As the legs kept coming, he broke into a clumsy, stumbling run, cutting down a darkened hallway where he was certain other nightmares would be waiting for him. He saw a door. He grabbed the knob and threw it open. A breath of hot, spoiled darkness blew out at him.
It was just a closet.
That’s all it was.
Yet…
yet,
he saw that it was much more that that. For in the fear-induced hallucinatory narrowing of his perception, he saw that it was no closet. No, it was a coffin. It was a narrow house, an oblong box like in an old horror movie and he was holding the lid in his hand like a grave robber rooting around in old tombs for wedding rings and valuables.
He tried to let it go, but it refused.
It
refused
to be released.
Chazz knew in a steadily dimming corner of his mind that still functioned somewhat rationally that it was the closet/coffin that was making the decision here. He could not let go of it any more than he could will one of his fingers to drop off.
His hand was fused to the lid.
And whatever dark alchemy and deranged witchery were behind it, he was powerless next to it. He tried to yank his arm back with everything he had because this was not only bad in and of itself, but it was trapping him here while that thing with a hundred legs hunted him down. The second time he tried it—absolutely wild by this point, his eyes like glass balls drawn into bloodred sockets, a froth of mad-dog foam on his lips—the pain was intense. It was as if he was trying to tear his hand free at the wrist.
His only reaction, other than jumping and jerking from the adrenaline coursing through him like a hot shot of pure cocaine, was to cry out in a voice that he hadn’t used since he was ten years old:
“Leave me go! Leave me go! Leave me go! Oh, please, oh Jezuz Godz, leave me go!”
But it did not let him go.
This was not only an incantation, an evocation, but an invitation as well. Inside the closet that was no closet, he could see a body in a black burial dress hanging by its neck from the coat rod. Except it was no body, no woman, but…
Danielle.
Yes, Danielle remade as a puppet or a doll or a window dummy. Her eyes were missing, her face like gleaming white rubber, her jaw hinged like that of the Tin Man in
The Wizard of Oz.
As she performed a slow, twisting turn on the rope that noosed her broken neck, the hinged jaw opened and she said,
“What’s your pleasure, doll-face?”
With a shriek, Chazz broke free.
He pulled himself back with such strength that he threw himself four feet. Four dangerous feet into the shadow of the thing with a hundred legs.
He scooted around on his ass and saw the creature bearing down on him.
The hallway was flooded with moonlight, because it
wanted
him to see. That was a very necessary part of it. It wanted him to look upon it so he would drown in his own fear, which it would suckle and juice from him drop by drop.
It was a massive thing, a perpetual motion machine of metal pipes and wooden reeds and snapping elastic cords. A living, pulsating armature of femurs and ulnas, spoking rib bones and gleaming puppet bone slats dragged ever forward by scuttling toadstool-white doll legs that were hinged and swiveled, skeletal and fleshy, most with feet, others just wiggling stumps. All of it was welded together and threaded with knotted undulant cobwebs whose strands were thick as vines. They hung in rotting cerements and fluttering crepe and ropy sheaths. The thing spewed out sticky ribbons of them from a dozen puckering, sap-dripping orifices. It dragged dozens more behind it like a placenta.
Chazz screamed and pissed himself as it came for him.
Its legs rattled off the floor and walls and ceiling.
Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop,
went its legs, only there were so many of them it was booming and echoing in the confined space of the hallway like god-awful drums pounding and beating and hammering:
CLIPCLOPCLIPCLOPCLIPCLOPCLIPCLOPCLIPCLOP—
As the thing pressed in ever closer, its leggy/webby form opened like a flower to reveal a cluster of blind white eyes the size of softballs and a sticky black chasm that must have been its mouth, which kept opening wider and wider like a birth canal to suck him in.
He crawled frantically away, knowing he had mere seconds.
The thing had hoped to debilitate him with fear, to put him to his knees where he would finally scream and sob and suck his thumb, crawl into the darkest corner of the darkest closet of his dark, crowded little mind.
And he was close, so very close.
He saw another doorway, crawling faster to reach it, not daring to take the time to get to his feet. As he got through the door, the thing behind him so large that it could barely fit down the passage now, he heard its voice like a needle scratching on an old record:
“I will make my nest of scraps and bones and soiled rags. I will knit a cocoon of gray dust and old blood and virulent webs and lay the pulp of my eggs here in this womb of fractured darkness and my creeping young will feed upon you. In sorrow, shall I bring forth my children here in this deserted house. For that which brings harm also makes fertile.”
Then Chazz had the door closed and locked, his sweaty fingers pressed against it. He heard the thing coming. The noise of its many scurrying legs was deafening. It made his ears ring and his teeth ache. The door actually bulged as the thing struck it, battering it again and again, pushing its mammoth girth against it.
Then it stopped.
It scraped the door with something like dozens of claws, then made a sucking sound as if it had pressed its mouth up against it. There was a slimy, wet noise like the licking of many tongues. Then the voice again, that same strident, creaking voice:
“Rinky tinky tink,”
it said of all the absurd things, repeating it again and again with a lilting child-like rhythm.
“Rinky tinky tink, there’s a new one in town, I think.”
By that point, Chazz was probably mad.
He was probably struck blind with insanity. But something in him that wanted to survive would not curl up into a ball and die. It simply refused to…even when the thing began to project images of its victims into his head. He saw how it crushed them flat with its bulk until their entrails gushed from their mouths. How it slurped their juices up with its many sucking mouths and then ingested them, regurgitating what was left like husks. He saw how it tormented its enemies—blowing out their eardrums with its screeching voice and inserting hooks up their nostrils like Egyptian embalmers, drawing out their brains in spongy clots. How it nearly shook with orgasm when they tried to escape and it seized them with a thousand wriggling doll parts.
It wanted him to see it in its entirety: so it showed itself to him.
It wanted him to know its cruelty: so it showed him this as well.
And by then, Chazz could take no more. Screaming and hysterical, he ran from the door and dove straight at the window with every ounce of strength and weight he possessed. The window shattered and he hit the ground with a rain of glass fragments.
Bleeding, bruised, his mind bouncing around in his skull like a bullet, he ran off into the night before it could get him.
But even so, he knew he had not escaped it.
17
When he got the door closed, Lex went down to his knees on the floor, trying to tell himself he had not seen any of it. He tried to make himself believe that none of it was any more real than what Soo-Lee and he had seen in the diner. But he didn’t believe it. He found he
couldn’t
believe it because Danielle had been murdered and that was no fantasy. He’d seen it. It was real.
Or was it?
That was one of the questions that kept dogging him. Had the idea been planted in their heads? Had it been shown to them with three-dimensional authenticity so that their overcharged imaginations and fears would do the rest?
He kneeled there, just breathing, listening to Creep and Soo-Lee doing the same. Neither of them had really spoken since Danielle was murdered and he had the feeling they never would, not until he did. Not until he oiled their jaws for them and got them working again.
There was a terrible taste in his mouth, rusty and coppery but with an acidic sort of bite to it like tart fruit. He’d never tasted anything like it before and he was almost certain it was the taste of fear, a combination of chemicals the body secreted during times of incredible stress. A sort of adrenaline/hormonal/pheromonal/endorphin-laced cocktail and this was its by-product, a sickening flavor.
He was going to remark on it to the others, but he didn’t dare.
He just didn’t dare.
His scalp was greasy with sweat that ran from his hairline and stung his eyes. It felt almost cool against his hot face. He was exhausted. They were all exhausted…but the idea of anything like sleep was absurd. You didn’t take a nap in the cave of a man-eating tiger and where they were was no doubt much more dangerous.
“I think we’re safe for now,” he finally said.
In the dimness of the house, Creep just nodded his head. “Danielle’s dead. She’s…dead, man.”
“There was nothing we could do,” Soo-Lee said.
Creep laughed sarcastically. “Well, there’s one thing we could have done and that was not coming here in the first place.”
“And how could we have avoided that?”
“Chazz shouldn’t have brought us here.”
Lex sighed. “Creep…it isn’t Chazz’s fault.”
“He took that fucking shortcut.”
“Which nine times out of ten would have been just fine. It had nothing to do with him. This…all this is completely out of his control. I don’t know who’s behind this, but whoever they are, they have a way of rigging things, making things happen. We were brought here for a purpose.”
“To be killed?”
Lex just shook his head. “I don’t know. There’s no way any of us can know until we stop running and start thinking.” He studied their faces in the shadows. “This entire place is some kind of imitation. It’s not a real town. It’s either a projection of one or some kind of…of physical hallucination we’re all sharing.”
“Feels pretty real to me,” Creep said.
“It
is
real. But it’s only real because someone or something is reinforcing that. When they stop, it’ll stop.”
“And how can you know that?”
“I can’t. It’s pure gut feeling and for now that’ll have to be enough. Unless, of course, you have a better explanation.”
Creep didn’t. He just sat there silently, brooding and scared. “So you think this place is a sort of time loop or alternate reality, something along those lines?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“I noticed it from the first,” Soo-Lee said. “Everything looked so…artificial. I remember thinking it was like a movie set, some director’s idea of what a small town should look like, you know? Everything was too perfect, too planned, too…
seamless,
if that makes any sense.”
It did, Lex figured. “It’s very sterile, isn’t it? Like the memory of a small town seen through rose-colored glasses. Not the real town, but a synthetic, glossy, nostalgic too-good-to-be-true sort of town in a Normal Rockwell kind of way.”
“Yes, like a set,” Soo-Lee said.
“Exactly. I thought the same thing when we went into that diner—it was exactly what I thought a diner should be from images programmed into my mind from old movies and TV shows, Rockwell paintings and postcards. Everything was perfect just like the town itself.” He thought that over and felt it was the key somehow. “I mean, hell, there’s not any cars to crowd the streets. There’s not even cracks in the sidewalks or weeds in yards. Nothing that would upset the perfect balance.”
“And what does that mean?” Creep asked.
“It means,” Soo-Lee said, “that as weird as it sounds, it’s like we’re trapped in somebody’s dream or memory of a town. Not the real Stokes, but the way somebody wanted it to be or imagined it to be in their own self-deluded little way.”
“Okay, now I’m more scared than ever,” Creep said.
Lex told him how when they were in the diner, when they refused to accept the reality of it as offered, it changed. It became a darker and dirtier place, an ugly place complete with corpses and rats and flies. “It’s like our disbelief pissed somebody off. Oh, you don’t like this? I can make it worse.”
“That’s when the door disappeared,” Soo-Lee said.
“Yes, exactly. This puppet master we’re talking about changed the look of the diner, but it couldn’t stop us from escaping. The door disappeared, but it was still there. We walked through it, even though its image was gone. So there are limits to the power of this other.”
Creep was getting it now. He sat up. His eyes looked almost brighter in the darkness. “That means if we found where we came in, we might be able to get out. We might not see the road but it’s probably there.”