He dropped the fry back onto its plate. “It’s fake,” he said. “All this food is fake. It’s like that plastic food little kids play with. And I bet that’s exactly how it tastes.”
The words had no more than left his lips when he felt a subtle shift in the atmosphere of the diner. It was quick and inexplicable. He no longer smelled good things to eat and drink. No, now he smelled mildew and rot.
“Lex,” Soo-Lee said, grabbing his arm.
But he saw, all right. There were mice running around on the floor. A rat was on a table gnawing at a club sandwich that looked like it had been sitting there for weeks. The bread was green with mold. There were flies everywhere. A beetle crawled out of a malted cup. A burger was writhing with maggots.
Yes, it had happened everywhere.
Everywhere.
The walls were dingy, the plate glass windows dirty, the counter and tables filthy with rat droppings and food scraps gone black. The red vinyl booth cushions were torn open, stuffing hanging out. There was three inches of dust on the floors. Ceiling tiles above were water-stained, some missing entirely.
“Let’s get out of here,” Soo-Lee said.
Yes, that was a good idea. A very good idea because he had the most appalling feeling that the diner was decaying and if they did not get out, they would decay with it like worms trapped in a rotting apple. Beyond the grimy counters, the chalkboard had changed now.
It no longer offered the day’s specials. Now it read:
LEX FONTAINE
SOO-LEE CHANG
CHAZZ ACKELY
RAMONA LAKE
CREEP RODGERS
DANIELLE LECARR
† REST IN PEACE †
A white fear opening up inside him, Lex grabbed Soo-Lee and they raced for the door… only there was no door. It was not simply missing, it was like it had never been there in the first place. There were only the plate glass windows with their lower fringe of curtains hanging like dingy rags, but no aperture where a door might have been placed.
Soo-Lee was shaking.
So was he.
“What… what is this?” she said, maybe more to herself than to him.
But without a doubt it was an excellent question: what exactly was this? What sort of mind game was it and what was the fucking point of it all? Who was running it? If they wanted Lex and Soo-Lee to be unnerved and scared, well they had been successful. Lex’s skin was crawling. It felt like something inside his head wanted to fly apart. He felt helpless and trapped like a fly in a web.
Christ, he felt like he was buried alive.
But he had to think. He knew that much. He couldn’t lose it because whatever puppet master was running this show wanted him to. The only real weapon he’d ever had in his life was his mind and he couldn’t let all this dull its edge now.
Think.
Yes, yes. The image of the diner had been offered to them with flawless diner perfection: the smells, the sights, even the sounds of the soft drink bubblers and coffee percolating. But he had turned his nose up at it. He had been suspicious. He had refused to accept the simple joy of what was offered, so it was made worse. He was being punished.
“Well,” he said, very loudly, “I’m not buying this either, so you better fucking try again.”
This time, the atmospheric shift was not so subtle.
He felt a wave of force pass through the room. It was actually tangible and had enough intensity to nearly knock the both of them down. It made him feel woozy and dizzy and he wondered if it had been such a good idea to challenge the puppet master of this not-so-little nightmare.
The room shifted.
The air seemed to crack open like an egg.
Lex’s vision went blurry. He held on to Soo-Lee, who was having trouble staying on her feet. When they got a hold of themselves and their vision cleared—it was almost like the room had gone misty or out of focus—they looked around and saw there was more than decay and filth to contend with.
They saw bodies.
Corpses.
Soo-Lee gasped and Lex felt his stomach contents bubble up the back of his throat. For one second he thought the room was filled with mannequin people, but it wasn’t that at all. It was worse. Oh yes, it was much worse. The corpses were arranged at the tables and in the booths, at the stools lining the counter. They were all pale and shrunken-looking, desiccated like scarecrows. Their faces were bloodless, their hands—skeletal white claws—were resting on tables and gripping coffee cups and holding spoons and forks.
But the worst part was that their throats were all slit.
A sharp knife, Lex found himself thinking. It must have been done by a very sharp knife.
The gashes were neat and bloodless, almost surgical. And that was enhanced by the fact that they were all sutured shut with black catgut. Their lips were likewise sewn shut with an X-pattern stitching, giving them the look of fairground shrunken heads. Their eyes were missing, too, neatly replaced by black shoe buttons. The entire effect was like someone had turned them into voodoo dolls.
But not true voodoo dolls (if there was such a thing), but the way you might imagine a voodoo doll should look. The sort of programmed image, it occurred to Lex, that existed in everyone’s head from living in a culture saturated by cheap horror imagery.
To say it was grisly and frightening would be to minimize the absolute horror of it. There had to have been twenty of them in the diner. And not just men and women, but children, too… even an infant in a blue bunting cradled in his zombie-like mother’s arms, stitched-up like a sock puppet.
Lex just stood there.
He didn’t know what to do or what to say. Soo-Lee was shaking, speechless, and wide-eyed. Her hand held his in a crushing embrace. He was pretty certain she was very close to going into shock.
But there was nothing he could do for her.
And nothing he could do for himself.
The other phenomena was generalized. A Mary Celeste-type diner emptied of people. Disturbing. Then it began to decay. Even more disturbing. But what was written on the chalkboard was beyond all that: personal and shocking.
These corpses weren’t like the mannequin things. These were of a different species, but it meant something. Within the microcosm of this haunted little town, it meant something.
“All right,” he said to Soo-Lee, “we walked in here, we can walk out. Physics is physics.”
She nodded quickly.
“The door was right there. It must still be there, only someone or something won’t let us see it.”
That was his logic and it was culled mostly from TV shows, paperback novels, and movies. But it gained ground in his head. What would they have called something like this on The X-Files or The Outer Limits? A mind screen? A hallucinogenic screen? Something like that. Maybe that was bullshit, but it gave him an unwavering frame of reference in his mind and, dear God, how he needed that because it felt like his world had just ripped out the seat of its pants.
Clutching Soo-Lee to him, he walked to the plate glass windows.
“Right there,” he said, under his breath. “It was right there.”
He waved his arm to get Creep’s attention across the street and the glass instantly steamed like a mirror in a bathhouse.
Got that covered, too, do you?
“That door is still there,” he said.
Soo-Lee nodded quickly again. If he said it, it must be true. She had been brought down to the level of simple child-like reasoning now. The fear owned her. She belonged to it.