Dr. Morbid's Castle of Blood (Masks)

by Hayden Thorne

  We barreled through the main doors that led inside the castle. Man, it felt like we were trapped inside an amusement park haunted house thing. If it came with a ride like the one in Disney’s “Haunted Mansion” deal, that’d be great, but we were stuck depending on our feet and our energy levels.

  The castle was dark with only a few torches lighting up our way. What was freakier was the fact that our path toward the final destination, the tower room where Sleeping Possessed Beauty lay, was nothing more than a narrow, dark corridor lined with torches and an occasional sleeping dead person. Some of the corpses even lay right in our path, so we had to step over them, freaking out and shivering. I felt as though I’d reverted to being five years old, when I was convinced that stepping over a dead body in my dreams meant having that corpse come alive just as I put one foot over it, and it’d reach out and grab my ankle with its cold, dry hand.

  Our vision was also limited to maybe fifty feet ahead because nothing but shadows filled the area beyond that point. So every step forward meant an element of surprise for us, and I seriously was over surprises at that point.

  “Ow. Dude, ow.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re cutting off my circulation. Quit with the death grip.”

  I blinked and looked down. Somehow I’d managed to grab hold of Ridley’s right arm with my left hand, fusing my stiff fingers around it like steel claws. I held on to my knives with my right hand, which also kept a death grip on them.

  “Sorry. This is like reliving a recurring nightmare I had when I was a kid,” I said, letting Ridley go and barely taking notice of him massaging that part of his arm that I’d probably damaged. “I never thought I’d be so freaked over a game, but I am. Any idea how much therapy is? I hope my parents have me covered under their insurance.”

  “Don’t know, but I’m sure we’ll end up seeing the same doctor. Maybe there’s such a thing as a group discount.”

  The temperature inside the castle wasn’t cold, but the smell was weird. It was old, musty, and moldy, which didn’t solve my extreme paranoia problem. What was worse was that my imagination was starting to go into overdrive, and I could’ve sworn that some of those corpses we passed moved a little. I swallowed and glanced back to make sure we weren’t followed. The corridor behind us was quiet but no less creepy. I still couldn’t help but sense that we weren’t the only ones in the castle who were up and about, and the only good thing about this was that at least the air didn’t reek of rotting corpses.

  The corridor turned sharp corners, and those were hairy moments. More than once, we turned a super dark corner, only to come face-to-face with a corpse that wasn’t lying down but was sleeping on its feet while leaning against the wall, its head turned as though it were waiting for us to show up. Whenever we spotted one of those, we both had to stop, freak out for a couple of seconds, and then move forward, pressing ourselves against the opposite wall to avoid coming within two feet of the sleeping corpse thing.

  “I don’t see Peter and the others anywhere,” I hissed after a while. I also realized then that our footsteps echoed in the corridor—or at least they’d begun to, anyway. Maybe we were way deep inside the bowels of the castle at that point, and every little bit of sound bounced off walls and stuff. “Do you?”

  Ridley shook his head. I heard him swallow. “Nope. Just corpses that make me want to give up gaming for the rest of my life and beyond.”

  “God, they’re supposed to be turned into things that blend in with the scenery. What if they were turned into one of these corpses?”

  “I don’t know,” Ridley stammered. “Something tells me that they weren’t. Gut feeling. I’ve learned to trust that.”

  “I hope you’re right. This castle’s packed with sleeping dead bodies, and it’ll be hell trying to find the others if they’ve been turned into one of those gross things.”

  The longer we walked and searched, the more unsettling the place became. With the echoes filling the silence with distorted sounds, I couldn’t help but sense that we weren’t alone. Or at least we weren’t the only ones who were awake and moving around, and that feeling grew stronger and stronger as we moved along. Ridley stayed in front, his hands nothing more than a pair of glowing balls, while I stayed as close as I could behind him, my grip on my knives alternately tightening and loosening as I kept looking behind me with every strange echo I heard.

  As usual, I saw nothing but sleeping corpses, an occasional torch, and solid blackness beyond a fifty-foot distance. I suppose I should be grateful that we had that fifty-foot leeway should the corpses suddenly come alive and chase after us, but I didn’t feel particularly thankful for anything at that moment.

  Ridley and I made a couple more turns and then found ourselves stepping through a big open door and staring, drop-jawed, at what looked like a throne room. It was massive, like it could hold a hundred or so people with lots of extra room to move around in. It was lit—kind of dimly, though—with several torches along the walls, and hanging from the ceiling were old and torn up pennants. If anything, there seemed to be way more cobwebs than pennants above us. The thrones for both king and queen stood on a dais that was set against the opposite end of where we entered, and there sat both monarchs. Oh, yeah, they were also totally dead, their bodies slumped in their thrones, their arms hanging off the sides, their heads bowed. And scattered all over the area were dozens of the same old, same old nightmarish bodies, every one of them looking like they hadn’t gone through a process of mummification yet because their skin appeared soft and full though discolored, not dry and hard and sinking against bone. Their eyes were either closed and practically fused shut or partly open, so that we could see their dried up eyeballs through the dusty gaps. Their bodies’ positions also looked stiff, which was understandable if they died lying on the floor like that. They all looked like the bodies of people who’d recently died.

  Oh, and have I mentioned the echoes? Yeah, there were echoes in that throne room, and I’m not just talking about the sounds that Ridley and I made, walking, talking in whispers, and constricting our bladders to keep them from messing up our underwear. There were other softer, weirder sounds that seemed to come from nowhere.

  “Ridley, wait,” I whispered, stopping and listening, holding my breath. Ridley froze and looked back at me.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Ssshh. Listen.”

  We both fell silent and strained our ears. I sure as hell had no idea what kinds of sound effects were created for a game like this one, but it seemed as though what sounded like footsteps from some distance as well as faint, hollow voices were a part of the program. The footsteps—or what sounded like footsteps—were irregular, like someone walking for a few paces and then stopping before taking a couple more steps and then stopping again, etc. The voices were the ones that really upped the creepy meter for me because they sounded more like sighs or light giggling, but I couldn’t tell for sure. I knew that they were voices, but whether or not they were forming words was hard to distinguish. All I was aware of at that moment was my hair standing on end and my skin breaking out in goosebumps.

  “We gotta get out of here,” I whispered again. “I can’t stand this anymore.”

  Ridley looked back at the throne room. “Do you think they’re in here?”

  “We don’t have a choice but to look,” I replied. “We just have to be quick about it. I can see a door over there by that corner. I think that’s our way out of here.”

  With that, we both hurried forward, staying as close together as we possibly could, looking over the corpses, focusing our search in the center of the throne room first before moving along the perimeter, checking the bodies lying near or against the walls as well as the thrones. I don’t think my hair went down the whole time. It felt like I’d doused myself with extra hold hairspray, and every hair up and down my body was standing at attention. Seriously, things looked way, way different from the other end of a computer game, and I was sure that I wouldn’t b
e hyperventilating in terror if my view of the castle and corpses were limited to computer animation that I could control with the use of a mouse and a keyboard.

  “God, I’ll never, ever play another computer game again other than retro Pac-Man,” I muttered as I shadowed Ridley, subjecting myself to more of the same kind of psychological trauma that’d make shrinks tons of money. Our footsteps sounded loud and harsh against my ears, and so did my breathing. I tried to ignore those other sounds, but I couldn’t. Those damned voices got under my skin, and I couldn’t shake them off so easily. I didn’t know if Ridley was able to, and it was hard to guess what was going through his mind as he had his superhero face on.

  “They’re not all here,” Ridley said after another moment, and we stopped, looking around. “But—it’s weird, Eric, but I feel that one of them is. I mean, here—in this room with us.”

  I stared at him. “You can sense the others the way Althea can?”

  He shrugged, looking a little helpless and confused. “I think so. I mean—maybe that’s because of my leveling up from all those life points I earned, or maybe it’s because of genetics. I don’t know. I just—all I’m sure about now is that one of the others is in this room right now.” His voice grew louder and surer. He nodded as he looked around. “Yeah, I’m sure of it now. The feeling’s strong.”

  “But I didn’t see anyone—only dead bodies that’re set to wake up any minute now, and no one looked familiar,” I said, and if I didn’t had knives on me, I’d be wringing my hands in desperation.

  “No, no—it’s different. I mean, what I sense is different. I think…” Ridley’s voice faded, and he fell silent for a few seconds, frowning as he thought things over. “If one of them is here, then he or she is transformed but not in the way that’s obvious in the game. I sensed that no one’s been turned into a corpse, but if they’re supposed to blend in with the scenery…” His words faded.

  I frowned. I even almost scratched my head, but I quickly realized that I was holding a knife in each hand and was relieved that I caught that before I could scalp myself and create even more scenarios of absolute horror. “You mean he or she’s in superhero form? I didn’t see anyone in spandex anywhere. Or in Freddie’s case, I didn’t see any dorky-looking Japanese monster rubbing elbows with dead people.” Then I stopped and pinched my eyes shut. “Oh, I’m such a dumbass. They’re supposed to blend in with the scenery. That’s right—I keep ignoring that bit.”

  “It’s simple, and it makes sense,” Ridley said, and he walked toward the nearest wall, staring long and hard at it. “And I think I understand what Althea meant when she said their vital signs seem weird.”

  “Okay, so they’ve been turned into objects that are a part of the castle. Like hell are we gonna be able to find them in time. That’s just as bad as all of them turning into corpses and mixing it up with the rest of the bodies here.”

  “No, wait—it’ll be okay. I’m sure of it.”

  He talked slowly, the way people talked whenever they were speaking out their thoughts as ideas trickled through. Then he started to walk around the throne room again, his eyes riveted to the walls, and it was all I could do to follow him, praying under my breath that we weren’t wasting too much time in that room. I kept glancing around to make sure that we were the only ones moving.

  Ridley suddenly stopped. “Wade’s here,” he said, his voice firmer but still in a whisper. Then he looked at me, grinning. “I can sense her. Or more like I spotted her.” He raised a hand, the glowing bubble around it vanishing, and he pointed at the wall directly across from us. “See? She’s been transformed according to her powers, it looks like.”

  I stared long and hard at the wall and at first saw nothing but a line of torches. Then it dawned on me. One of the torches looked different. Its fire was brighter, more vivid, almost cartoon-like in the way it glowed starkly against the dark walls, while the other torches lit the throne room with dull, yellow fire.

  “One of these things is not like the others,” I said, returning Ridley’s grin. I lost no time and quickly tiptoed through the scattered corpses to the opposite wall.

  The torch we were looking at was set on a holder of some kind, and it was easy for me to pull it out. The torch itself was made of something like smooth metal that was a bright red shade, which mimicked Wade’s superhero costume as Miss Pyro. The rest of the torches were made of the usual dark brown wood that looked old and rotten.

  “Okay, let’s get out of here,” Ridley said, and he led me through the door that we spotted earlier.

  It took us into another corridor that wasn’t any different from the one we were in. Narrow, dark, and occasionally littered with corpses, it made the throne room feel like a quick break in between claustrophobia-laced nightmares. The only comfort I had at that point was having Wade with us even though she wasn’t exactly going to be helpful in any fight that was set to break out soon. What she did, though, was light up the corridor like a Fourth of July fireworks display when I held her up. It was as though her fire—or maybe fire power—was on full blast, and in torch form, she cut down on the trauma by not only lighting up our immediate space with super brightness, but also blast the shadows beyond fifty feet, so that we could see well past that. I was never a good judge when it came to distance, but I was sure that her fire power helped us see clearly all the way to a hundred feet either ahead of us or behind us.

  For a moment, I wondered if Wade used to be a lighthouse in a past life. I mean, you know—these things could get complicated and bizarre.

  “Wade,” I said, panting, as we ran through the nightmarish maze, “I hope you can still somehow use your offense powers even while transformed like this. I swear I won’t abuse them, but when push comes to shove, I’ll really, really need your help.”

  Naturally, Wade couldn’t answer, though the fire seemed to hiccough a couple of times, showering us with some harmless sparks the same way wood in a fireplace or campfire would pop and shower sparks. I felt my terror levels lower then, and seeing Ridley’s fists once again glowing with his own defense powers made me feel even better and more protected.

  Of course, one thought kept crossing my mind the whole time—what forms would Freddie and Peter take if they were both changed like Wade? Freddie could be anything! If we were inside a game about a fairy tale, I figured that he’d be changed into something that had to work with the setting somehow, which meant no dorky Japanese monsters anywhere. I mean, sure, it would’ve been great if he’d somehow turned into a miniaturized Godzilla, as it’d be easy to spot him and even use him as part of our arsenal against corpses coming to life. But in a classic fairy tale setting, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what form he’d take.

  I grimaced. Come to think of it, what the hell form would Peter take? He had speed and super strength powers, which translated to what?

  “Well, at least I don’t need to pee,” I muttered, glancing behind me when I thought I heard those creepy, hollow voices ringing along the corridor.

  Chapter 11

  After what felt like an eternity, we found ourselves inside another big room, which turned out to be a banquet room. It was as huge as the throne room, and this time, we saw long tables that ran along three of four sides in a U-shape thing. The tables were covered with old, tattered, and soiled tablecloths, and the food and plates sitting on them were rotten, moldy, and buried under thick cobwebs.

  As for the people who were struck down during a feast—well, they were all slumped in their chairs, looking no different from the other corpses we’d seen so far. The walls were again lined with torches, though nothing stood out this time, which meant that we were carrying around the correct torch to save from this game.

  “Do you feel anything?” I asked Ridley as I followed him around the room, looking at the corpses to make sure that neither Freddie nor Peter was hobnobbing with those nasty things. Thankfully they weren’t.

  “I do, yeah. But I don’t see anything out of place here.” Ridley stopp
ed after we made our first round. “Maybe we should split up and look again.”

  I stared at him, trying not to panic. “Okay, I’ll buy the argument that splitting up will save us time, but if something moves and comes after us, I’m going to lose it, and not only am I going to blame you, but I’m taking you down with me.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen until we find all three of them,” Ridley said, though he looked as freaked as I felt. Both of us kept looking around furtively, making sure that we were still the only ones moving. This game was turning us into a pair of obsessive-compulsive types. “We can’t avoid that. The only thing we can do now is to make it happen as quickly as possible. Dude, we gotta get this over with.”

  “I know, I know. Still doesn’t make it any less sucky.”

  Ridley patted my shoulder and walked off. At least he left me with Wade. She might not be much help at the moment beyond giving me a lot of light, but knowing that she was with me helped temper my panic, especially since those weird echoes were back. My skin kept crawling, and I kept gulping in deep breaths to counter that feeling.

  Ridley and I went opposite ways, with him going clockwise around the room, and me going counterclockwise. I held up Wade the Magic Torch and used one knife to poke around some of the bodies and dishes. I couldn’t see anything out of place, and I was about to meet Ridley midway through.

  “Shit,” I said, stopping and looking around again. “Where is he?” I thought I heard a thin, metallic voice laugh from some far corner of the castle, and I shuddered again.

  I was about to take another step forward when I spotted it. Him. It. Whatever. It was like part of a suit of armor sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall. Just like Wade the Magic Torch before, this one—Freddie or Peter—stood out starkly against the godawful setting. The armor was more like just the upper half that covered the torso, made up of the front and back plates with something like leather straps on the sides that needed to be buckled together in order to hold everything in place. The plates were nicely decorated with patterns that looked Medieval or fairy tale-ish, I guess, and they were also polished to a high sheen. Yep. Looked like we found our guy. Thing. Whatever.