The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

by Stephen Hand

  Their arrival had not gone unnoticed.

  Ever since the dry brake discs of the van had squealed up to the front of the dilapidated old shack, Luda May had been watching through the store’s barred windows. And if the building looked bad, Luda May looked even worse. The skin on her small withered body was leathery from years of exposure to the harsh Texas sun and from long days of being blasted by the wind and dust of the prairie.

  The little old lady looked as gnarled as tree bark, but she was as hard as the local limestone. Her hair was tied back and she wore the functional cotton clothes of someone who’d never seen a designer outfit in her whole goddamned life.

  She watched the kids closely—saw them almost fight their way out the vehicle.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” she intoned in a heavy accent, her face impassive. “Something like this comes along, you realize just how crazy the world is out there.”

  The rest followed in a whirlwind.

  That young man came in—the one with the grease-monkey hands and the black goatee—and told Luda May all about some crazy girl gone done wrong with a genuine revolver. At first she thought the boy was spinning her a crock, but then that other one, the lanky streak of four-eyed piss, went and said the same thing. And so did the cute blond with the muscles.

  They all stood there, just bawling till Luda May told them to show her the goddamn body: if there were such a thing. So they took her out, where she met them pretty young chickies coming out the john and they all showed her where that dead girl had blown her stupid young brains out. No wonder the five of them looked like they’d proper shit themselves. It was a terrible, terrible tragedy, no mistake.

  So they headed back inside, except the two cutie darlings who stayed out by the vehicle, and Luda May went behind her counter and picked up the telephone. The kids needed help, ain’t that a fact, and Luda May knew exactly who to call.

  Andy, Kemper and Morgan stood and watched across the counter as the old storekeeper rang for the police.

  “It’s awful,” Luda May was saying down the phone a short time later. “There’s six of ’em all together. Includin’ the dead ’un, poor thing.”

  As she continued her conversation, the guys loosened up and started to look around.

  The place was totally Hicksville. It was as if the people who owned the store were scavengers, selling anything they could lay their hands on to whoever might be passing by. Morgan couldn’t believe that that redneck grandma got anything at all in the way of custom. He’d seen hardly a car on the road all day and there didn’t seem to be much around here in the way of farmsteads. Maybe they were on the edge of town like Kemper had said. Otherwise, Morgan couldn’t see how the gravel-voiced old girl could stay in business.

  The air inside the store was hot and dusty and the general condition of the place was a perfect match for the rundown mess they’d seen out in the lot. There didn’t seem to be much going on in the way of refrigeration or gadgets and Luda May’s merchandise looked as if a blind man had thrown it onto the shelves and all over the floor. The thing she seemed to sell the most was meat. Morgan had found a long shelf that was piled up with nothing but beef: cured beef, cubed beef, beef jerky. He tapped Andy on the back.

  “Dude. Want some beef?”

  Andy smirked and pointed up to a chalkboard featuring other delectable provisions for sale: beef tongue, ham hock, head cheese. Andy couldn’t help but remember the slaughterhouse and the fact that Morgan had said he was a vegan.

  “Do vegans eat head cheese?” asked Andy sincerely.

  If Morgan wasn’t so stoned, and if they weren’t all in such deep shit right now, he would probably have slapped the idiot.

  How can head cheese be vegan? You take a head, clean it by removing the eyes, ears and brain—though this is optional—then you break the skull up into a number of different pieces, boil the damn things, throw in some herbs and stuff, remove all the solids from the pan, grind them together, and let the resultant paste cool down and solidify in a bag of cheesecloth or something. Then, once this carrion paste has totally dripped dry into a block, you can take it and carve it up into yummy slices. So you’re eating the fucking head and chowing down on pieces of face. How the hell can that be vegetarian?

  Morgan sighed. The sickly smell of treated beef was starting to bother him. Come to think of it, the whole room smelt pretty damned bad.

  Besides the meat, the store was mostly packed out with more used clothing and a wide choice of old auto spares. The clothing was a jumble of all kinds of different styles and sizes: men’s jackets, boy’s pants and shoes, women’s dresses, you name it.

  Some of the clothes were a little old fashioned, but some looked like they’d just come straight from the mall. It was the same with the auto parts. On a different day, Kemper would have happily searched through all the worn tires, fan belts, hoses and brake cables. And he would definitely have found something he could use from a couple of bins full of different mirrors and spark plugs.

  Today, however, he was starting to feel more than a little frustrated. So far, this had been the worst couple of hours of his entire life, and all he wanted to do was get rid of the body, square things up with the law and then get back on the damn road to Dallas.

  He drummed his fingers on the filthy counter top waiting for Luda May to bring the call to some kind of conclusion.

  “Why don’t you come out and ask ’em yourself?” she was saying, in her harsh, rasping tones. Then she stopped to hear the reply.

  “Uh-huh . . . Uh-huh . . .”

  Finally, she lowered the phone from her ear and turned to Kemper. “Where’d you say you found her again?”

  Kemper started to mess with his goatee.

  “I already told you,” he said with barely suppressed impatience. “Ten minutes west of here.”

  Luda May lifted the receiver again. “About three miles west . . . Right.”

  Then she hung up, at the same time spitting a wet ball of chewing tobacco into a spittoon lying on the floor.

  Friggin’ redneck.

  “How soon will he be here?” asked Kemper.

  Luda May stopped. She looked at him. Squarely in the eye. She was taking her damned time like she just didn’t get it.

  “Sheriff said he’s headin’ over to the old Crawford Mill.”

  What?

  Kemper . . . He, wait . . . No . . . Kemper was . . . What did she say?

  “The what?” asked Kemper, not quite sure this was really happening. He had a dead body in the back of his van and the cops decide to go on a tour of Travis County? What was wrong with these people?

  The old shopkeeper kept to the plain facts. She was only telling the boy what the sheriff had told her. Wasn’t her problem if the boy didn’t like what he was hearing none.

  “Wants to know,” she continued, “if y’all wouldn’t mind drivin’ out that way to make a report?”

  “Yes, we goddamn mind!” barked Kemper. It was crazy. Why should they have to go out to the sheriff? It was the sheriff’s damn job to come to the scene of the incident.

  During his trek through the land of bad-smelling meat products, Morgan had been listening to this increasingly heated exchange. He was still a bit high on the dope he’d had earlier, but he wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t tell bullshit when he heard it. And he was hearing it now. Total bullshit. He’d been trying his best to stay calm. They’d dealt with the girl thing. They’d brought her here, played everything by the book, but now everyone kept dicking them around like no one gave a fuck. It was too much.

  They could have thrown her body out the van any time they liked. Christ, they didn’t even need to pick her up in the first place—and now they were supposed to go driving round some fucking hillbilly back road in search of some mill they’d never fucking heard of and which probably didn’t exist on any single map known to fucking mankind. What was the sheriff doing that was so important, getting Patsy and Dolly to suck his dick off? No. No way.

  “Ho
w often do girls blow their heads off around this shit-hole town?” he shouted, stepping over to join Kemper at the counter.

  Like Morgan, Kemper was pretty pissed off too. This sheriff bull wasn’t what he needed to hear right now.

  “We’re not going to drive around town with a DEAD GIRL IN MY VAN!” he shouted.

  Luda May grabbed on to the counter with both hands, tilted her head and stared daggers at the two of them. They had no right to come on in here and talk to her like that. Not in her nigger-frigging store.

  Andy could see it was getting ugly. He knew his friends were highly strung but it wasn’t the old lady’s fault. If they should be shouting at anyone, it should be the sheriff. But for all they knew, the sheriff might have had something really urgent on his hands, while the dead girl—she was finished business.

  Quickly, he walked over and grabbed both his friends by their shoulders. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said warmly but with an undertone of severity. Then to his friends, “Cool it.”

  Kemper looked at him—at Andy, telling him to cool it—then sighed, the air escaping through his long nose. Morgan followed suit, and stepped away from the counter. But he was ready to join in as he watched Kemper try with Luda May one last time.

  “Why the hell can’t the sheriff meet us here?” whined Kemper.

  “Didn’t say,” replied the storekeeper stiffly. “Just be a couple of hours b’fore he could.”

  At the mere mention of “a couple of hours,” Kemper finally lost it. He leant over the counter and exploded in Luda May’s face.

  “Give me a fucking break! There’s no goddamn way we’re waiting a couple fucking hours!”

  But Luda May just stood there and stared right back at him. She took it all. Everything he got. Kemper was just a boy. She wasn’t going to let herself get worked up over his baby-ass whining. He could shout at her all day for all she cared.

  Kemper was in her face now but she calmly crossed her arms and looked him right back in the eye. And when he quit his yapping, she coldly informed him, “Young man, what you do is your own business.”

  And that was the end of it. They could either go up right now and meet the sheriff at Crawford Mill or they could wait down here for two hours with Luda May with her auto parts and her fucking head cheese. Her breath stank of pig spunk.

  Kemper pushed his way back out into the open air. God, he didn’t realize just how much that festering shit hole had been bothering him. Andy and Morgan followed, leaving Luda May to watch them through the window just like when they arrived.

  For their part, Pepper and Erin had agreed never to talk about their trip to the restrooms again—except maybe if drunk and trying to gross someone out in a game of “The world’s worst . . .”

  The girls found it hard to believe what Kemper had to tell them. In fact, all five of them thought it was pretty damned messed up, but what choice did they have? It seemed that since they’d picked that girl up, their whole life had been on rails. And things would probably stay out of control until they got rid of the body. They were still a long way from Dallas, so now they either had to go find the sheriff or wait two hours for him to show here.

  Everyone was feeling pretty damned pissed.

  It was insane that they had to make a decision like this just because this backwater piss-hole had only one lousy dumb-ass cop to go around.

  Erin, Morgan, Andy, Kemper, Pepper—they were all sick of the fix they were in. Which is why they quickly decided to go find the sheriff. Okay, it sucked. Okay, it was damned annoying. And, okay, it was totally crazy, but—and this was a big “but”—the sooner they found the sheriff, the sooner they’d get rid of the body. And the sooner they did that, the sooner they could hightail it and make for the Interstate. So, yeah, every which way they looked at it, the whole thing was bullshit. But at least this way, they could make the pain go away faster.

  Erin was voted to go back in and get directions to the Crawford Mill from Luda May The way seemed straightforward enough and Erin didn’t think she’d have any trouble remembering it.

  For her part, Erin didn’t see how Kemper and the boys could have fallen out with Grandma Head Cheese. When Erin spoke to her, the old gal seemed friendly enough. Sure, her social skills were a bit rusty, but what could you expect, working and living out here in a place like this?

  No, Erin and Luda May had got on just fine. In fact, Luda May had even taken the trouble to wish Erin a safe journey and she’d asked Erin to pass on her regards to Sheriff Hoyt—something Erin said she’d be only too glad to do.

  * * *

  The van pulled away from the store, the big wheels kicking up a major dust storm behind them, and then they were gone. Only they couldn’t continue going the way they were headed before—the way that would get them out of this miserable place.

  No. They hadn’t gone forty yards along the highway when Erin pointed out the narrow, clogged access road that turned left off their route and led deep into the plains. That was where Luda May said they had to go if they wanted to meet the sheriff.

  And if they thought the road had been bumpy before, now they really knew what the word meant. Most of the paving on the access route was cracked, rutted, and overlaid by mounds of packed dirt. Kemper was constantly having to watch where he was going to keep the wheels of the Dodge on a reasonably level surface. And now the trees were really closing in—on both sides. Kemper smiled; all this dry wood had to be good for a barbecue.

  “She’s starting to stink back there,” said Pepper, motioning in the direction of the corpse.

  She and the other two guys had stayed up close behind the front seats. No one wanted to move down to the rear of the wagon.

  “No worse than the inside of that store,” quipped Morgan, feeling contaminated by having spent just ten minutes in that godforsaken dive. “Did you guys see all that nasty beef shit in there?”

  Erin didn’t want to be reminded. When she’d gone back inside to ask Luda May the way to the Crawford Mill, the stink of the place had hit her like a sledgehammer. And that was no exaggeration.

  “Morgan,” she warned. “If I have to heave again, I’m doing it on you.”

  But Morgan didn’t want to argue right now, because suddenly the journey had started creeping him out. He could see how hard it was for Kemper to keep going and he could see how increasingly overgrown the area was becoming with tall dry Johnson grass. Where the hell were they going? He could see the other guys weren’t impressed either.

  “Maybe we should have just waited at the store,” said Morgan ruefully.

  “For a couple of hours?” reminded Andy. “No thanks.”

  There was only one way they could possibly go but as each second took them deeper and deeper into the middle of nowhere, the group began to feel lost. Each of them sat in silence and started to look around, trying to see something, anything, that could be an indicator to the mill or to the sheriff. Erin in particular was watching out for something. Luda May had said—

  There!

  A gravel trail turned right through a crowded grove of over-leaning dead trees choked with bramble, Johnson grass and vine. That was the way they had to go. It was the trail Luda May had told her about—even if it did seem pretty damned creepy.

  “The lady said this road would take us right to the house,” said Erin, as much to convince and reassure herself as the others.

  Kemper shook his head then turned the wheel in the direction of the trail. He really didn’t like this, he didn’t like it at all. In the back of his mind he hoped Erin had made a mistake so that they could turn round and then find the real way to Crawford Mill.

  The trail they were on now was going to kill the suspension. And the place had a bad vibe to it—something he couldn’t quite put his finger on, and he was usually pretty thick-skinned. But right now, all five of them were getting jumpy. Their nerves tingled, and they found themselves looking and listening at everything with a high-strung intensity.

  Well, look at that . . .
>
  Just ahead of them a wrecked car lay off by the side of the trail. It had been there for months at least and was almost half concealed beneath dense undergrowth. Kemper couldn’t quite make out what the vehicle was, but he thought it was a Ford. God knows how it got there, but at least it meant that someone was living out here after all. They must be on the right track. Whoever Crawford was, this was probably one of his old vehicles. Like many farmers, he’d probably just left the automobile to rust in a disused corner of his own land.

  Andy was less encouraged. He’d seen the abandoned car, but there was still no sign of any mill, and still no sheriff.

  “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I didn’t take a week off work to drag a damn corpse around the prairie.”

  There was a pause—then suddenly they all howled with laughter!

  Christ, Andy hadn’t meant it as a joke but there was something about the timing of it all. This place, Luda May, the dead girl, the abandoned car—Andy had deadpanned the one-liner at the perfect moment—and suddenly the absurdity of their predicament had given them a moment of release, albeit one laced with an undercurrent of screaming broken glass.

  Everyone was still laughing when Kemper suddenly called out, “Hey! What’s that?”

  They looked forward.

  Through the harrowing trees ahead of them, they caught their first sight of a building.

  FIVE

  The old Crawford Mill. That’s what Luda May had called it. That was her name for this . . . this . . . How could you describe it?

  Their first thought was that they’d come to the wrong place; this couldn’t be where the sheriff planned to meet them. But then they went over all the directions Luda May had given Erin and this was the only place that fit. But look at it!

  As he parked the van, Kemper could see a skeletal mess of angular wooden structures—rotting, dilapidated, lost, defiant, unnerving—a farmstead painted in scabs by Hieronymous Bosch using a cold steel nail-gun as his brush.