Doll Face

55

Mother Crow came charging out of the shadows making a screeching, squealing sound like a grinder biting into a steel plate. She pushed out a rolling mist of red steam, jerking and thrashing on her scores of puppet strings. She made a clanking noise like machinery, a sibilance of boiling vapors, and a repellent slithering sound that, to Lex’s overheated imagination, reminded him of immense, bloated leeches intertwining.

Now, at this final hour, the terror inside him was deep and shivery. How could they possibly stand against her? How could they hope to overwhelm a biomechanical monster driven by pure deranged supernatural wrath? It seemed they were beaten on every front.

The creature was going for Ramona.

And somehow, someway, he knew that she had been its target all along. Not him. Not any of the others. They were throwaways, stock characters, spear-carriers. The real center of power was Ramona and if she could not be usurped here and now, it would end for this horrible twisted monstrosity that—

Mother Crow, a voice said to him quite calmly. Her name is Mother Crow.

It sounded like Ramona’s voice, as if she had spoken right next to his ear.

As it bore down on her, another voice—his own—informed him, Stand and fight! Fight for Ramona! If she can’t win, you can’t either! So fight! Goddammit, fight!

Yes, that was the thing and nothing else mattered and maybe it never had.

Ramona waited for Mother Crow and there did not seem to be even a momentary twinge of fear or apprehension on her face.

“COME AND GET ME, YOU OLD FUCKING HAG!” she shouted. “YOU DRIED-UP OLD BAG OF HAY! I’M RIGHT HERE! YOU NEVER HAD ANY POWER! YOU NEVER HAD ANYTHING! YOU WERE AFRAID! AFRAID OF BEING ALONE! AFRAID OF NOT BEING ABLE TO PULL THE STRINGS AND MAKE YOUR WORKERS DANCE!”

Mother Crow shuddered with rage, roaring and growling.

As the bulk of her passed just overhead, Lex swung his wrench and shattered a brace of mannequin arms that reached for him. But that wasn’t enough and he knew it. The witch would merely regenerate herself. He had to destroy this place. Habitat destruction. That was they key. He went wild at that point, swinging his wrench and bashing pipes and valves and amplifiers. He saw a massive worm gear set in the wall and went at it like a berserker, pounding it until the chain slipped its cogs and there was a scream of tortured metal, an explosion of fiery blue sparks, and the factory itself seemed to cry out in agony.

(NO! NO! NO! I CANNOT DIE!)

He could hear Mother Crow’s screaming, tortured voice in his head. It seemed to be coming from some distant plain of suffering, gathering strength like a tempest, and driving right into his skull, punching through his thoughts.

The chain whirred and sparked, throwing out black smoke that smelled like burning oil and industrial sludge, and then it came right off its cogs, swinging like a boomerang and nearly taking Lex’s head right off. It clanged to the floor, its heavy iron teeth stripping a junction box off the wall in an explosion of discharged electricity.

It was like some kind of devastating chain reaction.

The driver gears and clock wheels had lost their balance and the mainspring lost its tension and there was a great high-pitched squeal from above as chains and pinions came loose, tearing apart the machinery and ripping vacuum lines and steam piping free as they fell. The great pendulums above were out of calibration like everything else, wobbling and gonging as they smashed into one another. One of them broke free of its housing and sheared through the great spider’s web above… and the spider that clung there. Both came crashing down, the pendulum impaling a machine, belts and rotors flying up into the air like shrapnel as bearings superheated and melted and relays went with a blinding white flash, oil and diesel fuel igniting and sending up a mushrooming curtain of flame. The spider itself crashed among the wreckage, bursting into a million writhing doll parts upon impact that were swallowed by the blaze.

And again, Mother Crow’s voice pounded through his head.

(MY CHILDREN! MY CHILDREN! MURDERING MY CHILDREN!)

There was a searing stink in the air, a burned smell of blown fuses and melted rubber, fatigued metal and hot ozone. The entire complex was coming apart.

“NOW YOU’LL BE ALONE WITH WHAT YOU MADE!” Ramona taunted her. “YOU BELONG ALONE! YOU NEVER HAD ANYONE! YOU’RE DRY! YOU’RE BARREN! NO ONE EVER LOVED YOU AND NO ONE COULD STAND THE SIGHT OF YOU, YOU FUCKING OLD MAID! OLD BAT! VIRGIN!”

Mother Crow’s worming bulk struck the floor as her tendrils snapped and burned. She towered above Ramona, sizzling and smoking, an acrid steam pouring from her that stank like burning corpses. Her body was melting and popping, mannequin faces screaming out their agony and limbs liquefying like hot tallow. She struck the floor and then rose up again, glued to it by millions of oozing strings of hot plastic.

(I REFUSE TO DIE!)

Lex dropped to one knee, the fury of the beast’s words like a hive of bees in his head droning full blast. He let out a cry, feeling the true intensity of her mind as it pierced his own. She could have turned his brain to sauce if she wanted to and if it hadn’t have been for Ramona, she probably would have.

Her image blurred in his eyes and then blurred again and he saw… he saw her head become a great clock face that had to be twenty feet or more in circumference. Instead of hour and minute hands there was a corpse-like husk crucified to it, a thing of bones and rags and whipping white hair: the physical remains of Mother Crow. Her face was ravaged and worm-holed, the parchment-dry skin suckered to the leering skull beneath like papier mâché. Dozens of lines and hoses were plugged into the mummy as if she were the central brain box, all of them slinking and trembling like tentacles. Whatever still haunted those bones was a flat and blatant evil, a swollen parasite with a noxious, polluted mind. Even in death, the mummy’s death mask was hitched in a scowl of unearthly hate.

Ramona threw what looked to be an aluminum barreled flashlight right at it and caught it dead-on, the skull breaking apart like a vase and there was an eruption of white light.

She kept at it, swinging the axe and chopping into the beast, cleaving mannequin parts loose that struck the floor, some melting and others struggling with stolen life that was fading fast now.

The clock face was gone then and there was some gruesome hybrid of a woman’s head and a centipede that screamed in agony, thrashing back and forth, side to side. As Lex hit it with his wrench, it slapped him aside and he hit the floor, blood streaming from a torn gash in his forehead. As the threshing mandibles of the head—which looked oddly like jagged ice tongs—reached down for Ramona, she let out a wild and resounding rebel yell and buried the blade of her axe right into the thing’s face, which split open and gushed ribbons of yellow slime.

Crippled and blind, Mother Crow half-crawled and half-dragged herself out of harm’s way, but Ramona kept after her.

WHACK! went the axe.

WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!

Lex got to his feet, pipes and machinery crashing all around him as the chamber came apart. He swung the big wrench into Mother Crow overhanded again and again, smashing the chittering plating that held her together, hot fluid shooting into the air and blistering his face.

(I WILL I WILL I WILL NOT CEASE!)

But she no longer had a choice, he knew. Even her deathless, energetic mind could not survive the total disruption of its environment. She was nearly vanquished and only her raging ego kept her going by that point.

She crept away like a stepped-upon spider, broken and crumpled, great sections of her falling away and revealing the unnatural struggling machinery within that was enclosed in a welded steel armature that resembled some abstract skeleton. She was crippled badly, her dying screams steadily losing volume and becoming a shrill whining that itself dissolved into something like a sobbing and mewling. Severed compression lines and hydraulic hoses trailed behind her like slit arteries, gushing black fluid in gurgling pools.

Ramona charged in and brought the axe down on the remains of the cleaved head and it broke apart, a discharge of opaque blood squirting up into the air. Burning and sparking with high-voltage arcs, barely moving, the remains of Mother Crow were engulfed in flames, crackling and collapsing.

And by then, the entire place was on fire.