Doll Face

50

Where are you going, doll-face? And what are you going to do when you get there? said a voice of scraping metal. Do you know who you’ll see and what they will say to you?

Creep pressed himself to the wall of this place that could not be but was real enough to touch. He had been escaping a doll thing down a black corridor that should have led into the hub, as he thought of it, but did not lead there… unless it had and he was there because who really knew and nothing made a lick of sense anyway.

He waited, thinking, I should escape it before it finds me.

But escape where? That was the question. The voice was inside his head, yes, but it was also in front of him and behind him and to all sides, it seemed.

Don’t you worry and don’t you fret, little doll-face, because you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, the voice said, giggling.

That’s when the lights started coming on. Not good clean electric lights, of course, but wavering orange-yellow lights like those of huge antique tapers. The sort that threw greasy shadows and created pockets of writhing darkness. But light was light and Creep was content with anything he could get. The corridor was more along the lines of a circular industrial tunnel, he saw now, set with aluminum conduits bolted to the walls that must have held electric lines or steam piping, something of that sort, heavy ducts overhead.

Not knowing what else to do, he moved on and soon the tunnel widened and he began to see… at first he did not know what they were only that there were many of them crowded along the walls. He looked closer to all sides and saw that they were molds, casting molds of the sort that were used to thermoform plastic parts. They were all hinged like clamshells, standing open. He saw molds for hands and feet, legs and torsos, arms and heads, a variety of faces all carefully machined or carved from aluminum. They looked like death mask impressions. He saw others, molds taller than he was, that were full-body molds—one section had a perfect hollow of a mannequin back and the other that closed over it, a hollow of the mannequin front. When the thing was closed, hot plastic or some other material would be injected into it and, when it cooled, it could be opened and there would be a perfect life-size doll.

As he walked along, he saw dozens of these.

Some for men, others for women and even children. Looking at them and thinking about what they might turn out, Creep began to shiver, and then he began to sweat. Though he was hot and feverish, the sweat that rolled down his face was cool to the touch. It had a foul yellow smell to it that sickened him. This was the odor of the human machine poisoned out by the bile of its own fright, dementia, and horror. This is the stuff that ran from you, he knew, when all hope was gone and you were fundamentally fucked in every conceivable way. Men who walked to the gallows or the electric chair probably sweated out corruption like that. He had never smelled anything like it before and he supposed most people only did once—right before they died.

C’mon, doll-face, stop thinking. You’re no good at it. And, besides, you’re almost there, you’re getting real close to who you came to meet.

The voice kept taunting him, but Creep stumbled on almost blindly, obediently. He saw no reason now to argue his fate or try to run from it. Who he had been his entire life, he was not now. He would go where the voice suggested and he would see what waited there, because there really was no alternative.

As he walked and the molds became more numerous, piled against one another in heaps until he could no longer see the walls themselves, he heard the voice telling him how close he was. Then he saw the owner of the voice. Even though he trembled with terror, he was not really surprised.

Danielle was hanging from the wall.

Not really Danielle, but the same horror he’d seen on the TV at that house, Danielle remade as a doll—a pallid and naked thing, her limbs swiveled at the joints, her smallish breasts like pert mounds with nipples that were shiny pearls. The gash between her legs seemed to throb with vitality, swollen and juicy like a ripe peach. Her flesh was textured burlap, formfitting, but not lying on what was below quite right as if she were a snake gradually sloughing its skin. Her chest rose and fell as if she really needed to breathe.

Look at me, doll-face, she said, her hinged jaw mocking speech. As I am, you will soon be.

Her blonde hair was lustrous and shining, but like a wig it seemed to be coming loose from the white scalp beneath, shifting off to the side. One eye was a black pit, the other gleamed like a moonstone, opalescent and milky. It was recessed from the mask-like face, blank yet hideously alive.

Creep thought of running. It was purely instinctive, but it was the only thing he could think of doing.

No, no, not now, the Danielle-thing hissed. Not when you’ve come so far.

It writhed on the hook that suspended it, straight waxen lips pulling back from tiny teeth that were like jagged kernels of corn. She kept squirming, something inside her wriggling obscenely like a Slinky in a sock. If he did not obey her, Creep knew, she would climb down and show him exactly what was beneath her skin. Maybe she would make him touch it and he did not want that, oh God, anything but that.

Go see who waits for you, doll-face, Danielle said, but by then, he was already doing so. Tears spilled from his eyes and his teeth chattered, his hands shaking so badly he had to press them to his sides to hold them still. His eyes felt dry and scratchy, but he did not dare blink. In the blink of an eye, the most malign things could happen in this place.

Go, doll-face, show her what you’re made of… she’ll like that.

“No!” he hollered, some last fragment of free will and survival instinct kicking up its heels inside him. “I won’t go and there’s nothing you can do that will make me!”

He felt good saying that. Hell, he felt empowered and determined and resilient in the face of this god-awful nightmare… but he was still walking forward. Maybe there was a last struggling fragment of defiance in his mind, but nobody had told his body about it and onward it went to keep a meeting with revelation and doom.

The perfectly disturbing part about it all was that he could not stop.

His body would not respond. His somatic nervous system had been hijacked and he was no longer in charge of his own body. He was just a rider now like a man on a bus. He no longer had control… yet, he could speak, he could move his lips, his head, his arms, he just could not stop the forward progression of his feet.

It was insane.

Desperate now, he slapped himself in the face with one hand after the other until his cheeks were red and burning, until pain and confusion made tears run. But none of it shocked him out of it and there didn’t seem to be a damn thing he could do about that.

There comes a time, the Danielle-thing informed him, when all choices are made for us and happy we are for it.

Creep had a powerful need to tell her to shut the fuck up because she wasn’t even human anymore. She hadn’t been much before, but she was even less now and he wanted to find a nice five-pound ball-peen hammer and smash her to pieces. God, it was crazy, but the idea of pulverizing her was almost sexually exciting… not that any of that really mattered because he was still moving down the tunnel to his fate and the realization of that made everything else seem pretty damn insignificant.

The tunnel was gradually widening.

And it was getting warm.

Creep was perspiring freely now. Some of that was fear and anxiety, but not all of it. The heat was palpable, rising a few degrees at a time. The air felt hot in his throat, difficult to breathe. It was about then, as sweat began to drip off the end of his nose, that he heard a sort of rushing/roaring sound like hot water gurgling through a high-pressure pipe and the entire tunnel began to quake. The rushing noise got louder. The tunnel felt like it was in motion.

What the fuck?

Now it was filling with a churning white steam like the sort of thing that a whistling teakettle blows out. It came on in a hissing, rolling cloud. And even if Creep had been able to turn and flee, he would never have escaped it. The steam hit him, engulfed him, and the pain of being seared was instantaneous. He hit the floor and bounced off the walls, hurting and gagging, but knowing that as painful as it was, it was not lethal.

The steam was not enough to kill him.

He heard a thrumming sound and something came out of the tunnel, which had grown quite large now. Whatever it was—and he could see very little of it—it came charging out at him like a phantom from the fog, grim and hulking and horribly industrial, bringing heat and noise and the hot pig iron smell of a foundry. It was a machine becoming flesh or flesh becoming machine. A deranged biomechanical thing that was assembled from yellowed rungs and knobs of bone that protruded from a riveted shell of discolored canvas-like skins, a machine of corpses and wriggling doll parts set with hissing vacuum lines and bulging pneumatic hoses, a great steel bear trap of a mouth that was a 5,000-psi cutting ram.

And above it, like a hag broken on a wheel, he saw a mummy with whipping white hair, a living death mask grinning and cackling.

These were the things Creep thought he saw as it seized him and pulled him into itself, as his hands and feet were impaled by spiked drive chains that carried him into a core of boiling smoke where an immense buzz saw split him from his crotch to the crown of his head in a gushing baptism of his own blood and meat.