It was only a matter of time.
The smoke seemed to be getting thicker. The moonlight cast expanding shadows of it across the seared wreckage. She began to see other things in the ashes, which were ankle-deep now. Body parts. She thought they were the remains of people burned in the fire that took Stokes so many years before… but no.
They were doll parts.
Baby doll parts.
All of them oxidized by the blaze. Little hands melted, bodies folded in half, groups of them welded together, dozens of little faces looking up at her with hollow eye sockets, blistered and ruined. And all of them grinning with what seemed some macabre delight.
Despite the heat, Ramona felt chills run down the back of her arms and up her spine.
She stood there on hot feet, rocking back and forth on burning heels, trying to think and finding it nearly impossible to string two coherent thoughts together. A little voice located somewhere in the back of her skull was whispering to her, telling her that it wasn’t the heat or exhaustion or trauma of this night that was mixing up her brain like a jigger of martinis well-shaken, but that which controlled this place, her hypothetical controller or Controller, for certainly it deserved proper-noun status.
Don’t you get it, Ramona? This is the old mindfuck it’s playing on you. Your resilience and obstinacy are wearing it thin. Tormenting you and breaking you down is more work than you’re worth so the Controller wants this done right now. Here in this shithole dumping ground of pristine and perfect Stokes, a.k.a. Mayberry RFD, it wants you dead before you get away again and figure out more and start turning what you know against it, because you will. It knows it and so do you.
Doing the two-step on her broiling feet, images of dancing barbecued chickens parading through her head from an old TV commercial, she began to realize that there was truth in what the voice said. The fog of her brain cleared momentarily like a good clean breeze blew through her skull.
You’ve already figured the town out there is Stokes before the fire.
You’ve already figured there is a guiding hand at work here.
And you know that the siren activates these things and it’s coming from the east. That’s the epicenter of this here fucking quake and you know it. The Controller might just be afraid that you’ll track it to its source and put it out of commission.
What do you think of that?
Yes, what did she think of that?
But there wasn’t exactly time for thinking because the ground was hot, the air was gagging with vapors of searing smoke, and she was most certainly cornered. Her head seemed to spin again and she started seeing things, things that were either pure hallucination or real or some bizarre combination of both.
She saw doll faces watching her from the junked cars.
High above the reaching steeples and craggy branches of the town she could see the moon like a glowering eye and as she stared into it, it seemed to get bigger, a puffy discolored lid pulling away from the white, shining orb beneath that looked unpleasantly juicy like a pickled egg.
She saw skeletons around her. Not perfect, gleaming Halloween skeletons, but badly used things that were yellow and brown, some black as coal, but all disarticulated and shattered, jaws sprung in wide silent screams when they had jaws at all. Most of them were over near the fence in the distance, but there were others scattered about. In fact, not four feet from her there was an ancient baby buggy whose spoked wheels were threaded with cobwebs and whose bonnet was torn and flapping, a swallow’s nest tucked away in the folds. And in it, oh yes, a baby that had been burned right down to the bare bones. It had worn some kind of bunting that melted to its tiny skeleton in black rags. The insane thing was that it was still burning. Its black bones were smoking, flames coming from its eye sockets and mouth.
She saw rats picking through the piled refuse. They were greasy gray bags of fur with tiny red eyes like jewels that sparkled in the moonlight. They all made a curious ticking sound as of pocket watches that were slowly running down.
She blinked her eyes and she heard a steady thump-thump-thump of a door swinging open and shut. It came from a small ramshackle hut set between the masts of two burned trees. Tiny ashes fell from them and made a tinkling sound on the sheet metal roof. As she watched, a man came stumbling out, holding his face in his hands. He was not on fire, but black smoke steamed from him in twisting plumes. The stink of roasted flesh and burned hair were nauseating. He stumbled maybe two or three feet and then hit the ground, breaking apart like cigar ash.
These were the things she saw or was made to see and they were all, in their own way, part of the puzzle of Stokes (or anti-Stokes, as she was beginning to think of it) that she needed to put together if she ever wanted to get out.
CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK, CLICK-CLACK.
It was coming again. Of course it was.
She almost collapsed with despair.
She turned, coughing on the fumes, and that great ambulant collection of living mannequins was bearing down on her. It cast a long and freezing shadow before it that was like something from an old film noir. The shadow seemed equally as alive as what threw it—a black and crawling thing, expanding, throwing dozens of reaching tendrils before it. Then the thing itself entered the junkyard, a Frankensteinian patchwork of parts, a pulsating colony of heads and hands and shambling legs.
“It’s Ramona,” the many mouths said. “It’s Ramona. Get her so she can be with us. Pull her apart and paste her parts to ours. Put her head high up on top so she can scream with us…”
The other heads affixed to its torso did not join in the chorus. They were low, bestial things that bayed and snarled and hissed, clattering their teeth and snapping their jaws.
The thing—Frankendoll, was its name, she decided—moved ever forward and Ramona knew she was trapped. The only way out was the fence at the back of the yard. But getting there without being overwhelmed by the heat and the fumes would not be easy. She felt dizzy and queasy and she couldn’t seem to think straight.
If you just wait here, it will all be over with soon. Very soon now.
But she couldn’t allow that. She stumbled on, her mind flying around in her head like an uncaged bird, crashing into the walls of memory and reason, leaving her confused and breathless. She fought on, maneuvering around the hulks of cars, stepping over weed-sprouting transmissions, tripping over a rusting section of pipe and going down into the cinders that burned her hands. The pain was real and it was like a good, refreshing slap in the face.
The fence was about thirty feet away now, maybe closer.
You’re almost there. Pour it on for godsake, just pour it on!
Behind her, the Frankendoll monstrosity was still chanting her name, still pushing forward. She turned back once and looked. The sight of it nearly took the heart from her. In the moonlight, it was a cartoonish monster that could not possibly be, a gargantuan hybrid of parts that all seemed to be moving independently though they were part of the wriggling whole. Legs stomped and hands reached and heads shook from side to side. The fused torsos all seemed to be in motion like they were trying to pull themselves apart from the central mass.
The thing was in some kind of demonic rage now as it stalked her.
It kicked barrels out of its way, flipped a leaning bedspring end over end, and charged through a smoldering tower of tires, kicking up a haze of soot that filled the moonlight in dusky clouds. It would have her. And the closer it got, the more it became enraged at the idea of seizing her in its hands. It smashed through heaps of burned lumber and tossed a broken rocking chair into a collection of banged-up trash cans. Its many totemic, blistered faces were breathing out puffs of black smoke.