The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

by Stephen Hand

  Half the chair was inside the hall and the other half was just inside the large bathroom. Beyond, Erin could see Old Monty lying on the floor. He was struggling to lift himself up onto the toilet seat. As she watched, he pulled his catheter tube out of the toilet bowl, clearly embarrassed that all this was happening right in front of her. But what choice did he have?

  He called out to her, “Could you just—”

  Suddenly, a loud metallic whine scraped through the walls of the bathroom, drowning out the remainder of Old Monty’s sentence. A damaged faucet had kicked into life, jump-starting all the plumbing in the entire building. All around her, Erin could hear the ear-splitting groan of straining lead pipes.

  Monty held out a hand to her. She couldn’t hear him, but he needed her help. Carefully, she stepped over the wheelchair.

  She noticed the washbasin off to her left. Brown water was pouring in torrents from the faucet, only to run spiraling down the drain.

  She reached out.

  The old man took hold of her hand and started to pull. Erin braced herself, tried to lift him. For such a thin man with a good part of his body missing, the old feller was extremely heavy and his grip was incredibly strong. Erin had to pull real hard to—

  Something passed in the hallway behind her.

  It was hard getting in the right position. She had to kick the wheelchair aside and close the door so that she could get some leverage.

  Old Monty grabbed at her, he pulled on her, he strained, the two of them groping, clutching, panting with exertion, struggling, fighting for control, getting nowhere, making no progress.

  The more Erin tried to help, the more he seemed to be pulling her down. Ke . . . Kem . . .

  Kemper sat on the porch swing. He thought he’d heard Erin talking on the phone a minute ago, but she seemed to have stopped. She better have good news.

  He took a pack of cigarettes out from one of the large utility pockets in his pants. With the skill of someone who’s had plenty of practice, he shook a cigarette loose and popped it between his lips. He then put the packet away and indulged in the time honored ritual of flipping open his lighter with that unmistakable tink, and then slowly, coolly lighting the smoke. He put the lighter back and inhaled . . . luxuriously.

  Place didn’t look so bad out here. Wide open spaces. Peace and quiet.

  He exhaled and glanced at his watch. It was getting late.

  “Come on, Erin,” he said out loud. “What the hell’s taking so long?”

  It was damned irritating to be just one wall away from knowing what was going on. Surely the old man had seen Erin enough to realize they weren’t gonna hurt him.

  Kemper took another drag at the cigarette then tossed it on the floor. Then he got up and headed inside the house. He was sick of waiting and he wasn’t going to let some old guy in a wheelchair mess him around any longer.

  However, the moment he walked through the door, Kemper stopped and took stock of his surroundings. He was in a long hallway—the place looked like something from the Civil War, everything was so old. And there was a loud whining sound. It seemed to be coming from all over the place and reminded him of the noise made by trapped air in old water pipes. All the same, it was pretty loud.

  He couldn’t see Erin or the old guy and, thanks to that noise, he couldn’t hear them either. So, feeling inexplicably nervous, he set off slowly down the hall.

  A short way on, he came to the open stairway on the right. He didn’t think Erin would be up there, so he kept straight on down the—hold it a minute!

  There was something hanging on the wall beneath the stairs. He didn’t know why, but it caught his eye for some reason. He went forward and took a closer look. But even a few inches away from the thing, he still had trouble making sense of it.

  It was a tiny rodent skull with bells in its eye sockets with feathers and more bells dangling beneath it on lengths of catgut. Suddenly it hit Kemper that the skull was just like all that other weird shit they’d found back at the mill. And that’s why the curio had attracted his attention. The eerie similarity had triggered his instincts long before he actually understood what it was.

  He took the skull down from the wall and turned it over in his hands. The bells jingled, a quiet but crystal-clear sound. Taking care not to make any more noise, he slowly went to put the thing back—when he noticed a door crack slightly ajar just behind him.

  He reached out towards the door but forgot about the rat skull in his other hand. Before he knew it, the demented object was slipping through his fingers. It hit the polished floorboards in a cascade of ringing bells.

  Dammit!

  Hoping no one had heard him, Kemper stealthily bent down and reached forward—

  As the blurred figure swept behind him.

  —and brought the sledgehammer down on the back of his skull. The blow was merciless, pounding and bloody.

  Kemper fell stunned, twitching, his limbs out of control, his bowels loosening, and his whole body relaxing in helpless defeat.

  He felt something grab hold of his hair and denim jacket. He was helpless, pulled sliding along the polished floor, stunned, feeling no pain, unable to move, beaten. Something had taken control of Kemper and, through concussed rolling eyes, he could barely make sense of the grappling bulk that now had complete mastery of his flesh.

  Through the descending haze, a voice in Kemper cried with fear but there was no expression of it in his brutally enfeebled limbs. A floating space of horror opened up and consumed him as he took his first glimpse of the force that had crushed him.

  A man. Big, powerful, bulky, a fat-quivering excited body, howling, squealing like a pig with hard-on excitement.

  The destroyer.

  He had control of Kemper in a way the boy’s mind could not accept.

  The face of the attacker was too much.

  Not possible. Just not possible.

  Thick heavy boots, pounding the floorboards as the squealing mound of fat grabbed at Kemper, pulled at him, ripped at his hair. Rough pants, filthy, stains, blood, shit, dirt, piss. The top shirt, dirty and striped, short sleeves revealing an undershirt tucked in at the elbow inside two leather vambraces, protecting and strengthening each of the forearms. And the heavy leather apron, jagged with crisscrossing lines of stitching, brown and stinking just like the dead girl in the van. An apron custom-sewn from skin.

  Kemper focused on the fat fingered hands that manhandled total control of him—fingers heavy with jewelry: signet rings, graduation rings, engagement rings, wedding rings. They pushed and pulled Kemper, leaving everywhere the fingerprints of overwhelming frustration.

  Kemper knew he was lost.

  Something was wrong and there was nothing he could do about it; he had no power. He had been dominated, crushed and when he finally looked up into the face of the man who now owned him, he looked into the face of hell.

  Two insanely staring eyes and a fat-lipped slobbering mouth full of rotting teeth encased in a mask made of human flesh. Kemper’s master was wearing a real human face, skinned, decaying and crudely stitched beneath a ripped scalp of someone else’s black hair running thick with lice.

  The frustration.

  Erin.

  Kemper had been overpowered by Leatherface, who squealed and screamed like a fucking pig in the dying boy’s face.

  “You’re not helping me!” Erin shouted. “Just relax!”

  “What?” Old Monty shouted back.

  It seemed as if the screeching from the faucet was getting even louder. On top of that, the damned dog wouldn’t quit barking and running around. It was driving Erin crazy. What the hell was going on here? Did the old man want her help or not? She grabbed hold of his wrists and tried even harder.

  * * *

  Kemper tried to resist but he barely had control of his muscles. The sledgehammer had pounded the tissue of his brain, flooding the convoluted gray mass with blood. Try as hard as he might, there was nothing the boy could do except feel the outrage of his helpl
essness.

  Leatherface dragged Kemper down the full length of the hallway, past the closed bathroom door, to the darkened area at the end of the corridor.

  This part of the house was completely different from all the other rooms on the ground floor. It seemed to be used only for storage and was a complete mess. In one corner of the room stood a pile of chairs, in another there was a linen basket and an old mattress next to a toolbox with what looked like a child’s rag doll lying in it.

  But Kemper didn’t pay any notice. The only thing he sensed was the change in atmosphere from normal house to bad house. He knew from the lousy condition of the storeroom that it acted like some kind of gateway, dividing the world he loved from the world he was going to die in.

  Set in the middle of the far wall was an industrial sliding door made of reinforced metal. The door was totally at odds with the rest of the farmhouse, incongruous with the plantation style. Rusty, scratched, heavy—the door was the kind you’d expect to find leading to the cold room of a slaughterhouse. And now, the door was wide open, revealing a small room bathed in a cold green light, a room with blood on the walls.

  Kemper lay slumped, his head bleeding as Leatherface dragged him by the shirt towards the open doorway. The boy’s arms hung limply by his side as his body slid along the dirty floor. What he could see of Leatherface’s own skin beneath the full-head human mask seemed red and raw. Kemper tried to speak, to tell the bastard to go to hell, but he couldn’t even do that.

  With one final spastic heave, Leatherface threw Kemper’s limp body in through the door and shambled in after him. He then turned and, with one final sickening whine, grabbed hold of the door and slammed it shut with a colossal crash of metal that shook the entire house.

  SEVEN

  “What the hell was that?!”

  Panting with exertion and scared out of her wits by the crash of metal, Erin let Old Monty fall back on to the floor. Something was wrong, she could feel it.

  She stepped over the fallen wheelchair, threw open the bathroom door and ran out into the corridor.

  Behind her, the old man’s face cracked into a strange expression. It seemed like a smile, but more knowing. If anything, the distortion of Old Monty’s weathered features was smug, malicious—a thinly disguised sneer. His flint-like eyes were narrow with anticipation.

  Out in the hallway, Erin bolted to where she thought the sound had come from. It seemed as if the whole building was still reverberating with the thunderous noise. Surely Kemper must have heard it from outside. If he had, he might already be in the house.

  She turned left down the hall and came to the storage area—there was a lot of old junk in here. Something else; there was a door in the wall facing her. It was a hefty sliding door made of scored, damaged metal and it looked totally out of place. There was something about the huge sliding panel that filled Erin with irrational fear and she was only too glad to see it closed.

  Shivering, she turned her back to the door, and looked down the length of the hall to the screen doors leading outside. Sunlight flooded in through the gauze but failed to reach this far down the corridor. She took another quick look through the discarded bric-a-brac lying about the place but there was nothing—nothing except damned junk.

  Hell, she was sure the noise had come from somewhere round here.

  She paused.

  What if . . . what if the sound had come from behind that weird door?

  The reluctant thought had barely entered the young woman’s head when she heard a noise behind her—from behind the door!

  Erin spun round—the door was still closed.

  The noise she’d just heard had sounded like a dull thud.

  “Kemper?” she called. She still hadn’t seen him. Was he outside the house, inside or what?

  She walked over to the door and took a closer look at it. There was a bar handle fixed near the right edge—she tried it, but it was no good. Underneath the handle was a rusty latch but she couldn’t see any way to open that either. Again she tried the handle, pulling on it with all her strength, but the sliding panel refused to budge.

  Feeling frustrated and increasingly scared, she took a step back and stared at the door—and noticed a peephole!

  She hadn’t seen it before. It was set up in the middle of the door and was about six feet off the ground, so Erin had to get up on her tiptoes to look at it.

  As far as she could tell, the lens of the spyglass seemed to be set in the center of a disc. This wasn’t the usual simple round hole people drilled through their front doors for security; it was something much more elaborate. The metal disc encasing the lens seemed to be held in a circular mount, as if the disc with the lens were separate from the rest of the door.

  Erin stretched up and put her eye to the glass but it was useless. She couldn’t see much and what she did see was tiny and distorted. The only thing she did notice for sure was that the room on the other side of the door seemed to be lit up all pale green, which was kinda weird.

  Her calves started to ache so she stepped down and tried putting her ear to the door. Maybe if she listened—

  Nothing.

  Erin cursed. She was running out of ideas fast.

  Whatever was happening on the other side of that door—and whether the loud bang had come from in there or not—Erin couldn’t see, hear or do anything. And suddenly she was wondering whether any of it was her business in the first place.

  She’d only come looking because the noise had scared the hell out of her. It had been like the tolling of a giant funeral bell, and following on top of her crazy struggle with the double amputee, it had sent her into a panic. She felt the need to do something. Anything.

  Kemper.

  Erin turned and made ready to head straight back out to the front porch, when suddenly she heard a dry metallic squeak come from behind her.

  Though Erin didn’t know it, someone had been watching her from the moment she’d run into the storage area at the end of the hallway. Someone had been observing her from the other side of the metal door, using the spyglass to intrude upon her every movement.

  The lens was mounted in a pivoted rim that could be angled left and right to follow the girl as she paced back and forth across the hallway. And he had followed her. He had watched her searching every dark corner. He had witnessed her feeble struggle with the door handle. He had seen her face in fish-eye close-up when she’d looked right into the spyglass.

  He was still tracking her with the moving eyepiece when the lens casing had rubbed noisily against the circular frame—metal on metal. Rusty. Screeching. Suddenly making noise. She turned!

  The spyglass froze.

  Erin spun on her heels and rushed back towards the door.

  That sound!

  The door was still closed, everything was still the same but . . . but . . .

  The peephole! It had moved!

  Erin was positive that when she first saw the spyglass it had been flat, flush with the door. But now it seemed to be raised on one side and depressed on the other, almost as if—

  “Something wrong?”

  Erin jumped.

  It was Old Monty. He was back in his wheelchair and was now facing her in the middle of the corridor, blocking her way out of the house.

  There was something odd about his manner. Erin half expected him to accuse her of deserting him when he needed her help, or maybe attack her for going off wandering around his house—but he said nothing. And he certainly didn’t seem to have had any trouble getting up off the bathroom floor by himself.

  Suddenly every instinct in Erin’s body screamed not to trust the old man. Legless or not, this guy was dangerous. And she didn’t like the way he was holding his cane.

  “Where is he?” asked Erin.

  “I don’t know,” answered Old Monty defiantly. “On the porch where you left him, I guess.”

  “What?” shouted the girl, her head starting to spin.

  She had the impenetrable metal door behind her,
and the old man sitting in front. She was trapped. Or was she?

  Seizing the initiative, Erin ran forward and pushed her way right past the haggard old farmer, practically shoving his wheelchair aside, so that she could run down the hallway towards the front door.

  Behind her, Old Monty massaged the sweaty right stump of his knee and leered, his dry lips glued with old spit.

  Pepper sat between Morgan and Andy on the porch of the abandoned cotton mill. All three of them were now sick of the place and couldn’t wait for Kemper and Erin to bring the sheriff.

  They hadn’t seen Jedidiah since he’d tried to shut them in the room full of crazy drawings. It was probably for the best because, whatever Pepper said, the kid was downright weird and both Morgan and Andy had taken a sharp dislike to his creepy little face.

  Time had now slowed to a standstill. It was hot, quiet and depressing. None of them could see any bars, but it felt like they were locked in some kind of prison with no chance of parole. Not even death would bring an end to this eternity of just sitting here, waiting by the gin for nothing.

  But maybe there was a God after all.

  Pepper heard the car first, and soon all three of them were up on their feet.

  Someone was driving up along the trail they themselves had taken from the general store. Someone was coming.

  Morgan’s first thought was that it might be another weirdo. Another Luda May or another Jedidiah—some fucked-up hillbilly in a V10-powered killwagon or something. But it was Pepper who said it for all three of them:

  “Thank God.”

  The vehicle was a police car and the sight of it was truly manna from Heaven.

  Morgan broke out into the biggest smile he’d had since his last joint, while Andy just shook his head with goddamned relief. The cops, they were finally here—he couldn’t believe it. Kemper and Erin had done it: they’d followed Jedidiah’s directions, gone up to the sheriff’s house and now he was here. Maybe the two of them were in the car with him.

  The red bubble light on the top of the police car was cracked and the front end of the vehicle was dented. Matter of fact, the whole car looked like it had seen better days. If Kemper were around he’d be able to tell you just how old the model was. But that just meant the car matched everything else they’d seen round here so far.