Bloodstained Oz (6 page)

But there were no rats.

The dolls were moving on their own, toddling closer to her father’s
prone form. Her throat tightened as she watched them tentatively touching him,
as if to make certain her was not merely injured but properly dead. Gayle
stared for several heartbeats, saw the figure closest to her father grab hanks
of his hair and tug sharply, throwing its entire body into the effort.

Her mother made a soft noise and Gayle turned just in time to see one
of the larger dolls—a jester dressed in red and black, with a smile that
showed what seemed to be a hundred teeth—take her mother’s hand in both
arms and drag the woman’s arm upward. Fine red lines of blood trickled down
from where the jester’s cold white fingers touched her mother’s skin.

Gayle screamed.

The tiny figures let out screams of their own, angry hisses and cries
of warning. She ran for the stairs, her heart thundering in her chest, her
eyes wide and lips pulled back in terror. As she reached the fourth step, her
foot slipped and her shin scraped along the hard wooden edge, but Gayle only
gasped and dragged herself up, moving as fast as she could. The sound of a
hundred different porcelain feet followed her, louder and louder, closer and
closer, as she ascended.

Limping, wincing with every step, Gayle used her hands on the railings
to help steady and propel her upward. She reached the landing and risked a
look back. The dolls swarmed up the stairs in a wave of porcelain and paint.
Their tiny painted eyes stared at her and their minuscule mouths scowled and
laughed and shouted streams of filth and vitriol.

Throat raw, voice cracking, Gayle shrieked as she ran. Her room was so
close, but the pain in her shin was like a hammer pounding her leg. Still, she
was almost at her room. She could make it. She could…

She was wrong. A brilliant lash of pain caught the meat of her calf
and Gayle hissed at the sudden explosion. It was the jester, and in his hand
he held her father’s whittling knife, the short blade looking more like a sword
in his hands. The tip of the blade was wet with her blood.

Gayle kicked at it with her good leg catching the doll in its grinning
face. The thing let out a squawk as her foot slapped against its cold ceramic
smile, and it slammed into the wall. The jester shattered, and was silent.
The other dolls paused when they saw what she had done. Gayle stared at the
fragments of the jester’s head, surprised by the ease of the thing’s
destruction.

And then it stood up again, half of its painted face caved in, and ran
at her a second time, crying out in rage as it came. Fragments of the broken
head spilled to the ground with every step it took.

Gayle got through the threshold into her room and slammed the door,
pressing her body against the wood to add her weight to the barrier.

Her father’s whittling blade slid under the door, jabbing through her
slipper and into the meat of her right foot. She jumped back, whimpering as
the space under the door was darkened by the mass of the tiny figures trying to
get in.

She wanted her father, her mother, anyone who could come to her and
take her away from the nightmare. A figure no larger than a mouse was pushing
through the gap under her door, and Gayle surveyed the darkness of her room,
seeking something to use as a weapon. She dropped to the floor and frantically
ran her hands over the boards until she got hold of one of her shoes. The heel
was scuffed and worn, but still solid enough for her purposes. The tiny figure
screamed as the first blow broke its body in half, and kept screaming until she
shattered its head into fine powder. Even then the remains of it twitched and
tried to move.

More of the things pushed against her door and beat at it with their
hands, their bodies.

Gayle could barely breathe. Her pulse was so loud in her ears. She
searched the darkness again.

Her closet!

She moved as quickly as she could and slipped into the dark cubicle,
closing the door and pulling her winter coat from its hanger. Gayle shoved it
against the floor and wedged the fabric into the narrow opening.

The sounds of the things were muffled now, not by one door but by two,
and she allowed herself to shiver. The darkness was complete and Gayle curled
herself up into a ball and pressed her body against the back wall of the
closet. She rocked and whimpered under her breath as the knocking sounds
continued.

How long did it last? She didn’t know. The sounds continued the same
way for a long time and then the noises changed, grew louder as the porcelain
nightmares finally managed to get through the door and into her room. Their
feet tapped across the wood and their voices, small and faint, came drifting
through the air with promises of pain and death.

Gayle made herself stay as still as she could, tears silently burning
tracks on her cheeks, nose running. The air in the closet was stale and hot
and she wanted her mommy more than ever before in her life. Sweat beaded on
her skin and left her thirsty. Her bladder ached and she needed to pee so
badly she thought she would just explode.

Then she heard her father’s voice and in a rush of hope and relief, all
of those discomforts vanished.

“Daddy?” Her heart thumped so hard in her chest she thought it might
break her ribs.

She heard her father’s voice a second time, angry, demanding something.
The words were hard to make out, but the tone was clear.

And then she heard the other voice, a cold whisper that seemed to dry
the sweat from her body and chill her feverish flesh. Whatever spoke to her
father had a presence she could feel even through the layers of the house, and
it made her want to run, to hide even deeper in her closet, as if that were
possible.

Her father did not speak again, but he screamed. Daddy’s sounds were
enough to make her cry out loud, and Gayle covered her mouth with both hands to
muffle the noise of her sobs. Her eyes were wide open, but there was nothing
for her to see, nothing but a darkness that seemed to swallow her and savor the
taste of her trembling flesh.

Then her father’s voice was suddenly silenced.

Her mother cried out, a short, anguished wail that ended abruptly as
the wall behind Gayle shook with a brutal impact.

Gayle could do nothing but listen. She heard the sounds of the
porcelain people moving around her room, trying to find her and then struggling
against the closet door, once again striking the wood with their bodies and
whatever weapons they could find.

From somewhere below she felt it move, that fearful thing, that horrid
presence that had first made her parents cry and then silenced the sound of
their voices.

After that the dolls quieted down enough that she could hear the sound
of footsteps slowly climbing the stairs. She listened for an eternity as those
steps came closer, until the door leading to her bedroom creaked open with
dreadful slowness.

“What have we here? Have you found another?”

The words were spoken with care, enunciated in the tones of a foreigner
trying to hide his accent. The voice that spoke them was cold; the words
resonated through her body and made her head hurt.

The dolls answered, one hissed voice talking for the sum of the small
army. “She is there, master, a small one, a child of these people.”

Four more steps and she could feel it, feel the hairs on the back of
her neck rise as whatever lay on the other side of the door now stood just
beyond it. So close. Her breath plumed with the sudden cold, and goose bumps
rose on her skin.

“Yes, I can smell her.” From above she heard scratching noises, the
wood protesting as something dragged across it, clawing the door.

“Are you there, child? Will you tell me your name?”

Gayle shook her head, too scared to speak. Her throat felt as if she’d
swallowed half the dust in the fields, and Gayle pushed herself against the
farthest wall again, and whimpered.

“Ah, well, I have other things to attend to this evening. For now, I
take my pleasure from the scent of your terror. How long will you hide there,
girl? It will be interesting to see. I look forward to watching your eyes
while fear breaks your mind. Another time, though. I’ll let you simmer in
your fear until I return.”

For a moment, she felt it hesitate. Then the thing left. She could
sense its absence, just as she had its presence. Like the air before a big
storm, she could feel the atmosphere change when it arrived, and now she felt
it again now. She could feel it as surely as she felt the aches from the small
wounds she’d earned in the night. The temperature rose almost as soon as it
departed, and wherever it might have gone, it seemed to have taken the
porcelain people with it, for there was only silence beyond the closet door.

Still, she stayed in the closet, afraid to move and even more afraid of
what she would find when she left the darkness and sought the comfort of her
parents.

      Hank woke abruptly, blinking away the
darkness of sleep, vision out of focus as he tried to make sense of the gray
lightlessness of his prison cell. Not dark, really, not with the dim lights
that burned forever out in the corridor of the cell block. But night, as far
as night ever went here.

      The illumination flickered as though a
lightning storm was passing by.

      A scream rose and fell, the furious roar
of a murdered man who didn’t know he was dead yet. Hank blinked and shook the
fog of sleep from his head, and then he realized that it wasn’t a scream at
all, but a horn blaring over and over and over again.

      Red lights began to blink out in the
corridor.

      At last, the grogginess of sleep fell
away completely and he understood that it was the fire alarm. Somewhere in the
prison, a fire burned.

      “Shit!” Hank snapped, jumping up. He
pulled his pants and boots on as quickly as he could, wiped his hands on his
dirty T-shirt, and then pressed his face against the bars, trying to get a
glimpse out into the corridor.

      A guard ran down the hall, muttering the
Lord’s name over and over and over again, pumping a shotgun as he went. A
dozen prisoners shouted to him but he did not so much as glance into any of the
cells.

      “We’re gonna fucking fry in here!” cried
a voice from further down the block. “We’re gonna burn!”

      “Maybe that’s fate,” said someone else
– Haskell Prosser, he thought. “Hell’s what we deserve.”

      “Speak for yourself, Prosser,” Hank
snarled. He stood back and shook his head, glancing around the cell. Much as
he hated it, and as much as the fear festered in his gut, the skinny little
preacher fuck was probably right. They were going to roast alive.

      “God damn!” Hank roared, and he banged
on the bars with his fists, then laid his head on the metal.

      It was cool.

      He blinked, then wrapped his hand
tightly around one of the bars. The metal wasn’t just cool, it was downright
cold. Wherever the fire was, it was nowhere near this cell block. That was
one piece of good news, at least.

      His little blast of hope was interrupted
by the thunder of a shotgun further along the hallway, down the way the guard
had run. It echoed, but no sound followed it.

      Then, with a clatter, the lights went
out. At least, the dim gray illumination disappeared, leaving only the
emergency lights, the red blinking that flashed again and again, strobing the
cells and the bars and the grim faces of hard men.

      Something rushed back the way the guard
had come, moving down the corridor so quickly that it was little more than a
black shape in the flashing red light. Hank barely caught a glimpse.

      There came another clatter, a bang of
metal, and all of the doors on cell block E opened at once, swinging out an inch
or two. Relief flooded through Hank and he laughed softly, the uneasiness of
the prior moments eclipsed by this turn of events.

      “Emergency procedures!” called an
inmate, triumphantly. “They can’t just let us burn to death. Got to let us
loose.”

      Men started to push out into the
corridor, tentatively at first. Awash in that crimson light, they did look a
little bit like the residents of Hell. Then they broke, like wild horses at a
sudden noise, and ran for the doors that would take them into the main hall and
then out into the yard.

      Hank held onto the bars of his cell door
and for a moment a ripple of fear went through him and he was tempted to pull
the door shut, lock himself back inside. It was a wild, lunatic impulse and he
had no idea where it had come from. He laughed at the foolishness of it, then
turned and ran to his bunk, where he had hidden the emerald necklace he had
found earlier in the day. It was warm to the touch, just as the bars had been
cold.

      This was his future. These jewels, the
gold, they were going to give him another life, a kind of life he had never
even allowed himself to imagine.