Doll Face

39

By that point, Lex had no idea where he was or what the hell was even going on. He remembered the eyes, the many eyes, how they crawled like insects and then digging into the walls that held him that felt like living tissue. And then, and then—

Then he couldn’t be sure because everything was twisted up and turned inside out. He tried to make sense of it, to apply logic, but even his fine and reasoning brain could not explain any of this. He recalled the car that had taken Creep away, then getting separated from Soo-Lee and what followed.

Jesus, had that just happened?

His sense of time was distorted, stretched like taffy until minutes seemed hours and days seemed seconds. He had to get a grip. He had to put this in some kind of perspective. He had to find Soo-Lee. The amazing thing was that he was outside. He was sitting on his ass in the cool grass outside the house. He had no memory after he began trying to dig his way out. Somehow… the house had ejected him.

Ejected?

No, he had a sense that it had been more along the lines of vomiting. Like a dog that couldn’t keep something down, it had regurgitated him. And why was that? Because he was refusing to accept any of it and refusing to buy into it? Was that it? Maybe. Yet, he felt there was more to it than that. Hell, something in him was certain there was more to it than that.

Why does a dog vomit something out? Why must it get something out of its belly?

But the answer was simple: a dog—or any other living creature with a stomach—vomited things out that were destructive to it, that would make it ill. Lex proceeded along that line of thought. Okay. Why was he destructive? Partly because of his stubbornness. That made sense. But there was another reason that he was a diseased cell in the body of Stokes.

And the answer to that was obvious.

So obvious it was ridiculous.

Oh, come on. It can’t be that simple.

But maybe it was. He had dug through the walls. He had injured the house and in doing so injured Stokes. It was absolutely insane, yet he almost felt that there was something to it. He didn’t honestly believe the walls of the house were really living tissue. That was a hallucination, an image placed in his mind to scare him or offend him, to revolt him to the point where he wouldn’t think of trying to tear through them. And, perhaps, for the house and for Stokes that was a weak spot. Maybe wherever the illusions were heaviest were the weakest points, places he and the others had to be warned away from.

He couldn’t be sure.

It was all so mixed up. He believed everything in Stokes, including the town itself, was a hallucination, but not necessarily a psychological or mental hallucination but a physical one, if that made any sense. Some things were nothing but illusions, but others were very real. But telling them apart was not easy. They were mixed together, woven into a common skein, perfectly joined.

And all of it was the result of the fucked-up mind or morbid intelligence that brought it together and made it real. Whether that was on purpose or accidental remained to be seen.

Lex got to his feet.

He was going back in the house. Soo-Lee was in there somewhere. Probably crouched in a corner, scared out of her wits. And that was the danger: if she believed what Stokes showed her, it could most certainly harm her or even kill her.

His head feeling screwed on tight again, that dizzy sense of unreality fading fast, Lex walked up the flagstone path to the porch. He didn’t think there was anything that could really stop him, he didn’t believe that—

Whump! Whump! Whump!

A series of explosions blew the windows out of the high, leaning house, a wave of heat hitting him and throwing him five feet as blazing wreckage rained down all around him. The house was on fire. It went up with a series of explosions as if a propane tank or something in the cellar had ignited.

Covering his head with his hands, Lex ran for the street as another wave of heat slammed into him and pitched him to the pavement. Soo-Lee… oh dear God, Soo-Lee, was the only thing that ran through his mind. Brilliant red flames jumped from the windows and licked up the siding. Two attic turrets on the roof blazed up like match heads. Burning shingles, boards, and debris erupted into the air as the roof exploded, vaporizing into a rolling orange cloud that leaped skyward. It all came falling down like a storm of fiery meteorites—lathing and timbers and planks and what appeared to be a smoldering staircase that crashed not ten feet from him in an explosion of flames and sparks.

He hobbled away from the inferno, coughing on clouds of black smoke that filled the streets.

And from all around him, maybe from the other houses and the very town itself, he heard what seemed like hundreds of voices screaming: YAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH! It was much like when he had kicked the TV screen in the house. All those voices, only this time it was the sound of agony.

The entire world around him flickered yellow and orange like a candle guttering in a carved pumpkin. As he looked back, even the trees in the yard were on fire. It was a real three-alarm conflagration and the house looked like some great burning barrel flaming in the night. As he stood there, his arms singed from debris, a section of hair burned from his head, and his face dark with soot, he muttered Soo-Lee’s name and sank to his knees.

How long he kneeled there, sobbing, he did not know.

He only stood up when there was a violent roaring and the house fell into itself in a blazing pyre of glowing orange timbers and a cloud of red sparks rose into the night. The house was gone. It didn’t look like there was anything standing but the blackened fingers of chimneys.

And Soo-Lee was gone with it.

She could not have survived it.

The puppet master did not want you going in there. It did not want you undoing all it had done. It had to keep you from finding out something or hurting the house further in your quest so it… it cut off a thumb to save the hand.

And it used fire. It was always fire at the root of things. Back at the diner, when all else had failed, the corpse dummies had burst into flames. When he and the others saw that old sitcom from hell on the TV, there had been flames flickering outside the windows. Yes, at the root of all this there was fire.

Numb, caught between waking and nightmare, Lex stumbled up the street, just moving blindly with no set destination in mind. Earlier, before the fire, he had thought he could simply walk in the house, grab Soo-Lee, and walk out again, leave Stokes by hurting it enough that he would be expelled.

But now he was not interested in leaving.

He wanted to stay.

He wanted to find the puppet master and destroy him/her/it.

And it was at that very moment as if he had channeled some psychic feed, that he looked east and saw an orange glow on the horizon that slowly died out. He did not think it was a trick. He needed to go there for that was the fountainhead of this nightmare.

Without further ado, going on nothing but intuition, he began to move to the east to meet whoever or whatever was running this show.