by Alan Spencer
Janet saw the curtains of a bathtub and quickly drew the curtain back. It was an instinctive reaction to seeing so many horror movies in her lifetime.
She doubled back and screamed again.
A woman was in the tub, as pale as the white porcelain. Her throat had been slit at the femoral artery. The tub was filling up with blood. Trails of red ran down the curves of her breasts, belly and the dips of her pelvis.
Janet stayed up against the wall, wanting to curl up into a protective ball and shield herself from this horrible sight.
The corpse’s eyes were wide in a morbid death stare. The eyes made a squeaking sound as they turned in their sockets to regard Janet.
The corpse said this under its breath: “I couldn’t help him. I knew nothing. That’s why I had to die. Just like you will, Janet. You better know something, or you will be next. You will be like me. Dead and forever trapped in this house.”
Janet unleashed a scream as the corpse’s eyes were pushed out of her head by giant clods of black dirt. More dirt pushed itself out from her ears and mouth, and ripped through her sinus cavity until her head split down the middle to unleash what fought so hard to escape. Janet watched the corpse’s flesh and muscle tear as dirt exploded at high pressures from the corpse’s body until the bathtub overflowed with earth.
The corpse had buried itself.
Janet threw aside the curtain in revulsion. She closed her eyes, shook her head, counted to ten and timed her breathing. Each breath steered her away from hyperventilation. From insanity.
Access the situation. Access the situation. Access the situation.
The burning doorway. The heat, what could’ve been flames, brushing up against her body. What exactly had brought her here in this apparent trap without an exit?
Maybe trap wasn’t the correct word.
I’m in a room. I don’t have a clue how I got here. I could leave this room if it wasn’t locked. Who locked me in? Who put me here?
The concern for her safety deepened. The sinking feeling of helplessness dissolved her ability to stay calm. She could use every breathing technique known to man, but it wasn’t going to help.
You wanted a story. Well, lady, you got your fucking story. Morty Saggs and his wife are God knows where, and you’re here alone and nobody’s looking for you. Nobody’s going to help you.
Pray that corpse doesn’t leave the tub.
Don’t think about the corpse.
What are you going to do now? You could be home, making house and spending your time with your wonderful husband. Why did you throw yourself into somebody else’s problem? You don’t have a career. Nobody cares about you as a journalist. You’re an amateur. You might as well be a blogger. You’re not going national. You’re a nobody. You’re a nothing. You’re going to suffocate in this room. You’re going to die all alone. You’re going to die a horrible, unimaginable death.
Janet banged her fists against the mirror in anger. She had been staring into it with each mean hurtful thought she hurled at herself. The mirror could shatter if she punched it hard enough, but she feared breaking the glass and cutting herself. She could get an infection. This room could harbor every disease known to man. Flesh-eating bacteria and plagues. Malignant cancers. It was easy to believe, considering how foul this glass box stank of that woman’s dead body in the tub.
Her striking the mirror revealed more surface to reflect. Janet saw herself, how her eyes were giant globes, and how her mouth was drawn in a tight frown. The very essence of fear. She was a living example of vulnerability.
Janet kept crying out to anybody and anyone.
“Help me! Please, please, pleeeeeeeeeeeease! Heeeeeeeeeelp!”
The shower curtain was torn from the pole. Shower rings clanged against the floor. A deflated corpse charged with dangling arms to choke her. Janet’s eyed doubled at how the woman’s face hung in ribbons. The mouth and tongue, what was left of it, kept spitting out dirt.
“They will never find your body, Janet! You shall die here with me!”
The doorway leading out of the room blazed red.
Janet didn’t care about the scary light. She chose the door. Anything to get away from that corpse!
Chapter Twenty-Four
Red hot heat, red hot light, red hot everything, Detective Larson was overwhelmed by the transition from Morty Saggs’s bedroom to this. He was blinded, and a sense of weightlessness attached itself to his body. The air went from red hot molten heat to an icy barren cold. Larson’s neck was turned awkwardly. He was forced into a sitting position. His arms were forced at his sides. The detective’s legs were bent as if he were sitting down and turned at an odd angle. Not upside down, but not right side up either. Everything was in pitch black darkness. He didn’t smell that terrible burning smell anymore. That didn’t mean the awful odors had ceased. A new odor replaced the previous one. Did he hear the slither of maggots swimming in a fetid body? And what was up with the sound of a motor chugging on its last life?
Coughing against a disgusting smell the detective couldn’t put a name to, he tried to shift in the tight cramped space and bumped full-on into something wet and cold. He pivoted right, and he hit something else damp. Larson had little leverage to maneuver. He would surely freeze if he didn’t find escape soon. Another problem, his air was running thin. He was dizzy from taking in his own exhalations. Larson fought against himself and the objects in the tight space that seemed to make the area tighter by the second.
Then came two gunshots. Loud enough to be coming from nearby. The detective trained his ears to the slightest noise. He needed an indication of where the fuck he was so he could get out of here. Something had happened to him, Larson easily gathered. Maybe Morty saw him enter the house and clubbed him over the head. It wasn’t impossible Morty stashed him in a closet or a hideaway for safekeeping as he dealt with the cops outside his house.
Larson tried to call out to whoever was on the scene, that he was here, that he needed saving, and for them not to shoot him. From another corner, there was the sound of a hard and awkward landing. Shrills defining high levels of excruciating pain. Even more gunshots rang out. Shotguns being pumped. Disoriented voices clashed against sharp deliveries of panic. Footsteps drummed upstairs and downstairs in droves. Movement came from everywhere. Shots. Running. Falling. Retreating. Advancing. Agony and discord. Repeat.
Larson had to escape this cramped space and help his officers. Morty Saggs had really lost his mind. He imagined the investigative team would find Glenda’s dead body. Larson prayed Cheyenne wasn’t killed as well. The psycho was going to kill as many people as he could before the good guys could take him down. It always happened that way with the serious psychos.
Larson tried to batter his way out of the tight nook. So cold, he was shivering. How much longer could he survive in this black box? Even if he could survive another hour, Larson refused to stay in here another minute.
Struggling to make sense of the darkness to locate a switch, a doorknob, anything to open the trap he found himself in, Larson continued hearing gunplay. The blasts echoed from up high, from low, and even yards out from his position.
Was Morty packing a machine gun up there?
It didn’t matter what Morty was doing. Larson couldn’t do a damn thing to help matters until he escaped this box. He fought harder and gained nothing. The weight of something pressed harder against him and further limited his mobility. Larson bent his left arm in, forced his left leg back so his other leg could rear back like a kicking horse. He gave the escape one last shot before giving in to exhaustion. He channeled every bit of momentum and strength into that one kick. Larson’s foot connected with a flat surface. A burst of light made him shut his eyes. He rolled forward, collapsing onto the floor. Glass shattered all around him. Something landed on top of him, and he couldn’t get up. Pinned down by something hideous, Larson could only shout out in ter
ror.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It was only moments after Morty made his declaration about finding his wife when he started paying closer attention to the things that were off about the basement. One corner of the room was occupied by a row of female mannequins. The mannequins were completely white except for the blue eye shadow over their eyes and the neon pink lipstick painted on. There were also supplies for a seamstress stowed away in a tall wooden hutch. Everything else in the basement was somebody else’s. Nothing down here belonged to Morty.
“What the fuck is going on with this house?” Bruce paraded about the room turning over boxes and spilling spools of thread and dress patterns, as if searching for the answer. “I saw it change. One second, your shit is here, and then the next, somebody else’s shit. Tell me I’m not crazy.”
“You’re not crazy,” Morty said. “Or maybe we’re both crazy.”
Cheyenne dispelled the notion.
“This room, that doorway, that’s crazy, but we’re not crazy. It’s this house. There’s something about that doorway. What do we know about this house anyway?”
Bruce’s astonishment hadn’t changed. He was eyeballing the ceiling, the walls and the new items occupying the space.
“It’s a house. What else can you say about it? Morty, things like this have never happened before in the years you’ve lived here, right?”
“No. Absolutely not. I’ve lived here for almost ten years. We got the house for a really good price. Almost fifteen grand cheaper than its true market value.”
“Just because it’s on sale doesn’t mean a fucking thing,” Bruce said. “Tell me something that matters, you idiot. Who owned this house before you?”
“Everything was done by a realtor. I didn’t meet the previous owners.”
Bruce kept scanning the mannequins and the sewing equipment. “I don’t know. I’m trying, guys. I don’t know what’s going on here. This is impossible to figure out.”
Morty held his daughter by the arm and said, “We need to get out of this room now.”
Morty noticed a long sheet of burgundy fabric folded on top of a worktable. Measurements covered the sides of the table. Inch and centimeter markings. It was the seamstress’s work station. He decided to cover Hannah’s body with the fabric.
“Just for now.”
Everybody agreed covering Hannah up was the right thing to do.
Bruce noticed the sink in the corner. He hurried to it, splashing cold water in his face and lapping up water he collected in his turned-up hands. Bruce drank the water with increasing fervor.
“That’s better. I’d rather have a beer. That’d really give me back my composure. Pale ale. The darkest Guinness you got. How about a finger of scotch? Fuck it. Water will do. I don’t know what I’m going to tell my girlfriend when I get out of this situation. Hell, what are we going to tell the police? I guess we can pretend we suffered some group psychosis. Yeah, officer, a burning door sucked us all in, and we ended up in the basement of Morty’s house. But it wasn’t Morty’s house, you see. There were mannequins and sewing equipment instead of Morty’s shit. The new stuff just appeared. Good enough explanation, copper? You believe me, don’t you? I wouldn’t lie to the law, would I?”
Morty stared at his babbling friend talking and talking. Bruce couldn’t see it. Bruce couldn’t taste it. His bald head down to his chest was covered in the brightest of blood. The sink was coughing up blood like a spewing artery. The red came out in clots. The sink was filled with floating things. Tidbits from the human anatomy. Cheyenne couldn’t look. She was crying hysterically and yanking on Morty’s arm to tell the man—for God’s sake tell the man he’s covered in blood!
Morty forced out the warning, “Bruce, look in the mirror!”
Bruce looked up in the mirror. His body locked up for a second. Then he released a yawp of shock. Bruce started coughing. Revulsion destroyed his face. He was on his hands and knees sticking his finger down his throat to cough up the tainted water. After burping and gagging himself for what felt like minutes, he puked up a wide puddle of red.
Morty kept his daughter from seeing the flapping tongue in the red puddle and the twitching pointer finger. How had Bruce swallowed a tongue and a finger without noticing? Morty dared to look in the sink. It was filled halfway, brimming with nasty worms, and plated insects, and eyeballs of unknown life forms.
Morty said it for himself as much as his suffering friend and daughter. “This house can’t be trusted. Bruce, are you okay? Jesus, what happened?”
Bruce sensed him coming near and urged Morty away.
“Stay back. We know nothing about what came out of that sink. I don’t want anybody else getting hurt. I, I—Morty, I felt things moving inside my stomach! I felt fingers twitching. It’s so disgusting.”
With the sickening expression of horror on Bruce’s face, added to the blood coloring his skin, it was hard for Morty to stay by his friend’s side, but he did. Morty tore a square of fabric from one of the many tall fabric rolls that were up against the wall. He helped Bruce clean off his face and hands to the best of his ability. Without water, that was almost impossible.
Bruce kept making himself throw up. He was at the point he was only coughing up bile and nothing else. Bruce got back up to his feet and clutched his stomach.
“I don’t feel right.”
“Just stay calm,” was the best Morty could come up with.
Cheyenne was already across the room and treading up the wooden staircase to the first floor. She wanted nothing to do with the bloody sink or what Bruce puked up. The tongue and finger were motionless on the ground in the circle of sticky blood. Morty didn’t know what to make of it except to believe this house was haunted.
Cheyenne cursed at the top of the stairs. “Goddamn door!”
Morty launched up the wooden stairs. Cheyenne kept turning the knob, furious. It wouldn’t open.
“Let me through,” Bruce said. “I’ll knock the bitch down.”
“Bruce, wait—just hold on!”
Morty helped his daughter scramble down the stairs and clear the way because Bruce was already positioning himself to turn into a human battering ram. “Hurry, Cheyenne. Once he gets an idea in his head, he won’t back off until he does it.”
“I just swallowed a bunch of fucking blood and gross shit. Nothing except getting the hell out of here will make me feel better. So get the fuck out of my way!”
Morty and Cheyenne scrambled away from the staircase. It wasn’t but a second later the large man was charging up the stairs. When Bruce was halfway up, that burning smell filled the air. The red was so bright at the doorway, Bruce shielded his eyes and faltered. He crashed through the staircase steps when he collapsed backwards.
When the burning red eased up, Morty raced over to Bruce. The man was sprawled out in the nook under the stairs. He had landed on the bare concrete. Bruce moaned in pain. He was clutching his right arm. A circle of blood on the side of his bicep was mushrooming. Morty thought the man had broken his arm, but the wound didn’t match that hypothesis.
Bruce, wincing, warned Morty, “Get down! I heard a gunshot! Somebody’s shooting up the place.”
Bruce was right.
Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang.
Fast successions of shots were issued by many guns upstairs. Morty dove for cover, putting his body over Cheyenne’s.
Various people were shouting and talking over each other. Morty wanted to run up the stairs, bang on the door and beg for help, but the bullets were flying fast. There was no way to know for sure who was firing those shots. Stray bullets pounded through the ceiling and hit things in the basement. One hit Hannah’s body under the blanket between the shoulders. Another hit one of the mannequins. Three bullets hit the washer and dryer. Morty prayed they didn’t get hit with a bullet like Bruce did. The man wasn’t faring so well. This situation was
getting out of hand, and there wasn’t any way to make it any better except to duck for cover and pray for the best.
Cheyenne’s body jerked with each shot that ripped through the ceiling. How many more shots were coming? Morty heard people crashing onto the floor and shouting. Sounds of hysteria. Ten agonizingly long minutes passed before the gunshots ended.
Morty said to everybody, “Wait. Don’t get up just yet. They might not be done up there.”
“What is going on in this goddamn house?” Bruce kept repeating the question. “Those assholes up there shot me in the arm!”
“It has to be the police,” Morty guessed. “Who else could it be? It sounded like a dozen people stomping around up there.”
“Nobody’s doing anything now. Maybe they’re all dead.”
Cheyenne didn’t like hearing that their help could be dead.
Morty was quick to correct that thinking. “It could be anything. There’s so little we can figure out from down here.”
“Why don’t you take a peek up there, Morty? Since you know so much about what’s happening and everything? After all, this is your house. If there’s something fucked up going on, wouldn’t you be the most likely to know about it? Don’t you think, Cheyenne? This is happening in Morty’s house. Doesn’t that bother you? And your mom disappearing like she did. It makes a person think. I’m only connecting the dots here.”
Cheyenne was very upset in the moment, but not too upset to defend her father.
“What’s happening is happening to all of us at the same time. My dad’s not crazy. He didn’t make the house the way it is. He didn’t do anything to my mother. How dare you, Bruce? This isn’t like you. My dad didn’t bring on those people shooting at each other upstairs. I might be worked up, but I’m not pointing fingers at anybody. What, did my father make the sink run with blood? You’re talking crazy. This is all crazy.”
Bruce was silent a moment, then he lowered his voice. “I’m sorry. I’m in a lot of pain. I’m scared, and I’m taking it out on you people. Forgive me.”
