He felt like a needle on a compass being pointed to magnetic north. He could turn away, and he had, but it drew him right back. The certainty was overwhelming. Looking at it?some kind of factory, he was thinking?he knew that there was revelation in that place. Maybe Chrissy wasn’t there, but it was important that he go in there.
But Tommy did not like it. “You know what that place is?”
Mitch just shook his head.
“That’s Hoblich and Sons,” Tommy explained. “A mannequin factory.”
Mitch was going to say, so what? They make dummies for store windows. But then he started thinking what it might be like in such a place. All those human-sized dolls standing around. And with what haunted the streets of Witcham, it was probably only one step up from the county morgue.
“I’ll hold your hand,” Mitch promised him.
“Oh, you think you’re funny,” Tommy said. The idea of going into that place was really eating him. “I don’t like them goddamn mannequins. I know it sounds stupid, but I can’t help it. They freak me out. Have ever since I was a kid.”
“Christ, you worked in a mortuary once, remember?”
Tommy sighed. “Yeah, and do you remember where I worked in high school?”
“Montgomery Wards. So what?”
Tommy swallowed and swallowed again. “They had this warehouse over in Bethany. Jesus. They’d send me over to pick things up in a van. Well, sometimes I had to go down into the basement.”
“And?”
“And, shit, it was creepy down there…all dark and weird and cobwebbed. A big, shadowy kind of place, you know? Stank to high heaven and you’d find rat droppings in the corners and hear things scratching around down there. One light bulb down there hanging on a string from the ceiling. There were mannequins everywhere…men, women, little kids. Boxes of parts. That light would cast all these creeping mannequin shadows on the walls. If you bumped that light bulb with a box or something, and I did it plenty of times, all those crazy mannequin shadows would start moving and dancing all around you. I think…oh man, this sounds bad…but I think if that light would have gone, I would have lost my mind.”
Mitch looked at him, rain running down his face.
It took a lot for a guy like Tommy to admit such things. It was hard on him to confess that there were really things that disturbed him, things like mannequins. That he would do so, was a sign of trust.
“We won’t be in there long,” Mitch told him. “And don’t feel goofy about it. I was scared of puppets when I was a kid and maybe I still am. When Chrissy…when Chrissy was little, she had this clown puppet with a battery in it. You know, or maybe you don’t, how those batteries just wear down on battery-operated toys? Well, sometimes they get weird and start talking by themselves. I go into her room one night to check her and down in her toybox, down at the bottom, that stupid clown puppet starts talking in this draggy, deep voice: ‘I want you to play with me,’ it says. Well, maybe it sounds like nothing now, but that night? All alone? Christ, I almost came out of my fucking skin.”
Tommy laughed. “Yeah, I guess we all got bullshit like that inside of us.”
Mitch edged into the parking lot, casting ripples before him. As he neared the factory, there was a prickling in his belly. This wasn’t excitement or even apprehension, this was more along the lines of terror. Like sneaking up to a casket in the dead of night, so you could reach out and swing up the lid, see what was waiting inside for you.
There was a sudden splashing.
Mitch and Tommy froze up. They had their guns and they had salt in their pockets. They figured they were ready.
“What the hell?” Tommy said.
A lone figure came around the side of the warehouse, running full out…or as full out as you could in two feet of standing water. A man. He charged out, falling flat on his face, swearing and shaking himself off, looking behind him and then getting up again, making for the front of Holbich and Sons. Right away, Mitch knew this was an ordinary person, just like he knew something was hunting him.
And then it showed itself.
Mitch made a gasping sound because he did not know what he was seeing. The thing was just too far off for them to illuminate it much with their lights. They were seeing it only by the pale light of the moon that broke a few fingers through from time to time.
“C’mon,” he told Tommy.
They raced across the inundated parking lot just as the guy made the front door, began pulling on it wildly, trying to get it open. The thing started scrambling in his direction and scrambling was very apt. Because this thing did not walk or run or even hobble, it skittered along on all fours like a monkey or maybe a spider. The guy saw it coming, then he saw the flashlight beams and Mitch and Tommy coming to his aid.
“Watch out!” he said. “There’s a thing…it’s a…”
There he broke off like his imagination had failed him in describing what exactly was after him. Mitch and Tommy got between him and the thing, put their lights on it. The blinding light in its face stopped it cold.
“Jesus,” Tommy said.
And that pretty much was what Mitch was going to say.
The creature was manlike in that it had four limbs, but those limbs were far out of proportion to its body, long and sinewy like the legs of some insect. It was hairless and glistening with rain, just dead white and blotchy, its torso covered with a fine cobwebbed growth. It rose up on those two hind limbs and its arms were long and apish, the left at least a foot longer than the right and covered in fleshy knobs. The right side of its face was human or nearly, but the left was horribly distorted like the skin there had melted and ran, covering the eye and twisting the nose and drawing the edge of its mouth up in a crooked grin. That single eye appraised them with a flat hatred. It opened its mouth and it had fine, needle-like teeth.
“What the hell is that?” Tommy said.
“You tell me,” the guy said.
Mitch was staring at it, mildly repulsed, trying to figure out what it was or what nature had intended it to be. It was not just some walking corpse, though in many ways it resembled one, even the rancid stench wafting off it. But this was more than that, absolutely freakish and imperfect, something meant to be a man, but missing the mark by about a mile. It didn’t seem to have a neck. Its head seemed to grow right out of its upper chest.
It gnashed those teeth and made a low growling sound in its throat.
Mitch dropped his flashlight and put both hands on his Remington auto-loader. The thing made a grating, breathing sound, tensing for attack and Mitch felt his balls try to sneak up inside his belly. The leg muscles flexed and it moved. Mitch opened up on it, blowing a hole in its belly and knocking it flat into a tangle of spidery, twitching legs. It squirmed and howled and thrashed about, trying to right itself, the whole time great gouts of black blood gushed from its wound with a funny smell like spilled bleach.
“Give it another one,” the guy said.
Mitch did, punching a hole in its chest. It rose up and shook itself and then went down dead. The stink of that black stuff diffusing into the water around it was simply disgusting. Not so much bleach now, but mud and quarry slime.
Then they put their lights on it, trying to make sense of its obscene anatomy which was obviously neither this nor that. It seemed to be dissolving in the water, its skin coming off in globs that floated around it.
“Look at that, will ya?” the guy said.
Mitch was looking, all right. Just below its navel, below the hole he had put in it, there was a bulging mass like the mother of tumors. It was white like the creature itself, but blushed with pink. And there was no mistaking what it was…a face. This nightmare had a face and part of a bulbous head growing out of its belly like some kind of freak birth. That face was covered in a fine membrane of skin, plaited in those weblike growths, but you could see the suggestion of a mouth, a nose, the hollows of eyes, but unformed and embryonic. Right above that parasitic growth, the creature was laid open. Inside, it was just as pale as it was outside, but there was a suggestion of something pink in there.
“Christ, Mitch, it’s like a sideshow thing, you know?” Tommy said. “Something they keep in one of those jars. A bucket birth.”
The guy with them nodded, wiping rain from his face. “And…holy shit…look! It don’t have no, no…you
