Doll Face

51

Lex heard Chazz’s final death-scream, though he did not know who it was. The scream echoed and faded, but there was no doubt which direction it came from and that was exactly where he went: to seek its source. He felt his way along the walls, knowing that at any moment a pair of gnarled puppet hands might reach out for him, but he didn’t think they would. Not just yet. He was being drawn into this place to meet the puppet master and he would not be denied that.

He made it to the hub, which was partially lit by moonlight streaming in through skylights some three stories above. He couldn’t see too much as his eyes adjusted. Just enough to see lots of gleaming machinery and to recognize that the hub was like a cylinder that went up and up. It was an immense chamber and he knew it was the puppet master’s lair. There was a hot, charnel stench in the air that was sickening.

Now pale blue phosphorescence began to illuminate his surroundings.

The walls were set with a veritable industrialized maze of tubing and dirty gray conduits, metal ductwork and what looked like spiraled ribs jutting forth that seemed to be in slow clockwise and counterclockwise motion like gears of some sort… and gears they indeed were because he saw that he was in the heart of what seemed to be a clock. It was insane, but he was seeing it. How much was real and how much was subjective, he couldn’t be sure. He only knew that he was inside the puppet master now.

Stokes was just a physical reality she or it had created, an idealized homage to a town that probably never really existed in the first place, at least not in the way Lex had seen it tonight. The town was a physical projection of psychic or mental energy, but the factory… well, that was the flesh and blood of the puppet master. If the town was its mind, then this was its body… and this chamber was its heart.

A clock.

Why not? The doll people seemed to operate in some way or another like clockwork toys, so why not the puppet master as well?

Sighing among the eerie and abnormal grandeur of it all, Lex shook his head. He could sit here and speculate for hours, but the truth, the real truth of all this would probably be denied to him. He had come for a reason and he had to see that through.

Yet… this place was fascinating. A living machine. The spiraling ribs that made up the walls were rotating slowly but constantly, kept in perpetual motion by the immense mainspring and swinging collection of pendulums high above, which in turn moved the immense toothed escape wheels of the clock train, pinions, levers, and ratcheting mechanisms. Minute wheels and hour wheels were in precise calibration, keeping the biorhythms of the machine in perfect balance. And everywhere, the elaborate gear trains clicking and grinding and meshing—driver gears and worm gears and spur gears. Like the anatomy of a flesh-and-blood organism, none of it ever stopped, ever rested, ever even slightly varied in sequence or the result would be total chaos and the end of the machine that powered Stokes and the puppet master who lorded over all.

Destroy it, Lex thought, and you destroy the puppet master.

He edged farther into the room, stepping over tangled electrical lines and steam hoses that moved against one another with sliding, slithery sounds like mating pythons. He ducked beneath revolving cylinders and around hydraulic rams, his ears humming with the clanking of gear boxes, red-hot bearings, spiked drive chains, and thrumming generator shafts. He kept moving, but moving carefully because it was a dangerous place, a surreal nightmare of a factory in which everything slammed and hissed and whirred, hungry toothed and razored chains anxious to pull the unwary beneath presses where they could be processed properly. High-voltage lines sparked, vats bubbled, steam pissed out through cracks in hoses, and great jagged hooks swung through the air, seeking flesh to impale.

The heat of it all was nearly unbearable. A mist of oil and grease rained in the air that was clogged with smoke and nearly unbreathable. Beyond the odors of lubricants, hot iron, wax and melted plastic, there was a darker odor, an ever-present slaughterhouse stench of well-marbled meat, blood and marrow and burned hair.

Then he saw the machine.

Maybe it was what he had been looking for the entire time.

But was it real? Was any of this real? Yes, it all had physical dimensions and all of it could slash you open, crush you, scald you, electrocute you, or boil the skin from your bones, but that did not make it real.

And the machine not twenty feet from him could not possibly be real.

It was forty feet long at least, machined out of some black metal that was knobbed and ribbed, gaping with chasms and spiraling protrusions. At the back end of it he saw men, women, and children lined up like stock. One by one, they gave themselves to the machine and grinding spiked wheels pierced their hands and fed them into its labyrinthine depths. Through mesh fine as wires, he could see spinning saws slicing them open and dragging the bloodied halves into a boiling vat where they were rendered to a superheated liquid that was fed by transparent arteries into a great aluminum press that smoldered and whined with gouts of escaping gas. The mold was cooled and when it opened at the other end with billowing clouds of steam, a doll person stepped out and joined ranks of other synthetic people that stood around like gape-jawed mummies in a Mexican catacomb.

Lex blinked his eyes again and again.

He didn’t believe for a moment that this was how they were made, but something wanted him to and he had to fight against an impulse to join the others at the feeder end.

It was then he looked straight up through dissipating clouds of hot vapor and saw an immense web up there, a spider’s web, but made of some pink silk that looked oddly like needle-thin sections of human skin. A man was crucified up there. He was dismembered, but all parts of his anatomy were arranged in comparative relation to one another.

Lex knew it was Chazz.

And as some immense spidery horror of wriggling doll parts hovered over the dismembered man and jabbed him with needles, he was certain of it. He could even hear his voice: “God… God… God… help me… oh please let me die…”

Lex was speechless, struck dumb by such an atrocity.

At least, until his own mouth opened and he heard his voice say, “You’re being pulled into this… you’re making this dark fantasy real… you’re getting weak…”

Yes, he blinked it away and concentrated and it was only then that he noticed something that had escaped him thus far—everything in the factory maze was connected with gossamer web-like filaments. Every piece of machinery, every gear, wheel, and press was connected to something that was coming out of the darkness now, racing out of it, an immense black shape connected to what seemed millions of white filaments like a gruesome puppet with a thousand strings.

It was time to meet the master of the maze.