“Hey, just because you got shot doesn’t mean you still have to be a dickhead,” Zack said.
“F-fools,” Tiffany moaned again.
“Her head’s harder than mine,” Zack mumbled.
Ignoring this, Maddie said, “We can’t just leave her there to die.”
“Why not?” Freddy said. “She killed Ellen.”
“Let her suffer in prison,” Maddie said.
Suddenly, Tiffany grinned. It was a twisted smile that made her look like the foulest witch in all of the land.
Death makes us all ugly, I suppose.
“I feel like she’s trying to tell us something,” Zack said. “With the ‘fools’ thing, you know?”
My head was still spinning from what I’d just gone through, from being inches away from taking the bullet instead of Tiffany. If I’d had a clear mind, maybe I would’ve caught on to why Tiffany was smiling. Unfortunately for the town of Moonfall, I didn’t.
It was Zack who caught on eventually, just a little later than would’ve been beneficial.
“She’s not a virgin, right?” Zack said.
We all looked at Jason.
His face was still twisted in pain, but now I sensed something else. Embarrassment, maybe?
“Seriously?” Freddy asked. “How is that possible? I heard she banged everyone. You’ve been with her for four months…”
Tiffany started laughing, which turned into a coughing fit, in which she hacked up globs of blood. She made a deliberate motion to get the bloody spit into the pentagram’s trenches.
Jason shook his head. “No—I, well, we’ve been close—”
“Oh, fuck,” I said.
That was when Tiffany spoke the words, the secrets, the unintelligible lines that would bring Cageface back to life.
“The blood of a virgin drips, the slasher rises, and then he rips.”
23
Rise!
“Come back to me!” Tiffany yelled, cackling.
Shit, this is not good.
Maddie and Zack rushed over and grabbed my arms to support me, but I shook them off. A cold fear had replaced all the pain in my body.
For a while, though, nothing happened.
“Guys?” Zack said. “We should probably be running…”
He was right, of course. I couldn’t remember a point in our friendship when Zack had been right so many times.
Maddie raised the gun up to the table that Cageface lay on. The moonlight illuminated all the grotesque features of his corpse: bumps, bloating, swelling, festering gashes, dead worms clinging to his ear, live worms crawling from his nostrils.
“Rise!” Tiffany yelled.
This time, Cageface listened. He sat up. His vacant eyes looked around the dank cavern.
“My love! My l-love! It’s me, it’s Tiffany!”
But everyone knew the best slashers never spoke. Cageface was no exception. He snapped his head toward the dying girl on the floor beneath him.
I was frozen, bolted to the ground. Everyone else seemed to be, too. We just saw a resurrection.
For Jason and Freddy, two normal guys, it must’ve blown their minds. For the Fright Squad, we’d seen these in the Academy, but seeing it in person was something else entirely.
Cageface stamped down on the dirt floor, shedding his leather straps with ease. He was a tall, thick man, no longer the boy who’d gone missing all those years ago. On his feet were heavy boots, the kind you might see welders and factory workers wear, the kind with steel toes. His pants, though aged and torn in enough places to actually put to question whether or not they were pants, were dark blue denim. Through the holes, I could see some exposed, yellowish bone: his femur, his kneecap, his hip. I could see raw flesh, red and green and sickening. Over his torso was a dark, long-sleeved shirt—also torn, also aged and stained with mud—but there were letters across his chest, words I could just make out.
‘CAMP MOONFALL EST 1955’.
I wondered if that was the shirt he’d died in after crawling out of the lake with the bear trap on his face, and retrieving his clothes. If the shirt had somehow just grown with him through the power of the dark magic the witch of the forest had possessed him with. Around the collar of this shirt, his clavicle jutted straight out, jagged, like an accusing finger saying ‘It’s all your fault! All your fault I ended up like this!’
“Honey,” Tiffany cooed. Renewed by the resurrection of her lover, she managed to sit up on her knees. “Honey, it’s me. D-don’t you remember my voice?”
It was a chilling voice; a witch’s voice.
Part of me knew we should be doing something: shooting at this monstrosity. Running. Anything besides standing just in the moonlit cavern beneath Camp Moonfall.
But I couldn’t.
It’s hard to explain. I’ll try anyway.
All my life I’ve watched movies. All kinds, but like I’ve said before, many of them have been horror movies. I couldn’t tell you how many hours I’d spent at Camp Crystal Lake with Pamela Voorhees, and then later on with Jason Voorhees, or how many hours I’d spent with my hands over my face while Michael Myers killed promiscuous babysitters, how many hours I’d spent in the dream world watching Freddy Krueger slice and dice the residents of Elm Street into pieces with his blade-hand.
Too many, that was for sure.
And here I was, seeing the rebirth of a real slasher, a villain I’d seen in countless iterations. I thought—maybe wrongly—that it was almost a religious experience…like a devout Christian finally meeting Jesus Christ in the afterlife.
I remembered pinching myself, and feeling the pain. Still, what did that mean? People felt pain in Freddy’s dream world, didn’t they?
Cageface blocked out the moonlight that was shining into the room.
“I did it!” Tiffany told him. “I did what you asked me. Now w-we can love each other.” She tried standing; her tan hands were now colored red from trying to keep her guts inside her body.
Cageface’s dead eyes looked at us, regarding us with cold curiosity. I felt my heart plunge to the depths of my stomach. It felt like it would drown there and never go back up to where it belonged.
But Cageface didn’t care about us. At least, not for the moment.
He turned and faced Tiffany, a movement that was both graceful and heavy, and then he stuck out a hand with two missing fingers toward his “love.”
Her eyes softened, as did her smile. She stuck out her own hand, the bloody one. A gray tube, her intestine, slithered out from the bullet wound in her stomach.
My stomach, full on my sunken heart, lurched.
“Oh, sick,” Zack whispered.
If I could’ve moved, I would’ve hit him right then. My mind told me that if Cageface had heard us, he would’ve attacked us. I know, I know—it was ‘my job’ to be brave in situations like this, but…it was hard. Harder than I care to admit.
And I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t believe that I was seeing a tender moment between two murderous psychopaths.
Their fingers brushed. Cageface’s catcher’s mitt swallowed up Tiffany’s dainty hand. Pretty soon, I was sure that a harp would start playing over this weird scene. Maybe mutated angels would drift down from the heavens.
Surreal, I tell you. None of that happened, but the tender moment didn’t stay tender much longer; Cageface turned out to be a not-so-romantic serial killer. Go figure.
24
Heeeere’s Cageface!
I couldn’t believe how much blood there was. Personally, I would’ve thought most of the blood was in the middle. Not in the arm.
But there was a lot of blood when Cageface ripped Tiffany’s arm right out of its socket. A burst sprayed out from the torn bone, like a popped water balloon. I’d always thought that kind of a spray was strictly reserved for horror movies, particularly slasher movies, but again, I was wrong.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m good at being wrong.
Tiffany didn’t scream when it h
appened. That was okay; all of us hanging out by the door did enough screaming for her. Myself included.
Cageface held her detached arm as the blood spurted from her side. It didn’t even look like Tiffany was in any pain. Her facial expression had hardly changed, and get this: I still saw love in her eyes.
Talk about psycho.
“They always said ‘love hurts’,” Zack commented. No one thought this was funny. Everyone was too shocked and too scared to laugh.
Of course, things got worse. They always did.
“M-my love?” Tiffany croaked. The realization that she’d just had her arm ripped off must’ve been settling in. As it happened, though, those were Tiffany’s last words.
The very thing she was in love with took her detached arm, and slammed it into the side of her head, hard enough for us all to hear the sickening crick of her neck breaking. In the bright moon, we saw part of her vertebra sticking out from the humped flesh. Her eyes rolled up to the whites, and she fell in slow motion, hitting the dirt hard enough to send a plume of dust all around her.
“Tiffany!” Jason yelled.
In hindsight, I don’t think it would’ve made much of a difference. Cageface may have been a reanimated corpse, but he was still aware of us, and I’d doubted he’d forgotten about our presence since ripping off Tiffany’s arm and then nearly decapitating her with it…but then again, who knows? Maybe he would’ve just walked back to the table, his bloodlust filled, and gone back to his deep slasher slumber if Jason hadn’t screamed.
But I doubt it.
Cageface spun around, blindingly fast, as if the killing had rejuvenated him somehow, and stared at us with those empty eyes. The bear trap was so embedded into his flesh that it looked like it was growing out of him, an extension of his skull.
Maddie raised one Glock, and Zack raised the other. He’d taken it from Tiffany’s waistband, and the weapon was covered in her blood. Drops flung off every which way as he brought it level with Cageface’s chest. I decided now was as good a time as any to get a move on.
Grabbing Jason’s arm before he could plunge closer to Tiffany’s dead body, and catching Freddy’s, I backed out of the pentagram room, into the main section with the heads lining the shelves, then back toward the ladder that led out of this deathtrap.
The guns went off simultaneously, the sounds so loud in conjunction, I thought my ears would start bleeding.
“Go! Go!” I shouted over the roar of the weapons, urging the other would-be counselors forward, up the slope.
Jason resisted at first, but gave in when I gave him a shove with all my might. He didn’t move a whole lot, as he was much bigger than I was—not to mention that I possessed about as much strength as a bag of marshmallows—but he went nonetheless.
I spun around. From this distance I could still see that the bullets riddled Cageface’s torso, and tore at the Camp Moonfall t-shirt, but he didn’t bleed. And he didn’t drop dead.
I knew in the back of my mind that this wouldn’t work. A slasher villain can’t be killed with something as normal as bullets. A much more arcane approach is needed, like a different ritual, or maybe just throwing a chain attached to a heavy stone around his neck, and tossing him into the lake, like they did with Jason in Friday the 13th Part VI. Not exactly a surefire way of stopping him forever—especially if there are any telekinetic girls around, like there was in Part VII—but it was better than nothing.
Cageface kept coming. The bullets only slowed him down slightly, causing him to rock back on his massive heels. He stepped out of the blood-filled pentagram, and was three strides away from getting a hold of me.
I took the door handle and slammed it shut as Cageface reached out. He didn’t get me, but it was close.
Too close.
There was a latch on the outside of the door, meant for a padlock. Seeing as there was no padlock immediately available, and I didn’t exactly have time to look for one, I grabbed the closest thing I could find—which was a screwdriver—and jammed it into the latch, wedging the door closed. It might not hold for long, but it would slow him down for the time being.
With a terrible bang, the door shuddered. The force of him hitting the other side was enough to send another cloud of dirt drifting from above us.
“Go!” I shouted again, knowing our time was short and only getting shorter.
Maddie and Zack scrambled up and ran for the ladder, which Jason was almost at the top of. Freddy reached down and grabbed him, pulled him up onto the cabin’s floor above. I was right behind Maddie and Zack when the door shuddered again. This time, the screwdriver slipped loose. It didn’t fall entirely, but one more hit, and it probably would.
“I hope he doesn’t know how to use a doorknob,” I said breathlessly.
Alas, the knob never turned. I was mounting the ladder, a view of Zack’s ass right in my face, when the door blasted open. In my head, I heard, ‘Heeeeereeeee’s Johnny!’ but Cageface was no Jack Nicholson, and he didn’t have an axe. This was real life.
I told myself not to look, to just focus on getting the hell out of this place, but of course I had to look.
What I saw threw me for a loop.
He didn’t break the door down with an axe or a sledgehammer, or even his own fists. He broke the door down with Tiffany’s corpse. Her crumpled body hung crookedly through the blasted wood. Cageface kicked the door now, and Tiffany fell onto the other side.
Then here he came. He was so big, he almost didn’t fit through.
I moved faster up the ladder. There were only about six steps left, but I took them like Rocky in Philadelphia, moving so fast that my foot slipped and I fell.
A grunt sounded above me, and I looked up as I felt something close tight around my wrist. Zack.
“I got you,” he said.
With him holding me, stopping my fall, I was able to find my footing on the steps.
Good thing, too, because Cageface was coming up the slope, so close I could smell him. He didn’t smell very good; probably even worse than when he was dead.
I hit the cabin’s floor, and took a deep inhale of the dust and built-up grime on the boards. It was the sweetest breath I’d ever taken.
“Grab the ladder! Grab the ladder!” Maddie cried out.
I turned my head, still trying to catch my breath. Not an easy task after all of that, and in the back of my mind, I knew the worst of it hadn’t even started. It was only about one in the morning; a lot of night was still left, a lot of night left to run from a serial killer.
Zack ripped the ladder up so fast, he practically threw it over his head behind him. Not an easy task, either. It was sturdy wood and probably weighed close to twenty pounds.
“The beds,” Jason said. “Help me, Freddy!”
I was glad Jason was in his right mind, but there wasn’t a lot of time to bask in that realization. As soon as I had caught my breath, I was losing it again. I got up and grabbed the heavy wooden bunk with Freddy, Jason, and Maddie. We collectively yelled as we pushed, and the bunk tipped. Teetered. Tottered.
Zack scurried out of the way, and it fell over with a resounding crash. I caught a glimpse of Cageface as it came down, peering up between the top and bottom bunk. His large hands were gripping the edge of the hole, and he had been in the process of pulling himself up onto the floor, but the bed had something to say about that.
The floor, being as weak as it was, gave way to the bulk of the bunks, allowing them to widen the hole. Floorboards, dust, dirt, and God knew what else piled onto Cageface below.
We stood there for a long moment, surveying the damage, our hearts beating loudly—at least mine was. This was a classic slasher movie mistake, yet I felt like we had no other option, like some outside force was willing us to stay there.
The cabin had stilled. Everything was now quiet, the crash no longer hanging in the air.
“Is h-he dead?” Freddy asked. He reached into his chest pocket and pulled out a joint. He tried lighting it, but his hands were shak
ing too badly.
As if he had spoken the magic words, we got our answer. A great, guttural grunt sounded, and the pile of debris burst in every direction.
“No, I don’t think so,” I said.
Freddy turned to me with his eyes wide. Since I’d met him, his eyes had never been that open. He was always too high.
Amazing what the threat of death can do to a person.
“Okay, now would probably be a good time to run,” I decided.
We ran.
25
You Have the Right to Remain Slashed
I grabbed the bag of weapons, noting that these would hardly be able to stop this unholy abomination (because if a bunch of bullets and a heavy bunkbed couldn’t, then nothing could).
We didn’t stop until we got to the cars. I knew if I looked over my shoulder, I’d see Cageface coming out of the cabin, walking as slowly and casually as if he were taking a stroll through the park on a sunny day. That was just how slashers walked. No matter how fast their victims ran, the slasher would always catch up with them. Horror 101.
In the little lot where we’d parked our cars—Zack’s PT Cruiser, Jason’s truck, and a Nissan sedan that was probably Ellen’s, judging by the lei hanging from the rearview mirror—we reached the part where we fumbled for our keys, or realized we’d left them in the cabin or the lodge or someplace far away. Then our flight from the killer would have to resume on foot, until we inadvertently tripped over a tree’s roots in the dark forest beyond, and succumbed to the killer’s machete or butcher knife or harpoon.
Right on cue:
“I don’t have my keys!” Jason shouted.
“Nooo,” Freddy moaned. He still held the joint, but still couldn’t light it because he was shaking so much.
Zack dipped into the pockets of his cargo shorts and pulled out his own keys. They glimmered in the moonlight, unobscured by any cloud cover.
Night of the Slasher Page 10