» Mon Nov 12, 2012 5:12 am Toy Box
As the sun dipped behind the mountains, erasing the last vestiges of light from the sky and turning the desert an inky black, Norrec found what he thought would be the perfect hiding place for the night. From a distance, he’d thought it had been a pile of ruins, some ancient mass of wrecked buildings and piled refuse. As he’d gotten closer, the twisted shadows had taken a new shape. The hulking arch that sat at the ruins’ edge had revealed itself to be a massive sign. “Welcome to the Toy Box! The Greatest Fair on Earth!”
Hefting his bag higher on his shoulder, Norrec had confidently strode into the fairgrounds to set up camp. Once he’d set fire to a barrel full of broken crates, the thief opened his bag to count his latest catch. In all the history of New Vegas, he’d never heard of anyone pulling off a robbery like the one he’d managed that very morning. It had taken months of practice, but when he’d walked in, stolen nearly twenty thousand caps, and gotten out with only one shot fired, it had been worth it.
The duffel bag he’d used to hold his “winnings” spilled a mixture of caps, NCR, Legion, and casino currencies. Finding someone to exchange them all would be expensive, but he’d just robbed the only town that would accept all four. With the NCR, the casino bosses and possibly Mr. House himself on his tail, Norrec didn’t want to risk another visit to New Vegas for a long time.
Halfway through sorting his income, something made the thief sit still and listen. For a moment, he thought he’d heard something other than the rustle of cash and the snap of the fire. As he slowed his breathing, he thought he could hear something rustling in the dirt and gravel that made up the fair’s earthen ground. At first he thought it must have been a rat, but no…. it was too loud. From the way he heard the gravel moving, he knew it had to be something bigger.
When he stood, the sound stopped. Whatever had made the noise had seen him stand and had decided to become still. The fire had all but ruined his night vision, and Norrec could see little more than vague shapes beyond the circle of light. Finally convinced that he’d heard a dog or cat in the darkness, he turned to sit. The moment his eyes left the shadows, the long scraqe of shifting gravel returned. What made his heart jump was how much louder it had become. Unlike a moment before, when it had sounded like something moving around, now it seemed like something was being dragged through the dirt.
In an instant he was on his feet searching his pitch black surroundings. Once again, the sound stopped as soon as he looked away from the fire. Concentrating, Norrec’s eyes fell on the nearest of the hulking buildings. As his eyes adjusted, he managed to read the “Hall of Mirrors” sign that hung over the broken doorway. Next to the door, some kind of mannequin or statue, stood watch over the door. It was probably some warning that children shouldn’t enter without an advlt.
However, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, they found the odd shape that was attached to one of the mannequin’s hands. It was as though the statue was holding something, like a wagon or… Maybe it was dragging it across the ground. As that realization came to him, the mannequin moved, walking swiftly into hall of mirrors, dragging its prize along behind it.
“What the [censored]?” Norrec shouted, drawing his handgun. The figure vanished without pause, the sound of it dragging something across the ground following it. His heart suddenly racing, the terrified thief tried to slow his breathing, to keep his arm from shaking.
At that moment, he had two options: he could either follow his stalker into the hall of mirrors, or he could grab his winnings and run. Shaking off the dread in his chest, Norrec strode into the building. He wasn’t going to let some psycho hermit scare him. He’d singlehandedly outwitted everyone in New Vegas. This guy would be a walk in the park.
The moment he stepped into the hall of mirrors, Norrec realized what he should have figured out the moment he’d left the firelight. With no electricity, the hall was about as bright as a well digger’s ass. Once he’d crossed the threshold he couldn’t see so much as the nose on his face, let alone follow someone. Before he had a chance to think of a solution, the electric lights overhead blinked to life.
After so long staring at shadows, Norrec was blinded by the sudden illumination. As his eyes adjusted, he found at least a dozen people standing around him.
Because his vision was little more than a blur, he could only see that they were there, and each one seemed to be standing several feet away. Even with his impaired perception, he could tell that they weren’t actually moving. In fact, as he stared at the shapes, his eyes half closed against the painful light, Norrec noticed that they didn’t even seem to be looking at him.
At last his eyes stopped hurting and he could see the figures around him. When he stretched a hand out, hoping to get an idea of perspective, his fingers met smooth glass. Instead of narrow, curved and twisted mirrors, Norrec found a single clear, glass pane. Beyond the glass was a small room decorated to resemble a Norman Rockwell living room.
Within, a mannequin, dressed as a house wife was frozen, halfway to putting a plate on the table. Though the statue was lifelike, its motionless state left it looking surreal. Behind him, Norrec found another diorama, this one containing two child-like mannequins both watching a TV. The hallway he was in had two rooms on each side forming a narrow walkway to a fifth that led around a corner. Each room had a picturesque setting of a pristine family. And each and every frozen mannequin was facing away from the hallway.
Mildly shaken by this disturbingly well-kept dioramas, Norrec turned his attention to the square of illuminated earth outside the hall of mirrors. He glanced back to his fire, which was beginning to die down and the pile of cash waiting for him to spend. All he had to do was make a run for it and escape into the desert. Before he could make up his mind, every hair on the back of his neck stood on end. Some instinct, the same thing that had kept him alive during the robbery flared to life. He didn’t know how, but at that moment, Norrec knew he was being watched.
In one, fluid motion Norrec turned and raised his hand cannon. The confidence in his fire arm to protect him was not misplaced. During the robbery, the thief had used that fifty caliber handgun to mow down the one guard too stupid to get out of his way.
At the end of his sights, Norrec found the mannequin in diorama at the end of the hallway. She was wearing a white dress with a red sash, her black hair cut in the classic fifties style, and she was staring right at him. She wasn’t just watching the hallway, but actually staring at him.
Keeping his weapon trained on the motionless figure, Norrec slowly approached the glass wall at the end of the walkway. As he neared, he noticed how inhuman the mannequin appeared. The most obvious example was we her smile. It was inhumanly long, stretching all the way up to her cheek bones. Her skin was also unnaturally perfect, free of any discoloration, blemishes or marks, and yet, at the same time, it also looked real. However, the moment he got a close look at her eyes, any illusion of humanity vanished.
Not only were they obviously made of porcelain, shiny, and flawless, but they were oversized to the point of being grotesquely disproportionate to her face. They bulged from the mannequin’s skull. The whites were perfectly white, like pearls, the iris, a brilliant blue as bright as the sky at noon, and the pupils mirror black.
When he moved to get a closer look, the mannequin’s hand darted to press against the glass. Norrec leapt backwards, instinctively squeezing the trigger. A small dot of shattered glass formed the center of a spider web of cracks in the window pane. However, the glass didn’t break, and the mannequin didn’t move again.
Getting himself under control, Norrec looked closer at the bizarre figure that stood beyond the cracked glass. He had to convince his panic-addled mind that she was just a robot, or mechanized mannequin. As he stared, he could spot small imperfections here and there, spots where her “skin” had been stretched or pinched to fit properly. Whatever had been used bore a remarkable resemblance to actual human skin. Invariably though, Norrec’s eyes were drawn back to the porcelain orbs that stared at him.
When he finally managed to tear his gaze away from the mannequin, the thief glanced to his right, where the hall continued. As he might have expected from a hall of mirrors, the pathway wound. However its edges, twists and turns were defined by the rooms. Moving away from the glass, he ventured further into the maze of dioramas.
By the time he’d rounded another corner, he could begin to notice a pattern. The further into the hall of mirrors he moved, the less well kempt the rooms became. At first it was barely noticeable, dust on the glass or cobwebs in the rooms. Even the hallway itself had become grimier, a layer of caked on dust covering the floor, while the lights overhead become dim, flickering bulbs of illumination.
However, when he reached the third bend in the hall, he was presented with a glass wall covered by a layer of dust. The room within was covered in cobwebs and dust, and even the two mannequins within looked as though they were beginning to fall apart. Their perfect skin had dulled, their hair falling away and one was even missing one of its large eyes.
As he watched, the other mannequin, a man who looked like his arm was ready to fall off, turned to stare at the interloper. When the half rotted figure faced him, Norrec thought he had lost his mind. The urge to start screaming uncontrollably suddenly gripped him. A bladder loosening terror unlike anything he’d felt before gripped his heart. The sudden realization of the danger he was in, of what he was looking at… of what figure in the dark had been dragging, hit him full force.
“Oh [censored], oh [censored], oh [censored],” he swore, backing away. Like all the other mannequins in the hall of mirrors, this man had an impossibly wide grin, but unlike the others, his skin had split. From his ear to his chin, the skin had torn revealing a streak of whitish-grey material beneath. Though it had taken him a moment to realize it, Norrec recognized bone wrapped in rotting flesh.
Each and every mannequin he’d seen must have been the same. They’d had their eyes plucked out, their skin bleached and pulled over some kind of mechanical sinew, and then that insidious smile stitched into their dead flesh.
When he’d backed away from the dust coated window, he’d inadvertently put his back against another room. Even as he leaned against the glass, shaking and sweating, Norrec felt eyes on the back of his head for a second time. Maybe it was the subtle sound of something moving behind him. Maybe it was the vaguest shadow that had more or less formed in the hallway. Whatever the case, he knew someone, or something was standing directly behind him.
Gritting his teeth, Norrec turned, bringing his pistol up for the third time that night. He was met with yet another glass pane, so encrusted with filth and grime that it had become completely opaque. Only a dim light permeated through the grime.
Despite this layer of dust, Norrec could see a hulking figure standing beyond the glass. At first, he assumed it was another mannequin, some dead person who’d been stitched into some kind of oversized doll. When he moved to get a better look, the figure behind the glass knocked against the pane with something it held in its hand.
Shouting another curse, Norrec saw that the figure was holding someone’s arm. It was holding a half rotted arm that was missing two fingers, where as the remaining digits had been rotted down to nothing more that skeletal fingers.
“[censored] you!” Norrec shouted, his voice pitching higher than he wanted it to. He was breathing like he’d run a marathon, his heartbeat pounding in his ears. In response, the figure beyond the glass raised its arms, and the one it held, and pointed to the far end of the hallway.
Norrec’s eyes followed the skeletal fingers. Opposite from where he’d entered the hall of mirrors, a poorly lit room waited for him. It seemed to be where the end of the maze, the last diorama before he’d finally find who or what was behind all of this.
Pistol at the ready Norrec made slow deliberate steps toward the room. It took every ounce of his will not to turn and run, but he couldn’t shake the thought of the freak running around in this maze slitting his throat while his back was turned. It would be better just to face whoever was here, and put a bullet in them.
Once he’d passed through the threshold, Norrec found whom he suspected was behind every jump and scare in this freak show. A solitary overhead lamp illuminated a man hunched over a workbench in the center of the room. Because of the poor lighting, the thief couldn’t discern exactly how large the seemingly empty room was. However, when he saw what the man was working on, Norrec quickly forgot about anything that might have been in the darkness.
“Is that someone new?” a hollow, raspy voice asked. The man turned from his small workbench to look at Norrec. The dark hair that fell to his shoulders covered most of the man’s face, but did not hide the malicious smile that went from ear to ear. It was hauntingly similar to the decapitated human head that was lying on the man’s table.
A young woman, once someone who would have caught others’ gaze, lay there, her body long gone, staring at the ceiling with glass eyes. The same psychotic smile that was on each of the others dolls was stitched into her features.
“What the [censored] is this?!” Norrec shouted, hearing the screech in his own voice. Though he brought the handgun up to point at the monster, his hand shook too hard for him to believe he’d actually hit anything. The psycho seemed to lose interest in Norrec, turning back to the woman’s head. “That was you running around in there, you sick [censored]?”
The man turned back to Norrec, a cross between aggravation and impatience painted on his visage. For several, long moments, he stared at the robber, as though the weapon shakily aimed at his forehead meant nothing. At last, a long scowl twisted on the man’s face.
“Robby. He was the one giving you a scare; he can be such a little [censored]!” The man’s voice pitched a shade lower as he went from a calm tone to a near shout. The sudden vehemence caused Norrec to take an involuntary step backwards. “Robby, come out and apologize to your new brother.”
The sound of someone dragging something across the floor reached Norrec’s ears and sent a sphincter tightening panic through his body. One of the shadows that pressed around the workbench came into view. A mannequin, nearly a head taller than the robber and twice as wide stepped into view. Long, oily hair framed the same grotesque, glass-like eyes and horrific grin. And clutched in one hand, Norrec saw a bound form, roughly the size of a body, wrapped in blood stained cloth.
When “Robby” moved to take a step nearer, the thief reacted instinctively. The fifty caliber bullets made short work of the mannequin, each shot taking a hand sized chunk of metal and flesh and sprayed it across the room. When there was nothing more than a pile of machinery fused to human skin and tissue, Norrec let out a shaking breath. There was no way in [censored] hell he would let them make him a part of this collection of abominations.
Though he hadn’t reacted to the thunderous noise of Norrec’s handgun firing within an enclosed space, the man sitting at his workbench stood and went to the ruined remains of Robby. When he stooped to lift the severed and mangled head from the rest of the all but destroyed mannequin, Norrec thought he could see a hint of sadness. However, at that moment, he couldn’t care less. The victorious robber had seen enough of this freak show and was well and ready to put its psychotic mastermind out of his misery.
The last of the fifty caliber rounds ripped through the psycho’s left cheek, spattering chunks of his jawbone and skull across the room. For a moment, Norrec stared at his opponent, sure that he’d just made the wastes a better place. However, the moment passed when he noticed the lack of blood. With a portion of his jaw missing, this long haired sociopath should have been gushing blood. However, none came, and when he… it turned to face Norrec, the robber knew why. Instead of flesh and bone, the old man had a skull of steel and clockworks.
“Children,” the robotic monstrosity chimed in an almost melancholic voice. “Would you be sports and butcher this mother [censored]!” The sudden vehemence in the man’s voice upon ordering Norrec’s death sent a chill down the man’s spine. His breathing suddenly seemed to be the only noise in the room, a thundering wheeze that deafened him to the machinations around him. His fingertips going numb with terror, Norrec dropped his empty pistol and took a step back… only to run into something behind him.
Turning, already feeling warm liquid running down the side of his leg, the robber found another mannequin, blocking his retreat. This one was the woman who’d first shown her face, a smile still plastered across her visage. Her eyes bored into his, porcelain and unreal, and yet unflinchingly piercing. Behind her, dozens of others had gathered, all smiling, staring, waiting.
A long, unbroken scream ripped its way from Norrec’s lips as the creature reached for him. It was an animal howl, the last dying breath seeking its way out of his body.
“Stitch, stitch, stitch…” The Father absently muttered to himself. Doggedly, he worked on his latest creation, the remains of the interloper who’d turned Robby into a pile of embalmed flesh and wires. As he tugged the string tighter, the thief began to smile, his severed head at last beginning to resemble the others. Soon, he too would take his place in The Family. “Now there’s a smile!”
