“That’s when the door disappeared,” Soo-Lee said.
“Yes, exactly. This puppet master we’re talking about changed the look of the diner, but it couldn’t stop us from escaping. The door disappeared, but it was still there. We walked through it, even though its image was gone. So there are limits to the power of this other.”
Creep was getting it now. He sat up. His eyes looked almost brighter in the darkness. “That means if we found where we came in, we might be able to get out. We might not see the road but it’s probably there.”
“Maybe.”
Soo-Lee nodded. “But finding it will be the problem. This town is a maze and I think we’ve all noticed that. I don’t think we’ll be allowed to find it. This other will confuse us and get us lost. And it’ll throw more doll people at us. Anything to stop us from getting away.”
“But if we could get there.”
“Even if we got there, we might not know we were there,” she said.
Creep slumped down again.
“Everything we’ve done since hitting that thing with the van to arriving here has been carefully planned, I think,” Lex told them. “We’re right where it wants us to be. We’ve been carefully herded. It threw certain things at us that would make us run and offered us shelter—this house—when it knew we couldn’t run anymore. What we need to start thinking seriously about is acting rather than reacting. We have to start taking some charge of our destiny or this other will run us ragged and then destroy us with those doll things.”
He wasn’t really sure how much on target he or Soo-Lee were with their thinking, but it felt right. Judging by what they had experienced and seen thus far, it seemed to fit. It was like a game, like they were being manipulated by the imagination and whims of a cruel child.
“So when do we started acting?” Creep asked
“When they throw something else at us,” Soo-Lee said. “We can leave this house right now. We can run in circles, but in the end we’ll only be reacting again. What we need to do is wait for what is thrown at us next and overcome it. That would be the first step, I think.”
Lex loved that woman. Her instincts and intuition were right on target every time.
Creep said, “When do you think it’ll start again?”
“Any minute now,” Soo-Lee said. “I can almost feel it beginning.”
18
Creep wasn’t sure what to make of them and their theories. It always seemed like Lex and Soo-Lee were on a private wavelength or something. They seemed to communicate very easily without words. But he wasn’t part of that. Even in school, he had not been part of that. For all he knew, their harebrained theories would get all of them killed.
He stood up and went over to the window.
He saw nothing out there, but that didn’t mean anything.
Inside, he was bunched up tight, just waiting for the air raid siren or whatever in the hell it was because that’s when it would start. Soo-Lee said it was about to happen and he did not doubt that at all. The thing that scared him is what form it would take.
“I wonder if Ramona and Chazz are still alive,” he said.
“If anyone is still alive, it would be Ramona,” Soo-Lee said. “She’s always been a major dynamo. If she is, she’s probably thinking what we’re thinking.”
“And it won’t be easy killing Chazz. He won’t go down quietly.”
Creep didn’t really care about Chazz. He didn’t want him dead or anything, but his thoughts were of Ramona.
They were in the living room of a house that looked pretty much like every house on the block. An average clapboard two-story. They hadn’t been upstairs yet or down into the basement and there was no point in nosing around in those places and looking for trouble.
Trouble will find us just fine without any help.
He took out his lighter and flicked it, the jumping flame lighting up the room and giving him a look at things. It was all very typical. A couch, two wingback chairs with accompanying lamps. A coffee table. A bookcase. A big old console stereo. And a TV that looked like something from a museum—a massive cabinet that sat on four legs with huge, bulbous channel and volume knobs and a bubble screen, obligatory rabbit ears up on top.
The lighter started burning his fingers and he killed it. “Notice how everything’s old? There’s dinosaur shit all over this stuff,” he said. “No technology newer than the 1960s. No cells or computers. Not even a VHS player for chrissake. Even my gramma had one of those.”
“It fits,” Lex said. “This figurative other we’re talking about is remembering the good old days of 1960. It can’t be too much more recent than that. I bet if you go over to that bookshelf, you’re going to see nothing copyrighted after 1965. Just a guess.”
Creep went over there. He flicked his lighter. “A shitload of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Let’s see… To Kill a Mockingbird… The Agony and the Ecstasy… Franny and Zooey. Yeah, all old shit. The stuff they make you read in English class.”
“I love To kill a Mockingbird,” Soo-Lee said. She was an English major; of course she would say that.
Lex grunted. “I had to read Franny and Zooey in tenth grade. Our teacher was obsessed with Salinger.”
“Aren’t all lit teachers?” Soo-Lee said.
“Most, except for my eleventh-grade English teacher. Mr. Spreeg. He was big on Faulkner. Just the mention of Faulkner’s name gives me narcolepsy now.”
Creep ignored them. He wasn’t interested in debating fucking books. The thing that was intriguing him was that old TV set. He very badly wanted to take it apart and get at the tubes. When he was a kid, his uncle Frank had collected vintage TV sets and he had an amazing collection of old tubes. Creep loved looking at them. He wanted to open this one up and paw through its guts until he found those tubes like a diver digging through an oyster for a pearl.
The world lost something when they invented solid-state circuitry, he thought. There’s just something about old vacuum tubes.
Which was quite an admission from a techie like him.
In the dark, he kept staring at the murky shape of the TV and the funny thing was that he did not seem to be able to look away. He knew they were in a rough spot here, a truly horrible situation, but it was like Soo-Lee and Lex were not even in the room. His eyes were fixed on the dead TV and his mind could think of nothing else.
It was strange.
It was more than strange.
In his mind, he began to see black-and-white images of the shows that TV must have pulled in with its rabbit ears back in the good old days… grainy, fluttering images of things he had never seen and never really wanted to. The men smoked pipes and read newspapers; the women always had aprons on and slaved away in the kitchen; the children were unrebellious, well-mannered, and well-dressed. It was an age he did not understand. But the images captivated him and it was like he was really watching that old set.
What the hell is going on here? he asked himself, but there were no answers in his head. Nothing that made any kind of sense anyway.
A tiny white dot appeared on the screen.
And he wasn’t the only one seeing it because Soo-Lee gasped.
“What the hell?” Lex said.
The pictures were gone from Creep’s head now. He, like the others, was staring at the tiny white dot in the center of the bubble screen. It was growing. It went from the size of a pin to the size of a quarter, gradually expanding. Now the screen came on and there was static, a field of snow, and wiggly horizontal lines.