Celebrity Hell House

by Millard, Adam

  CELEBRITY HELL HOUSE

  Adam Millard is the author of twenty novels, ten novellas, and more than a hundred short stories, which can be found in various collections and anthologies. Probably best known for his post-apocalyptic fiction, Adam also writes fantasy/horror for children, as well as bizarro fiction for several publishers. His “Dead” series has been the filling in a Stephen King/Bram Stoker sandwich on Amazon’s bestsellers chart, and the translation rights have recently sold to German publisher, Voodoo Press.

  CELEBRITY

  HELL HOUSE

  ADAM

  MILLARD

  Copyright © 2015 Adam Millard

  This Edition Published 2015 by Crowded

  Quarantine Publications

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All characters in this publication are fictitious

  and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,

  is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any

  form or by any means without the prior

  permission in writing of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or

  cover other than that in which it is published

  and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchase.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-0-9932070-3-7

  Printed and bound in Great Britain

  Crowded Quarantine Publications Ltd.

  34 Cheviot Road

  Wolverhampton

  West Midlands

  WV2 2HD

  For Zoe. Without whom, I would

  be waking up in a skip every morning.

  “A celebrity is any well-known TV or movie star who looks like he spends more than two hours working on his hair.” – Steve Martin

  “Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.” – Emily Dickinson

  "I've been noticing gravity since I was very young." – Cameron Diaz

  1

  Peter Kane stared incredulously at the monitor in front of him, unsure if the chapter he’d just finished was the greatest thing he’d ever written, or the worst piece of prose since E.L. James discovered she had fingers and a computer back in 2009. For the longest time he sat gawping at the screen, random sentences jumping out at him: Ooze poured from her blackened maws; her teeth were like kernels of popcorn; she looked like the discarded offspring of Joan Rivers and Gene Simmons.

  His suspicions were true. It was simply terrible, the kind of thing a child might turn in at the end of the term for no other purpose than to piss off their teacher. It certainly wasn’t the work of a thrice British Fantasy-nominated author, winner of the Golden Skull for Literature two years in a row, and also-ran for the Vincent Price Book Awards 2012™. In fact, in that moment, Peter felt the sudden urge to march over to his awards cabinet and smash the lot to smithereens with his own face.

  “What’s happening to me?” he said, pinching his aquiline nose between thumb and forefinger. Shaking his head, he pulled open his desk drawer and retrieved a bottle of something golden and non-expensive; he was a writer, not a film star. With his glass freshly replenished, he eased himself back in his chair and thought back to the good times, the days when invites to horror conventions would land on his doormat with the same frequency as takeaway menus and charity clothes bags. In those days, the days of believable characters and truly horrific plotlines, Peter had had it all. He was right up there, hobnobbing with James Herbert, sharing pizzas and beer with Shaun Hutson, hiding in convention cupboards from rabid readers who had cosplayed as characters from his books.

  Living the dream, his agent at the time had said, but at the time, Peter hadn’t believed her. Writing was, to him, a solitary game. Much like bestiality and haemorrhoid-popping, it was a pursuit best enjoyed alone.

  Now that those convention invites had stopped arriving, along with the royalty cheques to many of his earlier works, he realised how much he’d taken for granted.

  She had a vagina that would shock a geriatric porn-star. “What the hell was I thinking when I wrote that?” Peter said, once again fixated on the monitor. Those weren’t the words of New York Times Bestsellers; they were the kind of thing you would find in the credit-card sized advertisements at the back of Viz, perhaps a comedic poster promoting the surgical reparation of a battered vajayjay.

  No, the whole chapter would have to go – perhaps the entire novel. What was six months anyway, in the grand scheme of things? He could call his agent right now, tell him that the book had taken a turn for the worse and that he’d had no choice but to start from scratch. Sure, Ed would be pissed off, but that wouldn’t be anything new. Ed Coonts was the type of guy who could find something to whine about in a lottery win: Where will I keep all that money? Why does the taxman have to take so much? I’ve got to wait three weeks for my fucking yacht to arrive!

  With a deep sigh, Peter decided not to call Ed. The manuscript was manageable, inasmuch as he could probably rewrite what he had in less than a week, if he went balls to the wall. Whether the rewrite would be any better than the chuff currently glancing back at him from the screen was another thing.

  “Fuck it,” Peter said. He pushed himself up from the chair, hit save on the document, and carried the bottle and glass through to the lounge, where countless reruns of CSI: Liverpool and How Clean is Your Toilet? awaited him, along with whatever oblivion he could suck out of a six quid bottle of scotch.

  *

  There were three things in life that Peter Kane despised. First off, he loathed pop music, usually snivelled out by some insipid, pre-pubescent scrote with all the charm of a bag of weasel-shit. These people served no purpose other than to enamour other pre-pubescent little scrotes at sell-out arena-tours across the galaxy, whilst perfectly demonstrating the ancient art of miming into a microphone that wasn’t even plugged in. The good old days of proper bands – The Zep, Sabbath, Maiden, and Slade – were gone, replaced by such atrocities as The Bieber, The Cyrus, and The Pharrell, whatever the hell that was.

  Secondly, Peter Kane hated technology. “You can write on this tablet with this special pen, and it appears, like some sort of magic, right there on the screen.” Back in the day, people had something else like that. It was called a pen and fucking paper. “Ah, but you can read books on this.” Oh, just like you can read a book on a fucking BOOK! To Peter Kane, technology was moving backwards instead of forwards. His mobile phone, though a brick, was practically indestructible, unlike the paper-thin slices of plastic the kids were waltzing around with nowadays. “Hey, why don’t you Skype me, Pete?” Fuck you, moron. Why do you think I’m calling you in the first place; it’s so I don’t have to look at that ugly pan you call a face. To Peter, Twitter sounded like something you would do on the toilet after a particularly unforgiving prawn Madras. “You’ve got to get on Facebook, Pete,” Ed had told him the last time they had met. “You’ve got to be more visible.” At the time, Peter had no idea what Facebook was, but after a few moments of research, he came to realise it was a place where people could moan about their lives in public without having to leave the house. It was not the best place, therefore, for a washed-up, borderline alcoholic who couldn’t form coherent sentences when it mattered most, let alone on some two-bit public forum.

  Finally, Peter hated being woken by a ringing phone, and yet that was exactly what was happening. It could, he surmised as he fell off the sofa and almost rolled into the fireplace, be much worse. He coul
d have woken to a Cyrus-Bieber duet right there in his lounge.

  Composing himself, he climbed to his feet and meandered across the room like one of the creatures from his first book, Dawn of the Living Undead. His head was sore, his mouth was dry and crusty, and he was almost positive that he’d defecated in his Superman briefs, but the only thing he wanted to do in that moment was shut that fucking phone up.

  “This had better be important,” Peter said, pushing the answer button and holding the unbreakable brick to his ear. It had been charging all night long, and so his ear audibly sizzled where it met the phone.

  “Pete!” an excited voice screeched. Peter winced and moved the phone an inch away from his ear, which had already started to blister. “Turn on your TV right now!”

  “What do you want, Ed?” Pete mumbled through a mouthful of morning gunk.

  “Just turn on your TV, Pete. ITV7+1. Hurry, it’s about to start!”

  Peter sighed and staggered back through to the lounge, to where a new episode of How Clean is Your Toilet? was just starting. “I can’t find the remote, Ed,” he said. “I had it last night, but OW!”

  “Found it?”

  “Found it?” Peter said, sucking musky air in through clenched teeth. “Most of the buttons are wedged in my fucking heel!” He picked the remote up from the carpet and prodded at the shattered casing until the TV responded. “ITV7+1?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” replied Ed. “You’re not going to believe this, mate.” His excitement was palpable; Peter wanted to wring his fucking neck.

  ITV7+1 was an awful channel, showing the dreadful programmes ITV7 aired but an hour later. It was home to such televisual delights as The Only Way is Dudley and Feral Animals Do the Craziest Things. At that moment, while Peter gawked at the screen open-mouthed, an episode of something equally abysmal was drawing to a close, some shitty dating programme in which an excitable Geordie host tried to pair up handsome men and generically beautiful women as if they were hideous mongoloids and therefore unable to find love without resorting to desperate measures.

  “What am I looking at, Ed?” Peter yawned. He needed a glass of water, three aspirin, and another lie down. He hadn’t felt this bad since New Year’s Eve 1987 – the year he’d discovered Absinthe.

  “Just wait for it,” his agent said. “I know you don’t like being woken by the telephone, but this is really fucking cool. Trust me.”

  The credits on the awful dating show began to roll as one man and one woman walked off screen together, clammy hand in clammy hand, and the annoying gangly host stalked the studio, chatting up the women who had failed to win the judgmental prick over.

  Peter wanted to hang up, or hang himself; it was touch and go there for a while.

  “Okay, here we go,” Ed said, barely able to conceal his excitement.

  Peter plonked himself down on the sofa and tried to focus on the screen, where…

  *

  Black screen. The howl of a wolf. The creepy sound of panicked footfall on long-dead leaves. And then a voice, deep and sonorous, the kind of voice that could quite easily convince you that a certain brand of aftershave was better than all the rest. “Eight celebrities,” the voice said, drawing the words out far longer than was necessary. Some derelict mansion filled the screen, its walls decaying, its windows hanging on by sheer willpower alone. “One haunted mansion,” the voice hissed. Cameras began to pan through the rotting manse, revealing scurrying rats, jars of gelatinous waste, and a large painting hanging at the head of a staircase that looked about as innocuous as a bloody machete. “Can they survive a week in the Hathaway house?” asked the voice. More shots of the building’s interior turned up an empty swimming pool that looked as if it had been used for some strange fecal Olympics, a country-style kitchen and dining room where flies were in abundance, hovering over rotting meat and fruit teeming with maggots, and a toilet and bathroom that, surprisingly, weren’t in bad shape compared to the rest of the house, if you overlooked the word REDRUM scrawled across the mirror in childlike writing and the bathtub, which had been filled with a thick black substance that would make getting clean almost impossible. “Who will survive the horrors…” the voice continued, “…of Celebrity Hell House?” Cue maniacal laughter and a fade to black, before a title card appeared revealing that this programme was Coming Soon to ITV7.

  *

  Peter hadn’t realised how much he was frowning until he found an eyelash on his tongue. He hadn’t seen such an awful premise since his last novel, Djinn and Tonic.

  “You woke me up at…” – he checked his watch and discovered that it was a little after eleven in the morning – “…well, the time doesn’t matter, but you woke me up for that?” If his head was hurting before, and it had been, well now he felt as if a band of microscopic parasites were gnawing at his brain, rending grey matter and flesh as if they hadn’t been fed in eons.

  “I got a call at eight this morning,” Ed said, his excitement still obvious. “They want you on the show, Pete.”

  Now, not many things leave Peter Kane speechless. Once, in a drunken stupor, he’d stood at the toilet and given himself the obligatory two shakes (any more than that and it’s masturbation), and then yanked his flies up a little too forcefully. That had been one of the times where words were beyond him. But that, bleeding out from his manhood and whimpering like a small terrier in the throes of a tricky shit, was entirely different to the silence he found himself in the midst of now.

  “Pete?” A beat. “Pete, are you still there?”

  After a few seconds of silence, Peter managed a few words. “No,” was one of them, and, “fucking way,” were the other two.

  “I knew you were going to say that,” Ed huffed; Peter could almost taste his agent’s stale breath.

  “In which case,” Peter said, “why didn’t you save yourself the embarrassment and tell them to fuck the fuck right off?” His headache was worsening by the second. Any moment now and he would be hitting the deck, counting the stars as they danced across his vision, adding to the shit that was cold and hard, like a frozen aubergine, in his pants.

  “I thought it would be good publicity,” Ed said. “I mean, when was the last time something like this cropped up? Huh? You hide away in that house all day, refusing to take to Facebook and Twitter like the billion other authors out there, and then wondering why I have such a tough time selling your work.” He took a deep breath, but that wasn’t the end of his little tirade. Oh no, Ed Coonts didn’t do things in half-measures, and Peter knew this next part was going to sting like a sonofabitch. “Do you want to be the next Michael Crichton? Writing a few great books and then disappearing off the face of the earth?”

  “Michael Crichton didn’t just disappear off the face of the earth,” Peter said, incredulous. “He died.”

  “No he didn’t.”

  “He did, Ed. Back in 2008.”

  “Don’t play funny fuckers with me, Pete,” Ed said, a nervous laugh punctuating his sentence. “And don’t try to change the fucking subject. The point I’m trying to make is that if you do this show, no matter how shitty you think it is, I’ll be fending off the big five publishers by the end of the week, and that, my friend, is something you’ve been craving for the last ten years.”

  Though Peter hated to admit it, he knew very well how these reality shows worked. Pluck long-forgotten Z-list celebrities from their failing lives and give them a second shot at glory. He’d read all about how that kid from ET had forged a career in soul music after joining the line-up for I’m a Nonentity, Get Me Out of Here!, how Winnie Mandela’s appearance on Celebrity Petrol Station had plunged her back into the minds, and hearts, of the viewing public, how Stephen Hawking’s tenure on Celebrity Robot Wars (as Demolition Donut) had been quickly followed up by a whole new series on BBC2 about black holes and how not to get sucked into one. One career after another, reignited, resurrected, revived, which, as a writer, Peter knew were pretty much the same thing.

  “You know how much I
hate leaving the house these days,” Peter said, trying his damnedest not to faint.

  “That’s fine,” Ed said. “Because you won’t be leaving the house. At least, you will be leaving your house, but you won’t be leaving the Hathaway house, if you get my meaning.” Peter did, but he was far too busy trying not to pass out to care. “They’re going to put you, a seasoned horror author who lives this stuff on a daily basis, in a supposedly haunted house for a week with a bunch of screaming non-celebs. I’m no expert, Pete, but you’ve already got this in the bag.”

  “And, humour me here for a moment,” Peter said, picking dried spittle from the corner of his lip. “Say I do it. What do I win? I mean, what’s in it for me?”

  “Besides a guaranteed three-book deal with one of the big five, unlimited airtime in which to promote yourself, and a chance to get up close and personal with some really hot and terrified women?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “A hundred grand just for taking part, two-hundred and fifty if you’re the last celebrity standing.”

  Peter almost choked on his own tongue as he lunged forward on the sofa, cracked his head against the edge of the coffee table, and came to a rolling stop on the hearth.

  “Pete? What was that? Are you still there? Should I call someone? Blink once for yes, twice for no.”

  “Did you say a quarter of a million if I make it all the way?” Peter said, peeling himself up from the carpet, which was dotted here and there with fresh blood.

  “I did,” said Ed, somewhat proudly.

  Peter dropped back down onto the sofa, dabbing at his cracked head with the palm of his hand. “And you didn’t think to lead with that when you called?” he said.