Doll Face

10

Even though the van had passed by and its taillights winked out in the distance, Ramona knew she was still in the shit. In fact, she was barely keeping her head above it. She thought for certain when she ducked into the recess between the two buildings that the van—and the horror that drove it—would find her.

But off it went.

And off she had to go.

The others had to be somewhere. Unless, of course, those doll people had gotten them. She’d already encountered two of them and she wasn’t quite so naïve to believe that there were not more.

But what was this place?

What was its point?

It wasn’t Stokes. She knew that much now. She didn’t know where they were but it sure as hell was not Stokes because Stokes didn’t exist. Stokes had burned down in the 1960s. Either they had all suffered some collective nervous breakdown and were drooling in separate padded rooms or what she had seen and what she had experienced thus far was real.

You know it’s real. You damn well know it.

But that made it all worse, didn’t it?

It meant reality as she knew it had split wide open and they had fallen through the cracks. They had to be somewhere. As she looked up and down the streets, she was disturbed by what she saw. It was all so… fake. So perfectly arranged. So very artificial. It was like a small town you saw in an old Warner Brothers movie. The neighborhoods of nice little houses separated by squared-off hedges and fronted by narrow streets, rows of big elms and oaks. All the houses were older two-story jobs, but very well kept. There was not a single ranch house to be seen or any other evidence of post-World War II architecture. Even the street lights—none of which were lit—weren’t modern. They were more along the line of street lamps.

Creepy didn’t begin to describe it.

And the storefronts she had passed, all the little Main Street-type businesses lined up—barbershops, cafés, drugstores, offices—looked like a Hollywood director’s idea of small-town America, something envisioned by Frank Capra.

Ramona had grown up in a small town; she had lived in several, passed through dozens and dozens in her life getting from point A to point B. Some were quaint, some were ugly, some were pretty, some run-down, but they all had personality.

Stokes had none.

It was sterile and synthetic, like it had been kept in a box. Small towns came together in bits and pieces through the years, but Stokes looked like it had been built according to a very specific plan and that was to emphasize its small town-ness, if that made any sense.

This place was an imitation.

But there had to be a point to it all.

Just as there had to be a reason why they were drawn into it in the first place.

Funny, too, how there had been a near-torrential rainfall when they’d entered the valley and now not a drop of rain. Even the streets were dry as if it hadn’t rained in weeks. Interesting.

She stepped out into the street and listened. Nothing. No approaching sirens. Not so much as a car passing in the distance. No cars, no people, no life. Stokes was like a fucking doll house.

She walked calmly as possible up the sidewalk.

She would go in the direction the others had run. She would check out two or three more streets looking for a sign of them, then she was fucking getting out.

If she could get out at all.