Doll Face (24 page)

Why does a dog vomit something out? Why must it get something out of its belly?

But the answer was simple: a dog—or any other living creature with a stomach—vomited things out that were destructive to it, that would make it ill. Lex proceeded along that line of thought. Okay. Why was he destructive? Partly because of his stubbornness. That made sense. But there was another reason that he was a diseased cell in the body of Stokes.

And the answer to that was obvious.

So obvious it was ridiculous.

Oh, come on. It can’t be that simple.

But maybe it was. He had dug through the walls. He had injured the house and in doing so injured Stokes. It was absolutely insane, yet he almost felt that there was something to it. He didn’t honestly believe the walls of the house were
really
living tissue. That was a hallucination, an image placed in his mind to scare him or offend him, to revolt him to the point where he wouldn’t think of trying to tear through them. And, perhaps, for the house
and
for Stokes that was a weak spot. Maybe wherever the illusions were heaviest were the weakest points, places he and the others had to be warned away from.

He couldn’t be sure.

It was all so mixed up. He believed everything in Stokes, including the town itself, was a hallucination, but not necessarily a psychological or mental hallucination but a
physical
one, if that made any sense. Some things were nothing but illusions, but others were very real. But telling them apart was not easy. They were mixed together, woven into a common skein, perfectly joined.

And all of it was the result of the fucked-up mind or morbid intelligence that brought it together and made it real. Whether that was on purpose or accidental remained to be seen.

Lex got to his feet.

He was going back in the house. Soo-Lee was in there somewhere. Probably crouched in a corner, scared out of her wits. And that was the danger: if she believed what Stokes showed her, it could most certainly harm her or even kill her.

His head feeling screwed on tight again, that dizzy sense of unreality fading fast, Lex walked up the flagstone path to the porch. He didn’t think there was anything that could really stop him, he didn’t believe that—

Whump! Whump!
Whump!

A series of explosions blew the windows out of the high, leaning house, a wave of heat hitting him and throwing him five feet as blazing wreckage rained down all around him. The house was on fire. It went up with a series of explosions as if a propane tank or something in the cellar had ignited.

Covering his head with his hands, Lex ran for the street as another wave of heat slammed into him and pitched him to the pavement.
Soo-Lee…oh dear God, Soo-Lee,
was the only thing that ran through his mind. Brilliant red flames jumped from the windows and licked up the siding. Two attic turrets on the roof blazed up like match heads. Burning shingles, boards, and debris erupted into the air as the roof exploded, vaporizing into a rolling orange cloud that leaped skyward. It all came falling down like a storm of fiery meteorites—lathing and timbers and planks and what appeared to be a smoldering staircase that crashed not ten feet from him in an explosion of flames and sparks.

He hobbled away from the inferno, coughing on clouds of black smoke that filled the streets.

And from all around him, maybe from the other houses and the very town itself, he heard what seemed like hundreds of voices screaming:
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!
It was much like when he had kicked the TV screen in the house. All those voices, only this time it was the sound of agony.

The entire world around him flickered yellow and orange like a candle guttering in a carved pumpkin. As he looked back, even the trees in the yard were on fire. It was a real three-alarm conflagration and the house looked like some great burning barrel flaming in the night. As he stood there, his arms singed from debris, a section of hair burned from his head, and his face dark with soot, he muttered Soo-Lee’s name and sank to his knees.

How long he kneeled there, sobbing, he did not know.

He only stood up when there was a violent roaring and the house fell into itself in a blazing pyre of glowing orange timbers and a cloud of red sparks rose into the night. The house was gone. It didn’t look like there was anything standing but the blackened fingers of chimneys.

And Soo-Lee was gone with it.

She could not have survived it.

The puppet master did not want you going in there. It did not want you undoing all it had done. It had to keep you from finding out something or hurting the house further in your quest so it…it cut off a thumb to save the hand.

And it used fire. It was always fire at the root of things. Back at the diner, when all else had failed, the corpse dummies had burst into flames. When he and the others saw that old sitcom from hell on the TV, there had been flames flickering outside the windows. Yes, at the root of all this there was fire.

Numb, caught between waking and nightmare, Lex stumbled up the street, just moving blindly with no set destination in mind. Earlier, before the fire, he had thought he could simply walk in the house, grab Soo-Lee, and walk out again, leave Stokes by hurting it enough that he would be expelled.

But now he was not interested in leaving.

He wanted to stay.

He wanted to find the puppet master and destroy him/her/it.

And it was at that very moment as if he had channeled some psychic feed, that he looked east and saw an orange glow on the horizon that slowly died out. He did not think it was a trick. He needed to go there for that was the fountainhead of this nightmare.

Without further ado, going on nothing but intuition, he began to move to the east to meet whoever or
what
ever was running this show.

40

A flashlight.

Ramona decided she needed one of those more than anything. When she came upon a store whose window read HARDWARE, she let herself in. The door was open. Of course, it was open. Everything was open in Stokes. In Stokes you could trust your neighbors and you didn’t have to worry about things like thieves or
city people.
She was certain she had not thought that. That it was placed in her head or she picked up on some psychic vibe that was floating around.
City people.
No, that wasn’t a term she would have used. It was a phrase from someone who’d spent their life in small towns because they liked it that way and they were terrified to leave.

City people. Those rat-infested places are rotten with ‘em. And most of ‘em are dirty, slinking foreigners. Immigrants. Trash from every corner of the world.

She gasped. There it was again. She was beginning to believe it was the voice of the Controller. A narrow, paranoid, xenophobic mind.

Is that what this is all about?

There was no way to know and maybe she was better off not knowing.

Finding the flashlight was easy enough.

In her mind, she had been thinking about some little Tekna LED flashlight, but such things had not yet been invented in Stokes so she had to be satisfied with a heavy stainless steel Ray-O-Vac outfit that needed three D-cell batteries, which were easy to find as well. There was a certain satisfaction to having the flashlight in her hand. It was heavy and solid. Unlike modern ones that would probably shatter if you smacked someone in the head with them, this baby would crack a skull.

Okay then.

Time to move.

She walked randomly, edging steadily east,
knowing
she was edging east even if the Stokes she saw was repeated endlessly. That was part of the ruse. To confuse you and frustrate you and turn you around, make you doubt yourself. It was a maze, yes, but like any maze there was a path through it if you just used your head.

And then…breakthrough.

I’ll be damned.

Stretching before her was a large park. Just your average small-town park with benches and trees, the shadowy hulk of what she assumed was a war memorial in the distance. She saw a fountain nearby that was silent until she looked at it and then it came to life—sparkling water jetting orange and blue and green, lit by lights from below.

“Very nice,” she muttered.

Guiding herself with the flashlight, she walked over a little footbridge that spanned a bubbling creek. Frogs chortled among the lily pads. The handrail was carved with the names of lovers. Interesting. She studied them all in the light, checking out the dates carved in there. Not one more recent than 1960. Just as she’d suspected. The great fire had burned this damn place flat and what she was seeing was nothing more than an idealized memory.

Ramona crossed the bridge and was back on the grass again. She kept moving the flashlight beam around in arcs to spot any doll people before they spotted her, if that was possible. But there were none. They had slipped into dormancy again as if the Controller needed to rest now and then. Whoever was doing this must have been spending a lot of energy to maintain the illusion.

She came to an open area with a bandshell and rows of wooden seats bolted to a concrete slab. Ah, just the place to listen to a concert on a summer evening from the city band. She told herself to keep moving, but she was rooted to the spot. There was something here. Something important and she needed to trust her instincts on that.

What? What is it?

She knew she had to shut her mind down and let it happen. This place was speaking to her and she had to hear what it had to say, something she couldn’t do if she cluttered her brain with thoughts. It was like yoga: empty your mind and connect. She wasn’t sure if it was working, but she had the sudden inexplicable urge to walk up to the bandshell, so she followed her instincts and went up there. Between two lush rows of hedges, she sidled up to the stage and placed her hands flat on it.

There was something here.

She could feel it.

Yes, it was gathering around her, nothing exactly negative or even positive, just a flow of energy, of memory, and she went with it like a leaf floating down a creek. In days long past there had been band concerts here every Thursday night. Turning, she could see them in the dark, all the good folks of Stokes sitting there tapping their feet and snapping their fingers as the band behind her played on, brassy and off-key like all small-town bands, but nobody seemed to notice. Out on the green beyond, vendors sold hot dogs and balloons and peanuts and root beer. She noticed that the men wore suits and the ladies wore summer dresses and large floppy hats with flowers on them. Even the children were dressed up.

Was that real?

Is that how it truly was or how the puppet master wanted to remember it?

No thinking. Just feel.

Let it happen.

It was like a weird electricity was running through her, galvanizing her bones and feeding through her arteries and all of it running right up into her head and making her feel dizzy and woozy. Now all the people were gone. It was high summer and the grass was yellow. It was uncut, wild. Weeds had sprouted. The root beer stand was still there—shaped like a root beer barrel, of course—only it was faded from the sun, the service window boarded over. Birds were nesting on its roof. A few warped planks had popped loose and creaked in the breeze. The entire park was overgrown and abandoned. Even the little footbridge in the distance…the railing was splintered, cattails clogging the creek. She shouldn’t have been able to see that from this distance, but she saw it just fine. Just as she saw that on the railing somebody had carved:

FUCK STOKES

The image of that was like a cold shard of glass sliding into her belly. Yes, for the Controller—and these memories belonged to him/her/it—that was pain. It was an insult. It was a slap in the face.

Ramona could very much feel the Controller’s anguish…anguish that verged on rage. She could smell a stink of burning rubber. Yes, over near the creek there was a pile of tires somebody had lit on fire. Teenagers. They were drinking and swearing, openly pissing in the grass. Something had happened here. Something had made picture-perfect, placid, pure-as-the-driven-snow Stokes go belly up.

But what? What the hell was it?

Now Ramona could see an old woman sitting on the edge of the stage, a hunched-over, skeletal thing like a bag of sticks. Despite the summer heat, she was wrapped in some dark shawl that looked old and well-used like herself. Ramona could see her face. It was ancient and puckered like a peach pit, the skin pale and set with fans of wrinkles. She was muttering something. Her teeth were gray, narrow, rotting black at the gums. One eye was dark and glistening, the other blemished white, blanched almost silver.

“I’m here alone,” her voice said. “Do you hear me? Alone.”

Ramona was only a few feet from her. Her own throat was so dry she could barely speak, but she managed one word: “Why?”