A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous

by Shane McKenzie, ed.

The girl smiled at him. “I believe it.”

  “So, what do you think? Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving. Nobody should be alone on Thanksgiving. Do you want a place to stay for a few days?”

  She looked around the occult shop and back into Jamie’s eyes. She was obviously the type who thought she could see everything about people in their eyes. Of course, if that were true, she wouldn’t have picked up a sadistic trick and fallen in with a pimp.

  “You’re not into some satanic cult shit are you?”

  Jamie smiled nervously.

  “Yes. I am. And tonight at midnight, I’m going to sacrifice you to the goddess Kali or maybe the sun god Ra or maybe even Pele’ or Huitzilopochtli. He’s a particularly blood-thirsty Aztec deity, but then, he’s partial to virgins. I don’t suppose you happen to be a…”

  “Not by a long shot.” The girl laughed.

  “Oh well, I guess there won’t be any sacrifices tonight.”

  “My name is Katherine. My friends call me Kitten.”

  “Hello, Kitten. My name is Jamie.”

  “You own this place or just run it?”

  “My family owns it, my two brothers, my sister, and I. But since I’m the only one who didn’t want to sell the place and divide up the money when my parents died, I run it by myself. Once I croak they’ll liquidate everything, but for now it’s mine.”

  “Cool. Mind If I take a look at that apartment?”

  “Sure. Follow me.”

  They walked to the back of the shop, past the register and up a flight of stairs to Jamie’s apartment door.

  Jamie fumbled with his keys while he tried to figure out what to do.

  “How long have you lived up here?”

  “Since high school. This was my first apartment and it looks like it’ll be my last.”

  Kitten smiled sympathetically, but said nothing. Jamie opened the door and the smell of incense and candles wafted out followed by the smell of animals. Kitten stepped inside and winced when the door slammed shut behind her.

  THROUGH THE FOG OF incense she spotted the walls covered in blood spatters and scrawled prayers. She saw the cages upon cages of animals from rats to monkeys to snakes to goats and the multitude of statues, icons, totems, and altars. When she heard the sound of a muffled human voice coming from inside a locked room down the hall, Kitten knew something was wrong. She heard the door lock behind her, heard the footsteps approaching, saw the bowls of entrails atop the various altars, and felt the bile rise up to scald the back of her throat. Her eyes watered as she recalled the dozens of horror films she’d seen as a kid. They always culminated in a moment like this, the audience shouting for the heroine/victim to get out of there while the killer crept up behind her. For the second night, she had placed her life in jeopardy.

  “Why does this shit always happen to me?” she said out loud as she turned back towards Jamie, already anticipating his attack. Her body dumped a gallon of adrenalin into her bloodstream in preparation to run or fight for her life. But it was too late. She wilted to the carpet as Jamie brought the sixty-pound brass Buddha down onto her skull. Minutes later she was hog-tied and gagged, locked in a room with two other girls her age and a boy no older than fourteen who appeared to be as sick as Jamie. She began to weep then stopped when she realized it would do her no good. She just had to wait for Jamie to get back so she could try to reason with him and seize any opportunity to escape.

  JAMIE SAT WITH HIS back to the locked door as he listened to Kitten’s muffled screams. He had been sitting there for hours, watching with dread as the sun traveled across the sky, trying to work up the nerve to sacrifice one of his captives before nightfall. The winter solstice was drawing near. The shadows were increasing and they were hungry. He could see the bloodlust in their fiery red eyes as they glared at him from every dark corner.

  The room began to shake as the shadows continued to multiply, thrashing about in fits of rage, eager to get at Jamie or the sacrifices he held locked behind the door. The floor bounced and rattled like a rollercoaster as the screams and roars of the demons drowned out the sounds of Kitten’s weeping. Jamie clamped his hands over his ears again, trying to shut them out.

  “Go away. Go away. Go away! I won’t do it. I can’t! Not yet! I…I’m not ready yet. She’s not right. She’s too alive. I’ll find you someone better. I’ll find someone tonight.”

  Jamie grabbed his coat and hat as he walked out of his occult shop and locked it up for the evening. He had to get out of there. He needed to think, to figure out what to do, and he needed to find more sacrifices.

  As confusing as his life had become, his compulsive prayers and rituals at least made him feel like he was doing something to save himself. It made him feel as if he were taking control of his life. Kidnapping girls made him feel powerful. He just wasn’t sure he could take it to the next level, not until he was positive that this was what God, or Gods, or the Goddess wanted.

  Jamie scratched absentmindedly at the raspberry-red melanoma spreading across his cheek as he pulled the collar of his jacket up against the cold. There was no parking lot on this street and parking meters lined the block in both directions checked almost compulsively by ticket-happy meter-maids, so he parked his ‘77 VW Beetle nearly two blocks away. As he walked, he smiled up at Ra as the fiery sun god struggled to break free of the clouds even as he hurtled towards the horizon. Jamie turned away as the dark clouds began to form hideous faces, human faces with horns and fangs and odd growths and tumors protruding from their skin. Reptilian eyes turned toward him as their mouths split wide with ear piercing shrieks. Jamie was pissing The Gods off with his refusal to act. But he just wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do.

  Jamie studied every face that passed him. In some he saw the same taint of death that marred his own dour features. Others bristled with life so brilliantly that it was almost blinding. Jamie chastised himself for his jealousy as he scowled at them and imagined sacrificing them to the Sky Gods. But Jamie knew he didn’t have the heart to sacrifice anyone so alive. If he did manage to kill, it had to be something more like euthanasia. The three whores he had locked up in his room were all drug addicted street walkers who would have doubtlessly killed themselves in some way had he not interceded. The boy was dying from multiple sclerosis and was already partially paralyzed. Their deaths would be a mercy.

  But would it be enough to appease the Gods?

  The latest religion Jamie had adopted believed that without a human blood-sacrifice, the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli would be depleted of tonally and all movement in the universe would cease. The prospect so terrified Jamie that it haunted his dreams. Night after night he awakened screaming, throwing off his sweat-drenched sheets, grabbing for one of the hundreds of idols, amulets, and totems that guarded his bedside against evil and death.

  In the morning he’d run panicked for his window afraid the earth had ceased its rotation, only relieved once he’d seen the sun rise. Last week he’d nearly fainted when he’d stepped out of his shop into the street only to find the road empty of cars and people and not so much as a breeze stirring the air. He’d thought that his procrastination had doomed the earth to inertia. That had decided the matter for him. He began collecting sacrifices that very same evening.

  He’d picked up Naomi in a crack-house. He just walked in while she was nodding from a nose full of heroin and just about to chase it with a hit of rock cocaine, scooped her up into his arms, and carried her to his car. She slurred against his neck as he carried her, already negotiating for the next hit, heedless of any peril she might be in.

  “Yooooou want to fuck? You can do anything you want for fifty bucks. Or I’ll suck your dick for ten. For ten more I’ll even let you fuck me in the ass. Just let me finish this last hit and I’ll go anywhere you want. Hey!”

  She cried out as he folded her anemic body up into the trunk of his beetle and slammed it shut. He had to sit on it like he was closing an overstuffed suitcase in order to get the trunk to close. He dislocated her hip
and broke three of her ribs but he made her fit. He could hear her cry out as her body collapsed in on itself and the trunk locked in place.

  The very next day, Tara leapt into his car willingly as he pulled to a stop at a street corner crowded with prostitutes and drug dealers.

  “Hey, daddy! Want some pussy?”

  There were shadows all around her crying out for her blood. She didn’t seem to notice or care. Jamie heard a horrifying voice boom in the cramped confines of the car.

  “Kill this whore! Sacrifice her!”

  He wasn’t sure which God had said it, but he knew he had to obey. He gave her a snort of heroin and a whack on the head with a tire iron then drove straight to his apartment where he chained her up in the room with Naomi. He’d kidnapped little Bill while he was leaving the hospital after his last check-up, the one when they told him he only had a few more months to live. He’d scooped the boy up out of his wheelchair and walked right out of the building with him. So far he hadn’t hurt any of them. So far he hadn’t found the nerve.

  The Aztecs sacrificed twenty thousand people a year to their gods to keep the earth in motion, Jamie thought. All I need is one to make my contribution. Why is it so hard?

  He thought about Kitten, about Bill, and Naomi, and Tara, all chained up in his apartment waiting for him to make up his mind. But he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. The question kept nagging at him.

  What if I am wrong? What if this isn’t the true religion? What if by killing someone I am committing a sin and damning my soul to hell?

  But then the opposite thought would immediately rise up to complicate things and send him spiraling into a near panic.

  What if the Aztecs, the Druids, the Africans, the Greeks, the Polynesians, the Egyptians, and three quarters of the ancient world were right? What if by not killing I am damning myself?

  Since he’d first been diagnosed HIV positive and then with full-blown AIDS Jamie had been struggling with this same dilemma. Ever since his death sentence, he’d decided that in order to ensure his soul would not perish or suffer eternal damnation he’d had better play it safe and worship every god known to man just in case one of them was the TRUE god. Better safe than sorry. The problem was that so many of the religions conflicted. What was canonized by one was condemned by another. Sinner and saint were one and the same depending on the religion or the times. In order to cover his ass, he’d have to worship every religion, but by worshipping them all he was sinning against many and condemning his soul anyway. And then there were the jealous Gods, the monotheistic religions that made it a sin to worship any other. They pissed Jamie off the most.

  There has to be a solution, Jamie thought. There has to be a way to make it work.

  Jamie unlocked his car and collapsed behind the wheel. He closed his eyes and bit down on his lower lip trying to control his frustration.

  What do I do? What if they are all wrong?

  Jamie sighed in exasperation and looked at his face in the mirror. He looked like the Ghost of Christmas Past. He knew he’d be dead soon. If he couldn’t save his body then he had to at least save his soul. He drove to the hospital and followed the familiar path to the terminal ward. No one thought to question his presence there. With his emaciated body shivering from fever, the various rashes and tumors on his face and hands, Jamie looked like death. AIDS was kicking his ass. But he wasn’t technically terminal yet. The people housed here had only days or weeks to live. Jamie had another reason for visiting the terminal ward. Jamie was after virgins.

  Finding virgins of any age was difficult. Even nuns were getting laid these days. Priests and altar-boys were having more sex than rock-stars if the rumors were true. The only place he could be relatively sure to find a pure unsullied virgin was among the diseased and dying. He considered it a safe assumption that the young adults, twenty-one and under, who’d spent much of their lives in and out of the hospital, probably hadn’t gotten laid much.

  Jamie smiled at the night nurses as he passed their station. They smiled back with expressions of pity, disgust, or apathy. None of them questioned him. They had little doubt that he belonged. Jamie shuffled his way down to the farthest room and grabbed a wheelchair that sat unattended in the hallway. There was a boy inside the room exuding the all-too familiar smell of cancer. The smell was so overpowering that even without reading his chart Jamie knew the kid was terminal. No one survived with that much cancer.

  The kid was tiny, his appetite long destroyed by chemotherapy along with his hair. Jamie looked down into the boy’s eyes as they fluttered open, his brilliant blue irises now wan and rheumy.

  “Hi, kid. How was your Thanksgiving? Did they serve you turkey?”

  The boy scowled and turned up his nose.

  “Yeah, I don’t suppose turkey and gravy from the hospital cafeteria is much of a treat. Your parents sent me to get you out of here. Nobody should have to die in a place like this. We’re going outside beneath the stars. Would you like that?”

  The boy nodded, too weak to speak. Jamie took a quick look at his medical chart to get his name and the name of his doctor should he need it. Then he slid the IV from the boy’s arm, disconnected his morphine drip, and removed his oxygen mask.

  “You okay breathing without this thing?”

  Again, the boy nodded.

  Jamie threw back the kid’s covers and slid one arm under his legs and the other under his shoulder and lifted him from the bed. The boy’s head flopped backwards as if he had no spine and his head weighed a ton. Jamie eased him gently into the wheelchair.

  “Do you have regular clothes?”

  The kid nodded towards the closet across the room and Jamie walked over and withdrew a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. The kid must have been in the hospital since the summer. Jamie removed the boy’s hospital gown and slipped his t-shirt on over his head. Then he slid his shorts on.

  “It’s kind of chilly out now. We’ll take this blanket with us to keep you warm.”

  Jamie whipped the thin hospital blanket from the bed and wrapped it around the boy’s bare legs.

  “There. That’s better. You ready to go?”

  The boy smiled and Jamie wheeled him out of the room.

  He wheeled the kid down the opposite hall, away from the nurse’s station, and into an elevator. Minutes later, Jamie strolled leisurely through the main lobby and out the front door without anyone once stopping to question why such a sick boy was being taken out into the cold.

  Jamie wheeled the boy out to the parking lot and right up to his car. He slid the passenger seat back as far as it would go and lifted the boy into it. Then he hopped in on the opposite side and sped out of the parking lot leaving the wheelchair abandoned.

  The boy was smiling as he looked out the window at all the passing cars. Jamie wondered how long it had been since he’d been outside. He decided to drive him around a little for one last tour of the city before taking him to the park and butchering him.

  They cruised around Central Park, past Trump Tower and Rockefeller Center. Jamie watched as the boy craned his neck to see the top of the skyscrapers. He turned at Broadway and they cruised all the way down to Times Square. The boy smiled at the lights, and Jamie checked his watch. It would be dark soon.

  Jamie turned the VW around and headed back toward the park. It was already emptying out. He decided to wait until the darkness was absolute. There were very few people willing to brave the park after dark even with all the progress Mayor Giuliani had made in the war on crime. They’d be alone soon.

  They sat outside Tavern On The Green watching the carriage drivers change shifts as the sky grew darker. The park was alive with movement. Very little of it was human. Bizarre shapes gyrated and convulsed, thrashing about in the darkness. Here and there Jamie caught a hint of fangs or claws or flaming red eyes. He tried his best to hide his fear from the boy.

  The hot dog and ice-cream vendors were streaming out of the park like cockroaches. Jamie jumped out of the car as one of them pass
ed.

  “Hey, my man, can I buy a fudgesicle from you? Two, please?”

  “Uh-uh. I’m done for the night. I’ve got to get home to my family,” the guy said, his voice tinged with some faint Middle-Eastern accent that was nearly undetectable beneath the more pronounced Brooklyn one. The grizzled old ice-cream vendor pushed his cart right past Jamie without looking. He’d obviously had a bad day. Sales for ice-cream probably weren’t too good in November.

  “C’mon, can’t you help me out? My kid is dying of cancer and I’m just trying to show him a good time on Thanksgiving before he has to go back to the hospital.”

  “Thanksgiving is tomorrow. And I need to get home to my family tonight.”

  “He might not be alive tomorrow.”

  The ice-cream man knelt down and peered into the car. He saw the emaciated boy sitting in the front seat wrapped in a blanket, his mouth hanging open, struggling to breathe, his hair all but gone, and his eyes hollow pits sunk deep into his face. The boy’s eyes swam sluggishly towards the scruffy old ice-cream man as if even that took great effort. He smiled painfully, and the old man gasped and looked back at Jamie.

  “Oh, Jesus. Is he gonna be okay?”

  “No. No, he’s not.”

  “I’m sorry, man. Here, just take the ice-cream. I already totaled my receipts for the day. It would be too much effort to make change for you anyway.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  Jamie took the ice-cream and hopped back into the car. The boy was too weak to hold the fudgesicle, so Jamie held it for him. He didn’t start eating his own ice-cream until the boy had finished all of his. When the boy was finished, Jamie wiped his chin with the blanket and unwrapped his own. They sat there quietly watching the curtain of night thicken as Jamie slurped on the melting fudgesicle. It was a good thing it was cold out or the ice-cream would have already melted.

  “Thank you.”

  It was a hoarse whisper barely audible above the sounds of traffic and the rustling of the trees. Jamie wasn’t certain he’d even heard it. He turned towards the boy. There were tears streaming from the kid’s eyes as he stared back at him.