Celebrity Hell House

by Millard, Adam

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” the girl said. “Oh, and I’d really appreciate it if you told her” – she pointed across to the sleeping form of Lorna Giffard – “to try to control her urges. I’ve never seen such a display. Thought she was trying to tear the bleeding thing off. I had to cover my sister’s eyes.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Peter said, “but I’ll be sure to relay the message.”

  The girl began to fade. Peter flicked the cockroaches from his clothes, watched as they hit the adjacent wall with a mechanical click. One of them, an old one by the looks of it, exploded upon impact. He didn’t feel guilty in the slightest. Those things had come from nowhere, and there was a good chance that they weren’t even real. It was, he reasoned, like killing a character in some uber-violent videogame. Sure, they were assholes, but you weren’t really stamping on their head until it exploded like a watermelon. It was all a game, a game which he would need to up if he wanted to get out of here with the quarter-million.

  Then, the girl – Belle, creepy ghost girl, the best CGI ever! – was gone, and Peter was left alone on the centre of the room, feeling like a prize tit for engaging it in conversation for so long. Sure it would make great TV, but what was to say the public didn’t take it the wrong way? Figure Peter was a nut-job and have him sectioned quicker than he could telephone Lurch for a taxi home?

  “Eurgh,” said Lorna. “Did you say something?” Her eyes were closed, but she was clearly compos mentis.

  Peter sighed. “Go back to sleep,” he said. “I’ll tell you all about it in the morning.” Now was not the time to tell her about the lengths the producers were willing to go to in order to terrify the housemates, or that they had some amazing technology on hand, and lord knows what else.

  “M’kay,” Lorna muttered, slapping her lips like a seasoned crack-whore. “Tell me tomorrow.” And then she was snoring again, and Peter doubted that she would remember anything of the conversation come sun-up, which might be a blessing in disguise.

  He settled down into his armchair, and within a few minutes he, too, was asleep, for it would take more than some fancy special effects and a great actress to piss on his parade.

  15

  Pain. Terrible pain caused Michaela Strapon to lunge forwards in her bed, clutching onto her stomach as if her innards might fall out at any moment. “Jayzus,” she said, for she had learnt that by pronouncing it with a zee she wasn’t exactly blaspheming.

  It felt as if her guts had been replaced by a whirring motor with blades attached, and said blades were spinning ferociously, hollowing her out from the inside. She’d experienced terrible pain before – treading on Lego, biting into a Toblerone with a cavity, stubbing her toe against a furniture’s right-angle – but this, well this was something that set her teeth on edge.

  Swinging her legs over the edge of the bed, she remembered where she was, and that searching for the toilet in this dark, creepy, and unfamiliar place was like heading over to Mordor in a Robin Reliant with nothing more than a compass and a packet of Ginger Nuts in the glove compartment. In other words, she wouldn’t have attempted it if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.

  I’m on camera, she reminded herself. Shitting the bed was not an option, not if she wanted a career once she got out of the house. Yes, she had made her living sifting through other people’s shit, but did she want to wake up in a puddle of her own? Not really.

  Quickly, she moved across the room, flung open the bedroom door, and rushed through the darkness, in the direction of the bathroom. Along the way she tried several light-switches, none of which worked, and she knew that They were in control, not the housemates; that They decided when to allow them to see; that They had probably locked the shitter door, just to stir things up a little.

  Still she persisted, for there was no way she could give up now. I’ve come too far, she thought, and even her inner monologue was sobbing. She clenched as something tried to free itself from her body, and whatever had been there sucked itself back up, momentarily, and waited, knowing that it was just a matter of time, that Michaela wasn’t as strong and determined as she made out, that she was one scare away from redecorating the whole of the first floor.

  She bounced into a door, whimpered, fumbled around for the knob. It was a door – an old door – and therefore had to have a knob. When she found it, she whimpered again, for she was touching cloth and there were mere seconds to spare.

  With a turn of the cold, steel ball, the door flew open, and Michaela could just about make out a sink, a bathtub, and a toilet through the gloom. A noise escaped her that did not come from her lips as she slammed the door shut behind her. Before she reached the toilet, her knickers were around her ankles. The terrible thing she’d been holding in forcing itself out a few inches.

  “Fuck!” she said, spinning and landing on the toilet. If the bowl had been an inch wider, she’d have been in the drink for sure. The rim was icy cold, and a shudder ran the length of her spine.

  Then it was coming, freeing itself from her body as if she’d said something to offend it and it no longer wanted to be associated with her. Michaela kept praying it would snap off, for she knew it was coiling up in the bottom of the bowl like some fecal snake. It was only a matter of time before it bit her on the arse.

  But the relief was immense; she couldn’t help smiling as the pressure was slowly removed. It was like squeezing a particularly recalcitrant spot, one of those headless monsters that one always found oneself faced with on the night of an important event or date, one of those boil-like aberrations that required tweezers, pins, a hammer, and a pair of scissors to get rid of.

  Along with the relief came a god-awful stench that Michaela didn’t think she would ever get rid of, no matter how many times she brushed her teeth or deodorised. She made a mental note to burn her knickers as soon as she got a chance, for this stench was sticky, like something from another world.

  Michaela was trying to bite off the log when a thought assaulted her already addled brain: there are probably cameras in here…

  “No,” she whispered. “No, no, no, they wouldn’t put cameras in the lavatory.” She scanned the gloom for anything that flashed, whirred, or beeped, and even when she found nothing she wasn’t convinced. These people were capable of anything – she knew that after Celebrity Dogfights was renewed for its third season – and so she doubted they had a problem installing a few hidden cameras in what should have been the most private room in the house.

  It’s probably underneath you, said the voice in her head, which was apparently on a roll and wouldn’t stop until Michaela was left sobbing into the bathtub.

  “Stop being silly, Michaela,” she said as something plopped into the water below and the water splashed her backside. After a few moments of searching for the toilet roll – it was sitting atop the cistern, underneath what felt like one of those garish crocheted women in frilly dresses – she wiped and stood, peeling her soiled knickers over her feet, and found the chain that would flush her disgusting creation (if she was lucky).

  She pulled.

  Nothing happened.

  She pulled again, more frantically this time.

  A slight trickle of water, though nowhere near enough to rid the house of the Loch Mess Monster.

  “Don’t fucking do this to me,” Michaela said, her eyes watery and stinging from the smell.

  She pulled the chain once again, and all that came was pain; a terrible sharp shock that ran all through her body, and then her feet were no longer on the floor. She flew backwards, slamming into the shut door so hard that it splintered in its frame.

  It was only then, as she came to against the door, that she heard the music. It was a tinny, out-of-tune rendition of something she recognised, something that caused gooseflesh to rise on her skin. If she had been a scholar of classic music, she would have known the song as ‘Entry of the Gladiators (Thunder and Blazes), but she wasn’t, which meant that she recognised the song only as ‘Th
at Creepy-Ass Circus Music’.

  Through tear-blurred eyes she realised that the room was no longer drenched in darkness. A bright spotlight rushed across the walls, along the ceiling, came to rest upon the toilet she had, only a moment ago, been sitting upon.

  “Heeeeelp…” Her plea was nothing more than a whisper, for the wind had been royally knocked from her. She couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, couldn’t stop the urine from spraying from her. In her panic she’d forgotten to take a number one, but she was taking one now, and it was one of those that you doubt will ever end.

  Something began to emerge from the toilet, its edges limned by the spotlight, and for a moment Michaela’s breath caught in her throat. She watched as something furry and red, smothered in shit (her shit) rose from the bowl as if standing on some sort of toilet elevator. A pair of eyes, a large round nose, an impossibly wide grin, a frantically-spinning bowtie.

  “I’ll be with you in a minute,” said the creature. “You wouldn’t believe how much this shit slows you down.”

  A clown! A fucking clown! Rising from the plumbing, and cracking jokes on the way up! Michaela would have pinched herself if she had been able to move. This couldn’t be real. This was a prank gone too far. What kind of sick bastards were ITV7? It was bad enough that they would put cameras in the toilet, if indeed they had, but to conceal a clown down the crapper in order to scare her – they knew of her aversion to all things circus; it had gone right there on the form beneath her name and above her age – was taking things a smidge too far.

  “Flipping heck,” said the shit-covered jester. “I’d have been better off coming out of the sink.” His body now wholly out of the toilet bowl, he stepped forward on oversized shoes, which squeaked as they touched down on the bathroom tiles. “Oh, and I’m nothing to do with the show, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m just here to destroy each of you. Sorry about that.”

  This is a dream, Michaela assured herself unconvincingly. As a child she’d suffered such awful nightmares: falling from high buildings; being chased through dark forests by werewolves, back when werewolves didn’t walk around with their tops off trying to bed miserable-looking sows for no real good reason; being peeled like a banana by some insidious figure that looked a lot like Uncle Jeremy, but probably wasn’t.

  “You probably think you’re having a shitter of a nightmare,” said the clown, honking his nose for dramatic effect. Faeces dripped from his baggy trousers and slapped against the tiles with a sound akin to meat being dropped onto a butcher’s counter. “But I can assure you that this is all very real.”

  That’s exactly what a dream monster would say, Michaela thought, though there was something about the way he said it that suggested he was telling the truth. This was, she thought, a thing of pure evil, not some terrifying reverie from which she would most certainly wake.

  “I know what scares you,” said the clown. “I know everything about you, Michaela.” It practically hissed her name; Michaela trembled at the sound of it. “And unfortunately” – it glanced down at the faeces dripping from its clown-suit – “I know exactly what you had for breakfast yesterday.”

  “Please,” Michaela whimpered, finally mustering up the ability to say something – anything. “Please…don’t hurt…me.” Her words came out in staccato bursts, which was, she figured, better than fuck all.

  In the second that followed, the clown seemed to double in size as it loomed over her. The music – Entry of the Gladiators (Thunder and Blazes), not that she knew that – reached a crescendo, so loud now that her housemates must have heard it.

  “Hurt you?” the clown sneered, its teeth razor-sharp, its eyes clouded over with cataracts. “You come into my home, trespass upon my property, and then wonder why I’m going to stamp you to death with my size 29 clown-shoes?”

  “Huh?” Michaela just about managed before the first huge shoe came down on her skull, squeaking as it made contact. She saw stars, and then another foot knocked her unconscious.

  After that, the scent of her own shit faded pretty rapidly, as did everything else. It was surprising how quickly one’s senses were lost once one’s brain was splattered against a bathroom door.

  16

  “Anything happening?”

  Trev almost jumped out of his chair. “What the fuck are you playing at?” he said as his brother plonked himself down beside him. “You trying to get our inheritance all to yourself, you little cockwomble?”

  Nev Lovecraft lit a cigarette and shrugged. “You’ll just piss it all up the wall anyway.” He motioned toward the screens. “Any sign of our spectral moth?” He’d meant it as a joke, and yet a shudder almost sent him sprawling face-first on the desk.

  “Everything’s as it should be,” Trev said, arching his back until something cracked. “See?”

  Up on the screens, eight housemates slept peacefully. At some point in the last few hours, Crystal Cobb had made her way into Mark White’s room and was snuggled up next to him like a one-eyed kitten. “Did those two have some gland-to-gland combat?”

  “No such luck,” said Trev. “She staggered in there for a cuddle. But I reckon they’ll be mashing pissers by the end of the week. Not that we’re allowed to show any of that stuff anyway, and Pornhub have stopped buying the footage from us, too, so it seems like a terrible waste, really.”

  “Yeah.” Nev sighed. “Well, this all looks terribly boring.” He motioned to the screens once again. Nobody had even moved; why they couldn’t just all go to bed and scan through the footage in the morning was a mystery. He supposed it had something to do with the safety of the housemates. With so many TV personalities being arrested by Operation Yew Tree for historic rapes and paedophilia, it was no wonder they had to keep a close eye on this bunch. If Rolf Harris could be exposed as a dirty Aussie rapist, any one (though statistically-speaking, it was all of them) of these people on the screens could have secrets of their own, and therefore leaving them to their own devices, unsupervised, overnight, was not a terribly good idea. “I’ll take over if you want to go and get your head down for a few hours.”

  Trev yawned. His tepid tea-breath almost singed the eyebrows off his brother’s forehead. “That would be fantastic,” he said, standing and pushing his chair under the desk. “If you could feed and water Noddy holder in about an hour, that would be great. Aw, look at him.” He motioned to the Slade frontman, who was curled up in the corner, his huge top-hat covering his face and one leg twitching as if he were dreaming of chasing the entire line-up of Abba. “He went to find a hotel about two hours ago, but came back because none of the hoteliers had even heard of ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ and weren’t willing to put up a man in his spangling garb free of charge on the proviso he wrote a song about them.”

  “Who’s never heard of ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’?” Nev gasped. That was like saying you had never heard of The Spice Girls or Zack Galifianakis. There were kids in Africa that prayed daily to never have to sit through another Hangover movie.

  “Hope he gets a go in the house. It would be a shame to keep him cooped up in here for the next seven days.”

  “I know,” Nev said. “But the residential home wanted him back by Wednesday.”

  Trev sighed. “Well, his Whiskas is in the desk drawer, and he loves it when you tickle him just behind the sideburns.” He tilted his head, remembering a time – about an hour ago – when he and Noddy had thrown a rubber-band ball across the studio. Noddy was fantastic at fetching. “Okay, I’m going to bed for a few. Keep an eye on the screens. If anything happens, I’m right next-door, and I mean anything. That bed” – he pointed to the screen portraying Mark White and Crystal Cobb – “starts to shake, you come and wake me up, do you hear?”

  “Gotcha!” said Nev. “Oh, and you might want to shake out the sleeping-bag. I don’t know what was in that champagne, but I might have left some bubbles floating around in there.”

  Trev nodded and walked away, shouting across his shoulder, “Thanks for the warning.”
>
  “You’re welcome, bro,” Nev said, settling down in front of the monitor bank, praying for a more active shift than that which his brother had just endured.

  Come on, guys, he thought. Do something fucking exciting…

  17

  “You have to leave.”

  Mark White bolted upright, staring about the darkness through sleep-filled eyes. Beside him, the former Playboy Bunny, Crystal Cobb, snored like a drunken sailor. After a few seconds of listening, and hearing nothing but the one-eyed beauty’s sleep-growls, Mark eased his hand across her mouth to silence her, only to find that the snore started to come from her hollow eye-socket.

  Satisfied that he had dreamt the woman’s voice (‘You have to leave’), Mark relaxed back on the bed, his erection returning as quickly as it had waned.

  This entire thing was so surreal to him, and yet this was, he knew, what he was born for. He was one of those people that had everything in the way of looks, and nothing in the way of common sense. But what was common sense if you had to work in a factory for fifty years, providing for six kids – three of which were ginger – and trying to make ends meet with Alphabetti Spaghetti and Spam™ (other wartime precooked scrotum-meats are available)? So he hadn’t a clue how to count to ten, why Greenland was called ‘green’ when it was clearly covered in ice, or why it was called a Drive-Thru if you had to stop; none of that mattered because he looked good, and when you look good you don’t need to be smart. You just need to possess good teeth, an orange glow, and something close to a six-pack. The rest will take care of itself.

  “Oh my God, are you…are you masturbating?” said the female voice, and this time Mark was certain he had heard it.

  “No,” he whispered into the room. “I was scratching.” As a bit of a simpleton, Mark White was not so great at lying. “Who are you? Where are you?”