Chazz could see the lady in question.
She was a dreadful thing slumped in a chair, a swollen collection of animate parts like some fat, overfed infant that jiggled with rolls and bulges and deep-hewn crevices. Her flesh was pulsating. She was naked and lacked arms. Her body was horridly bulbous and rounded like a collection of smooth pink medicine balls married into a common whole, the offered gash between her legs like an axe cut that ran from her pubis to her belly. Her breasts were immense breathing spheres with juicy cherries in place of her nipples. Red juice had bled from them and stained her plump, uniform pinkness. He could barely see her face behind those bloated mammaries, but he saw enough of it to turn his guts to sauce. Her head was topped by wavy wheat-yellow hair set with bright blue bows, her plump lips a garish red and her eyes—set in pink blubbery sockets—were faded white marbles like the eyes of a waterlogged corpse.
Lady Peg-leg giggled and stomped her peg upon the floor. “She’s most anxious for what you have!”
By this point, Chazz was insane and he didn’t bother screaming or crying out. It was simpler to just titter with the others and grin maliciously when Lady Peg-leg reached down between his legs and grasped what was there in her hand, fondling and squeezing it roughly.
The bulbous woman shuddered with delight, shivering and rolling, the gash between her legs widening into a black cleft that could have swallowed him whole.
43
Soo-Lee crouched in the corner on a bed of straw as the blood ran down the inside of her thighs in red streams. She was naked and cold and disoriented and could not seem to remember how it was she had come to this place. Maybe she had been here forever, sitting like this, her back up against cold cinder block walls, her arms stretched out, her fingers splayed against the blocks. Maybe this is who she had always been and maybe everything she thought she knew before was just a dream she had while she waited, listening to the sobbing of a broken voice.
Sobbing?
Yes, she could hear it. The pathetic sobbing of a woman that she recognized as the sound of violation when all that you knew and all that you trusted in had been torn out by the roots, dirtied and dragged through filth, then tucked back inside you by greasy fingers. Yes, she knew that sound because once upon a time she had sobbed like that. But that was long ago and maybe it had not happened yet or it had happened before and she could not be sure. The sobbing, pained and pitiful, went on and she realized it was her voice but that seemed to mean nothing to her. She could only feel the pain in her belly, the deep gnawing pain, which was bright and cutting.
The blood continued to dribble from between her legs, dropping to the floor, creating a widening dark pool that glued her in place.
My blood.
My life.
She put her hands on her belly.
It was huge and round, the skin taut like it might tear from internal pressure. It was like a ball filling with air, inflated by gas. Even her navel stuck out now like the tip of a thumb. Inside, there was something. Something that shifted and rolled like an uneasy sleeper, nipping and gnawing at her.
You were raped, a voice told her.
No.
You were raped by a doll.
No!
You were raped by a puppet.
NO!
You were raped by a mannequin and it planted its seed and—
NO! NO! NO! NOOOOOOO!!!
She slapped her hands against her belly again and again like she was drumming on a bongo, hearing the sounds and feeling the deep-set agony it brought. If there was something in there, something alive but not alive, human but puppet, flesh but wax and wood… she would kill it. She would tear it out and pull it apart with her hands. Her fingers arching into claws, she made to do that very thing.
But something began to happen.
Something that dropped her mind into a white blankness of nonentity. It started with her toes. A coldness that numbed her and sucked the warmth from her veins and replaced it with an icy sludge. It threw out frigid roots that grew up through her legs and netted her thighs and infested her belly, climbing inch by inch up into her chest. Her well-abused sex felt like a flap of rubber, her bones like frosty sticks, her breasts like pert bags of ice, and it continued on and on, pushing the heat from her and replacing it with a chill blackness that swallowed her internals and stiffened her limbs and fingers, finally engulfing her brain, locking it in a black static that hummed incessantly but did not feel or emote any longer.
Soo-Lee could hear a voice telling her how it was going to be and how it had to be and there was no will in her to refuse it. Defiance was no longer among her natural rhythms. Acceptance and obedience were all that she knew. In her head, the humming went on and on until she knew nothing else but the humming that was a beautiful red silence that encompassed all and everything. Her lungs were sacs that breathed, her eyes were black glass that did not see, and when the thing began to chew, digging its way free, clawing and biting and finally bursting from her belly with slopping and slithering sounds, her face cracked open in a smile and she looked down at the wizened horror that was slicked red with her own blood and said, “Is that you, doll-face?”
44
Though Ramona knew it was probably a mistake, she went with the woman to her house that fronted the park. Inside, there were lights from guttering candles and she brewed them tea. The woman said her name was Mrs. McGuiness and she had been in Stokes a long, long time and knew how things worked. That was the sugar she used to get Ramona to go with her. That was the bait that drew the fly into the spider’s web.
Mrs. McGuiness was a large, but sickly woman. She was round and fleshy, but her skin was yellow and dry, almost flaky. But beyond that, her blue eyes were friendly in their puffy sockets and she said she knew things and Ramona desperately wanted to know what those things were.
As she sipped her tea, Mrs. McGuiness said, “Now, I can imagine you were pulled in here as oftentimes people are… but where is it you thought you were going?”
“I’m going east,” Ramona told her. “I’m tracking this to its source.”
“That’s a foolish proposition.”
Ramona shrugged. “God loves fools. Better to take the fight to the source than be on the defensive.”
“You certainly have a tongue on you.”
Ramona ignored that. She was beyond the point where such things mattered. She looked at the tea in her cup and decided it was probably black with poison. She would not drink it. “You told me I don’t know anything.”
“You don’t. You’re only guessing.”
“Then tell me what I don’t know.”
“It’s quite a yarn.”
“I’ve got the time.”
Mrs. McGuiness shrugged. “So you say. I’ve been here a long time, as I said. No one but the Mother herself has been here longer. I was one of the ones that did not try to run and did not conspire against her, so here I stay. I am provided for. I am left alone. I am not a synthetic thing that obeys its master because it has no soul.”
“Who is the Mother?”
Mrs. McGuiness rattled her cup against its saucer. “Who? Well, maybe what might be a better question, but no matter, no matter. She is Mother Crow. She is the last of the family. The last one and the most practiced of all.”
“Practiced in what?”
“Well, in the arts of the doll makers, the puppet masters. The Crows were not simple toy makers, dear. Oh no, oh no no no. Their figures—because that’s what they called them, figures—were more often than not mechanized. You see, the Crows weren’t always doll makers. Back in old Europe, they were clockmakers, artisans of fine precision instruments and delicate clockworks. They applied those skills, secrets, and techniques to their dolls. Not the window dummies, of course. Nobody likes their window dummies walking around, now do they?”