Then it started crawling up his leg.
It was no mouse.
It was a rat.
With a cry, he reached down and felt his hand brush against a greasy pelt that almost seemed to palpitate with the verminous life within. Goddamn thing was no bush league sewer rat, it was a monster the size of a cat and if he doubted its intentions before, there was no mistaking them as it bit into his leg and brought a hot, needling pain to his calf.
Chazz grabbed at it, clutching a thick rope of tail that squirmed in his hand like an especially unpleasant snake. He ripped the rat away from his pants, feeling its claws tearing at the material as they tried to maintain their hold. He had no idea what he had in mind other than peeling that son-of-a-bitch free, but he found himself swinging it around in loose circles, seeming to enjoy the power he held over it. Once he had picked up the necessary velocity, he let it fly.
It hit a patch of moonlit wall with the sort of force that should have injured it and made it bleed. But it left no blood splotch. In fact, as it hit the wall, it simply fell apart… it broke into pieces.
Chazz let out a muffled cry.
It wasn’t real. Like everything in this place, it just wasn’t real.
In the moonlight, he could see it there on the floor. Its head was hairless like that of a possum, detached from its body, the jaws still trying to bite. Two of its legs had fallen off and they were still moving, still trying to claw. But the very worst thing was that its body had broken open and he could see what looked like whirring gears inside it, spindles and springs.
There was no end to this shit.
The rat was like some windup toy.
And as this settled into Chazz’s mind, mixing up in there with the rest of it and making him more confused and pushing him that much closer to complete lunacy, he heard another sound.
Creak, creak.
He looked around. It was Lady Peg-leg again, it had to be Lady Peg-leg again… but no, as he peered out the window, he saw that she was no longer in the street. He couldn’t see her anywhere.
Creak, creak, creak.
And besides, this sound was in the room with him.
Yes, over there beyond what he thought was a couch, he could make out a dim figure. It was sitting in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth, back and forth.
Creak, creak, creak.
“Who… who’s there?”
And a voice, feminine in caliber, throaty and breathless, said, “It’s me, doll-face. And I’ve been here a long, long time.”
A woman, another doll woman.
He nearly started cackling hysterically at the idea of it.
“Stay away from me! You come by me and I’ll kill you!”
The voice giggled in its throat. “Oh, you don’t have to worry about me, doll-face. It’s the old lady who wants you. The peg-leg lady. She wants your heart. You have a nice, strong heart and she doesn’t have one at all. She wants yours.”
“Fuck you!” Chazz shouted.
The chair stopped creaking. “You only had to ask, doll-face. You only had to ask.”
The doll woman had risen from the chair now and was coming with that same clicking sound as the doll man in the street. She moved with a shambling gait, painfully and slowly as if one leg was longer than the other. He could see her reaching out with sharp fingers, long hair sweeping from side to side as she got closer.
With a scream, Chazz vaulted across the room to where he had seen a door.
He barely got through it. Her fingers dragged through his hair and then he slammed it shut behind him and he could hear her nails scraping at the other side as if they were not nails at all, but claws.
The door had a lock and he set it.
She continued to claw at the other side. “When I find you, doll-face, I’ll fuck you.”
Chazz threw himself backward, his skin crawling again.
He stumbled over a chair and fell into a pool of moonlight that made his fingers look ashen and almost phosphorescent like the petals of night-blooming orchids. He was shaking, drooling, chattering his teeth. Tears ran from his eyes and he could not throw together a single coherent thought.
There were a set of stairs before him, climbing to the second floor.
When he could think, he considered going up there and hiding in a room, but, no, he could not bear the idea of being in the same house as that thing in the other room. No, he had to run. He needed to escape. He needed to put some distance between himself and this place.
And this is exactly what he was going to do.
Then he saw something coming down the stairs and in his fevered mind it could be nothing but a giant, leggy spider. It had sighted him and decided he was its prey.
Clip-clop-clip-clop, went its many legs.
Chazz crawled away toward the door, thumping into it and on the other side, the voice said, “Now you have to make a choice, doll-face… me or it.”
13
Danielle’s world felt compressed.
It was tight and suffocating like a small black box. It consisted of these streets and buildings, thoroughfares and houses, all the little details that made up a town called Stokes that she knew existed only in nightmares and perhaps at the very perimeter of hell itself.
She was suffocating.
Waiting there, up against the window of some nameless shop, she was suffocating. Creep was standing there, nervous, agitated, moving this way and that, unable to sit still. Lex and Soo-Lee were in the street, glancing fearfully behind them at the darkened diner. They had gone in and then came out. They must have turned off the lights after they left.
Danielle realized that she had to use her entire body to draw in a breath.
She had to actually lift herself with the motion of her diaphragm to get any air in her lungs. When she tried to tell Creep that, her voice simply would not come because there was not enough oxygen to power it.
There was something wrong here.
Something bad.
The air was gone. She had to find a place where there was air or she was going to asphyxiate. She started walking, stumbling along really in the direction they had come from.
“Hey,” Creep said. “What are you doing?”
He reached out to grab her and she shrugged him aside and then she started running. Gasping for breath, seeking air she could breathe, she ran down the street and around the corner and the faster she went, the better the air was until she was no longer gasping.
Creep was running after her, calling out her name, demanding to know what in the hell it was she thought she was doing and, oh, had there been the time, she would have told him and then he would have understood.
She came around another corner and there was somebody standing there.
It was a man. A big man.
He moved with a clicking, whirring sound of gears and cogs.
Danielle skidded to a halt inches from him, backing up frantically. The moonlight showed her that he was not really a man, but another doll that only looked like a man. He was grinning at her and she saw that he had teeth.
“Is that you, doll-face?” he asked.
And then there was a silvery flash as he swung something at her.
She had enough time to let out a small cry as something thudded against her head, the impact driving her to her knees and then to the sidewalk, where she knew no more.
14
Goddamn idiot.
This is what went through Creep’s mind as he chased after Danielle, who was surprisingly fast and agile. She had the long legs of a gazelle and he figured she was some kind of jock to pour on speed like that. A runner or a soccer player. Maybe she played lacrosse and swam competitively like Ramona or raced mountain bikes like Soo-Lee. Regardless, that girl had game.