by Adam Millard
“Bloody hell!” Edie said. “You’ve only gone and thrown your arm off.” She flicked her cigarette into the open grave and dropped the shovel. “Come on. Inside. And you’d better ‘ope I can remember where I put my fuckin’ sewing-kit.”
*
Larry watched as she threaded the needle in and out of his shoulder, drawing the arm back into its rightful place. The smell was awful – like an abattoir, but without all the smoking middle-aged men comparing chauvinistic jokes. Larry understood why his ma had insisted upon wearing a heavy-duty dust-mask.
Go on, tell her, said the mask. And don’t take no for an answer, you hear me?
“I’m still going, Ma,” Larry said.
“No,” said Edie.
Beneath the mask Larry scrunched his face up, for he hated going against her wishes, despite how much he loathed her. At the end of the day she had raised him, reared him from the shy little urchin he’d been to the much-feared slasher he was today. If that wasn’t the sign of good parenting, Larry didn’t know what was.
“We have a connection now,” he went on. “Some sort of psychic bond.”
“What, like Penn and Teller?”
“Yeah, like NO, nothing like Penn and Teller,” he said. “Who the fuck are Penn and Teller?”
“Couple of wankers from Vegas,” Edie said. “Now hold still, otherwise you’ll be wearing your arm on your earlobe.”
Larry winced as the needle hooked deep into his flesh before emerging once again, covered in what looked like bacon, which kind of made sense.
Go on, urged the mask. Honestly, am I the only one around here with a pair?
“If I can see what she’s doing,” Larry pressed on, reluctantly, “then there’s a damn good chance she can see what I’m doing.”
“Well you’d better stop masturbating in the pigsty then, hadn’t you,” Edie said, forcing the needle deep into his skin once again.
“Ouch!” and, “How do you know what I do in the pigsty?” He should have been embarrassed, but he and his mother were close enough to discuss such taboo subjects. Besides, he knew that she flicked her bean to old photographs of Cary Grant. In fact, she had a whole heap of them in her second drawer down. Larry had stumbled upon them when he had been searching for something sexy to try on.
“I ain’t stupid,” Edie said, winking and running her black tongue across her sole tooth. “And I ain’t dumb enough to believe that you’ve been applying cream to Wilbur’s back because of some Mad Pig’s Disease.”
Wilbur, Larry thought, must have grassed him up. “Anyway, stop trying to change the subject, Ma. This is hard enough as it is, without you bringing up my tugging habits. I’m trying to tell you that I’m offski. Gone like the wind. Off to greener pastures, or in this case Haddon.”
“Haddon?” Edie frowned. “Why would you wanna go to Haddon? Even the people what live there don’t want to go to Haddon. There’s nothing there for you, Larry. Nothing but disappointment and scorn, and I can give you loads of that without you even ‘aving to leave the cabin. At least ‘ere you get three square meals a day, providin’ you don’t mind chowing down on carpet-cleaner.”
Don’t take no for an answer, the voice of the mask reminded him.
“I won’t take no for answer,” Larry said.
“What about ‘definitely not’?”
Larry shook his head. “That’s pretty much the same thing.”
“On no account?”
“Now you’re just poshing it up,” said Larry, staring down at the huge black scar he now wore at the top of his arm. “Are we done here? I’ve got some packing to do.”
Just then, and all of a sudden, Edie stood up and threw herself backwards. Her head missed the corner of the table by no more than an inch, and she landed in a heap on the floorboards. “Oh! Whoooooaaaaahhhh!” she wailed. “I think I’s ‘aving dizzy spells. Oh, ‘ere comes another one.” She rolled along the cabin floor, her bones rattling against the wood. It sounded like someone was trying to drag a bag of spanners up an uncarpeted set of stairs. When she came to a stop, she cried, “Ya wanna leave you’re ol’ ma like this? Just leave me ‘ere to rot while you go off gallivanting to Haddon?” She raised a hand to her head. “Fuck, I think I’m dyin’ Larry,” she said. “I’m dyin’ an’ you won’t be ‘ere to see it.”
Don’t listen to her, the mask said. She’ll see a hundred, make no mistake about it.
“Ma, stop this nonsense,” Larry said, easing his weary bones up from the chair. “I won’t be gone long. I just need to find the final girl, decapitate her, and Bob’s your mother’s brother, I’ll be back before your next bath.” That gave him at least six weeks if the shit hit the fan, which it most probably would.
Sensing his determination, Edie Travers peeled her desiccated body up from the floorboards and dusted herself down. “Haddon’s not the place for a Pigface like you,” she said, for she wasn’t quite ready to give up the ghost just yet. “The city’s ‘orrible. There are wimmin what sell their bodies for sex and fellas on every corner forcing crack cocaine into your ‘ands.”
I thought she was trying to talk us out of it, said the mask.
“You ain’t ever left these woods, Larry. You don’t know what ‘orrors are lurkin’ in Haddon.” She moved slowly across the room, stared out through the cabin window, or would have done if the thing hadn’t been boarded up twenty-five years ago. “I went there once,” she said. “Only for a packet of jerky, but I was only there five minutes before a bunch of reprobates took me into an alley and gave me a jolly good buggerin’.”
Larry was gobsmacked. “Oh, Ma. That’s awful.” And it was awful. Mainly for the reprobates that did the buggerin’.
“Yeah, I’ve never mentioned it before,” she went on. “But now seems the right time. Larry, I don’t want you getting buggered in an alleyway by five handsome guys who paid up front, despite you telling them that it was on the house.”
Larry frowned.
“I don’t want you coming back here with PTSD, waking up in the middle of the night on a sodden pillow, limping because your ass has been fubar-ed.” She sighed and began to roll a cigarette. Larry took that as a sign that she’d finished her sad story-cum-fond remembrance.
“I’m not being funny, Ma, but I doubt whether five handsome guys with cash on the hip are gonna wanna bugger a serial-killing porcine-faced growler like me in a dark alleyway.”
“It wasn’t a dark alleyway,” Edie said, lighting her cigarette. “This was broad daylight. There were kids there. One of them was taking pictures.”
“My point is,” Larry said, about to make his point, “I can look after myself. I’ve butchered more people than Kim Jong Un. I’ve slashed my way through more virgins than Russell Brand. I’ve—”
“I get the picture,” Edie said. “And it sounds like nothing I say is goin’ to make you change your mind. Just don’t come cryin’ to me when it all goes tits up, nosiree.”
Beneath the mask that was now a permanent fixture upon his heavily-disfigured bonce, Larry’s lips curled up a little. He’d done it. He had actually stood up to her and won. He’d never felt so pleased with himself in all his life (though, he was practically dead now, so he wasn’t even sure if it counted).
“Just promise me one thing,” Edie said, taking a lung-busting drag on her roll-yer-own.
“What? Anything, you name it.”
“If you see five handsome guys carrying a packet of out-of-date jerky, let ‘em know where I am.”
6
Haddon Airport – Terminal Two (For Posh People)
Sam Treat descended the steps of her private jet and took in a huge lungful of Haddon air. When she’d stopped spluttering almost three whole minutes later, she turned to her assistant and said, “Make a note. One second breaths maximum,” and her personal assistant, Martha Blankenship, flipped open a notepad and did just as Sam Treat told her to.
Sam Treat was beautiful. Voted number 49 in Heat Magazine’s World’s Hottest Women Feature 2015
(only 48 places behind Megan Fox, 26 places behind Michelle Obama, and one place behind Camilla Parker-Bowles), she had certainly been blessed in the looks department. Her long blonde hair cascaded down over her flawless shoulders; her large green eyes looked as if they had been drawn on by a Japanese cartoonist; her breasts were both the same size and her vagina went the right way, which was a cheeky bonus for anyone lucky enough to get a sniff of it. She was a remarkably fanciable human being.
As is the case with most people of a prepossessing and vain nature, she was also a prize cunt, or as her personal assistant Martha Blankenship liked to call her, Lady Cunt-Cunt.
Martha Blankenship, you see, was at the other end of the attractiveness spectrum (not to be confused with the ZX Spectrum). She had not been blessed with the looks of her charge. In fact, she had been royally buggered – though not in a dark alleyway – by the God of Good Looks, and so walked around with her jowls flapping and her eyes overlapping like something that had been tampered with by aliens, only for them to decide it was far too tricky and that the best thing to do was to return her to earth, mangled face or not. Still, she made do with what she had, which was not much since Lady Cunt-Cunt was also something of a miser. Martha Blankenship hadn’t seen a payslip for almost six months, and whenever she mentioned it, Sam Treat threatened to replace her with one of those tiny handbag dogs. Since she couldn’t afford to lose her seemingly non-paying job, Martha would back down, but she was as shrewd as she was ugly, oh yes, mark my words. Martha Blankenship had been stealing diamonds from Lady Cunt-Cunt for the last three months. First set of drawers in the master bedroom, second drawer down, behind the pink furry handcuffs and do-it-yourself Vajazzle set, was a black satin bag, and in that bag were hundreds and hundreds of tiny diamonds. So many diamonds were there that Martha had helped herself to at least twenty of the little blighters. It would be ruder not to help herself, or so she believed.
“So this is Haddon,” Sam said, walking across the airport tarmac as if she was back on the Versace catwalk.
“That’s what the sign says,” Martha replied, motioning to the huge placard hanging over the terminal entrance. “If you wanted to go somewhere else, we could always hop back on the jet.”
“What, and miss the party of the century?” Sam paused in front of a row of over-excited photographers. It was as if they had never seen such beauty before. Coming from Haddon, there was a good chance that they hadn’t.
“This way, Sam!” Snap!
“Over here, Miss Treat!” Snap!
“Can somebody move that ugly boiler out of the shot, please!” Snap!
“Do you have any idea how much tickets are for Harry Hunter’s party? Do you have any idea who’s going to be there?” Sam spun around so the paparazzi could get a good view of her jacksie. And a jolly fine Jacksie it was, too. One of the photographers fell to his knees, gasping and clutching his chest. It would be three hours before anyone noticed him lying dead on the runway.
“I’ve heard about Harry Hunter and his parties,” Martha said. “Is it true he has eight wives?”
“Seven,” Sam said, playing up to the press, which was just what they wanted for their low-rent tabloids and filth mags. “One of them fell out of a seventh-storey window up at his mansion last week. Rumour has it that he was doing her so hard from behind, he shot her across the room and over the handrail.”
“Isn’t that murder?” Martha asked.
“Depends how you look at it.”
“I’m looking at it from the blood-spattered ground below the seventh-storey window.”
“Well if you look at it like that—“
“Car for Miss Treat!” bellowed a portly looking fellow from the terminal doors.
“Ah, that’s us!” Sam said. “Come on, Martha. We’ve only got twenty-four hours to prepare for this party.” She looked her assistant up and down, and then up again, just in case she’d made some terrible mistake. “We’ll just concentrate on making me look super, ja?”
“Ja,” said Martha, which was amazing, really, as she hadn’t taken an Afrikaans lesson in her entire life.
7
Armand’s Arcade – Haddon
“And she reckons his Pigface fucker’s going to come here? To Haddon?” Richard Goodnight said, hammering at the joystick and buttons in front of him as if it had slept with his mother and then shared the experience to Instagram.
Freddy, leaning against the machine – Sonic the Little Spiky Blue Bastard III – shrugged. “That’s what she thinks,” he said.
“And you don’t?” said Richard, followed by, “Agh, fuck you, you little spiky blue bastard!”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” Freddy said. “I mean, what happened to us up there was terrible. Some real fucked up shit. It was like the first part in some terrible franchise, you know?”
“Did it ever feel,” Richard said, feeding more coins into the machine, “that there would be an inevitable sequel? You know what I’m talking about. Like, is there any chance that this Pigface fucker didn’t die – like really die?”
Freddy shook his head in the negative; any other way would have been a nod. “Pretty sure we saw his arms and legs come off,” he said. “And then the place went up quicker than Paul Gascoigne at a family barbecue. I’d say it would take some sort of miracle to bring him back.”
“Or voodoo,” Richard said. He head-butted the screen in frustration. “You little spiky blue motherfucker!” He fed more coins into the machine. “Seriously, you might want to look into that. Those witchcrafty types are complete nutters. A mate of mine…well, I say mate, but he’s more of a friend of a…well, I say friend of a—“
“Skip to the end.”
“Anyway, this complete stranger, he went to this island village to look for this missing girl, right? Ended up on fire in a giant man of wicker.”
“Isn’t that the plot of The Wicker Man?”
“Might be,” Richard said, thoughtful stroking the tuft of fluff that he hoped would one day blossom into a full beard. “My point is, whatever you do, never go to Scotland.”
Freddy sighed and tried to imagine what it would be like to have intelligent friends. “So you think Amanda might be right?” he said. “She seemed pretty fucking certain about it.”
“Women are like guns, man,” Richard said, turning from Sonic the Little Spiky Blue Bastard III and scanning the arcade for his next piece of action.
“Quick to fire off?” Freddy ventured, though he should have known better.
“You keep one around long enough, you’re gonna wanna shoot it.” And with that little nugget of misogyny, Richard Goodnight stalked across the room to the newest machine. Freddy reluctantly followed. A pair of guns were pointed at the screen, and Richard latched onto the one on the left. “Feel free to join in,” he said, motioning to the second gun.
“Anders Breivik’s Day Off!” Freddy said, pointing to the already-peeling vinyl at the top of the machine. “That’s a bit close to the fucking knuckle, ain’t it?”
Richard chuckled. He was a cunt like that. “Yeah, Armand said he got it dirt cheap.”
“Not surprised,” Freddy said, before taking hold of the second gun. “Back to my problem—”
“Can’t we just shoot some Norse kids and have a bit of peace and quiet?” Richard said, clearly annoyed. “Pigface is dead! You said you saw him, lying there in six pieces! I ain’t no doctor, but I reckon he was past the point of resuscitation!”
“Fine, fine!” Freddy said, lining up a shot. He took it and missed, though he was secretly glad. There was something intrinsically wrong about unloading on a bunch of schoolkids, but you try telling that to Rolf Harris…
After Richard’s little outburst, Freddy found it difficult to concentrate on anything. When Armand threw them both out a little over an hour later – something about getting ketchup all over his joysticks – he decided to call Amanda. Smooth things over. Tell her he was sorry, and that there was a chance she was right about this.
/> If Pigface was back, Freddy damn well wanted the final girl on his side. Much less chance of having his bollocks hacked off with a rusty axe.
8
Elm Street (Still not that one)
Amanda stood over the bed, staring down at the vast array of objects she had collected from around the apartment. With her mother out of town for the foreseeable future – some sex-toy conference on the other side of the country; DildoFest 2015, or something – Amanda knew she had time on her side. Time to put these potential weapons back where she found them.
“Okay,” she said, picking up a cheese-grater and tossing it across the room. She wanted to kill the fucker, not take the hard-skin off his heels. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
What she had, she realised after thirty seconds of rummaging, was a whole lot of nothing. Any knives she had previously thought useful were about as blunt as a bag of wet mice. At least she could hit the psycho over the head with a bag of wet mice; she didn’t trust these knives to butter a piece of toast without buckling under the pressure.
A hammer! She picked it up, swung it in a wide arc, and watched in dismay as its head flew off and smashed into her dressing-table mirror. Once the glass had settled, she said, “Fuck,” and dropped what was now essentially a small wooden hitting-stick onto the floor.
A Swiss Army knife was next to disappoint. Its knife had been snapped off about halfway up the blade, and the miniature saw was missing more teeth than the entire cast of Duck Dynasty combined. There was a decent flat-headed screwdriver, but again, she wanted to kill the bastard, not knock him up an Ikea wardrobe.
After five minutes of weapon-inspection, she came to the conclusion that she had no weapons. She would have to fend Pigface off with strong language and harsh stares.