“I’m going to kill you,” she said, trying to channel all the hate and frustration and rage that had haunted her ever since this nightmare began. “I’m going to hack you to pieces.”
She said this calmly, but authoritatively. At first, it was all lie and bluff, but then steadily her anger began to rise and she knew if she could not put this horror down, then she could not possibly face what lay ahead.
“NO, RAMONA! YOU MUST NOT DO THAT!” the voices told her.
She stepped forward, burning with rage.
Frankendoll took a few wary steps away, bumping into a table and overturning it.
Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack,
went its many drumming feet.
It was unsure now. The balance of power had shifted and Ramona could almost feel it in the air like a breath of heat surrounding her, pulling her in, making her its own…a spark, a blazing coal that would set tinder to burning and bring down a great forest of dark, twisting dread.
“Poor, poor Ramona. See how alone she is, how alone she has always been. Never able to trust and never able to forgive even herself. Always confused and miserable and burned black to her core,”
the voices taunted.
“See how small she is, pretty, pretty, but small and weak and filled with a void of hot wind lacking substance.”
Yes, she was being taunted and her buttons were being pushed, quite expertly at that. Mother Crow knew what lived in the mind of her enemies, she knew how to squeeze out every last drop of their terror, self-loathing, and secret angst like foul gray water from a sponge. Images of Chazz filled her head. He was an asshole, a bastard, a user and abuser…yet,
yet,
she blamed herself because her manic OCD could not accept the fact that she had not fucked up something somewhere, a dropped word, a missed clue, a skein of misery that she had not followed to its source.
Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack.
Frankendoll was closing in on her even as her own mind was closing up like a bivalve as she drowned in a sea of self-doubt and guilt that filled her with indecision that became weakness that weighed her down and made her unsure of who she was and even what she was.
“The poor dear, always so alone. She’s needed to become part of something bigger than herself and now she will,”
the voices said, more to themselves than to her.
“We’ll love her, we’ll protect her, we’ll let her join us.”
“But I won’t,” she managed, wanting to believe it but unsure now.
Certain that the hot air was bled from her, Frankendoll came after her like the monster in its namesake film—a barbarian of hate and destruction. It flipped tables aside and crushed wriggling doll parts beneath its step, knocking shelves free and tearing pegboards from the walls, bearing down on her with absolute fury.
And in that moment of vulnerability as her life hung in the balance—and an unspeakable fate—she brought up the axe and charged and Frankendoll met her on neutral ground among the wreckage it had created. The mouths yawned wide and screamed with an outpouring of rage. Dozens of new doll faces opened like blossoming flowers and hands reached out, clawed and deadly hands, and she saw Chazz’s disfigured doll face opening with the teeth of an ogre to peel her face free.
The axe landed.
It struck the monster square in the chest, splitting open two heads and cleaving into the mass beneath, which splintered with a loud cracking like deadwood or a crushed human rib cage. Bits of Frankendoll dropped away, a limb here and a head there. A viscous gout of hot yellow fluid erupted from the wound, burning Ramona’s face and sizzling as it struck the floor. The many agonized mouths screamed their displeasure.
And Ramona kept chopping and chopping as hands scratched her face and struck her, tearing out handfuls of hair and ripping her shirt open, busily trying to get at the flesh beneath to pull it apart and assimilate it. A million red globular eyes pushed out of the mass, a million scraping gray fingers clutched at her, and the brace of heads atop the creature’s shoulders opened wide and expelled a gurgling white vomit that had the consistency of rice. Ramona fought and it fought. They tore and thrashed and clawed at one another. Limbs flew and heads dropped and then the axe was wrenched from her hands and she was drawn closer to the pulsating mass, dozens of worming black tongues erupting like eels from deep sea caves to lick her eyes from their sockets.
But she did not give in.
Soaked with its vomit and its burning yellow blood that continued to squirt free in noisome loops, she was pressed up against the revolting tumescent flesh of the thing as it tried to bury her alive in itself, in its hot plastic skin, the gummy infected soup of tissue, which even then webbed over her and snaked around her in waxy, sodden ropes.
Still, she fought.
She tore at the mass of Frankendoll, digging into it, tearing out its flesh in spongy cobs and pulpous clots as its discharge flooded over her and engulfed her and she felt its many hands pulling at her limbs, making ready to dismember her and add her biology to its morbid collection. But it was also at that moment that she heard something throbbing inside and knew it must be its heart. Machines did not have hearts but this thing was not exactly a machine any more than it was a living thing, more of a biomechanical interface.
With her last ounce of strength, she plunged her hands deep into it, tearing her knuckles on gears and cogs and spinning wheels and felt her hands grip a fleshy beating mass that felt about the size and general shape of a football. She yanked with everything she had and tore it out by its coiling roots, falling back with it, free of the monstrosity that wailed and screamed, blistering and dissolving and swimming in a fountain of its own doll waste.
She held the heart of the thing over her head.
“NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!”
the voices boomed, seeming to make the room shake. Vessels shattered and the walls cracked open and dust was shaken from the ceiling overhead.
The heart was enormously slimy, dangling with fibrous pink tendrils that coiled and snapped. It was like some rotten, swollen black tomato pulsing in her hands.
THUMP-THUMP! THUMP-THUMP! THUMP-THUMP!
She tried to rend it with her fingers but it was rubbery and slick, palpitating wildly with what seemed conflicting arrhythmic beats like it was trying to jump free.
THUMP-THUMP! THUMP-THUMP! THUMPATHUMPATHUMPA THUMP—
As the hissing, bubbling mass of Frankendoll came at her, she threw the heart to the floor and picked up the axe. The voices screamed one last time before the blade came down and bisected the quivering muscle that sloshed like an overfilled water balloon. It erupted with an explosion of yellow juice that flooded over the floor and Frankendoll screamed, coming after Ramona again, but staggering and clumsy, smashing into things and tripping over wreckage. She grabbed her Ray-O-Vac and axe and went through the hole it had made where the door had once been.
It followed, but not for long.
It tripped over ribbons of its own flesh and sloughing limbs, leaving smears of tissue on the walls that squirmed with fingers and mashed faces as it put out clouds of boiling fumes and its flesh went liquid and pooled on the floor.
And then she was out of range of its death throes and before her, the hub and who she had come to meet.
53
Lex had seconds.
Amid the deadly clockwork that was the surreal machinery of the puppet master’s mind, he knew that the only way to stop all this was to stop the machine itself. It had to be unplugged, yanked out by the roots like a parasitic weed or its wheels would never stop turning. It was the only way. It was the only possible way.
As he felt the puppet master coming for him, he searched for something, anything that could be used to start smashing things.
There had to be something.
Then he saw there was.
A huge four-foot torque wrench that had to weigh thirty pounds. It would have been child’s play for Chazz to swing something like that around, but for Lex, who had always been a thin, wiry sort of guy who could never put on weight regardless of how much junk food he swallowed, it was like swinging some immense battle axe.
He gripped it, liking the feel and heft of it.
Without hesitation, he brought it up over his head and swung it at the first thing he saw—a gearbox. He thought he heard a cry from above him as the housing broke free and then he was certain of it as the wrench landed again, smashing several gears and upsetting their calibration, making them grind and spew flakes of metal and sparks.
At that precise moment, the siren started up again.
Here, at ground zero, it was like an air raid siren, deafening and blaring, so goddamn unbelievably loud that he couldn’t hear anything else. He gave the gearbox another whack for good measure, then he turned and brought the wrench down on a metal conduit that immediately crumbled and hissed with escaping steam. Just these two small blows seemed like nothing in comparison to the immensity of the machine around him…but it was felt. Something around him shifted. The factory trembled. Its delicate instrumentation was being attacked. He was an invading virus that would infect the body.
That’s when the puppet master revealed itself.
It had been hiding, creeping about, rushing out, then retreating as if it were confused, but it was not confused now. There was nothing left to do but fight and fight it would. It came out to meet the intruder in a dark, amorphous shape that seemed to be constantly in flux as if it couldn’t decide just what it was.
And Lex couldn’t decide either.
Something inside him demanded that he flee, but something else, something much stronger and inflexible, told him to stand his ground.
Face it. Look it in the eye and show no fear. Expose it for the weakling it is.
Which was great in theory. But as it came out to get him like a spider rushing out to snatch an insect, everything inside him went to rubber. The first thing he thought he saw was something like an immense sheet metal press with teeth. Then something more along the lines of a slinking mammoth demon worm encased in the chitinous black shell of a millipede that screamed in the voices of flayed children. It showed him a hundred mouths, then a thousand globular red eyes veined with black, and finally descending talons like shards of glass that had come to eviscerate him.
Don’t even blink. Do not look away.
Hefting the heavy wrench in his hands, he felt positively impotent against this thing that circled around him, a horrendous industrialized and mechanistic centipede suspended off the ground by its puppet strings of white tendrils. They were like a million wire-fine fiber optic cables, so many that they formed sheaths and braids, growing out of the beast and cradling it in a cocoon of cobwebs whose origins were high, high above.
It looked down at him with those seeking red eyes, which were not only horribly profuse but horribly intricate in design, like spinning gyroscopes, multi-lensed and multifaceted like the compound eyes of meat flies. The great undulant, vermiform body was a geometrically complex machine that pumped out hissing spirals of steam, trailing compression hoses and high-voltage lines like looping entrails. Its flexing shell looked like it was more metal than flesh or perhaps flesh becoming metal. Like the walls of the clockwork chamber itself, it was set with knobs and crevices and meshing gears, all of it seeming to be in constant industrious motion, spinning and linking and turning. And as it got closer to him, he dared blink and saw that it was composed not just of machine parts and flesh in some unnatural synchronicity, but of interlinked mannequins welded into some loathsome congregation of the damned. Eyeless and screaming, they reached out with thousands of thrashing arms and fingers.
And high above at the end of the corkscrewing neck, he looked into the face of the puppet master…and it was female. There was no mistaking that. The face of the old woman he had seen in the house, the one stitching up the dead boy. Maybe it wasn’t exactly human any longer, but he saw that it had once been so. She or it had trailing straw-dry hair like luminous white worms, the fissured face of a petrified corpse, blank eyes like the buttons of greasy toadstools, and puckered gums set with what seemed to be the whirring teeth of chains. A dire machine of hate and retribution now, but once,
once,
she had been a living woman and not a crawling malevolence.
As it came for him, he held up his wrench, more than a little aware of the pitiful threat he presented in the face of this immense chimera that had been birthed from the black womb of the factory.
54
“LEX!” Ramona cried when she saw him facing off against something that her mind could not even begin to categorize.
“LEX!”
The thing that had been coming for him paused, its segments flexing and gnashing. It hovered there, bleeding steam and breathing out smoke, drops of fluid dripping from its underside.