Doll Face

28

When the alarm shrieked, Lady Peg-leg woke up… at least, she once again was a living entity of some type. Chazz could see it happening. It was like some kind of 3-D hallucinatory special-effects mindfuck, only that was fantasy and this was real. No CGI could touch this because it was so unbearably subtle, so gradual that it simply happened as you watched and was so smooth and fluid you were not sure anything had happened at all.

Is it? Is it? Is it really happening? Am I actually seeing this shit?

Granted, his brain was not actually working real well of late. It was missing on more than one cylinder, his mind filled with dust and cobwebs and narrow spaces. Hell, there were no high, sunlit places up there anymore where he could walk tall and proud, just dim, dirty crawl spaces where he had to creep on his belly to get from point A to point B.

Yes, that was certainly true.

But… but this was something else again.

Lady Peg-leg had been lying there in an untidy heap like a discarded marionette, limbs going this way and that, head hanging off to the side, hands splayed, mouth hanging open like it was waiting for a sparrow to nest in it.

Then—

Then things started to happen. With a rattling sound like sticks and marbles shifting in a box, she stood up facing him. She was hunched over with a twisted old-lady spine, her head resting on one shoulder. She balanced there on one foot and the peg-leg itself, wavering slightly like she might fall down any second. A life force took her inch by inch, making what had looked essentially like a wooden puppet moments before into something animate and possibly organic. She filled with life like a balloon filling with air.

By the time Chazz was aware of the fact that it was really happening, it was already done.

A voice in the back of his head that sounded very distant, said, this would be the point where you run if you have any sense left.

But he wasn’t running.

In fact, he wasn’t doing anything. He was just watching her, feeling helpless and hopeless, a dreamlike sense of self-preservation trying to take form in his head but never really coming together. Lady Peg-leg had made no threatening moves and he could not take his eyes off her. She was watching him—even though she had no eyes—and he was watching her. He felt like prey. Once, when he was in tenth grade Bio 2, he had watched Mr. Berry drop a mouse into the cage of a pet rat snake named Herman. The mouse had been very excited at first to be out of the cramped little cardboard box it had made the trip from the pet store in. It jumped and frolicked with the pure joy of freedom… then it saw Herman. It squeezed itself into a corner of the cage, shivering with pure terror as Herman slowly, relentlessly moved in its direction.

Chazz felt just like the mouse.

Maybe Lady Peg-leg had no eyes as such, but there was something alive in the holes of her face and it was directed at him. She was watching him like Herman watched the mouse, preparing to strike.

Chazz knew he should do something, anything.

Get up off his ass at the very least and face this threat with the only tools he had, his strength and speed. But he wasn’t doing that or anything else because he was simply wrung out. He felt like one of those dingy rags his stepmom would hang out on the line after she gave the kitchen floor a serious scrubbing. He was limp and sodden and incapable of action.

Lady Peg-leg stood there, filled with menace but making no moves. She was dressed in some kind of moldering smock or shift, a raggedy black thing that reminded him of crow feathers, shiny and well-plucked. It draped from her in tattered scarves and bolts.

Good boys will be rewarded, she said, her voice echoing only in his mind. Bad boys will be punished.

She took a few steps in his direction, then a few more, and he watched her come. Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap, went her peg. She stepped fully into the moonlight and he got a real look at the bag of her face, at the deep crevices and gnarled pockets of tissue, the ruts and suturing, the discolored gums and overlapping yellow teeth, the lips like dried onion peelings. It wasn’t tissue, he knew, it was some kind of material like burlap, finely woven yet alive. It was flaking, coming apart, threads and ribbons of it hanging down like locks of hair. A trail of dried blood had seeped from one of the sutures.

Do you want to see your friends? Lady Peg-leg asked in his head, knowing it was what he wanted the most of all. Yes? Well, there is only one way to find them and that is through me. I can take you to them. I can join you to them. I can make you all whole again. All you have to do is take my hand and I’ll take you away from the fear and into the light. I’ll introduce you to she who makes and unmakes and she who rewards those who don’t run like scared little boys. Just take my hand…

His own voice in his head told him with finality that this was it, he either came to his senses and came to them very quickly or he took her hand and sank deeper into the mire of this nightmare until his lungs filled with black silt and his heart filled with black terror and he sank like a brick. This was it. This was the defining moment.

Lady Peg-leg held out her hand to him, palm upwards. He could see metal rods or bones straining just beneath the flesh.

He stood up.

He knew what he was going to do.

He was going to bowl this window dummy straight over, cut right through the line and into the end zone and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to stop him. That was his intention. So nobody was more surprised than he when he reached out and took her spongy hand in his and felt her wriggling fingers engulf his hand like tentacles that would never let go.

He screamed with one last act of desperation.

But it was too late by then.

Far too late.