Do it, she ordered herself.
She moved quickly down the hallway to the door. That’s how you did it in this place: if something scared you or filled you with anguish, you charged it dead on. She gripped the doorknob and threw it open. She took a step into the room, expecting some austere and utilitarian sort of office, something harsh and puritanical to fit in with the mechanistic mind of Mother Crow, but instead she found a workshop.
There were tables heaped with mannequin parts, of course. But by that point, Ramona was not really frightened of them. You could only see so many snakes before they lost their shock value.
You lie, God, how you lie.
She studied the racks of tools and instruments on the pegboards along the walls. They were hung with gleaming probes, long silver needles, loops of sutures and catgut, clamps and saws and knives of every description. Spools of wire and exotic-looking pulleys sidled up to bone screws and forceps, ball sockets and swivels, iron rods and gears. Another pegboard held faces, eyeless and jawless, things of wood and plastic and wax waiting to be fixed to some dire living machinery. There was a wall of eyeballs pinned to a cork board. They were in every color. She expected them to watch her, to follow her like eyes in old paintings, but they were just glass orbs. A fire hose was coiled on the wall, next to it an axe painted red.
The accoutrements of firefighting would of course be prevalent here in Mother Crow’s reimagining of this place, Ramona knew.
There was a pull string dangling from the ceiling and she pulled it, half-expecting to see a dozen ghoulish marionettes drop down in a jerking dance macabre, but the only thing that happened was that a light came on. It was an old-fashioned thing with a funnel-shaped shade that directed the light downward. It seemed to create more shadows than it dispelled. It lit up the contents of the table, but beyond its illumination was like the edge of the known universe where formless night things hopped and crawled in bleak nonexistence.
There was a door at the far end of the room and that’s where she was going.
She made it a few feet before she bumped into something hanging from the ceiling that she was certain had not been there a moment before. She gasped, shining her light around and whatever it was—her mind had a quick flash image of an articulated Halloween skeleton—dropped to the floor with a clattering noise.
Breathing hard now, wary, she put her light on it.
It was Creep.
Not the real Creep, but a doll version of him that had fallen apart when it struck the floor. There was his torso, a detached arm, a detached hand, an eyeball that had rolled across the floor. He was just a heap of parts. His head had no hair, his cranium was seamed like the monster in an old Frankenstein movie (for the ease of brain transplants, perhaps).
“They only got you because you let them,” Ramona found herself saying. “You didn’t fight, Creep. You went with what they offered. You looked for an easy way out. I’m sorry.”
The parts began to tremble, then to rattle.
They were alive and part of her had suspected as much. The heap that was Creep began to sluggishly crawl across the floor in a loose jumble and Ramona heard a high tittering in the back of her head like the insane laughter of a madwoman locked in an attic room. She had seen worse… yet, this collection of abstract humanity was like white ice cracking open inside her. She was dancing precariously on the edge of a full-blown nervous breakdown. The most alarming part was not the clattering progress of the parts or the thumping roll of the head itself, but the eyeball that rolled behind and the foot that hopped along in pursuit. As demented as it was, had it been a cartoon, it might have offered some morbid comedy.
But there was nothing funny about that heap of disjointed parts.
And there was nothing remotely amusing about how they began to stir in a whirlwind, jumping and rattling and spinning in the air before striking the floor again… then putting themselves together in proper order. Like a child stacking blocks, the Creep thing assembled itself. When it was finished, it stood there stiffly like a window dummy, swaying slightly back and forth.
Then it began to breathe in and out, chest rising and falling.
Something like a black leech slid between the lips and licked them. There was a tearing sound and a single eye winked open with a puff of dust. It looked over at Ramona with barely concealed lust.
“Dolly, dolly, dolly,” the Creep puppet said. The voice was his… nearly, but with a dry, rasping caliber to it like a rusty nail head scraped over concrete. “My dolly’s name is Ramona and with her I shall play.”
Click-clacking, it stepped in her direction, reaching out with white fingers lacking nails. Bits of them flaked off like loose plaster. The flaccid penis between the legs rose up, hard as a tent stake. It was throbbing. As Creep stood there, breathing harder and faster, a gout of drool ran from his lips to his chin. And his wooden penis—if wood it was—became positively engorged until it was as large as the Ray-O-Vac in Ramona’s hand. The head was pink and shiny, except it wasn’t a human glans but a pulsating baby doll head whose pink, blubbery lips opened and said, “Ma-ma, ma-ma, ma-ma,” in a squeaking doll voice.
Ramona was shaking all over.
Madness scratched inside her skull and she had the urge to laugh hysterically. Was this horror or humor or both or neither and why was she shaking uncontrollably and gooseflesh crawling up her spine and down the back of her arms?
Creep stepped forward and there was no doubt what was on his agenda, which, of course, was just the agenda of Mother Crow: what better way to debase, defile, and destroy Ramona than to have her violated by a fucking puppet? It had worked wonders with Soo-Lee.
Ramona wanted to step back, but she faced her fears even though it felt like her guts were crawling with slinking white worms that were sliding up into her chest. Creep reached out for her and she batted his hand aside with the flashlight. His mouth split into a grimace and he clawed out at her, but she was faster. She brought the cylinder of her trusty Ray-O-Vac around in an arc and struck him dead in the face.
He did not go down.
In fact, all he did was swing back and forth as if held aloft by strings she could not see. He swung in her direction and his fingers scraped along her breast. She smashed him with the light again and he swung away, picking up momentum to come swinging back, his leering mouth seeming to say, You silly twat, I can play this game all night. Back and forth, back and forth I go. You’ll get tired and when you get tired, I’ll move in closer because you’re my fuck toy and I’m going to treat you like a fuck toy, my sweet little dolly.
The thing was, Ramona could hear his voice inside her head, each word seeming to gain volume.
She smashed him again as he got his hands in her hair and yanked out a strand. She batted him away and he swung back into the darkness and faster, it seemed, than the light could track him. He was getting the entire room worked up. All the parts were beginning to wriggle. They wanted to get off tables and free themselves from hooks.
She ducked under him and he giggled with a piercing, gleeful sort of sound. He swung back around, fixing her with his single glaring eyeball, which seemed to be bulging from the socket like a duck egg.
She sidestepped him and felt the head of his penis brush her arm, the baby doll mouth now lined with teeth like fishhooks that drew blood. They were chattering with a dead, hollow sound like a skull in a catacomb. Clickety-clickety-clickety-clickety. Gravity should have ground him to a halt or at least slowed him a bit, but it did neither. The Creep puppet began to move faster and faster with slicing pendulum strokes, zipping past her. She couldn’t get out of his way fast enough. His fingers clawed her. The head of his bulbous, bright red penis nipped at her. The needling teeth chattered and with such volume she thought she would lose her mind.