Lady Peg-leg giggled and stomped her peg upon the floor.
“She’s most anxious for what you have!”
By this point, Chazz was insane and he didn’t bother screaming or crying out. It was simpler to just titter with the others and grin maliciously when Lady Peg-leg reached down between his legs and grasped what was there in her hand, fondling and squeezing it roughly.
The bulbous woman shuddered with delight, shivering and rolling, the gash between her legs widening into a black cleft that could have swallowed him whole.
43
Soo-Lee crouched in the corner on a bed of straw as the blood ran down the inside of her thighs in red streams. She was naked and cold and disoriented and could not seem to remember how it was she had come to this place. Maybe she had been here forever, sitting like this, her back up against cold cinder block walls, her arms stretched out, her fingers splayed against the blocks. Maybe this is who she had always been and maybe everything she thought she knew before was just a dream she had while she waited, listening to the sobbing of a broken voice.
Sobbing?
Yes, she could hear it. The pathetic sobbing of a woman that she recognized as the sound of violation when all that you knew and all that you trusted in had been torn out by the roots, dirtied and dragged through filth, then tucked back inside you by greasy fingers. Yes, she knew that sound because once upon a time she had sobbed like that. But that was long ago and maybe it had not happened yet or it had happened before and she could not be sure. The sobbing, pained and pitiful, went on and she realized it was her voice but that seemed to mean nothing to her. She could only feel the pain in her belly, the deep gnawing pain, which was bright and cutting.
The blood continued to dribble from between her legs, dropping to the floor, creating a widening dark pool that glued her in place.
My blood.
My life.
She put her hands on her belly.
It was huge and round, the skin taut like it might tear from internal pressure. It was like a ball filling with air, inflated by gas. Even her navel stuck out now like the tip of a thumb. Inside, there was something. Something that shifted and rolled like an uneasy sleeper, nipping and gnawing at her.
You were raped,
a voice told her.
No.
You were raped by a doll.
No!
You were raped by a puppet.
NO!
You were raped by a mannequin and it planted its seed and—
NO! NO! NO! NOOOOOOO!!!
She slapped her hands against her belly again and again like she was drumming on a bongo, hearing the sounds and feeling the deep-set agony it brought. If there was something in there, something alive but not alive, human but puppet, flesh but wax and wood…she would kill it. She would tear it out and pull it apart with her hands. Her fingers arching into claws, she made to do that very thing.
But something began to happen.
Something that dropped her mind into a white blankness of nonentity. It started with her toes. A coldness that numbed her and sucked the warmth from her veins and replaced it with an icy sludge. It threw out frigid roots that grew up through her legs and netted her thighs and infested her belly, climbing inch by inch up into her chest. Her well-abused sex felt like a flap of rubber, her bones like frosty sticks, her breasts like pert bags of ice, and it continued on and on, pushing the heat from her and replacing it with a chill blackness that swallowed her internals and stiffened her limbs and fingers, finally engulfing her brain, locking it in a black static that hummed incessantly but did not feel or emote any longer.
Soo-Lee could hear a voice telling her how it was going to be and how it
had
to be and there was no will in her to refuse it. Defiance was no longer among her natural rhythms. Acceptance and obedience were all that she knew. In her head, the humming went on and on until she knew nothing else
but
the humming that was a beautiful red silence that encompassed all and everything. Her lungs were sacs that breathed, her eyes were black glass that did not see, and when the thing began to chew, digging its way free, clawing and biting and finally bursting from her belly with slopping and slithering sounds, her face cracked open in a smile and she looked down at the wizened horror that was slicked red with her own blood and said,
“Is that you, doll-face?”
44
Though Ramona knew it was probably a mistake, she went with the woman to her house that fronted the park. Inside, there were lights from guttering candles and she brewed them tea. The woman said her name was Mrs. McGuiness and she had been in Stokes a long, long time and knew how things worked. That was the sugar she used to get Ramona to go with her. That was the bait that drew the fly into the spider’s web.
Mrs. McGuiness was a large, but sickly woman. She was round and fleshy, but her skin was yellow and dry, almost flaky. But beyond that, her blue eyes were friendly in their puffy sockets and she said she knew things and Ramona desperately wanted to know what those things were.
As she sipped her tea, Mrs. McGuiness said, “Now, I can imagine you were pulled in here as oftentimes people are…but where is it you thought you were going?”
“I’m going east,” Ramona told her. “I’m tracking this to its source.”
“That’s a foolish proposition.”
Ramona shrugged. “God loves fools. Better to take the fight to the source than be on the defensive.”
“You certainly have a tongue on you.”
Ramona ignored that. She was beyond the point where such things mattered. She looked at the tea in her cup and decided it was probably black with poison. She would not drink it. “You told me I don’t know anything.”
“You don’t. You’re only guessing.”
“Then tell me what I don’t know.”
“It’s quite a yarn.”
“I’ve got the time.”
Mrs. McGuiness shrugged. “So you say. I’ve been here a long time, as I said. No one but the Mother herself has been here longer. I was one of the ones that did not try to run and did not conspire against her, so here I stay. I am provided for. I am left alone. I am not a synthetic thing that obeys its master because it has no soul.”
“Who is the Mother?”
Mrs. McGuiness rattled her cup against its saucer.
“Who?
Well, maybe
what
might be a better question, but no matter, no matter. She is Mother Crow. She is the last of the family. The last one and the most practiced of all.”
“Practiced in what?”
“Well, in the arts of the doll makers, the puppet masters. The Crows were not simple toy makers, dear. Oh no, oh no no no. Their figures—because that’s what they called them,
figures
—were more often than not mechanized. You see, the Crows weren’t always doll makers. Back in old Europe, they were clockmakers, artisans of fine precision instruments and delicate clockworks. They applied those skills, secrets, and techniques to their dolls. Not the window dummies, of course. Nobody likes their window dummies walking around, now do they?”
“This is…this is all so insane.”
The old woman smiled at that, as if she understood the feeling all too well. “You said you were going east…do you know where it was you were
really
going?”
“The siren,” Ramona said. “I was seeking the siren.”
Mrs. McGuiness nodded. “Smart girl or maybe not so smart at all. The siren sounds and those things out there wake up, don’t they? Like wooden puppets deciding they are no longer wooden, eh? Well, listen. The siren is the shift whistle that puts them to work and it is Mother Crow who sounds that whistle as she’s always sounded it as generations of Crows sounded it before her.”
“Shift whistle for what?”
“The factory, child, the factory. The place where the dolls were made…at least, where they
were
made. Now other things go on there that would chill your blood to know of them.” She dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “Now listen. Before the fire of 1960—and I can see by your face that the fire is known to you—the Crow factory on the hill was the lifeblood of Stokes. Nearly the entire town worked there and it was a good town with good people who lived a good life and were respectful of one another. Not like the vermin in the big city. These were
good
folks and this was their town and the Crow family provided so that all might flourish. You’re far too young to know about this town or the factory, but once upon a time when the factory went nonstop and was the blood of this town, dolls were made up there. Dolls for children. Puppets, marionettes, even dime-store dummies of particular artistry. Crow figures were world-famous and the orders just rolled in and people were fat and happy and the town thrived. And watching, always watching, over the town
and
the factory, was Mother Crow, good Mother Crow like the old woman who lived in the shoe, loving each of her children more than she loved herself.”
Ramona lifted an eyebrow at that. She did not seem to remember the Old Woman in the Shoe being a loving mother, but that was neither here nor there. “So let me guess. The factory went belly-up, closed, people moved away to where the grass was greener, and Mother Crow took it personally.”
“That tongue,” Mrs. McGuiness said, shaking her head. “That awful tongue.”
“I got something wrong?”
“Yes, dear, you did. When they needed her, she was there for them. But when she needed them, they abandoned her. They took the good name of Crow in vain and paid no homage to who she was and what her fine family had done for them.”
Ramona nodded. “People need to eat, ma’am. I’m sure they hated leaving, but they had to go where there were jobs so they could feed their kids. I hardly think that’s a crime. What the hell did she want from them? Their firstborn?”
A darkness passed over the old lady’s face and Ramona figured she had gone too far. There was a time and place to speak your mind and mouth off and maybe this was not it. But she couldn’t help herself. She had been through too much, seen and experienced things that left her nerves not only on edge but humming like telephone lines. Proper conduct and etiquette seemed to have no place now. Her back was up and she was ready for a fight and she didn’t have the patience for trifling bullshit.
The darkness shadowing the old lady’s face remained a moment too long and Ramona wondered what horrors were hiding beneath, sharpening their teeth.
“Maybe she did want that,” Mrs. McGuiness said, her breath coming fast now. “Maybe she
deserved
that. She and her family had given blood and they wanted some in return and maybe all she really wanted was the simplest of things: loyalty.”
Ramona nodded. Yes, the Old Woman in the Shoe who whipped her children soundly and put them to bed. “Maybe. But maybe she asked for too much. Loyalty is great but it won’t put food on the table. Was Mother Crow willing to support everyone out of her own pockets?”
“Her pockets were as empty as theirs!”
“So they had no choice. They left.”
Mrs. McGuiness nodded. “Not all of them, not right away. But family by family they hightailed it out and left a graveyard in their passing. That’s what Stokes was, a big old graveyard and when the wind blew on dark nights, you could hear the emptiness of it and feel the sorrow and sense the desertion. Those are things you can feel in your soul, missy, and the soul of the town was blighted like a summer field, diseased black to its roots, and that’s when it began to bleed. I don’t expect you to believe it, but those that were still around—I was one of their number—we all saw it. Blood began to seep from the earth, bubbling up like crude oil but it was no oil—it was blood. You could smell it and taste it in the air. It came up through cracks in the street and filled yards and ran in the gutters. It terrified some and others were in rapture over the mysticism of the whole thing. These were the ones that would bow down before it and offer prayers to God above and lower things that crawled below.”
Ramona sighed. “And Mother Crow? What did she say about the blood?”
“Nobody knew. She was hidden away up in that silent old factory like a spider in a crevice and she wasn’t coming out for no one.”
Spider was right, Ramona figured, because that crazy old woman in her own way had webbed up the town and she wasn’t too happy about the townsfolk—
her
people—slipping out of her grasp like flies sneaking out of a spider’s web. But the blood? How did you explain that? Either Mrs. McGuiness was confused and deluded by the years or exaggerating to make a point or something very weird had happened and with all Ramona had seen, she would not have doubted that things could happen in Stokes that could not happen elsewhere.