Doll Face

53

Lex had seconds.

Amid the deadly clockwork that was the surreal machinery of the puppet master’s mind, he knew that the only way to stop all this was to stop the machine itself. It had to be unplugged, yanked out by the roots like a parasitic weed or its wheels would never stop turning. It was the only way. It was the only possible way.

As he felt the puppet master coming for him, he searched for something, anything that could be used to start smashing things.

There had to be something.

Then he saw there was.

A huge four-foot torque wrench that had to weigh thirty pounds. It would have been child’s play for Chazz to swing something like that around, but for Lex, who had always been a thin, wiry sort of guy who could never put on weight regardless of how much junk food he swallowed, it was like swinging some immense battle axe.

He gripped it, liking the feel and heft of it.

Without hesitation, he brought it up over his head and swung it at the first thing he saw—a gearbox. He thought he heard a cry from above him as the housing broke free and then he was certain of it as the wrench landed again, smashing several gears and upsetting their calibration, making them grind and spew flakes of metal and sparks.

At that precise moment, the siren started up again.

Here, at ground zero, it was like an air raid siren, deafening and blaring, so goddamn unbelievably loud that he couldn’t hear anything else. He gave the gearbox another whack for good measure, then he turned and brought the wrench down on a metal conduit that immediately crumbled and hissed with escaping steam. Just these two small blows seemed like nothing in comparison to the immensity of the machine around him… but it was felt. Something around him shifted. The factory trembled. Its delicate instrumentation was being attacked. He was an invading virus that would infect the body.

That’s when the puppet master revealed itself.

It had been hiding, creeping about, rushing out, then retreating as if it were confused, but it was not confused now. There was nothing left to do but fight and fight it would. It came out to meet the intruder in a dark, amorphous shape that seemed to be constantly in flux as if it couldn’t decide just what it was.

And Lex couldn’t decide either.

Something inside him demanded that he flee, but something else, something much stronger and inflexible, told him to stand his ground.

Face it. Look it in the eye and show no fear. Expose it for the weakling it is.

Which was great in theory. But as it came out to get him like a spider rushing out to snatch an insect, everything inside him went to rubber. The first thing he thought he saw was something like an immense sheet metal press with teeth. Then something more along the lines of a slinking mammoth demon worm encased in the chitinous black shell of a millipede that screamed in the voices of flayed children. It showed him a hundred mouths, then a thousand globular red eyes veined with black, and finally descending talons like shards of glass that had come to eviscerate him.

Don’t even blink. Do not look away.

Hefting the heavy wrench in his hands, he felt positively impotent against this thing that circled around him, a horrendous industrialized and mechanistic centipede suspended off the ground by its puppet strings of white tendrils. They were like a million wire-fine fiber optic cables, so many that they formed sheaths and braids, growing out of the beast and cradling it in a cocoon of cobwebs whose origins were high, high above.

It looked down at him with those seeking red eyes, which were not only horribly profuse but horribly intricate in design, like spinning gyroscopes, multi-lensed and multifaceted like the compound eyes of meat flies. The great undulant, vermiform body was a geometrically complex machine that pumped out hissing spirals of steam, trailing compression hoses and high-voltage lines like looping entrails. Its flexing shell looked like it was more metal than flesh or perhaps flesh becoming metal. Like the walls of the clockwork chamber itself, it was set with knobs and crevices and meshing gears, all of it seeming to be in constant industrious motion, spinning and linking and turning. And as it got closer to him, he dared blink and saw that it was composed not just of machine parts and flesh in some unnatural synchronicity, but of interlinked mannequins welded into some loathsome congregation of the damned. Eyeless and screaming, they reached out with thousands of thrashing arms and fingers.

And high above at the end of the corkscrewing neck, he looked into the face of the puppet master… and it was female. There was no mistaking that. The face of the old woman he had seen in the house, the one stitching up the dead boy. Maybe it wasn’t exactly human any longer, but he saw that it had once been so. She or it had trailing straw-dry hair like luminous white worms, the fissured face of a petrified corpse, blank eyes like the buttons of greasy toadstools, and puckered gums set with what seemed to be the whirring teeth of chains. A dire machine of hate and retribution now, but once, once, she had been a living woman and not a crawling malevolence.

As it came for him, he held up his wrench, more than a little aware of the pitiful threat he presented in the face of this immense chimera that had been birthed from the black womb of the factory.