The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

by Stephen Hand

  Kemper idly noticed there were a few seats and benches on the porch, along with what looked like a couple of old spring bedsteads that someone had propped up against the wall. If the sheriff wasn’t here, Kemper didn’t know what the hell to do.

  “Let’s get this over with,” he sighed, then he started to walk up the low grassy bank towards the house.

  Erin followed and, as they drew close, she caught sight of a rusty old mailbox standing where the house met up with the road. On top of the mailbox some bent metal letters spelled out a name, presumably the name of the people who lived here: HEWITT.

  But hadn’t Luda May said the sheriff’s name was Hoyt? Perhaps Erin had misheard her. Hewitt, Hoyt—maybe it was an accent thing?

  Andy was sitting on the porch steps. He hadn’t seen Jedidiah since he’d told the boy to stop messing with the body. Neither had Pepper and Morgan; Jedidiah had just taken off into the woods.

  Some time passed before the boy came back. He seemed to appear out of nowhere, coming hurriedly out of the trees with a peculiar smile on his face. Andy watched the kid very carefully. He wasn’t exactly over the moon to see the little oddball.

  Pepper, on the other hand, was glad he was back. She felt she still might be able to help Jedidiah in some way. Even if she couldn’t, the boy would probably be better company than Andy and Morgan right now. As soon as Kemper had left, the two guys had buttoned it.

  Pepper was still sitting with Morgan right next to the entrance to the mill. She smiled to welcome the boy as he walked over to her.

  “I drew a picture of you,” he said, taking Pepper by surprise. “Wanna see it?”

  “Sure,” she smiled.

  Jedidiah reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. Gingerly, he handed it to her.

  Morgan looked on as she slowly unfolded the badly creased sheet. He half expected the picture to be covered in scratchy red pen, a childish rendition of Pepper dripping with blood, but the picture was quite charming. Yes, the picture was childish, and yes it was clumsy and simple, but Jedidiah’s drawing of Pepper had an undeniable natural sweetness to it.

  “Wow,” glowed Pepper. “This is really good.”

  “You sure you’re not just saying that?” the boy questioned.

  Morgan was beginning to find the whole thing more than a touch surreal. Here they were, stuck at the “House of Horrors”, having to satisfy the creative temperament of Jedidiah the Jungle Boy.

  “No,” said Pepper firmly. “I swear I like it.”

  Jedidiah watched her for any sign of a lie but didn’t see one. She looked like she really thought his picture was good. So maybe—

  “Wanna see the rest of ’em I done?” he offered.

  More?

  “Sure,” said Pepper enthusiastically. Then at Morgan pointedly, “Don’t we?”

  Morgan looked at her. Then at the kid. “Of course we do,” he managed.

  Then the two of them got up and began to follow Jedidiah as he lead them round to the side of the mill.

  “Hey, where you guys going?” Andy called after them. Then he jumped to his feet and ran after them. They shouldn’t be going anywhere without him like that. What if they ran into trouble?

  Right up close, the Hewitt farmhouse seemed even more forbidding. It stood like a squat mass of powerful stone, almost as if the original owner sought to terrify his cotton-picking slaves through the sheer unnerving form of the building’s architecture. Yet the house seemed mostly clean. Some of the bricks were a little dirty, but that was only to be expected in a remote place like this.

  As Kemper walked the three or four steps that led up on to the porch, Erin took another look at the surrounding scenery. Unlike the Crawford Mill area, the land here was mostly open and grassy. There were a few trees standing about but nothing like the overgrown trail they’d just come along.

  She climbed up and joined Kemper in front of the screen doors.

  They could hear classical music from a record player somewhere inside the house. The record was scratched.

  Kemper hesitated, and they looked at each other for a brief moment before Erin took the lead and knocked on the wooden frame of the gauze screen.

  “Hello!” she called. “Anybody home?”

  No response. All they could hear was the music from what now sounded like an old phonograph.

  They pressed their faces closer to the mesh and tried to see inside, but it was no use.

  Now Kemper tried knocking, only more loudly.

  “Excuse me!” he hollered and he could hear his voice echo on the other side of the doors as if projected down a long hallway.

  “Hello!” shouted Kemper, growing increasingly annoyed.

  Where the hell was the sheriff?

  The music stopped.

  Erin and Kemper exchanged glances. Someone had turned off the phonograph. Someone had heard them. Someone was inside.

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

  The voice came from within the house. It was low, booming, and had a distinct Deep South drawl about it. It sounded like an old man.

  Kemper pressed his face closer to the door but still he couldn’t see in. He certainly couldn’t see whoever it was who had just called out to them. And then he heard something else, something like the growling of a small dog.

  “Are you the sheriff?” asked Erin loudly.

  “Do I look like the sheriff?” came a reply.

  “I don’t know,” called Erin. “I can’t see you.”

  Kemper scratched at his goatee. Nothing was going right today. Nothing.

  Jedidiah took Pepper round to a low door at the side of the mill. He offered to let her go through first, but she just smiled until he got the message and opened the door himself.

  Inside, Pepper, Andy and Morgan found themselves in a cramped area on the lower level of the gin. There was some light coming in from somewhere because, unlike the room by the front entrance, they could see in here just fine. But the light was still fairly dim and it was impossible to tell exactly where it was coming from.

  None of them were quite sure what this room was meant to be. There were cracked lead pipes running the length of the ceiling, there was more junk lying around and they found more crazy stuff: dolls’ heads, broken bones, a torn photograph, a bent windscreen wiper . . .

  One wall was covered with pictures, scraps of paper stuck in a haphazard spread across the splintered boards. The pictures, most with ripped edges were all drawn in Jedidiah’s simple hand and each picture was of a different person. He’d drawn men, women, children, boys, girls, even what looked like dogs, cats—pets. And now he added Pepper’s picture to the collection.

  “Thanks, Jedidiah,” she said, moved by his touching gesture. “I feel so honored.”

  “You sure about that?” mumbled Andy.

  If the drawing of Pepper was actually meant to be a representation of Pepper, who were all the other people Jedidiah had drawn? There were dozens of pictures up on the wall. Did Jedidiah expect them to believe that all these people had come out to this shit-hole of a place? Maybe the people on the wall were Jedidiah’s imaginary friends. Whatever.

  Andy followed the display down towards the end of the room, where the wall and the pictures, fell completely into shadow. Morgan stood just behind Andy’s shoulder and together the two of them were just able to make out that the half-hidden pictures were different to the stick caricatures Jedidiah had shown them. The scratched images down here were grotesque and as riddled with implied and explicit violence as the perverted figurines and skulls outside the front of the mill.

  “Hey, kid,” said Morgan, unable to lift his bespectacled gaze from a crude drawing of a dagger raped heart. “You draw these too?”

  BANG!

  It was the sound of the door being slammed shut. It had no effect on the light.

  Morgan looked round—Jedidiah was gone.

  Pepper had been looking up at the pictures on the wall, Andy too. No one had been watching the kid.r />
  “Maybe we should—” Pepper tried to say.

  But Andy cut in, “Go back to the van? Right.”

  Quickly, Andy stepped up and took the lead, and the three of them rushed over towards the closed door.

  Outside, Jedidiah ran away as fast as he could into the tortured grove.

  “Step back from the door,” the voice demanded.

  Erin was certain it was an old man talking. She glanced at Kemper. He shrugged. What else could they do? They were right up against the screens.

  Hesitantly, they stepped back onto the porch and waited.

  Slowly, the doors opened. The squealing hinges were desperately in need of some lubricating oil. And finally the old man inside the Hewitt house revealed himself—in a wheelchair.

  The old man cautiously wheeled himself out onto the deck of the porch. He seemed to be sizing Kemper up. But he also kept Erin in the corner of his eye. In fact, he was careful to make sure he could see everything as he came out to meet the two young people who’d been banging and hollering at his door.

  Erin could see that the man had had a hard working life. Beneath his plain, cream-colored cap, the man’s face was like a flesh-tone model of the Grand Canyon. The sallow cheeks were a web of deep lines and creases. Even the man’s nose was thick with wrinkles. He was clean shaven, but his gray stubble was the kind of dogged growth no razor could ever wholly remove. And his eyes behind the plastic brown fade glasses were a cold steel blue.

  The man was wearing a sleeveless undershirt, so Erin could see how years of hard labor had given the man’s arms and upper chest a sparse, wiry strength that still served him, as he pushed himself along in the wheelchair. A pair of fading, striped suspenders ran down the outside of his vest, fastened to his durable gray pants, which—

  Oh God!

  Only now did Erin notice that both the man’s legs ended at his knees. The fleshy, truncated stump-knuckles stuck out through the bottom of his pants which were pulled up around his thighs.

  Erin didn’t want her nausea to show but this had caught her totally off guard. The old man was an amputee and he made no attempt to hide the fact.

  A small sandy-colored dog ran out of the house and jumped up onto the man’s lap. But the old man ignored it. He remained stern as he looked at his new callers. Kemper noticed the man had a black walking cane in his right hand.

  “Sheriff don’t live here,” said the man impatiently.

  “That figures,” said Kemper, balanced precariously on the edge of no longer giving a damn. Everywhere they went, they kept hearing the same tune: Sheriff Not Here.

  The man snapped Erin a frosty stare. “You can call him if you want.”

  His offer shook her out of a daydream. Once she’d got over the sight of his twin stumps, she’d found herself watching the dog playfully pawing the man’s thighs.

  “Err . . . thanks,” she stuttered. “We’d appreciate it.”

  Kemper wasn’t sure whether phoning the sheriff from this place would do any better than phoning him from Luda May’s but he was prepared to try. At least the old feller was harmless, with his legs and all.

  Erin practically tiptoed round the old man’s wheelchair and started to open the door.

  “Wipe your feet,” barked the old man. “I like to keep a clean house.”

  She looked down and saw the doormat; it was almost spotless. Quickly, she wiped her platforms, then started to head on inside. Kemper followed suit scraping the dust off his shoes, but when he went to take the door from Erin, he found the old man’s cane barring his way. The dog started to growl.

  The old man looked up at Erin. “I said you can call him.” Then to Kemper, “You can wait outside. I ain’t looking for trouble.”

  As he said the last few words, the man in the wheelchair lifted his cane and prodded the capped end of the black stick up against Kemper’s chest.

  The young man held up his hands. “Okay, chief. Don’t shoot.”

  But the old man wasn’t smiling. Not a bit of it. He removed the stick from Kemper’s chest then motioned Erin to go on inside. Then he rolled his wheelchair back inside the house before finally using his cane to yank the door shut.

  Could this day get any more annoying?

  Kemper shook his head and kicked the ground. It was all down to Erin now.

  Inside, the man told Erin she could call him “Old Monty,” which struck her as an old-fashioned name, but then everything about Monty was old-fashioned. Even the back of his wheelchair was made of wicker or something. And then there was his house.

  Unlike the grim exterior of the Hewitt farmstead, the interior was as conventional and as inviting as any American home. The long hallway had a nicely polished floor, the walls seemed tastefully decorated—if a little out of date—and there was hardly a speck of dust about the place.

  She chided herself for even thinking it, but Erin could not see how Monty could keep the house like this, not in his condition. Maybe he had a housekeeper. Or maybe Erin hadn’t yet met all the family.

  She looked down the hallway; it ran the whole length of the house.

  There was an open door on the left and a closed door facing it on the right. Just past the closed door, a wide carpeted stairway climbed up to the second floor—and there seemed to be a space under the stairs.

  Further along, various doors opened left and right off the corridor until the way finally ended in what seemed like a storage area. That part of the hall didn’t get much light, but Erin thought she could see some old boxes and bits of furniture down there. She also caught sight of something else. It could have been a door but Erin wasn’t sure.

  Taking his time, the old man led Erin through the open doorway to the left into a well furnished living room, where all the furniture was draped with plastic slip-covers.

  “In here,” he said. “I’ll dial him for you.”

  Then he rolled over to a museum-piece telephone standing on an equally dated table, lifted the receiver and began to make the call.

  “Thanks,” smiled Erin nervously.

  While Old Monty waited for someone to pick up at the other end, Erin took a quick look around the room. Other than the faded wallpaper, all the ornaments and furnishings seemed to be in good condition—which wasn’t surprising if the old man kept everything under dust covers. She saw the old phonograph they’d heard earlier.

  There was an old 78 on the turntable, Mozart. There were pictures on the wall, sepia tinted portrait photographs of people long since buried in their graves. There were lamps, small ornaments, a couple of vases. Erin picked up a ceramic bowl of potpourri and inhaled. It was old and had gone off. She blew through her nose to clear the bad smell, then put the potpourri back on the table.

  A large brass fan was set up in the ceiling. Even though it turned, Erin could barely feel it in the closeness of the late summer afternoon.

  Suddenly, Monty’s cane came into view. It reached across in front of Erin and nudged the potpourri bowl back to the exact place Erin had first found it. The girl looked at Old Monty and started to shrug apologetically, only to see that he was ready to hand her the phone.

  Kemper was still kicking about outside.

  Luda May. Jedidiah. And now some old lunatic with his shins blown off. Wasn’t there one normal person anywhere in this damn town?

  “Thirty minutes,” Erin repeated down the phone. “Believe me, I’ll be there . . . Thank you, sheriff.”

  At long last, one of them had actually spoken with the sheriff. Not Luda May, not Old Monty; one of them.

  The sheriff had apologized and said he’d had to make some preparations that had delayed him. But he had confirmed that the old abandoned gin was indeed the Crawford Mill and he guaranteed he’d be out there to meet them within the half hour.

  Erin smiled.

  Like her momma always said: If you want somethin’ doin’, you gotta do it yourself.

  And for the first time since that girl had shot herself, Erin thought things were beginning to look
up. She couldn’t wait to tell Kemper. But when she turned round to thank Old Monty for his help, the disabled farmer wasn’t there.

  He must have left her alone to make the call in private, and now he was busy doing something around the house. He was a gentleman. In his condition, he had every right to be suspicious when strangers called. How could he defend himself? He had no neighbors who would hear if anything went wrong. No, Erin completely understood Old Monty’s initial surliness. And as far as she was concerned, they all owed the man a debt of gratitude.

  But now she was ready to be on her way.

  “Thank you,” she shouted, hoping he’d hear her, wherever he was. “I’m all set.”

  She paused for a minute, but there was no reply. All the same, she had to get going. It had taken her and Kemper around fifteen minutes to walk here, and now they had to make sure they were back in time for the sheriff.

  Taking one last look at the antique display of a living room, Erin went out into the hallway. She could just see Kemper pacing impatiently through the screen door.

  Then she heard a muffled voice.

  “Please—” It was Old Monty. He sounded put out.

  “I need a little help,” he called falteringly between sharp breaths. He was in some kind of difficulty. But where?

  “I’m in the bathroom,” he gasped. “I fell.”

  Now she got it. He’d left her alone to talk to the sheriff, gone to the john and fallen off his wheelchair. She didn’t want to be the cause of any discomfort for him, not after he’d helped her by letting her use the phone. Besides, Erin would have looked out for anyone with his kind of disability.

  And now she could hear his dog. The barks were echoing, which meant the dog was probably with the old man in the bathroom.

  Quickly, she set off down the long hallway. She thought about calling Kemper but didn’t want to waste any time. She could hear the old man struggling and a few moments later she found his wheelchair lying on its side in the middle of an open doorway.