by Sergio Gomez
The room started to spin. Stephen reached out for the wall to keep himself from falling.
“Who are you?!” the man screeched, mockingly echoing Stephen’s own question to him.
His voice was high-pitched, childlike, so unexpected coming from a man that tall and wide. He was built like a pro-wrestler, but the voice could have belonged to a Looney Tunes character.
The masked man reached behind him and when his arm came back up, he was holding a double-headed ax. It shone oddly underneath the ceiling lights. Stephen was transfixed by the metal blade. It shouldn’t be here. This man shouldn’t be here. None of this should be happening…
With a two-handed grip the man brought the ax up high over his head. He took a giant step forward and brought the ax down in a tight arc.
The blade went through the top of Stephen’s head, splitting his skull in half down to the bridge of his nose. There was time for one passing thought that he should have let his wife screw him one last time…and then his dead body fell backward with the weapon still lodged in the head.
The masked man crouched down and tugged on the ax handle. It was lodged in there good, so he jiggled it around to a series of pops as the blade broke through the skull on its exit. Blood and brain matter slimed out of the top of Stephen Lang’s head in a puddle of goo.
The man stepped through it as he started for the stairs.
Stephen was taking too long. She wasn’t sure how many seconds had passed and the clock in this room was stuck flashing twelve o’clock, but she knew it had been too long.
Nadine pushed the covers off and got out of the bed. Without taking her eyes off the doorway, hoping Stephen would come through it any moment, she found her slippers on the floor and put them on. Now she really was wishing she’d changed into her pajamas. Going off to confront the unknown in a slinky thong and peek-a-boo bra didn’t make much sense. It was so cold in the room now that her hands felt numb.
Stephen hadn’t come back with some story about chipmunks on the porch. He was still downstairs, which meant something must be wrong.
She took in a deep breath and went out of the room.
Because of the lack of windows, it was quieter in the hallway than in the bedroom. Here, she couldn’t hear leaves rustling or the crickets chirping outside. It made her feel isolated, and suddenly, the quietness was suffocating.
Nadine licked her lips and called out, “Stephen! Is everything okay?”
No response.
Of course not, the cabin was sturdy and solid, so much so that voices didn’t seem to travel through it well. Sounds crashed into the dense wooden walls and died there.
She cursed whoever had built it this way as she walked down the hallway. At the top of the stairs she tried again. “Stephen? Can you hear me? Hello?”
Nadine was about to take her first step down, when someone that wasn’t her husband came around one of the walls and stopped at the bottom of the stairs. He stared up at her with eyes that were too dark and a face that didn’t move when he spoke, mockingly repeating her words back to her.
“’Teven! Hello! ’Teven! ’Teven!”
Nadine screamed, and ran.
Nadine slammed the bedroom door shut and threw the lock on, thinking that would be enough to keep him out.
Out in the hallway, the masked man lifted the ax to his shoulder, slick with blood and sharp on both ends. With a single heave, the head of the ax broke through and came out on Nadine’s side. She screamed.
“’Teven!” the masked man mocked. “Helllooo? ‘Teven?”
The ax head pulled back, tearing a hole in its wake, and a meaty hand came through in its place. “’Teven, is everything okay!?”
She could hear him laughing out in the hallway.
Nadine bit back a scream and scanned the room for a weapon, anything, something, please God anything, but nothing stood out to her. The lamps? Maybe. But would they even do enough damage?
Screw it. She had to try something. And she could hide in the closet. Gain the element of surprise.
Yes, that was it.
She ran over to one of the lamps and picked it up, relieved to find out it was hefty. The power cord ripped right off the wall as she ran to the closet with it.
Meanwhile, the masked man’s fingers felt around the doorknob for the lock like fat worms searching for food.
Nadine shut the closet door behind her, and a few seconds after that the masked man unlocked the bedroom door. He barged through, ax over his head, ready to strike.
But froze when he saw the room was empty. She was hiding.
“Where are youuuu?” He asked, lowering the ax and stepping through the room.
Inside the closet, Nadine held her breath while clutching onto the lamp.
She exhaled, as slowly and quietly as she could as she heard him hunkering toward her, his steps heavy against the wooden floor. She looked at the knob, but there was no lock. Of course not, it wouldn’t make any sense for there to be.
She was going to be found, it was a forgone conclusion at this point. And he’d found her out quickly, too. How the hell had he done that?
It didn’t matter. She readied the lamp.
A term she’d overheard once when Stephen was watching a football game popped into her head; Hail Mary. The phrase had stuck out to her because the religious overtone to the name seemed out of place with the rest of the sport. Here, in a life or death situation, the term was more fitting.
This was her Hail Mary moment.
The knob turned, and the door was flung open. Before her stood a gargantuan man, but even more frightening than his immensity was his hideous face. It was dry, bloated, and somehow too big for his head.
Without wasting another second, Nadine leapt forward and threw the lamp at him. The man got his arm up fast enough to protect his head and the lamp shattered. Thick shards of ceramic clattered to the floor. Blood ran down from the intruder’s elbow he’d used to block the attack, but that was all the damage he’d sustained. It wasn’t the knockout blow Nadine needed.
“Found you! Now, we have fun!” The words came out in a high-pitched squeal.
The masked man grabbed one of her wrists, and yanked Nadine out of the closet. She tried breaking free, but he was too strong. He held her in place as she screamed.
The masked man struck her over the head with the ax handle. Nadine’s body slumped to the side in his grip.
“Quiet now?” he asked.
Nadine couldn’t answer. The single blow had been all it took to knock her out.
“Good. Too much noise,” the masked man said to no one but himself.
He threw Nadine over his shoulder and started out of the cabin.
The smell of hay and feces hit her nostrils before she even opened her eyes. Behind that, there was another pungent smell she couldn’t place her finger on that made her nose itch. Nadine reached up to rub at her nose. The rattling of metal and cold steel digging into her skin made her eyes fly open.
She saw metal handcuffs around her wrists attached to chains, and wanted to scream, but couldn’t. Her mouth was stuffed with a rag that tasted vile and used. There was thumping coming from somewhere behind her, reminding her of the banging back at the cabin.
The cabin. Right. That was the last place she’d been before waking up here…
Stephen.
Her husband had gone downstairs to make sure that everything was alright—and it hadn’t been.
The thump came again. Faster, harder this time, easier to locate—and it wasn’t coming from outside the barn. Or even from inside. It was her heart beating so loud it was in her ears.
Nadine sprang to her feet, and felt cuffs around her ankles, too. Enough moonlight came into the room that she could follow the chains. They fed down into the ground, then came back up and were attached to an old, gigantic machine. That meant she’d have to be able to move a ton if she was going to do more than crouch.
Her thoughts raced, settling finally on one question, where am I?
In front of her, what she had thought was a solid wall opened up around the frame of a door. Nadine squinted against the sudden light shining into her face, but kept her eyes open to see what was coming. The light revealed the bales of hay all over this place, they were stacked up almost to the ceiling. Their dry grass littered the floor. Bones and dark stains that could only be blood lay among the fallen pieces of hay, too.
In the doorway stood a silhouetted figure. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a significant gut that spilled out the sides as much as it did the front. He stood as if he was hunched over. She remembered him. The masked man from the cabin.
Her thoughts shuffled again. I’m going to die.
She screamed; the sound muffled by the rag in her mouth. But outside, in the dense woods that she had been so freaked out by on the way here, there would be no one to hear her.
The man moved forward, stepping into the light coming from outside the barn. He grabbed an electrical lantern from the wall and turned it on, then strolled toward her. Standing in front of her, he was even more imposing now.
Even worse, the glow of the lantern revealed him in terrifying detail. The mask on his face was ill-fitting, cracked, and peeling. The eyeholes were uneven, one much bigger than the other. The mouth part was cut out in a crude rectangle, like a child’s first attempt at using scissors, but it was big enough that the man’s thick lips protruded through.
He licked at them. The bottom of his tongue rasped against the leather mask as he did this.
No, not leather. Skin. Dear God…he was wearing someone’s face…
“Hullo? Wakey, wakey!” he said in a voice that was much too loud.
Her stomach curled in on itself as she saw the dangling ears on either side of the face the maniac was wearing, saw the little hairs still stuck at the top of the dried flesh. She felt the tickle of vomit climbing up her throat. She fought against it, though, because she was sure to choke on it with the rag blocking its exit.
Fighting against it made her light-headed, and she thought she was going to faint. Nadine fought to stay awake. She had to stay awake. If he took the rag out, maybe she would be able to talk her way out of this.
“No, no,” the masked man said, seeing her eyes starting to roll to the back of her head. “Awake. Awake. Stay awake. It better awake.”
Nadine shook her head to comply—for her sake, not his.
The masked man bent down to be eyelevel with her. His lips were turned up into a grin that trembled like he didn’t have much control of their facial muscles. He poked her on the temple with his index finger.
“You…stay awake. Fun is just beginning.”
His voice…it was so childish, almost calming if it didn’t belong to a three-hundred-pound man wearing a face over his head, and if she wasn’t shackled inside of a remote barn deep in the woods and her husband…oh dear God, where was Stephen?
“I will take the rag out. You scream. If you want, you scream. Makes it easier.”
He nodded to her, like a parent telling their child it’s okay to fall over the first time the training wheels are taken off a bike. Then he pulled the rag out of her mouth.
The man rose up to his full six-foot-five height and walked over to a wooden shelf at the end of the barn. He opened a metal case that was sitting on the bottom level. It was heavy-duty, like something the military might keep their rifles stored in. But what the masked man pulled out wasn’t a rifle, or even a weapon, really.
The moonlight glinted off the chainsaw as the man swung around. There was another happy, sloppy grin on his face as he trotted back to her.
Now Nadine screamed. She screamed until her throat hurt.
The masked man pulled the cord at the end of the chainsaw and watched in fascination as the blade begin to speed up and the little engine coughed and barked.
Nadine’s screaming could be heard over the sound of it.
The masked man pulled the cord one more time, and the chainsaw revved to life.
“Fun for me!” he yelled out. “Not for you!”
“No! No! Please!” Nadine cried, watching the man inch the chainsaw toward her right leg.
“Yes! Yes!” he screamed back, but she didn’t hear him, because Nadine went unconscious. She was out cold before the metal of the chainsaw bit into her leg, waking her again to a nightmare she couldn’t escape.
Chapter 1
Fred wasn’t even settled in his room yet when his phone went off. He set his backpack on the computer desk and looked at the screen, the name GAVIN was displayed on it. Fred wasn’t much in the mood to talk to him right now, but he’d been dodging his friend’s phone calls all day, and if he didn’t answer, Gavin would just keep calling until he did.
May as well get it over with, he thought, hitting the answer button.
“Hey man. Sorry, I was busy all day,” he lied, slumping into the computer chair by his study desk.
“No worries,” Gavin said from the other end of the line. “I know how it is. Finals are killing me.”
“Yeah,” Fred replied. Now imagine if you had a job.
He wasn’t going to say that to him, but he sure thought it. Fred picked up a pencil and tapped its eraser against one of the spirals of a notebook on his desk. He was hoping Gavin would make this quick. He had studying to get to.
“But fuck school,” Gavin cackled. “I’ll be back in town this Friday.”
“I know,” Fred said. The words came out with more edge than he intended. He wanted to believe it was because of the long shift at the electronics store, but he wasn’t sure that was the whole truth.
“Did you check out the link I sent you?”
“No, Gav, I haven’t. Haven’t had the chance.” In fact, he didn’t even know what link he was talking about.
“What the hell, dude!” Gavin said to him, then to someone else he yelled, “Fuck you too, buddy!”
“Are you driving?”
“Yeah, to my homie Beadie’s house for a party. Can you say drunk freshman girls?”
Fred groaned. “Jesus man. Weren’t you just complaining about finals?”
“Yeah, those are in the AM. Nights are for partying.”
Fred laughed. It was kind of amazing that Gavin was an astrophysics major, on the Dean’s list almost every semester, but yet somehow found time to party all the time.
“Nah, but seriously,” Gavin continued. “I might see Brooke there. I’ll tell her about the cabin.”
“Cabin? What?”
“Holy shit, man. Did you not get my text messages or something?”
“I told you, I’ve been busy.”
Gavin sighed dramatically into the phone. “I rented a cabin for the weekend. I sent you a link with all of the details—and you’re coming. I’m not taking no for an answer.”
“I don’t know, man. I kind of just wanted to kick back and relax after the semester was over—”
“Shut up,” Gavin said. “You’re coming.”
“I promised Noelle we’d hang out more when my time freed up.”
“Are you an idiot?” Gavin said. Fred could practically imagine him facepalming. “Invite her! Chicks love camping.”
Fred thought about that for a second. “Damnit, Gav. When you’re right, you’re right.”
“Come on Fredster, it’s our last summer before we turn into boring adults. Let’s do it big.”
If Gavin wasn’t such a Brainiac, he would’ve been a hell of a used car salesman. This wasn’t the first time that thought crossed Fred’s mind because Gavin had a way of persuading people since they were kids. He was so effective at persuasion that people would come out convinced that what Gav wanted out of them was what they had wanted in the first place.
Fred was feeling like that right now and wondered why he hadn’t come up with the idea. A relaxing summer getaway trip to a cabin in the woods. Was there a better setting to finally ask a girl to be your girlfriend?
“Fred, you still there?” Gavin’s voice stirred him out of his daydre
am.
“Yeah, yeah. Yeah to everything.”
Gavin laughed. “That didn’t take much.”
“Shut up.”
“Look, even if Noelle says no, I’ll make sure there’re chicks. Don’t worry about that.”
“Do you ever think about anything else besides getting laid?”
Gavin ignored the comment and continued, “You think you can hit up Fletch? The weed up here is dirt compared to his stuff.”
“Uh, yeah. Probably.”
“Alright,” Gavin said. “I’m at Beadie’s house. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Okay, man. Later,” Fred said, ending the call.
By later, Fred knew he meant he would drunk text him at four AM when he returned home from the party. It was kind of odd to Fred that he did this, but at the same time they were also each other’s oldest friend.
They’d been friends since Gavin shit his pants on a field trip to the zoo in front of the whole class. Fred’s mom happened to be chaperoning the trip and took him into the bathroom to clean him up and bought him new clothes from the zoo giftshop. After that embarrassing incident, none of the other kids wanted to sit and eat lunch with him, so Fred’s mom made him share a table with Gav.
While drinking apple juice and eating their PB and J sandwiches, Gavin told Fred that he thought the smell of the animals would be strong enough to cover up the smell of his poop in his pants. They laughed so hard that juice came out of Fred’s nose, and ever since then, they were friends. Best friends, even. But recently, they started to drift apart.
It was a combination of growing older and Gavin going to a school in upstate PA that started it. And now that Fred was busier with work to try to save money to get out of his parent’s house before graduation, and Gav was still into the whole partying scene, their lives headed in complete opposite directions, drifting them further apart.
Fred grabbed his phone to check the link, feeling a little bad about ignoring Gav the last few weeks, but then thought better of it. He put the phone in his pocket, forcing it out of his sight so he wouldn’t be tempted to open it up. He had studying to get to.
