by West, Sam
Under normal circumstances, Paul would not have doubted it. Shame that wasn’t going to happen. Not in the way he thought, anyway.
“I suppose that the girls did put me up to this, in a roundabout way.”
“Oh yeah? And what kind of roundabout way is that? And who do you think you’re fooling, waving a toy gun at me? Nice fake-blood, by the way. Really fucking convincing.”
This guy was really beginning to get on his tits.
“I am your brother, and I killed your mother. I raped your sister, and I beat the shit out of your father. If you take so much as one more step towards me, I’ll blow a hole through your fucking head.”
“You’re lying. This is a wind-up.”
But at last, he could detect the faintest trace of doubt in his voice.
“Go and take a closer look at the heads on sticks, then you’ll see I’m telling the truth. You might see something familiar about them.”
Ryan hesitated, but still he couldn’t read his expression, given how the light from the display was directly behind him. Just when he thought he was going to have to shoot him, which he really didn’t want to do, Ryan crossed over to the heads on sticks and Paul took a few steps closer. Now, with only a few feet separating them, Paul could see him more clearly. Not that it helped any. He stared at his profile in confusion; this guy was fucking unreadable.
“You weren’t kidding.”
“No, I really wasn’t.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
The direct question caught him off-guard; how was he still being so bloody casual about everything?
“I might let you live,” he lied, “if you do exactly as I say. We’re going to go back to where we started and we’re going to have a family reunion. Now move.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Claire’s eyelids fluttered open to blackness, her fogged brain aching with confusion and an intense feeling of horror that she couldn’t place. Distant voices permeated the greasy film of dread that coated her thoughts.
Am I at home in my bed?
It didn’t feel like she was in bed, but she didn’t know why.
Yes, I do know why. I’m upright.
Except, she wasn’t, not quite. She couldn’t decide if she was upright or if she was lying down, it felt like she was somewhere between those two states and the effect was deeply disorientating.
She was also cold. Very, very cold. Her hands were freezing and numb and felt like they were a million miles away from her body. When she went to draw them into herself, she found she couldn’t.
What the...?
Then everything hit her with the force of jumbo-jet falling out of the sky. Babysitting for the McQueen’s. The home intruder. The rape.
Her mother’s head. Dear God, her mother’s head.
She opened her mouth to scream, but instead her lips ripped painfully against something constrictive and sticky. Experimentally, she stuck out her tongue and it met with resistance. She blinked, trying to make sense of her surroundings, of the distant voices. Except they were less ‘voices’ and nearer screams. There was music, too. Weird, spooky music. She strained her eyes in the dark, for a second wondering if she were on a merry-go-round from the way everything was lurching and her head was swimming.
She went to lift her head, her neck trembling with the effort. Her head only lifted a fraction. As she did so, she became more aware of the state of her limbs. Her arms were stretched out at right-angles to her body, and her ankles were touching. Neither her feet nor her hands could move even a fraction of an inch. Now that she thought of it, her back was killing her. If felt as if a plank of wood was stabbing into her spine and was wedged between her butt cheeks.
Am I lying on a plank, she thought in dismay. How is that even possible?
From the way in which the wood scratched her skin, separated her buttocks and aggravated the discs of her spine, she suddenly realised that she was naked. Her skin tingled with this realisation; a mix of shame and cold.
Slowly, the spinning shadows stilled and gained the solidity of almost-recognisable objects.
The sudden sense of space made her senses reel, the voices
not voices, screams. He’s killing them all
echoing from another place beyond this cavernous room somehow familiar.
Where the fuck am I?
The fog was lifting in her brain, her terror sharpening as it cleared. With every passing second, the objects began to make more sense to her.
Terrifying, but somehow familiar figures loomed at her from the darkness. Her depth perception was still off, making those objects distort in the most nightmarish way, but she was beginning to get it.
A six-foot King Kong loomed at her in the darkness, his hairy body wrapped around the top of the Empire State building, an aeroplane in his meaty palm. Next to him was the larger than life, unmistakable, naked bulk of the world’s fattest woman – all one-thousand pounds of her. Beyond them, she thought she could make out the twenty-foot crocodile from the wild swamplands of Africa that had supposedly eaten ten men, but her eyes were beginning to ache with the effort of straining in the darkness.
Oh yes, she knew exactly where she was…
I am where the exhibits come to die.
Or in other words, the stockroom of I can’t Believe It’s True!.
But what the fuck am I doing here?
She cried out in pain when her head flopped backwards and smacked against hard wood. The room appeared to tilt on its axis, and she squeezed her eyes shut to prevent herself from throwing up.
Her eyes snapped open when she heard a creaking sound, her heart pounding wildly. Movement and a brief chink of light over on the other side of the room had her trembling in fear. She went to cry out, momentarily forgetting that she was gagged.
Helplessly, she watched the approaching figure in the gloom.
Not figure. Figures. There’s two of them. My rapist has a friend.
She let her head flop backwards, staring up at the dark ceiling.
“Hello, Claire,” said the bastard. Still she refused to look at him. “I’ve bought someone to see you.”
“Leave me alone,” she said, but it came out an incomprehensible mumble.
“Now, now, be nice, we’re all family, here.”
Dad, she thought, suddenly craning her neck to see who it was.
Except it wasn’t her dad. It was her brother.
“Hello, Sis,” he said in that horrible, cool way of his that always made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. “Crazy night, huh?”
“Sure is,” Paul said laughing, “Quite the party we’re having.”
Both men laughed.
That boy can’t be my brother.
But her head was spinning in confusion – she wasn’t even sure which man that thought referred to. Had Ryan been in on this – whatever this was – the entire time? It didn’t bare thinking about.
She locked eyes with her brother – the boy she had grown up with – and searched his face for the answer. It was so dark that she found it impossible to read his expression.
But he seemed so relaxed, like this was normal.
Are you here to help me or hurt me?
“In fact, I’m having such a great time tonight, I might even have to rethink the original plan. I was going to kill all of you, you see, but now I’m not so sure. I think that me and Ryan here are on the same page. We have an understanding, don’t we mate?”
“Yeah.”
Did they have an understanding? Or was Ryan playing him?
Or is he a murderous, piece of shit psycho like our big brother?
Wave after wave of panic crashed over her and she closed her eyes, trying to control her erratic breathing and slamming heart. This stranger couldn’t be her brother, it was impossible. Her arms especially were beginning to ache with being held out the way they were, her hands now alarmingly cold and numb.
“Blindfold her,” Ryan said. “I want where we’re going to be a surprise.”
When she lifted up her head, Ryan was looming over her, his arms outstretched. Fabric covered her eyes, the ends of which were tied together at the back of her head.
“That’s better. But enough chit chat. Wheel her through, Ryan.”
Wheel me through?
Her body jolted sideways and she screamed into the gag.
“I thought the cross was fitting, you know? Symbolic. Seeing as you are going to pay for your father’s sins.”
Of course. He’s tied me to the cross.
A few years back, she remembered how her dad had been forced to take down the life-size model of Jesus nailed to the cross. It had offended folks, seeing as it didn’t hold back on the blood and the nails. Or rather than the model itself, maybe it was the description on the plaque next to it that had left a bad taste in people’s mouths, detailing the drawn-out, agonising death that crucifixion entailed.
While she had been unconscious, he had prised off the wax-work Jesus and had managed to tie her to the cross in his place. The cross was now on the trolley which was used to transport the heavier exhibits, and she was being trundled out of the stockroom.
The wheels squeaked and two lots of footsteps accompanied her on the short walk. They passed through three doors, and briefly, light flooded her blindfold, turning her world a luminous shade of orange before plunging to black again.
The spooky music grew louder until it flooded her ears; music that she recognised only too well.
I’m in the Chamber of Terrors.
Suddenly, she jolted to a halt, and hands brushed her hips. Then she felt herself being propelled upwards, the effect dizzying and disorientating.
“Help me out here,” Paul grunted.
More hands on her body, accompanied by that sense of ascending ever upwards. With her arms outstretched, she felt like a soaring bird… Until a nasty jolt reverberated through her body. She could feel that she was now near enough upright, the cross probably propped against the wall.
“Remove the blindfold,” Paul said.
The pressure lifted from her eyes, and she blinked, clearing her blurred vision. The first thing she noticed was that she was so tall, that the ground seemed so far away.
“Isn’t it nice to finally be all together. A proper family, joined by blood.”
Paul was standing next to her, his head bent all the way back to look up at her. Slowly, she took everything in. From her elevated height, she had a panoramic view of her surroundings. To her left were the stairs that led up to the main lobby, just before which a headless body lay sprawled on the ground. Her mind reeled – was that her father?
To her right, the corridor turned a sharp corner, effectively blocking her view of the rest of the Chamber of Terror. Before that was the display of the Broadgate Butcher. There was something wrong with the display, she had been down here enough times to know that.
The first thing she noticed was that the Broadgate Butcher himself was missing. And now she came to think of it, was Paul wearing the Broadgate Butcher’s apron?
Then she clocked the bodies. Instead of the usual woman that lay on her back on the butcher’s block with the severed leg, there appeared to be two women… Two very lifelike women. They were tangled together on the table, a pile of bloody, gory, naked flesh. At first glance, she didn’t comprehend what she was seeing on the ground next to the table, it was just too horrible.
Legs, she thought in dismay. Oh sweet Jesus, he’s cut off their fucking legs.
Then, to her horror, the lump of female flesh on top moved.
She went to scream, but the gag absorbed the noise. She struggled against her binds, for the first time properly seeing the rope that bound her to the cross at the wrists and the feet. She saw how her big tits lurched and wobbled with her struggles, and a fresh surge of anger washed over her. Her sheer impotency, her pathetic helplessness gave way to pure, unadulterated anger.
“You look fucking hot when you struggle,” Paul laughed. “But don’t rock your cross too hard or you’ll topped over. Don’t lose your head like your mother. Or Louise or Mike.”
It’s Mike. Oh, thank God…
Her gaze settle on the male corpse, tears of utter relief that it wasn’t Dad blurring her vision. Now that it had been pointed out to her, she easily recognised that it was Mike because the body was far too short to be her father.
But he was right about her struggling, she could easily fall over, so she stopped moving. Her brother, who stood next to the psychopath, also gazed up at her. There may now have been enough light to properly see his face, but his expression remained unreadable.
When he smiled at her, her blood curdled.
It’s an act, she told herself. He’s trying to look crazy in front of him. He’s biding his time, he’s going to get us out of this…
“Do me a favour, dear brother, please switch on the light of the electric chair display. It’s behind the small wooden panel just to the left of the chair.”
“Sure,” he answered casually, like he had been asked for nothing more dramatic than to pass the salt at the dinner table.
He did so, and the light above the waxwork figure being electrocuted in the highbacked, wooden chair came on.
Ryan stood before the display, his broad back obstructing her view. He didn’t speak, didn’t move, and just stood there, staring at the display like it was the most fascinating thing in the world.
“So?” Paul asked. “What do you think? Move yourself, for fuck’s sake, let your sister take a look.”
Ryan stepped to one side, still with his back to them. It took her a second or two to work out what it was she was seeing, because she didn’t immediately recognise the figure in the electric chair for who he was.
“Dad,” she tried to cry, ripping her lips in the process.
Oh my God, he’s dead.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Her father sat there unmoving, eyes closed, the metal plate on his head, wrists bound to the wooden arms of the chair. Like her, he had electrical tape over his mouth.
“Wake up, motherfucker,” Paul said, striding over to him. “The drugs should be wearing off by now.”
He slapped him hard across the face and he groaned slightly, his head flopping sideways.
Thank God, she thought, sobbing in relief.
Paul ripped the tape off his mouth, and her dad’s eyes fluttered open, glazed and unseeing. All the while, Ryan watched the spectacle with his back to her, completely silent.
More groaning drifted her way from over on the butcher’s table. At least, she thought it was groaning, it might have been the recorded wailing that accompanied the spooky music.
“Now that we’re all together at last, I think we should all get to know each other properly. Or, specifically, you should get to know me. What do you say, Dad?” he shouted into James’s face. “Should I tell them, or do you want to?”
Claire thought she saw Ryan’s back tense, but she didn’t know for sure.
Do something. For once in your bloody life, will you just do the right thing?
Her dad groaned and muttered something incomprehensible. He sounded like he’d had a skin-full, and her heart tripped afresh in terror at her waking nightmare.
“Okay, fine, I’ll tell them, shall I? I’ll tell them how you raped your own mother. Like she didn’t have enough problems, bringing you up alone. You got her pregnant, then you fucked off forever.”
James struggled against his binds, squirming ungainly in the chair, looking faintly ridiculous with the metal plate on his head. He slumped in the chair, apparently realising that he wasn’t going anywhere.
“I didn’t know she was pregnant. When she did that to me, I just left and never looked back,” he said, his speech slurring. “I changed my name and put it all behind me.”
“You might have changed your name from Jason Brown to James Atwood, but you’ll always be a Brown, just like me.”
“You don’t know what an evil woman she was, the abuse I suffered as a child…
”
“The abuse you suffered? What about the abuse she suffered when you raped her and beat the living shit out of her?”
“She’s lying! That woman is pure evil.”
“Fuck me, you really are a piece of work. She adopted me out because she was scared I would turn out evil, like you. She thought it was kinder to protect me from the truth. She said that she regretted giving me up every day of her life but she thought it was for the best. When I did finally track her down, she was dying of fucking cancer. And after she died, I came for you. For my family.”
“Untie me, and we can talk about this properly.”
Claire thought how her father seemed to be collecting himself together, his speech clearing with every passing second. But what he was saying…. Dear God, she couldn’t even begin to get her head round it right now.
“You’re just fine as you are. In fact, I think we should play a nice, family game. So, Dad, should Ryan here fuck your daughter, or my sister and niece, depending on how you look at it, or do you want to do the honours?”
“Jesus Christ, you’re a fucking psycho.”
“And is it any wonder with my sorry, genetic heritage?”
“Let me go right now, or they’ll be hell to pay.”
“Hell to pay, huh? I like that. My whole life has been a waking hell, and now you and your family are the ones that are paying, not me. For once in my life, it’s not fucking me that’s paying.”
“Please, we can work this out…”
“As a family, were you going to say? Wasn’t that what your wife said just before I cut her fucking head of?”
“For God’s sake,” her dad shouted, his voice now perfectly clear. “Stop this, right now. I will stand by you, I will take responsibility for my actions if you just stop now.”
“Oh, fuck off. You fucked up, and now you have to pay. Those are the rules. So what’s it going to be? Ryan to fuck her, or you fuck her? She’s a good lay, I’ll say that much. And most definitely not a virgin.”
To her utter dismay, her dad roared laughter.