By then, Chazz knew no more.
49
Ramona stood on the road, staring up at the factory on the hill and a deep chill settled into her bones. Even if she hadn’t known that this was the evil core of Stokes, she would have felt it. The factory brooded atop the hill like a poison mushroom, seeping toxic juices that blighted the countryside and filled the town below with venom. This was it. This was the malignancy that needed to be cut out, torn up by the roots and burned to ash. This was the nucleus of the tumor itself and she was about to drive right into it like a hot needle.
She was not unexpected.
She knew that much.
Mother Crow did not want her here. In fact, she feared it as Ramona herself feared the idea of coming in the first place. That was what they had in common: fear
and
rage. Because they both stood ready to fight to the death and neither would back down.
This was endgame.
Resolutely then, Ramona started up the drive to the factory.
And things began to change just as they had in the park. Reality was warping, unzipping itself and she smelled smoke. Yes, the thick, pungent smoke of the burning town. She heard something like a muffled explosion and the factory ahead of her literally split right open, gushing flames and huge rolling clouds of ash.
It started here. The fire started here at the factory and swept down into the town. That’s what happened.
There was no way she could know that, but the certainty remained: it had started here and she was seeing it. Regardless of what Mrs. McGuiness said, it had not started in the town. It had started right here.
The sky above was lit by a red glare and waves of heat rolled down at her. The trees to either side of the road burst into flame. The field was burning. The factory was engulfed in tongues of flame and she could hear people screaming. She looked behind her and watched the town down there burn. It was an amazing conflagration and nothing was spared. It looked like a bonfire. She turned her gaze back to the factory. It was broken and mangled, immense walls of flame rising into the night. There was another explosion and then another from its blazing guts and things began to rain from the sky: slats of burning wood, smoldering bricks, and fiery bits of metal. The factory was giving up its ghost and this is what it vomited up in its death throes.
The heat was enough to roast her, but Ramona pushed on, untouched by any of it. She stepped through smoldering ash four inches deep, moving around pieces of the burning factory, parting sheets of churning smoke. The factory erupted again and more debris rained down into the fields of cinders. She thought they were parts of corpses, but they were not corpses but doll parts and mannequin parts. She saw grinning melted faces and blackened heads, limbs and bodies. Things welded together by the heat, human-shaped armatures whose plastic and wax flesh was bubbling and oozing free. It all continued to burn and she realized the screaming she heard was not that of people, but from the dolls themselves…their charred and blistered mouths were crying out into the night, rising in a single wavering note of agony.
But dolls can’t scream. Mannequins and puppets can’t know pain,
a voice of reason informed her.
But I’m hearing it. I’m hearing something.
Then…it all began to fade and it was daylight many years later and the factory was in ruins around her. Why was she being shown this? But there were no answers, so she just quit asking questions and let it happen, soaking it all up. The remains were scattered everywhere like bones in a field after a great battle. Bricks were caught in the tangled grass, crumbling walls of them and teetering cairns from which saplings grew. Great crawling shadows were cast by the looming skeleton of the factory itself, gathering in dark pockets and nighted hollows. A spooky, pervasive silence shivered in the air. She could hear a creak of metal in the wind somewhere, maybe an old rain gutter or a loose piece of tin.
Two smokestacks still stood, rising from the blackened wreckage like fleshless fingers, one straight and tall, the other leaning to the side like it might tip over at any time. Crows held court atop them, spreading their wings and cawing. Scrub brush had grown up everywhere, heaps of debris becoming hills of wild weeds and devil grass. She heard creatures scurrying about, birds calling out.
The closer she got to the factory, the more wreckage there was.
More bricks and rotted planks and old smoke-blackened timbers, but also rusty machine parts, girders, conduits and iron piping in which swallows nested. She stepped around the remains of a third smokestack that had fallen and was netted by weeds. Huge gears rose from the earth like the backs of fossil saurians. The factory had fallen into itself, filling vast pits and cellar-holds below in junk heaps of twisted iron, collapsed walls, and a multitude of tiles that reminded her of flakes of skin.
And yet again, she had to wonder,
why am I being shown this?
But the answer was obvious now. Mother Crow had shown her the fire and its aftermath as if to pound into her head that whatever had lived (or existed) in the factory was long gone now. The fire had neutered it and made it harmless. It was all just a memory now and the entire area was a graveyard. There was no danger here. Ramona should go back into the town. That’s where the real threat was.
But Ramona, of course, wasn’t buying it.
She wasn’t buying any of it.
Approaching the hulk of the factory and stepping into its black shadow, she could almost hear it sigh with displeasure.
She opened the door and went in.
Because it was time.
50
Where are you going, doll-face? And what are you going to do when you get there?
said a voice of scraping metal.
Do you know who you’ll see and what they will say to you?
Creep pressed himself to the wall of this place that could not be but was real enough to touch. He had been escaping a doll thing down a black corridor that should have led into the hub, as he thought of it, but did not lead there…unless it had and he was there because who really knew and nothing made a lick of sense anyway.
He waited, thinking,
I should escape it before it finds me.
But escape where? That was the question. The voice was inside his head, yes, but it was also in front of him and behind him and to all sides, it seemed.
Don’t you worry and don’t you fret, little doll-face, because you ain’t seen nothin’
yet,
the voice said, giggling.
That’s when the lights started coming on. Not good clean electric lights, of course, but wavering orange-yellow lights like those of huge antique tapers. The sort that threw greasy shadows and created pockets of writhing darkness. But light was light and Creep was content with anything he could get. The corridor was more along the lines of a circular industrial tunnel, he saw now, set with aluminum conduits bolted to the walls that must have held electric lines or steam piping, something of that sort, heavy ducts overhead.
Not knowing what else to do, he moved on and soon the tunnel widened and he began to see…at first he did not know what they were only that there were many of them crowded along the walls. He looked closer to all sides and saw that they were molds, casting molds of the sort that were used to thermoform plastic parts. They were all hinged like clamshells, standing open. He saw molds for hands and feet, legs and torsos, arms and heads, a variety of faces all carefully machined or carved from aluminum. They looked like death mask impressions. He saw others, molds taller than he was, that were full-body molds—one section had a perfect hollow of a mannequin back and the other that closed over it, a hollow of the mannequin front. When the thing was closed, hot plastic or some other material would be injected into it and, when it cooled, it could be opened and there would be a perfect life-size doll.
As he walked along, he saw dozens of these.
Some for men, others for women and even children. Looking at them and thinking about what they might turn out, Creep began to shiver, and then he began to sweat. Though he was hot and feverish, the sweat that rolled down his face was cool to the touch. It had a foul yellow smell to it that sickened him. This was the odor of the human machine poisoned out by the bile of its own fright, dementia, and horror. This is the stuff that ran from you, he knew, when all hope was gone and you were fundamentally fucked in every conceivable way. Men who walked to the gallows or the electric chair probably sweated out corruption like that. He had never smelled anything like it before and he supposed most people only did once—right before they died.
C’mon, doll-face, stop thinking. You’re no good at it. And, besides, you’re almost there, you’re getting real close to who you came to meet.
The voice kept taunting him, but Creep stumbled on almost blindly, obediently. He saw no reason now to argue his fate or try to run from it. Who he had been his entire life, he was not now. He would go where the voice suggested and he would see what waited there, because there really was no alternative.
As he walked and the molds became more numerous, piled against one another in heaps until he could no longer see the walls themselves, he heard the voice telling him how close he was. Then he saw the owner of the voice. Even though he trembled with terror, he was not really surprised.
Danielle was hanging from the wall.
Not really Danielle, but the same horror he’d seen on the TV at that house, Danielle remade as a doll—a pallid and naked thing, her limbs swiveled at the joints, her smallish breasts like pert mounds with nipples that were shiny pearls. The gash between her legs seemed to throb with vitality, swollen and juicy like a ripe peach. Her flesh was textured burlap, formfitting, but not lying on what was below quite right as if she were a snake gradually sloughing its skin. Her chest rose and fell as if she really needed to breathe.
Look at me, doll-face,
she said, her hinged jaw mocking speech.
As I am, you will soon be.
Her blonde hair was lustrous and shining, but like a wig it seemed to be coming loose from the white scalp beneath, shifting off to the side. One eye was a black pit, the other gleamed like a moonstone, opalescent and milky. It was recessed from the mask-like face, blank yet hideously alive.
Creep thought of running. It was purely instinctive, but it was the only thing he could think of doing.
No, no, not now,
the Danielle-thing hissed.
Not when you’ve come so far.
It writhed on the hook that suspended it, straight waxen lips pulling back from tiny teeth that were like jagged kernels of corn. She kept squirming, something inside her wriggling obscenely like a Slinky in a sock. If he did not obey her, Creep knew, she would climb down and show him exactly what was beneath her skin. Maybe she would make him touch it and he did not want that, oh God, anything but that.
Go see who waits for you, doll-face,
Danielle said, but by then, he was already doing so. Tears spilled from his eyes and his teeth chattered, his hands shaking so badly he had to press them to his sides to hold them still. His eyes felt dry and scratchy, but he did not dare blink. In the blink of an eye, the most malign things could happen in this place.
Go, doll-face, show her what you’re made of…she’ll like that.
“No!” he hollered, some last fragment of free will and survival instinct kicking up its heels inside him. “I won’t go and there’s nothing you can do that will make me!”
He felt good saying that. Hell, he felt empowered and determined and resilient in the face of this god-awful nightmare…but he was still walking forward. Maybe there was a last struggling fragment of defiance in his mind, but nobody had told his body about it and onward it went to keep a meeting with revelation and doom.
The perfectly disturbing part about it all was that he could not stop.
His body would not respond. His somatic nervous system had been hijacked and he was no longer in charge of his own body. He was just a rider now like a man on a bus. He no longer had control…yet, he could speak, he could move his lips, his head, his arms, he just could not stop the forward progression of his feet.
It was insane.
Desperate now, he slapped himself in the face with one hand after the other until his cheeks were red and burning, until pain and confusion made tears run. But none of it shocked him out of it and there didn’t seem to be a damn thing he could do about that.
There comes a time,
the Danielle-thing informed him,
when all choices are made for us and happy we are for it.
Creep had a powerful need to tell her to shut the fuck up because she wasn’t even human anymore. She hadn’t been much before, but she was even less now and he wanted to find a nice five-pound ball-peen hammer and smash her to pieces. God, it was crazy, but the idea of pulverizing her was almost sexually exciting…not that any of that really mattered because he was still moving down the tunnel to his fate and the realization of that made everything else seem pretty damn insignificant.