by Alan Spencer
“Get away from that, Dad. You don’t know what it means.”
Morty kept shaking his head at what didn’t make sense. Inanimate objects didn’t have blood to bleed and brains to spill. How could he twist this sight into something logical?
Bruce got up and asked for help with his wounds, disturbing Morty from scrutinizing the mannequin. Bruce’s arm was dripping with blood from the stray bullet that came from upstairs. Together, Morty and Cheyenne tore more fabric from the rolls of material in the corner and wrapped it around Bruce’s arm wound.
“I have to get to a hospital,” Bruce said, eying the blood. He was pale in the skin and purple in the lips. “That bullet can’t say in there. We have to get it out.”
“We will, I promise,” Morty reassured his friend as he wrapped the fabric around the man’s biceps three times. “Keep pressure on it. We’ll find a way out of here.”
“If we can’t get through that upstairs door, we’re not going anywhere. I’m going to die.” Bruce headed up the stairs, determined to escape now that he had lost so much blood. “I have to get to a hospital. And soon.”
Morty could hear Bruce stop at the giant hole in the steps where he had crashed through earlier. He stepped around it, then he started turning the doorknob and banging it with his good arm.
“Let us out! Let us out, right now! I’m dying down here! You can’t do this to us! Tell us what you want. Why are you locking us down here?”
Bruce was losing himself to the panic of the situation. Morty stared at the amount of blood that had exited his friend’s body and knew the man didn’t have a lot of time. It was only an arm wound, but if he didn’t get the bullet out, it would mean bad things.
There were so many problems, Morty couldn’t focus on a single challenge. Morty kicked over the mannequin, grabbed the steel scissors and shouted, “Why is this mannequin bleeding? Why aren’t you asking yourself that, Bruce? The door won’t open no matter how hard you bang on it. Something is keeping us here against our will. It’s not a person. It’s, it’s something else. They took Glenda, and now they took us. We have to figure out what it wants.”
Morty turned his head up at the ceiling. “What do you want? Say it, and I’ll do it! None of this is necessary! Anything you want. Anything. We’ll do it.”
Bruce kept banging against the door. “Don’t waste your breath. This isn’t a situation for talking. I’ll get us out of here. Watch me. I’ve had enough of this house.”
Cheyenne was at the bottom of the stairs. She was right between the two men who were competing to correct an insane situation. She was so unsure of what was going on, she could only frown and beg her father and Bruce to stop what they were doing. They were scaring her.
Morty was so frustrated, scared and unable to do anything to help himself, he didn’t hear his daughter until Cheyenne grabbed him and shook him hard.
“Look! Hannah’s moving!”
Chapter Thirty
Detective Larson turned around to find a young officer pop out of the living room closet. He recognized the cop.
Officer Wright kept pointing at the floor, saying real fast, “They’re gone. Where did the bodies go? Twelve cops were here. Right here. The man, that man, he slaughtered them all. I saw it happen. But where’s the blood? Where’s the blood? I’m not making this shit up. And I’m not crazy either. None of this makes any sense. I’m going out of my mind.”
“Boy, you need to take a deep breath and calm the fuck down.” Larson grabbed the cop by both arms and sunk his fingers in real deep until it hurt. The pain got the young cop’s attention. “I just got out of a refrigerator trapped with a corpse. When I got out, the body started talking to me. If I can get a grip after that, so can you.”
“Why were you in the fridge?”
“I didn’t voluntarily go into the fridge, dumbass. I was forced through this burning doorway, or something like that, you see. It was red—”
“—Me too, me too! Yes, all of us entered Morty Saggs’s house like that. The squad went upstairs to the bedroom. Morty was calling out to us, and BAM, we’re in this room being attacked by this tall, burly guy wearing plastic eye gear, a doctor’s mask and a painter’s outfit. The guy slaughtered everybody. Well, everybody except for me. I hid from him. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I would be dead right now if I stood there like an idiot and let him slaughter me. None of us stood a chance against him. You believe me, don’t you? I had no choice but to hide. I didn’t want to die.”
“Shut up, boy. I’m thinking. Sit down on the couch and calm down. Listening to you talk is starting to seriously aggravate me.”
Larson was thinking all right.
The connections were missing, that vital glue to keep it all together. Corpses didn’t come back to life. Houses didn’t trap people. Red burning light didn’t transport persons from one place to another. Dead killers like Ted Lindsey didn’t return to life to take out an entire squad of policemen.
“You said a dozen cops died in this room?”
Wright shot up from the couch. He had so much nervous energy. He’d been repeating the explanation to himself under his breath the entire time the detective was thinking over the matter.
“Yes. I mean, blood was everywhere. He had hammers and a chainsaw, and he kept shouting something about his wife. ‘Who killed my wife?’ That’s what he kept shouting. ‘Who killed my wife?’ Dude was scary. Even if I tried, there was nothing, and I mean nothing, I could do. He killed all of those cops in under a minute flat. No exaggeration. I’m not a coward. I was scared, yes, but I’m not a fucking coward. I did what I had to do to save my life.”
“Shut up, you hear me? Calm down, or I’ll calm you down for you. I understand you were under duress, so drop it. No more explanations.”
The detective recognized Officer Wright from the precinct. He was Dean Wright’s boy. Judging by the kid’s lack of toughness and wherewithal, even in this situation, the detective knew the boy had a heaping dose of nepotism to get him through the academy and into that uniform. The officer needed validation and something to do, so that’s what Larson did. Anything to shut the young pup up would serve well to help improve this tricky situation.
“I’m going to have you check every door in the house. See if one is unlocked. I couldn’t get them open earlier. Yell at me if you can open one of these doors.”
Wright was covered in a nervous sweat. He stumbled from one room to the next, trying to force open doors and failing.
“It’s like the doors don’t function like they should, you know what I mean? If the classic way doesn’t work, I guess I can try this.”
Wright turned over the kitchen table, broke off one of its thick wooden legs and bashed it across one of the living room windows. The makeshift bludgeon split down the middle. Wright smashed it over the glass again and again until what he had in his hand was decimated.
Wright gave the detective a helpless look. What now showed in his eyes.
The detective moved to the front bay window and peered outside. The streetlight shed that ambient red. It was pure night without a moon or any stars in the sky. The block was silent. Nobody had their lights on. No cars were in the driveways. No barking dogs in people’s backyards. Nothing.
What was he supposed to draw from this scene?
“Okay,” Larson said, thinking out loud. “We’re not where we’re supposed to be anymore. Whenever we crossed that doorway, we went somewhere else.”
“But we’re in someone’s house. This is real.”
“Corpses don’t come back to life. And that man you say killed all those cops—even though there’s no trace of blood or their bodies—has been dead for well over ten years. This used to be Ted Lindsey’s house. And however this is happening, maybe the knock-off killer mimicking Ted Lindsey wants something from us.”
“What does this fucker want?”
“You
said it yourself, Officer. This guy wants us to solve the case of Deborah Lindsey’s murder. And we’re not leaving this house until we do.”
From downstairs, they heard a woman’s scream.
Chapter Thirty-One
The bullets that had been tearing through the house earlier mattered little up against the corpse standing in the room with Janet. The corpse was a younger man, high school age, maybe in his twenties. It was hard to distinguish these details under the glow of the red light bulb shedding its mean color. The sunken contours of the boy’s face, the skin thinning and turning into a black bruise color, sullied any ability to truly determine the boy’s age. Not that it mattered. Janet focused more on how the young man’s hands were constantly issuing blood from dozens of crude holes the size of BB pellets. In one of the young man’s eyes, over a dozen ink pens were jammed through the cortex.
The young boy acted oblivious to his inflictions.
He was too busy pointing at the floor.
Janet screamed yet again. “Oh my God!”
Yet another body was on the ground. It was a woman in a pink evening gown. Her black hair was soaked in blood. Janet could see a dent in the back of her skull.
The corpse spoke, though when he opened his mouth, a collection of beetles and centipedes crawled free, slithering down the boy’s body and onto the floor, soon hiding in the shadows of the room. Crunching through exoskeletons and insect bodies, the corpse spoke without affectation. Those vocal cords were good and dead.
“Don’t run from me. My name is Chad Neilson. I’m not here to hurt you. At least not now. I’m doing my best to hold back the evil inside of me. Evil has inhabited this house, and evil has summoned you here. Once you crossed that door, you entered a new plane of existence. This is where the dead reside who seek justice for the wrongs perpetrated against them. We’re waiting for someone, anyone, to mend our broken souls. We were all brought to this house and murdered at one point.
“There’s only one thing we want, Janet, and only you and the others here can give it to us. The way back for you will only be available for so long. If you don’t give us what we want before the doorway closes in on itself, you’ll be trapped here with us for all eternity. I promise you’ll suffer in torment. Not you, nor anybody else, is leaving until we get what we want. I’m trying to help you before I go bad again. You don’t want to be around when I go bad. So you better hear me out. I need your undivided attention. I beg of you.”
Every alarm and red flag in Janet’s mind went off. Janet searched the room for a weapon. Anything to defend an attack, be it against a corpse or anybody. A heavy book from a nearby shelf. The bedside lamp. There wasn’t much here in the room to use.
She could sprint for the door, but she knew it wouldn’t open. She was trapped. This house was controlled by something evil.
Janet did her best to stay calm. That was a tall order indeed. She had to hear this ghost/corpse/aberration out. The more information she gathered, the more likely she might survive this nightmare. The reporter in her had enough backbone to stand in place and listen to this dead man speak.
“I died in this house. Nails were driven through my hands downstairs in that damn basement. I was forced to eat insects. The son of a bitch burned my genitals. He even,” the corpse pulled up his shirt, revealing his stomach with a “T” of stitching, “cut me open. You see my flesh move along my belly? Those are rats inside of me. He cut a hole into me, shoved rats inside, and then sewed me up. Those rats were nice and hungry. They’re still eating my insides, tunneling through my intestines and scouring every inch of me for a new morsel to eat.
“At that point in his interrogation, whatever he wanted me to say, I shouted it with every conviction a man in agony could muster. It still wasn’t enough for the sick bastard. Nothing could appease that lunatic sadist. It will be you next, Janet, if you don’t solve this poor woman’s death. Nobody knows who killed her. To this day, even. You must find out. While there’s still humanity in those who died in this house, you must solve Deborah Lindsey’s murder.”
Janet, unable to restrict her inquisitive nature as a reporter, even under these extreme circumstances, asked, “Who is Deborah Lindsey? How did she die?”
The corpse cringed as if suffering a fresh round of cruelty against his body.
“The murder weapon was left on the scene. It was a failed robbery. Deborah died for nothing. Whoever broke in didn’t steal anything. Someone took a nine iron and bashed in her skull. One thwack was all it required to cave in the back of her head. Dead,” he snapped his finger, breaking both of the digits off in the process, “like that.”
Chad eyed the broken bits of bones extending out of his shattered hands. It was as if the reality of his death was closing in on him even harder.
“I can’t hold it back much longer, Janet. I have so much hate and evil locked up inside of me. When you die like I did, in total agony, it follows you to the grave. It follows you into eternity. I can’t rest until the one responsible for what happened to me is held accountable. My soul will always be broken, and it’s up to you people to mend it. If you fail, you shall suffer the consequences.”
“Wait, who else is here?”
“You’ll find out very soon, Janet.” Chad pointed at the bedroom door. “You may leave now. They’ll be waiting for you downstairs.”
“Wait, wait, wait. Don’t go.” She couldn’t believe she was asking Chad to stay. The corpse wasn’t getting any easier to look at, but he had such vital information. “Why was I forced through that doorway? Why me?”
Chad’s face contorted into a sinister smile. The movement caused two of the pens jammed into his eye socket to fall onto the ground.
“Not counting the cops who got sucked in the doorway on accident, everybody was brought here for a reason. Together, you can solve the crime. You can find out who killed Deborah Lindsey. The living owe us that much. The way we suffered, please, give us what we need to rest in peace. Before it’s too late. I’m not the only one who will be sorry if you fail.”
The light bulb in the ceiling started to glow an even brighter red. Janet had to squint against its intensity. She covered her face with her hands to fend off the sharp light. Once the red reached its height, the color vanished altogether. The room was bathed in normal light. Chad was gone. Deborah’s body had vanished.
The bedroom door creaked open by itself.
Janet heard the screams coming from downstairs and hurried down the staircase to find out who else was trapped in the house with her.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Morty was the first to hurry to the table and lift the sheet over Hannah’s body. Hannah was indeed alive. She tried her best to sit up, but the collection of nails driven through her hand kept her sitting in the chair. Hannah’s eyes were full of tears. He words were bogged down with the tortures inflicted against her body.
“Wait,” Morty said, “I’ll find something to get those nails out. Hannah, we’re going to get you out of here and to a hospital, I promise.”
Morty’s words were cut off by a bitter Hannah.
“I’m dead, Morty. You stupid shit. What that horror of a man did to me I pray none of you have to endure. But you will. Worse than me. Oh, so much worse. What he expects from you is impossible to fulfill. With every new nail he drove into my hand, with every fingernail he ripped out, that bastard made me say things that weren’t true. Lies, lies, LIES!”
Cheyenne teetered between comforting Hannah and keeping her distance. Morty and Bruce were searching the room for tools to free Hannah from the table. So far, their search was fruitless.
Morty kept talking. “Who is this guy? Do we know who this man is?”
“Yes. His name is Ted. He used to live in this house. Your house, Morty. He took Glenda. He reached through the doorway and pulled her in. Ted wants to know who killed his wife. He will make you find out, or what happened to me wi
ll happen to you. He used Glenda to bring all of you here. Ted thinks someone among us knows what happened to his wife.”
Morty was trying to take in what she was saying without studying her wounds too much. Her flesh was changing. What was once cycling blood and pumping with life was degrading. Even Hannah’s eyes were drying out and shrinking in their sockets, yet still she talked, and what she said was terrible.
“Ted will interrogate you to the end of your sanity. Find out who killed Deborah Lindsey. You must. She died in this house. Ted’s victims all died in this house AND SO WILL YOU!”
Hannah’s face was a melting candle. Morty gasped watching her mandible, tongue and teeth shape the words through liquid see-through skin. The madwoman jerked her hand upwards, ripping it from the table. Half of her hand remained stuck by the nails. Her hand was a mitt of spurting blood and broken fingers. She used that hand and swung it against Morty’s chest. He was thrown across the room by the force of the blow. Morty crashed into the mannequins who suddenly came to life, holding him down, choking him. Two of the mannequins leaned on his stomach and lungs to snuff him where he lay.
Morty briefly caught Hannah leaning over a cowering Cheyenne, who had fallen onto the ground in horror. Hannah’s face was dripping flesh onto her body. The flesh was actively moving, combining and coagulating into a noose that slithered like a snake up to Cheyenne’s throat. Once that boiling flesh noose had wrapped around Cheyenne’s neck, the noose shot up to the ceiling with a wet thack and held Cheyenne high up in the air. He could hear his daughter choking. Cheyenne’s eyes were as wide as they could get, bulging from the sockets.
Hannah’s face, only a skull with strands of muscle tissue and hair, cackled at Cheyenne’s pain. Morty was ripped from his daughter’s situation watching the mannequin’s features writhe and shape intense animosity. There were no eyes, just the pink lips and blue eye shadow. If only he could gain leverage, the mannequins were hollow on the inside. Four of them on top of him, he was outnumbered and overpowered.
