CLICKETY-CLICKETY-CLICKETY-CLICKETY-CLICKETY-CLICKETY!
When he came around again, he knocked the Ray-O-Vac out of her hand and it rolled under the table, going out. There was no time to retrieve it. He would have had her the moment she tried. Now it was just the two of them and that circle of light concentrated on the moving doll parts on the table. She could hear him giggling in the darkness around her, but she could not see him. The door wasn’t far away, but she knew she’d never make it… not without a rider mounting her from behind.
The Creep puppet came out of the darkness with a swooping sound like an owl seeking a mouse. His penis was standing hard and perversely bloated, streaking at her like a surface-to-air missile. She dodged past him and he disappeared into the darkness, giggling. Panicking, she dashed for the door and he struck out at her like a shark coming out of the depths, his fingers tearing her shirt up the back and scraping slivers of skin free.
When he came at her again, she sidestepped him, then knocked the light aside so it swung back and forth, disorienting her and hopefully him. He came after her and crashed into a pegboard. He made a growling sound and came again, but when he did, Ramona jumped out at him with the fire axe in both hands. Before he could slow his descent, the axe was in flight. It caught him in the head, splitting his face wide and his puppet body immediately struck the floor, its invisible wires sheared.
Ramona, axe held to strike, bore down on him.
Creep reassembled himself. It was like watching a film run in reverse. He was standing between her and the door and she planned on going right through him, but she never got the chance. As Creep stepped out to meet her, the door behind him flew open… then blew right off its hinges, taking a good section of the wall with it.
Even Creep hadn’t been expecting this.
What stepped through the hole in the wall was the apex horror; Frankendoll.
It was back.
A hideous, gargantuan mass of writhing doll flesh that throbbed and pulsated, roiling and grotesquely alive. It stepped forward on a dozen legs, a multitude of mannequin and puppet faces screaming and crying out in death agonies. Ramona recognized the new additions: Soo-Lee, Chazz, and Danielle.
Now it wanted Creep.
If a puppet could look frightened, he did. He tried to shamble forward and a brace of arms shot forward like greased pistons, fists and claws tearing into him, raking him apart with hooked nails. The Creep puppet cried out as it was pulled apart and ingested, assimilated into the mass like a corpse fed into a wood chipper. He sank away and then his white face pressed back out, joining the other ghost faces that hung from the creature’s chest like swollen polyps.
Still clutching the axe, Ramona made a mad dive for her flashlight.
Face your fears. Overcome them, a voice instructed her. Do not empower them.
But looking up at the howling, shrieking, grinning faces of Frankendoll, it was not so easy. They looked like fetish masks carved from teak and pitted driftwood, eye sockets gouged deep into blackness, mouths cut into jagged sawtoothed holes, noses hacked into the triangular hollows of skulls. They reminded her of the leering faces of Japanese temple demons. Some were whole, others split apart by the birth of yet another head, still others had divided like cells. And for every complete head, there was a cluster of fetal, unformed knobs sprouting around it. Some with mewling mouths and others with a single eye, and some that were nothing but toothy hungry chasms.
“It’s our Ramona come back to us,” a choir of voices said, discordant and moaning, squeaking and shrilling like the pipes of a poorly tuned church organ. “Bring her to us. A place has been prepared, let our queen reign from high above.”
As if proof of that, two mannequin heads at the very apex of the creature parted to show Ramona the place of honor and glory her head would decorate.
Think! she commanded herself. There’s got to be a way out of this! There’s got to be a way to fight!
But the fight was nearly gone from her.
She just didn’t have much left.
Frankendoll stood there, its glistening jellied flesh shifting with a near-constant osmotic motion, tissue draining away and filling hollows, leaving gaping crevices in its wake that revealed mainsprings, skeletal armatures, and whirring gears. Heads migrated and changed positions. It made slopping, juicy sounds, its many fused torsos expanding and deflating like soap bubbles. Ramona was reminded of the plastic army men her brother had played with. How one day, he dumped lighter fluid on them, claiming they had been nuked, and lit them up. What was left after the flames died out, a molten magma of melted bodies and jutting limbs and oozing faces, looked pretty much like what she was looking at it. Except this thing was viscidly alive, pulsing and pink and breathing, an elastic conglomeration of dolls, puppets, and mannequins trapped in a communal tar pit of seething, bubbling doll meat.
“I’m going to kill you,” she said, trying to channel all the hate and frustration and rage that had haunted her ever since this nightmare began. “I’m going to hack you to pieces.”
She said this calmly, but authoritatively. At first, it was all lie and bluff, but then steadily her anger began to rise and she knew if she could not put this horror down, then she could not possibly face what lay ahead.
“NO, RAMONA! YOU MUST NOT DO THAT!” the voices told her.
She stepped forward, burning with rage.
Frankendoll took a few wary steps away, bumping into a table and overturning it.
Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack, went its many drumming feet.
It was unsure now. The balance of power had shifted and Ramona could almost feel it in the air like a breath of heat surrounding her, pulling her in, making her its own… a spark, a blazing coal that would set tinder to burning and bring down a great forest of dark, twisting dread.
“Poor, poor Ramona. See how alone she is, how alone she has always been. Never able to trust and never able to forgive even herself. Always confused and miserable and burned black to her core,” the voices taunted. “See how small she is, pretty, pretty, but small and weak and filled with a void of hot wind lacking substance.”
Yes, she was being taunted and her buttons were being pushed, quite expertly at that. Mother Crow knew what lived in the mind of her enemies, she knew how to squeeze out every last drop of their terror, self-loathing, and secret angst like foul gray water from a sponge. Images of Chazz filled her head. He was an asshole, a bastard, a user and abuser… yet, yet, she blamed herself because her manic OCD could not accept the fact that she had not fucked up something somewhere, a dropped word, a missed clue, a skein of misery that she had not followed to its source.
Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack.
Frankendoll was closing in on her even as her own mind was closing up like a bivalve as she drowned in a sea of self-doubt and guilt that filled her with indecision that became weakness that weighed her down and made her unsure of who she was and even what she was.
“The poor dear, always so alone. She’s needed to become part of something bigger than herself and now she will,” the voices said, more to themselves than to her. “We’ll love her, we’ll protect her, we’ll let her join us.”