Look What You Made Me Do

by Elaine Murphy

  “Carrie,” Footloose croons, his voice echoing off the walls, “I know you’re awake. I can see your eyes moving. It’s time to start the game.”

  I give up pretending and struggle to a sitting position, the murder carpet falling away, the icy winter air pricking my skin. The room spins and sways, and I lean against the wall behind me, feeling the rough-hewn wood poke through my shirt. Nausea hits in a wave, and I gag. I thought the rancid smells were from the murder carpet, but that was wishful thinking. They’re here, in the room. Sick and blood and fear. Death.

  “Let’s go,” Footloose orders. “You know the rules. Escape or die trying.”

  What I know is that everybody died and there is no escaping, because that’s not the outcome he wants. Even from here, I can see that the door is too good to be true. The moonlight filters through the window, but there’s no light at the base of the door, nothing to suggest a frame. It’s just an illusion, a mirage. The naive idea of escape.

  I turn instead to look behind me. There’s a click and a whir, and I whip back around. In the upper-right corner of the room, a red dot blinks and moves. A camera. A quick scan reveals four in total, capturing my final moments.

  Just over my shoulder is a doorway, a real one. A few feet past it is a short set of well-lit stairs that I assume lead down to the room with the couch and the towel, where I last saw Shanté. That direction seems like a much better option than whatever lies ahead, but before I can move, the choice is made for me. The unseen light casts a yellow circle on the wall at the top of the steps, and now a dark, unmistakable shadow moves into view. Footloose. He was just a voice in the movies, but now he’s part of the show. I don’t know if he was always this hands-on or I’m the exception, but I suspect it’s the latter. Becca hit people with a car because it was easy. Like her, Footloose doesn’t want to do the hard work. He just wants to watch people try and fail so his name-calling is justified.

  “Move, Carrie.”

  Obviously, moving is the worst thing I can do. The rooms in the video had no clear goal. No door in the poison room, nothing in the pool. The towel room felt safe, innocuous. He comforted his victims, made them feel a little better, and then forced them to flee, terrified and in pain, stumbling into this room and the false hope lurking outside that fake door. Somewhere in the twenty feet between me and the opposite wall is where they lost their feet. I know it. I can smell it. He used to be a butcher, but I wasn’t lying before. More than anything, he’s a coward. He invented a cowardly excuse to kill people when the real reason was that he, just like Becca, simply wanted to do it.

  I hear a faint sound, like Footloose is taking a breath, ready to speak again. He holds his tongue when I push to my feet, still a little wobbly from the drugs. My neck hurts from the needle, and there’s a bump on my head that wasn’t there before. Maybe I fell out of the chair when he drugged me, maybe I made the trip here in the trunk, or maybe he dumped me on this floor like so much human garbage. Maybe all three.

  I brace my hand on the wall and kick tentatively into the room, waiting for something to happen. I think of movies with explorers in booby-trapped caverns with spikes dropping from the ceiling, darts shooting from the walls, and a line of fire tearing across the floor. But nothing happens.

  Bending, I roll the carpet and then scoop it up and heave it into the room like a log, tossing it five, maybe six feet. It skids across the floor and falls flat on its side, unfurling partway. The remaining cameras click and hum as they come to life, zeroing in on the intruder, but nothing else happens.

  A stair squeaks behind me as Footloose starts his ascent. The shadow on the wall looms larger, and I imagine him with a syringe in one hand and a cleaver in the other, ready to take things into his own hands if I don’t follow his deadly script.

  I ease into the room. One cautious step and then another, just a few inches apart. Immediately the smells start to intensify. The tang of blood is strong, twining with perspiration and other bodily fluids. But the floor beneath my bare feet feels smooth and clean, and I can see enough to ascertain that there are no noticeable objects or puddles on the floor. The smell is coming from somewhere hidden, unseen.

  I approach the carpet like it’s a raft in the ocean and have almost made it when my foot catches on the edge of one of the floorboards. I find my balance before I can fall, breathing hard. Carefully, I crouch to collect the carpet, teetering like I’m walking on a tightrope instead of a floor. My fingers have just curled over the edge of the rug when Footloose speaks behind me.

  “You’re so slow, Carrie.”

  Startled, I topple forward, my elbow planting hard in the unrolled carpet. The floor underneath gives way, and I sink in several inches, the carpet catching my arm like a net. I cry out in surprise, the sound masking the thud of a board smacking the wall of the pit below, a trap sprung.

  His laugh is cruel. “You’re such an idiot. Everyone wanted to make a run for it, but you—you love the punishment, don’t you? It’s why you helped your sister all those years. You whine to make it sound like you didn’t enjoy it, but you had all the opportunities in the world to leave and you chose to stay. And here you are, taking your time all over again. Not leaving.”

  When I glance back, he’s leaning against the wall next to the doorway. His hands are empty, but I can feel the evil in his eyes. The eyes from the dark trees at Kilduff, the eyes from my closet, the eyes that watched my sister die. The eyes hoping to watch me die, too.

  “No, I’m not,” I protest, letting my voice quaver. I pretend to be feeling blindly around the floor, but I’m easing back the corner of the carpet to examine the hole that’s opened up beneath it. I gag as the stench of the hole is released. It’s the smell of blood leached into earth, of tears, of death. It’s the smell of Jacinda Moon and Ron Anderson and Marcy Lennox and Shanté Williams and too many others.

  It’s too dark to see much, but the moonlight glints off something at the bottom of the hole, something small and raised, like a button or a sensor. A few inches above that, nestled into the side of the trap, is what looks like a blade. The kind that might chop off the foot of someone running toward the door, to freedom, their foot falling into the hole, stomping on the button, and activating the blade.

  I got lucky a minute earlier when just my toe touched the corner. But not the corner of this trap, a different one. The floor must be full of them. It’s why Footloose hasn’t followed. He doesn’t need to. But he should have. Because from where he’s positioned, he can’t see what I’ve seen. He doesn’t know I know.

  “Where will you bury me?” I ask, trying to think, to buy time. I can’t have come this far just to lose. “With Becca?”

  Footloose chuckles. “Who said you need to be buried? You’ve been kind enough to bring along your very own grave. I’ll just roll you up in that filthy carpet and dump you in a field where someone will find you in a few days. Or weeks. What will the police think when they test the carpet? All that DNA, all those missing people. They’ll be preoccupied for years.”

  “They—”

  “Enough stalling,” he says, pulling a knife from his pocket. It’s not a cleaver, though, and I remember Becca’s story about trying to chop off somebody’s arm, the guy we buried on the golf course. How difficult it was. Footloose isn’t going to use a knife to cut off my foot. He’s going to use his traps; the knife is just a prop.

  Leaving the carpet over the opening, I shoot a wary look over my shoulder and crawl toward the door, feeling with my fingertips for another weak spot in the floor. I find one almost immediately, my heart pounding as I make a mental note of its location. My palms slide along the wood, and I try to go slowly, to be cautious, but the smell of filth and decay is so strong it’s taking all my strength not to retch and give away my discovery.

  “Just a little more,” Footloose murmurs behind me. His tone is encouraging, but there’s a note of excitement as he waits for the finish line.

  A glance back confirms he’s entered the room a little m
ore, just two or three feet, wanting a close-up view of what’s about to happen. The red eyes of the cameras are zeroed in on me, recording this for posterity and whatever else he does with his creepy home movies.

  I peer up at the fake door, the window at the top a deceiving beacon of hope.

  “Why did you kill Shanté?” I blurt out.

  “Who?”

  I press my fingers into the floor in front of me. There’s no movement; it’s solid. “You put her foot in my freezer.”

  “Oh, her. Shanté.” He drawls her name in a slow, mocking way. “Because she saw me at her friend’s funeral.”

  “She wasn’t even allowed inside.”

  “Not inside. Outside. After. When you three were talking. And filming.”

  And suddenly I know what Becca found. I’d sent her three videos, not just the two I’d used to run my own failed comparison. I’d taken a third video outside the church while talking to Shanté and Laurel. I’d told the others to play along and they had, posing and taking selfies. Shanté had paid the price for a discovery I didn’t even know I’d made.

  Footloose takes another step, leaving just five or six feet between us. The fake door is just as far. Two deadly options.

  “Don’t come any closer,” I beg, holding up a hand like that might work. “Please. I’m—I’m going.”

  His mouth quirks. “Are you?” He makes a movement like he might lunge for me, and I react in kind, pressing hard on the spot on the floor I know is firm and collapsing forward, like it’s one of the traps, the rolled end of the murder carpet blocking his view.

  I scream as though I’ve hit a trap, my hand severed, my cry loud and tortured. It’s the sound of someone who, of all the people who have died in this hellish room, most deserves to be here. I scream for a decade of complicity, for Becca, for Shanté, for everyone who no longer can.

  Over my shoulder, I see Footloose watching, his whole body tense, expression giddy. I flop flat on the floor, scratching with my good hand, trying to lift myself up and failing. I don’t know how long it takes to die this way, so I writhe and twist interminably, eyes rolling, before slowly letting the life leach out of me, all the exhaustion and terror draining away. I keep my eyes open, staring blankly, and see Footloose studying me, committing this moment to memory, although it’s already committed to film. He seems to be counting, making sure I’m dead, and after everything I’ve been through today, staying still is the hardest part. Not flinching when he finally moves, his eyes on the floor as he notes the safe places to step, approaching my lifeless body.

  “Aw,” he says, one finger tracing lightly over the sole of my foot. “A hand. Not quite as exciting as a foot, but perhaps more appropriate, given how you helped your sister, hmm?”

  He sniffs the air, searching for the smell of fresh blood, but the odor from the open hole is too rotten, too powerful. “Now what am I—”

  I shove up as fast as I can, startling him. He’d crouched to inspect me and now topples back, scuttling like a crab. I lunge for him and he jerks away, his cry of rage quickly silenced as his arm plunges into one of his traps. There’s a click and a soft whoosh before his eyes widen and he screams, a roar of pain and outrage and disbelief.

  I hurl myself over Footloose, pinning him down, forcing his arm to remain in the hole so he can’t bring it up, can’t try to stanch the flow of blood. The mineral tang is so strong it makes my eyes water. He claws at me with his good hand, his knees flailing, hitting me hard in the thigh and knocking me sideways. I use the murder carpet as a buoy, keeping me safe from the deadly floor, holding on for dear life as he tries to kill me with his final breaths. He grabs my elbow and rolls his body, attempting to force my arm into the same hole, but he’s losing energy fast, his breath coming shallow, grip easing.

  I keep him pinned, my eyes on his face as I watch the life seep out, one slow second at a time. His chest stops rising and falling, his legs stop twitching, and still I don’t move, not trusting, not believing. I’ve seen too many dead bodies, but I’ve never seen anyone die.

  I don’t know how much time passes. Too much, definitely. I’m stiff and sore when I finally dare to move, shifting cautiously, waiting for Footloose to come back from the dead. But he doesn’t. His mouth is slack, eyes closed, and when I use a finger to lift an eyelid, he stares vacantly at the ceiling.

  I push at the floor, trying to convince my shaky legs to stand, my hand slipping in a pool of warm blood. I thud back down onto Footloose, his body grunting grotesquely, like I’ve knocked the last of the breath from his lungs. Over the sound of my own panicked whimpers, I hear something metallic clink in his pocket and fish it out: car keys.

  His left hand is still attached, palm up, fingers bare. Reluctantly, I shift to peer into the hole and there, at the bottom, glittering in the trickle of moonlight through the window over the nonexistent door, is the hand with the thick silver ring, the one that broke my tooth. My father wears a ring from his college football days, and one of my high school teachers wore a ring with his family crest on it. When I asked for Footloose’s name earlier, he said maybe later. Later’s no longer an option, and if I want any chance of learning who he is—who he was—this is it.

  Nausea wells up fast and hard as I reach into the hole and snatch up the severed hand. I clutch the thumb, still soft and warm, and resist the urge to hurl it across the room, instead dropping it onto the floor and staring at it like, well, a dead man’s hand. It takes four tries before I can convince myself to touch it again, holding it down by pressing two fingers into its palm and twisting the ring. It slides off easily, bumping over the knuckle and off the tip of his finger like it was meant to be mine. Like I’ve earned it. I wipe it clean and stuff it in my pocket.

  For what is hopefully the last time ever, I unroll the rug. Parts of it are drenched with Footloose’s blood, a literal red carpet. Becca would have loved that joke. I crawl across the carpet to the stairwell, finding three more trapdoors and springing each one, revealing their horror. I’m shaking with exhaustion when I reach the hallway, the hum of the cameras my only company. I stare at their glowing red eyes, the only remaining witnesses to this show, to my crimes and confessions. As much as I need to tell someone about this, to let the town know it’s finally safe from the serial killer it knew and the one it didn’t, I can’t. Both have trapped me, even from beyond the grave. Becca by planting evidence on the bodies; Footloose with his records from my home, his home, and here. If the police discover this building, they’ll be able to find the recordings, wherever they are.

  I descend the stairs to the room below. There’s a new door open on the far wall, one I didn’t see in the movie. It leads into yet another room, this one small and cool, a desk light shining on a computer with two monitors, a microphone, and too many wires and unidentifiable devices. I could spend hours smashing the pieces, but no matter what I do, there’s someone out there who can put them back together, revealing the misshapen puzzle that tells my story, however right or wrong. Mostly wrong.

  A handle glints on the wall, a dead bolt painted black just beneath it. I twist the lock and the door swings open to reveal a dark forest. I walk the perimeter of the building, my bare feet crunching over dead leaves and pine needles. For all the horrors hidden inside, the cabin looks deceptively harmless, crude and imperfect, a roughly shaped box designed to blend into its surroundings.

  Finally, I find the car. It’s old and unremarkable, the kind no one would notice or remember seeing, even with a busted taillight. My suitcase sits discarded next to the passenger-side door, probably intended to be thrown away later to support the theory that I’d left for the airport and never made it. I retrieve the keys from my pocket, trying three before finding one that fits the ignition. The car starts and stale, cold air pulses out of the vents. Relief makes me want to cry, but as much as I want this ordeal to be over, it’s not. Not yet.

  There’s a cigarette lighter on the dash, and I push it in, waiting for it to glow red hot. I’m exhausted and
filthy, but I get out of the car to scoop up huge armfuls of leaves and pinecones and bring them into the house, covering the floors and stairwells. Footloose lies where I left him, gazing blankly at the ceiling. I go back out for more kindling, gathering small sticks and setting them up in random piles in the rooms like miniature bonfire towers.

  Finally, I hunt through my suitcase, pulling out a change of clothes and the bottle of hair spray I’d packed for my trip. I strip and dress quickly in warm, blood-free clothes, tossing the case into the backseat of the car. Returning to the house, I pump hair spray on the clothes and the murder carpet and each stack of sticks and use the rest to create a trail through the rooms. I make sure to douse the computer area so nothing can be salvaged, should anyone later find this place and think to investigate. On the desk is a Soda Jack can, its tab already gone. It’s ancho chile flavor.

  I jog back to the car. My breath hangs in the icy air, but I can barely feel the cold. The cigarette lighter glows bright orange, and I pinch it from the dash between two fingers, hurrying back into the house to touch the lighter to the sticks and the leaves, watching tiny flames spring up, catching, jumping, spreading quickly. I start fires as I retreat, thick smoke filling the air and making me cough.

  In the computer room, I light a stack of leaves on the desk, watching a tiny spark flare and then die. No. No. I snatch up a stick and hustle back into the main room, touching it to the growing fire. It lights up, and I run back to the office, setting it on the glowing wet patch of hair spray. It catches fire immediately.

  I cough again and turn for the door, stopping when I hear a dull thud. Then another, and another. Each more frantic. For a second, I think it’s Footloose, pulling his mangled body through the burning house, seeking his revenge.