The House by the Cemetery

by John Everson

  “Mike?” she whispered.

  He revved the chainsaw and began walking toward her. Jeanie darted back the way she’d entered, but instead, Leatherface turned back and ran out of the room toward the front door. Jeanie hesitated, not sure why he was running away from her. But as she turned the corner of the L to leave the room out the back hallway, she understood.

  Just as she reached the door, the chainsaw revved, and swung toward her.

  Jeanie stumbled backward and he kept coming, waving the whirring silver teeth of the blade at her chest and head.

  Jeanie turned the corner back into the dining room and started to run toward the front door. Only, she took the short way around the cannibal table, her habitual route for the past few weeks when walking through this room.

  And a second later found herself standing on the edge of the big black hole.

  She looked down and the garish lights of the basement played over a pile of body parts. There were heads, arms and torsos all glistening in a gory heap directly below. At the highest part of the mound of corpses, it was dark, but at the edges of the heap of bodies, she could see the tips of long, tall spikes.

  She knew right where they were, in terms of the basement. The Vlad the Impaler exhibit was just below. Dozens of five-foot-high sharp metal spikes, all reaching for the ceiling.

  Oh shit.

  The chainsaw was in the air buzzing closer and closer behind her head. Jeanie had no options.

  She jumped, aiming for the darkest part of the stack of bodies.

  Her landing was soft, though something bit at her left calf. Above her, she heard the chainsaw connect with the floor where she had been standing a second before. Then the machine whine faded away, as Leatherface pulled it back and returned to his position at the front of the room to wait for new guests to enter the house.

  Jeanie was safe for a moment.

  Now she just had to get off the pile of bodies and back to the floor of the basement without impaling herself in the process.

  She turned her head and found herself looking directly into the blood-splattered face of the ‘Groovy’ guy. His eyes were open in terror. Jeanie couldn’t help it. She let out a short scream.

  Then she tore her gaze away from that bit of horror and took in the rest of her situation. She felt wetness seeping into her clothes. And as she looked down the length of her body, she could easily see why. Her knee rested inside the crimson cavern the chainsaw had ripped into someone’s gut. The gristle of the shoulder end of a woman’s arm was shoved up against her chest. Something hard pressed against her groin, and as she shifted slightly, she saw what it was. The decapitated head of a man. He had a five-day growth of beard, but he was bald on top. His eyes were also open, staring sightlessly at Jeanie’s crotch. She shivered and looked away, toward the hallway that led past this grisly exhibit. There were three rows of silver spikes between the edge of the pile of bodies and her escape.

  Above her, the chainsaw let out an angry war cry as a woman screamed in true terror. Jeanie now realized that there was a difference between the screams that they’d elicited in patrons from an unexpected scare versus those in a true deadly situation. The cries of true horror sounded different. It wasn’t something she could have explained, but you could hear it.

  Something hit her in the back, and she gasped. It was heavy. She turned to see what it was and choked.

  It was half of a woman.

  Intestines slid over Jeanie’s ribcage as they exited the shredded cavity of the victim. They looked like bloody snakes and she shrieked at the sight. But a second later, her scream was cut off when another weight hit her. The other half of the victim. The woman’s pink gym shoe landed on top of the face of the dead woman beneath her. Before Jeanie could react, another body fell from above. She caught the blur of a heavyset man with glasses, and then heard the most horrible scream she had ever heard as he belly-flopped onto a handful of steel spikes next to the stack of corpses. His scream stopped abruptly as the spikes jutted through his back in three places. Another had caught him in the side of the head, and stuck fast in his skull. While his body slid down the spikes a couple feet, his head pinned him to the top of the spike.

  “Jesus,” Jeanie whispered. She resisted the urge to panic. While there was death all around her, she had escaped the chainsaw…now she just had to escape the spikes. The tops of the pointed spikes were all stained red, with bodies and body parts hanging on many of them halfway to the floor – like toothpicks with human olives. Argento had never imagined an impaling zone this cruel when he’d set it up with a handful of fake bodies streaming fake guts.

  Jeanie grabbed at the dead woman’s hand that hung over her, and pulled the woman forward. If she was going to get to the edge of the rows of spikes without being impaled herself, she needed to build a bridge. She rolled the ragged rib cage over to rest on the edge of a spike, but as soon as she pressed down on the woman’s jacket, the spike slid through the bones, and the upper half of the woman began to slide down the spike. The next corpse was lodged at least three feet down.

  No, she thought. They can’t slide. They need to wedge.

  She grabbed at the woman’s long blond hair and held her from slipping down the spike. And then she had an idea, thanks to the fat man nearby.

  Jeanie pulled the head by the hair and positioned the woman’s mouth over the tip of an impaler. Grimacing but not giving in, she pressed the spike through the glossy lips of the dead woman. The head sunk, but caught.

  That was the ticket.

  If she could use a handful of heads to create the base, stopping the soft flesh of the bodies from slipping down the spikes, she could then layer the tops of those heads – anchors – with a couple other bodies. A gruesome human suspension bridge.

  Another scream from above, and two more bodies fell through the opening. One landed on Jeanie’s legs, the other impaled itself a couple feet away. Not where she needed it to be.

  She took a breath, and smelled the strong scent of iron. And something far more pungent and foul. The bowels of dozens of people had opened beneath her.

  Rather than throw up, she grabbed at the denim jacket of a man who now lolled across her legs, and dragged him forward and over the woman whose head she’d impaled. Jeanie could think of only one thing.

  She was getting out of here.

  A hot rinse of blood soaked into her shirt as she dragged his corpse, but she ignored it, focusing only on getting the man’s mouth in the place she needed it to be. Fellating a silver spike.

  As the bodies continued to fall in a grotesque rain of screams and blood spray, she grabbed and moved them, layering pelvises over skulls on the spikes. She layered their limp, heavy bodies across each other, crisscrossing the corpses in a Lincoln Log style. Her hands and arms were slick with blood, but she hardly noticed now. She shrugged off the fake guts that were strapped around her waist so that she could move easier, and slapped them across a spike. More building material.

  A man’s voice screamed from above her, and the chainsaw whirred again. An arm suddenly fell through the hole, and bounced off the corpse pile to fall to the floor a couple feet away. The rest of the man came through the hole a second later, screaming without stop. He missed the center of the bodies and a spike suddenly poked through his thighs. His chest, however, rested on the edge of the island of bodies and he reached out his hands to Jeanie.

  “Oh God, fuck,” he cried. “Please help me.”

  He struggled, but all that did was make his legs slip farther down the spikes. He was pinned like a butterfly. As his legs slid down, he let out a series of sharp guttural cries. Jeanie turned toward him and took his hand.

  “Stop moving,” she said. “You’re making it worse.”

  And then another body fell from above. Another man. The guy landed on top of the pinned man’s waist, and she saw his eyes suddenly bulge.

  Th
e force of the new body pushed his stomach down hard on a spike that had been buried in the chest of another pinned corpse. A rain of blood splattered on the floor and the man didn’t scream or beg anymore. Jeanie let go of his hand, but took the hand of the body that had killed him. It had avoided getting wedged, so she dragged it behind her across the corpse bridge and laid it across the head of a woman.

  That did it. She had wedged a bridge of ripped and bleeding bodies right up to the edge of the spikes.

  She crawled across their still-warm flesh slowly, spreading her weight out as much as possible. Beneath her, she felt flesh shifting, sinking.

  “Please, please, please,” she whispered as slowly, carefully, she crawled across the dead. And then she had her hand on the back of the skull that rested on the final stake between her and the open ground below. She pulled herself forward, as the bodies beneath her shifted and moved. Something sharp poked at her thigh. Was it a spike or someone’s broken bone?

  She didn’t want to find out. Jeanie pushed against the skull beneath her hand and felt it sink. The spike below was working its way through the skull of the corpse. But now Jeanie could look over the tower of spikes and see the open floor four feet below.

  “Now or never,” she whispered, and closed her eyes for a second, steeling her nerve. Then she rolled across the bodies, not stopping when she reached the edge. She flipped right over the edge as one of the bodies behind her gave way, sliding two feet down a stake that she’d been resting on. It didn’t matter. For a second she was in the air, and then she landed hard on the ground.

  Jeanie cried out as her thigh slammed the wood, but she kept rolling and staggered to her feet in a heartbeat.

  She looked down at herself and grimaced. Her jeans and t-shirt were absolutely sodden with blood. Shreds of someone else’s flesh stuck to her pants like lint. Jeanie looked up as another body came through the hole in the ceiling above to smack down on top of the pile.

  She forgot about the gore and turned away toward the exit of the basement. She could be out of the house in seconds and then could finally find Lon and get him to turn the house lights on and stop sending people inside.

  Her leg hurt from where she’d landed, but Jeanie limped toward the cellar stairway out.

  She could see the Exit sign just ahead, with the white sign above it disputing the light. Argento had painted ‘NO’ in bright red letters above ‘EXIT’.

  Jeanie moved toward it, safe at last.

  Someone moved out of the corridor ahead of her and took a position directly in front of the stairs leading out.

  A figure with a long silver knife.

  Jeanie began to cry.

  The killer from the attic blocked her way out.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Jillie tugged on Ted’s arm as they stepped into the foyer. “See, I told you this would get us in okay.”

  “Yeah, but now you stand out like…a woman in a clown suit,” he said.

  The chainsaw whirred in the room to their right and Jillie pointed straight ahead. The arrows on the floor told them to turn right. ‘This Way To Your Doom’, the words next to them encouraged. The hallway ahead had police tape across it. Most of it had been knocked down already, but a couple strips still barred the way a foot above the floor.

  “Let’s go this way,” she said.

  “And get us thrown out for going the wrong way?” he said.

  “I think this leads straight to the stairway to the attic,” she said. “Come on.”

  She stepped over the tape and ducked into the hallway beyond. Ted followed, shaking his head. Screams erupted with the whir of the chainsaw behind them, and Jillie motioned Ted forward. When they reached the kitchen, Jillie stopped and crouched down.

  “What is it?” Ted whispered.

  She pointed at the puddle of blood surrounding the woman on the floor.

  “That’s real blood,” she said.

  “That’s what they want you to think,” he said. “Don’t you remember, she’s going to jump up any second and give you a heart attack.”

  Jillie shook her head. “Not this time,” she said. She pushed the body over, and despite knowing that the woman was dead, she jumped back when she saw the ravaged torso. The woman’s neck had been slashed ear to ear, and the blood was obviously real, when you saw it next to the makeup blood. Someone had slashed down the center of her shirt, severing both the cotton of her tee and the strap of her bra. It had also dug deep into the line of her sternum, ending in a foot-long hole in her belly. Wet red and yellow chunks of flesh hung out of the wound, and Jillie dropped the body back to the ground.

  “It’s happening,” she said. “I knew it from the start.”

  She stood up and went to the sink. A blackened face with poached eyes glared back at her. The man was very, very dead. A spotlight lay in the water next to his face. It was still plugged in to the wall socket, but it no longer was giving out any light.

  “So now that we know it’s happening, how do we stop it?”

  “Stop her,” Jillie corrected. “This is all part of a ritual,” she said. “We have to stop it before anyone else is sacrificed for it.”

  “Yes, but how?” he said.

  “We have to find her heart,” Jillie said. “And put a stake in it.”

  “But she’s already dead,” Ted said.

  Jillie shook her head. “If this is part of a reincarnation spell, I don’t think so. Not anymore. There have been too many sacrifices already.”

  Ted looked confused, but Jillie grabbed him by the arm and pulled. “Come on,” she said. “She’ll be in the basement. That’s where all of the other events in this house have been. They found animal bones down there, and magic ritual symbols in the past. All in the same spot. All dead center of the structure. The house’s heart. It’s where she pushed me. It’s where she’s held on all these years, waiting.”

  Together they ran down the hallway past the strobing lights and howling music. When they turned the corner, they found the bodies.

  “Oh my God,” Ted said. “Is it too late?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s not quite midnight yet. That’s always the hour of change. The weakest moment in the fabric between today and tomorrow, natural and supernatural. Come on.”

  Carefully they threaded their way through the corpses blocking the hall until they reached the stairs down. Jillie didn’t slow, but immediately launched down them.

  “Wait,” Ted called in a loud whisper. “Be careful,” he warned. “Whoever did this is still here.”

  “I’m counting on it,” Jillie said on the fourth step. Then she took the next three and in a second stood on the plank floor of the basement.

  “What are we looking for?” Ted whispered.

  She shrugged. “We’ll know it when we see it. I don’t know how all the sacrifices work, but her center is down here. That way,” she said, pointing to the right.

  Ted nodded, but didn’t move. “Okay,” he said. “Lead on.”

  Jillie shook her head. “Chivalry is dead.”

  Ted shrugged. “This is your party and I don’t want to be dead.”

  Jillie rolled her eyes and began leading the way down the aisle. “We’ll all be dead eventually,” she said.

  “Yeah, but we don’t have to die tonight,” he said from behind her.

  “We’re not going to die,” she said. “We just have to avoid getting stabbed.”

  “Someone should have told that to him,” Ted murmured, and pointed.

  They were passing a display that was clearly an homage to The Exorcist; there was a bed and nightstand in the center, and a girl with a green-tinged face and glowing eyes sitting up in the center of the bed. Her hair was wild and the soundtrack overhead kept repeating two lines in the midst of a nerve-racking soundtrack: “The power of Christ compels you!” one voice cried
and shortly thereafter, a demonic growl declared, “Your mother sucks cocks in hell!”

  But the bed and the soundtrack and the flaring lights weren’t what Ted was talking about. There was a man lying in front of the bed. He could have been part of the set, but a closer look made it clear he wasn’t. The man wore jeans and a black shirt with a cartoon on it that boasted ‘Fast zombies miss the brains’.

  Jammed into his mouth was a long wooden pole; a crucifix was mounted on the opposite end. It had probably been a setpiece for The Exorcist room, but now it was a murder weapon. Blood pooled around the back of the man’s head, where the end of the pole had plunged through his neck to gouge its way into the floor.

  “I wonder who he pissed off,” Ted said.

  “I don’t think he had to piss off anyone,” Jillie said. “She wants the blood of everyone standing in that line outside spilled in here.”

  “But why?” Ted said.

  “She needs their life to return,” Jillie said. “She needs gallons of blood. This isn’t just vengeance. There’s a purpose.”

  “A method to the madness?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I just don’t know what the method is. Or rather, what the last act is. I just hope we’re not too late to stop it.”

  They walked past another display, this one an homage to Hellraiser. And like in the movie, a man had been mounted on a cross in the center of the space, with chains liberally covered in hooks attached to the body. The man’s arms and legs and cheeks and abdomen were all gouged and pulled tight by hooks, his flesh stretched like yellowed taffy off his bones and pinched toward the walls.

  But like the last display, the star of this torture scene was not a dummy. There was no makeup here.

  The puddle on the floor beneath his legs was the result of a bladder voided, and the blood spatter rained on the floor was real blood, the trickle of life that had dripped from the holes of the hooks. The man had been bled dry as he hung helpless in the air.

  Jillie walked into the set and reached up to put her fingers on the man’s chest.