Doll Face

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.

As the legs kept coming, he broke into a clumsy, stumbling run, cutting down a darkened hallway where he was certain other nightmares would be waiting for him. He saw a door. He grabbed the knob and threw it open. A breath of hot, spoiled darkness blew out at him.

It was just a closet.

That’s all it was.

Yet… yet, he saw that it was much more that that. For in the fear-induced hallucinatory narrowing of his perception, he saw that it was no closet. No, it was a coffin. It was a narrow house, an oblong box like in an old horror movie and he was holding the lid in his hand like a grave robber rooting around in old tombs for wedding rings and valuables.

He tried to let it go, but it refused.

It refused to be released.

Chazz knew in a steadily dimming corner of his mind that still functioned somewhat rationally that it was the closet/coffin that was making the decision here. He could not let go of it any more than he could will one of his fingers to drop off.

His hand was fused to the lid.

And whatever dark alchemy and deranged witchery were behind it, he was powerless next to it. He tried to yank his arm back with everything he had because this was not only bad in and of itself, but it was trapping him here while that thing with a hundred legs hunted him down. The second time he tried it—absolutely wild by this point, his eyes like glass balls drawn into bloodred sockets, a froth of mad-dog foam on his lips—the pain was intense. It was as if he was trying to tear his hand free at the wrist.

His only reaction, other than jumping and jerking from the adrenaline coursing through him like a hot shot of pure cocaine, was to cry out in a voice that he hadn’t used since he was ten years old: “Leave me go! Leave me go! Leave me go! Oh, please, oh Jezuz Godz, leave me go!”

But it did not let him go.

This was not only an incantation, an evocation, but an invitation as well. Inside the closet that was no closet, he could see a body in a black burial dress hanging by its neck from the coat rod. Except it was no body, no woman, but… Danielle. Yes, Danielle remade as a puppet or a doll or a window dummy. Her eyes were missing, her face like gleaming white rubber, her jaw hinged like that of the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. As she performed a slow, twisting turn on the rope that noosed her broken neck, the hinged jaw opened and she said, “What’s your pleasure, doll-face?”

With a shriek, Chazz broke free.

He pulled himself back with such strength that he threw himself four feet. Four dangerous feet into the shadow of the thing with a hundred legs.

He scooted around on his ass and saw the creature bearing down on him.

The hallway was flooded with moonlight, because it wanted him to see. That was a very necessary part of it. It wanted him to look upon it so he would drown in his own fear, which it would suckle and juice from him drop by drop.

It was a massive thing, a perpetual motion machine of metal pipes and wooden reeds and snapping elastic cords. A living, pulsating armature of femurs and ulnas, spoking rib bones and gleaming puppet bone slats dragged ever forward by scuttling toadstool-white doll legs that were hinged and swiveled, skeletal and fleshy, most with feet, others just wiggling stumps. All of it was welded together and threaded with knotted undulant cobwebs whose strands were thick as vines. They hung in rotting cerements and fluttering crepe and ropy sheaths. The thing spewed out sticky ribbons of them from a dozen puckering, sap-dripping orifices. It dragged dozens more behind it like a placenta.

Chazz screamed and pissed himself as it came for him.

Its legs rattled off the floor and walls and ceiling.

Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, went its legs, only there were so many of them it was booming and echoing in the confined space of the hallway like god-awful drums pounding and beating and hammering: CLIPCLOPCLIPCLOPCLIPCLOPCLIPCLOPCLIPCLOP—

As the thing pressed in ever closer, its leggy/webby form opened like a flower to reveal a cluster of blind white eyes the size of softballs and a sticky black chasm that must have been its mouth, which kept opening wider and wider like a birth canal to suck him in.

He crawled frantically away, knowing he had mere seconds.

The thing had hoped to debilitate him with fear, to put him to his knees where he would finally scream and sob and suck his thumb, crawl into the darkest corner of the darkest closet of his dark, crowded little mind.

And he was close, so very close.

He saw another doorway, crawling faster to reach it, not daring to take the time to get to his feet. As he got through the door, the thing behind him so large that it could barely fit down the passage now, he heard its voice like a needle scratching on an old record:

“I will make my nest of scraps and bones and soiled rags. I will knit a cocoon of gray dust and old blood and virulent webs and lay the pulp of my eggs here in this womb of fractured darkness and my creeping young will feed upon you. In sorrow, shall I bring forth my children here in this deserted house. For that which brings harm also makes fertile.”

Then Chazz had the door closed and locked, his sweaty fingers pressed against it. He heard the thing coming. The noise of its many scurrying legs was deafening. It made his ears ring and his teeth ache. The door actually bulged as the thing struck it, battering it again and again, pushing its mammoth girth against it.

Then it stopped.

It scraped the door with something like dozens of claws, then made a sucking sound as if it had pressed its mouth up against it. There was a slimy, wet noise like the licking of many tongues. Then the voice again, that same strident, creaking voice: “Rinky tinky tink,” it said of all the absurd things, repeating it again and again with a lilting child-like rhythm. “Rinky tinky tink, there’s a new one in town, I think.”

By that point, Chazz was probably mad.

He was probably struck blind with insanity. But something in him that wanted to survive would not curl up into a ball and die. It simply refused to… even when the thing began to project images of its victims into his head. He saw how it crushed them flat with its bulk until their entrails gushed from their mouths. How it slurped their juices up with its many sucking mouths and then ingested them, regurgitating what was left like husks. He saw how it tormented its enemies—blowing out their eardrums with its screeching voice and inserting hooks up their nostrils like Egyptian embalmers, drawing out their brains in spongy clots. How it nearly shook with orgasm when they tried to escape and it seized them with a thousand wriggling doll parts.

It wanted him to see it in its entirety: so it showed itself to him.

It wanted him to know its cruelty: so it showed him this as well.

And by then, Chazz could take no more. Screaming and hysterical, he ran from the door and dove straight at the window with every ounce of strength and weight he possessed. The window shattered and he hit the ground with a rain of glass fragments.

Bleeding, bruised, his mind bouncing around in his skull like a bullet, he ran off into the night before it could get him.

But even so, he knew he had not escaped it.