by C. T. Phipps
“I just don’t like it,” Nancy replied.
“You know you’ve actually said some fairly vulgar things,” Carrie replied. “Jerkwad is a reference to ejaculation.”
“Huh,” Nancy said, seemingly surprised by this. “I never thought of it that way.”
“It’s a weird case. It comes from the phrase, ‘shot his wad’, which originally referred to old style muskets. They included a wad of flammable material in with the powder. Forgetting to put the bullet in or otherwise mispacking the gun could result in you ‘shooting your wad’, having a misfire. By the 1920s, nobody remembered the origin of the phrase anymore, so it came to be assumed it was sexual in origin. These days ‘shot his wad’ has fallen out of use, probably for being assumed to be vulgar, and hardly anyone remembers what ‘wad’ originally meant. Ironic, since most light insults are worse insults with the sharp edges worn off by overuse,” Carrie said, going into a surprisingly lengthy description of a subject no one on Earth cared about.
Nancy just stared at her.
“There’s also a bunch of inconsistencies. Like the fact that ‘screw you’ is vulgar but ‘screw this’ isn’t,” I said. “‘Bite me’ is very sexual but no one considers it so.”
Nancy looked at me.
“You have no idea how boring the asylum was some days,” Carrie said. “I actually studied word etymology for like three months due to only having access to a dictionary. They took away my library privileges for a year after I tried to bedazzle one of the nurses to death. It turns out it’s pretty hard to kill someone with a glue gun and fake jewelry.”
I tried not to smirk. “I’ll give you points for style, at least. You always were better at this whole theme killer thing.”
Mostly because I’d made an honest effort to get better. Unfortunately, I was hearing voices now and had tried to kill someone because I’d felt the urge to. In military terms, I was committed now and there was no avenue for retreat. Maybe my desire to avoid being like Dad had been limited to the kinds of people he prayed on—or maybe I just wanted to impress the pretty girl.
“Hey, maybe you can carve notches on your flesh every time you kill someone,” Carrie said.
“I think a Batman villain did that,” Nancy said.
“Who?” Carrie asked.
“Batman?” Nancy said. “Bruce Wayne? The Dark Knight?”
“Never heard of him,” Carrie said. “Is he a slasher? I’m not up on any of the new ones. Apparently, the entire business of murder became very ironic and postmodern mid-Nineties.”
“I have,” I said. “I always thought the Calendar Man should be his archenemy. Then again, I’m biased against holidays.”
“Ooo, you could go on your killing sprees on April 15th!” Carrie said. “No, wait, that wouldn’t leave you much time to kill. Maybe from January 27th to April 15th? Wait, then you couldn’t help Nancy. Dammit. You did not think this theme through.”
I walked out the door and looked to my side, seeing one of the ax boxes open with a variety of axes sticking out of the top. There was a battle ax, two hatchet, one fire ax, three single bit axes, a polearm, and one covered in runes that was whispering of the coming apocalypse. I went for an ordinary hatchet and turned back. “You guys coming or not?”
Both women exchanged a glance then followed me. Nancy picked up the polearm on her way down and put it over her shoulder. Carrie picked up the Necronomicon and her doggie, apparently intended to bring both down with her despite already holding a plastic tub of blood. I grabbed the flashlight I’d left on the kitchen counter and kept it in my off hand.
“So, Nancy, what do you like to do with your spare time?” I asked, finding the door to the basement in the kitchen.
“What spare time?” Nancy joked.
The door opened to reveal a long narrow passage with a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling over the basement steps. There was a dark and musty scent the basement and the single beam of light I cast down only illuminated featureless gray concrete. There was a dripping noise and the sounds of skittering that told me we had an infestation of rats—as if the place wasn’t already enough of a dump.
“I’m serious,” I said, heading on down.
“So am I,” Nancy said, following. “Between training, studying, and watching over my friends—I don’t exactly have much of what you’d call a social life. Hell, even when I went to school, it was because my mother and grams wanted me to be able to infiltrate quote-unquote normal society successfully.”
“That sounds insane,” I said, simply.
“Believe me, we’d know,” Carrie said.
Nancy shrugged. “Both my parents, which is how I think of them really, were really dedicated to their cause. They sent me to what they considered the highest risk college in the nation. Hawthorne University has a huge number of students disappear every year. Sometimes ten, sometimes thirty.”
The three of us reached the basement floor and I turned my flashlight around. The place wasn’t that different from other basements, being primarily used for storage, and had signs of water damage from flooding. There were cardboard boxes, old furniture, children’s toys, a broken piano, and an old furnace. Much of it looked eerie with the layer of dust and darkness around it.
The combination of old sounds that houses naturally made certainly didn’t help either. There was a vintage ventriloquist’s dummy on the ground, dressed in a tuxedo, with its head pulled off. Its face had been shattered as if someone had stamped their foot on it repeatedly.
“Yeah, sorry, that was me,” Nancy said. “I hate dummies.”
“Bark!” Cujo said.
“Who doesn’t?” Carrie asked. “I think everyone on Earth hates dummies, clowns, and spiders.”
“I like spiders,” Nancy said. “I used to have one that I called Daddy Longlegs. He was fuzzy and I loved him.”
“Egh,” Carrie said, shuddering.
“Some people love clowns,” I said. “It’s just that John Wayne Gacy and the Joker ruined them for everyone else.”
“Who?” Carrie said. “Not Pogo, the other guy.”
Pogo was John Wayne Gacy’s clown persona. I’d have to show her the Batman films sometime, I’d only seen two, but they were quite enjoyable. They’d be a fool to replace this Michael Keaton person.
“Was it the Fraternity kidnapping people, or did you take care of it?” I asked. So far there was no sign of the vampire, but it wasn’t like it was a huge basement so we’d find him eventually.
Nancy frowned. “No, it was something else. One of my sisters handled it.”
“Sorority sister or sister—” I started to ask.
“Ooo, vampire!” Carrie interrupted, pointing.
I turned my flashlight over where she was pointing and saw a surprising sight. In the back end of the basement, behind the steps was a crude (emphasis on the crude) medical facility. A hospital bed was set up with straps and chains that reminded me of H.P. Lovecraft’s Memorial Hospital. The bed’s prisoner was, indeed, a withered corpse that was wearing a polo shirt as well as pair of dress slacks. His lips were retracted and revealed a set of teeth with four prominent canines, confirming what he was. A stake was prominently sticking out of his right side, looking like it had originally belonged to a croquet set. That wasn’t the strange part, or at least the strangest part, however.
Attached to the vampire’s corpse were a half-dozen IVs with them with two going down his throat while the others were attached to his neck and thighs. They were linked to a variety of mostly empty blood bags hanging over his head that had been jury-rigged to a dialysis machine. There were Styrofoam boxes scattered about and what looked like canning equipment of all things. It was a crude set up and obviously stolen from local medical centers with no thought to hygiene—not that a vampire was likely to notice, being dead and all.
“What the hell is all this?” Carrie said, struggling to hold onto Cujo,
“Bark-bark!” Cujo said, jumping out of her arms and snarling at the comatose und
ead.
“I think they may have been draining him,” I said, looking at him.
“Why?” Carrie asked, confused.
“Supposedly, vampire blood is a powerful aphrodisiac and instant steroid,” Nancy said.
“I thought you didn’t know vampires existed,” Carrie said.
Nancy blanched, freezing up. “Uh—”
“So you lied,” Carrie said, sounding less offended and more amused at her attempts to deceive. “Is your name even Nancy Loomis?”
“Not really,” Nancy admitted, surprising me. “That’s just the name I go by. My real name is Nancy but I got Loomis from an old horror movie.”
Okay, now I felt like an idiot.
“Interesting,” I said. “That would make sense since neither of your maternal ancestors seem like they’d go by their married names.”
“Neither of them married,” Nancy said. “They’re both dead, too, so they don’t own me.”
I didn’t believe her. She was still lying. I wasn’t going to hold that against her, though. We all had our secrets and the fact she wasn’t trying to kill us or run away was already a great show of trust. Still, it did hurt given the trust we’d shown her. “Is your mother really Vivienne Weiss and your grandmother Janet Leighton?”
“Yeah,” Nancy said. “But both of them had our names legally changed so we’d stay off the grid.”
“Did it help?” I asked.
“No,” Nancy said. “We had to move like a dozen times growing up. Lots of wannabe slashers wanted to kill us. They wanted to be the ones to finally finish off a bloodline of survivors. They came close at least twice.”
I wondered if that was how her mother and grandmother had died, if they were dead at all. “So, you were faking when I was explaining everything to you.”
Nancy frowned. “Yeah. Though I did learn some things from you. My mom always advised me to play dumb around men because that way they were likely to underestimate you.”
“I think that strategy was a failure given my introduction was you beating a man to death before explaining you were a college graduate,” I said.
Nancy grimaced. “Yeah, both of my guardians had issues.”
“Did you recognize us?” Carrie asked, putting the blood tub down on a cardboard box. “Am I famous?”
“Yes,” Nancy said. “I knew who you were. Grandma Leighton kept a detailed set of files on what she called potential slashers. There’s like forty of them in addition to the two hundred or so active ones in North America. Most of whom are kept in H.P. Lovecraft’s Memorial Hospital. That’s like a government dumping ground for studying dangerous supernaturals. She had me memorize the files of everyone there. I was about ready to cut off your head when I recognized you, but I wanted to make sure you were really a...”
She stopped.
“Monster?” I asked.
“Slasher,” Nancy said. “You’ve turned out to be something very different from what I expected.”
Carrie picked up Cujo again and shook her head. “Tsk-tsk-tsk. What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
“After meeting you, I figured I might use you guys to go after the Fraternity,” Nancy said. “It was a crazy plan but they’re way out of my league and you also seemed really eager to help.”
“Because my brother wanted to bone you,” Carrie said. “Oh, how you have broken his heart.”
“Carrie,” I said, sighing. “Please stop.”
“I’m sorry,” Nancy said. “As creepy and weird as you guys are, not an entire turnoff, Will, let’s be honest, I think you are good people. By my own screwed up and not legally binding standards, at least. I mean that. Let’s face it, if you were going to kill me, then you would have tried already. I think.”
“You think?” Carrie said. “I have never been so insulted since my father’s zombie was chopped up and he left us alone for the first time in years!”
“I forgive you,” I said. “Deception is a survival tool.”
“Don’t!” Carrie said, pointing at me. “We are not aiding this lying hussy until she gives us something real! I’m not going on a killing spree for just anyone! Only friends!”
“Carrie—”
“Don’t Carrie me!” Carrie said. “I can Carrie myself!”
I blinked, confused. This conversation had gotten away from me.
“If telling you something true will help,” Nancy said, drawing a deep breath, “then you should know one of the women being held prisoner isn’t just my sorority sister. My sister by blood is there too. She’s also an Artemis.”
Chapter Nine
“Your sister?” I asked.
“You told us you had a sister and that she’s an Artemis?” Carrie asked, stunned. “Way to betray your family, Nance.”
“Bark!” Cujo said, and I swore the dog sounded disappointed in her.
“What?” Nancy asked.
“What if we were psycho killers or something?” Carrie said, making the entire conversation even more surreal. “You barely know us!”
“Stop, please,” I said, dryly, making a time out gesture. There was only so much silly I could take in a single night. I was also running on adrenaline, resurrection magic, and no sleep. “Thank you for sharing this, Nancy.”
“I swear, bro, you are the most downbeat slasher I have ever met,” Carrie said. “I mean, what’s the point of being an immortal spree killer if you can’t enjoy life?”
Nancy looked about ready to crack up, in the good way. “Oh God, you are the most entertaining people I have ever met in my life. How the hell did you get to be so funny?”
“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die,” I said. “Mel Brooks. I used to love his movies before the asylum.”
“He created Frankenstein, right?” Carrie asked.
“Yes, Carrie, yes he did,” I said, knowing the truth but too amused to dissuade her. Besides, if we kept following up every tangent then it would be three o’clock without us making any of our preparations. Thankfully, we still had about twelve hours on that end.
“Ah,” Carrie said. “Funny guy.”
“So, Artemises are real,” I said, trying to figure out where in the conversation I should try to jump back in. After all, we were right in front of a mummified vampire and just discovered our friend (?) was lying to us. “You come from an entire family of them.”
“Yeah, bro, they are,” Carrie said. “They’re also separate from slashers since I’m pretty sure I’m a girl and a slasher. At least last time I checked.”
“My grandmother called us Cerridwens actually,” Nancy said. “Cerridwen’s the—”
“Celtic goddess of the moon,” I interrupted, once again displaying the benefits of H.P. Lovecraft Memorial Hospital’s library. I didn’t know as much about Celtic mythology as Greek but I knew enough to identify the name. “Yes. She’s also a goddess of wisdom and the Underworld.”
“Warrior women associated with the moon, blood, murder, and magic,” Nancy said. “Doesn’t matter which culture really.”
“That sounds incredibly sexist,” Carrie said. “So are you powered by virgin power? Because we can get around that. I mean, you’ve said you’re not, but we’ve already established you’re a lying liar who lies. It’s also possible you could be a technical virgin. Hey, no judgement. Maybe it doesn’t count if it goes somewhere other than the sweet spot or if you use protection. You have to be precise about these things.”
“Oh dear God,” I said, covering my face with one hand.
“You wouldn’t understand!” Carrie explained, once more embarrassing the hell out of me. “Most people don’t understand how people like you get out of bed in the morning, bro. It’s sex, death, and taxes for the rest of us. But it’s okay, two out of three ain’t bad.”
“As far as I know, virgin power is a myth,” Nancy said, visibly forcing down laughter. “That just seems to be a myth like William thought. I mean, we wouldn’t last very long as a g
roup if we couldn’t procreate.”
“That’s how the Shakers died out,” Carrie said. “It turns out a celibate community has its downside. See, I know history too! Sexual and religious history in one no less!”
You said slashers and Artemises are one in the same once, I tried to contact the Spirit of the Hunt. How does this fit in with that?
I’ll share this one fact with you, William, but know it will come with a cost. You will be required to repay it someday, perhaps soon, perhaps in a thousand years from now, the Spirit of the Hunt said. Long ago, humankind was hunted by beings far nastier than itself. Monsters walked the land openly and took whoever they wanted rather than seizing those who wandered too far from the herd. Humanity cried out for champions to protect them and made bloody sacrifices to whatever gods would listen. The result was getting their wish granted in the most horrible way possible. The Nephilim were born from congress with terrible things. Beings both mortal and immortal who would hunt the monsters with a violence equal to their most ferocious species. The Artemises were one of the few bloodlines uncorrupted after millennia of killing.
What corrupted the others? I asked, stunned at this bit of information. Why did slashers start hunting their fellow humans?
I have not the slightest idea, the Spirit of the Hunt said.
I opened my mouth, ready to speak aloud, then closed it. You don’t know?
I said I was a god, I never said I was omniscient, the Spirit of the Hunt said. I can’t pay attention to all my children simultaneously. If I had to guess, I’d say that it was the allure of power as it usually is with men. In the ancient days, killers like you were revered even if you were a bunch of homicidal sociopaths. Gilgamesh was punished by the gods for kidnapping too many women for his harem, Herakles regularly murdered people in berserk frenzies, and the less said about Medea the better. It’s just a stereotype that the female Nephilim are gentler than the men. There are also still a few monster-hunting male slashers out there. You’ve even heard of them I bet.
She was right, I had. I’d even mentioned one as an example of slashers who hunted murderers. “Can you believe this?”