“LEX!” she shouted. “LEX!”
But there was no reply, only her voice coming back to her from what seemed a dozen different locations, forever bouncing and echoing but not losing its volume. Such a thing was not physically possible, but it kept up until she had to cover her ears with her hands.
When it ended and she could think again, she tried to be reasonable, logical. This was just like the diner. What she was seeing was some sort of physical illusion, but that didn’t mean it was necessarily real. Lex was probably close by. She had to let herself see him. Drawing in a deep breath, Soo-Lee reached out again to where she knew he would be in the dark and she touched more doll things. Something like a wet, furry mouth nipped at her finger.
The puppet master is turning up the heat. You are terrified and that is energizing all this. Just try to calm down.
She did try, but to no avail. She could not overcome the vein of hot-white terror that moved through her in waves. To beat it would mean she would have to convince herself that the walls were not lined with waiting doll people and that would mean touching them, thinking through them, and reaching out for what was really there.
Impossible.
Entirely impossible.
She tried again and nearly gagged on her own fear. It filled her throat like warm vomit. No, there was no thinking around something this big, this omnipotent, this starkly real. Meeting it face-to-face was beyond comprehension. She needed to move. Trembling, she began to shuffle forward, following the passage and letting it take her away, hoping that movement and distance would somehow wear this dark fantasy down until reality reinserted itself. The passage seemed to veer from the left and to the right, back and forth, slowly moving ever downward until she was gripped by a crushing claustrophobia.
Ahead, there was light… dim, guttering yellow light but light all the same.
She went to it, moving faster now and when she reached it, she had to put a fist to her mouth so that she did not scream again. The light was coming from the doll people that crowded the walls in some medieval vision of hell. It came from their hollow-socketed eyes—a flickering yellow glow. As she stood there, up and down the passage each set of eyes lit up like Christmas bulbs and the reason for that, she knew, was because it was important she see just how many of them there were so she would realize how weak and insignificant she was by comparison.
Their mouths were all yawning open as if they were screaming… screaming out the pure terror of what they were and maybe what they had once been. The screams were silent. Her ears did not hear them, but in her mind they were high-pitched and hysterical, scraping her nerves raw.
She stumbled along, gasping for breath, her head filled with the shrieks of the dead, damned, and deranged, her eyes rolling in their sockets as they took in all the swarming figures around her bunched together, the screaming faces and surreal, frightening architecture of their bodies: the dangling limbs and skeletal bodies, torsos laid open to reveal the intricate clockwork guts of gears and cogs and wires and pulley systems, the elaborate bone-like armatures. The faces of doll babies were paper skulls, leering and ape-like, bodies like shattered vessels and ossuary baskets.
Something inside Soo-Lee was caught between a laugh and a scream at what she was seeing, at all the leering, jeering, ogling, staring doll faces that pressed in from every quarter. So many, so very many. Looking upon them evaporated her will and made her heart feel like a swamp that had been drained, leaving nothing but black mud and rotting organic detritus behind. In her mind, she could see her soul leaving her body like a thousand glimmering fireflies exiting her mouth.
It was all subjective, but she was forced deeper into the barren underworld of herself.
You can’t fall apart now. You can’t! Lex is trying to reach you so try to reach him!
Yes, she knew that was important, but knowing it did nothing to lessen her claustrophobia. It increased by the moment. The passage now seemed to be entirely made of doll people. They grew from the walls like piebald mushrooms—lumped, mounded, bulbous, and crowding, synthetic faces pushing out like expanding soap bubbles until there were no walls, only more and more faces of grinning sackcloth, sloughing burlap, carved wood, and vacuum-formed plastic. They seemed to be multiplying around her through some perverse binary fission, faces splitting into more faces that divided yet again into still more. She watched with unblinking, fearful eyes as the face of a smiling mannequin woman cracked open with a rubbery, shearing sound like a soft-shelled egg and four, then five puckering baby doll faces emerged like hungry chicks, oval mouths opening and closing, suctioning like blowholes.
It happened again and again as faces and bodies ripped open to disgorge clusters of puppet babies still glistening with the foul slime of afterbirth.
Soo-Lee fought down the urge again to scream and laugh simultaneously, to vent the gibbering madness inside her. This is what it was like to go insane. It felt like her mind had gone to a warm, melting glop that would drain from her skull or run out of her ears.
The multitude of heads around her seemed to inflate like balloons, alive but inert, animate yet lifeless, their shrill mewling cries reverberating through the passage and pushing her far beyond the boundaries of sanity.
Their glowing eyes seemed to watch her, peering deep inside her.
Even the angled ceiling above now was formed of hanging mannequin things. Faces like demonic baboons sneered and grinned overhead, dangling limbs swaying back and forth in some unheard charnel rhythm, sharp fingers like darning needles brushing the top of her head and tracing the back of her neck with splintered nails.
No matter which way she turned, their awful cadaverous visages pressed in closer and closer, their luminous eyes making bodies move and limbs reach as shadows crawled and crept. She could hear them whispering and giggling with scratching, mocking voices. She could feel an unnatural heat coming from them and smell the dark fetor of their breath.
The wise thing would have been a full retreat, but there was no going back now. Behind her, the walls had pushed in and sealed the passage with doll parts and the walls around her were pressing in ever closer. She stumbled along faster and faster, falling, getting up, falling again, faces moving in closer and fingers like tree roots tangling in her long hair. Hinged mouths called her name and begged her to join them.
As she fell yet again, she looked up to see the swollen belly of a doll woman. It was cutaway like that of an anatomical model to reveal a doll fetus within, suspended upside down in the amniotic sac. It was a plastic stillborn thing… yet it was sucking its thumb with slurping sounds for a lack of anything better to suckle. When it turned its shriveled, eyeless face on Soo-Lee, she crawled away on all fours, making a pained moaning sound in her throat.
It’s a lie, she told herself.
It’s an illusion that has been created to unhinge your mind, to amplify your fear and thereby enhance the power of the puppet master. You know that. You’ve known it all along, yet you keep cooperating. You keep reacting instead of acting. It was a stupid dumbfuck bonehead play to come down this passage and you knew it, yet you did.
Yet, you did.
This stopped her. Jesus, she was crawling around on her hands and knees like an animal, like some mole scrabbling about underground. She stood up. She stood up tall. She had to think herself out of this mess before it got any worse… if it could conceivably do so. The way behind her was sealed up. Or at least, it seemed to be. What if it wasn’t at all? What then?
Soo-Lee turned on her heel and moved back the way she had come.