And then it was hovering over him, an immense abstract sculpture knitted together out of mannequin legs and doll arms and puppet heads, bones and sheaths of silk and dripping spider spit. It whirred and clicked and hissed. Death vapors blew out of its many black mouths that puckered open and closed, ropy tangles of saliva falling from them into his face and burning, God, searing like acid and Chazz screamed as he felt the tissues of his chin and cheeks dissolving.
I won’t go out like this! a voice in his mind bellowed. I will not die like this! I… REFUSE!
The agony of it all made him give one last Herculean effort and he managed to get one hand free that he tore at the Spider Mother with, batting aside crawling snakes of silk and tearing open clusters of bulging egg sacs that burst like water balloons, spilling jellied slime over him.
Still he fought.
He wrenched a grasping doll arm out of its socket, shattered a grinning puppet face and pummeled the Spider Mother until his knuckles bled. She had pushed a dozen hollow-eyed mannequin faces out at him and he punched them, smashing his fist into them, knocking some back, cracking others open and making them open their hinged jaws and scream at him. He was hurting her; he knew that. She was screeching and mewling and shaking.
If only it was enough…
He kept at it, completely out of his head, until his knuckles broke and the skin was sheared from them. And the only thing that really stopped him was the crowding faces that opened their black, dripping mouths and sprayed him with sticky threads of silk that were very much like Silly String. They netted his face and webbed his bloody, broken hand. They were wet and elastic and burning, their tensile strength unbelievable.
She had him.
He had hurt her, but now she had him and he was helpless. One of the mannequin faces hinged open like a clamshell. A fleshy proboscis emerged, horridly phallic and pulsing. The end of it puckered open like a tiny mouth and a surgically fine black needle emerged. She jabbed it into his throat and, as she did so, other mouths produced similar proboscises and likewise jabbed him. Numbed by toxins, Chazz hung there limply as the Spider Mother began to suck his blood with a perfectly ghastly sound of children sucking milk through straws. She siphoned off enough to take the fight out of him and by then he was flaccid and partially cocooned, whimpering out of fright and madness.
“Now, Mr. Man,” she said in a dozen smooth, silky, and blatantly sensual voices. “You’ve been promised to others and it’s my job to dole out your good parts.”
The mannequin heads parted like a sea and a set of mandibles emerged like a set of gigantic scissors. They were chitinous things, snipping open and closed, their inside edges set with razor blades. The Spider Mother took what Lady Peg-leg and the bulbous woman wanted first: his manhood. They darted in and snipped his balls and cock free and Chazz screamed with a high, wailing sound that was amplified in the huge chamber, echoing and coming back at him. His breath came in great gurgling, pained gasps as he screamed and screamed again.
There must have been an audience down there somewhere because he heard what seemed hundreds of voices moan with pleasure: OOOOOOOOOHHHHHH….
The Spider Mother was throbbing with ecstasy by that point, her mouths blowing out hot plumes of steam and things inside her—gears and motors, cogs and red-hot bearings—whirring and whining and squealing.
Chazz was still crying out, though his strength was fast ebbing. As the blood gushed from between his legs, countless swollen pink tongues emerged from the spider’s underside and greedily lapped it up. Still, he continued to thrash in his silken harness, mouth shrieking and head snapping from side to side, his eyes bulging like they were going to blow from their sockets.
She snipped off his left arm and then his right.
AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH, moaned the voices.
By then he was fading fast, hearing the voices and his own screams and feeling his life draining away as she nipped and licked him, drilling him with stingers and opening him with glistening, busy mouth parts like sheaths of surgical knives.
The last thing she took was his still-beating heart, ripping it from his chest like a bulb from black soil, holding its pumping, bloody mass up for all to see before dropping it below to anxious outstretched hands.
By then, Chazz knew no more.
49
Ramona stood on the road, staring up at the factory on the hill and a deep chill settled into her bones. Even if she hadn’t known that this was the evil core of Stokes, she would have felt it. The factory brooded atop the hill like a poison mushroom, seeping toxic juices that blighted the countryside and filled the town below with venom. This was it. This was the malignancy that needed to be cut out, torn up by the roots and burned to ash. This was the nucleus of the tumor itself and she was about to drive right into it like a hot needle.
She was not unexpected.
She knew that much.
Mother Crow did not want her here. In fact, she feared it as Ramona herself feared the idea of coming in the first place. That was what they had in common: fear and rage. Because they both stood ready to fight to the death and neither would back down.
This was endgame.
Resolutely then, Ramona started up the drive to the factory.
And things began to change just as they had in the park. Reality was warping, unzipping itself and she smelled smoke. Yes, the thick, pungent smoke of the burning town. She heard something like a muffled explosion and the factory ahead of her literally split right open, gushing flames and huge rolling clouds of ash.
It started here. The fire started here at the factory and swept down into the town. That’s what happened.
There was no way she could know that, but the certainty remained: it had started here and she was seeing it. Regardless of what Mrs. McGuiness said, it had not started in the town. It had started right here.
The sky above was lit by a red glare and waves of heat rolled down at her. The trees to either side of the road burst into flame. The field was burning. The factory was engulfed in tongues of flame and she could hear people screaming. She looked behind her and watched the town down there burn. It was an amazing conflagration and nothing was spared. It looked like a bonfire. She turned her gaze back to the factory. It was broken and mangled, immense walls of flame rising into the night. There was another explosion and then another from its blazing guts and things began to rain from the sky: slats of burning wood, smoldering bricks, and fiery bits of metal. The factory was giving up its ghost and this is what it vomited up in its death throes.
The heat was enough to roast her, but Ramona pushed on, untouched by any of it. She stepped through smoldering ash four inches deep, moving around pieces of the burning factory, parting sheets of churning smoke. The factory erupted again and more debris rained down into the fields of cinders. She thought they were parts of corpses, but they were not corpses but doll parts and mannequin parts. She saw grinning melted faces and blackened heads, limbs and bodies. Things welded together by the heat, human-shaped armatures whose plastic and wax flesh was bubbling and oozing free. It all continued to burn and she realized the screaming she heard was not that of people, but from the dolls themselves… their charred and blistered mouths were crying out into the night, rising in a single wavering note of agony.
But dolls can’t scream. Mannequins and puppets can’t know pain, a voice of reason informed her. But I’m hearing it. I’m hearing something.