Doll Face

52

Close now, so goddamn close.

Ramona was nearing the axis of chaos and she could feel the dark magnetism of it pulling her in just as it simultaneously tried to force her away. She was afraid of it and it was afraid of her, only she did not know why and she feared she would die before she found out. In the distance there were the loud industrious sounds of a foundry—clanking and gnashing, snapping and popping, metal grinding against metal and an ever-present hissing of hot gases.

The corridor would lead her there.

Step by step, she was closer.

Thoughts scurried through her head, things she did not want to be thinking about but kept sprouting like weeds nonetheless. This night had been endless. It might have been going on for hours or days now. Time had lost all meaning here in the devil’s playground. She knew the fate of Soo-Lee, and Creep was probably dead, too. Same for Danielle. But she wondered about Lex. She even wondered about Chazz. She still had feelings for him—struggling, fleeting things though they were—and she wondered if he was still alive.

But a voice in her head said simply, No. He was physically strong but mentally weak and morally corrupt. Once you stripped away his muscles and good looks, there wasn’t anything beneath but a frightened whiny little boy and you know it. Easy prey for Mother Crow.

Ramona wasn’t going to think about him anymore.

He was gone. He had to be gone.

And what they had, had been gone even longer.

She scanned the corridor with her light. She was heading in the right direction; her instincts assured her of this. The floor was messy, unlike the rest of the town. Did that mean anything? Where was the precision, the sterility, the obsessive neatness you saw in the streets? Underfoot was a carpet of leaves, cigarette butts, candy wrappers, metal shavings, wood splinters, and an extremely aged water-stained copy of Playboy. There were gray doors set in the walls. One said PRODUCTION SUPERVISOR and another PLANT MANAGER. Something brown and crusty like old shit had been rubbed on them. Maybe it was blood.

At the very end there was a large six-paneled oak door. Very elegant compared to the others. It was shiny, well-waxed and polished. It gleamed like a table in a Pledge commercial. There was a plaque on the door. It read:

MOTHER CROW

PRESIDENT

Ramona knew it probably hadn’t said anything like that back in 1960 or the decades preceding. But there it was, black letters emblazoned on a gleaming brass plaque. MOTHER CROW, PRESIDENT. She was struck by the absurdity of it. Could it possibly have said something like that back in the day? Was the old lady that crazy, that arrogant, that full of herself? But the answer to that was obvious. The hag thought she owned the town. She had cursed the fleeing workers when the orders dried up at the factory. She had fucking survived death and created this sideshow.

Yes, the old lady had certainly been that crazy, that arrogant, and that full of herself. Typical despot. Typical tyrant. Typical matriarch of a fallen dynasty. MOTHER CROW, PRESIDENT. It was enough to make you fucking puke. In fact, it was enough to—

Wait.

It didn’t say Mother Crow now. It said something else:

RAMONA CROW,

PRESIDENT

That made Ramona take a step or two backward. A sick joke perpetrated by a sick mind. She realized then that the old lady could have insulted her, her mother, her entire family and Ramona would have shrugged it off. But this was more than an insult, it was disturbing. It was like having the old hag cackling in her ear with her sour old lady breath.

“Stop it,” Ramona said.

But the plaque persisted: RAMONA CROW, PRESIDENT.

“FUCK YOU!”

RAMONA CROW, PRESIDENT AND CEO, it now said.

“STOP IT!”

RAMONA CROW, MAKER AND UNMAKER, CREATOR AND DESTROYER.

She rubbed her fists against her eyes to make it go away, but it would not go away. Mother Crow had found a weak nerve and she was going to work it, nip it, pluck it, yank on it. And the pain was almost physical, but more so it created a building misery in Ramona, a bottomless grief, a black chasm of despair.

Do it, she ordered herself.

She moved quickly down the hallway to the door. That’s how you did it in this place: if something scared you or filled you with anguish, you charged it dead on. She gripped the doorknob and threw it open. She took a step into the room, expecting some austere and utilitarian sort of office, something harsh and puritanical to fit in with the mechanistic mind of Mother Crow, but instead she found a workshop.

There were tables heaped with mannequin parts, of course. But by that point, Ramona was not really frightened of them. You could only see so many snakes before they lost their shock value.

You lie, God, how you lie.

She studied the racks of tools and instruments on the pegboards along the walls. They were hung with gleaming probes, long silver needles, loops of sutures and catgut, clamps and saws and knives of every description. Spools of wire and exotic-looking pulleys sidled up to bone screws and forceps, ball sockets and swivels, iron rods and gears. Another pegboard held faces, eyeless and jawless, things of wood and plastic and wax waiting to be fixed to some dire living machinery. There was a wall of eyeballs pinned to a cork board. They were in every color. She expected them to watch her, to follow her like eyes in old paintings, but they were just glass orbs. A fire hose was coiled on the wall, next to it an axe painted red.

The accoutrements of firefighting would of course be prevalent here in Mother Crow’s reimagining of this place, Ramona knew.

There was a pull string dangling from the ceiling and she pulled it, half-expecting to see a dozen ghoulish marionettes drop down in a jerking dance macabre, but the only thing that happened was that a light came on. It was an old-fashioned thing with a funnel-shaped shade that directed the light downward. It seemed to create more shadows than it dispelled. It lit up the contents of the table, but beyond its illumination was like the edge of the known universe where formless night things hopped and crawled in bleak nonexistence.

There was a door at the far end of the room and that’s where she was going.

She made it a few feet before she bumped into something hanging from the ceiling that she was certain had not been there a moment before. She gasped, shining her light around and whatever it was—her mind had a quick flash image of an articulated Halloween skeleton—dropped to the floor with a clattering noise.

Breathing hard now, wary, she put her light on it.

It was Creep.

Not the real Creep, but a doll version of him that had fallen apart when it struck the floor. There was his torso, a detached arm, a detached hand, an eyeball that had rolled across the floor. He was just a heap of parts. His head had no hair, his cranium was seamed like the monster in an old Frankenstein movie (for the ease of brain transplants, perhaps).

“They only got you because you let them,” Ramona found herself saying. “You didn’t fight, Creep. You went with what they offered. You looked for an easy way out. I’m sorry.”

The parts began to tremble, then to rattle.

They were alive and part of her had suspected as much. The heap that was Creep began to sluggishly crawl across the floor in a loose jumble and Ramona heard a high tittering in the back of her head like the insane laughter of a madwoman locked in an attic room. She had seen worse… yet, this collection of abstract humanity was like white ice cracking open inside her. She was dancing precariously on the edge of a full-blown nervous breakdown. The most alarming part was not the clattering progress of the parts or the thumping roll of the head itself, but the eyeball that rolled behind and the foot that hopped along in pursuit. As demented as it was, had it been a cartoon, it might have offered some morbid comedy.

But there was nothing funny about that heap of disjointed parts.

And there was nothing remotely amusing about how they began to stir in a whirlwind, jumping and rattling and spinning in the air before striking the floor again… then putting themselves together in proper order. Like a child stacking blocks, the Creep thing assembled itself. When it was finished, it stood there stiffly like a window dummy, swaying slightly back and forth.

Then it began to breathe in and out, chest rising and falling.

Something like a black leech slid between the lips and licked them. There was a tearing sound and a single eye winked open with a puff of dust. It looked over at Ramona with barely concealed lust.

“Dolly, dolly, dolly,” the Creep puppet said. The voice was his… nearly, but with a dry, rasping caliber to it like a rusty nail head scraped over concrete. “My dolly’s name is Ramona and with her I shall play.”

Click-clacking, it stepped in her direction, reaching out with white fingers lacking nails. Bits of them flaked off like loose plaster. The flaccid penis between the legs rose up, hard as a tent stake. It was throbbing. As Creep stood there, breathing harder and faster, a gout of drool ran from his lips to his chin. And his wooden penis—if wood it was—became positively engorged until it was as large as the Ray-O-Vac in Ramona’s hand. The head was pink and shiny, except it wasn’t a human glans but a pulsating baby doll head whose pink, blubbery lips opened and said, “Ma-ma, ma-ma, ma-ma,” in a squeaking doll voice.

Ramona was shaking all over.

Madness scratched inside her skull and she had the urge to laugh hysterically. Was this horror or humor or both or neither and why was she shaking uncontrollably and gooseflesh crawling up her spine and down the back of her arms?

Creep stepped forward and there was no doubt what was on his agenda, which, of course, was just the agenda of Mother Crow: what better way to debase, defile, and destroy Ramona than to have her violated by a fucking puppet? It had worked wonders with Soo-Lee.

Ramona wanted to step back, but she faced her fears even though it felt like her guts were crawling with slinking white worms that were sliding up into her chest. Creep reached out for her and she batted his hand aside with the flashlight. His mouth split into a grimace and he clawed out at her, but she was faster. She brought the cylinder of her trusty Ray-O-Vac around in an arc and struck him dead in the face.

He did not go down.

In fact, all he did was swing back and forth as if held aloft by strings she could not see. He swung in her direction and his fingers scraped along her breast. She smashed him with the light again and he swung away, picking up momentum to come swinging back, his leering mouth seeming to say, You silly twat, I can play this game all night. Back and forth, back and forth I go. You’ll get tired and when you get tired, I’ll move in closer because you’re my fuck toy and I’m going to treat you like a fuck toy, my sweet little dolly.

The thing was, Ramona could hear his voice inside her head, each word seeming to gain volume.

She smashed him again as he got his hands in her hair and yanked out a strand. She batted him away and he swung back into the darkness and faster, it seemed, than the light could track him. He was getting the entire room worked up. All the parts were beginning to wriggle. They wanted to get off tables and free themselves from hooks.

She ducked under him and he giggled with a piercing, gleeful sort of sound. He swung back around, fixing her with his single glaring eyeball, which seemed to be bulging from the socket like a duck egg.

She sidestepped him and felt the head of his penis brush her arm, the baby doll mouth now lined with teeth like fishhooks that drew blood. They were chattering with a dead, hollow sound like a skull in a catacomb. Clickety-clickety-clickety-clickety. Gravity should have ground him to a halt or at least slowed him a bit, but it did neither. The Creep puppet began to move faster and faster with slicing pendulum strokes, zipping past her. She couldn’t get out of his way fast enough. His fingers clawed her. The head of his bulbous, bright red penis nipped at her. The needling teeth chattered and with such volume she thought she would lose her mind.

CLICKETY-CLICKETY-CLICKETY-CLICKETY-CLICKETY-CLICKETY!

When he came around again, he knocked the Ray-O-Vac out of her hand and it rolled under the table, going out. There was no time to retrieve it. He would have had her the moment she tried. Now it was just the two of them and that circle of light concentrated on the moving doll parts on the table. She could hear him giggling in the darkness around her, but she could not see him. The door wasn’t far away, but she knew she’d never make it… not without a rider mounting her from behind.

The Creep puppet came out of the darkness with a swooping sound like an owl seeking a mouse. His penis was standing hard and perversely bloated, streaking at her like a surface-to-air missile. She dodged past him and he disappeared into the darkness, giggling. Panicking, she dashed for the door and he struck out at her like a shark coming out of the depths, his fingers tearing her shirt up the back and scraping slivers of skin free.

When he came at her again, she sidestepped him, then knocked the light aside so it swung back and forth, disorienting her and hopefully him. He came after her and crashed into a pegboard. He made a growling sound and came again, but when he did, Ramona jumped out at him with the fire axe in both hands. Before he could slow his descent, the axe was in flight. It caught him in the head, splitting his face wide and his puppet body immediately struck the floor, its invisible wires sheared.

Ramona, axe held to strike, bore down on him.

Creep reassembled himself. It was like watching a film run in reverse. He was standing between her and the door and she planned on going right through him, but she never got the chance. As Creep stepped out to meet her, the door behind him flew open… then blew right off its hinges, taking a good section of the wall with it.

Even Creep hadn’t been expecting this.

What stepped through the hole in the wall was the apex horror; Frankendoll.

It was back.

A hideous, gargantuan mass of writhing doll flesh that throbbed and pulsated, roiling and grotesquely alive. It stepped forward on a dozen legs, a multitude of mannequin and puppet faces screaming and crying out in death agonies. Ramona recognized the new additions: Soo-Lee, Chazz, and Danielle.

Now it wanted Creep.

If a puppet could look frightened, he did. He tried to shamble forward and a brace of arms shot forward like greased pistons, fists and claws tearing into him, raking him apart with hooked nails. The Creep puppet cried out as it was pulled apart and ingested, assimilated into the mass like a corpse fed into a wood chipper. He sank away and then his white face pressed back out, joining the other ghost faces that hung from the creature’s chest like swollen polyps.

Still clutching the axe, Ramona made a mad dive for her flashlight.

Face your fears. Overcome them, a voice instructed her. Do not empower them.

But looking up at the howling, shrieking, grinning faces of Frankendoll, it was not so easy. They looked like fetish masks carved from teak and pitted driftwood, eye sockets gouged deep into blackness, mouths cut into jagged sawtoothed holes, noses hacked into the triangular hollows of skulls. They reminded her of the leering faces of Japanese temple demons. Some were whole, others split apart by the birth of yet another head, still others had divided like cells. And for every complete head, there was a cluster of fetal, unformed knobs sprouting around it. Some with mewling mouths and others with a single eye, and some that were nothing but toothy hungry chasms.

“It’s our Ramona come back to us,” a choir of voices said, discordant and moaning, squeaking and shrilling like the pipes of a poorly tuned church organ. “Bring her to us. A place has been prepared, let our queen reign from high above.”

As if proof of that, two mannequin heads at the very apex of the creature parted to show Ramona the place of honor and glory her head would decorate.

Think! she commanded herself. There’s got to be a way out of this! There’s got to be a way to fight!

But the fight was nearly gone from her.

She just didn’t have much left.

Frankendoll stood there, its glistening jellied flesh shifting with a near-constant osmotic motion, tissue draining away and filling hollows, leaving gaping crevices in its wake that revealed mainsprings, skeletal armatures, and whirring gears. Heads migrated and changed positions. It made slopping, juicy sounds, its many fused torsos expanding and deflating like soap bubbles. Ramona was reminded of the plastic army men her brother had played with. How one day, he dumped lighter fluid on them, claiming they had been nuked, and lit them up. What was left after the flames died out, a molten magma of melted bodies and jutting limbs and oozing faces, looked pretty much like what she was looking at it. Except this thing was viscidly alive, pulsing and pink and breathing, an elastic conglomeration of dolls, puppets, and mannequins trapped in a communal tar pit of seething, bubbling doll meat.

“I’m going to kill you,” she said, trying to channel all the hate and frustration and rage that had haunted her ever since this nightmare began. “I’m going to hack you to pieces.”

She said this calmly, but authoritatively. At first, it was all lie and bluff, but then steadily her anger began to rise and she knew if she could not put this horror down, then she could not possibly face what lay ahead.

“NO, RAMONA! YOU MUST NOT DO THAT!” the voices told her.

She stepped forward, burning with rage.

Frankendoll took a few wary steps away, bumping into a table and overturning it.

Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack, went its many drumming feet.

It was unsure now. The balance of power had shifted and Ramona could almost feel it in the air like a breath of heat surrounding her, pulling her in, making her its own… a spark, a blazing coal that would set tinder to burning and bring down a great forest of dark, twisting dread.

“Poor, poor Ramona. See how alone she is, how alone she has always been. Never able to trust and never able to forgive even herself. Always confused and miserable and burned black to her core,” the voices taunted. “See how small she is, pretty, pretty, but small and weak and filled with a void of hot wind lacking substance.”

Yes, she was being taunted and her buttons were being pushed, quite expertly at that. Mother Crow knew what lived in the mind of her enemies, she knew how to squeeze out every last drop of their terror, self-loathing, and secret angst like foul gray water from a sponge. Images of Chazz filled her head. He was an asshole, a bastard, a user and abuser… yet, yet, she blamed herself because her manic OCD could not accept the fact that she had not fucked up something somewhere, a dropped word, a missed clue, a skein of misery that she had not followed to its source.

Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack.

Frankendoll was closing in on her even as her own mind was closing up like a bivalve as she drowned in a sea of self-doubt and guilt that filled her with indecision that became weakness that weighed her down and made her unsure of who she was and even what she was.

“The poor dear, always so alone. She’s needed to become part of something bigger than herself and now she will,” the voices said, more to themselves than to her. “We’ll love her, we’ll protect her, we’ll let her join us.”

“But I won’t,” she managed, wanting to believe it but unsure now.

Certain that the hot air was bled from her, Frankendoll came after her like the monster in its namesake film—a barbarian of hate and destruction. It flipped tables aside and crushed wriggling doll parts beneath its step, knocking shelves free and tearing pegboards from the walls, bearing down on her with absolute fury.

And in that moment of vulnerability as her life hung in the balance—and an unspeakable fate—she brought up the axe and charged and Frankendoll met her on neutral ground among the wreckage it had created. The mouths yawned wide and screamed with an outpouring of rage. Dozens of new doll faces opened like blossoming flowers and hands reached out, clawed and deadly hands, and she saw Chazz’s disfigured doll face opening with the teeth of an ogre to peel her face free.

The axe landed.

It struck the monster square in the chest, splitting open two heads and cleaving into the mass beneath, which splintered with a loud cracking like deadwood or a crushed human rib cage. Bits of Frankendoll dropped away, a limb here and a head there. A viscous gout of hot yellow fluid erupted from the wound, burning Ramona’s face and sizzling as it struck the floor. The many agonized mouths screamed their displeasure.

And Ramona kept chopping and chopping as hands scratched her face and struck her, tearing out handfuls of hair and ripping her shirt open, busily trying to get at the flesh beneath to pull it apart and assimilate it. A million red globular eyes pushed out of the mass, a million scraping gray fingers clutched at her, and the brace of heads atop the creature’s shoulders opened wide and expelled a gurgling white vomit that had the consistency of rice. Ramona fought and it fought. They tore and thrashed and clawed at one another. Limbs flew and heads dropped and then the axe was wrenched from her hands and she was drawn closer to the pulsating mass, dozens of worming black tongues erupting like eels from deep sea caves to lick her eyes from their sockets.

But she did not give in.

Soaked with its vomit and its burning yellow blood that continued to squirt free in noisome loops, she was pressed up against the revolting tumescent flesh of the thing as it tried to bury her alive in itself, in its hot plastic skin, the gummy infected soup of tissue, which even then webbed over her and snaked around her in waxy, sodden ropes.

Still, she fought.

She tore at the mass of Frankendoll, digging into it, tearing out its flesh in spongy cobs and pulpous clots as its discharge flooded over her and engulfed her and she felt its many hands pulling at her limbs, making ready to dismember her and add her biology to its morbid collection. But it was also at that moment that she heard something throbbing inside and knew it must be its heart. Machines did not have hearts but this thing was not exactly a machine any more than it was a living thing, more of a biomechanical interface.

With her last ounce of strength, she plunged her hands deep into it, tearing her knuckles on gears and cogs and spinning wheels and felt her hands grip a fleshy beating mass that felt about the size and general shape of a football. She yanked with everything she had and tore it out by its coiling roots, falling back with it, free of the monstrosity that wailed and screamed, blistering and dissolving and swimming in a fountain of its own doll waste.

She held the heart of the thing over her head.

“NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!” the voices boomed, seeming to make the room shake. Vessels shattered and the walls cracked open and dust was shaken from the ceiling overhead.

The heart was enormously slimy, dangling with fibrous pink tendrils that coiled and snapped. It was like some rotten, swollen black tomato pulsing in her hands.

THUMP-THUMP! THUMP-THUMP! THUMP-THUMP!

She tried to rend it with her fingers but it was rubbery and slick, palpitating wildly with what seemed conflicting arrhythmic beats like it was trying to jump free.

THUMP-THUMP! THUMP-THUMP! THUMPATHUMPATHUMPA THUMP—

As the hissing, bubbling mass of Frankendoll came at her, she threw the heart to the floor and picked up the axe. The voices screamed one last time before the blade came down and bisected the quivering muscle that sloshed like an overfilled water balloon. It erupted with an explosion of yellow juice that flooded over the floor and Frankendoll screamed, coming after Ramona again, but staggering and clumsy, smashing into things and tripping over wreckage. She grabbed her Ray-O-Vac and axe and went through the hole it had made where the door had once been.

It followed, but not for long.

It tripped over ribbons of its own flesh and sloughing limbs, leaving smears of tissue on the walls that squirmed with fingers and mashed faces as it put out clouds of boiling fumes and its flesh went liquid and pooled on the floor.

And then she was out of range of its death throes and before her, the hub and who she had come to meet.