Doll Face

11

“I suppose we should go over there and have a look,” Lex said. “I rather doubt those lights came on purely by accident.”

But Creep didn’t like the idea. “Fuck that. It’s a trap. I know it’s a trap. It’s like… like… like…”

“Bait?” Soo-Lee said.

“Yeah! That’s it, Lex. It’s bait to draw us in. When we get there, something’s going to happen and I know it. Those things’ll be in there, waiting for us.”

“Maybe that’s exactly why we should go over there.”

“Are you nuts?”

Lex shrugged. “Something’s going on here and I got a real nasty feeling that we’re not leaving until we figure out what. In fact, if we don’t figure it out, we may never get out.”

“I’m all for walking right out of here.”

“It’s not going to be that easy.”

“How do you know?”

The thing was, Lex wasn’t sure. He just had a very bad feeling that all of this was not by accident. That it was on purpose. That this town existed for a specific reason and they were drawn into it for a purpose. “Listen,” he said, “here’s what we’ll do. I’ll go check it out. You wait here. You went to look for Chazz and Ramona, now it’s my turn.”

Creep shrugged. It was obvious he still didn’t like it, but the idea of there being no personal danger involved bolstered him some. “All right.”

“I’m going, too,” Soo-Lee said.

Creep sighed. “And I babysit the psycho.”

Lex ignored that and led Soo-Lee across the street.

Creep was right, of course. Maybe it wasn’t a trap exactly—or maybe it was—but there was something very weird about it just like there was something very weird about this town, which, presumably, did not exist in the first place. There were no lights on anywhere and now one just happened to come on. Now wasn’t that interesting?

But, honestly, he didn’t think it was interesting at all.

He thought it was downright disturbing.

With Soo-Lee right behind him, he moved cautiously up the sidewalk until he got to the diner. Looking through the plate glass windows, he could see tables and booths, a counter with round stools.

But no people.

Somebody must have turned the lights on.

“This is creepy,” Soo-Lee whispered.

Yes, it was at that.

What was also creepy was that the word DINER was lettered in each window. No name other than that, just DINER. Not the DOWNTOWN DINER or the DO-DROP-IN DINER or JIMMY’S HASH HOUSE or BOBBIE’S BURGER BARN. It was all very generic just like the town itself, which made him realize that every shop and store he had seen were like that—GROCERIES and INSURANCE, BARBERSHOP and DENTIST, but none of them with any more specific titles.

It reminded him of the elaborate train set he had put together with his dad when he was in grade school. There had been depots and mountains, trees and roundhouses, and a little town where every storefront had a very generic title just like in Stokes.

This is everytown, he thought. It’s bits and pieces of every town everyone has ever seen from every old movie, every old TV show, every fucking Norman Rockwell calendar. There’s a reason for that and you better figure out what it is.

“I’m going in,” he told her. “Maybe you should wait out here.”

“No thanks.”

He pulled open the door and it jingled. He stepped inside. And what was weird in the first place only got that much weirder. His first impression on coming through the door was that the place smelled old, empty, and musty… but that changed when he was three feet inside. It was like the diner suddenly came to life. He could smell hot coffee and burgers, pie and french fries. It all smelled exactly the way he thought a diner should smell, as if his own memories and expectations had been hijacked.

There was food set out everywhere.

Lex blinked and then blinked again because he was certain it was a hallucination of some sort. It had to be a hallucination. Nothing else could possibly explain it. On the counter, he saw cups of coffee that were still steaming. A cheeseburger on a plate with a bite out of it, a fry dipped in ketchup. A slice of blueberry pie with ice cream that was not even melted yet. It was the same at the booths and tables: bowls of hot soup, malteds in icy metal cups, BLTs and grilled cheese sandwiches. The soups were barely touched, malteds barely sipped, the sandwiches all with the requisite one or two bites from them as if to emphasize the fact that the diners had all just left… perhaps seconds ago.

“What the heck is all this?” Soo-Lee asked.

But he didn’t know.

Together, they stepped behind the counter, moving very slowly and carefully as if they expected to find a tripwire. There were no booby traps, just pots of hot coffee and a large, freshly poured Coke in a cup. A chalkboard announced the day’s specials: HAMBURGER PLATE .79¢ CHICKEN NOODLE SOUP .50¢, CHICKEN FRIED STEAK $1.00.

“Can’t beat the prices,” Soo-Lee said.

No, you can’t, Lex thought. And when was the last time you could get food that cheap? The 1960s? The 1950s?

Everything was fucked-up and out of whack.

They peered through the archway into the kitchen. Burgers and bacon were frying on a big, greasy range.

Lex went back out into the dining area. He picked up a fry and examined it closely.

“You’re not going to eat that?” Soo-Lee said.

But that’s exactly what he was going to do. He doubted the physical reality of what he was seeing so he was putting it to the test. It felt like a fry. The weight and texture were perfect… but it had no odor and he was willing to bet it had no taste.

He looked around. Incredible. This place was like the Mary Celeste of diners. All the patrons had been mysteriously snatched away into thin air. Oooo-weee-oooo. Except that it was all bullshit, a carefully constructed ruse. There had never been people here.

He dropped the fry back onto its plate. “It’s fake,” he said. “All this food is fake. It’s like that plastic food little kids play with. And I bet that’s exactly how it tastes.”

The words had no more than left his lips when he felt a subtle shift in the atmosphere of the diner. It was quick and inexplicable. He no longer smelled good things to eat and drink. No, now he smelled mildew and rot.

“Lex,” Soo-Lee said, grabbing his arm.

But he saw, all right. There were mice running around on the floor. A rat was on a table gnawing at a club sandwich that looked like it had been sitting there for weeks. The bread was green with mold. There were flies everywhere. A beetle crawled out of a malted cup. A burger was writhing with maggots.

Yes, it had happened everywhere.

Everywhere.

The walls were dingy, the plate glass windows dirty, the counter and tables filthy with rat droppings and food scraps gone black. The red vinyl booth cushions were torn open, stuffing hanging out. There was three inches of dust on the floors. Ceiling tiles above were water-stained, some missing entirely.

“Let’s get out of here,” Soo-Lee said.

Yes, that was a good idea. A very good idea because he had the most appalling feeling that the diner was decaying and if they did not get out, they would decay with it like worms trapped in a rotting apple. Beyond the grimy counters, the chalkboard had changed now.

It no longer offered the day’s specials. Now it read:

LEX FONTAINE

SOO-LEE CHANG

CHAZZ ACKELY

RAMONA LAKE

CREEP RODGERS

DANIELLE LECARR

† REST IN PEACE †

A white fear opening up inside him, Lex grabbed Soo-Lee and they raced for the door… only there was no door. It was not simply missing, it was like it had never been there in the first place. There were only the plate glass windows with their lower fringe of curtains hanging like dingy rags, but no aperture where a door might have been placed.

Soo-Lee was shaking.

So was he.

“What… what is this?” she said, maybe more to herself than to him.

But without a doubt it was an excellent question: what exactly was this? What sort of mind game was it and what was the fucking point of it all? Who was running it? If they wanted Lex and Soo-Lee to be unnerved and scared, well they had been successful. Lex’s skin was crawling. It felt like something inside his head wanted to fly apart. He felt helpless and trapped like a fly in a web.

Christ, he felt like he was buried alive.

But he had to think. He knew that much. He couldn’t lose it because whatever puppet master was running this show wanted him to. The only real weapon he’d ever had in his life was his mind and he couldn’t let all this dull its edge now.

Think.

Yes, yes. The image of the diner had been offered to them with flawless diner perfection: the smells, the sights, even the sounds of the soft drink bubblers and coffee percolating. But he had turned his nose up at it. He had been suspicious. He had refused to accept the simple joy of what was offered, so it was made worse. He was being punished.

“Well,” he said, very loudly, “I’m not buying this either, so you better fucking try again.”

This time, the atmospheric shift was not so subtle.

He felt a wave of force pass through the room. It was actually tangible and had enough intensity to nearly knock the both of them down. It made him feel woozy and dizzy and he wondered if it had been such a good idea to challenge the puppet master of this not-so-little nightmare.

The room shifted.

The air seemed to crack open like an egg.

Lex’s vision went blurry. He held on to Soo-Lee, who was having trouble staying on her feet. When they got a hold of themselves and their vision cleared—it was almost like the room had gone misty or out of focus—they looked around and saw there was more than decay and filth to contend with.

They saw bodies.

Corpses.

Soo-Lee gasped and Lex felt his stomach contents bubble up the back of his throat. For one second he thought the room was filled with mannequin people, but it wasn’t that at all. It was worse. Oh yes, it was much worse. The corpses were arranged at the tables and in the booths, at the stools lining the counter. They were all pale and shrunken-looking, desiccated like scarecrows. Their faces were bloodless, their hands—skeletal white claws—were resting on tables and gripping coffee cups and holding spoons and forks.

But the worst part was that their throats were all slit.

A sharp knife, Lex found himself thinking. It must have been done by a very sharp knife.

The gashes were neat and bloodless, almost surgical. And that was enhanced by the fact that they were all sutured shut with black catgut. Their lips were likewise sewn shut with an X-pattern stitching, giving them the look of fairground shrunken heads. Their eyes were missing, too, neatly replaced by black shoe buttons. The entire effect was like someone had turned them into voodoo dolls.

But not true voodoo dolls (if there was such a thing), but the way you might imagine a voodoo doll should look. The sort of programmed image, it occurred to Lex, that existed in everyone’s head from living in a culture saturated by cheap horror imagery.

To say it was grisly and frightening would be to minimize the absolute horror of it. There had to have been twenty of them in the diner. And not just men and women, but children, too… even an infant in a blue bunting cradled in his zombie-like mother’s arms, stitched-up like a sock puppet.

Lex just stood there.

He didn’t know what to do or what to say. Soo-Lee was shaking, speechless, and wide-eyed. Her hand held his in a crushing embrace. He was pretty certain she was very close to going into shock.

But there was nothing he could do for her.

And nothing he could do for himself.

The other phenomena was generalized. A Mary Celeste-type diner emptied of people. Disturbing. Then it began to decay. Even more disturbing. But what was written on the chalkboard was beyond all that: personal and shocking.

These corpses weren’t like the mannequin things. These were of a different species, but it meant something. Within the microcosm of this haunted little town, it meant something.

“All right,” he said to Soo-Lee, “we walked in here, we can walk out. Physics is physics.”

She nodded quickly.

“The door was right there. It must still be there, only someone or something won’t let us see it.”

That was his logic and it was culled mostly from TV shows, paperback novels, and movies. But it gained ground in his head. What would they have called something like this on The X-Files or The Outer Limits? A mind screen? A hallucinogenic screen? Something like that. Maybe that was bullshit, but it gave him an unwavering frame of reference in his mind and, dear God, how he needed that because it felt like his world had just ripped out the seat of its pants.

Clutching Soo-Lee to him, he walked to the plate glass windows.

“Right there,” he said, under his breath. “It was right there.”

He waved his arm to get Creep’s attention across the street and the glass instantly steamed like a mirror in a bathhouse.

Got that covered, too, do you?

“That door is still there,” he said.

Soo-Lee nodded quickly again. If he said it, it must be true. She had been brought down to the level of simple child-like reasoning now. The fear owned her. She belonged to it.

Lex figured the logical and rational thing to do was to walk right at the window where he knew the door had been and, hopefully, still was. Maybe his reasoning was shit, but it was time for the acid test.

Then behind him, the sound of a spoon dropping.

The sound of a stool creaking.

I don’t want to see, I don’t want to fucking see this.

Soo-Lee was stiff as a post. Her hand was chilled as if she had been handling an ice pack.

His mouth dry as soot, Lex turned very slowly and looked upon what the diner wanted him to see. He nearly screamed. Soo-Lee certainly would have if her voice wasn’t gone and there was sufficient air in her lungs to propel it.

The voodoo doll people were alive and moving.

They weren’t doing anything menacing. No horror show creeping or any of that. They were simply going through the motions of being diners, imitating what they might have done in life. They were bringing sandwiches and spoons of soup and cups of coffee to their mouths in some kind of mockery of eating and drinking, something they were incapable of with their lips being stitched shut. One of them was even reading a newspaper and two others were face-to-face in an animated, yet silent, conversation. Cups rattled and forks were set down. Coffee was poured and chicken fried steak cut into. It was like some bizarre parody of the living condition. They were mimes and nothing more. It might have been darkly comic if it weren’t for how they looked and the very nature of this place.

Silently, Lex and Soo-Lee watched them.

It seemed there was very little else they could do.

“I think we can go through that door whether it’s there or not,” Lex said. “C’mon, let’s try. It’s crazy, but if we believe it’s there, it just might be.”

Soo-Lee was just beyond herself. It was obvious she didn’t know what to think about anything, but it was also obvious that she had absolute faith in him. He could see that much and it gave him a sort of strength.

They turned together and reached out for the plate glass window, believing and yet not believing at all.

Behind them… things went quiet.

Shit.

They turned and the voodoo doll diners had stopped what they were doing. The playacting was over, apparently. They were all completely frozen in place. Coffee cups were held in midair, same for spoons and forks. A guy in one of the booths held an uneaten hamburger to his mouth. When it fell from his fingers, he didn’t seem to notice.

Lex didn’t like it.

Something was about to happen.

Something bad.

And then, as if the diner knew he was expecting it, the voodoo doll people all slowly swiveled their heads until they were all staring out at Lex and Soo-Lee with those shiny button eyes. It was very unnerving.

“Fuck this,” Lex said.

He turned his back on them and went over to the plate glass windows. Reaching out with his hand, he pressed his fingertips to the window and saw them stop at the glass. Yet, even though he saw them stop, he felt the door that he could not see give an inch or two.

There was a rustling and he saw that all the diners were on their feet now.

In a group, they were coming.

He chanced one more look behind him and, yes, they were indeed coming… except they were all on fire. Not just on fire, but melting like wax dummies as they blazed. Eyes steamed and bubbled, oozing from sockets. Noses and lips slid from faces. Faces became skulls glistening with dripping flesh wax. They all stood there as their skin superheated and dripped off in clots, revealing the bones beneath, hair flaming up like burning wigs.

The stink was unbearable.

Lex pushed and went through the door and out into the night, dragging Soo-Lee with him. He moved quickly and did not stop until they were in the street. Then he dared to turn, expecting to see a mob of button-eyed people in hot pursuit.

But there was nothing.

The diner was completely dark. There was no indication that the lights had ever been on or that any of it had happened in the first place. He went up to the plate glass windows. Cupping his hands like binoculars to cut the glare of the moon high above, he peered in there.

It was completely empty.

“This is fucking crazy,” he said.

Then the alarm began to sound again.