by John Everson
“Fuck,” Mike whispered under his breath. But he’d learned not to question Katie. And if Emery said it, it was Katie who spoke. He’d realized that much a while ago. There was only one girl calling the shots here.
Mike pointed toward the alcove behind the bureau, and the guy looked at him hard for a second, and then started walking toward the entry point without a question.
Thank God for small favors.
Mike followed him into the half-hidden area and pointed dramatically down at the floor. They guy looked confused for a moment, and then as if on cue, the floor door opened and Emery came out.
She stood next to the open door and pointed, just as dramatically as Mike had, for the man to walk down the ladder.
The guy hesitated for just a moment, and then turned and began to descend the stairs.
Emery looked at Mike and for the first time in the entire time he’d known her, he swore the girl smiled.
When the big guy had stepped down four or five stairs and the door was closing behind him, Emery took it in her own hands, and waited for him to disappear below her before she followed.
When the door closed, Mike heaved a sigh of relief. Whatever shit happened down there, it was on her, not him.
After the next group passed by on the stairs and began screaming down the aisle as haunters with hag masks and knives jumped out at them, Mike quickly slipped down the stairs before the next group could ascend.
He was going to check in with Lon and see what else was up for tonight. Because his job for Katie was done. At least for the next 24 hours.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Thirty-seven out-loud screams tonight. Argento was happy. He hadn’t heard Lucio’s score yet, but his own was better than he’d charted on any other night for the past two weeks.
Sometimes pressure was what drove you to succeed.
And sometimes you were just lucky.
He didn’t know which of those scenarios he owed his numbers to, but he was proud of the rank he’d racked up. It ought to put him back in contention with his friend.
Lon had just called the ‘spooks out’ call, which meant that all guests were out of the house, and they were closed for the night. He walked out of his room with a faint grin and headed to the makeup room to get rid of his gear. There was a line at June’s mirror, but he didn’t need to worry about that shit. He pulled the gloves and mask over his head and went upstairs to hang it on the rack with the others.
“So, what did you hit?” he asked Lucio when he got back down.
“Twenty-nine,” Lucio said.
Argento grinned. “Creeping up on you, man. Thirty-seven.”
“Bastard,” Lucio said. “I even made a girl piss her pants, I swear I did.”
“Sometimes the knife is better than the maggot,” Argento said.
“Yeah, sometimes.” Lucio grinned. “But rarely. You want to grab a drink? A few people are going.”
Argento shook his head. “Wiped. Maybe tomorrow. I just want to head home.”
Lucio shrugged. “I hear ya. See you tomorrow.”
Argento smiled as his friend headed out the front door. There was one thing he wanted to do before he left. Lon had mentioned earlier that a couple of the lights in the basement were out. So he grabbed replacements from a pack he kept in the Nightmare on Elm Street bureau and headed to the hall. Lon was talking to Lenny at the end of the hallway, but looked up as Argento came out.
“You’re gonna be the last one out,” Lon said.
Argento shrugged. “Nah, you guys are still here. I just wanted to fix those lights before I go.”
Lon nodded. “Fair enough. Mike’s closing up tonight, so we were just leaving. You want to meet us up at The Edge in a few? We’re going to have a beer.”
He shook his head. “Lucio already asked me. I gotta get some sleep.”
Lon grinned. “Save up your energy for another big scream night tomorrow? Got it. See you then.”
Lenny waved and the two of them walked toward the front foyer.
Argento had second thoughts for a moment about following, and then shook his head. He needed some sleep; his throat had been scratchy earlier, and he couldn’t afford to be sick for Halloween.
He descended the ‘Don’t Go In The Basement’ stairs and saw the problems. There was a floor spot out on the far right, which was easily fixed. But there was also a top spot out near the middle of the maze, and he needed a different bulb for that. He replaced the first one, and smiled as a red glow instantly lit the wall. It was a small change, but every light made a difference.
Argento went back upstairs, but left the lights on. He thought he had a replacement for the other spot in his trunk; he hadn’t used many of those and they were LEDs so they should have lasted the whole show. He replaced the other extra bulb and went outside.
The night air was cool, but a little humid. It smelled of the forest, and he took a deep breath. There was nothing better than the night. He preferred to sleep all day and work at night, when he had a job that allowed it. For a long time, he’d been a stock boy at a Jewel supermarket, and it was perfect. He had a night shift, but could drive home long before the sun came up.
He stood still for a few minutes, just breathing the air and listening to the chime of the night bugs. They buzzed and droned and chirped like an orchestra, a steady, constant background of natural music.
Argento smiled and finally walked to the car to retrieve the bulb. He opened the trunk and found he did, indeed, have a pack of them tucked in the back. He grabbed the box and decided he might as well keep some extras in the house with the other bulbs.
When he went back inside, he paused for a moment, listening for any sound to tell him where Mike was. He hadn’t seen the carpenter in hours, though Lon said he was here. He should let him know that he was still here so he didn’t lock Argento inside.
“Mike?” he called. “You around?”
When there was no answer, he shrugged and dropped the spare bulbs in the Nightmare room and grabbed a screwdriver before heading down the stairs. The mount for these spots was a little more difficult to get to – he had to take off a plastic guard – but he should be out of here in a minute anyway. Maybe the guy was taking a dump somewhere.
Argento walked over to the dead lamp and reached up to unscrew the housing. The whole mount moved, instead of the screw, and he frowned. With one hand, he held it fast to the beam and tried unscrewing it with the other hand. The screwdriver promptly jumped out of the hole and gouged a hole in the joist.
“Damnit,” he whispered, and tried it again. He tapped the back of the screwdriver to jiggle the screw mount, and then twisted…this time it unlocked. He grinned and got the rest of the housing off and then swapped out the bulb. A blue halo appeared, bringing out a splatter pattern on the wall nearby that he was particularly proud of. It was all a part of a whole. No light, no swatch of paint was unnecessary.
Some artists worked on canvas, but Argento liked to think that he worked in three dimensions. Five, really, because he also used music and sometimes scent to fill out the atmosphere of a room.
Something thumped at the end of the basement.
Argento froze. The aisle he was in appeared completely empty, just shadows of red and blue and green light melting and merging across the empty plank floor.
Another noise then. A scraping. As if something was being dragged across a floor. For a second he thought maybe it was Mike putting something back in place, but the noise sounded closer than that. And he saw nobody else in the basement. Could an animal of some kind have gotten in? Raccoon?
“Shit,” Argento whispered. Slowly, he began to walk toward the back of the basement, where the source of the sound seemed to be. It was dark back there, by design. Every few seconds a strobe went off and illuminated a gutted man that June had created. It looked pretty good, but Argento didn’t think
it was quite good enough to have a solid light trained on it. The impression the strobe made was better than letting people stare at it too closely.
He stared at the area behind the gutted man for a moment, watching as the strobe illuminated the dark space near the back wall three or four times. Nothing.
He walked over to the wall at the right. It was the back of the house, the side that faced the cemetery. But there was nothing there. He stepped around the false prop wall to look behind the room that the public saw, and the space was dark.
Then he heard a voice through the wall. Someone was talking in low tones close by. It sounded like a man. Mike?
Argento frowned and stepped closer to the back wall. He cocked his head to see if the sound was coming from upstairs, but no. His ear said it was directly in front of him. Behind a wooden wall which he thought butted up to the cement foundation. But maybe not.
He ran his hands over the wood, pressing on it to see if it gave somewhere. That’s when he found the cavity in the wood. And when his hand slipped into it, he found the door knob. There was a room down here? How had he decorated this space and not known this?
Argento turned the knob and the door swung inward. The hinges were on the inside – so that’s why you couldn’t see the door from inside the basement.
He stepped inside and saw Mike standing on the right side of the room. Katie, his girlfriend, was next to him, and another girl, a stocky woman with a head of knotted brown hair, stood next to them. Only, she was propping up a body that appeared to be slumped against her. If the guy really was relying on her for support, he couldn’t figure out how she managed it. The guy looked like a construction worker; his shoulders were broad and he must have stood well over six feet.
Argento opened his mouth to call out to Mike, who still hadn’t noticed him enter the room. But then he shut it. The slumping guy was naked from the waist up, and the chunky girl was holding his arm over what looked like a casket at the end of the room.
He frowned. What the hell was going on here? Then he saw the girl lift a silver blade, and swipe it across the guy’s arm. A spout of blood erupted from the man’s bare arm to spray across the casket, and a light went off in Argento’s head. That’s not makeup, he realized.
“What the hell are you doing?” he yelled and bolted forward.
Mike turned and moved to intercept him but before he could, Argento had grabbed for the knife arm of the girl. She didn’t flinch. Instead, she released her hold on the big man and lunged.
Something cold touched Argento’s neck. He opened his mouth to cough, and then the whole world lit on fire. He grabbed for his neck but it was too late. Emery pulled back the blade and the knife left his throat, which instantly filled with blood. Argento choked and blinked and struggled to scream. This couldn’t be happening.
He heard Mike yell something but he couldn’t understand the words. Everything seemed like it was closing in and he felt hands grabbing at him, but Argento found that he could only see the thick lips of the big girl as she bent over him and stared at him with dull brown eyes.
Argento kicked and twisted on the floor as he clutched his neck and tried to stem the tide of hot blood flowing out. And then all of a sudden he was lifted into the air by the girl.
“We need to get an ambulance,” Mike said.
Chapter Thirty
Mike’s stomach sank as he turned and saw Argento standing in the hidden basement room. They’d managed to keep the room secret this whole month, but now, as they approached the final days, the set guy had stumbled not only on the room, but on the bloodletting.
“Shit,” he said under his breath and turned to head the guy off. Emery was busy washing Katie’s bones with blood, but maybe he could steer Argento off before he really got what was going on.
“What the hell are you doing?” Argento yelled and bolted toward Emery. Mike moved to intercept him, but missed. And the next thirty seconds played out like a slow-motion film in his eyes as Emery’s knife swung around and stabbed, catching Argento right in the side of the neck, piercing, sliding in like it was a sheath and then pulling back. And then the wiry little set and lighting guy was clutching at his neck, as red blood splashed through his fingers and he fell to the floor.
Emery scooped the man up and Mike grabbed for her arm. “We need to get an ambulance,” he yelled. “Put pressure on his neck.”
“It’s too late for that,” Katie said behind him. “He’s going to be gone in seconds. Just look at his eyes.”
Emery struggled to hold Argento over the coffin so the blood dripped inside.
“Help her,” Katie urged. “Don’t waste his life. He’s going to be dead in seconds no matter what.”
Mike’s head swam with conflicting emotions but he had followed Katie this far, and somehow that made him go once more with what she said. He grabbed Argento’s black-booted feet and hefted the man up and over the coffin, trying to hold him steady as the man’s feet kicked and his middle tremored. Emery gripped him by his shoulders and tilted his upper half so that the blood dripped in a steady river across the raw sheaths of muscle and meat that had taken shape in the coffin. After a couple minutes, the body grew still, and one arm hung limply across the meat of the growing body below.
“Lift his feet higher,” Katie urged, and Mike did, closing his eyes when he saw the blood flow increase.
This wasn’t happening. None of it. Mike held his eyes closed and wished himself back to that meeting with Perry. He imagined himself turning down the job, and muddling by these past few weeks with normal jobs. Maybe he would have fallen into a full steady gig without Perry’s help. Or maybe he would have lost his house. But either way, he wouldn’t have been standing here holding a man’s legs in the air so that he could bleed the body’s last blood onto a ghost’s reborn corpse.
“That’s enough,” Katie finally said softly.
Mike opened his eyes as the body began to move – because Emery was pulling it. He followed her lead to lay Argento on the ground. The man’s eyes were wide open, staring at the wooden ceiling as if in shock at what he saw. Mike swallowed hard and reached over to finger the man’s eyelids closed.
He couldn’t look at him that way.
“What the hell are we going to do now?” he whispered. “You promised that we weren’t going to kill anyone. They’d all go home and wake up with a bandage and a weird scratch on them that they couldn’t recall getting and that was it.”
“Curiosity killed the cat,” Katie said. “He shouldn’t have come here.”
“That doesn’t help,” Mike said. “The police are going to come. They’ll arrest me and Emery and this whole thing will have been in vain.”
Katie shook her head. “No, they won’t,” she said, and then pointed at the big guy who lay unmoving on the floor next to Argento. “First, you’re going to take our friend here for a walk so that he can get home and not wake up here. Then you’re going to come back and help Emery bury this other one.”
Mike felt a tear running down his cheek. “I can’t,” he whispered.
“You have to,” Katie said. “You want to hold me in your bed every night, don’t you?”
He nodded.
“In just a few more days, I’ll be yours to hold forever. Right now, we have to finish the plan. This is a setback, but we need to work with it. You need to make it right.”
“We can’t make it right,” Mike said. “Argento’s dead.”
“And his death will help in bringing me back to life. It’s a trade. Don’t waste his life by stopping on me now.”
Emery was starting to bandage the arm of the big man who remained alive, and after a minute, Mike bent to help her. When the gauze was taped in place she began to pull a t-shirt over the guy’s mostly bald head.
Then the two of them put the man’s arms over their shoulders and lifted him to his feet. His body seemed to unconsciously
respond, and together they walked him like a zombie out of the basement.
There was a pickup parked just down the gravel path, and Mike patted the man down and found the keys in his right pocket. Emery helped load the man into the passenger’s side and then Mike drove the truck down the road toward Cicero Avenue. He pulled off on the side of the road and pushed and pulled until he’d shifted the guy into the driver’s seat, all the while looking over his shoulder to make sure no cars were coming. An unlikely, but occasional, risk at one a.m.
Once the man was in the seat, Mike rolled down the window and closed the driver’s side door.
“You should go home,” he said in the man’s ear. He repeated himself twice more, and then stepped backward, away from the truck. He was only a few yards down the road when he heard the crunch of gravel. He turned and saw the pickup moving slowly down the shoulder of the road. After a moment, it eased hesitantly onto the asphalt. The brake lights went on and off a couple times, but then the truck suddenly accelerated.
One problem out of the way.
* * *
“What are we supposed to do with him?” Mike asked when he got back to the basement. Emery had closed the casket and put away the bandages. But Argento still lay, very dead, in the middle of the floor.
“Put him in my grave,” Katie said. “The earth should still be loose there.”
“And his car?”
“Find his keys and drive it away from here. I’m sure you can lose it somewhere.”
Mike wanted to protest, but what was the point? If he ditched the body somewhere so that someone could find it, the police would be all over the haunted house. And if he tried to come clean about what had happened…he’d be in jail. To be honest, he was more worried about getting rid of the car than the body.