If he had someone at his side, someone like Ramona for instance, he would fight with her (or him) happily.
Forget Ramona, dumbass. You knocked her aside when that mannequin woman grabbed hold of you. You cracked up. You showed her what you were made of. Maybe muscles and attitude on the outside, but nothing but shivering pudding on the inside.
He refused to think about that.
That’s not the way it was. Yet, the idea that he was a coward haunted him and would not let him go. As much as he tried to sweep it out of his mind, it clung there like a dust ball, getting bigger, gathering all the debris inside his brain until it pretty much blotted out all else.
He started running again.
He knew he wasn’t running from any real threat but running from himself. He dashed around a corner—good God, the streets were all the same, all the very same—and ran smack dab into one of the doll people. He crashed into it before he could stop himself and they both went down.
It was trapped beneath him.
In those few seconds of shock before he fought himself free, he saw it was Lady Peg-leg. Her white wig was nearly detached from her scalp, hanging off to one side like a rag. Her face was loose and flaccid like latex rubber, the eye sockets filled with a formless blackness.
Chazz screamed and threw himself backward, cracking his head on the edge of a building, seeing stars. The very worst thing was that she came with him. She was stuck to him. He hit her and pushed her away, but she was glued to him. They rolled across the sidewalk together, but he could not throw her. He ended up on his back and she was on top of him, not moving or doing anything, just a dead dummy, a conjoined twin he could not separate himself from.
He screamed again, her gruesome face inches from his own.
It hung in flaps and pouches, a breathing bag of flesh that seemed to inflate and deflate with respiration. Great furrows, crevices, and deep-hewn wrinkles were cut into it. Black suturing ran from the corners of her mouth and up to her forehead where they joined more intricate stitch-work. Her face was like something sewn together out of three or four corpse faces. The suturing was so tight it pulled her lips away from juicy pink gums and peg-like teeth that were all twisted and gnarled.
But the most shocking thing was that even though she wasn’t moving, she was alive. She was breathing and he could feel the dull thudding of her heartbeat.
Wild and hysterical, he fought to be free of her but she clung on tenaciously.
On his feet, he smashed her into the brick face of a building again and again, trying to shatter her, to break her into pieces but she was incredibly tough and resilient. Her head bounced about on her sagging, flabby neck, her face brushing his own, her lips feeling cold and greasy like the entrails of a fish.
Somewhere during the process, she merely slid off him like a sloughed skin.
He did not run.
He went down on his ass, gibbering and mad, drool running from his mouth and tears flowing from his eyes. He did not think and he did not feel. He just waited there for her to wake up.
There seemed to be nothing else left.
26
“They’ve stopped,” Soo-Lee said, trying to regulate her breathing in the dark clamminess of the cellar. “I don’t hear them anymore.”
“It’s not over,” Creep said.
Lex said nothing. He figured they wouldn’t be down in the cellar if it hadn’t been for Creep and he wasn’t too happy about it. Creep had lost his nerve. Lex did not believe that they were in any real danger up there. It was weird and disturbing, but there was no true threat. Not if they kept their heads. Not if they let it play out. He knew from his experience in the diner that they could have gotten out anytime they wanted. Regardless of how the room had rearranged itself, they still could have gotten out because the “real” room was still there even if it wasn’t visible.
Now he wasn’t so sure.
Once again, they had been manipulated, driven to the very place the puppet master wanted them. He had a feeling they were in a momentary lull until that siren went off again.
“There’s something down here,” he said. “Something our host wants us to see or to find.”
Creep trembled next to him. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. But, trust me, nothing is by accident here.”
The three of them were leaning up against a wall at the bottom of the steps. Lex had locked the door to the cellar and the doll people beat and scratched at it for some time before going quiet. He knew they were still out there, but they weren’t doing anything.
A lull. That’s all this is.
He was thinking the smart thing to do would be to sneak out now while they were inactive. Soon, the siren would sound again and then there would be real trouble.
But it wasn’t going to happen.
He was almost certain there would be a dozen or so of them frozen in the hallway and he did not honestly believe that Creep had the guts to move among them, even if it meant freedom.
So they waited there, shoulder to shoulder, not able to retreat and afraid to go deeper into the cellar itself.
Lex, feeling wicked and frustrated by it all, said, “What do you think, Creep? What do you think we should do?”
“How should I know?”
“You led us down here.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“You could have kept your head.”
“Fuck you.”
“Knock it off,” Soo-Lee said. “The both of you. Since we’re here, let’s see what there is to see.”
Uncommon bravery. Something Creep lacked completely and something Lex wasn’t too sure he had himself.
“It’s pitch-black. Can’t see a damn thing down here.”
“Try using your lighter,” Lex suggested.
Creep, sighing, dug it out. He handed it to Lex, not wanting to be the one to flick it as if he might be punished for the transgression. Lex took it from him and flicked it. The flame was bright and even. They were in a long, narrow corridor. There was a lot of junk piled around against the walls. Everything from stacks of water-stained cardboard boxes to old bicycle frames and a particularly nasty-looking mattress that was nearly black with stains as if someone had bled to death on it long ago.
Amazingly, there was also a candelabra sitting atop an old dresser that lacked drawers. There were three red candles in it half burned down, wax melted down the stems. It was like something out of an old European horror movie
“How convenient,” Soo-Lee said.
Lex just stared at it. “Isn’t it, though?”
But then everything was a little too convenient and a little too coincidental in Stokes. You tended to find what you needed when you needed it, particularly when it had the potential to enhance your uneasiness. On the other hand, if you needed something to get you out or make you feel safer, you’d never find it in a hundred years.
He lit the candles. “There. Now we can pretend we’re a couple of dumbasses in a monster movie.”
Creep giggled, but there was no mirth to it, only a sort of low-key, slow-burning hysteria.
Lex led the way down the corridor, feeling like he was moving down the passage in a Halloween spook house waiting for the ghosties and ghoulies to leap out at him. He didn’t think that was too far off the mark. There was a door at the end, but there were no cobwebs or bloody handprints on it. The knob was old, very old, tarnished and grimy from generations of hands.
He looked back at Soo-Lee in the guttering candle light.
The jumping illumination painted her face in an orange glow, casting shadows under her eyes and cheekbones. It made her Asian features look almost mystical and cruel. But she was neither. He knew that much. She was solid and practical, kindhearted.
He gripped the knob without any Hollywood drama and threw the door open. What he saw in there was almost what he expected to see. Not exactly, of course, because he couldn’t have known, yet it was no surprise.
“Boxes,” Soo-Lee said.
Creep disagreed. “Coffins. Those are coffins.”
Lex and Soo-Lee looked at each other and then back at the boxes. Yes, coffins. But not the modern sort that people cried over, but cheap pine boxes that, again, were like something out of a horror movie. A Hammer movie to be more precise, Lex thought.
The Brides of Dracula
or
The Vampire Lovers.
One of those period screamers his mom always watched when he was a kid. There had to have been twelve or fifteen of them piled in an untidy heap as if they had been dropped from above.
“Shut the door,” Creep said. “Just shut it already.”
But Lex was not so certain it was going to be that easy. What he had in mind was stupid horror movie logic, but he saw no other way. He was almost certain that they needed to open a few of those boxes or they would never be allowed out of there. He told Soo-Lee the same.
“Yes, maybe,” she said. “But if we do that, aren’t we allowing ourselves to be manipulated again?”
“Maybe.”
“No maybes about it,” Creep said.
Yet, when Lex went in there, they followed. When he pried the first lid off, they pressed in closer to see. What he saw was himself. A dummy of himself. It even wore his clothes. It was what he would look like as a doll person: lips pulled in a straight line, eye sockets like deep holes drilled into a smooth and white face, the fingers interlocked over the belly like those of a corpse in a casket. It wasn’t alive in the ordinary sense. More like something that was
waiting
to live.
It was terrifying…yet oddly intriguing. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off it even though it made him feel like screaming.
Creep had stepped back away from the box. “Put the fucking lid back on, man. I can’t stand looking at it.”
Lex figured that was pretty sage advice.
He clattered the lid back in place, almost certain the thing would wake up at any time. Thankfully, it didn’t.
“We better check the other ones,” Soo-Lee suggested.
“Fuck that,” Creep said. “Just stop, okay? Enough is enough. You two have to learn when to stop.”
They ignored him.
They pulled off two more lids. Soo-Lee found herself looking down at a mannequin of Creep that was nearly identical to him, save the mocking grin on its face and the fact that there was no warmth, no humanity, no good or bad or anything inbetween etched into the features. It had not lived and experience had not seasoned it, given it character.
Lex found Soo-Lee’s doll copy.
It was even more intriguing than his own. The porcelain-white face framed by long black hair was flawless, the cheekbones high, the lips full. Unlike his own imitation, this one had eyes. Not human eyes exactly, but more like gelid orbs of pooled dark liquid that seemed to watch him. She looked very good as a doll. There was no getting around it. The copy was perfect, even more physically perfect than Soo-Lee herself. He touched its face and it was not plastic or wood or wax, but something very soft almost like silk. There was a tactile pleasure associated with it and he did not want to draw his hand away. He had the strongest desire to run his hand over the swell of the breasts.
“What are you doing?” Soo-Lee asked him.
“It feels almost alive,” he told her.
He could not seem to pull his hand away. The touching was pleasurable, erotic even, like the very act was flooding his brain with endorphins. He needed to put both hands on her and touch her, feel every curve, run his hands up and down her.
Then Soo-Lee pulled him back.
And for one moment, he felt rage, uncontrollable rage. He wanted to hit her. It was like she had unplugged him from the greatest joy he had ever known. Then it passed and he was just confused.
“It moved,” Creep said in a haunted voice. “When she pulled you away, the doll moved its hand.”
It had me and it didn’t want to break contact,
Lex thought.
Somehow it must have been feeding on me, drawing something from me.
Soo-Lee, practical and determined, put the lid back on and then did the same with the other box. Out of sight, out of mind.
“We need to get out of here,” she said. “We don’t have much time, so don’t waste any of it. Let’s go.”
She led them away and up the stairs, unlocking the cellar door and holding the candelabra out before her. The hallway was empty. There were no doll people anywhere. Nobody stopped to consider what that might mean. Soo-Lee was in charge now and she was all business. She towed Lex by the hand and he dragged Creep along. The workroom was gone. Now it was just the living room that was a snapshot from 1960, an ad from a Sears & Roebuck catalog fifty years out of date.
Soo-Lee got them to the front door, set the candelabra aside, and stepped out into the night. Lex and Creep followed. Together they stood at the foot of the steps.
“Now what?” Creep said.
“Now we get out of here,” Soo-Lee told him with an authority that could not be argued with.