Doll Face

25

She was still out there.

She was still waiting for him.

Chazz could not see the Spider Mother. He could not hear her. Yet, he could feel her out there, sense her drawing closer. He was like a streetlight and she was a moth. She was circling him, drawing ever closer, creeping up just out of sight, waiting to pounce.

He was not running now.

He was simply run out. But he refused to stay still for more than a few seconds or a minute at the very outside. Every time he stopped, he threw out feelers, trying to figure out where she might be. Casting for scent like a bloodhound. And each time he did, he thought: You can’t outrun her. You can’t escape. This is her town and she decides where every street leads to.

Now and again, he could almost feel her eyes on him, her many eyes… if she even had eyes at all. It made him break out in a cold sweat. And once, several streets back, he was almost certain he heard the distant thumping of an immense heart. In his mind, he could see it: not the Spider Mother, just a huge, well-muscled heart in an empty lot, flabby and black-red, beating away. Not necessarily her heart but perhaps the heart of the town, the secret black beating heart of it that nourished the body. He could almost imagine the sewers and pipes and conduits beneath the ground being blood-swollen arteries and veins.

You’re thinking crazy. You’re thinking absolutely crazy, he told himself.

It was true and he knew it, but even so he was not convinced of the fact. There had been a time—long ago, it seemed—when he would have rejected such thinking out of hand as any sane person would have. But that time was gone and reality was not such a given anymore. That which once made no sense made all the sense in the world today.

“Move,” he whispered under his breath.

Chazz stood up, looking around. He could not hear the clip-clop of the Spider Mother. Maybe she had given up, but he didn’t believe that for a moment. He moved down the sidewalk, eyeing doorways, unable to decide if they promised sanctuary or danger. He moved on for another ten and then fifteen minutes and saw nothing and heard nothing. He began to stand tall again and not bent over and skulking like some scavenging animal.

He walked with a more confidant stride.

He breathed easier.

His brain became less clouded and he began to think less instinctively and more like a man. He had been running and getting absolutely nowhere. Now that there was not menace around every corner, he began to consider how he might find the others. Because, really, that was the true horror of this entire situation… being alone. The doll people and Lady Peg-leg and the Spider Mother, they were all horrible, of course, but being alone against them made it so much worse.

If he had someone at his side, someone like Ramona for instance, he would fight with her (or him) happily.

Forget Ramona, dumbass. You knocked her aside when that mannequin woman grabbed hold of you. You cracked up. You showed her what you were made of. Maybe muscles and attitude on the outside, but nothing but shivering pudding on the inside.

He refused to think about that.

That’s not the way it was. Yet, the idea that he was a coward haunted him and would not let him go. As much as he tried to sweep it out of his mind, it clung there like a dust ball, getting bigger, gathering all the debris inside his brain until it pretty much blotted out all else.

He started running again.

He knew he wasn’t running from any real threat but running from himself. He dashed around a corner—good God, the streets were all the same, all the very same—and ran smack dab into one of the doll people. He crashed into it before he could stop himself and they both went down.

It was trapped beneath him.

In those few seconds of shock before he fought himself free, he saw it was Lady Peg-leg. Her white wig was nearly detached from her scalp, hanging off to one side like a rag. Her face was loose and flaccid like latex rubber, the eye sockets filled with a formless blackness.

Chazz screamed and threw himself backward, cracking his head on the edge of a building, seeing stars. The very worst thing was that she came with him. She was stuck to him. He hit her and pushed her away, but she was glued to him. They rolled across the sidewalk together, but he could not throw her. He ended up on his back and she was on top of him, not moving or doing anything, just a dead dummy, a conjoined twin he could not separate himself from.

He screamed again, her gruesome face inches from his own.

It hung in flaps and pouches, a breathing bag of flesh that seemed to inflate and deflate with respiration. Great furrows, crevices, and deep-hewn wrinkles were cut into it. Black suturing ran from the corners of her mouth and up to her forehead where they joined more intricate stitch-work. Her face was like something sewn together out of three or four corpse faces. The suturing was so tight it pulled her lips away from juicy pink gums and peg-like teeth that were all twisted and gnarled.

But the most shocking thing was that even though she wasn’t moving, she was alive. She was breathing and he could feel the dull thudding of her heartbeat.

Wild and hysterical, he fought to be free of her but she clung on tenaciously.

On his feet, he smashed her into the brick face of a building again and again, trying to shatter her, to break her into pieces but she was incredibly tough and resilient. Her head bounced about on her sagging, flabby neck, her face brushing his own, her lips feeling cold and greasy like the entrails of a fish.

Somewhere during the process, she merely slid off him like a sloughed skin.

He did not run.

He went down on his ass, gibbering and mad, drool running from his mouth and tears flowing from his eyes. He did not think and he did not feel. He just waited there for her to wake up.

There seemed to be nothing else left.