Doll Face

38

Even though it was coming for her, Soo-Lee did not scream because she had no voice. The scream was inside her, echoing through her skull, but she could not let it vent. Her throat was constricted, her lips pressed tight, her jaws locked. She would die silently now and in great agony and there was very little she could do about it. All that had come before was merely to soften her up for this terrible moment. As the grinning horror shambled in her direction, she realized she had been meat being tenderized and now she would feel the teeth.

As she backed away from the thing with the flayed face, she was almost certain she had seen it before somewhere. Wasn’t it the haunter of her childhood nightmares? A grim shape that stalked the ebon byways of her subconscious mind? Maybe, maybe not. All she could be sure of was that it was not alive in the generally accepted sense of the term—it was a zombie armature, an animate articulated puppet sewn with something that was not exactly flesh and not exactly cloth.

There were too many thoughts and emotions in her mind, all of them sharpened and made deadly by a fear that was so huge inside her that it was nearly incapacitating. The thing seemed to know this, suckling it, growing fat on her terror. She could practically hear the hollow thumping of its heart. It stopped about four feet from her, fixing her with eyes that were not eyes but deep black sockets. “Is that you, doll-face?” it said and that brought the scream cycling out of her, practically ejecting from deep in her guts.

It was a walking carcass, overstuffed, lumpy and disfigured, rawboned limbs standing out at right angles from the body, fingers stiff and splayed. The face was at once some sloughing bladder of putty and a deflated mask-like balloon, a grotesque jigsaw puzzle that was stretched and pulled by crude suturing not of gut or thread but of some heavy string like packing twine that had been stitched in and out of the flesh in grisly intersecting lines that created bulging pockets of flyblown tissue.

Knowing that it offended her, it grinned with a hacked mouth that made her knees feel weak. There were no lips, just a ragged hole as if it had chewed away its own mouth in a feeding frenzy. Its slat-like gray teeth looked capable of just about anything.

Soo-Lee did not move away fast enough, though God knew the will to do so was most definitely there. It reached out for her and grasped one of her arms in a hand that was like a loose glove, the fingers digging in painfully. The creature whispered something to her, but in her state of abject terror she could make no sense of the garbled words or the scraping puppet voice that spoke them.

It spoke again and this time she heard what it said all too clearly: You will be my beautiful bride, doll-face. And upon our marriage bed, I will know you.

No, not an it, not exactly, but a he and his intentions were obvious.

Soo-Lee screamed and fell back, tripping over her legs and hitting the floor on her ass. She scrambled away, finding her feet, as the scarecrow man got closer and closer still.

He was grinning… if that lopsided, cadaverous grimace could indeed be called such a thing. Loose ends of stitching twine dangled like yarn from his face, which, up close, was yellow and white and gray, corrugated and cracked open like dry clay. It was in constant motion as if there was something beneath it that badly wanted out.

The scarecrow man seized her again with a speed that seemed impossible.

She reacted immediately this time, peeling its fingers away from her arm. They were strong, their grip like iron… yet they were hideously spongy. She managed to peel them free, one of them squishing with a hot spray of slime like a swollen, juicy caterpillar. With a cry of disgust, she turned away and felt the scarecrow man groping for her. Guided by sheer instinct, she clawed out at him with her nails, catching him in the face. Her pinkie snared a loop of twine and she heard it pull free with a sound like thread yanked through a buttonhole. He let out a cry that was half-anguish and half-rage.

Before she could make good on her escape, one of his hands grabbed her by her swinging ponytail and dragged her back. With what seemed little effort, he swung her around and launched her directly at the bed. Her head cracked against one of the posts. She recovered, but not very easily. She climbed to her feet, dazed and sluggish, clawing out at him again but missing entirely.

For godsake, run! If he catches you, he’ll rape you!

Somewhere in the depths of her brain, a voice that was not hers tittered at the very idea. A mannequin raping a woman? A dummy exhibiting physical love? A horny puppet? Yes, the mind certainly boggled and it made no sense whatsoever, yet there was no doubt in her mind that he was going to force himself on her and if he was successful, she would go mad. There would be no alternative. She would go stark-raving mad.

As she tried to escape, her head gradually clearing, her legs ready to move, he seized her again. He battered her head against the bedpost until she went limp. She felt fingers like hooks rake across her back, tearing her shirt open and scraping against her spine. The pain was bright and energizing, but when she tried to fight, he slammed her face into the bedpost again.

When she came to, she was on the bed and he was on top of her, pressing himself down. His face was badly unraveled, the entire left side sagging like a wet paper sack. She could feel the dark sweet stink of his breath blowing in her face as he panted excitedly, the black sockets of his eyes like ragged holes. His entire face was inflating and deflating as he breathed, a sloughing expanse of stitches and seams and loose flaps.

She screamed and threw him, sliding off the bed and hitting the floor on her knees. Her head hurt and there was blood all over her face. But the truly frightening thing was that she was naked. He had meticulously stripped her and she was crawling across the floor, nearly out of her mind.

The lights went out.

The darkness was absolute and unbroken.

Soo-Lee got to her feet and stumbled about, bumping into things and upsetting other things that thumped to the floor or shattered at her feet. She could hear him breathing. Was it to the left? The right? Just behind her? She had to find the door. Her outstretched fingers brushed against a leathery mask and she screamed again. She whirled, moving this way and that, trying to find the door and trying to keep away from him as he stalked her silently.

Something touched the nape of her neck.

She clawed out at it.

Something clutched one of her breasts and she knocked it aside.

She circled, started, stopped, searching, feeling her way around and knowing that she would never find the door because that wasn’t part of the game. Sobbing and terrified, nearly in shock, she tried once more and he grabbed her by the throat. “Is that you, doll-face?” he asked as his other hand roughly kneaded her left breast. She fought and clawed and kicked, but it was no good. His breath was hot and searing now like the air from a blast furnace. His excitement was making him burn from the inside out.

“Please,” she heard her voice whimper. “Oh… please…”

“No need to beg, doll-face,” he breathed. “No need at all…”

She clawed out at him in defiance one last time, fingers tearing into him, and he came apart in moth-eaten rags and mildewed shifts, dusty wrappings like those of an Egyptian mummy. But none of the damage she did cooled the fire that burned in him.

The next thing she knew she was on the bed and something rough and knobbed like a rawhide bone was pressing into her and she screamed one last time, venting her horror and madness and violation… at least until his mouth closed over her own in a flaccid and rubbery pouch.