Doll Face (8 page)

It hit a patch of moonlit wall with the sort of force that should have injured it and made it bleed. But it left no blood splotch. In fact, as it hit the wall, it simply fell apart…it broke into pieces.

Chazz let out a muffled cry.

It wasn’t real. Like everything in this place, it just wasn’t real.

In the moonlight, he could see it there on the floor. Its head was hairless like that of a possum, detached from its body, the jaws still trying to bite. Two of its legs had fallen off and they were still moving, still trying to claw. But the very worst thing was that its body had broken open and he could see what looked like whirring gears inside it, spindles and springs.

There was no end to this shit.

The rat was like some windup toy.

And as this settled into Chazz’s mind, mixing up in there with the rest of it and making him more confused and pushing him that much closer to complete lunacy, he heard another sound.

Creak, creak.

He looked around. It was Lady Peg-leg again, it had to be Lady Peg-leg again…but no, as he peered out the window, he saw that she was no longer in the street. He couldn’t see her anywhere.

Creak, creak, creak.

And besides, this sound was in the room with him.

Yes, over there beyond what he thought was a couch, he could make out a dim figure. It was sitting in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth, back and forth.

Creak, creak, creak.

“Who…who’s there?”

And a voice, feminine in caliber, throaty and breathless, said, “It’s me, doll-face. And I’ve been here a long, long time.”

A woman, another doll woman.

He nearly started cackling hysterically at the idea of it.

“Stay away from me! You come by me and I’ll kill you!”

The voice giggled in its throat. “Oh, you don’t have to worry about me, doll-face. It’s the old lady who wants you. The peg-leg lady. She wants your heart. You have a nice, strong heart and she doesn’t have one at all. She wants yours.”

“Fuck you!” Chazz shouted.

The chair stopped creaking. “You only had to ask, doll-face. You only had to ask.”

The doll woman had risen from the chair now and was coming with that same clicking sound as the doll man in the street. She moved with a shambling gait, painfully and slowly as if one leg was longer than the other. He could see her reaching out with sharp fingers, long hair sweeping from side to side as she got closer.

With a scream, Chazz vaulted across the room to where he had seen a door.

He barely got through it. Her fingers dragged through his hair and then he slammed it shut behind him and he could hear her nails scraping at the other side as if they were not nails at all, but claws.

The door had a lock and he set it.

She continued to claw at the other side. “When I find you, doll-face, I’ll fuck you.”

Chazz threw himself backward, his skin crawling again.

He stumbled over a chair and fell into a pool of moonlight that made his fingers look ashen and almost phosphorescent like the petals of night-blooming orchids. He was shaking, drooling, chattering his teeth. Tears ran from his eyes and he could not throw together a single coherent thought.

There were a set of stairs before him, climbing to the second floor.

When he could think, he considered going up there and hiding in a room, but, no, he could not bear the idea of being in the same house as that thing in the other room. No, he had to run. He needed to escape. He needed to put some distance between himself and this place.

And this is exactly what he was going to do.

Then he saw something coming down the stairs and in his fevered mind it could be nothing but a giant, leggy spider. It had sighted him and decided he was its prey.

Clip-clop-clip-clop,
went its many legs.

Chazz crawled away toward the door, thumping into it and on the other side, the voice said, “Now you have to make a choice, doll-face…me or
it.”

13

Danielle’s world felt compressed.

It was tight and suffocating like a small black box. It consisted of these streets and buildings, thoroughfares and houses, all the little details that made up a town called Stokes that she knew existed only in nightmares and perhaps at the very perimeter of hell itself.

She was suffocating.

Waiting there, up against the window of some nameless shop, she was suffocating. Creep was standing there, nervous, agitated, moving this way and that, unable to sit still. Lex and Soo-Lee were in the street, glancing fearfully behind them at the darkened diner. They had gone in and then came out. They must have turned off the lights after they left.

Danielle realized that she had to use her entire body to draw in a breath.

She had to actually lift herself with the motion of her diaphragm to get any air in her lungs. When she tried to tell Creep that, her voice simply would not come because there was not enough oxygen to power it.

There was something wrong here.

Something bad.

The air was gone. She had to find a place where there was air or she was going to asphyxiate. She started walking, stumbling along really in the direction they had come from.

“Hey,” Creep said. “What are you doing?”

He reached out to grab her and she shrugged him aside and then she started running. Gasping for breath, seeking air she could breathe, she ran down the street and around the corner and the faster she went, the better the air was until she was no longer gasping.

Creep was running after her, calling out her name, demanding to know what in the hell it was she thought she was doing and, oh, had there been the time, she would have told him and then he would have understood.

She came around another corner and there was somebody standing there.

It was a man. A big man.

He moved with a clicking, whirring sound of gears and cogs.

Danielle skidded to a halt inches from him, backing up frantically. The moonlight showed her that he was not really a man, but another doll that only looked like a man. He was grinning at her and she saw that he had teeth.

“Is that you, doll-face?”
he asked.

And then there was a silvery flash as he swung something at her.

She had enough time to let out a small cry as something thudded against her head, the impact driving her to her knees and then to the sidewalk, where she knew no more.

14

Goddamn idiot.

This is what went through Creep’s mind as he chased after Danielle, who was surprisingly fast and agile. She had the long legs of a gazelle and he figured she was some kind of jock to pour on speed like that. A runner or a soccer player. Maybe she played lacrosse and swam competitively like Ramona or raced mountain bikes like Soo-Lee. Regardless, that girl had game.

And for Creep, whose major sports consisted of marathon sessions of
Resident Evil,
she was simply out of his league.

He called out to Lex and Soo-Lee, but they were already on the way.

Man, this was just great. Like they didn’t have enough problems already trying to stay alive and keep sane, now they had to babysit this psycho bimbette while she showed them how she ate the turf in the 100-yard dash.

He saw her disappear around a corner ahead and, damn, she did not break stride at all. She leaned into it and zipped around it with incredible grace. The sort of grace that would have put Creep himself right on his ass and twisted an ankle to boot.

He made the corner finally, but he had to slow way down and even so, Christ, he nearly tripped over his own feet like a geriatric monkey. But there she was. Just ahead and pouring on the speed again.

He followed her, hearing Lex and Soo-Lee gaining on him.

He had a feeling they would overtake him any second.

He saw Danielle round another corner and by that point he was starting to think she wasn’t even fucking human. He was ready to give up, call it a day and hang up his cleats, but something pushed him on. He was not the bravest guy in the world—outside of X-box 360, where he was nearly a legend—but he knew that if he didn’t stop her, something really bad would happen to her. Something that might have already happened to Chazz and,
gulp
, Ramona.

He came around the corner at the precise moment that Danielle skidded to a halt like a sprinting wildebeest that had just run smack dab into a hungry lion.

Only, in this case, a lion would have been preferable.

Creep saw the doll man standing there and he stopped, too. This guy—
thing,
whatever it was—was a huge form that towered above her like a graveyard angel. It wore a huge dark coat that looked like a moldering tarp. It hobbled closer to her with a see-sawing side to side gait, dragging one leg behind it. Its face was like a fright mask made of burlap or pale gray sackcloth, but yet it was flesh because as it spoke, the thin-lipped, crooked mouth moved as if muscles beneath were in motion.

Creep heard what it said:
“Is that you, doll-face?”

Then it swung what it held in one narrow, long-fingered hand…a hatchet. The blade caught Danielle right at the crown of her skull, splitting her head like moist green wood. The sound it made reminded Creep of a cleaved gourd. He was hit by a wet spray of blood and brains and went right down to his knees with a broken cry.

The hulking thing began to drag itself in his direction, stepping over the still-shuddering corpse of Danielle.

Creep just waited for it.

He was speechless and stunned, his mouth hanging open, fingers numbly pawing at the blood and gray matter on his face, which had the consistency of greasy gelatin from a canned ham. He was struck dumb and motionless. It felt like his own blood had drained down into his feet and he was in danger of pitching over face-first to the sidewalk.

The moonlight made the hatchet man’s face look almost luminous.

There were tufts of white hair jutting from his malformed head, the face itself seamed and sutured, one empty eye socket set lower than the other, both filled with the formless blackness of endless nighted catacombs. He had no nose and his mouth was distorted from the stitching that held it together.

Again, Creep was struck by the impression that it was a mask…but as the thing approached him, it grinned with a lopsided, mocking smile.
“Is that you, doll-face?”
it asked, raising its hatchet to strike. Gore dropped from the blade. Tissue and hair were clotted on it.

Creep waited for it, but then Lex grabbed him and pulled him away, half dragging him and half carrying him out of range of the monster.

“Run!” Soo-Lee said.
“Run!”

She was leading them and Creep found his feet and ran at Lex’s side, feeling suddenly that he could have run ten miles if that’s what it took. His fear and horror became vigor and he put it to work.

Behind them, the hatchet man followed.

15

In the brooding silence, Ramona moved up the sidewalk, doing her best to keep out of the direct moonlight and beneath the shadows thrown by the awnings positioned over the storefronts. Each one was striped. Each one antique. Each one out of place and time like the whole goddamn town.

She knew that in the greater scheme of things, or at least the greater scheme of the town specifically, that it meant something if she could only figure out what. Her head was just too full of shit to figure it out. Too much anxiety and stress and terror and apprehension.

It was all masking her ability to think clearly, to reason.

This place was a box, a big black box, but there was a key that opened it if only she could find it and recognize it for what it was.

The alarm had sounded again and that was trouble.

The last time it had sounded, the broken man had come to life and that other thing in the van had attacked Chazz, poor, worthless Chazz. In her way of thinking, that meant if there were other mannequin people around, the alarm probably had activated them.

She had no real proof of that, but she believed it.

For now, she had to find the others.

They had to be here somewhere. But that seemed to be part of the problem. Every street seemed to look alike. The business sections were like repetitions of one another as were the residential districts. She swore she saw the same storefronts, the same houses again and again. That was impossible, of course, because she was moving in a straight line, yet the feeling persisted.