The tunnel was gradually widening.
And it was getting warm.
Creep was perspiring freely now. Some of that was fear and anxiety, but not all of it. The heat was palpable, rising a few degrees at a time. The air felt hot in his throat, difficult to breathe. It was about then, as sweat began to drip off the end of his nose, that he heard a sort of rushing/roaring sound like hot water gurgling through a high-pressure pipe and the entire tunnel began to quake. The rushing noise got louder. The tunnel felt like it was in motion.
What the fuck?
Now it was filling with a churning white steam like the sort of thing that a whistling teakettle blows out. It came on in a hissing, rolling cloud. And even if Creep had been able to turn and flee, he would never have escaped it. The steam hit him, engulfed him, and the pain of being seared was instantaneous. He hit the floor and bounced off the walls, hurting and gagging, but knowing that as painful as it was, it was not lethal.
The steam was not enough to kill him.
He heard a thrumming sound and something came out of the tunnel, which had grown quite large now. Whatever it was—and he could see very little of it—it came charging out at him like a phantom from the fog, grim and hulking and horribly industrial, bringing heat and noise and the hot pig iron smell of a foundry. It was a machine becoming flesh or flesh becoming machine. A deranged biomechanical thing that was assembled from yellowed rungs and knobs of bone that protruded from a riveted shell of discolored canvas-like skins, a machine of corpses and wriggling doll parts set with hissing vacuum lines and bulging pneumatic hoses, a great steel bear trap of a mouth that was a 5,000-psi cutting ram.
And above it, like a hag broken on a wheel, he saw a mummy with whipping white hair, a living death mask grinning and cackling.
These were the things Creep thought he saw as it seized him and pulled him into itself, as his hands and feet were impaled by spiked drive chains that carried him into a core of boiling smoke where an immense buzz saw split him from his crotch to the crown of his head in a gushing baptism of his own blood and meat.
51
Lex heard Chazz’s final death-scream, though he did not know who it was. The scream echoed and faded, but there was no doubt which direction it came from and that was exactly where he went: to seek its source. He felt his way along the walls, knowing that at any moment a pair of gnarled puppet hands might reach out for him, but he didn’t think they would. Not just yet. He was being drawn into this place to meet the puppet master and he would not be denied that.
He made it to the hub, which was partially lit by moonlight streaming in through skylights some three stories above. He couldn’t see too much as his eyes adjusted. Just enough to see lots of gleaming machinery and to recognize that the hub was like a cylinder that went up and up. It was an immense chamber and he knew it was the puppet master’s lair. There was a hot, charnel stench in the air that was sickening.
Now pale blue phosphorescence began to illuminate his surroundings.
The walls were set with a veritable industrialized maze of tubing and dirty gray conduits, metal ductwork and what looked like spiraled ribs jutting forth that seemed to be in slow clockwise and counterclockwise motion like gears of some sort…and gears they indeed were because he saw that he was in the heart of what seemed to be a clock. It was insane, but he was seeing it. How much was real and how much was subjective, he couldn’t be sure. He only knew that he was inside the puppet master now.
Stokes was just a physical reality she or
it
had created, an idealized homage to a town that probably never really existed in the first place, at least not in the way Lex had seen it tonight. The town was a physical projection of psychic or mental energy, but the factory…well, that was the flesh and blood of the puppet master. If the town was its mind, then this was its body…and this chamber was its heart.
A clock.
Why not? The doll people seemed to operate in some way or another like clockwork toys, so why not the puppet master as well?
Sighing among the eerie and abnormal grandeur of it all, Lex shook his head. He could sit here and speculate for hours, but the truth, the real truth of all this would probably be denied to him. He had come for a reason and he had to see that through.
Yet…this place was fascinating. A living machine. The spiraling ribs that made up the walls were rotating slowly but constantly, kept in perpetual motion by the immense mainspring and swinging collection of pendulums high above, which in turn moved the immense toothed escape wheels of the clock train, pinions, levers, and ratcheting mechanisms. Minute wheels and hour wheels were in precise calibration, keeping the biorhythms of the machine in perfect balance. And everywhere, the elaborate gear trains clicking and grinding and meshing—driver gears and worm gears and spur gears. Like the anatomy of a flesh-and-blood organism, none of it ever stopped, ever rested, ever even slightly varied in sequence or the result would be total chaos and the end of the machine that powered Stokes and the puppet master who lorded over all.
Destroy it,
Lex thought,
and you destroy the puppet master.
He edged farther into the room, stepping over tangled electrical lines and steam hoses that moved against one another with sliding, slithery sounds like mating pythons. He ducked beneath revolving cylinders and around hydraulic rams, his ears humming with the clanking of gear boxes, red-hot bearings, spiked drive chains, and thrumming generator shafts. He kept moving, but moving carefully because it was a dangerous place, a surreal nightmare of a factory in which everything slammed and hissed and whirred, hungry toothed and razored chains anxious to pull the unwary beneath presses where they could be processed properly. High-voltage lines sparked, vats bubbled, steam pissed out through cracks in hoses, and great jagged hooks swung through the air, seeking flesh to impale.
The heat of it all was nearly unbearable. A mist of oil and grease rained in the air that was clogged with smoke and nearly unbreathable. Beyond the odors of lubricants, hot iron, wax and melted plastic, there was a darker odor, an ever-present slaughterhouse stench of well-marbled meat, blood and marrow and burned hair.
Then he saw the machine.
Maybe it was what he had been looking for the entire time.
But was it real? Was any of this real? Yes, it all had physical dimensions and all of it could slash you open, crush you, scald you, electrocute you, or boil the skin from your bones, but that did not make it real.
And the machine not twenty feet from him could not possibly be real.
It was forty feet long at least, machined out of some black metal that was knobbed and ribbed, gaping with chasms and spiraling protrusions. At the back end of it he saw men, women, and children lined up like stock. One by one, they gave themselves to the machine and grinding spiked wheels pierced their hands and fed them into its labyrinthine depths. Through mesh fine as wires, he could see spinning saws slicing them open and dragging the bloodied halves into a boiling vat where they were rendered to a superheated liquid that was fed by transparent arteries into a great aluminum press that smoldered and whined with gouts of escaping gas. The mold was cooled and when it opened at the other end with billowing clouds of steam, a doll person stepped out and joined ranks of other synthetic people that stood around like gape-jawed mummies in a Mexican catacomb.
Lex blinked his eyes again and again.
He didn’t believe for a moment that this was how they were made, but something wanted him to and he had to fight against an impulse to join the others at the feeder end.
It was then he looked straight up through dissipating clouds of hot vapor and saw an immense web up there, a spider’s web, but made of some pink silk that looked oddly like needle-thin sections of human skin. A man was crucified up there. He was dismembered, but all parts of his anatomy were arranged in comparative relation to one another.
Lex knew it was Chazz.
And as some immense spidery horror of wriggling doll parts hovered over the dismembered man and jabbed him with needles, he was certain of it. He could even hear his voice:
“God…God…God…help me…oh please let me die…”
Lex was speechless, struck dumb by such an atrocity.
At least, until his own mouth opened and he heard his voice say, “You’re being pulled into this…you’re making this dark fantasy real…you’re getting weak…”
Yes, he blinked it away and concentrated and it was only then that he noticed something that had escaped him thus far—everything in the factory maze was connected with gossamer web-like filaments. Every piece of machinery, every gear, wheel, and press was connected to something that was coming out of the darkness now, racing out of it, an immense black shape connected to what seemed millions of white filaments like a gruesome puppet with a thousand strings.
It was time to meet the master of the maze.
52
Close now, so goddamn close.
Ramona was nearing the axis of chaos and she could feel the dark magnetism of it pulling her in just as it simultaneously tried to force her away. She was afraid of it and it was afraid of her, only she did not know why and she feared she would die before she found out. In the distance there were the loud industrious sounds of a foundry—clanking and gnashing, snapping and popping, metal grinding against metal and an ever-present hissing of hot gases.
The corridor would lead her there.
Step by step, she was closer.
Thoughts scurried through her head, things she did not want to be thinking about but kept sprouting like weeds nonetheless. This night had been endless. It might have been going on for hours or days now. Time had lost all meaning here in the devil’s playground. She knew the fate of Soo-Lee, and Creep was probably dead, too. Same for Danielle. But she wondered about Lex. She even wondered about Chazz. She still had feelings for him—struggling, fleeting things though they were—and she wondered if he was still alive.
But a voice in her head said simply,
No. He was physically strong but mentally weak and morally corrupt. Once you stripped away his muscles and good looks, there wasn’t anything beneath but a frightened whiny little boy and you know it. Easy prey for Mother Crow.
Ramona wasn’t going to think about him anymore.
He was gone. He had to be gone.
And what they had, had been gone even longer.
She scanned the corridor with her light. She was heading in the right direction; her instincts assured her of this. The floor was messy, unlike the rest of the town. Did that mean anything? Where was the precision, the sterility, the obsessive neatness you saw in the streets? Underfoot was a carpet of leaves, cigarette butts, candy wrappers, metal shavings, wood splinters, and an extremely aged water-stained copy of
Playboy.
There were gray doors set in the walls. One said PRODUCTION SUPERVISOR and another PLANT MANAGER. Something brown and crusty like old shit had been rubbed on them. Maybe it was blood.
At the very end there was a large six-paneled oak door. Very elegant compared to the others. It was shiny, well-waxed and polished. It gleamed like a table in a Pledge commercial. There was a plaque on the door. It read:
MOTHER CROW
PRESIDENT
Ramona knew it probably hadn’t said anything like that back in 1960 or the decades preceding. But there it was, black letters emblazoned on a gleaming brass plaque. MOTHER CROW, PRESIDENT. She was struck by the absurdity of it. Could it possibly have said something like that back in the day? Was the old lady that crazy, that arrogant, that full of herself? But the answer to that was obvious. The hag thought she owned the town. She had cursed the fleeing workers when the orders dried up at the factory. She had fucking
survived
death and created this sideshow.
Yes,
the old lady had certainly been that crazy, that arrogant, and that full of herself. Typical despot. Typical tyrant. Typical matriarch of a fallen dynasty. MOTHER CROW, PRESIDENT. It was enough to make you fucking puke. In fact, it was enough to—
Wait.
It didn’t say
Mother
Crow now. It said something else:
RAMONA CROW,
PRESIDENT
That made Ramona take a step or two backward. A sick joke perpetrated by a sick mind. She realized then that the old lady could have insulted her, her mother, her entire family and Ramona would have shrugged it off. But this was more than an insult, it was disturbing. It was like having the old hag cackling in her ear with her sour old lady breath.
“Stop it,” Ramona said.
But the plaque persisted: RAMONA CROW, PRESIDENT.
“FUCK YOU!”
RAMONA CROW, PRESIDENT AND CEO, it now said.
“STOP IT!”