He saw another doorway, crawling faster to reach it, not daring to take the time to get to his feet. As he got through the door, the thing behind him so large that it could barely fit down the passage now, he heard its voice like a needle scratching on an old record:
“I will make my nest of scraps and bones and soiled rags. I will knit a cocoon of gray dust and old blood and virulent webs and lay the pulp of my eggs here in this womb of fractured darkness and my creeping young will feed upon you. In sorrow, shall I bring forth my children here in this deserted house. For that which brings harm also makes fertile.”
Then Chazz had the door closed and locked, his sweaty fingers pressed against it. He heard the thing coming. The noise of its many scurrying legs was deafening. It made his ears ring and his teeth ache. The door actually bulged as the thing struck it, battering it again and again, pushing its mammoth girth against it.
Then it stopped.
It scraped the door with something like dozens of claws, then made a sucking sound as if it had pressed its mouth up against it. There was a slimy, wet noise like the licking of many tongues. Then the voice again, that same strident, creaking voice: “Rinky tinky tink,” it said of all the absurd things, repeating it again and again with a lilting child-like rhythm. “Rinky tinky tink, there’s a new one in town, I think.”
By that point, Chazz was probably mad.
He was probably struck blind with insanity. But something in him that wanted to survive would not curl up into a ball and die. It simply refused to… even when the thing began to project images of its victims into his head. He saw how it crushed them flat with its bulk until their entrails gushed from their mouths. How it slurped their juices up with its many sucking mouths and then ingested them, regurgitating what was left like husks. He saw how it tormented its enemies—blowing out their eardrums with its screeching voice and inserting hooks up their nostrils like Egyptian embalmers, drawing out their brains in spongy clots. How it nearly shook with orgasm when they tried to escape and it seized them with a thousand wriggling doll parts.
It wanted him to see it in its entirety: so it showed itself to him.
It wanted him to know its cruelty: so it showed him this as well.
And by then, Chazz could take no more. Screaming and hysterical, he ran from the door and dove straight at the window with every ounce of strength and weight he possessed. The window shattered and he hit the ground with a rain of glass fragments.
Bleeding, bruised, his mind bouncing around in his skull like a bullet, he ran off into the night before it could get him.
But even so, he knew he had not escaped it.
17
When he got the door closed, Lex went down to his knees on the floor, trying to tell himself he had not seen any of it. He tried to make himself believe that none of it was any more real than what Soo-Lee and he had seen in the diner. But he didn’t believe it. He found he couldn’t believe it because Danielle had been murdered and that was no fantasy. He’d seen it. It was real.
Or was it?
That was one of the questions that kept dogging him. Had the idea been planted in their heads? Had it been shown to them with three-dimensional authenticity so that their overcharged imaginations and fears would do the rest?
He kneeled there, just breathing, listening to Creep and Soo-Lee doing the same. Neither of them had really spoken since Danielle was murdered and he had the feeling they never would, not until he did. Not until he oiled their jaws for them and got them working again.
There was a terrible taste in his mouth, rusty and coppery but with an acidic sort of bite to it like tart fruit. He’d never tasted anything like it before and he was almost certain it was the taste of fear, a combination of chemicals the body secreted during times of incredible stress. A sort of adrenaline/hormonal/pheromonal/endorphin-laced cocktail and this was its by-product, a sickening flavor.
He was going to remark on it to the others, but he didn’t dare.
He just didn’t dare.
His scalp was greasy with sweat that ran from his hairline and stung his eyes. It felt almost cool against his hot face. He was exhausted. They were all exhausted… but the idea of anything like sleep was absurd. You didn’t take a nap in the cave of a man-eating tiger and where they were was no doubt much more dangerous.
“I think we’re safe for now,” he finally said.
In the dimness of the house, Creep just nodded his head. “Danielle’s dead. She’s… dead, man.”
“There was nothing we could do,” Soo-Lee said.
Creep laughed sarcastically. “Well, there’s one thing we could have done and that was not coming here in the first place.”
“And how could we have avoided that?”
“Chazz shouldn’t have brought us here.”
Lex sighed. “Creep… it isn’t Chazz’s fault.”
“He took that fucking shortcut.”
“Which nine times out of ten would have been just fine. It had nothing to do with him. This… all this is completely out of his control. I don’t know who’s behind this, but whoever they are, they have a way of rigging things, making things happen. We were brought here for a purpose.”
“To be killed?”
Lex just shook his head. “I don’t know. There’s no way any of us can know until we stop running and start thinking.” He studied their faces in the shadows. “This entire place is some kind of imitation. It’s not a real town. It’s either a projection of one or some kind of… of physical hallucination we’re all sharing.”
“Feels pretty real to me,” Creep said.
“It is real. But it’s only real because someone or something is reinforcing that. When they stop, it’ll stop.”
“And how can you know that?”
“I can’t. It’s pure gut feeling and for now that’ll have to be enough. Unless, of course, you have a better explanation.”
Creep didn’t. He just sat there silently, brooding and scared. “So you think this place is a sort of time loop or alternate reality, something along those lines?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“I noticed it from the first,” Soo-Lee said. “Everything looked so… artificial. I remember thinking it was like a movie set, some director’s idea of what a small town should look like, you know? Everything was too perfect, too planned, too… seamless, if that makes any sense.”
It did, Lex figured. “It’s very sterile, isn’t it? Like the memory of a small town seen through rose-colored glasses. Not the real town, but a synthetic, glossy, nostalgic too-good-to-be-true sort of town in a Normal Rockwell kind of way.”
“Yes, like a set,” Soo-Lee said.
“Exactly. I thought the same thing when we went into that diner—it was exactly what I thought a diner should be from images programmed into my mind from old movies and TV shows, Rockwell paintings and postcards. Everything was perfect just like the town itself.” He thought that over and felt it was the key somehow. “I mean, hell, there’s not any cars to crowd the streets. There’s not even cracks in the sidewalks or weeds in yards. Nothing that would upset the perfect balance.”
“And what does that mean?” Creep asked.
“It means,” Soo-Lee said, “that as weird as it sounds, it’s like we’re trapped in somebody’s dream or memory of a town. Not the real Stokes, but the way somebody wanted it to be or imagined it to be in their own self-deluded little way.”
“Okay, now I’m more scared than ever,” Creep said.
Lex told him how when they were in the diner, when they refused to accept the reality of it as offered, it changed. It became a darker and dirtier place, an ugly place complete with corpses and rats and flies. “It’s like our disbelief pissed somebody off. Oh, you don’t like this? I can make it worse.”