Bullshit, this is all bullshit, all a cheap fucking game and this town is nothing but a cheap fucking carnival. That’s all it is. That’s all it can be.
She walked faster, refusing to give in and refusing to accept the grim inevitability that she was going nowhere, that she might as well have been running on a treadmill. Same storefronts, same houses, same trees, same boulevards… God, it went on and on.
But so did Ramona.
Because anyone that had ever known her discovered one thing sooner or later: she had a stubborn streak a mile wide and she refused, simply refused, to give up or give in. She would not be beaten by this nightmare. She would exhaust it, she would wear it down, she would make it spend itself until it was simply out of breath and the walls of perception ran thin… then she’d be out, she’d be free.
But she was the one that ran out of breath.
Scared, but mostly angry and irritated at everything, she stopped, catching her breath and making herself think. There had to be an answer here. There had to be a way out. Christ, she was starting to feel like a hamster run to death on a wheel.
Swearing, she started walking again.
Since moving in a linear fashion was getting her absolutely nowhere, she changed her tactics. She moved completely by instinct. She walked this way, turned on her heel and cut down an avenue, then down a street, up a boulevard. Her navigation was haphazard, it was random as hell. She did not think about what she was going to do, she just did it, guiding herself with pure animal sense. Her point was that this was all controlled somehow and she was going to break down the Controller one way or another, force him or her or it to show itself and reveal its hand.
She walked faster and faster, listening to her footsteps echoing off the faces of buildings and houses.
Then she stopped dead, knowing that she had struck a nerve with her theoretical controller.
Listen, listen to that.
Though she was no longer walking, she still heard footsteps.
She turned and there was no one there… at least, no one she could see. But the footsteps were approaching and it was not merely one set, but many sets. They made the slapping sound of bare feet, yet they had an almost hollow little echo to them.
She heard a low whispering.
What might have been the giggling of a child.
She felt the fine hairs at the back of her neck rise up, a chill moving upwards and over her scalp. She was being stalked by things she could not see and they were getting closer and closer.
Maybe it worked, maybe I wore it down, maybe I’m forcing its hand.
But there was no satisfaction in that because she was quite literally terrified of something—many things—she could not see. They were coming for her. The whispering grew in volume until it seemed like maybe it was a dozen children out there, hissing and piping and gibbering with a low and eerie sibilance that seemed to fill her head and echo around in her skull.
She ran.
She ran as fast as she could and every time she paused, it seemed that they were closer still. They were going to run her to the point of exhaustion. As she passed store windows, she clearly saw display mannequins turn their heads and watch her progress. Finally, she stopped and turned.
“Show yourselves already,” she said, her anger rising above her fear.
One of them stepped from the shadows—a naked girl or an imitation of the same, to be more precise. She was a little thing with a matted mop of blonde hair, her face the color of frost and the texture of silken spiderwebs, her eyes like ragged holes looking into a dark and empty room. From chest to hips, she was open as if there hadn’t been enough flesh to cover her. Inside… there was nothing. Just a metal framework that was narrow and spoking like the bones of jackals.
There was no machinery.
No electronics.
Nothing that could make her work, yet she moved, she was alive. Ramona heard an insane laughter in the back of her head. She was insane. She had to be completely insane.
“It’s Ramona,” the girl said in a perfectly shrill, scraping voice that was many miles from what a girl’s voice should have sounded like. “Ramona, Ramona, Ramona, Ramona.”
The others began to appear now, stepping out to chant her name.
Dozens of them.
Many of them were unfinished, their heads like swollen, nodding toadstools. An army of Raggedy Ann dolls from hell, faces stitched and spliced, carved and slapped together out of papier-mâché that grinned and moved like living tissue. Effigies cut from fissured deadwood and dry rot, scarecrows with pipestem legs and spidery tree branches for hands, animate sculptures of mortuary pipes and rib cage baskets. Some lacked limbs and a few lacked heads, one of them was little more than a walking armature waiting to be fleshed out, another was a set of legs with a post-like spine and a cracked open, hairless head but nothing else.
They called her name, whispering it, seeming to like the sound of it: “Ramona, Ramona, Ramona, Ramona,” they chanted, gathering volume and intensity until their voices were a whispering, shrilling cacophony: “RAMONA, RAMONA, RAMONA, RAMONA, RAMONA—”
It grew louder and louder until she couldn’t take it anymore and she vented her horror in a high, whining scream. She stumbled back and away from the dolls, tripping over her own feet, silvered by pale moonlight.
They closed it on her, reaching for her.
One of them kicked its head before it on the sidewalk. It rolled over like a ball, orange locks splaying out over the cement. It righted itself, turning to look at her with empty eye sockets that could see nothing. Its mouth opened and it screamed at her, perfectly mocking her own cry again and again, cycling higher with each piercing shriek.
Ramona, as close to madness as she’d ever been, dropped to her knees, her flesh crawling and her mind sucking into some black crevice of numbing child-like terror. One last shred of adult reason broke through like a beacon and she shouted: “I DON’T BELIEVE IN YOU! YOU’RE NOT REAL! YOU HEAR ME? YOU’RE NOT REAL!”
But they kept coming.
She knew there was only one thing to do. Only one possible way to break the spell of madness. Her instinct warned her away from it, but her rational mind demanded it because if she did not fight them here and now, did not put this hallucination down, then it would never, ever stop until her mind was completely gone.
With a cry of rage and violence, she stormed at them, vaulting right into their midst and she felt their cold little fingers scratch her face and their mouths bite into her arms, but it did not slow her down. She fought and clawed and kicked and bowled them over and fell away from them.
The street was littered with doll parts—heads and arms, torsos and legs and hands, tangled cords and pulleys and gears… what amounted to the guts of the things. She knew she hadn’t hit them that hard. Not hard enough to break them into pieces.
But they were in pieces.
She stumbled back, blinking her eyes, waiting for them to reassemble themselves as the mannequin woman had. But they were nothing but parts, inert and inactive, completely incapable of anything like motion. It looked like someone had dumped out the bargain bin from a puppet shop.
Do you see? Do you see? They are nothing and they never were nothing! They couldn’t be anything but what they are—wood and wax, steel rods and sackclothing, plastic and papier-mâché, glue and rubber hoses and gears… don’t you see? Don’t you fucking see?
She shook her head because she did not see and she goddamn well knew better. Maybe now they were parts. Maybe they were never anything but parts machined and cut and carved. But something in this nightmare shithole of a town trembling darkly on the borderland of fucking hell had the power to make them move. It could make them do anything it wanted. It made them live, it made them breathe, it made them walk. Maybe it couldn’t give them souls as such, but it woke something up inside them… something stalking and malignant. She had seen it hiding in the darkness of their eyes, a nameless black life force.