by Stephen Hand
“What the hell’s he doing?” moaned Erin.
She was totally serious about canning her boyfriend if he kept up this crap. Now was not the time for childish bullshit. All the same, if it was Kemper, she could kill him and then they could get out of here.
Feeling suddenly hopeful, the four of them started to run back along the road they’d come in on. As soon as they caught up with Kemper they’d be on their way.
Jedidiah watched them go, laughing as he bounced up and down on top of the tractor. It always went the same way.
It was all so funny.
Kemper’s filthy, beaten body lay face-up in the empty bathtub on the basement floor, his hands and legs hanging out over the sides of the squalid tin vessel. His whole body was still fully clothed but his garments were soaked through with blood, dirt and piss.
Leatherface grabbed hold of the dead boy’s legs and tied his ankles together with a stout rope, which he then hooked up to a hoist hanging down from a beam in the ceiling. When everything was set, the skin-wearing freak pulled slowly on the other end of the pulley until, inch by inch, Kemper’s feet began to rise.
The sound of the horn was getting closer.
At first, Erin thought they needed to follow the access road. She naturally assumed they’d find the car they were looking for some way along it. But, as they got closer, they realized the sound was coming from somewhere off to the side.
It was Andy who found the other trail leading off the access road. The turning was so obscured by greenery that they’d completely missed it when they’d first driven in. However, there was no mistaking the tracks in the dirt; cars had been here before, and recently.
“This way,” said Andy.
It looked to him as if someone had tried to hide the turning, because the tire marks looked fairly new, and yet there were vines and branches in the way. But they couldn’t have grown like that in the short time since the tracks had been made. They must have been put there, like camouflage.
Good job Andy had thought to bring the tire iron with him from the van.
At first the going had been pretty difficult.
Morgan was the only one wearing long sleeves, which explained why he alone hadn’t picked up any scratches on his arms. But they pressed on, forging headlong through the tangled grove, fighting their way through bushes and weeds and tripping over small rocks that jutted up from the surface of the path.
The fact that cars had already been this way didn’t seem to make it any easier for them. Unfortunately, they had no choice. Each step they took brought them nearer to the blaring horn—which never once faltered or wavered. Soon the four young people managed to find their way out into a large open clearing.
Where they stopped dead.
“Looks like somebody missed the road,” observed Andy ruefully.
They had reached what could only have been described as an automobile graveyard. The clearing was strewn with the dinosaur remains of at least two dozen wrecked vehicles. There were cars of different makes and models going right back to the Forties. There were camper vans and pickups. There were station wagons, some almost brand new.
Andy looked at the plates: Ohio, Florida, Michigan, New York, Louisiana, Washington. There were automobiles from all over the place here, and none of them had any wheels!
In fact, moving closer, Andy could see that each and every one of the vehicles had been stripped for parts: auto spares like the ones they’d found lying near the Crawford place and for sale at Luda May’s. But there were no wrecking facilities here. There were no offices, no buildings, not even a shack. So it wasn’t a salvage yard. And the only way out of the clearing was the way they’d come in—that carefully concealed trail.
Andy didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one bit.
The deafening horn sound came from a late Sixties Ford station wagon.
The windows were all smashed and the interior of the car looked like it had been ripped apart by a grizzly or something. There was broken glass everywhere, the radio had been torn out and there were kids’ toys scattered all over the floor. The toys had all been broken.
There was no one inside the driver’s seat. The horn was blowing but there was nobody there.
Andy beckoned the others to stand back then, slowly and hesitantly, he stepped up to the driver’s side. He saw the plates: California. Then he looked in through the broken window. Someone had wedged a gnarled wooden stick against the steering wheel, keeping the horn locked on. Andy reached forward and knocked the stick away, finally bringing some peace and quiet to the place.
But who’d done such a thing? Jedidiah?
Over on the other side of the car, Morgan had seen something lying on the back seat. It was something weird. Carefully, he extended his arm through a hole in the shattered glass of the side-door window.
“Be careful,” whispered Pepper.
A look of fear crossed Morgan’s face. His arm—it was trapped!
He tried to pull it loose, but his limb was held fast and now it looked as if it was starting to hurt.
Pepper gripped her head in her hands and cried out—which was Morgan’s signal to remove his hand from the car and break into a cheap laugh.
“That isn’t funny!” shouted Pepper, amazed he could still be a dick after everything they’d been through today.
Erin would have bawled him out as well but she was more interested in what he’d found. He had something in his hand.
“What is that?” she asked, her voice indicating she really didn’t want to know.
Pepper shared the same opinion. It seemed everything they’d found until now was just too creepy for words. There was all that skull stuff back at the mill and Jedidiah’s freaky drawings, and then there were the human teeth underneath the tractor. And now what?
Morgan was holding a storage jar containing a clear amber fluid—it could’ve been piss, but he wasn’t sure. And there was something else in the jar, something suspended in the fluid.
Morgan couldn’t help but slip into a nervous smile as he looked closer and realized that the thing floating upright in the liquid was made of two Polaroid photographs glued back-to-back. The pictures just hung there, slowly turning, their images refracted by the deep yellow viscosity of the fluid.
The four of them gathered round to take a closer look at the images.
On one side, the photo seemed to be the picture of a family. There were parents smiling, a teenage girl, a little boy in a T-shirt and a cute baby girl wearing rabbit pajamas—she must have been around a year old.
Pepper was freaked out.
What the hell was the photo doing here? It looked like a perfectly normal family—five happy people. But their picture was stuck in a jar of what could have been piss or oil and left on the back seat of a trashed car? Why do that? What was the point? Who would do such a crazy thing?
Although they didn’t know it, the four friends were still in a state of shock. Shock from the death of the girl in the van, shock from encountering the panoply of morons who’d dogged their way ever since and shock from having to sit around for what seemed like hours outside a redneck hunting lodge. And shock from being on the receiving end of a constant stream of visual madness.
Compound their distress with the constant frustrations they’d had to endure together with the unshakeable feeling they were never going to leave this place, and you could begin to understand why, when they turned the jar to see the second Polaroid, it took them almost five seconds to realize they were looking at a relaxed portrait of the girl who’d blown her head off.
Their minds—almost in denial—were too numb to see it, but the second photograph was definitely of the dead teenage girl.
“That’s her,” gasped Erin. “The hitchhiker!”
And suddenly they all began to see the broken pieces of a jigsaw tossed out onto the Texan landscape before them. The girl was part of a family. Before she killed herself she’d said she wanted to go to California; the plates on the station wagon were f
rom California.
But they couldn’t complete the puzzle just yet.
“What were they doing out here?” wondered Pepper.
“Looking for the sheriff?” replied Morgan angrily.
Is that what this was? All these cars? People sent up here to look for the sheriff only to have their automobiles end up in this fuel-injected cemetery? And were the passengers broken up as well? Until they became insane? Suicidal?
Morgan put the jar down then turned to look at his friends.
A complete mood change had come over him. He wasn’t playing practical jokes anymore, and Erin could see that his knees were shaking inside his flared pants. But then she too had felt an icy wall of panic slam into her the moment she’d recognized the face in the picture.
The teenager looked a lot happier in the photo than she did with a gun barrel in her mouth.
“Who’s got the keys?” snapped Morgan as he held out his hand. His fingers were twitching. He wanted the keys to the van. He wanted to leave. Now!
Erin walked forward and tried to get by him but he pushed her back.
“You gonna stop me?” she threatened.
But Morgan received support from an unexpected quarter.
“Who put you in charge?” asked Pepper.
This was the first time the two girls had fallen out. Erin had a real fight on her hands.
“You wanna go?” she said. “Go! But we’re not leaving in that van without him.”
They still hadn’t found Kemper and Erin was not about to take off and desert him in his own goddamn wagon.
She took the keys to the Dodge out of her pocket and gripped them tight, making it clear that Morgan would have to knock her cold before she’d let him have them.
Morgan was desperate. “Andy, let’s get the fuck out of here while we can.”
Pepper backed him up. “I don’t know about you guys, but I happen to like my teeth right where they are.”
Well, Andy had wanted to take Kemper’s place and look after things while he was gone, but now he understood how Kemper really felt when they argued. Suddenly everyone was ganging up on Andy to make the decision. It was pretty clear which way Morgan and Pepper wanted him to go, but Erin . . .
She knew she couldn’t depend on Andy. They’d been at loggerheads almost all day, but Erin could really use his help right now. He and Kemper were meant to be buddies. So was Morgan, but she always guessed Andy and Kemper were closer. Now she was gonna find out just how good a friend Andy really was.
The blond haired youth was finding it tough. He didn’t know which way to go, though his heart told him to quit while he was ahead—if you could call it that.
He scratched at the stubble on his cheek before finally looking at Morgan.
“Dude,” he said persuasively, “we’re talking about Kemper.”
Erin breathed a sigh of relief. Suddenly, Morgan lunged forward and tried to snatch the car keys out of her hand. But somehow, she managed to avoid him. Then she quickly stuffed the keys back into her pocket.
“Don’t even think about it!” she warned him.
But Morgan hadn’t thought. The moment he had sensed which way Andy was going to turn, he’d panicked.
God, what did it take to get away from this damn insane place? Everyone was acting crazy. Why didn’t they just leave? Just get in the van, godammit, and go!
Erin turned and started to head back along the hidden trail. This mass grave with its twisted auto-carcasses gave her the creeps.
“Hey!” Andy called after her. “Wait up!”
Which left Morgan and Pepper nothing to do but dejectedly follow the two of them back to the old Crawford Mill.
Kemper was now hanging upside down over the bathtub. Something fell out of his pocket and landed in the metal basin with a loud clinking noise.
Leatherface looked down into the shit-lined washtub and grasped the object with his fat, grubby fingers. It was small, round and it shined brightly, catching a ray of sunlight through the hole in the wall.
Not interested.
He tossed the small metal band onto an adjacent table, where it landed atop a streak of dried blood. The room was full of things he’d taken from the people he’d brought down there.
The stitch-masked killer grabbed hold of Kemper’s dangling form, seizing the boy’s head with one massive hand and holding a long boning knife in the other.
Over on the table lay the gold and diamond engagement ring that had fallen in the bathtub.
“I will, I promise,” Kemper had told Erin earlier that day. “I was just waiting for the right time.”
Leatherface stabbed the dead boy in the face.
NINE
“I wish this day had never happened.”
The afternoon was growing pale and Pepper found herself remembering a dream she used to have a lot as a kid.
She’d be late for school and have only five minutes before the bell. So she’d hurry out of her house only to notice she’d forgotten her books. So she’d have to go back and fetch them. But when she came out again, she’d realize she’d got no clothes on.
So she’d have to go back again and get dressed. But then she wouldn’t be able to find her clothes. And when she did, she would keep getting tangled up in them, having to take them off and putting them back on, knowing full well that her five minutes were up. And even when she was finally dressed, she’d run out to catch the school bus only to remember she’d left her homework behind.
The dream would end only when she woke up. She never got to school, never stopped forgetting stuff and she never overcame her overwhelming feelings of fear and frustration—frightened of being late for class, but doing her damnedest to get there.
Only now, sitting in front of the old mill beside Morgan, Pepper was already awake—it wasn’t a dream. But the feelings of fear and frustration were exactly the same.
Morgan looked at her and smiled.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” he said, and he put an arm round her shoulder. But she pulled away from him.
He turned, embarrassed, and looked down at the shoes on his feet, only to see something roll along the ground straight towards them. Whatever it was, it had come through the open doorway of the mill from inside the shadows of the building.
Pepper screamed!
But Morgan grabbed her forearm—just for a moment—to stop her, to make her look.
It was just a dirty, busted-up softball.
Morgan stepped up to the doorway. It was even darker inside the mill now but he could see where the ball had come from; Jedidiah was sitting on the dilapidated armchair that stood just inside the entrance. The kid was swinging his legs and rubbing his palms against the rotten armrests.
“Don’t ever sneak up on people like that!” shouted Pepper. She’d had it with being scared all the time.
But sneaking was all Jedidiah ever seemed to do—when he wasn’t poking dead bodies with his stick, or asking crazy questions. Now, however, the boy sat still in the armchair. Then, after a suitable pause, he sheepishly asked, “Is your friend really gonna have a baby?”
Christ! He’d even been listening in on their conversations when they first got here!
Morgan wasn’t cutting Jedidiah any more slack.
“Do yourself a favor, kid, and get the hell out of here.”
But Jedidiah didn’t budge. “I hope it’s a boy.”
“GET OUT OF HERE!” Morgan exploded. He was sick and tired of escapees from the local freak-show trying—and succeeding—to gross him out. What did the little bastard want Erin to have a boy for? So he could grow up to be a dirty, pathetic moron like him?
Jedidiah scurried out of the mill, scooping up the softball only to throw it ahead of himself so he could run after it. He was still playing games even when being chased off.
It was peaceful outside the Hewitt house.
Dusk was about an hour away and the wind was easing back, passing like a whisper through the leaves of the trees.
Old Monty was round the side of the building where he’d gone to water his small herb garden. As the old man leaned forward in his chair, watering can in hand, his dog scampered playfully under his wheels. So far, it had been a good day for the two of them.
Just beyond the shinless lying cripple, white sheets, bedding and other laundry billowed from a dozen lines—it was perfect drying weather. And over past the grass field with the laundry stood a tall barn.
“Kemper!”
That voice—
The old man stopped what he was doing at once, the contented smile dying completely on his tight-lipped face.
His dog started to bark. Someone was out there but Old Monty already knew who it was—he remembered her voice.
Erin walked out from round the corner of the brick building. She seemed to be alone. Well, she couldn’t have found her fat-mouthed boyfriend, could she?
“Hi,” smiled Erin nervously. “It’s me again.”
The dog ran forward and yapped at her heels. Truth be told, she wanted to kick the shit out of the hairy little bastard.
Old Monty put the watering can down on the ground and wheeled over to find out what in God’s name she wanted.
* * *
Andy watched from the cover of the long grass. The idea was that while Erin distracted the old fart, he’d nip into the house and look for Kemper.
It was Erin’s idea. Once they’d all finally sat down and talked everything through, there seemed to be no other solution. The last time she had seen Kemper was out on the porch. He never showed at the mill, he wasn’t at the clearing with the wrecked autos, so where else could he be?
Another thing: Erin said there was something suspicious about the old guy. Monty Hewitt didn’t seem to care what had happened to Kemper. And Erin still didn’t know what had made that loud noise she’d heard when she’d been stuck with the old man in the bathroom. For all she knew, that bang could have been Kemper. Maybe he was sneaking round the house. Or maybe he’d had an accident.
Either way, the only way they could be certain that Kemper wasn’t inside the house was if they went and checked for themselves. There was no point asking the guy in the wheelchair because if what Erin had said was true, he seemed downright hostile.