Doll Face

30

Standing in the middle of the street, Ramona heard something that made her jump. It wasn’t much of a sound. Just a clattering as if something had been dropped, but in the silence it was big and unexpected and she knew it was but the first stirring of what was going to happen next and the very idea chilled her.

You were raging a minute ago. You were ready to take on the world. Where’s that anger now? Where’s that determination?

She didn’t know. It was just… gone. It dried up inside her, evaporated, leaving her standing there shriveling in her own skin, trapped in this hell zone of a town, this twisted and very fucked-up dream and she honestly did not know what to do about it.

Yes, you do. The east, the east. That’s where this is all coming from. Track it to its source. You know what you have to do.

And, yes, she did.

It was a very simple strategy, of course, but executing it would not be so simple at all and she knew it. She heard another clattering sound and this time it came from above as if something had dropped on a roof up there. She could hear it rolling down and falling. Then something hit the pavement not three feet from her. It landed with a meaty thud and exploded like a pumpkin, spraying her with goo and what appeared to be a stringy sort of tissue.

It was a head.

Not a human head, of course, but a doll head… yet, one that was grotesquely well-fleshed. She screamed and brushed the tissue from her. God, it was warm. This wasn’t something from a doll shop; it was flesh and blood even if the very idea of that was impossible.

Clatter, clatter.

Something else now. A hand. A mannequin hand. It landed three feet away and began to crawl in her direction. Another hand fell and then another. A leg came down and clattered on the sidewalk. Then an arm, another head—this one was empty, rolling like a ball in her direction.

It was raining doll parts.

Still another head came down. A woman’s head with dirty blonde hair. It barely missed her. It rolled over and over, blood exploding from its mouth with a gurgling sound.

But that’s not possible, a voice in Ramona’s head told her. It’s nothing but a mannequin head and mannequins don’t bleed, they’re not real and they can’t bleed because they’re not alive, not alive, not alive—

But it was alive.

The blood-spattered face was moving, the mouth trying to say her name and she knew it.

The doll parts were falling everywhere now. Some were breaking apart upon impact, but most were quite lively. Ramona stood there, hearing them dropping around her, unsure what to do. She had to get out of there, but in what direction should she escape? The longer she hesitated—the entire rain of parts had only been going on less than a minute by that point—the more limbs and heads there were. She was standing on the one spot where nothing was falling, but before long she would be trapped on her little island in an ocean of animate parts.

The heads were screaming her name. Legs hopping in her direction, arms crawling and hands pressing forward like albino spiders.

A woman’s head dropped a few feet away, rolling in her direction. It had bulging white eyes and whipping red locks, its jaws opening and closing. “RAMONA,” it shrieked. “RAMONA! RAMONA! RAMONA! RAMONA!”

Ramona screamed, unable to keep her cool now as the doll parts converged on her and more heads rolled forth crying out her name. Something hit her shoulder and clutched there. A doll hand that was hot and almost flabby. Its fingers dug into her flesh as it crept toward her throat. She pulled it loose and tossed it. Other things fell on her. Smaller things that writhed in her hair like worms. Screaming again, she pulled them free along with locks of her hair—fingers. They were crawling over her scalp, one of them sliding down her neck and creeping down her spine.

She squirmed, tearing the fingers from her hair and slapping away one that tried to worm its way into her mouth. She fought, screeching and hysterical, as another worked its way into the valley between her breasts and the one tracing down her spine forced its way down the back of her skinny jeans. Down on her knees, oblivious to everything else now, she unzipped her pants and pulled them down, seizing the finger as it attempted to slide up her rectum.

The body parts moved in.

A hand clutched her wrist and another slid up her thigh. More fingers dropped into her hair. One of them pushed itself between her lips and she bit down on it and it went to pulp between her teeth. Gagging, sickened, she spit the remains out as waves of nausea rolled through her.

But there was no time for that.

All the parts were pressing in and there was no time for anything but flight. Juiced with absolute terror, she broke free with manic acceleration, knocking everything out of her way and batting aside a head that came spinning end over end out of the shadows. She tore more fingers from her and threw herself into the first doorway she found, that of a clock shop. The door was open as she knew it would be because nobody locked their doors in Stokes, not in the good old days of 1960.

As she got through the door of the shop, the bell jingling above, a hand grabbed her by the throat and she fought frantically with it as its fingers squeezed her windpipe shut. She stumbled to her knees, tearing at the fingers, finally yanking them free, the nails cutting trenches in her neck. The hand was almost slimy with some hot secretion like sweat.

But it can’t be sweat, you know it fucking can’t sweat, there’s no way it can sweat—

When it continued to move in the moonlight, she stomped it until it came apart, her eyes starting from her head and teeth clenched, her blood boiling with panic.

It stopped moving.

She clung to a glass counter filled with watches, trying to catch her breath, trying to keep her mind from spraying into a fine mist in her skull.

Thump, thump, thump.

Mute with horror, she looked behind her and felt her knees go weak. She stumbled back against the wall. Doll faces. That’s what she was seeing. Dozens and dozens of shining white doll faces hitting the plate glass windows… but not dropping away, hanging on, suckering themselves to the glass with their mouths, like snails clinging to the sides of an aquarium.

They crowded the windows, all with the same sucking lamprey mouths and feral eyes as red as wet cherries, but luminous and bright like tensor lamps. Staring, searching, sweeping the confines of the store with a lewd, diabolic glare, they watched her. The eyes looked to her like the running lights of ghost ships coming at you out of the fog. Noxious and poisoned eyes that fixed her to the wall like a pinned beetle, knotted her insides, making her want to crawl into the darkness within herself and cry.

There were so many faces by that point that they covered the windows, the mouths sucking at the glass with the repulsive, slobbering sounds of babies at teats. All of them were oblong and distorted, made of some white undulant tissue that would not hold its shape. They inflated and deflated, forever shifting and mutating like images in fun-house mirrors. They waited there, watching her, pulsating like jellied ova.

Ramona suppressed a mad desire to start giggling and stumbled back into the shop, through a door and into some kind of workroom. Dizzy, nearly in shock, she hit the floor and lay there, shaking. Hot sweat rolled down her face and her teeth were chattering. This was it. It was just too much now. She was going insane and she welcomed it. There was no point in fighting; better just to accept things and go quietly mad.

Still blackened with soot, sticky with sweat and ashes, her pants unzipped and her coat gone, her shirt torn open and her scalp aching from the hair she’d torn from it, she closed her eyes.

No, Ramona, don’t go to sleep. You can’t go to sleep now.

But it was too late. The exhaustion and trauma had emptied her and she felt her mind dropping into darkness. Bare seconds after she warned herself against it, she was sleeping.