by Jack Vantage
The kid shook her head as the cane brushed around her face.
“I’ll tell you what happened. I also had a dog and when my sis was around your age, around your size—I think she was a little plumper than you actually—I left her alone with my dog. His name was Terror, and do you know what happened?” Wickedness caged his eyes.
The child’s eyes widened with fear, as the Crypt Keeper turned his canes head to face her. A large gold Rottweiler’s head stared the kid, then opened its mouth.
The kid gasped as Julie’s chewed head came up its throat and a distant “Mummy” echoed through the room.
The terrified mother grabbed her child close as the Crypt Keeper retracted the cane.
A murmured unnerve spread through the group. Some smiled at the prospect of the looming fear.
“May we leave please?” the mother asked, stuttering. Her eyes were wide with fear of the man.
The Crypt Keeper stared her in the eyes, like she’d asked for something unobtainable, then said calmly. “Of course, you may.”
He whipped his cane in the direction of a door, which made the group jump at the threat of the cane’s head. Tall vase holders stood either side of the selected door, and two white stone heads, chunky bald heads and eyes closed, sat motionless upon them. He said, “Be quick and don’t look back. That door will lead you to the exit and safety. But please don’t come again,” he said with a coldness that cut into the cosy atmosphere of the park.
Quickly the mother and child headed for the door. The mother turned the gold knob again and again, but it was locked. Then the statues on either side craned their necks and screamed into her ears.
She nearly jumped out of her skin as the door finally gave way. The last thing the group heard were her screams echoing down a long corridor.
The door slammed shut and the statue heads returned to their static position.
The Crypt Keeper looked around. “Is anyone else here too frightened to experience my world?” He inspected each person with his eyes. Then with a huff he hobbled towards the large grand doors and turned to face everyone. “Welcome to the house of the dead.” His voice echoed around the room. All the teen boys were smiling, eagerly anticipating the next bout of fear.
Then came a creepy chuckle which built from within. His smile returned to a sinister grin and he cleared his throat “This way please,” he said, and pushed the large doors open. “Or the next group will be coming with us.”
Lecodia glanced at Dylan. “Do not leave my side.” She couldn’t even watch a horror movie, let alone experience one.
Dylan laughed lightly.
The group walked into a circular room. The bottom half was dressed in a plaster of Paris mould that stunned with its detailed design. Hundreds of angels and cherubs were sketched into the plaster, all with their bows, arrows, wings, and harps, an angelic work of art. All floated around the gates of Heaven, which were massive iron gates of Godlike strength. Four doors mirrored each other centre circle, and that was it. Nothing frightening nor eerie, just the angels. Above that, boring vertically striped white and brown wallpaper covered the walls.
“Gather in, my minions,” said the Crypt Keeper who hunched to the room’s centre and turned on his sinister stance. “The journey is fraught with danger, peril, and fright,” he said as the doors behind the group slammed shut with an echoing bang. “There is no turning back now, no escaping the clutches of the damned. You are about to delve into the realm of the dead, a place where evil lurks.”
He hobbled around the group, speaking at them one by one. His eyes sucked the fear from within each guest. “And terror lives here. When you’re in my maze you’re in my labyrinth of Hell, a place where people vanish, scream, and perish.”
The lights began flickering as he continued. “Imagine a place where pain is pleasure and demons are angels.”
The plaster mouldings moved, possessed alive like phantoms of Halloween. The angels turned nasty and flew around the moulding, their angelic faces transforming into grimaces of hatred and anger. They moaned like they had been subjected to perpetual agony.
Dylan sank into the atmosphere as the room was immersed in darkness, then flickered with dim light, then went dark again.
The mouldings swirled with evil, where the angelic demons gouged at each other, dismembered each other, ripped at each other.
The Crypt Keeper moved with the flickering light, appearing at the next person with each break of its illumination.
“This place is for tortured souls,” he said. His distant voice grew louder and louder and his eyes defended the devil. He held his cane outward. “A place where there are no happy endings, just an eternity of evil.”
He appeared in front of Lecodia, who gripped Dylan’s hand and screamed.
“Give me your souls and you may leave my land of horror.”
The lights blacked out, plunging all into silent, pitch-black darkness. The group’s breath was the only sound that haunted the air. Lecodia wanted to cry.
The Crypt Keeper screamed.
The light flickered again, revealing him standing centre room, buckled over, the mouldings still moving as if alive. Like a strobe, the light offered glimpses of the Crypt Keeper’s pain as he eased himself up. His face was an agonising expression and he began to convulse. He screamed again as beads of blood trickled from his bald head, streaking his face.
With each illumination the horror intensified. He began melting. His skin slipped from his head and exposed body. Blood and tissue glopped and sludged in congealed chunks off his chin. He held his hands out to the group like he was begging for help. He screamed hard and loud until the scream turned into a drowning gargle. Then his eyes forced from their sockets and his tongue lolled out. His skull liquefied to slime, oozing a putrid, pale green.
The air was soaked in screams and terror as the Crypt Keeper opened his mouth wide. It split, sending his head backward. It dropped to the floor where a pool of blooded gunk festered and smoked. His body shortened, sliding downward in a mess of gore, and the lights cut again.
Panicked souls breathed in fear. Murmurs of horror sounded from the stunned group.
The room shuddered, creaked, then fell fast, the lights flickering again as everyone tried to hold onto someone. As if in an out-of-control elevator they were descending faster and faster. The screams of panic grew stronger. Lecodia’s scream was deafening.
“We’re gonna die!” someone shouted as the lift fell hard.
The vertically striped wall paper zoomed upward as they travelled downward in the dim light. Then the lift stopped with a jerk that heaved bodies to the ground.
The lights illuminated as the Crypt Keeper’s voice spoke from the unknown.
“Don’t forget, my souls, the path is fraught with danger, peril, and fright. Don’t lose your heads.”
The mouldings had returned to their angelic art, the room was light, and the four doors opened as the group lifted themselves from the floor, grumbling.
Lecodia was not impressed. “Remind me to kill you when this is over,” she said as she picked herself up.
“It’s only just started.” Dylan laughed. “Which way do you want to go?”
Everyone was back on their feet, looking at each other, all fearful of what waited behind the doors.
Lecodia didn’t want to imagine what horror was about to jump at her. The scene was set, and the mood was a tingling, nerve-shredding doom that haunted the minds of the group. Behind the doors was something terrible, something unimaginable, a ghost, a monster, something that would pierce her soul with terror.
“This way, guys,” said one of the teen boys. “Let’s try this way first.” He was confident, in a geeky sort of way, standing tall against the night. His hair was a thick, bushy brown, his shoulders wide.
How long before the place breaks him? Lecodia thought. It had already broken her. His three smaller friends looked spooked, ready for the real terror. They were children at the age when horror ran riot in the imaginatio
n and turned your dark bedroom into a threatening evil that lingered behind reality, the other side, the closet. The three smaller teens looked frightened by the pervasive unknown. With no choice they followed close and went through the far door.
A mother and father stood beside their son, a small, chirpy-looking chap aged around twelve. The mother, a large round woman, had sweated from the opening of terror. She held her boy tight.
Lecodia hoped her heart would take the shocks, hoped she would not keel over and join the dead.
The father was far too small to be her husband. It was like little and large, but none the less he led the way.
“This way,” he said to his son and wife. His humble look was ill fit for this place. They entered the nearest door.
The last people standing in front of Dylan were a pair of double dates. They all looked at each other, smiling with fear.
The two women were around twenty-five, and the two men around thirty. The women were attractive. One was a honey-blonde with a petite figure and ocean-blue eyes. The other was a fiery red head, her hair a golden wave.
The guys looked like ball players, tough guys with smooth looks. One of them mocked a pose of horror to the blonde, who smiled back.
“Guys, you have got to lead.” said the blonde. Her voice was as soft as snow.
Lecodia imagined how much the woman would scream, wince, and shake as she moved through the maze, much like her.
Lecodia felt younger. She realised what this kind of fear and fright did. It brought back the memories of childhood. She smiled, albeit a scared smile.
The double dates walked through the next door. Suddenly a loud shout came from their direction, followed by female screams and then male chuckles.
Yep, Lecodia thought. It brought out the child in you. She looked at Dylan, unimpressed. “More scares, more jumps, more death. Dylan, you take your hand out of mine and I will turn evil.”
He grinned. “Come on, you’re safe with me.”
Together they walked through the final door where a corridor ran long. Then the slam of the door cemented their path of horror.
The light was dim, the floor damp, and the walls a dirty white, like a disused hospital ward. In the distance, groans faintly travelled the palpable air as they moved forward. They edgily looked left and right at doors they passed. Lecodia didn’t want to think what lay behind them as flesh cutting tools buzzed with action and screams of pain seeped with echo through.
As they neared the end of the corridor, the lights cut momentarily, then illuminated again. At the corridor’s end appeared a figure. It was turned sideward, breathing heavy and slouched like a question mark. Torn, baggy rags dressed the short, wrinkled body like a nightgown that had never been washed.
“Dylan, I don’t like this.”
It was a she, her dangling hair a thick mess of black, like filthy straw. Her body looked brutalised with age, but she could be no older than twenty. Her bare arms bore yellowish skin with black veins underneath, and her breath thinly misted the air. She turned her head and looked at Dylan and Lecodia, who were petrified.
The woman looked ill, like a flesh-eating disease had ravaged her body, and her eyes pierced them with evil. Her mouth opened wide, and she let out a terrible screech, like an old woman who was impaled on something. Her mouth continued widening. It widened into madness, into something hideous. Blackness peered from her gaping throat. Her eyes turned white, lifeless, and opened beyond the norm.
She raised her arms, screeching louder than the ears could bear, and charged them like a lunatic. Her head bounced and shook. The mouth disturbed Dylan. It continued widening, her face elongating into an unrecognisable ghoul.
Lecodia wanted to run, but she was glued by terror to the spot.
Dylan dragged her and pushed through a door to the left. He turned and slammed the door shut inside the dark room.
Both breathed easy. The room was pitch black darkness. Lecodia couldn’t even see Dylan. The ghoul’s screech subsided outside the door.
“Dylan. Are you there?” Lecodia asked as a beeping, monotonous bleep sounded in the dark air.
Before Dylan could reply a light clicked on.
Lecodia screamed.
An operating table was positioned centre room, where a man lay semi-conscious.
His head slipped left and right as he moaned. His eyes rolled. An operating light pooled the table, and over him stood a doctor doused in blood. He lifted the patient’s heart as it beat and dripped blood back into the peeled-open body. His ribs were cracked wide and poked the air, and his skin folded over and revealed internal tissue.
“Please take a seat and I’ll be right with you,” the doctor said. His voice was muffled behind his blood-soaked mask.
As Lecodia screamed, Dylan pulled her back into the wide corridor where all was quiet. She looked around, looking for the screeching ghoul, but she’d vanished. Together she and Dylan moved forward reluctantly, waiting for the next shock, eyeing the environment closely, like death could come for them at any moment. Lecodia hated it.
They reached the intersection at the corridor’s end, where the she-ghoul had appeared a moment ago and looked left and right. Rightward another corridor ran long. Atop the walls was a thin mesh that stretched along the wall to the ceiling like a partition. A faint orange light moved around behind. It cast an eerie shaded glow along the hospital-like corridor, like something was lurking behind the mesh.
Suddenly, a beast growled from behind.
Both Dylan and Lecodia froze. Lecodia closed her eyes in hope of waking up, she was petrified, and her body shivered. They turned together, and Lecodia opened her eyes.
Six monsters, beasts of the night, snarled at them from fifty feet away. Two stood on all fours on the floor, two clung effortlessly to each wall as if spiders, and two hung above the pack on the ceiling. Their eyes were bloodshot red and their bodies a lean and mean muscular threat. A thin, glossy coat of black fur covered their skin. They were like large dogs that had evolved from the ape kingdom.
They snarled like they were rabid, revealing ferocious, drooling teeth. Their eyes lifted closer inward of each other as the snarls grew more and more ferocious. Their baboon snouts stretched long and red-raw, like their skin was turned inside out. The creatures crept forward, their dagger-like claws tapping the floor, ceiling, and walls. They seemed to slide left and right in a deadly prowl, one leg crossing the other, blocking them in.
“Dylan, I’d like to wake up now.”
“Right, on me,” he said. “Now!”
Both dashed right down the light-moving corridor.
The beasts roared and gave chase.
Lecodia could feel them as she ran, and she didn’t want to look back. She only wanted to stay focused on the door that stood ahead at twenty meters, but she couldn’t help it. She finally craned her neck and looked behind, where the beasts chased like a pack of wild hungry wolves.
The wall-based creatures criss-crossed the corridor, leaping and springing from one wall to another, gaining ground with every pounce. The floor-based monsters hurdled each other in a desperate scramble for their predatory prize, as did the pair on the ceiling.
Lecodia knew they were only illusions, but she didn’t have the courage to find out, so she ran faster. She didn’t care what horror waited behind the next door.
Growls of hunger echoed the corridor.
Dylan and Lecodia hit the door simultaneously, forcing it open, then slamming it closed as the beasts battered into it from the other side.
Momentarily they scratched and thumped at the door, further scaring Lecodia. Then they subsided, and silence loomed again.
Dylan turned and looked at the large square room they’d entered. It was Hell. All the walls and ceilings were made of limp, dangling upper torsos. The bodies protruded a bloody, squidgy mess, like the walls were made of raw muscle tissue. Each torso protruded from the bloody walls at the waist. Lecodia wanted to vomit, and her nerves were pushed to the breaking point
by the rotting smell.
Blood dripped from the torsos that hung out of the ceiling. They dangled freely and limp, like abattoir carcasses. Lecodia grimaced and looked at the faces, which were pictures of tortured death, some recognisable, others a pulpy mush. The bodies on the walls hung over each other, overlapping the row below. It was like the insides of a stomach, where people were mutilated and destroyed.
The vile texture of the walls was more than even Dylan could take. Lecodia could see the connoisseur of illusion was terrified.
Six stone statues were positioned around the room’s edges, all carved differently, a family. One statue was that of a man standing earnestly, another a woman standing formally. Four kids shrinking in age made up the others, and a golden pulpit stood centre room. Blood continued dripping on their heads from the pulpy ceiling and the dead bodies that dangled from it.
Lecodia whipped her head around and watched Dylan follow with a look of terror-induced disgust.
He said, “They’re not real, Lecodia.”
“Dylan, there are no doors.”
He gestured toward the pulpit. “Let’s check this out.”
Both stepped up to the golden pulpit and gazed at the writing from an open large book. The paper appeared older than time.
Dylan blew dust off its surface and read the passage aloud that was scribed in an exquisite style. “Two people stood in a box, two people trapped. With no way out nor hope of solace, how will they escape? The family are split. They could help if they were together. Put them where the oldest starts and marry them forever.” He paused, then looked at Lecodia. “It’s a puzzle. We have to move the statues together, oldest first and down to the youngest.”
Lecodia looked to the chequered floor and spotted six black squares side by side in front of the pulpit. “There,” she said. “They need to go there.”
A click sounded, and the bodies came to life. The dangling torsos lifted on the walls and moaned with a sickening noise.
Lecodia looked at them. Their eyes were dead, their mouths spewed blood, their hands reached for them, and they moved towards them as the room began to shrink. Hundreds of diseased souls closed in.