by C. T. Phipps
PSYCHO KILLERS IN LOVE
By C. T. Phipps
A Mystique Press Production
Mystique Press is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Crossroad Press Digital Edition 2020
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-951510-26-8
ePub ISBN: 978-1-951510-22-0
Cover design by Raffael Marenetti
Copyright © 2020 C. T. Phipps
LICENSE NOTES
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Meet the Author
C. T. Phipps is a lifelong student of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. An avid tabletop gamer, he discovered this passion led him to write and turned him into a lifelong geek. He is a regular blogger and also a reviewer forThe Bookie Monster.
Bibliography
The Rules of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #1)
The Games of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #2)
The Secrets of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #3)
The Science of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #4)
The Tournament of Supervillany (Supervillainy Saga #5)
The Future of Supervillany (Supervillainy Saga #6)
I Was a Teenage Weredeer (The Bright Falls Mysteries, Book 1)
An American Weredeer in Michigan (The Bright Falls Mysteries, Book 2)
Esoterrorism (Red Room, Vol. 1)
Eldritch Ops (Red Room, Vol. 2)
The Fall of the House (Red Room, Vol. 3)
Agent G: Infiltrator (Agent G, Vol. 1)
Agent G: Saboteur (Agent G, Vol. 2)
Agent G: Assassin (Agent G, Vol. 3)
Cthulhu Armageddon (Cthulhu Armageddon, Vol. 1)
The Tower of Zhaal (Cthulhu Armageddon, Vol. 2)
Lucifer’s Star (Lucifer’s Star, Vol. 1)
Lucifer’s Nebula (Lucifer’s Star, Vol. 2)
Straight Outta Fangton (Straight Outta Fangton, Vol. 1)
100 Miles and Vampin’ (Straight Outta Fangton, Vol. 2)
Wraith Knight (Wraith Knight, Vol. 1)
Wraith Lord (Wraith Knight, Vol. 2)
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Table of Contents
Foreword
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Foreword
I love slashers.
A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Halloween are the ones most people know, but I’m a fan of many more. I also love the parodies, deconstructions, and homages that they’ve created over the years. You haven’t got a full appreciation for the genre until you’ve tried Scream, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, and Tim Seeley’s Hack/Slash. At the end of the book, I’ll have a whole list of recommendations for movies and works that I think my audience will like. I even have a soundtrack plotted out.
What is a slasher? A slasher is, in simple terms, a movie or piece of media that is about a murderous killer that is stalking a group of individuals that must struggle to survive against their attacker’s rampage. A slasher can be an escaped mental patient, an immortal zombie, a ghost, or any number of other things. One quality most possess is a nebulous invincibility. They can attack you, hunt you, and stalk you with seemingly no ability to be stopped until the final confrontation (because then there wouldn’t be a story). You can shoot them, stab them, or throw them off a roof and they’ll just keep coming back. Running away from them is useful but they always seem to find a way to get ahead of you, even if they’re only seen walking. They might wear a mask, or they might not, but each slasher has a depersonalized element that makes them like a supervillain. Very few, except for Freddy Krueger, are chatty and the majority are mute horrors.
Facing against the slasher is usually the Final Girl. Conceived of in the academic work Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film by Carol J. Clover, they’re basically the young women that manage to turn the tables against slashers in the majority of said movies. Whether a babysitter or a sorority sister, they manage to survive despite the deaths of several friends. Joss Whedon, without specifically naming this trope, used it as the basis for creating Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He wanted to empower one of the victims in a horror movie so that when she went into an alley with a monster, she kicked said monster’s ass.
The original slasher story is And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie of all people. The Queen of Locked Door Mysteries conceived of a group of scummy people trapped on an island before they were knocked off one by one. Psycho isn’t really a slasher. It not only has a tiny body count, but its focus on the killer rather than the victim opened the way for many more murderer-focused stories. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Black Christmas would both debut within a few months of each other in 1974. They set the template for the gorier, crazier, and more survival-orientated horror movie that dominated the 80s. Movies like the ones I mentioned in my opening would become box office icons and they eventually became satirized as a formula in the 90s. We even had a successful show in 2006 about a serial killing vigilante named Dexter Morgan.
But why a love story?
Fans of my other work like the Supervillainy Saga, Agent G, Lucifer’s Star, and Wraith Knight know that I enjoy doing stories from the perspective of villains. There’s something awesome about getting into the perspective of the bad guy that I really enjoy. Here, I had a lot of fun playing with the making of a slasher, William has sympathetic qualities while also living in a culture that wanted h
im to be worse than he was. Contrasting him was the character of Nancy, that I wrote as a love letter to my favorite Final Girls and probably would have been first to be murdered in most movies as she was a “bad” girl. The two of them travel through a crazy send-up of the tropes and attitudes of slasher movies that I have assembled here.
I hope you enjoy their story.
Chapter One
“Psycho Killer” by the Talking Heads played on the jukebox of the diner. The Last Stop Diner looked like it was straight out of the 1950s, except dirtier and grimier. So, I suppose you could say it was like a diner straight out of the 1950s with several decades of use since then. The chair vinyl was frayed, the waitress looked surlier than a grizzly bear, and the patronage was a mixture of truckers as well as meth-heads. It was the sort of place that if you said there was a psycho killer present, most people would just nod and say, “Yep, sounds about right.” Really, I should be offended.
Honestly, the term was grossly inaccurate, and I much preferred the term slasher. It was decades since the heyday of my people since the Eighties when Fred, Mike, the Camp Killer, the Camp Killer’s Mother, and others stalked the streets. The media had popularized them and led to a slew of imitators, some actual slashers (more on that later) and others just the more mundane sort of killer looking for attention. Privately, I tended to believe if most of their victims hadn’t been lovely young women then society’s latent misogyny wouldn’t have turned them into celebrities.
My father, Billy Jones Patrick, had been one of the first slashers. Maybe not as early as the Motel Shower Murderer but certainly up there. Billy was one of those monster misogynists who targeted slumber parties and sororities for maximum affect. He even did it on Christmas, which was a terrible thing to do to your children I have to say. I mean, what child likes when their father must work on Christmas? Chooses to work on Christmas? A crappy one, I tell you. Eventually, the lifestyle caught up with Billy after a series of embarrassing ax-murders in Santa suits and other holiday killing sprees (who wants to see mass murder on Saint Patrick’s Day?).
Billy did, however, live long enough to explain that true slashers weren’t entirely human. I’d never understood what he meant by that until he’d finally taken on one too many strapping young ladies. She drove a car into him, chopped off his head, and then burned him with an entire can’s worth of gasoline. Now, normally, that would be enough to finish off even a true slasher, but Billy’s malevolence meant that his evil continued to linger to this day. Like right in this diner for instance.
“Junior, I think we need to talk,” the ghostly form of my father’s blond and bearded form said, wearing a striped Christmas shirt. He was looking significantly better than when I last saw him physically. He’d been a charred decapitated corpse then, killed by one of his victims who did everything she could to make sure he didn’t come back from the dead again. Mind you, Billy was translucent now, but the fact he was talking to me now was a major improvement over oblivion. For him, at least. None of the locals could see my father and didn’t seem to be interested in the conversation we were having.
“Please don’t call me Junior,” I muttered, sipping my horrid coffee. “I hate being called that.”
“You’re not worth calling Billy the Undying yet,” Billy said, puffing his chest up and saying his name like anyone remembered him. It had never quite sunk into my dad’s brain that being one of the first slashers was nothing compared to being the first and he was mostly remembered by diehard murder aficionados.
“No one ever called you that but us,” I replied, “and only because you made us do it.”
Billy frowned. “Well, what do you want to call yourself? You haven’t killed anyone yet so just giving yourself a name isn’t going to do it. People have tried that. It never works. I knew one guy who called himself the Hatchet—”
I interrupted. “I go by William, Dad. William England.”
“We’re Irish, son.”
I frowned, wondering if there was any point to speaking to my father’s spirit. “It’s called throwing people off the scent that I’m your family. This may surprise you, but being a CPA is hard when you’re the child of a notorious serial killer.”
I’d managed to escape the family business or at least I’d tried to. After Billy had finally met his final death, supposedly, both my sister and I had ended up institutionalized despite our relative sanity. Apparently, people in the government believed we might possess the so-called slasher gene and go on a rampage ourselves. I’d managed to break out of the asylum we were incarcerated at, which did wonders for my claims of innocence, and eventually got my sister out. From there, it had been a series of credit card frauds, student loans, and faked credentials to getting myself certified at the age of twenty-eight.
“You can’t escape your destiny,” Billy said.
“I can certainly try,” I said.
“All that effort training you,” Billy muttered. “I should have slashed your face up when you were sixteen like I planned. You wouldn’t have such a stuck-up opinion of yourself. You look like the guy who would play you in the movie about yourself.”
“It’s all about the fame with you, isn’t it?” I asked.
“No, that’s just a side benefit,” Billy said, grinning with teeth that would have looked entirely appropriate on a shark. “But seriously, you’re wasting that body. Put it to use!”
My father was referring to all the cardio, martial arts, and weapons training he’d put me through that had left me in far better physical shape than the average CPA. Most slashers were in pretty good physical condition but tended to be on the, uh, creepy and gross side. We could heal almost all injuries but that didn’t mean that we healed well. Unfortunately, being above average in looks meant people remembered my face when they saw me. I didn’t help matters by sticking out like a sore thumb among present company. Maybe a $500 leather jacket and designer jeans weren’t the best choice for this location, but fake it until you make it, especially when all your clothing was stolen.
I stared at him. “Yes, how awful it is I can walk among normal people without them screaming.”
Billy snorted. “Like that’s a good thing.”
I rolled my eyes. “We’re not beholden to your legacy. Neither me nor my sister. She’s rejected you too.”
“Ooo, William, I have a good target for us!” my sister said, sliding into the seat across from me by my father.
Carrie England was a perky five-foot-two redheaded girl with long curls. She wore a ski cap and winter jacket even though it wasn’t that cold.
My sister was cute as a button and an actual murderer with four kills to her name: one abusive orderly and three boyfriends that were various kinds of scumbags. It seemed she had an actual radar for these things and deliberately sought them out for killing.
“We’re not killing anyone,” I said, dryly and finishing my awful coffee.
Carrie was insane, and it was my job to look after her and keep her from going on killing sprees. Unfortunately, my father wasn’t helping matters. Sort of.
“Women can’t be slashers,” Billy said, as if he was speaking the word of God himself.
Carrie glared death at Billy. It was strangely adorable. “Why the hell not?”
“It’s a guy thing,” Billy said. “The slasher gene is passed down from father to son. Women can be black widows, mercy killers, cannibal chefs, and co-killers but—”
“That is a vicious stereotype!” Carrie said, appalled. “I’ve done the research and the slasher gene is on the X chromosome. The Camp Killer’s mom was actually a slasher before him.”
Billy looked unimpressed. “Yeah, there’s like two in the entire history of murder. You should find yourself a nice husband to help dispose of the bodies. You need to quit trying to do this yourself.”
“You’re the one who named me after the slasher who slaughtered all her high school bullies!” Carrie said.
“Movie Carrie isn’t real, sis,” I said.
�
��She could be,” Carrie said.
Horror writers had a long history of incorporating real life monsters, folklore, and urban legends into their stories. There had been real life inspirations as far back as The Murders at Rue Morgue and they’d made movies of most of my father’s “friends” from the Eighties. Stephen King, though, as far as I knew, was completely original in his inspirations.
“Your mother named you, Carrie,” Billy said. “Personally, I would have named you after Mary Jane Kelly.”
“After Jack the Ripper’s final victim?” Carrie said, shaking her head in disgust. “It’s like you don’t even want me to succeed.”
“I don’t want you to succeed,” Billy said, crossing his arms.
A large woman with scars on her face and dressed in a pink dress with an apron walked over to us. “Whatcha all talking about?”
“Nothing,” I said, sighing.
“We’re arguing with our dead father’s ghost about who to kill next,” Carrie said, cheerfully.
I facepalmed.
The woman smiled. “Ah, that’s adorable. Your father used to come here all the time. Are you sure I can’t interest you in trying our ribs? They’ve got a special ingredient. Hehehe.”
I stared at her. “Special ingredient?”
She gave me a knowing wink.
Great, we were in a cannibal diner.
“I’m vegan,” Carrie said, lying. She ate more meat than a wolf. “Sorry.”
“Suit yourself,” the woman said, turning around.
I turned to Billy. “Is this a psycho killer diner, Dad?”
I knew the answer, I just wanted to confirm it. I’d chosen the town of Wounded Buffalo, Kansas, population 134, in hopes of finding a place I could stay off the grid with my sister. Something about the place had leapt out at me and I wondered if my dad’s somewhat meager supernatural powers had influenced me from beyond the grave.
“A psycho killer town, son.” Billy smirked. “Remember, you’re always more vulnerable to mind-control when you go to sleep. Wounded Buffalo, Kansas is a slasher hot spot. I used to use this place to lie low between jobs. Wonderful people. Every one of them is as crazy as me.”