She saw rats picking through the piled refuse. They were greasy gray bags of fur with tiny red eyes like jewels that sparkled in the moonlight. They all made a curious ticking sound as of pocket watches that were slowly running down.
She blinked her eyes and she heard a steady
thump-thump-thump
of a door swinging open and shut. It came from a small ramshackle hut set between the masts of two burned trees. Tiny ashes fell from them and made a tinkling sound on the sheet metal roof. As she watched, a man came stumbling out, holding his face in his hands. He was not on fire, but black smoke steamed from him in twisting plumes. The stink of roasted flesh and burned hair were nauseating. He stumbled maybe two or three feet and then hit the ground, breaking apart like cigar ash.
These were the things she saw or was made to see and they were all, in their own way, part of the puzzle of Stokes (or
anti-Stokes,
as she was beginning to think of it) that she needed to put together if she ever wanted to get out.
CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK.
It was coming again. Of course it was.
She almost collapsed with despair.
She turned, coughing on the fumes, and that great ambulant collection of living mannequins was bearing down on her. It cast a long and freezing shadow before it that was like something from an old film noir. The shadow seemed equally as alive as what threw it—a black and crawling thing, expanding, throwing dozens of reaching tendrils before it. Then the thing itself entered the junkyard, a Frankensteinian patchwork of parts, a pulsating colony of heads and hands and shambling legs.
“It’s Ramona,”
the many mouths said.
“It’s Ramona. Get her so she can be with us. Pull her apart and paste her parts to ours. Put her head high up on top so she can scream with us…”
The other heads affixed to its torso did not join in the chorus. They were low, bestial things that bayed and snarled and hissed, clattering their teeth and snapping their jaws.
The thing—
Frankendoll,
was its name, she decided—moved ever forward and Ramona knew she was trapped. The only way out was the fence at the back of the yard. But getting there without being overwhelmed by the heat and the fumes would not be easy. She felt dizzy and queasy and she couldn’t seem to think straight.
If you just wait here, it will all be over with soon. Very soon now.
But she couldn’t allow that. She stumbled on, her mind flying around in her head like an uncaged bird, crashing into the walls of memory and reason, leaving her confused and breathless. She fought on, maneuvering around the hulks of cars, stepping over weed-sprouting transmissions, tripping over a rusting section of pipe and going down into the cinders that burned her hands. The pain was real and it was like a good, refreshing slap in the face.
The fence was about thirty feet away now, maybe closer.
You’re almost there. Pour it on for godsake, just pour it on!
Behind her, the Frankendoll monstrosity was still chanting her name, still pushing forward. She turned back once and looked. The sight of it nearly took the heart from her. In the moonlight, it was a cartoonish monster that could not possibly be, a gargantuan hybrid of parts that all seemed to be moving independently though they were part of the wriggling whole. Legs stomped and hands reached and heads shook from side to side. The fused torsos all seemed to be in motion like they were trying to pull themselves apart from the central mass.
The thing was in some kind of demonic rage now as it stalked her.
It kicked barrels out of its way, flipped a leaning bedspring end over end, and charged through a smoldering tower of tires, kicking up a haze of soot that filled the moonlight in dusky clouds. It would have her. And the closer it got, the more it became enraged at the idea of seizing her in its hands. It smashed through heaps of burned lumber and tossed a broken rocking chair into a collection of banged-up trash cans. Its many totemic, blistered faces were breathing out puffs of black smoke.
But Ramona did not sit still.
Even though her eyes were watering, her breath scratching in her throat, and sweat left clean trails down her ash-darkened face, she saw the fence and went toward it, dizzy and tripping and fumbling, but gaining ground foot by foot. Then the fence was very close and she poured on the speed, jumping up onto an old TV set and vaulting up at the fence. She grabbed hold of the top of it, some seven feet from the ground, and pulled herself up and over with her last reserves of strength. She fell into a grassy lot on the other side, panting and shaking, tears streaming from her eyes.
Frankendoll screamed.
With each of its many mouths, it screamed with a sound of dozens of shrieking, tortured children. Then it hit the fence, pounding and kicking and beating at it. Ramona saw the tops of its heads just over the upper planks. It went absolutely hysterical and she saw the fence begin to come apart, loose boards falling and rusted nails ejecting into the air. Planks split and fence posts fell over like saplings.
“NO! NO! NO, RAMONA! DON’T DO THAT!”
the mouths cried out to her.
“IT’LL BE WORSE IF YOU DO! WE CAN HELP YOU, WE CAN MAKE IT EASY, WE CAN DELIVER YOU QUIETLY—”
“Fuck you!” she called out at them with poison.
The doll horror went at the fence with renewed fury like Godzilla going after Tokyo. Boards were flying, planks split lengthwise, posts launched up into the air, wood splinters and blowing clouds of sawdust erupting into the sky.
“YOU STUPID STUPID STUPID MISERABLE CUNT!”
the voices cried out and if it were possible for animate dolls or a hulking animate
Franken
doll to go insane, it did at that point, sounding absolutely hysterical with wrath.
“WHO ARE YOU TO UPSET THE BALANCE? WHO ARE YOU TO DARE STAND UP AGAINST WHAT WE ARE? WHO DO YOU THINK YOU FUCKING ARE?”
But by then she was on her feet, running.
Where she got the energy from, even she didn’t know. But it was like competing in the fifty-meter freestyle swim. Just when you thought there was nothing left, you got a burst of energy and you turned the corner.
When she finally came to a stop, she waited on a shadowy patch of sidewalk, listening for the approach of Frankendoll, but there was nothing. She was only glad that she had somehow managed to break free of the business section and was not looking at a plate glass window that said SUNDRIES.
But she knew damn well that the only reason she had gotten away was not that she had outsmarted the Controller, but that he, she, or
it
had become bored with the chase, with her very tenacity.
Regardless, she was free.
20
A phone was ringing.
It stopped Chazz dead in the middle of the street. He went down to his knees, sweat dropping from his head to the pavement like raindrops. He was being run to death and was aware of the fact, but he didn’t seem to care. He only understood that he must flee. Earlier—ten minutes or twenty or thirty, who knew?—he had thought he heard a phone ringing, but he dismissed it. It was distant and fading. Maybe not there at all. The sort of sound you might hear late on a summer night when you had the windows open and thrashed in your own perspiration. A ringing from several streets away.
But if that had been fantasy, there was no denying the reality of this.
It rang and rang.
Cupping his hands over his ears, he shouted: “Answer it already! Why doesn’t somebody just fucking answer it already?”
But the reason for that was fairly obvious. His brain was moving in such strange rhythms now that it took him some time to realize that nobody
could
answer it because there were no people in this town. But how could it ring if nobody called?
None of it made sense.
Unless it was Ramona or one of the others but he did not believe that.
It kept ringing and ringing.
It’s for you and you know it.
No, no, he wouldn’t let himself think that. Nobody would be calling him because there was no one who could call him. God, the ringing drilled right through his skull and made his brain ache. A ringing phone. An empty town. Why was it familiar? Was it an old show he had seen or maybe some story they had to read in high school?
Don’t matter, Chazz. Don’t matter at all,
that voice in his head told him.
The call is for you and if you don’t answer it, it’ll never stop ringing.
But he wouldn’t do that. He’d already made up his mind. That would just be asking for trouble and he had more than enough right now. But if he wasn’t going to answer it…then why was he walking in the direction of the ringing, tracking it to its source? It hadn’t been a conscious decision. He was certain of that. He didn’t honestly believe he had any say in the matter. His legs were walking over there and he was obeying and his lips were trembling, a whimpering in his throat.
He was on the sidewalk.
No, no fucking way. I won’t do it.
He was moving toward the ringing.
I’ll just turn and run.
He saw what looked like a little cab stand. The window was open, one of those sliding types like they have at ice-cream parlors. The phone was sitting just inside on a ledge, a big old black phone with a rotary dial. God, it was a dinosaur, a beast from another age.
Okay, you found it, now go.
But he wasn’t going. He could see the shadow of his hand reaching for it and then it was not just a shadow, but his fingers gripping the receiver. It was heavy. You could brain somebody with it like in an old movie.
He brought it to his ear.
He heard static, a windy sort of static like a strong breeze blowing across empty fields and down lonely byways. He looked up across the street and he could see the telephone poles, the wires strung between them. He could hear them humming. The sound he heard had been carried to him across fields and through thickets, over county churchyards and down deserted streets and moonlit meadows. And slowly, so very slowly, all that loneliness and dark distance became a voice:
“Chazz…I don’t like to be kept waiting. When I call, you better answer.”
Jesus.
He nearly fell over, but try as he might he could not pull the phone away from his ear. The deserted streets suddenly looked that much more deserted, the shadows that much more like shadows, and the night that much darker, like some finely woven web of black funeral silk.
“Oh, what’s the matter, Chazz? Are you afraid? Are you terrified?”
And he was, God yes, he was. It was more than the phone ringing in this empty dead town, knowing he would be nearby to answer it. It was the voice itself that he had heard back at the house, the voice of the entity he referred to as the Spider Mother, the woman with a hundred legs. He had heard her speaking through the door to him and now she was calling him, baiting him with her squeaky voice.
“Do you want this to be over with, Chazz?”
His breath coming in gasps, he nodded. “Yes…I just…I just want to get out of here. But I don’t know the way. I can’t find the way. I just can’t find it.”
The Spider Mother made a hissing sound that slowly wound itself out into something like a cooing.
“You poor little thing, lost and alone, and no one to hold you. No one to make it better. No one to take away the fear and the dread. No one but me.”
“Please…just leave me alone…”
“Ohhhhhh,”
she said.
“That’s not what you really want. You want Mama to come and hold you. You want Mama to make things better. That’s what you want.”
“No, I—”
But it wasn’t true. He could say it all he wanted, recognizing the horror and revulsion of the thing that spoke to him, but deep inside he was not so sure. Her voice was oddly soothing. It was peaceful, like being wrapped in dark silk and tucked away somewhere where no one could ever hurt you. But that was the danger, that was the threat, that was the seduction. The Spider Mother’s voice was taking him away places, making him feel helpless like an infant. She was netting him in strands of warm, comforting spider silk, twining him in it, creating a bunting that he could sleep away eternity in, locking him down into a dark, poisonous cocoon from which there could be no escape.
“You just wait right there, Chazz, and Mama will come for you.”
But he knew he couldn’t allow that. He already had a repulsive, skin-crawling image in his head of her webbing him up and forcing him to suckle from the wrinkled sacs of her teats.
“No…stay away from me. I won’t let you touch me.”
“You’re ruining it all, Chazz. You’re going to make it ugly. You’re going to make it hurt real, real bad.”