Scary Stories: A Collection of Horror - Volume 2 (Chamber of Horror Series)

by Billy Wells

  He hadn’t called for backup like he had said he would, and she wondered why but didn’t say anything.

  He exited the car and walked along the sidewalk toward the main building as if he was taking a stroll through the park.

  If he was trying to impress her, she hoped it wouldn’t get him killed. She watched him disappeared behind the building.

  After a half hour had passed and Logan had not returned, Norma took out her phone to call her parents and found she must have forgotten to charge her cell. It was stone-cold dead.

  She really felt nervous after another half hour passed. If the beast had gotten Logan, would it come for her next? Could the animal break the windshield and get to her in the car? She didn’t think so, but she thought she’d be safer inside the building with other people.

  There were ten cars and two white vans in the parking lot. The zoo was probably closed, but, with all those vehicles, someone must be inside. She thought about Logan and hoped he was okay. She had no intention of going around the building like he did. She would go through the employee entrance. It was only a few feet to complete safety. There were phones inside which she could use to call her parents. She had to chance it.

  Exiting the cruiser, Norma made a mad dash for the employee entrance, and, as she had expected, the door was unlocked. She rushed inside and locked it. Her heart was beating like a jackhammer as she tried to catch her breath, not from the short run, but from the fear of being exposed to the beast for those few seconds.

  She made her way to the place where tickets were sold and the tours began. When she opened the door inside the main area, the fond memories of working as a tour guide relieved the tension for a fleeting moment, but immediately the fear returned. Nothing appeared out of place, but she had an overpowering sensation of impending danger that raised goose bumps on her arms.

  Where were the people who had driven the cars still in the parking lot? She thought there would be safety in numbers, but she was still alone. She sighed and shook her head at the absurd notion that everyone who owned those cars was probably dead.

  Looking for something to calm her down, she walked a few paces to the large tank in the middle of the room to see if Mogambo was still there. Norma smiled in spite of the angst that gripped her when she saw the familiar mottled-green skin of the twenty-foot python snake that caused all the kids in the neighborhood to scream the first time they entered the lobby.

  Something big flitted by the window so fast she couldn’t process what it was. Turning back, she saw Mogambo sliding up the face of the glass inside the tank. He had that hungry look he always had around feeding time. His forked tongue lapped the glass, and his cold eyes fixed on her.

  Again questions plagued her. Where were all the people? Where was Logan? Was the beast close by that killed the man in the ditch and the others?

  Dispelling the creepy thoughts again, at least for now, Norma further inspected the lobby for clues. She saw the sign she hadn’t noticed before, hanging inside the glass on the front door, which read Closed for Repairs All Day in black Magic Marker. She remembered once, when she was a tour guide, how they had closed the lobby for an hour when the ladies’ room toilet had backed up. Under the counter, there were several preprinted signs they used for different occasions, but a sign written in Magic Marker, and not preprinted, seemed very odd.

  Norma had initially thought they had closed the zoo because of the animal attack, but apparently someone had closed it early this morning even before the police had appeared on the scene and had cordoned off the parking lot. Closing the zoo on one of their busiest and most profitable days had never happened when she’d worked here, toilets overflowing or not.

  Also, if the zoo closed early this morning, where were the people who owned those cars in the guest parking lot?

  Looking out the back window, she noticed white vans with Media Productions written on the side. She also saw a strange-looking hulk of a machine, which resembled a bulldozer except for its octopuslike arms that could be extended in different directions. Did this belong to the zoo, or was it something brought in to make the movie? She’d never seen it before.

  Norma decided to do a little more detective work and pushed open the door of the room where the employees clocked in for the day. When she saw the seven time cards in their slots on the wall, she felt another sudden pang of unease in her gut as the mystery deepened. She inspected one of the cards and found that Henry Antonucci had punched in that morning, but he had not punched out. All seven cards indicated the same scenario. If the zoo were closed for repairs, why hadn’t the employees clocked out?

  Norma left that room and moved to the door leading into the back where the temporary cages were and listened. Not hearing a hairy beast thrashing about inside the back room, she opened its door and saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  Moving down the hall to the ladies’ room, she pushed open that door and peeked inside. There was no sign of mops or of toilets overflowing like that time last summer. She returned to the reception desk.

  There she found the front page of the morning paper spread out on the desk. A picture of the monster she’d seen in the ice with his claws upraised was posed with a big grin on his face. The headline read Media Productions Start Filming Movie at Treasure Trove Zoo Today.

  She read the article that indicated filming would take place from March 2 through March 9. The movie was a Clyde Yarrow production about a defense project gone wrong. Scientists experimenting with DNA had created something half human and half animal that terrorizes northern New Jersey before devastating the Big Apple.

  Norma felt like an utter fool, and, by now, her parents and Mason would know what she’d seen was only a prop for a new monster movie like Logan had said. They would have the last laugh after all.

  Her fear and trepidation eased as she picked up the reception desk phone to call 9-1-1. Then she would call her parents to tell them that she was all right. She didn’t want them to come to the zoo looking for her with the beast still on the prowl. After punching in the numbers, she discovered this phone was dead. She went to another phone on a table across the lobby and found it was also dead.

  On the large flat-screen TV above the reception desk, the words News Flash appeared in large bold letters. The announcer was on the scene in front of the arena only a few blocks from where she was now. He said with a stern face:

  After the initial attack of a man early this morning along Springfield Avenue, body parts of eleven more victims have surfaced in close proximity to Crystal Lake and the woods behind the North Valley Arena. The medical examiner stated that all the deaths were the result of attacks by several large carnivores, probably big cats, such as a tiger or a lion that may have escaped from a traveling circus. A truck that could have been transporting such animals was found overturned on the shoulder along Route 281. The police have issued a warning to residents of the surrounding townships, particularly Mount Glory, to stay inside until the animals are captured or killed. Four policemen who had been searching the woods behind the arena, where I’m standing now, are included in the list of casualties. Three other officers are missing at this hour. Their identities are being withheld until their families have been notified. We will interrupt programming with updates as they occur until this bizarre crisis is over.

  Norma stood with her mouth agape, trying to process the unbelievable events unfolding no more than a block away. This seemed like something from a nightmare. How could this really be happening? Being alone with savage beasts possibly lurking right outside the door terrified her. If this were a movie, the scary music should start building right now.

  What to do? Stay inside or go back to the car? She considered locking herself in one of the large cages in the back until the police arrived but decided not to.

  Suddenly one of her coworkers from last summer, Chester Tull, bounded into the lobby with a cart, several buckets of water, towels, and a mop.

  Chester’s sudden entrance startled Norma, but, from th
e look on his face, he was even more startled. He stood nervously in front of her, noticeably trembling with his mouth open like a little boy who had just been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

  She smiled at the mentally challenged teen that did odd jobs around the park when she had worked here for two summers in the past.

  He stood shifting from one foot to the other like he had to pee badly and couldn't think of what to say.

  Norma cracked the ice by saying, ”I guess you know twelve people have been attacked and killed by wild animals. The police are all over the place down by the road, plus all over the parking lot, the woods, and the lake. You should stay in the office until someone arrives. Be sure you don’t forget and go outside by mistake.”

  She could see his eyes processing what she had just said about the people who were dead. For some reason he didn’t seem concerned at all that wild animals were running around Mount Glory killing people and eating them. He would probably have had the same reaction if she’d said, “Hey, Chester. Whoppers are half price this week at Burger King.”

  “You didn’t forget to leave any of the cages open last night, did you, Chester?”

  He shook his head adamantly. “I never left no cages open,” he said excitedly. “I fed all our big cats this morning. It wasn’t none of them that done this.”

  Norma didn’t know what to make of the way Chester was acting and took a seat on a chair along the wall. “Where are the employees who came to work this morning? They clocked in, but never clocked out.”

  “I don’t know, Norma. I’ve been so busy moppin’ and doin’ my chores, I don’t know when they left. Maybe they found out about the dead people and left in a hurry.”

  All of them? she thought. She didn’t see the point in asking any more questions, since Chester didn’t have a clue about anything. And then she remembered. “Did you know the phones are out?”

  Without hesitation he said, “They were on the blink when I got here this morning. I don’t know why. I guess the phone company is workin’ on it.”

  “I’m glad it wasn’t the Treasure Trove Zoo animals that killed those people,” Norma said, picking up the morning paper. Then, pausing, she felt a little like Columbo when she continued, “Why did they close today anyway?”

  “Goliath …” Chester stopped short and, after a beat, reconsidered his response. “Shit backed up in the men's room. It was a terrible mess. We couldn’t let anyone inside to buy tickets.”

  It was obvious Chester wanted to get the hell away from her and her questions, but she asked anyway, “Oh, one more thing. Did you speak with an Officer Logan this morning? He came into the lobby about an hour ago.”

  “No, Norma. I ain't seen no policeman around here today. Hey, I can’t talk now. I need to take care of my chores if we’re gonna open tomorrow. Nice to see you.” Chester pushed the cart down the hall in the direction of the rooms with the cages.

  Norma shook her head and wondered what was wrong with him. He was acting even stranger than usual. He had worked at the zoo for years. He was mostly a gopher, except for his main job, which was feeding the big cats and cleaning their cages. She thought Chester had mentioned Goliath when she had asked about why they had closed the park, but she wasn't sure.

  Goliath was a huge tiger the zoo had acquired the year she had started. If there were any monsters, other than the ones in the movies, Goliath was one of them. The enormous predator was by far the most ferocious beast she had been close to … standing outside his cage, of course. He weighed almost seven hundred pounds, and his teeth and claws made the ones the monster in the ice had look puny.

  Even if the monster in the lake had been real, if it had met Goliath on some Indian plain, she was convinced the tiger would be the victor with one claw tied behind him. Norma shivered to think of a poor antelope in the clutches of such a savage beast.

  Through the window, she saw her parents’ station wagon pulling alongside the arena and approaching the entrance to the zoo. Norma didn’t want to go outside, but she had to warn her parents not to get out of their vehicle. Why hadn’t the police stopped them when they had first pulled in?

  Norma ran through the hall to the side entrance and cracked open the door. The opening was too narrow to see anything outside so she opened it wider until she could see her parents approaching the guest parking lot.

  Then she heard a phone ringing outside, to the right, behind her. She stepped on the porch and cautiously inched forward toward the sound. In a pile of leaves a few yards away, Norma saw a stew of body parts and a partial torso lying in a pool of blood. There among the remains, she saw a phone in the palm of a severed hand still ringing. A police officer’s badge dangled from a piece of a bloody uniform. Beyond that, she saw part of a shredded head too gruesome to identify. Norma was reeling from the horror that the beast had probably killed Logan, but she had to think of her parents now.

  Her parents saw her standing at the side door and pulled into a parking space not far away. Suddenly Norma heard an engine roar to life. From out of nowhere, the massive machine—with the octopuslike arms she'd seen before—moved quickly from behind the building with Chester at the controls.

  With deadly force, the enormous bucket arm slammed down on the roof of her parents’ station wagon, crushing the frame of the car and exploding all four tires with one devastating downward stroke. Norma watched in horror as the bucket of the metal monster came down again and again. With each crushing blow, the vehicle sunk lower and lower until it was only a flattened block of metal, rubber, and broken glass.

  Norma stood riveted in her tracks, spellbound at the horror taking place before her eyes. Her face was a mask of unbridled hatred, debilitating remorse, and bitter tears, as she stood transfixed on the landing outside the side entrance. Ralph and Rita, the zoo’s two leopards, appeared like phantoms from the trees behind the wreckage of her parents’ station wagon, trying to get at their mangled bodies inside.

  Chester quickly turned the killing machine in her direction. In a flash, two more tentacles of the hellish thing shot past her face, barely missing her nose.

  From the corner of her eye, Norma saw the monstrous girth of Goliath rushing toward her like a runaway train. His enormous frame, moving across the sun in front of her, reminded her of a solar eclipse. All she could see was a mouthful of teeth and his raging claws as she reopened the door and rushed back inside.

  Just as she slammed the steel door behind her, she felt the earth move from the impact of the onrushing carnivore. Norma had no idea how the door, or even the wall, had withstood the seven-hundred-pound collision that rattled the fillings in her teeth. Ignoring the danger Chester might pose, she ran deeper into the interior as the sound of claws tearing at the exterior door chilled her to the bone.

  Goliath’s sudden attack hadn’t allowed Norma to fully get her mind around the fact that her parents were dead, killed by Chester—that unfortunate, mentally challenged dweeb she had always pitied but had always treated with respect. Why had he committed such an unimaginable act of cold-blooded murder against people who had always been kind to him?

  She remembered that other time Chester had forgotten to lock the cages after he had fed the big cats. That would have been another disaster, just like today, if Goliath’s trainer, Atlas, a truly scary bastard, had not risked his life to draw the animals back to their cages. Unfortunately, as it turned out, Atlas was the only one who didn’t escape unscathed. Goliath had taken his arm but, for some reason, had left it at that.

  The muscle-bound trainer, who was as wide as he was tall, had filed a workman’s comp claim for five million dollars but had ended up not getting a dime because of a technicality. The zoo administrators tried to fire him for appealing the claim repeatedly, but finally an onslaught of negative public opinion caused them to let him keep his job. A large percentage of Mount Glory citizens threatened to boycott the zoo forever if the administrators fired the town hero. What a legal fiasco it had been for over a year.

&
nbsp; Had Chester left the enclosure door open again? It certainly seemed that way. Goliath, Ralph, and Rita were outside right now. If they had escaped, then the three lions must be prowling about as well. It was staggering to think of how many more people might be slaughtered if six big cats were loose in Mount Glory.

  Why else would Chester go ballistic and start killing people? He must have left the door open last night, and now he was probably trying to prevent the police from killing his precious animals due to his forgetfulness. There was no telling what was going through his warped mind at this point.

  She had no idea how many more people had died so far, but she did know that she didn't want to be one of them. She had to find a safe place to stay until the police arrived. “The police!” she thought. Norma pulled out her phone and punched in 9-1-1. She stared at the blank screen. “Shit,” she screamed when she remembered trying her phone while in the cruiser and finding it dead. How could she have forgotten? Was she losing it?

  She saw the desk phone and picked it up. It was still dead. Had Chester cut the telephone lines too?

  Certainly someone would come soon to find out why Logan had not called in. She had to find somewhere to hide until then. What to do? Should she lock herself in one of the cages in the medical wing until the police finally arrived? It was risky. She’d be a sitting duck in the cage if Chester had a weapon. She remembered seeing Logan’s gun on the ground outside, but she was too scared to go get it.

  Where was Chester now? Was he getting ready to launch another attack?

  On her way to the medical wing, she tried to locate a weapon she could use to defend herself but couldn't find one. Chester had killed her parents, but was he responsible for everything that happened today? Somehow, knowing Chester, it didn’t seem possible.

  Where was Atlas, Goliath’s trainer? Did the animals get him too? Wait … Did Atlas somehow convince Chester to help him get some payback for not being compensated for the loss of his arm? Chester loved the big cats and was gullible enough to do whatever Atlas said was necessary to keep them from harm’s way.