by John Everson
“What are you doing?” Ted whispered. His voice was sharp.
“Just trying to tap in,” she said.
Jillie rested her head and stood there for a minute, not speaking. When she finally pulled back, Ted asked, “What did you feel?”
“Nothing,” Jillie said. “I saw him die. And I felt nothing at all.”
She looked perplexed, and Ted pulled her arm. “Come on,” he said.
She nodded and stepped away from the body. Her face was troubled, but she walked back into the aisle and only paused briefly as they passed the next display. There was a woman’s torso there, propped upright on a church altar, with her vacant eyes staring toward the aisle. Her waist and legs were missing, and a stream of blood leaked over the edge of the altar to drip down and spread on the floor.
Jillie only shook her head. “This is not good,” she whispered.
“Ya think?” Ted said. “Should we be recording anything?”
“Sure,” Jillie said absently. “If you want. But this is different. This isn’t a haunting situation.”
“What would you call it?”
“A ritual. A massacre.”
Jillie walked further down the aisle, and the lighting changed. Ted reached into his backpack and pulled out an EMF reader. Maybe Jillie didn’t care right now about documenting all of this, but later, she’d be asking what he’d been doing in here with her the whole night.
There were times she could be really unfair…and unforgiving.
The meters on the tracker were alive.
Ted held the tool out toward the aisle behind them and slowly moved it forward, watching the readings. The LED meters shivered and moved; nothing drastic, but they weren’t still either.
“There’s activity here,” Ted announced, looking around the spotlit dark. “But nothing focused.”
“That’s all of the victims,” Jillie said. “Not the main event.”
He followed her around the corner and they began a new row of grotesque sets as they walked toward the exit. Having done this once before, Ted understood how it flowed, even if he didn’t remember the ‘kill’ scenes exactly.
Ted reached out to grab Jillie’s shirt. She slowed, and he pointed down the long aisle in front of her before whispering, “Who is that?”
There was a woman standing at the edge of the aisle. And she was clearly a woman, not some prop. Her face moved, and she looked both left and right as she studied the room. But when Ted trained the EMF reader on her, the dial did nothing.
“Jillie,” he called. “Look.”
He held the reader out in front of him, and she glanced at the dial.
“She’s alive,” Jillie said. “But there’s no way that this is simply the work of one disturbed woman. Let’s see what’s really going on.”
Jillie kept walking forward, toward the girl at the end of the aisle. She had unruly brown hair, kinked and curled in a wild way across her shoulders. She stared straight ahead though, her gaze focused on something down the other aisle, as she held a long silver blade into the air.
Ted followed behind, holding the EMF reader out in front of him. The needles looked nervous, but really didn’t move. On either side of the walkway were sets depicting scenes from horror films, but Ted didn’t look at most of them seriously enough to try to guess what they were. When he did look, he saw people bleeding from a wide variety of wounds. He didn’t want to see those; instead he tried to focus on his EMF meter rather than the death that was clearly in evidence all around him.
“Who is behind all of this?” he asked.
“Someone with a plan,” Jillie said. She strode forward then and held up her hand, gesturing for the woman to stop whatever she was doing. They were close, and she saw the opportunity to intervene.
The woman didn’t see her right away, and instead lifted her knife higher to threaten somebody in the aisle ahead. Jillie and Ted couldn’t see who, but they began to run forward.
“Stop!” Jillie screamed.
The woman paused, surprised by the interruption. She turned to face Jillie and changed the focus of the knife blade. At the same time, she kept her gaze divided, watching whoever she had been threatening. Without warning, she suddenly darted down the side aisle away from them.
Jillie ran to follow and Ted was right behind. When they reached the aisle, they finally saw who the woman was really after.
A girl stood just a few feet down the passageway from the killer. She was covered in blood, head to toe. She could have been representing Sissy Spacek from the pig blood scene in the movie Carrie. The woman with the knife suddenly ignored Jillie and Ted and moved toward the girl like a storm.
“Stop!” Jillie cried again.
But this time it was Ted who didn’t hold back. He elbowed past Jillie and ran the five yards down the aisle to catch the woman.
“Leave her alone!” he yelled, as he drew closer to the woman.
The woman with the knife stopped midway down the aisle and turned toward him with the blade raised.
“Stop!” he screamed.
The woman’s answer was to swing the blade like a scythe as she turned toward him.
Ted slowed his approach, but it was too late. The woman moved fast.
Ted gasped as the steel of the knife slipped easily through the cotton of his shirt and into his chest.
“Noooo!” Jillie screamed, but she could do nothing to save him.
Ted gasped and choked.
The knife moved fast through the soft flesh of Ted’s belly. There was a pinch at his heart. It felt like it should have been more painful, really, but Ted didn’t have the chance to say that to anyone. Instead he groaned and collapsed like a house of cards to the floor.
The killer only gazed at him for a moment, however, before turning her attention back toward the other woman waiting at the end of the passageway.
Jillie dropped to her knees, grabbing for Ted’s hand. His shirt bloomed with blood and her fingers were almost instantly warm with his life.
“Hold on,” she whispered to him. “I’ll get an ambulance.”
Ted grimaced and slowly shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Just don’t let her get to you.”
“You’re going to be okay,” Jillie promised. But she knew as she said it that he wasn’t. His chest was like a well of blood, and his breath came in wet wheezes.
“You can have my fries,” he gasped. His mouth twisted in a pained scowl, and then went still.
“Ted?” Jillie whispered. She repeated his name louder, but he didn’t move.
His eyelids didn’t blink.
Her eyes filled with tears, but then self-preservation forced her to look up from her friend. She knew the killer had to be just a few feet away, maybe already coming for her. But when she looked up, through her bleary gaze, she realized that the knife woman was gone. And so was her intended victim.
Jillie felt a small relief at that, since it allowed her to release her grief and hold Ted.
She put her arms around him, ignoring the wet blood that covered his chest.
“I’m so sorry I dragged you into this,” she whispered, and laid her cheek on the stubble of his. “So, so sorry,” she whispered, as her tears slipped down to pool on his bloody shirt.
Chapter Forty-Three
The nails hurt his back.
Mike screwed up his eyes and moaned as he rolled over on Emery’s dangerous bed. How long had he been asleep there? he wondered.
He rolled his feet over the side and pushed himself up to a sitting position.
That’s when he realized that he was covered in blood. He looked down his arm and saw his sleeve was dark with it. His other arm was the same.
He hadn’t lain down in the bed that way. And he didn’t feel injured. Had he gouged himself badly on a nail? He ran a hand up and down one arm and s
hook his head. The sleeve was damp with sticky blood. Only, nothing on his arm hurt. He didn’t think he was hurt. He just felt a little…woozy.
So then…how had he gotten all bloodied?
Mike stood up, and tried to survey his body in the dim light of Emery’s room. There was just a single candle, and Emery and Katie were nowhere to be seen. His sleeves were sodden with blood, and his chest and belly and crotch were all damp with it as well.
What the hell?
Mike started to walk toward the stairway when his foot connected with something on the floor.
He looked down and saw a chainsaw lying there.
A familiar Leatherface mask lay on the floor nearby.
“What did you do?” he whispered. Then he climbed up the stairs to reach the attic.
The eerie music played, but nobody was there. Mike descended the stairwell to the main floor and realized the house there also seemed empty. It was as if he had slept until after closing time. All the lights were on, but nobody was home.
Mike walked around the corner and abruptly stopped.
It might not be so much that nobody was home, but rather, that everyone who was home was dead.
The corridor was filled with bodies. And clearly these were not props, but real, bloodied, murdered bodies.
“What the fuck?” Mike whispered.
He stepped between the corpses until he reached the hallway that led to the kitchen and the front foyer. People were lying on the floor everywhere. His stomach contracted to a tiny ball of ice. The world had turned dangerous and strange in a way he had never imagined in his worst nightmares.
Mike walked toward the front of the house, intending to find Lon. But when he reached the foyer, he looked outside and saw that the deck was empty. The ticket-taker booth was untenanted, and the long line of people to get in to the haunted house…was gone.
How long had he slept?
And why was he covered in blood?
Mike stepped back from the door and looked instead toward the Texas Chainsaw Massacre room. The walls seemed painted in blood. He walked inside and looked around. The ‘cannibal’ table had blood spatter everywhere. The tablecloth was drenched. The ‘props’ that Argento had made were no longer creepy unto themselves – their fake blood was dripping with the real thing.
He looked at the plank floor and saw the oblong hole that had been carved into the basement. Why had anyone cut a hole in the floor?
Mike shook his head and stepped back to the main hall. He had to find Katie, and he knew where she probably was. He headed back through the hallway of bodies toward the stairway down. While the sounds of Goblin and John Carpenter still echoed through the air from the various rooms, otherwise, the house was quiet.
He stepped down the stairs into the basement and found it equally deserted. But then, as he walked down the aisle toward the secret room, he realized that it wasn’t completely empty. While there didn’t seem to be any living patrons roaming the halls in search of a good scare, there did seem to be plenty of dead patrons.
Each of the display rooms that made up the basement Aisle of Atrocities was now filled with dead people.
Some were chainsawed and some were stabbed…but all of the bodies he saw appeared very dead, no matter what ‘set’ they were in.
Mike felt frightened beyond anything he had ever been. Something terrible had happened here tonight, while he had been asleep. But what? And why?
He reached into the recessed opening and pulled open the door to the room where Katie’s bones lay.
And almost instantly, he heard the first voice to break the silence since he’d awoken.
“There you are,” Katie said. “We’ve been waiting for you!”
Chapter Forty-Four
She had escaped the psycho who had cut off Bong’s arms and legs, managed to slip past the maniac with the chainsaw, build a bridge of human bodies to avoid being impaled and land bloody but basically unharmed on the ground just yards from the exit to this slaughterhouse.
And after all that, she was going to die anyway. It wasn’t fair.
Those were Jeanie’s first thoughts as she confronted the girl from the attic with the bloody knife.
She stood in a faceoff with the girl, who barely seemed there at all. The killer’s eyes seemed to stare right through Jeanie. But Jeanie didn’t trust that blankness; she’d seen the damage this monster had done with her knife. The evidence lay bleeding on every floor of this house.
Jeanie feinted to the right, and the knife followed her. The woman’s body did not. Her feet stayed planted in place, blocking the aisle. Jeanie could turn and run back the way she’d come, but then she’d have the knife at her back. She needed more distance between her and the killer before she could chance turning around.
Jeanie edged a step backward, and then another.
The girl with the knife stepped forward, maintaining the distance.
Fuck. What the hell was she going to do? She didn’t have a weapon, and this girl was twice her size and held a knife that she clearly was not afraid to use.
She was going to have to turn and run and pray that she could put a couple steps between them before the killer reacted.
The knife suddenly raised in the air as the killer prepared to attack.
Jeanie steeled herself to go, when someone yelled from just around the corner.
“Stop!” a woman’s voice cried.
The girl looked at the source of the voice, and as she did, Jeanie stepped backward a step. And then another. And another.
“Leave her alone,” a man’s voice cried.
And then the killer took off and Jeanie seized the opportunity. She turned and ran.
Behind her, she heard the steps of the killer, and the voices of the couple. She couldn’t pause to look back, but when she turned the corner she realized quickly that there were no longer any footsteps at her back. She slowed her pace enough to glance behind, but didn’t stop.
She was no longer being followed at the moment.
And then the basement echoed with a scream.
Jeanie swore beneath her breath. She knew the knife meant for her had just found at least one of the people who had given her the opportunity to escape. And if the killer had taken care of those two, that knife would be coming for her again any second.
Jeanie rounded the corner to the left, and then stopped before the pathway turned left again. The stairway out of this hellhole was at the end of this corridor. But was the way clear?
She hugged the false wall of one of the exhibits and peered around the corner. Spotlights showed blue and red and green against the walls and floor, and a strobe flickered in one of the exhibits near the end of the corridor. There were a couple bodies lying on the floor but otherwise, nothing moved.
Jeanie took a breath and stepped around the corner. But just as she did, something crashed in the hallway she’d just left.
She ducked into the exhibit to the left to get out of sight.
It was supposed to be some kind of dungeon; there were chains hanging from all of the walls, and a woman was locked in a wooden rack. The device had never been functional; Jeanie knew, because she’d helped Argento assemble part of it.
But it looked impressive, with its big wooden wagon wheels and plank backing boards. And iron manacles.
Somebody had made it look more real than it was. There had been a bloody manikin chained to the device, but now there was a real woman there. Her wrists and ankles were pulled tight to the opposite ends of the rack, which made what had happened to her midsection more dramatic.
She was broken open like a piñata, her groin and ribs yanked far apart to allow her intestines to cascade like bloody vines over the edge of the wood.
Jeanie grimaced and looked away. She slipped behind the Iron Maiden that Lucio had designed in his garage and crouched down on the floo
r. She should be able to stay safely out of sight here for a while.
She could just see the corridor from there. Jeanie let out a breath and then forced herself to take in another, trying to still the pounding in her chest. In the distance, she thought she could still hear the sounds of talking, or sobbing. But it could have been part of the soundtrack too; the whole basement had distinct zones of eerie sounds and synthesized throbbing all designed to make the walk through its exhibits more intense.
Something dripped on Jeanie’s head.
And again.
She reached up to wipe it and her fingers came away dark.
Jeanie looked up and saw the source. A man in ripped jeans hung from chains attached to the rafters. His shirt had been removed. His throat was a red circle of slashed flesh that had dripped and drooled in a dozen different rivers down the hair of his chest and belly. His face hung down, and she could see the sightless whites of his eyes in the dark.
Without thinking, she started to rise, to get away from the blood, but just as she did, she saw feet in the corridor.
Jeanie froze in a half crouch. She didn’t dare breathe.
Another drop of blood hit her forehead, and ran down to her nose. She screwed up her face in disgust but still managed to hold her breath. She would not let the killer know she was here.
Drip.
The white soles of tennis shoes moved a step farther down the corridor. And then slowly, another.
Drip.
Jeanie was dying to wipe her face, but she didn’t dare move a muscle.
The feet turned then, and began to slowly walk back the way they’d come. The way she had come.
Jeanie slowly took a breath, and let it out. And breathed again. She raised one hand in slow motion and brushed it across her forehead, nose and cheek to clear the blood away. She wiped it off on her jeans, which were already heavy with other people’s blood. She refused to think about that, and forced herself to stay focused on the corridor.
Nothing moved.
Slowly she relaxed a little, and settled down to wait. The seconds passed like hours, and she forced herself to count to one hundred.
