It not only persisted, but it haunted her.
She stopped there beneath one of the awnings, one of the same striped awnings, trying to make sense of things. Yes, reality was distorted here, but just because it was, that did not necessarily mean there wasn’t a rhyme and a reason behind it all.
Oh, quit trying to fucking rationalize everything. Don’t you get tired of it all?
But she didn’t because that’s who and what she was. She had spent her life looking for signs and portents, the systematics and mechanisms behind perfectly ordinary events. Take Chazz, for example. She had known for some time he had been screwing around on her, but she didn’t leave him. She didn’t even broach the subject or sink to his level like many other women might have and start sleeping around. No, not her. She looked for vague clues and hints in conversations and daily activities with him that should have tipped her off that his infidelity was inevitable and wondering what she had done wrong, what she had failed to recognize, and how she must be on guard against minor infractions in their relationship that led to major problems.
And she was doing that now.
She waited there, smoking a cigarette, knowing she had to quit before swim season started…but tonight was just not the night.
She was thinking about that alarm or siren or whatever it had been. She knew the general direction it came from—the east—and she was very tempted to track it to its source because she felt deep inside that if she could do that, she might be able to shut it down, and if she shut it down, she might just shut this whole town down with it.
But that was foolish and dangerous.
The reasonable thing was to give up looking and backtrack to where the van had been. That was the point of entry into this madhouse and probably the escape route.
She turned around, moving faster now in the direction she had come.
The same storefronts, the same houses, the same everything.
She walked and walked and walked and it seemed she was still no closer to where she had been, wherever that was and wherever it could be in the greater scheme of this lunacy.
Bullshit, this is all bullshit, all a cheap fucking game and this town is nothing but a cheap fucking carnival. That’s all it is. That’s all it can be.
She walked faster, refusing to give in and refusing to accept the grim inevitability that she was going nowhere, that she might as well have been running on a treadmill. Same storefronts, same houses, same trees, same boulevards…God, it went on and on.
But so did Ramona.
Because anyone that had ever known her discovered one thing sooner or later: she had a stubborn streak a mile wide and she refused, simply refused, to give up or give in. She would not be beaten by this nightmare. She would exhaust it, she would wear it down, she would make it spend itself until it was simply out of breath and the walls of perception ran thin…then she’d be out, she’d be free.
But she was the one that ran out of breath.
Scared, but mostly angry and irritated at everything, she stopped, catching her breath and making herself think. There had to be an answer here. There had to be a way out. Christ, she was starting to feel like a hamster run to death on a wheel.
Swearing, she started walking again.
Since moving in a linear fashion was getting her absolutely nowhere, she changed her tactics. She moved completely by instinct. She walked this way, turned on her heel and cut down an avenue, then down a street, up a boulevard. Her navigation was haphazard, it was random as hell. She did not think about what she was going to do, she just did it, guiding herself with pure animal sense. Her point was that this was all controlled somehow and she was going to break down the Controller one way or another, force him or her or
it
to show itself and reveal its hand.
She walked faster and faster, listening to her footsteps echoing off the faces of buildings and houses.
Then she stopped dead, knowing that she had struck a nerve with her theoretical controller.
Listen, listen to that.
Though she was no longer walking, she still heard footsteps.
She turned and there was no one there…at least, no one she could see. But the footsteps were approaching and it was not merely one set, but many sets. They made the slapping sound of bare feet, yet they had an almost hollow little echo to them.
She heard a low whispering.
What might have been the giggling of a child.
She felt the fine hairs at the back of her neck rise up, a chill moving upwards and over her scalp. She was being stalked by things she could not see and they were getting closer and closer.
Maybe it worked, maybe I wore it down, maybe I’m forcing its hand.
But there was no satisfaction in that because she was quite literally terrified of something—many things—she could not see. They were coming for her. The whispering grew in volume until it seemed like maybe it was a dozen children out there, hissing and piping and gibbering with a low and eerie sibilance that seemed to fill her head and echo around in her skull.
She ran.
She ran as fast as she could and every time she paused, it seemed that they were closer still. They were going to run her to the point of exhaustion. As she passed store windows, she clearly saw display mannequins turn their heads and watch her progress. Finally, she stopped and turned.
“Show yourselves already,” she said, her anger rising above her fear.
One of them stepped from the shadows—a naked girl or an imitation of the same, to be more precise. She was a little thing with a matted mop of blonde hair, her face the color of frost and the texture of silken spiderwebs, her eyes like ragged holes looking into a dark and empty room. From chest to hips, she was open as if there hadn’t been enough flesh to cover her. Inside…there was nothing. Just a metal framework that was narrow and spoking like the bones of jackals.
There was no machinery.
No electronics.
Nothing that could make her work, yet she moved, she was alive. Ramona heard an insane laughter in the back of her head. She was insane. She had to be completely insane.
“It’s Ramona,”
the girl said in a perfectly shrill, scraping voice that was many miles from what a girl’s voice should have sounded like.
“Ramona, Ramona, Ramona, Ramona.”
The others began to appear now, stepping out to chant her name.
Dozens of them.
Many of them were unfinished, their heads like swollen, nodding toadstools. An army of Raggedy Ann dolls from hell, faces stitched and spliced, carved and slapped together out of papier-mâché that grinned and moved like living tissue. Effigies cut from fissured deadwood and dry rot, scarecrows with pipestem legs and spidery tree branches for hands, animate sculptures of mortuary pipes and rib cage baskets. Some lacked limbs and a few lacked heads, one of them was little more than a walking armature waiting to be fleshed out, another was a set of legs with a post-like spine and a cracked open, hairless head but nothing else.
They called her name, whispering it, seeming to like the sound of it:
“Ramona, Ramona, Ramona, Ramona,”
they chanted, gathering volume and intensity until their voices were a whispering, shrilling cacophony:
“RAMONA, RAMONA, RAMONA, RAMONA, RAMONA—”
It grew louder and louder until she couldn’t take it anymore and she vented her horror in a high, whining scream. She stumbled back and away from the dolls, tripping over her own feet, silvered by pale moonlight.
They closed it on her, reaching for her.
One of them kicked its head before it on the sidewalk. It rolled over like a ball, orange locks splaying out over the cement. It righted itself, turning to look at her with empty eye sockets that could see nothing. Its mouth opened and it screamed at her, perfectly mocking her own cry again and again, cycling higher with each piercing shriek.
Ramona, as close to madness as she’d ever been, dropped to her knees, her flesh crawling and her mind sucking into some black crevice of numbing child-like terror. One last shred of adult reason broke through like a beacon and she shouted:
“I DON’T BELIEVE IN YOU! YOU’RE NOT REAL! YOU HEAR ME? YOU’RE NOT REAL!”
But they kept coming.
She knew there was only one thing to do. Only one possible way to break the spell of madness. Her instinct warned her away from it, but her rational mind demanded it because if she did not fight them here and now, did not put this hallucination down, then it would never, ever stop until her mind was completely gone.
With a cry of rage and violence, she stormed at them, vaulting right into their midst and she felt their cold little fingers scratch her face and their mouths bite into her arms, but it did not slow her down. She fought and clawed and kicked and bowled them over and fell away from them.
The street was littered with doll parts—heads and arms, torsos and legs and hands, tangled cords and pulleys and gears…what amounted to the guts of the things. She knew she hadn’t hit them that hard. Not hard enough to break them into pieces.
But they
were
in pieces.
She stumbled back, blinking her eyes, waiting for them to reassemble themselves as the mannequin woman had. But they were nothing but parts, inert and inactive, completely incapable of anything like motion. It looked like someone had dumped out the bargain bin from a puppet shop.
Do you see? Do you see? They are nothing and they never were nothing! They couldn’t be anything but what they are—wood and wax, steel rods and sackclothing, plastic and papier-mâché, glue and rubber hoses and gears…don’t you see? Don’t you fucking see?
She shook her head because she did not see and she goddamn well knew better. Maybe
now
they were parts. Maybe they were never anything but parts machined and cut and carved. But something in this nightmare shithole of a town trembling darkly on the borderland of fucking hell had the power to
make
them move. It could make them do anything it wanted. It made them live, it made them breathe, it made them walk. Maybe it couldn’t give them souls as such, but it woke something up inside them…something stalking and malignant. She had seen it hiding in the darkness of their eyes, a nameless black life force.
So maybe they were nothing but parts now, but that could change in the blink of an eye. A car was nothing but parts, too, until someone got behind the wheel and made those parts work. Then it could be made to kill.
Trying not to cry, trying not to deflate with madness, she shook until cold sweat ran down her face and then she promptly fell to her ass, panting and sobbing and making a moaning sound deep in her throat. Her face was scratched, her arms bitten, her shirt torn from sharp little fingers.
They were real and yet they were not.
They were solid, they were physical, but when she attacked them with fury, they simply fell apart.
When she had calmed somewhat, she sat there, trying to get her head working so she could get her body moving and get her ass somewhere relatively safe. Because right then her mind and body were completely out of sync.
And her mind was much closer to full-blown insanity than she dared contemplate.
“Just get it together,” she told herself in a very soothing and almost motherly sort of voice. “Get it together and get your feet under you.”
Slowly, she did just that.
She got to her feet and she was not dizzy. Disturbed, yes, but no longer white inside with rabid fear. She bunched her muscles and worked out the kinks in her neck. She was ready. God yes, she was ready as she was ever going to be.
And good thing, too.
Because the doll parts began to move.
16
Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop.
Chazz saw an immense hairy thing with a poison-dripping mouth, its many legs set with spinnerets swollen like balloons.
But, of course, it wasn’t a spider.
There were many horrors in Stokes, but giant arachnids weren’t among them. In the moonlight that splashed the stairwell he could see legs…what seemed to be dozens upon dozens of mannequin legs coming down the stairs. So many of them, in fact, that their feet were not only on the steps themselves but clopping off the walls and rapping against the stair balusters, several gliding down the stair rail itself.
This is what he saw.
This is what made white ice flow in his veins and his breath scrape in his throat. Sweat beaded his face and he had a perfectly mad desire to start giggling.
Legs, legs, legs, so goddamn many legs…they must be connected to something.
That’s what he was terrified of. It scared him more than what was behind the door clawing to get out. All those legs…they just kept coming and coming and he could clearly see the ball joints at the knees and something above, a body of some sort and he did not want to see that.