She was trying to speak.
The cloth-like material of her face moved like it was alive. Her mouth was horribly lopsided. One side of it opened to speak, but the other side remained fused as if it was sewn shut.
“TURN IT OFF!” Soo-Lee said, sitting up. “TURN THAT FUCKING THING OFF!”
Creep just sat there, unable to move.
Danielle’s single eye had been looking at him, now it was looking right at Soo-Lee and there was no mistaking it despite the fuzzy, wavering image. She continued to speak and Soo-Lee clasped her hands to either side of her head like she was trying to keep it from flying apart. She had taken more than she could stand and she was very close to a breakdown.
Lex jumped up and the Danielle-thing tracked him with her eye.
He ran at the TV and kicked the screen with everything he had.
Creep was sure it would never break because that’s how things worked in places like this that were sculpted from the bits and pieces of nightmare. He was surprised when a crack appeared in the crystal. Danielle was slowly shaking her head from side to side as if she was disappointed. By then, Lex had kicked the TV two more times and just before the screen went black, Creep saw Danielle open her horribly synthetic mouth and scream. Though there was no sound, he could hear it echoing around inside his skull until he thought that he would be the one to have a breakdown.
Then the screen went black.
There was a tiny white dot that gradually faded. But before it did, at the very moment Lex gave it his last and most powerful kick, a sound rushed through the house that seemed to be carried on a moaning wind of burning air:
OOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
The chilling, sibilant sighing of what seemed to be hundreds of voices that cycled through the rooms and died out below them, somewhere in the vicinity of the cellar.
And that’s when things started to happen.
19
Ramona stood there, watching the doll parts moving on the ground as if some sinister life-spark were circulating through them. Hands trembled, torsos thumped, and legs kicked. Heads opened and closed their mouths, whispering with needling, strident voices.
She started breathing in and out very quickly, nearly hyperventilating.
An ice-cold sweat ran down her spine.
The parts continued to move as if a wind were blowing through them, making them rattle and click and tremble. As she watched, one, then two and three and four torsos rose up into the air, the others following suit as if they were being worked by invisible wires from above. Dozens of them spun around in some kind of storm and then they came together with heat and motion and impact, fusing into a common whole that danced up and down before her, swaying and gyrating to some unheard melody. Then the legs stood up. Those whose feet had broken loose reattached themselves.
She let out a tiny, strangled cry.
The legs were hopping around, pale and oddly fleshy, their ball joints shining in the moonlight. She was waiting for them to walk over to her, but that didn’t happen. They jumped up into the air, spinning around the common torso and then they, too, were sucked into its mass, gluing themselves to it. The mass continued to move and sway as before, but now it floated about with countless bare kicking mannequin legs that made it look like some horrible spider composed of human parts. Hands were joined with arms that clattered on the pavement and then they, too, flew up in the air, rising as if on a hot column of gas. They circled the mass of legs and torsos and were sucked into the mass, becoming part of it, arms flexing and fingers wiggling as this new and strange accumulated horror accustomed itself to its new environment.
Then the whispering heads.
They bounced up into the air, many of them fastening themselves at odd angles atop the many bunched and stacked torsos. Other heads adhered themselves to the bellies and breasts like gruesome ornaments.
Then this new and nearly indescribable mutation settled back down to the pavement, hissing and clicking and whirring. It approached Ramona with the marching of innumerable feet.
She ran.
Beyond terror, completely irrational with fear, she ran, sprinting down the street and up the sidewalk and around a corner. Pausing there, pressed up against the face of a building, adrenaline pumping through her, she made herself wait and listen. For a few seconds there was nothing and the buzz of fear inside her mellowed slightly. Listening to her own breathing, she stared at the blank faces of little shops across the street. The moonlight was bright, impossibly bright. She saw FLORIST, ICE CREAM PARLOR, and, at the very end, SUNDRIES. Yes, all very generic as before.
When was the last time there were stores called Sundries? Even if this is some weird 3-D representation of Stokes from the 1960s, things like that had to have been something of an oddity even then. A holdover from a much earlier time.
She heard the doll-thing coming again with an echoing
click-clack
of what sounded like a hundred feet marching forward in hot pursuit.
She ran.
Down the street, around another corner, cutting through an alley and across a little park that she had not seen before. When she got to the other side, she found another street and ran down it, racing around yet another corner and pausing again, her lungs gasping for breath and sweat beading her face.
Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack, click-clack, CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK—
God, it was getting closer.
It wasn’t possible.
That immense gangling thing could not be getting closer, but it was. The sound of its marching feet was echoing in her head like the cacophonous ticking of some gigantic clock, getting louder and louder and louder. And it was as she realized this, that she looked across the street and saw it again: SUNDRIES. Next to it, ICE CREAM PARLOR, and next to that, FLORIST.
I couldn’t have gone in a fucking circle. I couldn’t have.
She hadn’t. She knew she hadn’t. Either this whole goddamn town was one big loop or, yet again, she was being led, pushed in a certain direction by whoever ran this place. It wanted to break her with fear. That was important somehow to the Controller. She had to be broken. It wanted to run her to death like a dog.
Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack, click-clack—
It was getting closer now like it had before when it was just a collection of malevolent doll children. Closer and closer. As before, Ramona knew there was only one possible way to break the spell. She could not run from it; she had to run
at
it. It was the only way, regardless of how unbearably frightening the idea was.
CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK!
Jesus, it was almost on her.
She could see its shadow coming around the corner, an impossibly massive and undulant thing with marching legs, wavering arms, and nodding heads.
Sucking in a slow breath, she went to meet it before she had time to reconsider the foolishness of what she was about to do.
I won’t be run to death, I refuse.
She saw it bearing down, maybe forty feet from her, its shadow already touching her and feeling cold, dreadfully cold, like the air from a freezer. She ran right at it and it chanted her name and waited for her, its many arms open wide like it wanted to hug her, crush her in its multi-limbed embrace.
No!
Ten feet from it, she turned. She just couldn’t do it. She couldn’t let that horrible thing take hold of her. It would seize her, the arms enfolding her and crushing her against itself until her insides squirted out of her mouth like red jelly.
She turned on her heel and cut between two buildings and then she was in some huge fenced lot. A dead end. It was some kind of junkyard. She saw heaps of refuse, old barrels, uneven stacks of rotting lumber, and junked cars up on blocks. They lacked windshields and doors, the hoods raised and rusted in place, the engine compartments empty save for sprouting weeds. This was the graveyard of the town. As she stepped into its vast wasteland, she saw broken bottles glinting in the light, stacks of bald tires, and the bent frames of old bicycles. She stepped around a cracked bathtub and an overturned toilet. Things scattered among the refuse and she knew they had to be rats.
With each step, a little cloud of black dust puffed up.
They smelled hot, like cinders. She blinked her eyes and everything in the junkyard was smoldering. It happened that fast. Not burning, but smoldering as if the actual fire had burned out some hours ago and what was left was the choking incinerated stink, the hot ashes, and the lingering heat. She could feel it through the soles of her shoes. The junk cars were blackened, the wood charred, the tires melted into unrecognizable shapes that still let out greasy black fingers of rubber smoke.
Ma’am, please listen to me, okay? The only Stokes on Highway 8 burned to the ground back in the 1960s, I’m told.
Ramona let out a little cry because it wasn’t some voice of memory echoing in her head, but an actual voice. It sounded like it was spoken from inside one of the cars. But she refused to go see. She did not want to see. Gagging on the scorched smell, she stumbled forward, sweating rivers now, her feet hot and sore, her skin feeling like it was sunburned. If she didn’t get out of here and fast, she was going to become disoriented by the fumes and pass out.
It was only a matter of time.
The smoke seemed to be getting thicker. The moonlight cast expanding shadows of it across the seared wreckage. She began to see other things in the ashes, which were ankle-deep now. Body parts. She thought they were the remains of people burned in the fire that took Stokes so many years before…but no.
They were doll parts.
Baby doll parts.
All of them oxidized by the blaze. Little hands melted, bodies folded in half, groups of them welded together, dozens of little faces looking up at her with hollow eye sockets, blistered and ruined. And all of them grinning with what seemed some macabre delight.
Despite the heat, Ramona felt chills run down the back of her arms and up her spine.
She stood there on hot feet, rocking back and forth on burning heels, trying to think and finding it nearly impossible to string two coherent thoughts together. A little voice located somewhere in the back of her skull was whispering to her, telling her that it wasn’t the heat or exhaustion or trauma of this night that was mixing up her brain like a jigger of martinis well-shaken, but that which controlled this place, her hypothetical controller or
Controller,
for certainly it deserved proper-noun status.
Don’t you get it, Ramona? This is the old mindfuck it’s playing on you. Your resilience and obstinacy are wearing it thin. Tormenting you and breaking you down is more work than you’re worth so the Controller wants this done right now. Here in this shithole dumping ground of pristine and perfect Stokes, a.k.a. Mayberry RFD, it wants you dead before you get away again and figure out more and start turning what you know against it, because you will. It knows it and so do you.
Doing the two-step on her broiling feet, images of dancing barbecued chickens parading through her head from an old TV commercial, she began to realize that there was truth in what the voice said. The fog of her brain cleared momentarily like a good clean breeze blew through her skull.
You’ve already figured the town out there is Stokes before the fire.
You’ve already figured there is a guiding hand at work here.
And you know that the siren activates these things and it’s coming from the east. That’s the epicenter of this here fucking quake and you know it. The Controller might just be afraid that you’ll track it to its source and put it out of commission.
What do you think of that?
Yes, what
did
she think of that?
But there wasn’t exactly time for thinking because the ground was hot, the air was gagging with vapors of searing smoke, and she was most certainly cornered. Her head seemed to spin again and she started seeing things, things that were either pure hallucination or real or some bizarre combination of both.
She saw doll faces watching her from the junked cars.
High above the reaching steeples and craggy branches of the town she could see the moon like a glowering eye and as she stared into it, it seemed to get bigger, a puffy discolored lid pulling away from the white, shining orb beneath that looked unpleasantly juicy like a pickled egg.
She saw skeletons around her. Not perfect, gleaming Halloween skeletons, but badly used things that were yellow and brown, some black as coal, but all disarticulated and shattered, jaws sprung in wide silent screams when they had jaws at all. Most of them were over near the fence in the distance, but there were others scattered about. In fact, not four feet from her there was an ancient baby buggy whose spoked wheels were threaded with cobwebs and whose bonnet was torn and flapping, a swallow’s nest tucked away in the folds. And in it, oh yes, a baby that had been burned right down to the bare bones. It had worn some kind of bunting that melted to its tiny skeleton in black rags. The insane thing was that it was still burning. Its black bones were smoking, flames coming from its eye sockets and mouth.