Doll Face

49

Ramona stood on the road, staring up at the factory on the hill and a deep chill settled into her bones. Even if she hadn’t known that this was the evil core of Stokes, she would have felt it. The factory brooded atop the hill like a poison mushroom, seeping toxic juices that blighted the countryside and filled the town below with venom. This was it. This was the malignancy that needed to be cut out, torn up by the roots and burned to ash. This was the nucleus of the tumor itself and she was about to drive right into it like a hot needle.

She was not unexpected.

She knew that much.

Mother Crow did not want her here. In fact, she feared it as Ramona herself feared the idea of coming in the first place. That was what they had in common: fear and rage. Because they both stood ready to fight to the death and neither would back down.

This was endgame.

Resolutely then, Ramona started up the drive to the factory.

And things began to change just as they had in the park. Reality was warping, unzipping itself and she smelled smoke. Yes, the thick, pungent smoke of the burning town. She heard something like a muffled explosion and the factory ahead of her literally split right open, gushing flames and huge rolling clouds of ash.

It started here. The fire started here at the factory and swept down into the town. That’s what happened.

There was no way she could know that, but the certainty remained: it had started here and she was seeing it. Regardless of what Mrs. McGuiness said, it had not started in the town. It had started right here.

The sky above was lit by a red glare and waves of heat rolled down at her. The trees to either side of the road burst into flame. The field was burning. The factory was engulfed in tongues of flame and she could hear people screaming. She looked behind her and watched the town down there burn. It was an amazing conflagration and nothing was spared. It looked like a bonfire. She turned her gaze back to the factory. It was broken and mangled, immense walls of flame rising into the night. There was another explosion and then another from its blazing guts and things began to rain from the sky: slats of burning wood, smoldering bricks, and fiery bits of metal. The factory was giving up its ghost and this is what it vomited up in its death throes.

The heat was enough to roast her, but Ramona pushed on, untouched by any of it. She stepped through smoldering ash four inches deep, moving around pieces of the burning factory, parting sheets of churning smoke. The factory erupted again and more debris rained down into the fields of cinders. She thought they were parts of corpses, but they were not corpses but doll parts and mannequin parts. She saw grinning melted faces and blackened heads, limbs and bodies. Things welded together by the heat, human-shaped armatures whose plastic and wax flesh was bubbling and oozing free. It all continued to burn and she realized the screaming she heard was not that of people, but from the dolls themselves… their charred and blistered mouths were crying out into the night, rising in a single wavering note of agony.

But dolls can’t scream. Mannequins and puppets can’t know pain, a voice of reason informed her. But I’m hearing it. I’m hearing something.

Then… it all began to fade and it was daylight many years later and the factory was in ruins around her. Why was she being shown this? But there were no answers, so she just quit asking questions and let it happen, soaking it all up. The remains were scattered everywhere like bones in a field after a great battle. Bricks were caught in the tangled grass, crumbling walls of them and teetering cairns from which saplings grew. Great crawling shadows were cast by the looming skeleton of the factory itself, gathering in dark pockets and nighted hollows. A spooky, pervasive silence shivered in the air. She could hear a creak of metal in the wind somewhere, maybe an old rain gutter or a loose piece of tin.

Two smokestacks still stood, rising from the blackened wreckage like fleshless fingers, one straight and tall, the other leaning to the side like it might tip over at any time. Crows held court atop them, spreading their wings and cawing. Scrub brush had grown up everywhere, heaps of debris becoming hills of wild weeds and devil grass. She heard creatures scurrying about, birds calling out.

The closer she got to the factory, the more wreckage there was.

More bricks and rotted planks and old smoke-blackened timbers, but also rusty machine parts, girders, conduits and iron piping in which swallows nested. She stepped around the remains of a third smokestack that had fallen and was netted by weeds. Huge gears rose from the earth like the backs of fossil saurians. The factory had fallen into itself, filling vast pits and cellar-holds below in junk heaps of twisted iron, collapsed walls, and a multitude of tiles that reminded her of flakes of skin.

And yet again, she had to wonder, why am I being shown this?

But the answer was obvious now. Mother Crow had shown her the fire and its aftermath as if to pound into her head that whatever had lived (or existed) in the factory was long gone now. The fire had neutered it and made it harmless. It was all just a memory now and the entire area was a graveyard. There was no danger here. Ramona should go back into the town. That’s where the real threat was.

But Ramona, of course, wasn’t buying it.

She wasn’t buying any of it.

Approaching the hulk of the factory and stepping into its black shadow, she could almost hear it sigh with displeasure.

She opened the door and went in.

Because it was time.