The doll things that were the walls of her tight little world began to get agitated right away. They shook and trembled. Fingers grasped, limbs kicked, mouths began to make a low sighing sound.
Still she pushed forward.
Either she broke the black magic spell of this place or was broken.
There could be no other way.
She kept moving, walking faster now, and as she did, really pouring on the steam, the passage began to open. She blinked her eyes several times to be sure of it, but, yes, it was opening.
It can’t possibly be this easy.
But maybe it was. She almost believed this until she saw the black hulking shape stepping from the shadows at the far end. That it was one of the doll people she did not doubt any more than she doubted that it was coming for her. She was breaking the rules of the puppet master’s little game and she was going to be punished now, broken upon the wheel of Stokes, as it were.
She began stepping backward, her resolve dispersing inside her.
No, no, no! she warned herself. Don’t back down! Don’t give in to the fear! Don’t you see? The illusion was dissolving, the house of cards was ready to fall so this… this… thing was sent to reinforce the nightmare and you’re yielding to it! Do not yield! It’s only as powerful as you make it!
As if the form could easily read her thoughts, it began to growl with a low throaty sound.
Soo-Lee trembled.
It wanted her to tremble, it needed her to tremble, because the more she trembled the more deadly it became. Her fear was the hot air that inflated it. Without that, it was nothing but a shriveling rubber sack… but even knowing this did not help because she was completely terrified. She could only see a hulking dark shadow moving steadily in her direction, but the terror it inspired was very real as the growling continued. As it came on, the glowing eyes of the doll faces winked out one by one. It was bringing darkness with it, a shifting wall of blackness.
She could not bear it.
She literally could not bear it.
As the lights were extinguished, the doll people lining the walls stopped moving. It was as if this thing was drawing the life from them as it came on. She could not see its face, only the dying lights winking off teeth that looked long and gnarled.
32
The clocks were going off.
Ramona came awake in a panic there in the darkness of the clock shop. She jumped and shook. Every damn clock in the place was ringing—grandfather clocks and cuckoo clocks, anniversary clocks and alarm clocks. BING, BING, BING! BONG! BONG! BONG! The shop was echoing with a constant ringing and gonging and shrilling. The effect was not just startling, but shocking.
It meant something, she knew that much.
In fact, clasping her hands over her ears, and calming somewhat, she knew it could only possibly mean one thing: the Controller wanted her awake. It—for she had trouble thinking of this significant other as a human being—did not want her resting. It did not want her getting sleep. It wanted her worn out and on edge because the games would work so much better that way if she were physically and mentally exhausted.
But there was more to it than that.
She was bound and determined to track this nightmare to its source, which was somewhere to the east and that could not be allowed. The Controller had tossed Frankendoll at her and then rained mannequin parts down on her. It would stop at nothing to scare her, confuse her, hurt her, and possibly even kill her.
And these were things Ramona very much needed to keep in mind.
The intelligence behind all this was not only twisted but sly and cunning and extremely dangerous.
But those clocks, those goddamn clocks…
Ramona sat there, knowing she had to do something as the clanging noise seemed to fill her skull and hurt her ears and even make her molars ache, if such a thing were realistically possible. It would drive her right out of her head and no doubt that was the point.
Without really thinking or planning, she got to her feet quickly, more agitated and pissed off than anything. “IT WON’T WORK!” she shouted above the racket. “IT WON’T WORK! DO YOU HEAR ME, YOU DIRTY SONOFABITCH? IT WON’T FUCKING WORK! I’M COMING FOR YOU AND YOU CAN’T FUCKING STOP ME!”
She was expecting her defiance to bring hell down on her perhaps in the form of a rampaging doll army… but that didn’t happen. What did happen was so subtle she nearly missed it. There was a change around her in the very air of the clock shop as if the atmospheric pressure either increased radically or decreased. The hairs stood up on the back of her neck and her ears popped as if she were on a plane gaining altitude.
Then… the clocks stopped.
Each and every one of them ceased their ringing and gonging. The silence that replaced the cacophony was practically loud.
Ramona stood there, waiting, breathing, feeling arrogant now and almost daring the Controller to try something else because she was learning things and she was ready to fight.
But there was nothing.
Not right away.
Don’t sit here and wait for it, she told herself. Don’t give it time to manufacture fresh horrors. These things must take energy so don’t give it the opportunity it badly needs, do not play into its hands.
Wishing she had a flashlight because the store was so unbearably dark, she moved around the counter, stepping carefully into the back room, which was as black as a buried coffin. There had to be a door here. A back way. She stood there, trying to be unpredictable. That was very important and she knew it. She had to keep the Controller guessing so she turned on her heel and went back out into the shop to the front door.
She peered out into the dark streets.
They were empty, completely untenanted, and in their emptiness was their threat. She didn’t see any of those doll faces out here. There were still sticky smears on the glass from their sucking mouths and Ramona could not pretend that the very idea of that didn’t disturb her greatly.
She pushed open the door.
Still holding on to it, she took two steps out and let her instinct make the decision for her. It told her to go out the back way. She turned on her heel again and went back inside. She dug out her cigarettes and lit one up. The flame of her Bic turned the shadows into living, sentient entities around her that slid along the walls and crouched in the corners and crept over the faces of clocks, so damn many clocks.
She stood there by the display case and smoked.
She could almost feel the Controller reaching out for her, trying to figure out just what the hell she was doing. But being that she didn’t know herself, second-guessing her would not be easy. Not easy at all. Her instinct and woman’s intuition were supercharged and she knew it. They practically made her skin tingle and her blood feel like it had become hot steam.
She was trying to feel for the Controller herself.
There would be something in the air when it decided to strike, when it sent a new horror to torment her with. It, again, would be subtle, but it would be there and she had to be ready to sense it. That was the key.
But there was nothing.
She took a few last drags from her cigarette and tossed it. It struck the face of a clock in a shower of sparks, the glowing remains of it smoldering on the hardwood floor. Let this goddamn place burn down, she thought. She stepped into the back room again and flicked her Bic. It was pretty much as she expected the back room of a clock shop would be and that was no surprise. Everything in Stokes was as you thought it would be. In the flickering light of her Bic, she saw grandfather clocks with their guts hanging out, dissected cuckoo clocks, and workbenches strewn with the anatomy of timepieces: pendulums and cam wheels and main springs, gears and cogs and pulleys.