In Your Face Horror (Chamber Of Horror Series)

by Billy Wells

  The note was signed T.F.

  Clancy sat with his mouth agape, pondering his next move. He was to lead the charge in stopping the Tooth Fairy when the sun went down.

  Needing to clear his head, he found a bench in the park where he watched throngs of people passing by. Most looked like they didn’t have a care in the world.

  When he returned to the office, he saw Alexander grinning from ear to ear. “You won’t believe what’s happened. A middle-aged man was wasted by a taxi at the corner of 38th and Park, and guess what he had in his pocket?”

  “What?” Clancy replied, caught off guard.

  “A pouch containing a crucifix just like the ones the Tooth Fairy used, a pair of stainless steel pliers, and a roll of silver dollars.” Alexander slapped the pouch on the table and continued excitedly. “Can you believe it? The commissioner is going to start popping the champagne bottles about five.”

  Clancy looked at the items inside and pretended to lock the pouch in his desk for safekeeping. Instead, he slipped it into his pants pocket when Alexander wasn’t looking.

  “Where did they take the body?” Clancy asked.

  “I think they took him to Presbyterian. Who cares where they took him. It’s a wrap. Put on your dancing shoes and let’s party. Robert Craig is alive and well. No more Tooth Fairy.”

  “It’s great news, but I can’t get my mind around it yet. I think someone should still be on surveillance tonight just to be sure.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be that poor slob. He’ll miss the party.”

  “I’ll volunteer for the duty. I’m not in the mood for partying,” Clancy said, putting on his coat and heading for the elevator.

  “Hey! Where are you going?”

  “To the morgue. I want to see what the Tooth Fairy looks like,” Clancy said as the elevator door closed.

  The sun was falling on the horizon as Clancy arrived at Presbyterian. He took the elevator to the basement and made his way to the morgue. He asked to view the body by himself, and the clerk waved him on.

  When he slid the slab forward and pulled back the sheet, he saw a middle-aged man who was uncommonly short with a pointed nose and protruding chin. Blood was splattered on his shirt and pants. The victim reminded him of a joker in a deck of Bicycle playing cards, but the sardonic smile had been replaced with a plaintive expression.

  As the corpse’s eyes stared back at him, Clancy recoiled when he felt a cold hand close around his in a vice-like grip. Pulling away, he was shocked to see the corpse’s hand lying limp on the table. As Clancy pulled the sheet over the face, he did a double take. The plaintive look was now a sardonic smile.

  Shaken by the weird feeling, he made his way out of the hospital and headed for the Craig house.

  As the full moon rose in the sky, he felt the weight of all mankind on his shoulders. He pulled into a parking space across the street and peered up at the bedroom window of the beast.

  He removed the pouch from his pocket and extracted the crucifix, the pliers, and two silver dollars from the roll.

  He didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, but tonight he had to save the world.

  * * *

  The Love Room

  When Feldman stepped inside the front door, he knew something was wrong. Walking from the foyer into the great room, he saw the stuffing from his sofa and loveseat spilled out on the hardwood floor. His glass coffee table and matching end tables were shattered into a thousand pieces on the accent rugs and into the dining room. His 55-inch TV had a gaping hole in the center of the screen. His face was a mask of fear and trepidation, but not because of the state of his personal property. Something far more serious troubled him.

  Without pausing to assess the damage to the living area, he walked briskly to the kitchen. Stepping over two expensive wall hangings someone had punctured with their fist, he crunched across the broken china blanketing the ceramic tile floor. Arriving at his destination, which was the door to the basement, he put his ear to the closed door and quietly listened. What if the culprit was still in the house? He might even be in the basement.

  Turning his eyes to the kitchen floor, he saw a butcher knife protruding from under a dinner plate in the rubble and picked it up. Calling the police was not an option at this point. If the intruder were here, he’d have to deal with him.

  He opened the door, turned on the light, and strained to hear the slightest movement from below. He heard nothing. He descended the fourteen steps with wary apprehension. When he reached the bottom, his greatest fear was realized. The door to the soundproof room was wide open. Looking inside, he found the young woman he’d abducted the previous evening gone. The nightmare that had caused him so many sleepless nights had finally come true.

  He had kidnapped fifty-two women over a ten-year period and had imprisoned them in this room without a glitch. The one he captured last night seemed a little harder to take down at first, but in the end, she was out like a light. His M.O. was always the same. He lured the women to his van under false pretenses in a remote part of the parking lot when it was near dark and visibility was poor. His victims always believed the female dummy in the front seat was his sick wife. When they approached the van, the stun gun worked perfectly. To his amazement, this last woman needed a double dose. After that, it was business as usual, and he dragged her into the van and took off.

  Feldman, a well-respected member of the community, was president of the local savings and loan and a deacon in his church. He lived on a five-acre estate a mile from the main road in the middle of nowhere. Once inside the garage, he carried each victim to the basement and tied them down on a king-sized bed in a padded cell he called his love room. After that it was all fun and games until he got tired of sodomizing and torturing the same person too long, or the bitch finally succumbed to the blood loss caused by his repetitive mutilations, which usually came to pass in about a month.

  When he turned on the light and entered, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The leather straps that held the woman had been ripped to shreds; the pieces were strewn about the room. It would have taken superhuman strength to sever the heavy, leather straps; no human being could have done this. He was even more astounded when he turned and saw the heavy steel door to the room hanging askew on one hinge. Looking more closely, he found a gaping hole in the doorframe where the dead bolt had been, which indicated the door had been opened from the inside.

  Whatever he had captured last night was not the typical pushover piece of ass he normally abducted. He gripped the butcher knife tighter and listened to the silence.

  Nothing.

  He surmised the she beast had trashed his house for revenge. No one had broken in as he had thought. He hoped the fit of rage had satisfied the thing, and she would not seek additional payback. She didn’t appear to be here now. If she were still here, she would have pounced on him as soon as he walked in the door. He was certainly no match for her.

  Suddenly he heard a sound upstairs. His hands began to shake, and his lower lip started twitching uncontrollably. He left the love room and ventured into the expanse of the remaining basement. He looked at the window he’d painted black at the top of the cinder block wall and knew he couldn’t crawl through it. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and all he could do was wait for the thing to come for him.

  Then he heard a loud snap in the furnace room. The lights went out, not only in the basement, but also in the entire house. The thing was only ten feet away and had tripped the circuit breaker.

  He started stabbing the butcher knife into the blackness as he backed toward the stairs.

  “Boo!” said an emphatic female voice in the dark.

  Feldman jumped backward and continued to stab the air wildly. He felt something touch his face and flung himself backwards away from it.

  The side of his head thumped against a column that felt like a brick wall. The knife slipped from his hand, and he fell hard on the concrete floor with a nose-cracking thud and lost consciousness.

 
When he awoke, he found himself on his back with his arms and legs tied with what felt like leather straps. He assumed he was in the love room, but in the pitch-blackness, he couldn’t tell.

  A female voice whispered in his right ear, “You are a very unlucky person.”

  Startled, Feldman recoiled away to the left and cried out, “Let me go! I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  He tried to remember the question and groaned, “Why am I so unlucky?”

  “Of all the women on the planet you could have abducted, you chose me,”

  “Who are you?”

  “It’s not who I am. It’s what I am.”

  Feldman said nothing and continued trying to free himself.

  “Did you see what I did to the leather straps?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see what I did to the steel door?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know I’m not a normal woman.”

  Feldman’s throat tightened with the words, “What are you?”

  After a long pause, a fiendish, cackle emanated from the graveyard stillness of the black basement. Feldman squirmed in horror under the leather straps. A sharp fingernail dug into his cheekbone just below his right eye. He felt her hot breath on his neck.

  “My name is Marlo,” she hissed. “You might say I’m like the bride of Frankenstein, but I’m a lot prettier and a lot stronger.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Doctors created me from body parts taken from cadavers in a laboratory at a military compound,”

  “That’s bullshit!” he shrieked. “Turn on the lights. Let me see you. We need to work something out. I’m a rich man I tell you. I’ll pay you an obscene amount of money if you’ll untie me and go your own way.”

  “I really can’t do that. I know what kind of monster you are. I found your scrapbook. You raped and tortured fifty-one women according to your ledger over a period of almost ten years. I found the videos you shot of what you did to each one of them. I can tell from watching several of them you are particularly fond of chainsaws.”

  Feldman kept silent still trying to free himself.

  “Cat got your tongue? I also found a map of where you buried what was left of them in the septic field out back.”

  Feldman squirmed, but couldn’t budge the straps that bound him. The leather had already cut off his circulation.

  “What do you want?”

  ‘I want you to suffer just like the women you tortured suffered. While you were unconscious, I thought of something so diabolical, it would even make the Marquis de Sade blush.”

  “Please, call the police. I’ll tell them everything. Turn on the lights. Let me see you,” he pleaded.

  “You saw me when you zapped me with the stun gun.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “It just so happens I have some of the white powder the doctors who created me used to animate my body parts.”

  Feldman grimaced at the thought.

  “Do you remember Belinda Wilson?”

  Feldman said nothing and continued struggling.

  “Do you remember her?” she screamed in his ear.

  “No. I don’t remember.”

  “She was a strawberry blonde with freckles. Thanks to you, she has no ears and no nose. According to your records, she went to the septic field on April 3 of this year. You must have a short memory. That would be seventy-one days ago. She should be a ripe candidate to be your first lover of the evening.”

  “What are you saying, you fiendish bitch!”

  “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Yes, Howard. Can I call you Howard? About an hour ago, I sprinkled a bag of the animation powder on the space where your journal says she’s buried. Shortly afterward, while you were out, I injected you with a double dose of Viagra I found in your medicine cabinet. There’s absolutely no doubt you will have an erection lasting more than four hours, and you’re going to need it.”

  Feldman heard a sound like someone dragging a foot across the tile floor upstairs, and then a low moan increased to a shriek. In the pitch-blackness, he heard something shuffling down the stairs, one agonizing step at a time.

  “Listen to me. I‘m a rich man, I tell you,” Feldman kept repeating this like a broken record until Marlo found his mouth in the blackness and snipped off his tongue with some garden shears.

  Belinda reached the basement floor and oozed toward the open door to the love room. An unbearable stench quickly filled every inch of the space and grew more intense as Belinda crawled into bed with Feldman, who, in spite of not having a tongue, kept trying to scream.

  Then when he thought nothing could get any worse, Marlo turned on the lights.

  Tommy

  Just like every other Friday, Pat Stevens came to visit the grave of her little boy, but today was different. This morning she discovered she was pregnant. She couldn’t believe her eyes when the test strip had turned blue. It was a miracle, and to be sure, she performed the test a second time with the same result. She couldn’t wait to tell her husband, Frank, the incredible news when he came home from work.

  After trying to conceive for more than two years and seeing four specialists, who all concluded she was physically unable to have a child, she had fallen into a deep depression. She and Frank argued constantly about adopting a child, but she was adamantly against it.

  After a period of barely speaking to each other, Pat told Frank that she would put the past behind her if he would agree to honor the memory of her only child with a gravesite at the nearby cemetery. She explained that the child from her first marriage had died at birth and they were so poor the city had taken care of disposing with the body. Since she was so distraught she could not have another child and the creation of the mock gravesite seemed to placate her, Frank gave in to the bizarre request.

  The cemetery was just a short walk through the trees from where they lived. She was proud of the site, which had a small plaster statuette of a baby angel for a headstone. Engraved on the face of the marble plate were two words: “Our Darling.” Each time she came to pay her respects, she wondered if she was the only one in the cemetery who was visiting a grave that had no body.

  She found a nearby bench, and despite her newfound joy of being pregnant, she couldn’t erase the guilt of what had really happened to her first child.

  The truth was that her first child was the result of a gangbang by most of the members of her high school football team when she was fifteen. She had no idea who the father was and was never married before she met Frank. Unfortunately, the baby was delivered after a C-section, which created the need to fabricate the previous marriage.

  Her parents were God-fearing Christians who would not allow her to have an abortion. When the baby was born with horrible birth defects, her parents told her that God was punishing her for having sex with so many boys out of wedlock.

  She named her son Thomas Eastwood because Clint was her favorite actor. Tommy was nothing but trouble. No one could understand a word he said because of a severe hair lip. His face was so grotesque that children wouldn’t stay in the same room with him. Pat knew she could never live a normal life with Tommy. He needed expensive special care, and no man would have anything to do with her once he saw him.

  When she was twenty-four, Pat decided to start a new life in Baltimore. It was far enough away from home, and she thought she might be able to hook up with a gangbanger who had moved there a while back. She packed two small suitcases and left with Tommy in a rental car. It was Sunday and her parents had gone to Church. She left a farewell note on the kitchen table for them that read, “Kiss my rosy red ass, you miserable hypocrites.”

  After driving about twenty miles on a country road, she turned off on a dirt road and finally pulled into a clearing with the remnants of a deserted well. She had stopped there many years ago on a picnic with some gangbangers.

  It looked a lot better th
en, before the weeds had overtaken everything.

  “Tommy, do you want to make a wish at the wishing well?”

  “What’s a wishing well?” Tommy mumbled.

  “Come with me and I’ll show you!”

  They made their way through the weeds to the wishing well.

  “Here’s a penny. Go to the well, close your eyes, and make a wish.”

  Tommy obeyed.

  “Now climb up on the edge and throw the penny into the well.”

  As Tommy leaned over the lip to throw the penny, Pat lifted his feet and threw him head over heels into the gaping mouth of the well.

  After a long silence, she heard the sickening thud far below. She wondered what he had wished for as she drove away.

  Ten years later, the guilt of killing her own child was still haunting her. She still had horrific nightmares that caused her to wake up screaming. Spending a little time at the gravesite each week helped ease the guilt of that unspeakable act so long ago.

  Today seemed like every other day when she walked up. Reaching down to place the red roses on the grave, she was shocked to see a bouquet of fresh lilies already in the vase below the headstone. She also noticed that the grass atop the grave looked like it had just been reseeded. As she removed the lilies and replaced them with her roses, she saw the name engraved in the marble. Directly under the words “Our Darling” was “Thomas Eastwood, September 8,1992–October 31, 2000.” Her head began to spin, and she slumped to the ground.

  Pat awoke at dusk. She struggled to her feet and brushed some grass from her skirt. She stared at the headstone in disbelief.

  Who could have done this? She had changed her name and spent a considerable amount of money to create a new identity. Her parents were dead, and she had lost contact with all of her relatives long ago. She didn’t attend her parents’ funerals and did not inquire about any inheritance she may have been entitled to. Her son’s name was something she made up after the birth certificate was filed without a given name. She was confident that fingerprints and DNA evidence would be useless in connecting her to the dead body even if it were found. If they did trace her, why had the police not arrested her?