Go see who waits for you, doll-face, Danielle said, but by then, he was already doing so. Tears spilled from his eyes and his teeth chattered, his hands shaking so badly he had to press them to his sides to hold them still. His eyes felt dry and scratchy, but he did not dare blink. In the blink of an eye, the most malign things could happen in this place.
Go, doll-face, show her what you’re made of… she’ll like that.
“No!” he hollered, some last fragment of free will and survival instinct kicking up its heels inside him. “I won’t go and there’s nothing you can do that will make me!”
He felt good saying that. Hell, he felt empowered and determined and resilient in the face of this god-awful nightmare… but he was still walking forward. Maybe there was a last struggling fragment of defiance in his mind, but nobody had told his body about it and onward it went to keep a meeting with revelation and doom.
The perfectly disturbing part about it all was that he could not stop.
His body would not respond. His somatic nervous system had been hijacked and he was no longer in charge of his own body. He was just a rider now like a man on a bus. He no longer had control… yet, he could speak, he could move his lips, his head, his arms, he just could not stop the forward progression of his feet.
It was insane.
Desperate now, he slapped himself in the face with one hand after the other until his cheeks were red and burning, until pain and confusion made tears run. But none of it shocked him out of it and there didn’t seem to be a damn thing he could do about that.
There comes a time, the Danielle-thing informed him, when all choices are made for us and happy we are for it.
Creep had a powerful need to tell her to shut the fuck up because she wasn’t even human anymore. She hadn’t been much before, but she was even less now and he wanted to find a nice five-pound ball-peen hammer and smash her to pieces. God, it was crazy, but the idea of pulverizing her was almost sexually exciting… not that any of that really mattered because he was still moving down the tunnel to his fate and the realization of that made everything else seem pretty damn insignificant.
The tunnel was gradually widening.
And it was getting warm.
Creep was perspiring freely now. Some of that was fear and anxiety, but not all of it. The heat was palpable, rising a few degrees at a time. The air felt hot in his throat, difficult to breathe. It was about then, as sweat began to drip off the end of his nose, that he heard a sort of rushing/roaring sound like hot water gurgling through a high-pressure pipe and the entire tunnel began to quake. The rushing noise got louder. The tunnel felt like it was in motion.
What the fuck?
Now it was filling with a churning white steam like the sort of thing that a whistling teakettle blows out. It came on in a hissing, rolling cloud. And even if Creep had been able to turn and flee, he would never have escaped it. The steam hit him, engulfed him, and the pain of being seared was instantaneous. He hit the floor and bounced off the walls, hurting and gagging, but knowing that as painful as it was, it was not lethal.
The steam was not enough to kill him.
He heard a thrumming sound and something came out of the tunnel, which had grown quite large now. Whatever it was—and he could see very little of it—it came charging out at him like a phantom from the fog, grim and hulking and horribly industrial, bringing heat and noise and the hot pig iron smell of a foundry. It was a machine becoming flesh or flesh becoming machine. A deranged biomechanical thing that was assembled from yellowed rungs and knobs of bone that protruded from a riveted shell of discolored canvas-like skins, a machine of corpses and wriggling doll parts set with hissing vacuum lines and bulging pneumatic hoses, a great steel bear trap of a mouth that was a 5,000-psi cutting ram.
And above it, like a hag broken on a wheel, he saw a mummy with whipping white hair, a living death mask grinning and cackling.
These were the things Creep thought he saw as it seized him and pulled him into itself, as his hands and feet were impaled by spiked drive chains that carried him into a core of boiling smoke where an immense buzz saw split him from his crotch to the crown of his head in a gushing baptism of his own blood and meat.
51
Lex heard Chazz’s final death-scream, though he did not know who it was. The scream echoed and faded, but there was no doubt which direction it came from and that was exactly where he went: to seek its source. He felt his way along the walls, knowing that at any moment a pair of gnarled puppet hands might reach out for him, but he didn’t think they would. Not just yet. He was being drawn into this place to meet the puppet master and he would not be denied that.
He made it to the hub, which was partially lit by moonlight streaming in through skylights some three stories above. He couldn’t see too much as his eyes adjusted. Just enough to see lots of gleaming machinery and to recognize that the hub was like a cylinder that went up and up. It was an immense chamber and he knew it was the puppet master’s lair. There was a hot, charnel stench in the air that was sickening.
Now pale blue phosphorescence began to illuminate his surroundings.
The walls were set with a veritable industrialized maze of tubing and dirty gray conduits, metal ductwork and what looked like spiraled ribs jutting forth that seemed to be in slow clockwise and counterclockwise motion like gears of some sort… and gears they indeed were because he saw that he was in the heart of what seemed to be a clock. It was insane, but he was seeing it. How much was real and how much was subjective, he couldn’t be sure. He only knew that he was inside the puppet master now.
Stokes was just a physical reality she or it had created, an idealized homage to a town that probably never really existed in the first place, at least not in the way Lex had seen it tonight. The town was a physical projection of psychic or mental energy, but the factory… well, that was the flesh and blood of the puppet master. If the town was its mind, then this was its body… and this chamber was its heart.
A clock.
Why not? The doll people seemed to operate in some way or another like clockwork toys, so why not the puppet master as well?
Sighing among the eerie and abnormal grandeur of it all, Lex shook his head. He could sit here and speculate for hours, but the truth, the real truth of all this would probably be denied to him. He had come for a reason and he had to see that through.
Yet… this place was fascinating. A living machine. The spiraling ribs that made up the walls were rotating slowly but constantly, kept in perpetual motion by the immense mainspring and swinging collection of pendulums high above, which in turn moved the immense toothed escape wheels of the clock train, pinions, levers, and ratcheting mechanisms. Minute wheels and hour wheels were in precise calibration, keeping the biorhythms of the machine in perfect balance. And everywhere, the elaborate gear trains clicking and grinding and meshing—driver gears and worm gears and spur gears. Like the anatomy of a flesh-and-blood organism, none of it ever stopped, ever rested, ever even slightly varied in sequence or the result would be total chaos and the end of the machine that powered Stokes and the puppet master who lorded over all.
Destroy it, Lex thought, and you destroy the puppet master.
He edged farther into the room, stepping over tangled electrical lines and steam hoses that moved against one another with sliding, slithery sounds like mating pythons. He ducked beneath revolving cylinders and around hydraulic rams, his ears humming with the clanking of gear boxes, red-hot bearings, spiked drive chains, and thrumming generator shafts. He kept moving, but moving carefully because it was a dangerous place, a surreal nightmare of a factory in which everything slammed and hissed and whirred, hungry toothed and razored chains anxious to pull the unwary beneath presses where they could be processed properly. High-voltage lines sparked, vats bubbled, steam pissed out through cracks in hoses, and great jagged hooks swung through the air, seeking flesh to impale.