by John Everson
“Yes, yes,” Argento said, but didn’t follow him out.
Mike shrugged and walked up the stairs. He waited for a few minutes on the porch, before noticing Argento’s face peering out of the attic window. The guy was re-walking the whole place again, apparently.
“Whatever,” Mike murmured, and pulled out his cell phone. He’d been meaning to call Perry all day to let him know that the watchman had apparently abandoned his vehicle and his job.
His friend answered on the second ring. “Hey Mike, what’s going on? I’ve been meaning to call you this week.”
“Well, it looks like we need a new night watchman,” Mike said. “That Gonz guy hasn’t been back in a couple days. But his truck is still parked here.”
“Damn, when was the last night he worked? I’m not paying the service if he hasn’t been showing up.”
Mike frowned. “Tuesday, I think he was here? Not since.”
He walked down the steps of the porch to move out of the sun and into the shade of the trees. He found himself in the graveyard, and sat down on the top of one of the taller stones.
“I’d call them, and have them send out someone else,” Mike suggested.
“No need,” Perry said. “I’ll call them and tell them to have that truck towed if their guy isn’t going to show up. And then I’ll fire them. We won’t need them anymore. The set people are going to start working nights on decorating the rooms you’re done with. That’s why I was going to call you today, to let you know.”
Mike laughed. “Well, thanks for the warning but…you’re too late. One of them is already here. Some nutjob called Argento.”
Perry laughed. “Go easy,” he warned. “He’s a talented nutjob. You stay out of his way, and he’ll stay out of yours.”
Mike nodded. “I can see that. I’m not sure he’s even aware that other people exist.”
“How much more time do you need to finish your part?” Perry asked.
Mike outlined the few projects remaining, and said he should be done by the week after Labor Day.
“Good!” Perry said. “Though if Argento or the rest need any help building stuff, I’d like you to stay on, and help them out. We need to open in a month. It’s going to be a race.”
“Sure,” Mike said. After a few more words, they hung up, and he turned to look at the house.
“Who was that?” Katie asked.
Her voice made him jump; she was literally a foot from his shoulder.
“Don’t do that!” he complained.
She grinned and slipped a cool hand across his neck. “Do what?” she asked innocently as her fingers ruffled his hair and then trailed down the line of his spine. “This?”
“No.” He grinned. “That you can do.”
“So, who were you talking to?”
“That was Perry,” he said. “The guy who’s running this whole renovation. He was just telling me about the decorating crew that’s going to start painting the place and I told him about our missing night watchman.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Guy who was keeping an eye on the place at night,” he said. “Hasn’t been here in a couple days, but you can see his truck still sitting right over there.”
He pointed at the glint of silver through the trees.
“Huh,” she said. “That’s weird that he’d leave his truck. You’re sure he’s not around?”
Mike shook his head. “I looked. Plus, we’ve been sitting on the deck the past couple nights when he should have been here. Anyway, these other people are going to start being around, so it doesn’t really matter, I guess. There will be someone in the house pretty much all the time from now on to get it ready.”
Katie frowned. “Does that mean you’re not going to have a beer with me at the end of the day?”
“I think we can still squeeze that in,” he said with a grin. “Oh, right there. Don’t stop,” he begged, as her fingernails found the perfect place.
“Where, here?” she said. Suddenly she moved her hand from his lower back to cup the crotch of his jeans. Her fingers and palm moved up and down slightly as she put on enough pressure to feel his balls shift inside the heavy fabric.
“Um, yeah,” he groaned with surprise. “That’s really good.”
“Okay,” she said, removing her hand as fast as she’d surprised him with it. “Good to know.”
She planted a kiss on his mouth, and then traced the outline of the chain and locket he still wore through his shirt before she backed away. “I’ve got something to do this afternoon, but I’ll be back later and we can see if that is still really good.”
Katie winked and turned around to walk through the gravestones toward the turnpike. She didn’t follow the gravel path, but instead circled the lower half of the small pond before disappearing into the undergrowth.
Mike had to take several deep breaths before he finally got off the stone and walked back to the house. Going back to work was going to be a bitch after that tease.
He desperately hoped it wasn’t an idle tease. She’d been leaving him blueballed for the past couple weeks, and he wasn’t sure how much more he could take. On a couple nights, he’d literally been in pain as he’d driven home after the sudden cessation of her kisses, his testicles filled and anxious, with no release allowed.
As he stepped up on the porch, the front door opened and the wiry man stepped out.
“I’ll be back,” Argento announced.
“When do you think?” Mike asked.
“Maybe late tonight. Maybe tomorrow night. I need to get some supplies together, but I have to work until ten tonight.”
“Do you need me to leave the front door unlocked?” Mike asked. “I’m not sure how that’s going to fly, but I won’t be here that late.”
Argento shook his head and held up a bronze key.
“I’m good.”
And with that, he marched down the steps to the gravel lane.
Mike shook his head and went to the truck to get the crowbar to force open the bedroom window.
After being outside for a while, once he was back in the bedroom, the air really felt stifling. Mike worked at shifting the window with his hands for a minute and had exactly the same success as he’d had this morning. None.
So, he finally sprayed some WD-40 on the dry-rotted window tracks, and then pressed the crowbar into the small gap.
The window ledge cracked as he pressed down.
But he moved the crowbar from side to side, pressing it down just a little, and then shifting it to the other end, trying to edge the window up centimeter by centimeter without having the frame skew further and get completely locked.
After a few moves from one side to the other, he had raised the window up enough to wedge his fingers in beneath the old wooden frame. He set the crowbar down and with both hands shoved beneath the window, gave a solid heave-ho…and the thing slid up another inch.
Air came rushing into the room in a welcome gust. It wasn’t cool, but it was cooler. He kept working at it and could hear things shifting inside the wall as he jimmied the window another inch and then two more. Once he’d gotten it halfway up, he sprayed the track beneath it with WD-40 and pulled it down most of the way. He sprayed the top half again, and then pushed the window back up. It moved easier now. He repeated that twice more, until the window moved up and down without too much effort. The sides gleamed with oil, but he didn’t care. The key was to be able to open the window without a crowbar. Hopefully, he’d worked out the seal that time had put in place.
Mike fingered the edges of the hole he’d made in the drywall, confirming it was solid. Then he lifted the biggest pieces of debris from the gap between the inner and outer wall and stacked them up with the pile he had accumulated in the room already. He’d bag and toss the whole mess once he finished mudding in a new piece of drywall.<
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As he reached in to pull one last piece from the area near the window, he saw a glimmer of something white on the ground. Something white but not drywall.
He reached over inside the wall and brushed off the dirt that partially obscured it. He could see a somewhat rounded knob; it didn’t look like anything that belonged to the architecture.
Mike grabbed the end and pulled it toward him, and a long piece emerged from the dirt. He pulled it out of the hole in the wall and held it up, not quite believing his eyes.
It was a bone.
And not the skeletal remains of some mouse or rat or squirrel that had skulked in the passage and died.
This was a human bone.
Arm or leg, from the size of it.
As that registered, Mike opened his fingers and let the thing fall. It rolled across the floor to lie next to the pile of drywall.
He was reminded suddenly of Katie’s story about people being hung and bled to death in secret, gruesome rituals in this house, and shook his head. He looked again inside the hole, and saw other bits of yellowed bone sticking up from the dirt and debris that littered the narrow passage.
Someone had walled in a body…or parts of one…behind this wall at some point long ago.
“Fuckin’ A,” Mike whispered to himself. He stepped away from the hole, shaking his head. “This is not a good house.”
He took a deep breath and imagined he smelled the stench of dead bodies. He could guess at the horrible stench that must have once permeated this place, if Katie’s stories were true. And with a human bone buried here in the wall, he thought that they very much could be.
“I need a drink,” he whispered, and walked out of the room to head to the cooler in his truck.
The first PBR went down really fast.
He slowed down a bit with the second. He needed to. Because he wanted to close up that hole before the daylight waned. He pulled a fresh piece of drywall from the back of the truck bed and marched back into the house.
Some things should remain buried.
Chapter Fourteen
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Argento said. Lucio, Lon, Jeanie and June all huddled around the kitchen table at June’s house. Three pieces of paper lay in the center, with boxes and notes sketched all over them.
“We’ve got three floors to play with,” he continued. “But the place isn’t huge. So, I think we set up the ticket taker outside on the deck.”
He pulled one of the sheets of paper closer and pointed out a path with his pencil as he talked. “We have them enter through the foyer, walk through the front room and the dining room, then cross the hall into the kitchen. There’s a back doorway to the kitchen, so we can have them go right through there and cross the hall into the back bedroom. If we have the carpenter cut through the back closet of that room, it would enter right into the den. And if we can cut through the back wall of the den, you’d be in the second bedroom. Exit through that main door, walk around a corner and you’ve got the stairs up to the attic.”
“Do you really think he can just knock out the walls like that?” June asked.
Argento shrugged. “It looked like it to me. We’ll have to ask him. If it doesn’t work…then people are just going to have to go out through the same door they came in.”
Lucio shook his head. “I don’t like that. We want a straightforward funnel, no backtracking.”
Argento nodded. “That’s the goal.”
At that moment, a loud yawn erupted from the hallway outside the kitchen. A moment later, Lenny walked in, stretching his arms toward the ceiling with his mouth wide open.
Lon turned and shook his head at June. “Does this guy ever go home?”
She shrugged. “When he needs to pick up his mail.”
“Morning, haunters,” Lenny said. “What are we all plotting today?”
“Well, for starters, it’s afternoon,” Lon said. “Didn’t you go to work today?”
Lenny shook his head and walked to the fridge. “Didn’t feel like it,” he said, rummaging around inside. He came out with a can of Coke and popped the tab. “I called in sick. I’m sure I’ll be fine by Monday.” He grinned and took a deep slug of the pop.
“And that’s what’s wrong with America today,” Lon declared. “No work ethic. You better not call in sick to the house.”
“Don’t worry,” Lenny promised. “Showbiz is different. The show must go on and all that.”
June sighed and rolled her eyes. Then she returned the conversation to the topic at hand. “Do you have ideas for the room themes yet?” she asked Argento.
“I have a few,” he said. The way he smiled, it was clear he had more than just a few.
“I thought we could make the dining room a big Texas Chainsaw Massacre theme. And the den could be our giallo room. I’m thinking a combo of Opera, Inferno, Suspiria, Phenomena.”
“I’d argue that those aren’t really all giallos,” Lon said, but Argento ignored him.
June leaned over to Jeanie and explained. “Those are all Dario Argento films,” she said.
Jeanie nodded. “Got it.”
“I thought the first bedroom could be the Nightmare on Elm Street room,” Argento continued.
June and Lenny both lit up. “Now you’re talking,” Lenny said. He grabbed June’s shoulders and squeezed.
“I thought we could borrow the stuff from your bedroom,” Argento said, looking at Lenny. He shrugged. “Sure, why not?”
“We have to have a Fulci room,” Lucio said. “It’d be cool to do something from a Jean Rollin film too – a Living Dead Girl or Fascination theme? I’m thinking we could stage the scene of the ghoul girl at the piano or maybe something like Brigitte Lahaie in that long cape threatening people with the big scythe. Or maybe have a vampire walking out of a grandfather clock? Or how about a Jess Franco thing…we could have the girl from Countess Perverse running around in a loincloth with a bow and arrow.”
Argento laughed and shook his head.
“I don’t think we’re going to get away with having a nude girl sitting at a piano, or a bunch of women in see-through silk waltzing around,” Lon said. “Or really anything from a Franco movie. This is a family show.”
“But the girls could have long, fake-looking fangs,” Lucio offered.
Lon shook his head. No.
Lenny laughed. “Yeah, gore is great, but no tits, God forbid.”
“How about an homage to the films on the 1980s Video Nasties list?” Lucio suggested.
“I think ‘banned in Britain’ might be a little obscure for our audience,” Lon said. “I don’t think most people in the suburbs are too familiar with Cannibal Holocaust or Antropophagus or Unhinged or Flesh for Frankenstein.”
“Maybe not,” Lucio said. “But they know The Evil Dead and I Spit on Your Grave. And some will recognize The Beyond.”
“I have white contacts, so we can have someone dressed up like that girl from The Beyond,” June offered.
“That would be awesome!” Lucio said.
Argento nodded. “I think you get the second bedroom for Fulci stuff.”
“So…it sounds like you have the first floor pretty mapped out,” Jeanie said. “Where do they go next?”
Argento pointed at the thin hall that ran along the left side of the diagram. “They walk down this hall and reach the stairways. We want to have someone stationed there probably, to make sure people go upstairs first or else they’ll miss the attic.”
“Brigitte Lahaie lookalike with the scythe,” Lucio suggested.
“Maybe,” Argento said with a grin. “It would be better if the stairwells were in different parts of the house, but we’re stuck with this setup. You go up or down right here.”
“And what happens in the attic?” June asked.
“We’ve got rafters, so we’ve got to do a noos
e,” Argento said. “I’m thinking we should play off the whole attic thing though, and have some old trunks up there that people can pop out of, maybe an old woman in a wheelchair, like Norma Bates, and then a row of old costumes that people have to walk past, like that room in Curtains. We could even have someone in the hag mask from there stalking the aisles.”
“Nice,” Lucio said. “I get to be the old crone with the sickle!”
Argento grinned. “Sold. But I thought you’d want to be a zombie?”
Lucio shrugged. “I can switch off.”
Argento shook his head. Then he pointed at the large space at the far end of the attic. “Here we’ve got a nice back room which I was thinking we could turn into a creepy kid’s playroom, like in House on Sorority Row. They’ll have to criss-cross here to get back downstairs, because there’s only one way up and down to the attic, so people will cross through the playroom and out the back door, which points them right back to the stairwell they came up on. We can divide the stairway, maybe?”
June pointed at the other piece of paper on the table and looked at Argento. “So what happens when they go in the basement?”
He grinned. “They enter…‘The chamber of horrors’!” he declared.
Lon laughed. “So, you’re decorating the basement to look like your bedroom?”
Argento snorted. “Downstairs, we’ve got two walled-in rooms, and a small area along the northern wall that’s enclosed to hide the utilities. I thought we could set up an aisle of exhibits with iconic monsters there.”
“An Aisle of Atrocities!” Lucio said.
“As people walked down the aisle they would see some of the most famous horror themes and film scenes. Countess Báthory, The Exorcist, Hellraiser, Romero’s zombies….”
“How about Fulci’s zombies?” Lucio asked. “They had better makeup. And maggots.”
Argento shrugged. “Rotting zombies, clean zombies, whatever. We can have a dungeon, and I thought one room could be a Vlad the Impaler room – I’ve got a friend who works at Ellis Manufacturing. I’ve already talked to him and we could get a bunch of tall metal spikes from him and hang some latex bodies on them. Easy setup, great spot for gory makeup skills,” he said, nodding at June and Jeanie.
