Doll Face

19

Ramona stood there, watching the doll parts moving on the ground as if some sinister life-spark were circulating through them. Hands trembled, torsos thumped, and legs kicked. Heads opened and closed their mouths, whispering with needling, strident voices.

She started breathing in and out very quickly, nearly hyperventilating.

An ice-cold sweat ran down her spine.

The parts continued to move as if a wind were blowing through them, making them rattle and click and tremble. As she watched, one, then two and three and four torsos rose up into the air, the others following suit as if they were being worked by invisible wires from above. Dozens of them spun around in some kind of storm and then they came together with heat and motion and impact, fusing into a common whole that danced up and down before her, swaying and gyrating to some unheard melody. Then the legs stood up. Those whose feet had broken loose reattached themselves.

She let out a tiny, strangled cry.

The legs were hopping around, pale and oddly fleshy, their ball joints shining in the moonlight. She was waiting for them to walk over to her, but that didn’t happen. They jumped up into the air, spinning around the common torso and then they, too, were sucked into its mass, gluing themselves to it. The mass continued to move and sway as before, but now it floated about with countless bare kicking mannequin legs that made it look like some horrible spider composed of human parts. Hands were joined with arms that clattered on the pavement and then they, too, flew up in the air, rising as if on a hot column of gas. They circled the mass of legs and torsos and were sucked into the mass, becoming part of it, arms flexing and fingers wiggling as this new and strange accumulated horror accustomed itself to its new environment.

Then the whispering heads.

They bounced up into the air, many of them fastening themselves at odd angles atop the many bunched and stacked torsos. Other heads adhered themselves to the bellies and breasts like gruesome ornaments.

Then this new and nearly indescribable mutation settled back down to the pavement, hissing and clicking and whirring. It approached Ramona with the marching of innumerable feet.

She ran.

Beyond terror, completely irrational with fear, she ran, sprinting down the street and up the sidewalk and around a corner. Pausing there, pressed up against the face of a building, adrenaline pumping through her, she made herself wait and listen. For a few seconds there was nothing and the buzz of fear inside her mellowed slightly. Listening to her own breathing, she stared at the blank faces of little shops across the street. The moonlight was bright, impossibly bright. She saw FLORIST, ICE CREAM PARLOR, and, at the very end, SUNDRIES. Yes, all very generic as before.

When was the last time there were stores called Sundries? Even if this is some weird 3-D representation of Stokes from the 1960s, things like that had to have been something of an oddity even then. A holdover from a much earlier time.

She heard the doll-thing coming again with an echoing click-clack of what sounded like a hundred feet marching forward in hot pursuit.

She ran.

Down the street, around another corner, cutting through an alley and across a little park that she had not seen before. When she got to the other side, she found another street and ran down it, racing around yet another corner and pausing again, her lungs gasping for breath and sweat beading her face.

Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack, click-clack, CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK—

God, it was getting closer.

It wasn’t possible.

That immense gangling thing could not be getting closer, but it was. The sound of its marching feet was echoing in her head like the cacophonous ticking of some gigantic clock, getting louder and louder and louder. And it was as she realized this, that she looked across the street and saw it again: SUNDRIES. Next to it, ICE CREAM PARLOR, and next to that, FLORIST.

I couldn’t have gone in a fucking circle. I couldn’t have.

She hadn’t. She knew she hadn’t. Either this whole goddamn town was one big loop or, yet again, she was being led, pushed in a certain direction by whoever ran this place. It wanted to break her with fear. That was important somehow to the Controller. She had to be broken. It wanted to run her to death like a dog.

Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack, click-clack—

It was getting closer now like it had before when it was just a collection of malevolent doll children. Closer and closer. As before, Ramona knew there was only one possible way to break the spell. She could not run from it; she had to run at it. It was the only way, regardless of how unbearably frightening the idea was.

CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK!

Jesus, it was almost on her.

She could see its shadow coming around the corner, an impossibly massive and undulant thing with marching legs, wavering arms, and nodding heads.

Sucking in a slow breath, she went to meet it before she had time to reconsider the foolishness of what she was about to do. I won’t be run to death, I refuse. She saw it bearing down, maybe forty feet from her, its shadow already touching her and feeling cold, dreadfully cold, like the air from a freezer. She ran right at it and it chanted her name and waited for her, its many arms open wide like it wanted to hug her, crush her in its multi-limbed embrace.

No!

Ten feet from it, she turned. She just couldn’t do it. She couldn’t let that horrible thing take hold of her. It would seize her, the arms enfolding her and crushing her against itself until her insides squirted out of her mouth like red jelly.

She turned on her heel and cut between two buildings and then she was in some huge fenced lot. A dead end. It was some kind of junkyard. She saw heaps of refuse, old barrels, uneven stacks of rotting lumber, and junked cars up on blocks. They lacked windshields and doors, the hoods raised and rusted in place, the engine compartments empty save for sprouting weeds. This was the graveyard of the town. As she stepped into its vast wasteland, she saw broken bottles glinting in the light, stacks of bald tires, and the bent frames of old bicycles. She stepped around a cracked bathtub and an overturned toilet. Things scattered among the refuse and she knew they had to be rats.

With each step, a little cloud of black dust puffed up.

They smelled hot, like cinders. She blinked her eyes and everything in the junkyard was smoldering. It happened that fast. Not burning, but smoldering as if the actual fire had burned out some hours ago and what was left was the choking incinerated stink, the hot ashes, and the lingering heat. She could feel it through the soles of her shoes. The junk cars were blackened, the wood charred, the tires melted into unrecognizable shapes that still let out greasy black fingers of rubber smoke.

Ma’am, please listen to me, okay? The only Stokes on Highway 8 burned to the ground back in the 1960s, I’m told.

Ramona let out a little cry because it wasn’t some voice of memory echoing in her head, but an actual voice. It sounded like it was spoken from inside one of the cars. But she refused to go see. She did not want to see. Gagging on the scorched smell, she stumbled forward, sweating rivers now, her feet hot and sore, her skin feeling like it was sunburned. If she didn’t get out of here and fast, she was going to become disoriented by the fumes and pass out.

It was only a matter of time.

The smoke seemed to be getting thicker. The moonlight cast expanding shadows of it across the seared wreckage. She began to see other things in the ashes, which were ankle-deep now. Body parts. She thought they were the remains of people burned in the fire that took Stokes so many years before… but no.

They were doll parts.

Baby doll parts.

All of them oxidized by the blaze. Little hands melted, bodies folded in half, groups of them welded together, dozens of little faces looking up at her with hollow eye sockets, blistered and ruined. And all of them grinning with what seemed some macabre delight.

Despite the heat, Ramona felt chills run down the back of her arms and up her spine.

She stood there on hot feet, rocking back and forth on burning heels, trying to think and finding it nearly impossible to string two coherent thoughts together. A little voice located somewhere in the back of her skull was whispering to her, telling her that it wasn’t the heat or exhaustion or trauma of this night that was mixing up her brain like a jigger of martinis well-shaken, but that which controlled this place, her hypothetical controller or Controller, for certainly it deserved proper-noun status.

Don’t you get it, Ramona? This is the old mindfuck it’s playing on you. Your resilience and obstinacy are wearing it thin. Tormenting you and breaking you down is more work than you’re worth so the Controller wants this done right now. Here in this shithole dumping ground of pristine and perfect Stokes, a.k.a. Mayberry RFD, it wants you dead before you get away again and figure out more and start turning what you know against it, because you will. It knows it and so do you.

Doing the two-step on her broiling feet, images of dancing barbecued chickens parading through her head from an old TV commercial, she began to realize that there was truth in what the voice said. The fog of her brain cleared momentarily like a good clean breeze blew through her skull.

You’ve already figured the town out there is Stokes before the fire.

You’ve already figured there is a guiding hand at work here.

And you know that the siren activates these things and it’s coming from the east. That’s the epicenter of this here fucking quake and you know it. The Controller might just be afraid that you’ll track it to its source and put it out of commission.

What do you think of that?

Yes, what did she think of that?

But there wasn’t exactly time for thinking because the ground was hot, the air was gagging with vapors of searing smoke, and she was most certainly cornered. Her head seemed to spin again and she started seeing things, things that were either pure hallucination or real or some bizarre combination of both.

She saw doll faces watching her from the junked cars.

High above the reaching steeples and craggy branches of the town she could see the moon like a glowering eye and as she stared into it, it seemed to get bigger, a puffy discolored lid pulling away from the white, shining orb beneath that looked unpleasantly juicy like a pickled egg.

She saw skeletons around her. Not perfect, gleaming Halloween skeletons, but badly used things that were yellow and brown, some black as coal, but all disarticulated and shattered, jaws sprung in wide silent screams when they had jaws at all. Most of them were over near the fence in the distance, but there were others scattered about. In fact, not four feet from her there was an ancient baby buggy whose spoked wheels were threaded with cobwebs and whose bonnet was torn and flapping, a swallow’s nest tucked away in the folds. And in it, oh yes, a baby that had been burned right down to the bare bones. It had worn some kind of bunting that melted to its tiny skeleton in black rags. The insane thing was that it was still burning. Its black bones were smoking, flames coming from its eye sockets and mouth.

She saw rats picking through the piled refuse. They were greasy gray bags of fur with tiny red eyes like jewels that sparkled in the moonlight. They all made a curious ticking sound as of pocket watches that were slowly running down.

She blinked her eyes and she heard a steady thump-thump-thump of a door swinging open and shut. It came from a small ramshackle hut set between the masts of two burned trees. Tiny ashes fell from them and made a tinkling sound on the sheet metal roof. As she watched, a man came stumbling out, holding his face in his hands. He was not on fire, but black smoke steamed from him in twisting plumes. The stink of roasted flesh and burned hair were nauseating. He stumbled maybe two or three feet and then hit the ground, breaking apart like cigar ash.

These were the things she saw or was made to see and they were all, in their own way, part of the puzzle of Stokes (or anti-Stokes, as she was beginning to think of it) that she needed to put together if she ever wanted to get out.

CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK.

It was coming again. Of course it was.

She almost collapsed with despair.

She turned, coughing on the fumes, and that great ambulant collection of living mannequins was bearing down on her. It cast a long and freezing shadow before it that was like something from an old film noir. The shadow seemed equally as alive as what threw it—a black and crawling thing, expanding, throwing dozens of reaching tendrils before it. Then the thing itself entered the junkyard, a Frankensteinian patchwork of parts, a pulsating colony of heads and hands and shambling legs.

“It’s Ramona,” the many mouths said. “It’s Ramona. Get her so she can be with us. Pull her apart and paste her parts to ours. Put her head high up on top so she can scream with us…”

The other heads affixed to its torso did not join in the chorus. They were low, bestial things that bayed and snarled and hissed, clattering their teeth and snapping their jaws.

The thing—Frankendoll, was its name, she decided—moved ever forward and Ramona knew she was trapped. The only way out was the fence at the back of the yard. But getting there without being overwhelmed by the heat and the fumes would not be easy. She felt dizzy and queasy and she couldn’t seem to think straight.

If you just wait here, it will all be over with soon. Very soon now.

But she couldn’t allow that. She stumbled on, her mind flying around in her head like an uncaged bird, crashing into the walls of memory and reason, leaving her confused and breathless. She fought on, maneuvering around the hulks of cars, stepping over weed-sprouting transmissions, tripping over a rusting section of pipe and going down into the cinders that burned her hands. The pain was real and it was like a good, refreshing slap in the face.

The fence was about thirty feet away now, maybe closer.

You’re almost there. Pour it on for godsake, just pour it on!

Behind her, the Frankendoll monstrosity was still chanting her name, still pushing forward. She turned back once and looked. The sight of it nearly took the heart from her. In the moonlight, it was a cartoonish monster that could not possibly be, a gargantuan hybrid of parts that all seemed to be moving independently though they were part of the wriggling whole. Legs stomped and hands reached and heads shook from side to side. The fused torsos all seemed to be in motion like they were trying to pull themselves apart from the central mass.

The thing was in some kind of demonic rage now as it stalked her.

It kicked barrels out of its way, flipped a leaning bedspring end over end, and charged through a smoldering tower of tires, kicking up a haze of soot that filled the moonlight in dusky clouds. It would have her. And the closer it got, the more it became enraged at the idea of seizing her in its hands. It smashed through heaps of burned lumber and tossed a broken rocking chair into a collection of banged-up trash cans. Its many totemic, blistered faces were breathing out puffs of black smoke.

But Ramona did not sit still.

Even though her eyes were watering, her breath scratching in her throat, and sweat left clean trails down her ash-darkened face, she saw the fence and went toward it, dizzy and tripping and fumbling, but gaining ground foot by foot. Then the fence was very close and she poured on the speed, jumping up onto an old TV set and vaulting up at the fence. She grabbed hold of the top of it, some seven feet from the ground, and pulled herself up and over with her last reserves of strength. She fell into a grassy lot on the other side, panting and shaking, tears streaming from her eyes.

Frankendoll screamed.

With each of its many mouths, it screamed with a sound of dozens of shrieking, tortured children. Then it hit the fence, pounding and kicking and beating at it. Ramona saw the tops of its heads just over the upper planks. It went absolutely hysterical and she saw the fence begin to come apart, loose boards falling and rusted nails ejecting into the air. Planks split and fence posts fell over like saplings.

“NO! NO! NO, RAMONA! DON’T DO THAT!” the mouths cried out to her. “IT’LL BE WORSE IF YOU DO! WE CAN HELP YOU, WE CAN MAKE IT EASY, WE CAN DELIVER YOU QUIETLY—”

“Fuck you!” she called out at them with poison.

The doll horror went at the fence with renewed fury like Godzilla going after Tokyo. Boards were flying, planks split lengthwise, posts launched up into the air, wood splinters and blowing clouds of sawdust erupting into the sky.

“YOU STUPID STUPID STUPID MISERABLE CUNT!” the voices cried out and if it were possible for animate dolls or a hulking animate Frankendoll to go insane, it did at that point, sounding absolutely hysterical with wrath. “WHO ARE YOU TO UPSET THE BALANCE? WHO ARE YOU TO DARE STAND UP AGAINST WHAT WE ARE? WHO DO YOU THINK YOU FUCKING ARE?”

But by then she was on her feet, running.

Where she got the energy from, even she didn’t know. But it was like competing in the fifty-meter freestyle swim. Just when you thought there was nothing left, you got a burst of energy and you turned the corner.

When she finally came to a stop, she waited on a shadowy patch of sidewalk, listening for the approach of Frankendoll, but there was nothing. She was only glad that she had somehow managed to break free of the business section and was not looking at a plate glass window that said SUNDRIES.

But she knew damn well that the only reason she had gotten away was not that she had outsmarted the Controller, but that he, she, or it had become bored with the chase, with her very tenacity.

Regardless, she was free.