“Maybe.”
Soo-Lee nodded. “But finding it will be the problem. This town is a maze and I think we’ve all noticed that. I don’t think we’ll be allowed to find it. This other will confuse us and get us lost. And it’ll throw more doll people at us. Anything to stop us from getting away.”
“But if we could get there.”
“Even if we got there, we might not know we were there,” she said.
Creep slumped down again.
“Everything we’ve done since hitting that thing with the van to arriving here has been carefully planned, I think,” Lex told them. “We’re right where it wants us to be. We’ve been carefully herded. It threw certain things at us that would make us run and offered us shelter—this house—when it knew we couldn’t run anymore. What we need to start thinking seriously about is
acting
rather than
reacting.
We have to start taking some charge of our destiny or this other will run us ragged and then destroy us with those doll things.”
He wasn’t really sure how much on target he or Soo-Lee were with their thinking, but it felt right. Judging by what they had experienced and seen thus far, it seemed to fit. It was like a game, like they were being manipulated by the imagination and whims of a cruel child.
“So when do we started acting?” Creep asked
“When they throw something else at us,” Soo-Lee said. “We can leave this house right now. We can run in circles, but in the end we’ll only be reacting again. What we need to do is wait for what is thrown at us next and overcome it. That would be the first step, I think.”
Lex loved that woman. Her instincts and intuition were right on target every time.
Creep said, “When do you think it’ll start again?”
“Any minute now,” Soo-Lee said. “I can almost feel it beginning.”
18
Creep wasn’t sure what to make of them and their theories. It always seemed like Lex and Soo-Lee were on a private wavelength or something. They seemed to communicate very easily without words. But he wasn’t part of that. Even in school, he had not been part of that. For all he knew, their harebrained theories would get all of them killed.
He stood up and went over to the window.
He saw nothing out there, but that didn’t mean anything.
Inside, he was bunched up tight, just waiting for the air raid siren or whatever in the hell it was because that’s when it would start. Soo-Lee said it was about to happen and he did not doubt that at all. The thing that scared him is what form it would take.
“I wonder if Ramona and Chazz are still alive,” he said.
“If anyone is still alive, it would be Ramona,” Soo-Lee said. “She’s always been a major dynamo. If she is, she’s probably thinking what we’re thinking.”
“And it won’t be easy killing Chazz. He won’t go down quietly.”
Creep didn’t really care about Chazz. He didn’t want him dead or anything, but his thoughts were of Ramona.
They were in the living room of a house that looked pretty much like every house on the block. An average clapboard two-story. They hadn’t been upstairs yet or down into the basement and there was no point in nosing around in those places and looking for trouble.
Trouble will find us just fine without any help.
He took out his lighter and flicked it, the jumping flame lighting up the room and giving him a look at things. It was all very typical. A couch, two wingback chairs with accompanying lamps. A coffee table. A bookcase. A big old console stereo. And a TV that looked like something from a museum—a massive cabinet that sat on four legs with huge, bulbous channel and volume knobs and a bubble screen, obligatory rabbit ears up on top.
The lighter started burning his fingers and he killed it. “Notice how everything’s old? There’s dinosaur shit all over this stuff,” he said. “No technology newer than the 1960s. No cells or computers. Not even a VHS player for chrissake. Even my gramma had one of those.”
“It fits,” Lex said. “This figurative other we’re talking about is remembering the good old days of 1960. It can’t be too much more recent than that. I bet if you go over to that bookshelf, you’re going to see nothing copyrighted after 1965. Just a guess.”
Creep went over there. He flicked his lighter. “A shitload of
Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.
Let’s see…
To Kill a Mockingbird…The Agony and the Ecstasy…Franny and Zooey.
Yeah, all old shit. The stuff they make you read in English class.”
“
I love
To kill a Mockingbird,”
Soo-Lee said. She was an English major; of course she would say that.
Lex grunted. “I had to read
Franny and Zooey
in tenth grade. Our teacher was obsessed with Salinger.”
“Aren’t all lit teachers?” Soo-Lee said.
“Most, except for my eleventh-grade English teacher. Mr. Spreeg. He was big on Faulkner. Just the mention of Faulkner’s name gives me narcolepsy now.”
Creep ignored them. He wasn’t interested in debating fucking books. The thing that was intriguing him was that old TV set. He very badly wanted to take it apart and get at the tubes. When he was a kid, his uncle Frank had collected vintage TV sets and he had an amazing collection of old tubes. Creep loved looking at them. He wanted to open this one up and paw through its guts until he found those tubes like a diver digging through an oyster for a pearl.
The world lost something when they invented solid-state circuitry,
he thought.
There’s just something about old vacuum tubes.
Which was quite an admission from a techie like him.
In the dark, he kept staring at the murky shape of the TV and the funny thing was that he did not seem to be able to look away. He knew they were in a rough spot here, a truly horrible situation, but it was like Soo-Lee and Lex were not even in the room. His eyes were fixed on the dead TV and his mind could think of nothing else.
It was strange.
It was more than strange.
In his mind, he began to see black-and-white images of the shows that TV must have pulled in with its rabbit ears back in the good old days…grainy, fluttering images of things he had never seen and never really wanted to. The men smoked pipes and read newspapers; the women always had aprons on and slaved away in the kitchen; the children were unrebellious, well-mannered, and well-dressed. It was an age he did not understand. But the images captivated him and it was like he was really watching that old set.
What the hell is going on here?
he asked himself, but there were no answers in his head. Nothing that made any kind of sense anyway.
A tiny white dot appeared on the screen.
And he wasn’t the only one seeing it because Soo-Lee gasped.
“What the hell?” Lex said.
The pictures were gone from Creep’s head now. He, like the others, was staring at the tiny white dot in the center of the bubble screen. It was growing. It went from the size of a pin to the size of a quarter, gradually expanding. Now the screen came on and there was static, a field of snow, and wiggly horizontal lines.
Nobody said anything.
Soo-Lee said earlier that she could feel something beginning and this had to be it or, at the very least, the prelude. A picture was coming up on the screen, but it was still rolling and bleached out. It was hard to say at first what they were looking at, but Creep knew it was coming. Those old tubes took time to warm up. The image would never be HD, but it would come. In its own way and time, it would come…and maybe this was what he feared the most.
He waited there with the others, wringing his sweaty palms.
The image stabilized. It was still grainy and not exactly sharp, but it was certainly clearer and they could see exactly what was going on. It showed a family sitting around a dinner table. A 1950s family by the looks of it. A mother and father and two boys having an animated conversation. There was no sound, but a canned laugh track was almost a given. As the peas and chicken were passed, the boys got very excited. They apparently were launching some sort of scheme that made the mother look comically overwhelmed and the father exasperated with a clear
oh-boy-here-we-go-again
kind of look.
“It looks familiar somehow,” Soo-Lee said.
Lex swallowed. “Yes…I think it’s
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
We had to watch it once in Mass Media in high school.”
“When is it from?” Soo-Lee asked. “The fifties? The sixties?”
“It ran a long time, as I recall, from the fifties into the sixties. But their sons are small here and judging from the furnishings, I’m going to say this episode is from sometime before 1960.”
“And why does that matter?” Creep asked.
“Because, again, our theoretical other is creating a physical image of the good old days before the social upheaval of the 1960s. This whole nightmare we’re trapped in has something to do with that, with some incident that happened back then.” He shrugged. “Maybe our other is trying to recreate a world before something happened.”
“What?” Soo-Lee said.
“A tragedy? Something that happened to the town or them personally. I don’t know.”
“You’re guessing,” Creep said.
“Of course I am,” Lex admitted.
The sitcom played on and Creep sat there, tensely, the images filling the room with flickering light. Soo-Lee’s and Lex’s faces were painted with a dull blue glow. What was the point of this? Was it somebody’s favorite show back in the good old days or was it kind of like Lex intimated, a frame of reference for a simpler time before some horrendous tragedy? Creep didn’t really care. He just wanted out. It all made him panicky because he knew it was leading up to something bad.
The camera panned away from the joyfully arguing family and focused in on an archway behind them that presumably led into a very standard 1950s living room. They saw a shadowy gray form sitting near the wall. It was ghost-like, out of focus, somehow contorted as if it had been put together wrong. There was a table before it with a body on it. A woman.
Creep was almost certain it was Danielle.
It was too dim and shadowy to be certain, but he had the feeling it was. The certainty was like a blade of ice in his heart. The shadowy figure—it was one of those doll people, he realized—was doing things to the body. It opened the corpse up, pulling things out, plucking off limbs like the wings of flies, carefully replacing everything with items he could not be sure of other than what appeared to be prosthetic arms and legs, a bundle of gears and cogs like the guts of a clock that were stuffed into the body cavity. Then the doll person was doing something to the face, peeling and slicing, then cutting and finally sewing. Stitching up what it had made with black gut that looked like fence wire.
“Shut it off,” Soo-Lee said. “Please shut it off.”
Creep was more than happy to oblige. He tried turning the on/off knob, but it did no good. The TV wasn’t even on and it wasn’t plugged into anything.
“It won’t do any good,” Lex said.
Creep knew it wouldn’t, but he tried anyway. He had the feeling that even if he had a hammer in his hand he could not have broken the bubble screen. It was not part of the plan, part of the game that was being played on them.
Now the Nelsons were gone along with their sons.
The camera had pulled away from the weird anatomical plunderings in the living room and was panning over the dining table, revealing the half-eaten food on the plates, the glasses of milk half-drank, the chicken and vegetables that still steamed on their serving trays. It showed them this, then it showed them the chairs pulled away from the table. One of them was tipped over, as if someone had left in a great hurry.
The camera passed by a single window quickly and light flickered out there beyond the curtains, the jumping light of a bonfire. But the camera didn’t waste too much time with that. It pulled back now and they could see the shadowy doll figure standing in the corner, head hanging to one side as if its neck was broken. It looked like some kind of mannequin leaning there, something incapable of movement.
The body was no longer on the table.
Creep felt an icy/hot fear-sweat run down his face. What had been on the table was shambling in the direction of the camera that seemed to be fixed now as if it was sitting on a tripod. The figure came closer, moving with an uneasy limping, seesawing sort of locomotion. One of its arms swung back and forth with pendulum strokes, a limp and dead thing, the other was missing.
“That’s Danielle,” Soo-Lee said, something breaking in her voice.
The figure got closer. It was still blurry and out of focus, but there was no mistaking that it was Danielle…or that it had
been
Danielle. Her long blonde hair was pulled over to one side of her head, gathered at one shoulder in snake-like tresses. Her face was pallid, grotesque, made of something that was not skin exactly, one eye a black fissure, the other staring out at them with a cataleptic glaze…but set back as if she was looking through the eyehole of a rubber mask. It rolled in its socket like a marble