Haunted: Dark Delicacies® III

by Del Howison

  I realized that I was staring at the house, thinking that the mist made it appear to be really evil. Ben was doing the same. Our group had already gone up the foggy walk—and had disappeared into the house as if they, like the fog, had been swept in by a spectral force.

  “So,” Ben said, a little anxiously, “it’s going to be good, right? These folks don’t mind paying the money for the boat trip over. It comes with good stories, real history, and bless those alligators!”

  I didn’t answer him at first. The house was disturbing me. And I still felt a little “haunted” myself by the lovely Callie. I didn’t understand why she was doing this when she looked so scared. I found myself thinking back about the comment the other woman had made, about it being in bad taste to make a haunted house out of a place where so much terror had occurred. Ben was worried. Why not? Times had been hard.

  “Sure, it all went great, will go great,” I told him. “Hey, I’m going to go on. I’ve heard about it, but I haven’t been through it. I’m worried about the blonde.”

  “What blonde?” Ben asked.

  “The one at the front of the boat.”

  Ben shrugged. “Frankly, the only girls I really noticed were the three brunettes with the football players. They were from Texas.” He grinned broadly. “And one of them had a pair of jugs on her the size of Texas too.”

  “She looked scared—Callie, the blonde. I’m going to try to catch up. It won’t be good if she has a panic attack, or something.”

  Ben shrugged. “Go for it, dude. So, I like the jugs, you like the blondes. I’ll be here. Oh, hey.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks for coming tonight. I know you’re juggling your own stuff. But tonight, seemed important to have the best.”

  “Sure. No problem,” I told him.

  “No. I mean thank you. Really. Tonight, it had to be you out here.”

  “Like I said, no problem at all, Ben.”

  I strode up the path, hurrying to catch up. The haunted house was hotter than hell as a tourist attraction right now. Ben had made a deal to get his people in right away for the twenty bucks extra they paid to come by the bayou.

  They had already been greeted by the zombie at the door. It was actually Darla Boudreaux, a cousin of Ted, Fred, and Jed. I told her hello, and she gave me a gooey kiss—she was wearing a lot of makeup. “Hey, you. Trying to catch up? Your group is already in the Egyptian gallery, screaming away. Our mummy jumps out of his sarcophagus.”

  “Thanks, I’ll meet up with them,” I told her.

  The lighting was done extremely well, the outside in the blue light that enhanced the fog, the inside hallways bathed in a crimson glow. The house was never so dark that you couldn’t see where you were going, but it was plenty dark enough to make you wonder just what was lurking around the next comer—indeed, just who or what was walking next to you.

  There was a crowd ahead of me, not my crowd, trying to slow down so that the costumed monsters would jump out and scare them. I excused myself and made my way around them. It wasn’t difficult; I was in my tour clothing, so I looked like an employee.

  The Egyptian room was first. The mummy started to scare a tourist but saw me and stopped. “Hey, Dan!”

  “Hey. Roger?” Roger Thompson worked for me part-time. I hadn’t had enough business lately to keep him on as full-time staffer. He was twenty-four, still a kid enough to really love dressing up as a mummy.

  “Yeah, yeah, it’s me. Cool place, huh?”

  “Yeah, get back in. The next crowd is coming through.”

  Roger lay back down, bringing the top of his sarcophagus along with him.

  It was well done. The walls here, false walls as they were, had hieroglyphics covering them; it appeared to be a section of a tomb. A lifelike Cleopatra had eyes that followed me as I moved—I expected her to be real, she was so lifelike, but she wasn’t. A partially mummified cat screeched from its wrappings as if it were being buried alive, and the soundtrack was an eerie Egyptian theme.

  The Egyptian area was followed by an old Celtic-slash-druid-slash-pagan arena, based on the bodies found in the bogs of England; a poor farmer was garroted, sacrificed to a harvest god. There were peat bog monsters running around there, scaring folks, along with a few druid priests.

  I moved on. The Inquisition happened again here in Louisiana, complete with some really scary inquisitors. In a tableau where the French Revolution was reenacted, an actor lost his head over and over and over again. Fake blood spurted, and the floor was filled with it in the area surrounding the guillotine’s basket. A few girls were screaming their heads off as they passed through, jumping, knocking into each other. The Boudreaux brothers had done exceptionally well with the sound system; each new era of death, dismay, and torture brought in a new and very creepy soundtrack.

  I don’t know why, but as I moved through the maze seeking my people, I felt a growing sense of restlessness. Something about the place just wasn’t quite … right. I told myself I was a fool. The sins of the past were not going to come back and make the walls of the old house come to life, seeking blood, or anything of the like. People just loved haunted houses. They loved to be scared. It was cool, and that was it.

  Famous murderers followed the French Revolution; I was in a street where Jack the Ripper was roaming; the Countess Bathory—a gorgeous young girl in a mammoth wig—walked the maze, studying all the young women, as if seeking their blood. New Orleans’ own Madame LaLaurie wove through the thrill seekers as her husband performed mutilating surgery on an actress laid on a slab. The actress screamed and writhed, and it was a horrible sight.

  I finally caught up with my own group; I saw the drunk and his pals. Seemed they were sobering up a little. Then, the Wall Street types, and the girls who had been flirting with them. We had come to another tableau; here, the onetime owners of the plantation were depicted. Madame Labelle was in an old-fashioned wooden bathtub; blood spilled everywhere around her. She lifted her bloody fingers and pointed out the women in the crowd. “Oh, do come over for dinner!” she said, licking her lips lasciviously.

  “Move, move, let’s get on!” The linebacker’s red-haired wife urged. She was snuggled up against her husband’s back.

  “Actress, honey, she’s an actress!” he murmured.

  But even the linebacker seemed to be unnerved.

  I skirted around them; I brushed against the wife, and she cried out, then smiled ruefully as she saw me. I grinned and excused myself, moving on.

  In the next scene, Monsieur Labelle was torturing a victim, a beautiful young woman. He was in a nineteenth-century waistcoat, much like my own. His white cotton shirt was stained with blood. His victim was on a marble table, and he was leaning over her, deciding whether to draw blood from her wrists or her throat.

  There was only one person in the area before the tableau: Callie. She was staring on with absolute horror.

  I was about to reassure her; I saw that the actor playing Monsieur Labelle was none other than Fred Boudreaux. I didn’t recognize the girl on the table.

  “It’s just a scene,” I told her, setting my hands on her shoulders.

  The others were starting to fill in behind us.

  Callie didn’t seem to know I was there. “No!” she cried. “No, stop him, stop him, it’s real!”

  The young woman on the table let out a horrible shriek as the knife touched down on her shoulder. The linebacker, who was behind me, let out a nervous laugh.

  The girl cried out again hysterically; she was naked beneath a sheet, and she was tied down with rope. She couldn’t move, but she thrashed about screaming. “Help me, help me! For the love of God, help me!”

  I smelled the blood; I can definitely smell blood. I know the scent of it inside and out.

  “It’s real, damn it, somebody help her, please, yes, for the love of God!” Callie shouted.

  I leapt over the velvet ropes that separated the “guests” from the actors. Fred Boudreaux looked at me, stunned. Then h
e smiled.

  I’d always known that the sucker was psychotic.

  “You want some of the action, Dan, is that it?” he asked me softly. Then he wielded the knife in my direction. It was a period piece; an antique knife with a sharp blade. It gleamed in the red light. And it came down at me before I could move, slicing across my collarbone.

  Blood spurted, but not as it might have. He’d been aiming for my jugular.

  I flew at him, bringing us both down on the floor. I didn’t have a weapon; I used my fists and my teeth. Everyone around the two of us was screaming and shouting, crying for help. A lot of the folks thought it was all part of the haunted experience.

  Some knew it wasn’t.

  I was already on top of Fred; he hadn’t been able to kill me with his first stab, and he hadn’t been prepared for the force of the attack I made. Fred should have known better when he saw me; he should have known what he was up against. I’d managed to rip out half his throat with my teeth, and not even his feeble attempt to skewer me in the gut caused much damage. I was still stunned that he’d really gone so mad, that he’d actually made use of the house to vent his sickness and attempt a murder before an audience.

  And yet, where else could you murder in plain sight and get away with it? Listen to a victim’s frantic and desperate screams, watch the blood flow, and have an audience screech and scream as well and then walk on by?

  The linebacker knocked down the velvet rope. Great. Big help. I was already lying on top of Fred, and he didn’t have much throat left, and the blood was spurting insanely from him. I didn’t know if I had meant to kill him; I only knew that he had meant to kill me.

  Chaos reigned. The linebacker held Fred down to help me, and he, too, became covered in blood. Someone went to help the girl who was tied to the table. People ran from the house, screaming, trampling one another. Ben had called the police. Cops were suddenly flooding through, bright lights were on, and eventually, the plantation emptied of tourists. The hysterical girl was not an actress; she had been one of the first to come through alone when Fred grabbed her. She gave a choppy version of events to one of the cops and was taken away in an ambulance. Finally, it was me, the linebacker, the cops, and Ted and Jed Boudreaux. They were horrified, claiming they’d known Fred was a little crazy, but in their wildest dreams, they had never imagined this. I’d gone to school with Ted, as I said. I believed him. He told the cops his brother believed the house was evil; he’d even believed evil could slip into people, but … well, everyone knew that the economy was in the dumps and … they’d needed to make a living.

  It was three a.m. by the time I was able to leave. Ben had been waiting for me, trying to find out what the hell was happening at first, then just pacing the beach in a state of horrified anxiety. I couldn’t calm him down. We didn’t have any more “guests” for the boat. They’d all been taken back to their various hotels and B and Bs by the cops.

  “Jesus,” he kept saying, sitting at the back of the boat. “Jesus.”

  Neither of us noticed the alligators slipping now and then from the bank to the water.

  The screech owl was still crying out, but the shrill and haunting sound just bounced off our ears.

  “Jesus,” Ben said again as we finally got the boat back to the landing.

  He looked at me then, shaking his head. “You saved that girl—he stabbed you. There’s blood all over you.”

  “I’m all right. Ben, go to bed. No, drink yourself to sleep. There’s nothing else you can do now.”

  “The cops …”

  “I have to make an appearance and another statement in the morning,” I told him. “They’ve got the linebacker. They think he did most of the subduing—and that he killed Fred because he had to,” I assured him.

  “Jesus,” Ben said. He blinked. He seemed to be past some of the shock. He shook his head. “I guess it’s true. Old Fred never knew that you were a vampire, huh? Hey—there’s no chance that he can come back, right?”

  “I’ll see to it,” I assured him.

  There were several of my kind living in New Orleans. I mean, where else did you go where you could act out all the time? I wasn’t a killer; I had never taken a life that didn’t need taking. These days, there were blood banks everywhere. We all knew each other, avoided each other, and kept a watch out for any of our kind who might show up in the city and ruin the good thing we had going.

  I could live off the blood banks—as could the others. And when there was a shortage, well, we had prisons with some of the meanest rapists, killers, and child molesters in the country. If one of them committed suicide, most folks felt that it was good riddance.

  “You always told me not to say anything to anyone,” Ben said. “Hell, when we were in school—wait, just how many times have you been through school?”

  I shrugged. “Several.”

  “I thought it was the coolest thing in the world, to have my best friend be a vampire. But you wouldn’t let me tell anyone, no matter how cool I thought it was. A good thing, huh? I mean, he might have killed your average guy, you know?”

  “Yeah, thanks, Ben. Look, it’s thanks to you that no one else was killed tonight, right?”

  He grinned sheepishly. “Not really, but I’ll take it.”

  “Ben, go get some stiff drinks, and go to sleep,” I told him.

  I had work to do.

  Problem was, there were usually a lot of folks around a morgue. It wasn’t really an easy task to get into one.

  I was noted by one of the cops when I arrived; I told him that one of the other fellows had been questioning me, I couldn’t remember his name, but he’d asked me to hang around. It wasn’t until the coroner and the cops started talking about the events in the reception chamber that I was able to slip back and get into the coolers.

  Fred was on the table, missing half his throat. But when I looked down at him, his eyes popped open. I was just in time.

  “You freak! I always knew you were a flipping freak!” he told me. Then he started to laugh. “So now … now, I’m immortal, right? Oh, Danny Boy, you’ve given me exactly what I always wanted. I can kill and kill and kill … and eat and eat and eat—until I don’t die!” he gloated.

  He started to rise.

  “No way, asshole,” I told him. The good thing about a morgue is that you can usually find a good scalpel. And, as you can imagine, I’m pretty damned strong.

  For most people, it’s really a task to cut off a human head. A burly murderer actually has to work really hard at a decapitation.

  But I’m good. Before he could begin to rise, I’d reached down, pinned him, and worked the scalpel.

  I left him with his head cleanly severed. I went back to the reception area, where no one seemed to notice that I had been gone. In fact, Jeff Major, a homicide detective, looked at me and set a hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Dan, I’ll get you home.”

  In the morning, there was only one thing left to do. I had to find Callie.

  I went to the B and B where she had told me she was staying. I knew old Mrs. Llewellyn who ran the place; she greeted me with hugs and a kiss on the cheek. The events of the previous night were the talk of the day. The story was on all the news stations, AOL, Yahoo, and so on.

  I was glad that the linebacker was happy to take the credit for bringing down the psycho. But Mrs. Llewellyn knew that I had been the first over the velvet rope.

  When she finished gushing over me, I told her I was looking for Callie.

  She groaned. “Not you, too!” she said with dismay. “What, is this going to start it all up again about that runaway?”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked her.

  “Last year, the cops were all over this place. Don’t you remember? There were a few girls who were reported missing. I had rented a room to a young girl named Callie Davenport. But she checked out of here, packed up her car, and left.”

  “What?”

  “Dan, she wasn’t anywhere near here this year.”


  “But I saw her last night. She was on the boat. She was the one who started screaming, letting everyone know that it wasn’t just a scene, that Fred Boudreaux was attempting to murder a girl right in front of our eyes.”

  Mrs. Llewellyn shook her head and smoothed her silver hair behind her ears. “Dan, if Callie Davenport is your Callie, then she’s back in town, she isn’t missing, and she’s staying somewhere else. Dan! I wouldn’t lie to you, you know that!”

  No, she wouldn’t.

  I went back out to see Ben. He’d taken my advice and started drinking. It was morning, but he was still drinking. He’d be all right; he’d just need a day to pull himself together.

  What I wanted was his list of reservations.

  He gave it to me. And I found her name. Callie Davenport. She had her local address listed as Mrs. Llewellyn’s B and B.

  “Did she say anything to you?” I asked Ben, puzzled.

  “Bro, I never even saw the chick you’re talking about,” he said. “I told you, I was into the girls with the huge hooters.”

  My fault; I had told him to drink. I wasn’t going to get anything out of him.

  I called Jeff Major at the police department. I didn’t tell him that I’d seen Callie; I just asked him about folks who’d supposedly disappeared from the area a year ago. I rather vaguely suggested that they might want to find out if anything had gone down the year before.

  I waited.

  They found Callie—and another three missing girls—in the ruins of the root cellar in the back of the plantation, slashed to pieces and mostly decayed.

  When I heard the news, I decided to drink also. Vampires can; we only need blood so often, and I sure as hell do enjoy a double malt scotch.

  So I took Ben’s boat out to the “beach,” Pearl River’s sandy beach where we had been the night before. The same place where the night is eerie as all hell and gators slip and slither in the water. The place where the screech owls cry out, and the brush rustles while the mist rises into a fog when the water temperature is higher than that of the air.