by John Everson
“Sorry, but this just feels like déjà vu. Only this time, we have stupid costumes.”
“Mine isn’t stupid,” she said.
“Like there aren’t a thousand evil clowns out on the street tonight,” he said.
“That’s how I fit in without being noticed,” she said.
“Hmmm.”
“You have to admit, this should keep us from being stopped at the ticket stand because someone recognizes us.”
“Nobody would have recognized us if we’d just come as ourselves,” Ted said.
“That guy who called the cops on us last time would have,” she answered quickly.
“Maybe. If he was here,” Ted said. “But now, since you’re in a clown suit, it’s going to be really difficult to stay under the radar.”
“O ye, of little faith,” she said. “Just work with me here.”
“The last time I did that, the cops came.”
“This is different,” she said. “It’s the final night. And it’s Halloween. If something happens here tonight, I don’t think it’s us that the police are going to be after.”
The group ahead of them suddenly surged forward, and Jillie grabbed Ted’s arm and squeezed. “There’s something going on in there tonight,” she said. “I can feel it.”
“Indigestion,” he said.
“I’m serious,” she said. The crowd all around them filled the air with stories and voices, but Jillie still whispered. “I have this horrible, black feeling. Like I’ve never felt before. It’s almost as if someone or something was sucking all of the life out of the sun.”
“That’s because it’s eleven o’clock at night,” Ted said. “And the sun went away a long time ago.”
Jillie threw her head back to look up at the stars. The night sky was clear and cold. “You’re impossible,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t understand why you do this at all.”
“Mainly because of the beef sandwiches you buy me at Nicky’s,” he said.
“I’m not talking to you anymore.”
They stood in silence for a couple minutes, and then surged forward again. There were only a handful of people between them and the ticket taker now. Behind them, there was a sudden wave of voices. They sounded angry. Someone yelled, “Fuck that shit,” and another yelled, “Come on, we’ve been here….”
Ted looked back and then said, “Looks like they finally cut off the line.”
Jillie nodded. “Figured that was coming soon. We’re good though. We’ll be in before midnight, which is all I really wanted.”
“You know nothing is going to happen at the Witching Hour, right?” he asked. He looked up at her with black zombie eyes – God she hated those contacts – and raised an eyebrow.
“Maybe not then,” she said. “But something will happen tonight. I feel like something is already going on in there.”
“It’s called having a good time,” he said.
“Not the things I’m feeling. They don’t feel good at all.”
Ted had nothing to say to that.
The line moved forward again and suddenly they were standing at the two steps leading up to the porch of the house. “We’ll take two,” Ted said to the man sitting at the table with a cashbox. He pulled out his wallet to give the man thirty dollars.
“Buyer beware,” the man said, and handed Ted their tickets.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Jillie whispered.
Ted didn’t answer her, but led them forward toward the door. A man in a black suit with white-face makeup grinned at them through ruby-red lips. Inside Ted groaned at yet another clown outfit. But then the dark clown opened the door, and they stepped inside.
Chapter Forty
Lon took his position in the den. He’d had to leave the ticket stand because for the third time tonight they were missing a haunter. First Lucio, then Brad and now Chris. He’d seen Mike was filling in for Brad when he walked past the dining room. It was too late now, but next year he had to put some strict things in place to stop this from happening. They couldn’t run this place on the busiest night of the year with people abandoning posts. Maybe if you didn’t show up, you got docked a week’s pay?
He shrugged and took an appreciative look around the room. He had to admit, when it was empty, the den was pretty eerie. Between the music that was piped in, the red and blue and green spotlights that lent the room a surreal flavor and the stained glass (false) windows and dark shadows in every corner, the place was definitely prepped to scare.
Lon was prepped to scare too. He wore the grotesque rubber mask of a pustulating rotting corpse figure that looked surprisingly real, and he held a long dangerous-looking axe across his shoulder. Never mind that it was plastic, it looked good. If you were standing in front of him and it was pointed at you, you would not have blown it off. You would have backed away in fear.
He’d filled in at this position before, and virtually every time he jumped out from behind one of the alcoves of the room to hold the axe out at the patrons, somebody screamed.
Honestly, Lon hated the sweaty feel of the mask, but he loved the screams. It meant he was doing something right.
Tonight, he held his blade high. It was Halloween. If Argento wasn’t here, he wanted to represent the guy well. This room, this costume, was Argento’s creation. It’s what the designer of this house had wanted.
Wherever Argento was, Lon wanted to make sure his vision was done right.
So he was ready when the door opened for his first ‘victim.’ He leapt out and stood at the ready with his axe.
The only problem was, the girl at the doorway did not appear in the least bit scared.
Instead, she stepped forward, with a long silver blade of her own cradled on one shoulder.
What is that about? he wondered.
All of his preparation suddenly fell to the floor. He was no longer the guy in place to scare…he was faced with a woman who was scaring him. Because…he was pretty sure her weapon was real. And he knew his was certainly not.
“Hey,” he said. “Can I help you?”
It was the dumbest ‘customer service’ phrase he had ever spoken, but he had to say something. Why not ask it before he got cut into tiny scrubs. Why was she here? Who was she? And why was she threatening him in his own haunted house?
She didn’t have the same kind of interest in communication.
The woman lifted her blade and ran toward him. Suddenly he realized that there wasn’t any communication that was going to occur here. There was only victim and killer. And he was on the wrong side of the equation at the moment.
“Wait a minute,” he demanded, dropping his fake weapon and frantically looking around for something to hide behind. Some way to avoid her blade. He ducked behind the couch, forcing her to choose which side she’d come after him on. When she hesitated, he ran to the bookcase and frantically toggled the lever to open the secret door.
It opened and he slipped through just as the crack of a blade fractured the shelf his fingers had just touched.
Lon stumbled into the secret room that led to the back stairs into the basement. The star within a circle symbol that had been etched into the center of the floor still remained from whatever Satan worshippers had put it there decades ago.
Argento and his team had played off that, and painted the walls with a series of symbols of witchcraft and the occult.
Lon ran for the stairwell, but the woman swung the long knife at him like a bat. The flat of the blade caught him in the hip hard, knocking him to the floor. He scuttled backward as the blade came down again, the business end this time, catching for a second in the floor before she pulled it up again and readied to strike.
He pulled himself up but there was nowhere to go. Lon stood face to face with the girl, and realized that he was really up shit creek here. This was not a prank. This girl was deadly s
erious. Her dark brown eyes never seemed to blink. Her jaw was clenched with fatal determination. She stepped relentlessly forward, one foot at a time, forcing him to the wall. A giant Ouija board was painted on the wall behind him and out of the corner of his eye he could see the arc of its letters. His face was next to the K.
“You don’t want to hurt me, I work here,” he said. “I’m helping to haunt this haunted house.”
She shook her head, and pinned him against the back wall with her body. Then she held the blade to his neck.
“You can’t haunt a house until you’re dead,” she said. “But I can help there.”
She stepped back and with one fast motion brought the heavy blade up and then down, whispering one word as it connected with his face.
“Goodbye.”
Chapter Forty-One
Jeanie put her foot down on the plank floor that Mike had laid at the bottom of the stairs, and felt her heel slide forward. She lost her balance, but grabbed for the banister and saved herself from falling on her ass. When she righted herself, she looked down to see what she’d slipped on.
“Oh fuck,” she whispered.
The floor was a river of red.
She looked to the left, and three bodies lay there in a row, their throats cut from ear to ear. When she looked to the right, the scene was worse. One by one she counted the bodies. Seventeen. Counting the ones on the right, there were twenty people dead in this hallway.
“Why?” she whispered as tears slid down her cheeks. She knew her makeup was running down to her chin, and for once in her life, it didn’t matter.
Jeanie pursed her lips and forced herself to step forward, ignoring the fact that she was walking through pools of blood. She had to get to the front of the house, and find out if anybody was still alive. The chainsaw still whirred, so that said someone was still up front.
She resisted the urge to tiptoe, and instead walked flatfooted down the slippery hallway. The last thing she wanted to do was slip and find herself coated in the death of twenty people.
As she passed the Argento room, she looked inside and saw a man and a woman lying on the floor. And then she stifled a cry as she saw the dark face of Lenny lying equally still nearby. Her stomach clenched and she balled up a fist to wipe her eyes.
This really wasn’t a dream.
She walked to the end of the hall to peer into the Nightmare on Elm Street room, and saw Angie hanging in her invisible harness from the ceiling, as she did every night. What was not the same as every night was the blood, which was literally raining down on the bed below. Jeanie restrained the urge to barf. This was not an effect. Angie was dead and bleeding as she hung upside down from the ceiling.
She refused to look again and turned back to the hall.
Jeanie stepped carefully past the dead bodies, worried that at any minute the killer would return around the corner. But the hallway remained empty of life. Step by step, she made her way to the end. When she reached the corner, she peered around to the right, and could see the black glass of a window at the front of the house looking out onto Bachelor’s Grove.
The LED lights tucked into the corners of the hallway flared red and purple in the sidewell of her vision as she peered into the back entrance to the dining room.
The screams of the house seemed to have diminished now, and all she really heard were the tense notes of the Goblin soundtrack playing nearby and the buzz of an angry saw.
“Where is everyone?” she whispered, and hugged the wall closer.
She couldn’t believe that nobody had tracked her down already.
Somebody screamed in the room ahead, and she didn’t fade back. Instead, she stepped around the corner and into the room. She stood in the back quarter of the dining room that represented the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie. The room was shaped like an L so she couldn’t see the main attraction yet. Just around the corner she got a glimpse of Brad hefting the chainsaw. He was playing his part well; the blade of the tool rose into the air frequently and she could hear the patrons screaming in answer. But she couldn’t see who he was threatening with it. Or what they did when he made the blades whine.
Jeanie crept forward, trying to see what was going on in the room ahead without anyone actually seeing her. She peered around the corner of the L finally and stifled a gasp.
There was a hole in the floor next to the ‘cannibal’ table. A big open rectangle cut through the floorboards that had not been there before. It was right in the path that people were supposed to take to walk through the Texas Chainsaw Massacre room. She crouched down, so that her head wouldn’t be seen above the table, and slipped along the wall to position herself on the far side of the table. Even though the killer seemed to have left Brad alone, she instinctively didn’t want to be seen. The killer could be lurking right around the corner.
But what the hell was with the hole in the floor?
As she reached the front corner of the room, its meaning became clear.
A group of four turned the corner. Two couples in their mid-twenties stepped into the room; they all looked as if they were well on their way to a hangover. One man with shaggy black hair took his arm off his thin, hawk-nosed girlfriend and threw it in the air in a fist. “Groovy!” he yelled.
“Wrong movie, asshat!” the other man said. “It’s more like, ‘You wanna have dinner with us? My brother makes great head cheese.’ Get it?” he pointed at the head on the dining room table. “Head cheese?”
Brad/Leatherface had secreted himself against the back wall until the group was fully in the room, and then he revved the chainsaw and jumped forward behind them. The only way for them to go was forward…only, there was a big hole in the floor there.
“Nice,” the ‘Groovy’ guy said. But almost immediately, his girlfriend screamed as the chainsaw clipped her on the arm. A gouge of red appeared instantly.
“Holy shit,” the boyfriend said. “That thing’s real!”
He turned to face down Leatherface.
“What the fuck man, you just hurt her for real! What do you think you’re doing?”
Leatherface didn’t say a thing. Instead, he simply revved the engine and jabbed forward with the chainsaw on full speed. It caught the complainer in the gut and suddenly the air of the room was filled with a red-hot mist. And the sounds of a hideous scream.
Leatherface pushed the chainsaw forward until the whirring blade came out the other side, next to the spine of the complainer. Then he pulled back the tool and let the body fall backward, into and through the hole in the floor. He held up the tool as the other three stood on the edge of the hole, screaming. Then he brought it down fast, catching the arm of the girl he’d already wounded.
But this time, it was more than a wound.
Shirt and skin and blood sprayed into the air and the girl’s arm suddenly fell free. The knuckles of her lost hand hit the floor first, but then the arm toppled over, disappearing into the black space behind.
The girl grabbed for her shoulder, now spraying blood like a tiny hose, and seconds later, fell backward to join her lost arm.
That left the other couple, who teetered on the edge.
“Over the table,” the guy screamed, and dove between the manikin figures toward the bloody props displayed on platters. But Leatherface didn’t miss a beat. He brought the chainsaw down and severed the man’s right hand. The fingers were still clutching for the tablecloth when the guy pulled back and screamed, blood spraying from the stump below his wrist. His girlfriend or wife echoed his scream and grabbed for his torso, but then turned her head away in disgust when she was suddenly sprayed in his blood.
Leatherface waved the chainsaw behind and in front of them. They twisted and turned, their feet just barely on the edge of the hole. And then the man lost his balance and toppled into the chasm. The woman grabbed for him, but all she managed to do was lose her own balance in the process
of trying to save him. They disappeared into the hole, and a second later, the air filled with a sharp, horrible shriek. And then the only sound in the room was the background music soundtrack, and the idling groan of the chainsaw.
That wasn’t Brad wearing the Leatherface mask.
Jeanie crept slowly along the floor out of sight behind the table. Maybe she could get on the other side of the madman and make a break for the front door before he turned from the hole.
But then she put her hand down on something soft.
Jeanie’s whole body went stiff. Her hand had touched someone’s arm. She looked down and saw Brad’s stubbled jaw just a couple feet away.
But that was all she could see of Brad’s head. Because the top half had been sawn off at the eyes.
Jeanie wanted to throw up. But she knew if she made a move of any kind, she’d be chopped up just like the foursome now at the bottom of the hole. She pressed herself tight against the corner of the room, trying to remain unseen in the shadow. Just a prop, not someone to be sawn up.
Leatherface returned to his own position standing back against the wall, awaiting the next group to appear.
No wonder nobody had been getting upstairs, Jeanie thought. They were all at the bottom of a hole, chainsawed into pieces. Everyone had to pass through this room before reaching the stairs.
Something tickled her nose. Maybe it was the smell of the blue smoke from the chainsaw. The room was thick with ghostly clouds that hung like demons in the air. She wrinkled her nostrils and breathed through her mouth, trying to hold the feeling down. Still, that tickle in the back of her nose grew and grew until her eyes began to water.
And then it couldn’t be denied and came out, all in a loud, angry sneeze.
Leatherface turned and the eyes behind the mask glinted in the low red light.
She didn’t move, but Jeanie knew he saw her. And then it suddenly dawned on her who the man behind the mask had to be. She knew his build, and his work shoes. He wore the same blue-checked flannel shirt she’d seen for weeks working around the house before showtime.