by John Everson
She pushed his hand down to the silver buckle of her belt, and Mike didn’t argue. He was not going to screw this up, after waiting so long, by asking questions. There would be time enough for answers later. He unzipped her shorts and began to slip them down her thighs. She moved down to the bed so he could pull them past her knees and off. When he dropped them off the bed on the floor, he saw the shadow of Emery still standing at the back of the room. His stomach constricted for a moment; he’d been so lost in Katie, he’d forgotten there was anyone else in the room. But the other woman didn’t move or say anything and again, his crotch told him not to fuck this up. If Katie didn’t care, why should he? He slid his fingers up Katie’s inner thighs, and slipped his thumbs beneath the elastic band of her panties when he reached them. She arched her back and he slid the silk down, gasping with desire as he exposed her.
“Hurry,” Katie whispered. She spread her legs apart and held her arms open for his embrace. He accommodated, pressing himself between her thighs and diving into her kiss. She took his breath away; her every touch sent jolts of fire down his back, up his thighs, into his crotch.
It had been months since Mike had had sex, and foreplay with Katie had gone on for weeks. He wasn’t slow or tentative about pressing inside her. He literally couldn’t wait. She accepted his entry with a quiet moan, and then Mike felt the threads of her scars – or wounds – scratching against his belly as he moved with her. The sensation was strange, but weirdly exciting. He had all of her, even if it was a ragged her, against him. He poured himself inside Katie, rolling her back and forth on the bed in the dark. Her hands pressed against his thighs and ass, massaging him and stroking his body as he moved the most sensitive part of himself inside her. At one point, he felt lips and breath on his neck even though Katie was beneath him. But he didn’t question it; his climax was too close to think.
Katie groaned and gasped in small tight sounds, and he struggled to hold his own sounds in, still aware that the decorators were working just a few feet above their head. When he finally let go inside her, a warm weight pressed down on his back. The soft flesh of breasts and the hot lips of a mouth that was not Katie’s kissed his back and neck, as he moaned into Katie’s shoulder.
Emery was lying on top of him, naked and hot. He was pinned between them, and his eyes rolled back. This was the strangest heaven. And then Emery’s hands were urging him to roll over, off Katie to lie on his back. He did, and before his thighs had fully touched the bed she was on top of him, her wetness pressing down on his erection, still bone-hard from the excitement of plumbing the depths of Katie.
“Oh my God,” he whispered, as the heat of her engulfed him. Compared to Katie, she was like a furnace, dripping with desire and panting with need. She pressed his wrists to the bed and rode him hard, with each motion bleating a tiny catch of a sound from her throat.
Mike couldn’t believe he was still hard enough for her to use; he couldn’t possibly come again, but Katie leaned over his face and kissed him as Emery used her hips and worked him inside her. He could feel the nails in his back now, as she pumped herself to orgasm, slamming his ass again and again toward the thousand nails beneath the sheet.
And then it was over. Emery let out something that sounded like a wounded animal caught in a trap. She froze above him, her breasts hanging down to just barely brush his chest. Then she lifted her hips and pushed off the bed, leaving him alone again with Katie.
“Thank you,” Katie said. “She deserved that. It’s been a long time for her.”
“Nice of you to share,” he said, laughing just a little. Nervously.
“If you take me, you get Emery,” she said. “We’re like a set.”
“Whatever you want,” he said.
Katie’s eyes squinted with humor. “I didn’t think you’d mind,” she said. “You’re a man, after all.”
“What are you saying?”
“I think you know,” she said. “None of you can say no to the kitty.”
He snorted and slipped his hand between her legs. She was still wet with the evidence of their orgasms. “You weren’t exactly resisting, yourself,” he said.
She ran her hand up his arm to touch his chin. “No,” she admitted. “But women can choose to resist. Men are slaves to their penises.”
Mike ran his fingers over the rough stitches that marred her middle. The flesh felt angry, puckered and hard. The black stitches scraped his fingers like wires.
“What happened to you?” he asked. “How did you get all cut up?”
“Are you sure you really want to know?” she said.
He nodded.
“They did an autopsy on me,” she said.
Mike made a face and shook his head. “They can’t do an autopsy on you while you’re alive,” he said.
Katie nodded.
“I know,” she said. “They did it after I died.”
Part Two
The Haunting
Chapter Sixteen
“They’re lined up all the way to the turnpike!” Jeanie exclaimed. She pushed the black drapes back over the window and walked across the room to her impromptu makeup station. This was the Nightmare on Elm Street room, so it was decorated like a girl’s bedroom. Which meant she had a full vanity where she could work on makeup. Once the house opened for business each day, she could easily stow her stuff in a drawer as the house haunters made their way to their stations in all of the themed rooms. At the moment, everyone was gathered there for a last makeup check and a pep talk from Perry Clark, the guy who had masterminded this whole thing. Lon, the house production manager, stood at his side. Lenny and June stood in the front row waiting for Perry to talk. Both of them were visibly beaming with excitement. This was the night they’d been working toward for the past two months.
“Quiet down for a second,” Lon called. “It’s almost show time.”
Jeanie slipped past Lenny to stand next to Bong. She’d played off his ethnicity and turned him into a pale Asian ghost with a long wig and black contacts. Against the pancake white of his face, his eyes were like dark pools of hell.
“Thank you all,” Perry said. “You have done an amazing job here. Lon just gave me the tour, and I have to say, this place gave me the creeps – and you all weren’t even in your places to jump out at me. Thank God!”
Perry grinned and nodded at the grizzled carpenter in the corner. The thin, quiet girl who was always with him, Katie, stood at his side.
“The first time I saw this place, I didn’t think it would be safe for people to walk through without tearing it down,” Perry said. “But Mike, here, managed to bring this place back from the dead.”
He pointed at Argento and Lucio. “And you two…well, you made it look like the dead! I don’t even want to know how you got the blood splatter to look so real. It’s disturbing, I have to tell you.”
Perry waved his hand around the room at the collection of ghouls and zombies and gutted ‘haunters’ and grinned. “And all of you look…disgusting. Huge thanks to June and Jeanie for turning you into…well…whatever you are. You’re all amazing. And that’s really all I have to say. I just wanted to let you know that I’m so proud of what you’ve all done. This is the first time in decades that Bachelor’s Grove has had something positive happening within its gates. So, I just want you to go out there tonight, and the rest of the month and…have fun scaring the hell out of people.”
Lon grinned and held up his hands. “Thanks to Perry for making this all happen. Haunting Bachelor’s Grove was a stroke of genius. Once they walk through, I know people are going to be talking about this house for the rest of the year. Just remember, we’re here to have fun. If you see someone having a real problem – like they get so freaked out they’re crying or won’t leave a room or something, fade back and text me. I’ll be just outside or downstairs in Ops every night to deal with anything that comes up. I want the rest of you
to stay in character for our guests.”
He looked at his watch and nodded. “Front door opens in fifteen minutes. So…places, everyone. Let’s haunt this house!”
The cast began to file out of the room, and Jeanie walked over to her makeup station to hide the rest of her things for the night. As she passed Perry, the businessman shook his head.
“That’s disgusting,” he said.
“What, this?” she asked, turning her belly to face him. She had worked with latex to create a grisly twine of guts. It was held fast to her back with flesh-colored straps, allowing the fake intestines to literally hang and sway out of her belly. They glistened with something that looked like blood mixed with a yellow slime.
“Go ahead and feel it,” she offered.
Perry grimaced, but put a finger out to touch one curled rope of guts. He instantly pulled his hand back.
“It’s good, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Maybe too good,” he said, and shook his head, grimacing. Then Lon came up and grabbed him away to talk about some issue with ticket processing out front.
She saw that Katie and Mike still remained in the back of the room, talking quietly. Katie’s face was pale, and she wore a crop top halter and Daisy Dukes to show off her midriff to maximum effect. Her midsection was crisscrossed with scars and stitches. The effect was striking, yet also subdued. Jeanie wondered if everyone moving through the house would catch the grotesquerie of it, especially with the low lighting and moving quickly through the rooms. Jeanie stepped over to the two, interrupting their conversation with a smile.
“Do you want me to add some blood to that?” she asked, pointing at Katie’s belly.
The other woman shook her head. “Nobody does my makeup but me,” she said curtly, and went back to saying something to the carpenter. Mike had gotten her the job as a ‘floater’ at the last minute. She was not assigned to a particular room, but would simply be wandering the house looking spooky. But she had refused all of Jeanie and June’s offers to help with her makeup. Jeanie didn’t like her; she seemed just a bit too full of herself.
“Suit yourself,” she said, and went back to her vanity to put the last tubes of blood and spirit gum to attach all of the latex appliances to the haunters back in the drawers.
“Ten minutes,” Lon called from somewhere out in the hall.
Jeanie felt a lump in her throat and shut the last drawer. Bong stood next to her, and she leaned up on tiptoes to give him a small peck on the lips. She barely brushed them but apologized. “Don’t want to ruin your lipstick,” she said.
“I can’t believe you made me wear lipstick,” he complained.
“I can’t believe it’s opening night,” she said. “Are you excited?”
He shrugged. “I can think of better ways to spend a Thursday night.”
Jeanie frowned. “But think of all the nights we’ll be together this month,” she said. “We’ll see each other more than ever.”
“I like seeing you better without your guts showing,” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I might like you better with lipstick.” Jeanie grinned and took his hand. “Come on, it’s almost time to begin.”
Mike bent down to kiss Katie, now that they were the last people remaining, and she shooed him from the room. He would be hiding out with Lon in Ops each night, helping with any problems. His official job had really ended three weeks ago, but Lon and Perry kept finding new reasons to keep him on the payroll. He didn’t mind, since it gave him a good excuse to hang around Katie. “See you later,” he told her, and exited the room.
* * *
Emery emerged from the closet then, wearing a black cowl and holding a long, curved butcher knife.
From somewhere in the house, someone yelled, “It’s showtime. Let’s get bloody!”
Katie nodded, and whispered, “Oh, we will.”
Chapter Seventeen
There were far more people tonight in Bachelor’s Grove than had ever been there before for a funeral. And the people in line were buzzing with excitement. Many of them had heard of the haunted cemetery, but never actually been there before.
“…I can’t believe they actually are doing this here…”
“…what if it really is haunted, like they always said…”
“…best gimmick for a haunted house ever. As soon as I heard about it, I was in…”
“…I’m going to scream, I just know it…”
Jillie Melton heard it all, and shook her head. She stood near the front of the line with Ted. She hadn’t been able to enter the house or get it shut down since the carpenter had sent her away, so she’d bought a ticket to get in on opening night. They couldn’t keep her out with a valid ticket. The county forest preserve commissioner had listened patiently before dismissing her as a kook with the explanation, “This is the best way to put all of that haunting nonsense to rest. Instead of having people sneak past the police and possibly get hurt in there at night in October, we’re turning it into an attraction. For the first time in years, Bachelor’s Grove will actually be a safe place to go at Halloween. The only ghosts that will be there will be the ones we put there.”
Jillie didn’t believe that for a heartbeat, but she knew when to give up on a full-frontal assault. She was going in tonight to feel just how dangerous this attraction was likely going to be.
“I’m really worried about this,” she said.
Ted shook his head. “I think you’re working yourself up over nothing,” he said. “All this construction, all these people? I think they’ve probably driven away a lot of the energy here.”
“You know better than that,” Jillie said. “Spirits don’t just get up and move. Most of them can’t leave the place they’re tied to without intervention. That’s why you see the repetition over and over. The ghostly hitchhiker getting in cars on the turnpike happens again and again and again. The mother and her baby. The apparition of the house, with blood painted all over its front door. That energy is tied to the graves and the house, and all this activity is going to feed it, not send it away. And the spirits here have never been happy ones.”
“Most of the negativity that’s been here was because of the devil worshippers that desecrated this place in the Sixties and Seventies,” Ted said. “The dark stuff that happened here was all caused by living, breathing humans, not ghosts.”
She shook her head. “There were sacrifices here,” she said. “That blood remains in the ground. The darkness may have been started by the living, but the spirits they tied here remain. There’s been death here, violent death. And I just have this horrible feeling that there’s going to be more.”
The line suddenly shifted, as the first ticket holders were ushered past the gate on the front of the porch. As they stepped up on the first wooden stair, Jillie felt a chill down her back. An invisible pressure, like two cold hands, pushed against the front of her shoulders, trying to repel her backward. Trying to send her away.
“I can feel them now,” she whispered. “Stage Three and we’re not even inside the house.”
Ted looked at her with concern.
“I don’t know what we’re going to find once we actually get inside. But I don’t think these kids have any idea what they’re going to be dealing with.”
She nodded at the group of high schoolers ahead of them. There were a half-dozen of them, and two were wearing black and gold Oak Forest High School jackets.
A man wearing a hideous mask that looked like the skin of someone else’s face held up a chainsaw as he stood guard at the door. He only let in one group at a time to the house. He opened the battered screen door and motioned with the chainsaw for the high schoolers to move forward.
“Step inside,” he said. “Don’t slip on the blood.”
Chapter Eighteen
Larry led a group up the steps to the house at Bachelor’s Gr
ove. They had all met for drinks at The Edge and planned to head to Naperville for a Halloween movie night with friends afterwards.
“We’re going to get as much horror in as possible tonight,” Diane had told the bartender just a half hour earlier, before her husband Troy had pulled her back to their table with Larry, Lisa, Amy and Pam.
“Everybody in the world doesn’t need to know,” Troy said.
“But everybody in the world should be going to haunted houses and watching scary movies this week,” she’d insisted.
Now that they were finally about to enter the haunted house, Diane could barely contain herself.
“Who’s ready to scream?” she asked.
Amy smiled and shook her head. But Lisa grinned. “Let’s see what they got!”
They crossed the porch after getting their tickets. The door was opened by a man dressed as Leatherface.
“Good thing I wore my red shoes,” Larry said, as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre doorman ushered them inside. “You won’t be able to see the blood on them.”
Lisa laughed and bit his ear. “After what you drank, you won’t be able to see anything soon,” she whispered.
“I can see just fine,” Larry said. “Like right there. Isn’t that a human thigh on the dinner platter? I’m gonna pass on that, but the liver and onions might be good if it’s not overcooked.”
The dining room table was made of weathered wooden planks and set with three table settings. A series of serving plates covered the middle. It looked like the preparation for a feast…if you were a cannibal. A pale, gray, disembodied head perched at the top of the table, and a silver platter was piled high with amputated hands and feet. The bloodied fingers and toes were piled next to a long hunk of human thigh. Behind the table, a blond girl in a thin blue shirt was tied to a chair that appeared to be made of human arms. Her hands shook and pulled hard at the bindings, trying to get away from the dead fingers that made up the ends of the chair arms beneath her.
