Doll Face

34

As Soo-Lee was lost deeper in the tangles of the doll passage, Lex did everything he could not to lose his cool. He told himself it was all illusion, whether physical or psychological it was still illusion. He had to ignore his base animal instincts of fear and the need to flee blindly. He had to maintain here or he was lost, completely lost.

But finally, as reality was completely torn asunder and reinvented around him, he lost complete control. “YOU’LL HAVE TO DO BETTER THAN THIS!” he cried. “THIS IS NOTHING BUT A CHEAPJACK PARLOR TRICK! IT’S FUCKING SECOND-RATE AND SO ARE YOU!”

Raging made him feel better, it made him feel stronger. Oh, he was still terrified, but he was doing the only thing he could do and channeling that terror into hate and anger until his hands were balled into fists and his body was shaking and his teeth were clenched. He was in a long, narrow corridor backlit by itself whose walls were pleated with some pink shiny material that expanded and deflated as it breathed. Because it was breathing and he could hear the low, hissing respiration. He tried to block it out and pretend it was not there at all because it seemed like if he acknowledged the sound of it and the horror it inspired, the louder and louder it got.

Like a child working a nerve. Knowing just how to annoy and disturb his or her mother and keeping at it, working it until she wanted to scream.

“It won’t be that easy,” Lex said softly and resolutely. “I know your secret. You’re alone and you’re afraid and you’re trying to put that fear on us. Misery loving company. But it won’t work. Because you’re weak.”

His defiance was worth something, it seemed.

No sooner had he spoken those words than the breathing sounds quieted until he could barely hear them. The walls were not breathing now. They were trembling minutely and they still looked like they were made of soft pink skin, but they were no longer breathing.

He almost thought for a moment that he heard a terrible and distant sound of anguished sighing.

Then the walls started to breathe again. Breathe? No, they were gasping for breath almost painfully like the lungs of a dying man, as if the more oxygen they took in the more their physical reality would be assured.

“You’re not real,” Lex said, kicking a section of wall.

The amazing and nearly comical thing about it was that a blue-purple contusion appeared almost instantly. If the entire affair hadn’t been so fucking demented, he might have laughed.

The walls were still breathing deeply, but they seemed calmer now as if they refused to be rattled by him. They began to swell with each breath, inflating and becoming puffy like air-filled sacs. They pressed in closer. He wasn’t afraid of walls made of skin that breathed? Well, time to check him out on the claustrophobia scale. The walls pressed in ever closer. They would crush him, asphyxiate him with their own fleshy mass.

Lex kicked out again and again, but though they bruised they would not retreat.

It was then that the most extraordinary and unpleasant thing happened.

Oval nodes appeared on the walls, hundreds and hundreds of them to either side. They expanded until they looked like the glossy chambers of bubble wrap, only an aqueous pink. As they continued to expand, each distending until he thought they would explode from internal pressure, they split open one after the other. They were not blisters of a sort, but eyes—green and blue and brown and hazel and violet, some horror-movie red and others a glimmering turquoise. He was in a chamber of flesh now being watched by thousands of eyes that were juicy and running with snot-like fluid that dripped in gouts.

The walls continued to push in closer and with them came the eyes, countless living unblinking marbles fixed on him, staring at him, looking inside him until his skin literally began to crawl and he hugged his shaking body out of sheer horror.

No, no, no, a simple child-like voice said in his brain. Not this, not fucking this of all things.

He knew he couldn’t let it break him. He had a few minor-league phobias—fear of extreme heights, flying—but nothing incapacitating. But the puppet master was bound and determined to break him. It was trying claustrophobia and ommetaphobia—the fear of eyes—and scopophobia—the fear of being stared at—and the scary thing was, it was working. Lex felt like he was shivering inside his own skin.

This was how it would break him.

This was how it would own him.

The eyes were even closer now, perhaps sensing an edge. They were large, swollen and glistening, crying tears of slime. They were no longer evenly spaced, but crowding now like bubbles until the walls and the ceiling above were nothing but eyes. They expanded and popped open, clustered like fish roe, forever watching. Within moments, he knew, they would touch him.

“No,” he said under his breath. He could not allow it. The others needed him and he knew it. More so, Soo-Lee needed him and he could not let her down. But the fear had disabled him, made him feel loose and liquid inside and there was nothing left to fight with.

Don’t let it, he told himself. Don’t let it win. Fight! Use your mind! Think! Think!

And whether it was a conscious thing or not, he did the first thing that seemed reasonable: he jabbed his index finger into one of the eyes. The effect was not unpleasant, at least not for him. At least not initially. He buried his finger all the way in it and felt it flinch with the invasion and possibly some sort of pain. It was hot and soft inside, not much different than sliding his finger into a sexually excited woman. Soo-Lee felt much like that, it occurred to him.

But it didn’t last.

The delicious—and almost obscene—tactile sensation was replaced by a grim suction from inside the orb. It felt burning hot in there. The flesh of his finger was stinging as if he’d jabbed a jellyfish. As he yanked his finger back out, the eye closed like a pink puckering mouth around his knuckle and he had to yank with everything he had to get free of it. A gelatinous goo like egg albumin spurted over his hand. It made his flesh burn with a stinging sensation. But worse… he felt a sharp jabbing in his left eye as if he’d poked his own eyeball.

Despite the pain, he jabbed another and another, feeling them burst with a spray of slime, and feeling the jabbing in his own eyes. But despite the pain, he would not relent. He took out six more eyes that way until the agony made him go to his knees.

When he opened his eyes again, trying to rub the hurt from them, the walls of eyes had retreated a few inches, which told him they did not care to be wounded. That was it then. Despite the pain, he would blind them all. Looking out through swollen, burning eyes, he prepared to do so… but something began to happen. As he watched, each individual eye sprouted tiny, wiry sets of legs that looked bristled like those of a spider. Each eye had four legs. And with the capacity to be mobile, they detached themselves from their sockets in the wall and flooded over him.

Lex let out a cry, slapping at them and smashing them beneath his fists. He kicked and punched the walls, crushing the eye spiders under him and rolling through their numbers until he was wet with eye goo and fragmented little legs—still kicking—were stuck to him.

They crawled over his face and nested in his hair, surged down the back of his shirt and scuttled up his pant legs and the only thing he could do in his mania was to get out of there before he drowned in them. His head filled with a shrilling white noise, he began digging right into the walls, tearing out cobs and masses of pink tissue as he tried to tunnel free.