who could never put on weight regardless of how much junk food he swallowed, it was like swinging some immense battle axe.

  He gripped it, liking the feel and heft of it.

  Without hesitation, he brought it up over his head and swung it at the first thing he saw—a gearbox. He thought he heard a cry from above him as the housing broke free and then he was certain of it as the wrench landed again, smashing several gears and upsetting their calibration, making them grind and spew flakes of metal and sparks.

  At that precise moment, the siren started up again.

  Here, at ground zero, it was like an air raid siren, deafening and blaring, so goddamn unbelievably loud that he couldn’t hear anything else. He gave the gearbox another whack for good measure, then he turned and brought the wrench down on a metal conduit that immediately crumbled and hissed with escaping steam. Just these two small blows seemed like nothing in comparison to the immensity of the machine around him…but it was felt. Something around him shifted. The factory trembled. Its delicate instrumentation was being attacked. He was an invading virus that would infect the body.

  That’s when the puppet master revealed itself.

  It had been hiding, creeping about, rushing out, then retreating as if it were confused, but it was not confused now. There was nothing left to do but fight and fight it would. It came out to meet the intruder in a dark, amorphous shape that seemed to be constantly in flux as if it couldn’t decide just what it was.

  And Lex couldn’t decide either.

  Something inside him demanded that he flee, but something else, something much stronger and inflexible, told him to stand his ground.

  Face it. Look it in the eye and show no fear. Expose it for the weakling it is.

  Which was great in theory. But as it came out to get him like a spider rushing out to snatch an insect, everything inside him went to rubber. The first thing he thought he saw was something like an immense sheet metal press with teeth. Then something more along the lines of a slinking mammoth demon worm encased in the chitinous black shell of a millipede that screamed in the voices of flayed children. It showed him a hundred mouths, then a thousand globular red eyes veined with black, and finally descending talons like shards of glass that had come to eviscerate him.

  Don’t even blink. Do not look away.

  Hefting the heavy wrench in his hands, he felt positively impotent against this thing that circled around him, a horrendous industrialized and mechanistic centipede suspended off the ground by its puppet strings of white tendrils. They were like a million wire-fine fiber optic cables, so many that they formed sheaths and braids, growing out of the beast and cradling it in a cocoon of cobwebs whose origins were high, high above.

  It looked down at him with those seeking red eyes, which were not only horribly profuse but horribly intricate in design, like spinning gyroscopes, multi-lensed and multifaceted like the compound eyes of meat flies. The great undulant, vermiform body was a geometrically complex machine that pumped out hissing spirals of steam, trailing compression hoses and high-voltage lines like looping entrails. Its flexing shell looked like it was more metal than flesh or perhaps flesh becoming metal. Like the walls of the clockwork chamber itself, it was set with knobs and crevices and meshing gears, all of it seeming to be in constant industrious motion, spinning and linking and turning. And as it got closer to him, he dared blink and saw that it was composed not just of machine parts and flesh in some unnatural synchronicity, but of interlinked mannequins welded into some loathsome congregation of the damned. Eyeless and screaming, they reached out with thousands of thrashing arms and fingers.

  And high above at the end of the corkscrewing neck, he looked into the face of the puppet master…and it was female. There was no mistaking that. The face of the old woman he had seen in the house, the one stitching up the dead boy. Maybe it wasn’t exactly human any longer, but he saw that it had once been so. She or it had trailing straw-dry hair like luminous white worms, the fissured face of a petrified corpse, blank eyes like the buttons of greasy toadstools, and puckered gums set with what seemed to be the whirring teeth of chains. A dire machine of hate and retribution now, but once, once, she had been a living woman and not a crawling malevolence.

  As it came for him, he held up his wrench, more than a little aware of the pitiful threat he presented in the face of this immense chimera that had been b
irthed from the black womb of the factory.

  54

  “LEX!” Ramona cried when she saw him facing off against something that her mind could not even begin to categorize. “LEX!”

  The thing that had been coming for him paused, its segments flexing and gnashing. It hovered there, bleeding steam and breathing out smoke, drops of fluid dripping from its underside.

  Now it turned and started in her direction.

  Its appearance made her take a step back and she tripped over a drainage pipe and went promptly on her ass, but she did not let go of the flashlight or her axe.

  It’s Mother Crow, Ramona! She’s coming to get you!

  But what she saw in that dizzying, hallucinogenic moment was not Mother Crow or the mutant mechanism she indeed had become, a hybrid of flesh and iron, but hordes of doll people stiff-walking in her direction. They were white-faced mannequins in black cloaks, evil clown puppets sprouting writhing red hair like wriggling rubber worms, blow-up dolls and marionettes with vicious sucking mouths, fanged moppets and razor-wielding baby dolls, kewpies with too many limbs and nightmare Raggedy Anns brandishing meat cleavers. Some dark toy chest had been opened, some closet unbolted, and out they came to maim and mutilate.

  Leading the pack was something like a wizened, corpse-faced hag in a ragged gray gunnysack dress that hobbled on a peg-leg. Her face was a sutured gray bag that looked like it had been peeled from a corpse in sections, then stitched back together in a living pelt. Her eyes were huge gaping holes, her mouth shriveled back from gums and teeth. Ramona saw she carried a giggling mannequin head in one hand, swinging it back and forth by lustrous black hair, and there was no doubt it was Soo-Lee.

  “RAMONA!” a voice shouted. “RAMONA! SNAP OUT OF IT!”

  It might have ended there but for the voice.

  She blinked her eyes and cleared her head and saw that Lex was busy. He was in action. He had some great wrench in his hands and he was smashing it into the machinery and tearing hoses from couplings. With each blow, she noticed, there were fewer doll people and the factory itself seemed to tremble with rage or pain and possibly both.

  By then, the peg-leg woman was closing in. There was blood running from her empty eye sockets and more of it misting from her stitched mouth. It ran down the leathery mask of her face. Her gait was more uneven than ever, determined but almost drunken. She reached up a withered claw and Ramona saw three fingers drop from it.

  She was damaged.

  This whole place was damaged.

  Lex was killing it.

  “DESTROY IT ALL!” he cried out. “WRECK IT! TRASH IT! BREAK IT!”

  But Ramona already knew that. Mother Crow was the machine and the machine was Mother Crow. They existed in some abhorrent, deranged symbiosis and one could not live without the other. Each blow struck to the machinery was a blow struck to her.

  The peg-leg woman was mere feet away by the time Ramona found her feet. The stitching of her face was coming apart and blood that was dark like runny ink spilled freely from numerous gaps and tears. Howling, she clawed out at Ramona with bloodstained fingers, but Ramona easily sidestepped the foundering automaton.

  “Cunt!” the woman growled with a guttural sound. “Interfering do-gooding cunt! I HAD HIM AND I’LL HAVE YOU! DO YOU HEAR ME?”

  One of her hands grabbed Ramona’s wrist and it was burning hot as if she was blazing inside. Puffs of smoke were beginning to churn from every orifice and split seam. Ramona yanked her arm free and three of the peg-leg woman’s fingers came away with it.

  She was beginning to crumble, to decay and dissolute.

  Ramona brought the axe around in a savage arc and the blade sheared right into the woman’s face, which cracked open like a snail shell, something moist and pink inside drawing away from the intrusion of light. She stumbled back, tripped over her own peg and hit the floor with a cloud of dust and fragments, a viscid yellow ooze draining from her ruined head.

  She moved no more.

  The axe still in her hand, Ramona swung it again, shearing a couple of hydraulic lines that gurgled out copious amounts of red blood. It wasn’t possible, but she saw it spill over the tops of her shoes. She smashed a control panel and sheared the couplings of a huge spring, then gashed open a power box that went with a blinding blue flash that should have knocked her on her ass but didn’t.

  Lex was in a wild frenzy, doing the same thing.

  They were winning.

  They were winning, by God.

  The factory around them was sputtering and grinding, things clanging that should have moved with oiled smoothness. There was a groaning of metal fatigue and the sound of leaking fluid. The air was hot and stinking, everything backlit by an irregular flickering like a dying fluorescent.

  This was the pivotal moment.

  55

  Mother Crow came charging out of the shadows making a screeching, squealing sound like a grinder biting into a steel plate. She pushed out a rolling mist of red steam, jerking and thrashing on her scores of puppet strings. She made a clanking noise like machinery, a sibilance of boiling vapors, and a repellent slithering sound that, to Lex’s overheated imagination, reminded him of immense, bloated leeches intertwining.

  Now, at this final hour, the terror inside him was deep and shivery. How could they possibly stand against her? How could they hope to overwhelm a biomechanical monster driven by pure deranged supernatural wrath? It seemed they were beaten on every front.

  The creature was going for Ramona.

  And somehow, someway, he knew that she had been its target all along. Not him. Not any of the others. They were throwaways, stock characters, spear-carriers. The real center of power was Ramona and if she could not be usurped here and now, it would end for this horrible twisted monstrosity that—

  Mother Crow, a voice said to him quite calmly. Her name is Mother Crow.

  It sounded like Ramona’s voice, as if she had spoken right next to his ear.

  As it bore down on her, another voice—his own—informed him, Stand and fight! Fight for Ramona! If she can’t win, you can’t either! So fight! Goddammit, fight!

  Yes, that was the thing and nothing else mattered and maybe it never had.

  Ramona waited for Mother Crow and there did not seem to be even a momentary twinge of fear or apprehension on her face.

  “COME AND GET ME, YOU OLD FUCKING HAG!” she shouted. “YOU DRIED-UP OLD BAG OF HAY! I’M RIGHT HERE! YOU NEVER HAD ANY POWER! YOU NEVER HAD ANYTHING! YOU WERE AFRAID! AFRAID OF BEING ALONE! AFRAID OF NOT BEING ABLE TO PULL THE STRINGS AND MAKE YOUR WORKERS DANCE!”

  Mother Crow shuddered with rage, roaring and growling.

  As the bulk of her passed just overhead, Lex swung his wrench and shattered a brace of mannequin arms that reached for him. But that wasn’t enough and he knew it. The witch would merely regenerate herself. He had to destroy this place. Habitat destruction. That was they key. He went wild at that point, swinging his wrench and bashing pipes and valves and amplifiers. He saw a massive worm gear set in the wall and went at it like a berserker, pounding it until the chain slipped its cogs and there was a scream of tortured metal, an explosion of fiery blue sparks, and the factory itself seemed to cry out in agony.

  (NO! NO! NO! I CANNOT DIE!)

  He could hear Mother Crow’s screaming, tortured voice in his head. It seemed to be coming from some distant plain of suffering, gathering strength like a tempest, and driving right into his skull, punching through his thoughts.

  The chain whirred and sparked, throwing out black smoke that smelled like burning oil and industrial sludge, and then it came right off its cogs, swinging like a boomerang and nearly taking Lex’s head right off. It clanged to the floor, its heavy iron teeth stripping a junction box off the wall in an explosion of discharged electricity.

  It was like some kind of devastating chain reaction.

  The driver gears and clock wheels had lost their balance and the mainspring lost its tension and there was a great high-pitched squeal f
rom above as chains and pinions came loose, tearing apart the machinery and ripping vacuum lines and steam piping free as they fell. The great pendulums above were out of calibration like everything else, wobbling and gonging as they smashed into one another. One of them broke free of its housing and sheared through the great spider’s web above…and the spider that clung there. Both came crashing down, the pendulum impaling a machine, belts and rotors flying up into the air like shrapnel as bearings superheated and melted and relays went with a blinding white flash, oil and diesel fuel igniting and sending up a mushrooming curtain of flame. The spider itself crashed among the wreckage, bursting into a million writhing doll parts upon impact that were swallowed by the blaze.

  And again, Mother Crow’s voice pounded through his head.

  (MY CHILDREN! MY CHILDREN! MURDERING MY CHILDREN!)

  There was a searing stink in the air, a burned smell of blown fuses and melted rubber, fatigued metal and hot ozone. The entire complex was coming apart.

  “NOW YOU’LL BE ALONE WITH WHAT YOU MADE!” Ramona taunted her. “YOU BELONG ALONE! YOU NEVER HAD ANYONE! YOU’RE DRY! YOU’RE BARREN! NO ONE EVER LOVED YOU AND NO ONE COULD STAND THE SIGHT OF YOU, YOU FUCKING OLD MAID! OLD BAT! VIRGIN!”

  Mother Crow’s worming bulk struck the floor as her tendrils snapped and burned. She towered above Ramona, sizzling and smoking, an acrid steam pouring from her that stank like burning corpses. Her body was melting and popping, mannequin faces screaming out their agony and limbs liquefying like hot tallow. She struck the floor and then rose up again, glued to it by millions of oozing strings of hot plastic.