Doll Face

20

A phone was ringing.

It stopped Chazz dead in the middle of the street. He went down to his knees, sweat dropping from his head to the pavement like raindrops. He was being run to death and was aware of the fact, but he didn’t seem to care. He only understood that he must flee. Earlier—ten minutes or twenty or thirty, who knew?—he had thought he heard a phone ringing, but he dismissed it. It was distant and fading. Maybe not there at all. The sort of sound you might hear late on a summer night when you had the windows open and thrashed in your own perspiration. A ringing from several streets away.

But if that had been fantasy, there was no denying the reality of this.

It rang and rang.

Cupping his hands over his ears, he shouted: “Answer it already! Why doesn’t somebody just fucking answer it already?”

But the reason for that was fairly obvious. His brain was moving in such strange rhythms now that it took him some time to realize that nobody could answer it because there were no people in this town. But how could it ring if nobody called?

None of it made sense.

Unless it was Ramona or one of the others but he did not believe that.

It kept ringing and ringing.

It’s for you and you know it.

No, no, he wouldn’t let himself think that. Nobody would be calling him because there was no one who could call him. God, the ringing drilled right through his skull and made his brain ache. A ringing phone. An empty town. Why was it familiar? Was it an old show he had seen or maybe some story they had to read in high school?

Don’t matter, Chazz. Don’t matter at all, that voice in his head told him. The call is for you and if you don’t answer it, it’ll never stop ringing.

But he wouldn’t do that. He’d already made up his mind. That would just be asking for trouble and he had more than enough right now. But if he wasn’t going to answer it… then why was he walking in the direction of the ringing, tracking it to its source? It hadn’t been a conscious decision. He was certain of that. He didn’t honestly believe he had any say in the matter. His legs were walking over there and he was obeying and his lips were trembling, a whimpering in his throat.

He was on the sidewalk.

No, no fucking way. I won’t do it.

He was moving toward the ringing.

I’ll just turn and run.

He saw what looked like a little cab stand. The window was open, one of those sliding types like they have at ice-cream parlors. The phone was sitting just inside on a ledge, a big old black phone with a rotary dial. God, it was a dinosaur, a beast from another age.

Okay, you found it, now go.

But he wasn’t going. He could see the shadow of his hand reaching for it and then it was not just a shadow, but his fingers gripping the receiver. It was heavy. You could brain somebody with it like in an old movie.

He brought it to his ear.

He heard static, a windy sort of static like a strong breeze blowing across empty fields and down lonely byways. He looked up across the street and he could see the telephone poles, the wires strung between them. He could hear them humming. The sound he heard had been carried to him across fields and through thickets, over county churchyards and down deserted streets and moonlit meadows. And slowly, so very slowly, all that loneliness and dark distance became a voice: “Chazz… I don’t like to be kept waiting. When I call, you better answer.”

Jesus.

He nearly fell over, but try as he might he could not pull the phone away from his ear. The deserted streets suddenly looked that much more deserted, the shadows that much more like shadows, and the night that much darker, like some finely woven web of black funeral silk.

“Oh, what’s the matter, Chazz? Are you afraid? Are you terrified?”

And he was, God yes, he was. It was more than the phone ringing in this empty dead town, knowing he would be nearby to answer it. It was the voice itself that he had heard back at the house, the voice of the entity he referred to as the Spider Mother, the woman with a hundred legs. He had heard her speaking through the door to him and now she was calling him, baiting him with her squeaky voice.

“Do you want this to be over with, Chazz?”

His breath coming in gasps, he nodded. “Yes… I just… I just want to get out of here. But I don’t know the way. I can’t find the way. I just can’t find it.”

The Spider Mother made a hissing sound that slowly wound itself out into something like a cooing. “You poor little thing, lost and alone, and no one to hold you. No one to make it better. No one to take away the fear and the dread. No one but me.”

“Please… just leave me alone…”

“Ohhhhhh,” she said. “That’s not what you really want. You want Mama to come and hold you. You want Mama to make things better. That’s what you want.”

“No, I—”

But it wasn’t true. He could say it all he wanted, recognizing the horror and revulsion of the thing that spoke to him, but deep inside he was not so sure. Her voice was oddly soothing. It was peaceful, like being wrapped in dark silk and tucked away somewhere where no one could ever hurt you. But that was the danger, that was the threat, that was the seduction. The Spider Mother’s voice was taking him away places, making him feel helpless like an infant. She was netting him in strands of warm, comforting spider silk, twining him in it, creating a bunting that he could sleep away eternity in, locking him down into a dark, poisonous cocoon from which there could be no escape.

“You just wait right there, Chazz, and Mama will come for you.”

But he knew he couldn’t allow that. He already had a repulsive, skin-crawling image in his head of her webbing him up and forcing him to suckle from the wrinkled sacs of her teats.

“No… stay away from me. I won’t let you touch me.”

“You’re ruining it all, Chazz. You’re going to make it ugly. You’re going to make it hurt real, real bad.”

And, yes, he knew that he was, but he wasn’t about to let that thing get him. He could not allow it. He had to fight; he couldn’t just give in. And with that, the phone slid from his hand and he ran out into the street, not knowing which way to go because all ways looked exactly the same. And maybe they were. Maybe it wouldn’t matter which way he went because all roads led deeper into the heart of this nightmare where she waited for him, waited to make him suckle from her so that he was hers forever. His legs would be her legs and his arms her arms and his beating heart would bring the blood that would make her strong and deathless—

Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop.

She was coming.

She knew where he was and she was coming now.

Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop.

The sound of her many marching legs was echoing through the streets now, bouncing off the faces of buildings, getting louder and louder, filling his head and filling his world and if he did not run right now, he would see her coming for him any moment now, rushing out of the dark to seize him the way a funnel-web spider might seize a fly.

But she was not coming down the streets.

She was coming from above.

She was creeping over roofs.

He looked up and saw her legs coming over the cornice of a three-story building directly across the street. He dashed off, choosing a direction purely at random, not thinking, just knowing he needed to get away before she trapped him. Because, sooner or later, she would.