Doll Face (6 page)

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.

Creepy didn’t begin to describe it.

And the storefronts she had passed, all the little Main Street-type businesses lined up—barbershops, cafés, drugstores, offices—looked like a Hollywood director’s idea of small-town America, something envisioned by Frank Capra.

Ramona had grown up in a small town; she had lived in several, passed through dozens and dozens in her life getting from point A to point B. Some were quaint, some were ugly, some were pretty, some run-down, but they all had personality.

Stokes had none.

It was sterile and synthetic, like it had been kept in a box. Small towns came together in bits and pieces through the years, but Stokes looked like it had been built according to a very specific plan and that was to emphasize its small town-
ness,
if that made any sense.

This place was an imitation.

But there had to be a point to it all.

Just as there had to be a reason why they were drawn into it in the first place.

Funny, too, how there had been a near-torrential rainfall when they’d entered the valley and now not a drop of rain. Even the streets were dry as if it hadn’t rained in weeks. Interesting.

She stepped out into the street and listened. Nothing. No approaching sirens. Not so much as a car passing in the distance. No cars, no people, no life. Stokes was like a fucking doll house.

She walked calmly as possible up the sidewalk.

She would go in the direction the others had run. She would check out two or three more streets looking for a sign of them, then she was fucking getting out.

If she could get out at all.

11

“I suppose we should go over there and have a look,” Lex said. “I rather doubt those lights came on purely by accident.”

But Creep didn’t like the idea. “Fuck that. It’s a trap. I know it’s a trap. It’s like…like…like…”

“Bait?” Soo-Lee said.

“Yeah! That’s it, Lex. It’s bait to draw us in. When we get there, something’s going to happen and I know it. Those things’ll be in there, waiting for us.”

“Maybe that’s exactly why we
should
go over there.”

“Are you nuts?”

Lex shrugged. “Something’s going on here and I got a real nasty feeling that we’re not leaving until we figure out what. In fact, if we don’t figure it out, we may never get out.”

“I’m all for walking right out of here.”

“It’s not going to be that easy.”

“How do you know?”

The thing was, Lex wasn’t sure. He just had a very bad feeling that all of this was not by accident. That it was on purpose. That this town existed for a specific reason and they were drawn into it for a purpose. “Listen,” he said, “here’s what we’ll do. I’ll go check it out. You wait here. You went to look for Chazz and Ramona, now it’s my turn.”

Creep shrugged. It was obvious he still didn’t like it, but the idea of there being no personal danger involved bolstered him some. “All right.”

“I’m going, too,” Soo-Lee said.

Creep sighed. “And I babysit the psycho.”

Lex ignored that and led Soo-Lee across the street.

Creep was right, of course. Maybe it wasn’t a trap exactly—or maybe it was—but there was something very weird about it just like there was something very weird about this town, which, presumably, did not exist in the first place. There were no lights on anywhere and now one just happened to come on. Now wasn’t that interesting?

But, honestly, he didn’t think it was interesting at all.

He thought it was downright disturbing.

With Soo-Lee right behind him, he moved cautiously up the sidewalk until he got to the diner. Looking through the plate glass windows, he could see tables and booths, a counter with round stools.

But no people.

Somebody must have turned the lights on.

“This is creepy,” Soo-Lee whispered.

Yes, it was at that.

What was also creepy was that the word DINER was lettered in each window. No name other than that, just DINER. Not the DOWNTOWN DINER or the DO-DROP-IN DINER or JIMMY’S HASH HOUSE or BOBBIE’S BURGER BARN. It was all very generic just like the town itself, which made him realize that every shop and store he had seen were like that—GROCERIES and INSURANCE, BARBERSHOP and DENTIST, but none of them with any more specific titles.

It reminded him of the elaborate train set he had put together with his dad when he was in grade school. There had been depots and mountains, trees and roundhouses, and a little town where every storefront had a very generic title just like in Stokes.

This is everytown,
he thought.
It’s bits and pieces of every town everyone has ever seen from every old movie, every old TV show, every fucking Norman Rockwell calendar. There’s a reason for that and you better figure out what it is.

“I’m going in,” he told her. “Maybe you should wait out here.”

“No thanks.”

He pulled open the door and it jingled. He stepped inside. And what was weird in the first place only got that much weirder. His first impression on coming through the door was that the place smelled old, empty, and musty…but that changed when he was three feet inside. It was like the diner suddenly came to life. He could smell hot coffee and burgers, pie and french fries. It all smelled exactly the way he thought a diner should smell, as if his own memories and expectations had been hijacked.

There was food set out everywhere.

Lex blinked and then blinked again because he was certain it was a hallucination of some sort. It had to be a hallucination. Nothing else could possibly explain it. On the counter, he saw cups of coffee that were still steaming. A cheeseburger on a plate with a bite out of it, a fry dipped in ketchup. A slice of blueberry pie with ice cream that was not even melted yet. It was the same at the booths and tables: bowls of hot soup, malteds in icy metal cups, BLTs and grilled cheese sandwiches. The soups were barely touched, malteds barely sipped, the sandwiches all with the requisite one or two bites from them as if to emphasize the fact that the diners had all just left…perhaps seconds ago.

“What the heck is all this?” Soo-Lee asked.

But he didn’t know.

Together, they stepped behind the counter, moving very slowly and carefully as if they expected to find a tripwire. There were no booby traps, just pots of hot coffee and a large, freshly poured Coke in a cup. A chalkboard announced the day’s specials: HAMBURGER PLATE .79¢ CHICKEN NOODLE SOUP .50¢, CHICKEN FRIED STEAK $1.00.

“Can’t beat the prices,” Soo-Lee said.

No, you can’t,
Lex thought.
And when was the last time you could get food that cheap? The 1960s? The 1950s?

Everything was fucked-up and out of whack.

They peered through the archway into the kitchen. Burgers and bacon were frying on a big, greasy range.

Lex went back out into the dining area. He picked up a fry and examined it closely.

“You’re not going to eat that?” Soo-Lee said.

But that’s exactly what he was going to do. He doubted the physical reality of what he was seeing so he was putting it to the test. It felt like a fry. The weight and texture were perfect…but it had no odor and he was willing to bet it had no taste.

He looked around. Incredible. This place was like the
Mary Celeste
of diners. All the patrons had been mysteriously snatched away into thin air.
Oooo-weee-oooo.
Except that it was all bullshit, a carefully constructed ruse. There had never been people here.

He dropped the fry back onto its plate. “It’s fake,” he said. “All this food is fake. It’s like that plastic food little kids play with. And I bet that’s exactly how it tastes.”

The words had no more than left his lips when he felt a subtle shift in the atmosphere of the diner. It was quick and inexplicable. He no longer smelled good things to eat and drink. No, now he smelled mildew and rot.

“Lex,” Soo-Lee said, grabbing his arm.

But he saw, all right. There were mice running around on the floor. A rat was on a table gnawing at a club sandwich that looked like it had been sitting there for weeks. The bread was green with mold. There were flies everywhere. A beetle crawled out of a malted cup. A burger was writhing with maggots.

Yes, it had happened everywhere.

Everywhere.

The walls were dingy, the plate glass windows dirty, the counter and tables filthy with rat droppings and food scraps gone black. The red vinyl booth cushions were torn open, stuffing hanging out. There was three inches of dust on the floors. Ceiling tiles above were water-stained, some missing entirely.

“Let’s get out of here,” Soo-Lee said.

Yes, that was a good idea. A very good idea because he had the most appalling feeling that the diner was decaying and if they did not get out, they would decay with it like worms trapped in a rotting apple. Beyond the grimy counters, the chalkboard had changed now.

It no longer offered the day’s specials. Now it read:

LEX FONTAINE

SOO-LEE CHANG

CHAZZ ACKELY

RAMONA LAKE

CREEP RODGERS

DANIELLE LECARR

† REST IN PEACE †

A white fear opening up inside him, Lex grabbed Soo-Lee and they raced for the door…only there was no door. It was not simply missing, it was like it had never been there in the first place. There were only the plate glass windows with their lower fringe of curtains hanging like dingy rags, but no aperture where a door might have been placed.

Soo-Lee was shaking.

So was he.

“What…what is this?” she said, maybe more to herself than to him.

But without a doubt it was an excellent question:
what exactly was this?
What sort of mind game was it and what was the fucking point of it all? Who was running it? If they wanted Lex and Soo-Lee to be unnerved and scared, well they had been successful. Lex’s skin was crawling. It felt like something inside his head wanted to fly apart. He felt helpless and trapped like a fly in a web.

Christ, he felt like he was buried alive.

But he had to think. He knew that much. He couldn’t lose it because whatever puppet master was running this show wanted him to. The only real weapon he’d ever had in his life was his mind and he couldn’t let all this dull its edge now.

Think.

Yes,
yes.
The image of the diner had been offered to them with flawless diner perfection: the smells, the sights, even the sounds of the soft drink bubblers and coffee percolating. But he had turned his nose up at it. He had been suspicious. He had refused to accept the simple joy of what was offered, so it was made worse. He was being punished.