Carefully, he stood up.
He took inventory of himself head to toe. He was a big guy. He was fast. He was strong. He felt his own power and it calmed him, gave him strength, brought some of that old arrogance back. If anybody could get this done, it was him, because he had the tools.
Letting out a breath, he moved through the shadows of the yard.
Everything was so unbelievably silent out there. There was not so much as the sound of a truck in the distance or a dog barking. It just wasn’t fucking natural. The moon had come up now, big and bright, frosting rooftops and lawns. But for all the light it brought, it also increased the shadows.
He walked around to the front of the house, still staying in the shadows of a big old oak in the side yard. He was tense and expectant. He looked down the street. He saw the direction he had come from. He either retraced his steps or he started doing some knocking.
And why did the very idea of that terrify him?
But he knew. If he made noise, he could be heard and he was afraid of being heard. If there were more of those things out there, they’d know exactly where he was.
Just as he edged nearer to the sidewalk, he retreated back under the tree.
Something, instinct maybe, made him go back. He didn’t like the idea of being out on the sidewalk or in the street where he could be seen. It was better to sneak through backyards. That made him feel more relaxed. He liked the idea of camouflage.
He vaulted hedges and fences, dropping into yards, hiding in pockets of shadow until he felt it was safe to move again. The farther he went, the more confident he became.
He slipped over another fence, scanning the yard between the house and the garage that flanked the alley. It looked all right. In fact, it—
Shit.
He heard a sound and everything inside him was instantly reduced to a cool, slopping jelly. He crouched just inside the fence, his hand gripping one of the posts and listened.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap.
What the hell was that?
It was coming from the alley and Chazz was far beyond the point where he could believe that it was anything perfectly ordinary or perfectly harmless. He waited there, his entire body trembling.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap.
He could see a moonlit stretch of alley from where he was. A shape came hobbling into view and his heart dropped south of his stomach. It was another one of those mannequin things. Oh yes, there was no doubt about it. It moved with an uneasy, hobbling gait and that was because it only had one real leg, the other being a peg-leg like a pirate in an old movie.
It kept coming.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap.
Then it paused as if it had heard something.
It looked like a woman, an old woman with a bent back. He could see her clearly in the glow of the moon. She was dressed in ragged clothes like a bag lady, a sack slung over one shoulder. She had a wild shock of white hair that was long and stringy, but patchy on the skull itself. Her scalp seemed to shine. And her face… he couldn’t see it too well, but it was grotesque and hanging like a grinning gunnysack.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap.
She went on her way and Chazz did not relax until he heard her tapping peg-leg fade into the distance. Even then, he was shaking and sweating.
He crept through the yard, moving even more carefully now, frightened of every shadow and bunched dark shape. They could have been all around him for all he knew. One of them could have been reaching out for him. No… no, he couldn’t let himself think things like that. It just wasn’t acceptable. He was on the verge of hysteria and he knew it. He was thinking like an animal again. He wanted to run, to flee, to find a new hiding place.
What he really needed was the van or another car.
And a weapon. Not a gun or a knife but something like a good Louisville Slugger. Something he could shatter those things with if they got too close. That had to be his priority.
He sidled along a house, studying its dark windows, praying that nothing would move behind them. He was going to chance it and run across the street. It was the only way. He had to put some distance between himself and Lady Peg-leg.
A sound.
Oh God, no.
It was getting louder and coming closer and he was locked down with fear, frozen with it. He couldn’t even get his body to respond. His brain was filled with white noise and he wanted to scream his head off.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap.
She was coming again. She had paused in the alley, sensing that he was near and now she was coming back to find him. She would not stop until she did and Chazz knew this deep in the black beating drum of his heart.
He made his body move.
She was slow, he was fast. He had to keep that in mind.
He moved out toward the sidewalk, then, with a burst of manic speed, he crossed the street into the shadows of the houses across the way. He stood by a porch, panting not so much out of exertion but of numbing fear. He waited and, Jesus, that tapping was coming again.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap.
She was not in the alley anymore. No, no, no. She had found the yard he had hid in and she was coming up the flagstone walk that led to the front porch. He saw her hobbling shape begin to emerge from the shadows. Raw panic breaking loose inside him, he made ready to run.
Then he saw an open window.
It was there toward the back of the house like it was waiting for him and something inside him was almost sure that it was. But he would not acknowledge that. He could not acknowledge that. He needed a place to hide. Lady Peg-leg wasn’t fast, but she was relentless and she would keep coming and coming until she ran him to death.
Chazz wasn’t going to let that happen.
He snuck over to the window and with an easy flex of muscles he slipped through into a darkened room. Murky shapes were all around him. He listened and waited, but nothing moved.
Quietly as possible, he slid the window down until it was only open an inch or two.
Then he waited.
Lady Peg-leg was crossing the street.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap.
10
Even though the van had passed by and its taillights winked out in the distance, Ramona knew she was still in the shit. In fact, she was barely keeping her head above it. She thought for certain when she ducked into the recess between the two buildings that the van—and the horror that drove it—would find her.
But off it went.
And off she had to go.
The others had to be somewhere. Unless, of course, those doll people had gotten them. She’d already encountered two of them and she wasn’t quite so naïve to believe that there were not more.
But what was this place?
What was its point?
It wasn’t Stokes. She knew that much now. She didn’t know where they were but it sure as hell was not Stokes because Stokes didn’t exist. Stokes had burned down in the 1960s. Either they had all suffered some collective nervous breakdown and were drooling in separate padded rooms or what she had seen and what she had experienced thus far was real.
You know it’s real. You damn well know it.
But that made it all worse, didn’t it?
It meant reality as she knew it had split wide open and they had fallen through the cracks. They had to be somewhere. As she looked up and down the streets, she was disturbed by what she saw. It was all so… fake. So perfectly arranged. So very artificial. It was like a small town you saw in an old Warner Brothers movie. The neighborhoods of nice little houses separated by squared-off hedges and fronted by narrow streets, rows of big elms and oaks. All the houses were older two-story jobs, but very well kept. There was not a single ranch house to be seen or any other evidence of post-World War II architecture. Even the street lights—none of which were lit—weren’t modern. They were more along the line of street lamps.