Doll Face

23

Lex took hold of him and yanked him to his feet.

Creep fought him like an animal, hitting and kicking and clawing, and Lex finally slapped him across the face and with enough force to put him right back down. Though he could not see Creep, he could feel him cowering at his feet, moaning and sobbing, utterly broken by whatever the puppet master had thrown at him, which must have been considerable.

“We need to stay calm,” Lex said, channeling some B-movie hero and knowing exactly how foolish he sounded.

Soo-Lee was at his side, practically clinging to him and Creep was shivering at his feet. They had both gone through something, but he had been aware of only the utter blackness and things moving in it. Then Soo-Lee screamed like she was being skinned alive and Creep had hit the floor, crying out and squirming, unable to even speak.

So now what? Lex asked himself. Now what? You seem to think you’re the guiding light here, so what next?

He almost laughed at that. If he was the guiding light then he had a very weak bulb. Soo-Lee helped him get Creep to his feet. Lex put questions to both of them and the answers were barely coherent.

“All right,” he said. “We stand together and we fight together.”

More B-movie wisdom, but he had no other frame of reference for something like this. They held hands in the darkness and waited for what came next and when it did, it was not what any of them expected. The lights began to come on. Not in a flash, but very slowly like mood lighting. The glow was orange like that of candles, dim and wavering, slowly brightening.

As it suffused the room, they saw that they were no longer alone and Lex had to wonder if they ever had been.

Soo-Lee gasped.

Creep made a pained sound.

And Lex just sighed. What now? What the hell now?

He knew the room he was seeing was not the room they had originally been in. There was no bookcase or antiquated TV set or console stereo. All that was gone. They were in some sort of workroom that looked like it was part doll factory and part Frankenstein’s laboratory. Two of the walls were hung with hairless doll heads and smooth unpainted doll faces, limbs of assorted sizes, the torsos of children right up to the torsos of adults. None of them looked as lifeless as they should have. He sensed movement in the faces… subtle, secretive, impossible… but there, a slow and yet deliberate crawl of facial muscles beneath waxen skins. Even the limbs were shifting, fingers unfurling, the chests of the bodies rising and falling with measured respiration.

The flickering orange light only enhanced this and made Lex’s skin feel like it was going to inch right off his bones.

He held Soo-Lee’s hand tighter and that of Creep, whose own hand felt limp and rubbery.

Don’t lose it, he warned himself. This is important. Part horror show and part history lesson.

Another wall was hung with what looked like archaic, well-yellowed anatomy prints. Lex thought he recognized several Da Vinci drawings, elaborately rendered explorations of the human body. There were dozens of them, all crowding for space, many tacked right over the top of others or overlapping one another. They were very old, most ripped and dog-eared, faded from age. There was everything from detailed explorations of the human skull to the musco-skeletal system, nervous system and lymphatics. There were also engineering prints where the organs were replaced by arcane machinery, pullies and wires and unbelievably complex clockwork gears.

There was a table, a sort of workbench.

Seated before it was an old woman whose face was wizened, wrinkles deeply etched, mouth hideously seamed. Her hair was stringy white yarn. She didn’t seem to have eyes. There was a body on the table. The body of a child or a child-like thing and she was stitching it shut, humming a melancholy tune in an off-key voice that sounded positively morbid.

Lex could not say that it was a dead child.

And he could not say it was a doll.

He was almost certain it was some sort of horrid hybrid of the two. Its head was detached, a series of tiny, intricate wires hanging in bunches from the throat. They looked like the fine rootlets of a plant. Its arms and legs were likewise divorced from the body. But it was its face that captured his eye—pale and smooth, framed by luxurious yellow hair, the lips sewn shut, the eyes wide and perfectly blue, perfectly sightless.

A voice in the back of his head said, Look away, oh Christ, look away! If she finishes putting it together, it will move. It will sit up and look at you with those dead cerulean eyes.

The other wall was taken up by shelving that was likewise crowded with nameless glass jars and bottles that looked to be filled with liquids and powders, vessels of eyes, and overflowing boxes of swivels, sockets, gears, fine steel piping, and spooled wire.

Lex knew without a doubt that he was looking at the puppet master of this awful place.

She was the one.

Hers was the mind that held them here.

He expected her to look up at him and acknowledge the fact that he knew, but she did not. She was far too busy putting together the little boy. Nothing could interfere with her work, her obsession and devotion to her craft. Her hands were in constant motion, practiced and expert. Before she finished stitching the torso shut, she poured something from a jar into her hand that looked pink and alive and stuffed it in there. Then she began to fit the limbs in place with meticulous artistry.

It was at this point that he and the others realized that the woman was not the only one in the room. There were others sitting about in folding chairs like an audience. They were doll people, the men in suits and the women in fine dresses. Their dead white faces emoted like rubber masks, empty eyes fixed on the old woman. Several of them had empty sleeves as if there had not been enough limbs to go around.

“This is insane,” Creep said under his breath. “This is all fucking insane.”

His voice boomed in the silence where the only sounds were those of the old woman and her fingers moving deftly at her creation. It was like a scream in church. The effect was instantaneous: the old woman stopped what she was doing. Snips in one hand and a surgical knife in the other, she looked up with eyes that were purple-red in flayed sockets. The doll people all turned their heads and looked in Creep’s direction.

One by one, they stood up.

Creep panicked and ran.

As the doll people began to move in their direction, he dashed through a doorway and down the hall. Lex and Soo-Lee had no choice but to go after him. There were several doors and he opened each one, crying out as he did so. From each doorway, another doll person emerged, reaching out to him with soft, puffy hands. He went to the doorway at the end. He threw it open and disappeared into it.

Lex and Soo-Lee went after him, just avoiding the reaching hands themselves. By the time they got through the door and slammed it shut behind them, the hallway was filled with animate dolls.

We’ve been herded again, Lex thought as he went down the steps into the cellar after Creep. Now they’ve got us right where they want us.