Dorrie found herself in a small room lit only by a bare bulb hanging from a socket near the chain she’d found. Occasionally it flickered, threatening to go out, and during those brief blinks of dimness, Dorrie’s heart skittered in her chest. She looked around and determined that she was in some kind of storeroom. There were metal bracer poles that formed racks with shelves to either side wall and along the back. On these were mostly boxes, big brown moving boxes like she’d used when she first moved out and into her place on Cerver Street. In fact—she squinted in the poor light, frowning as she approached one of the boxes—it looked like her handwriting, scrawled in loopy script on the cardboard sides. However, instead of labels such as KITCHEN or BEDROOM or even BOOKS, the boxes closest to her were marked NEW THIGHS, EXTRA HEADS, and stranger things: WHERE THE LIGHTS GO WHEN THEY GO OUT. ENDS. PORTABLE PORTALS.
She frowned, reaching a hesitant hand toward the nearest box, one marked DECORATIONS. She pulled it toward her. It came toward her so fast that it seemed as if another force from the other side gave it a push, and surprised, she let go of the corner she held. The box spilled over onto the floor, and the “decorations” tumbled out.
She covered her mouth with her hand to keep from gagging and stepped back, horrified that one of them might roll toward her feet. Globs of something yellowish and congealed and veined with white and red lay scattered about the floor. Tiny ornament hooks speared the globs, and a whitish crust that Dorrie couldn’t help thinking was skin seemed to seal them inside the globs, as if they had begun to heal and grow around the hooks.
Oh God. Oh my God, it’s fat. Chunks of fat. Balls and beads and bubbles of fat. Baubles of fat. The reiterated thought drove bile up into her throat. Dorrie took several long breaths to fight the nausea.
Behind her, she heard stiff movement, the scuffing of something inflexible on the floor, and cruel giggling. She turned and jumped, a strangled little cry escaping her throat, and staggered back a little against the box-lined shelves.
The mannequins that were crowded at the far end of the room—there were four of them, and they took up a significant part of the small room’s space—regarded her with cold, painted eyes. Not unseeing eyes, she thought with dread. They see me, all right. They’re watching me.
Judging me, she was tempted to think. A stupid thought, but it seemed right, all the same. The cool, naked forms, cream-colored, composed of bald heads, curving breasts, tiny waists, and small hips, posed, waiting. Each of them was propped up on long legs. One had no arms. Another sported only the bent arm, whose hand, connected by a seam at the wrist, rested on the hip. The third had two arms, at least down to the elbow, and the fourth had one long bent leg coming out of the shoulder socket. From everywhere that body part met body part, they bled out from the seams. In the quiet that hung between them, Dorrie could hear the blood droplets hitting the concrete floor, making little starbursts of red at their feet.
They stood in what were likely habitual display poses from their respective department store days, the flattering stances of supermodels and actresses. Their placement suggested a private conversation, an exclusive meeting of the beautiful people, a chick session of hen-pecking, catfighting, backstabbing, and two-faced, double-edged sweet talk. Dorrie had been the outside conversation subject of many of these groups, from grammar school straight through college. Cheerleaders, sorority sisters, prom queens, and princesses with perfect bodies and beautiful faces and their pick of any boy around—girls who found her weight first a thing of disgust and ridicule as a child, then a thing of abject horror as teenagers, and finally, a thing of hushed and whispered pity as college coeds. Her self-conscious loathing of those girls had first begun to finally dissipate, ironically enough, with her neighbor Cheryl, who seemed above needing to remind the world that fat women made her look thinner, or needing to maintain someone else’s discomfort to lessen her own. But she remembered the stances, the conspiratorial whispers and nods of the head, the look of superiority in their eyes. Her mother told her once that all girls were insecure and that all teasing was only to draw attention away from those insecurities from the safety of mob mentality.
Maybe that was true of some. Some were just bitches.
She’d come to find the world did contain women like Cheryl, who moved with unassuming grace, whose beauty seemed present but immaterial. She’d thought that maybe she’d reached a point in life where she was willing to attribute those qualities to other beautiful women, to make all modelesque women less powerful monsters and more vulnerable human beings. And to reinforce that idea, Dave had told them a little about his ex-girlfriend in the car on the way to Oak Hill, how she worried that people wouldn’t think she was smart enough or capable enough, how it made her feel like a helpless little girl when men leered at her, but how in spite of those things, she stumbled through. She tried to make informed decisions, tried to read the paper to learn about things to talk about (she also encountered, more often than not, people utterly uninterested in actually talking to her about anything important, or hearing what she had to say.) Maybe women like Cheryl felt insecure and scared and unsure of themselves.
But the looks on the faces of the mannequins masked no fears and insecurities of their own. Those looks, which seemed to observe and ultimately despise every part of her without any movement whatsoever of the eyes, chilled her. Those looks of hate meant retribution. They meant cruel pranks and torments that sometimes bordered on dangerous. They wanted to, in a sense, eat her alive with their hate.
And they stood between Dorrie and the only door out of the store room.
Without taking her eyes off the mannequins, she reached behind her, feeling for the top of one of the boxes, and stuck her hand in, hoping for (Oh God, anything, anything at all but blood and guts and body parts and—) something to use as a weapon. Her hand closed around something cold and hard, and she pulled out a tire iron.
Oh, thank God.
“Aren’t you going to cry, Dorrie?” The mouth of the mannequin with no arms didn’t move, but its voice, eerily muffled, rattled around its insides, trapped, a vicious animal waiting to spring. It sounded, Dorrie thought, vaguely familiar, from another time and place. Ashley. Ashley Tiller from middle school, blonde and blue-eyed—a girl whose power was secured through whispers behind the backs of hands and displays of callousness in the lunchroom.
“Uh…excuse me?”
The mannequin with the leg in its shoulder socket tilted its head with a stiff scuffing sound. “You were always such a crybaby. Whiny little Dorrie with her fat ass and her hurt feelings, bitching about why everyone was always so mean to her.” Natalie Romanieri from high school, the beautiful dark-haired cheerleader, the girl who only dated college boys, whose locker was more treacherous to navigate past than any girls’ room or gym locker room in the school.
Heat flushed Dorrie’s face. All the powerless anger and insecurity drove her free hand into a fist, set her eyes alight. There were a hundred things she wanted to say—almost twenty years’ worth of comebacks and insults running around in her head. But when she opened her mouth to speak, none of them came out.
“Do you have something to say to us, Dorrie? No? I didn’t think so. You never did. Your mouth was always full.” That one hit home with aching familiarity, down to the words verbatim. Jennifer Rossler, another high school girl, pretty, popu lar, wild, and looking to lash out at anyone that she could showboat over to draw more attention to herself.
A fresh wave of angry heat washed over Dorrie. She swung the tire iron in front of her.
The one with upper arms laughed. “What do you think you’re going to do with that, Dorrie? Really, this unhealthy, I daresay borderline obsessive, hostility you have toward women who have everything you don’t is just sad, frankly. Do you really intend to swing a tire iron at us?” And finally, Madison Monroe, from Seton Hall University, with her double-edged kindness and her pitying eyes. By then, even if Madison had actually possessed a single genuine bone in her body, Dorrie would h
ave hated her. She was the woman that girls like Ashley and Natalie and Jennifer grew into.
“I will,” Dorrie said, “if you don’t let me out that door.”
The one she’d come to think of as Natalie shook her head. “Not likely. You can’t fit.” She kicked her shoulder-leg out toward the door. “Not a lard-ass like you.”
Dorrie looked at the door. It did look smaller—a lot smaller. Not so small that she couldn’t squeeze, maybe, but…smaller, definitely. She felt acutely aware of her body and its dimensions, her hips, all the places of her that billowed out enough to be a potential problem.
She surprised herself by answering, “I’ll get out that door if I have to ram one of you through the wall to widen it. One way or another, ladies.”
With jerking steps, Madison moved toward her. “How about you try that?”
Dorrie took a few wide steps around it and headed toward the door. Madison stepped in front of her, moving surprisingly fast on such stilted legs.
“Oh, uh, Dorrie?” Jennifer said sweetly. “Why don’t you let us give you a makeover? Girls to girl. First, we’ll rip all the fat off you. Then we’ll stretch your legs and puff up your lips and paint your face. Let us play.”
Dorrie was absolutely terrified. She knew that tone; she knew they meant to do everything they said. For the second time that night, she surprised herself by swinging the tire iron into Madison’s perfectly curved fiberglass waist. It cracked, caving in a little.
Madison swung one of her upper arms and smacked Dorrie hard across the face. The pain sent white sparks across her eyes. The mannequin dropped another blow down on the dip between her shoulder and neck. Sharp pain flared out into her neck and back. She swung up, the tire iron catching Madison in the jaw, and the face first cracked then caved in. The empty cavity behind the face filled with blood, which spilled out onto the floor. The mannequin wailed in pain and sank to the ground.
The mannequins still standing collectively sent up a wail to join with Madison’s. It sounded to her like a siren. Blood poured out of their seams where the body parts met, streaming down their bodies and puddling on the floor.
Dorrie quickly stepped over the puddles to the door and yanked it open. Gagging, she tumbled out.
And she found herself on the quad.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Dave looked around the quad for his friends. Dorrie leaned against a corner where the buildings came together, her hand on her heart, catching her breath. Jake, his whole body shaking, crouched on his knees over by the gate where they’d come in. Steve sat slumped against the bench where the paper creatures had beaten him unconscious, bleeding and breathing in huge gasps. And Erik rose slowly to his feet in the center of the quad, in the dip where the hills sloped down into a little valley, away from the buildings.
“Hey, you all okay?” he called out to them, and, seeming to notice each other for the first time, the pain and uncertainty on their faces eased. They weren’t alone anymore. They rose with effort and made their way toward each other.
They all met in the middle by Erik.
“I’m confused,” Jake said. “Why did it bump us all out here?”
Erik shrugged. “I have to admit, I kind of thought it would try to bury us alive in there.”
“So, what, is that it? Did we have our trial by fire?” Jake shoved his hands in his jeans pockets. He looked very washed-out. “Are we done?”
A creaking sound in the sky, like something about to fall over, drew their attention upward. Overhead, stars hung scattered across the sky, but they could also see dark and swirling spots, huge vortexes that ate the stars. A trail of black spun out behind them, spitting out the processed light as glittering dust. Directly above them, strange flat islands floated across the night. They measured maybe fifty feet long and dropped sprays of dirt and sand into their hair. On many of them, black trunks and branches grew, and grotesque organic shapes with eyes and teeth in all the wrong places peered down at them from the branches.
“I don’t think so,” Dave said. He took a few steps and looked around. The last time a Hollower had put them in the middle of a dimensional crossroads like this, it had been hurt, maybe dying, and it just cranked out whatever odd images were in its head. The physical stuff—the houses with meat peeling off their frames, the lawnful of faces, the geysers of blood and rocketing jets of bone—that had all been what the Hollower itself was afraid of. He was sure they hadn’t hurt this one, or even ruffled it very much. So what was it doing? Experimenting? This…this was like the Hollower was still tapping into collective memory and smearing its own across that, a layer of its experiences over theirs. Maybe in doing that, it could accomplish what probing their fears couldn’t.
“What is this place?” Dorrie drew closer to Jake.
Before anyone could answer, a rumble like thunder nearly shook them off balance. One of the islands stopped overhead, and it took a moment before they realized they should—
“Run!” Dave said, and, dragging Steve, hurried up the side of the hill. They scattered, but the impact of the island knocked them over.
“Okay, okay. Everybody, let’s just go over by the catacomb door and figure out what we should do ne—” The words died in his throat as Dave stood up and turned around.
They were in the parking lot. Dave glanced back to the entrance they had used. Huge chains with thick links threaded in and out of the gate, with padlocks sporadically gathering and locking the chains. Curling barbed wire spiraled along the top. Wooden boards completely covered the windows. A broken-off piece of board, hanging from a rusted chain, said, “One more game.”
“What the hell?” Erik came up alongside him. “What’s it doing?”
Steve, with the help of Jake and Dorrie, limped up to join them. “It kicked us out? That doesn’t make any sense. I find it hard to believe it’s just going to let us walk out of here.”
“I don’t think it is,” Dorrie said. “Look at that sign. It’s still messing with us.”
“Well, I’ve got nothing.” Jake indicated the gate with a wave of the hand. “If it won’t let us back inside, I can’t see how we’re supposed to find it.”
“Dave!”
Dave felt his skin grow cold. It was Cheryl’s voice. He turned to the car—his car. It looked like someone sat in his passenger seat. The dark hair hung from the bowed head, obscuring the face, but he thought he recognized her anyway. He jogged and then broke into a run, the others following behind him. He vaguely heard a warning from Erik that it wasn’t Cheryl, but he dismissed it. He had to know. Had to see.
When he got to the car, though, the figure was gone—no trace of anyone in the passenger seat or anywhere else in the car. Dave slumped a little where he stood, and Steve clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Who was it?”
“Cheryl,” he said. “It was Cheryl. Well, it was something that looked and sounded like Cheryl.”
“Uh, guys?” Jake tapped them on the back, and they turned to see what had drawn Jake’s attention. The paved parking lot was melting. The few other cars in the lot groaned as they sank into the spreading ocean of liquid blacktop.
“We have to go,” Dave said.
“We can’t! Who knows if we’ll get another chance at this thing?”
Dave turned on Steve. “We won’t have any chance if the parking lot drowns us where we stand.” He dug in the pocket for his keys and made his way around to the driver’s side. Erik took the shotgun seat.
“This is what it wants,” Dorrie said. “If we get in that car—”
“If we don’t, baby,” Jake interrupted gently as Steve climbed in the backseat, “we might be in bigger trouble. It’s the lesser of the two evils.” He tugged her to the car. “I promise it’ll be okay.”
She smiled at him, but she looked sad. “You can’t promise that.” But she got in the car anyway, and he followed.
Steve groaned as he watched his own car, traded with the police cruiser before he drove over, disappear beneath a wave of asphalt.
/>
“Hurry,” Erik said through tight lips as Dave tried the ignition.
The car started, and he threw it into drive, heading for the hill and the main road that ran parallel to the bottom of it. A sheet of pavement heaved in front of him, and he swerved around it, narrowly missing the floe in the liquid mess of the parking lot. They all cried out when the car jumped, the back wheels pulling out of road reduced to tar right under them.
Dave’s car shot through the open gate and out onto the main road, heading by instinct to the Olde Mill Tavern.
After a moment, Erik said, “Okay, what in blue hell was that?”
“It wanted us out,” Dorrie said. “Although I can’t imagine…” Her sentence trailed off. They all noticed it at about the same time.
There were no other cars on the road. Normally that would not have been so odd at that hour of the night, except that there were none in the parking lots, none on the street, none anywhere. There were no lights in any of the store or diner windows, no signs lit up, and the street lamps winked out as they drove by each one. The street signs glowed, though; they hung slanted on the posts, the names a series of black smudges across their luminous faces.
The most unsettling part about the whole thing—the thing that made it abundantly clear that even though they’d driven away, they hadn’t really gotten away—was that there were people out on the street, walking, sitting, staring at the car as it drove by, going in and out of restaurants and diners. And none of them had a face. Not a one. None of them moved. They looked like mannequins, positioned to simulate life in a place that didn’t exist, a place devoid of anything human besides them.
“It’s never going to let us go,” Dorrie finally said. “We could drive out to California, drive right out into the damn Pacific Ocean, and it would twist the fish into sea monsters on our way to the bottom.”
Found You Page 21
