The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

by Stephen Hand

  He stopped by the open side door and waited. He had everything under control just fine. When they quit whining, he could continue with his investigation. Folk had to learn that they couldn’t just come driving through his town breaking any damned law they chose. Maybe people did that sort of thing up in New York or over in LA, but not here—not in Fuller, Travis County.

  Tears subsiding, Morgan looked up and saw that the sheriff had been waiting for his attention. Hoyt blamed him for the joint; he hadn’t said so, but Morgan could tell. Thank God they’d dumped the piñata.

  “C’mere, boy,” said the sheriff calmly.

  “Why?”

  “I want to know exactly what happened in this van.”

  Morgan was confused. “We already told you what happened.”

  It was good to see the sheriff behave rationally again, but they’d covered all this when he’d come before and picked up the body.

  “You told me,” replied the sheriff. “Now you’re gonna show me.”

  The way Hoyt said that—Morgan didn’t like it one little bit. He turned his head toward the girls lying on the ground next to him and he could see it in their eyes as well. None of them trusted the sheriff one damn bit. But what could the boy do?

  Slowly, almost grudgingly, Morgan got up. He had dirt all down the front of his clothes, where it mingled with his sweat. Erin and Pepper almost begged him with their eyes not to go with the sheriff. But they didn’t dare say a word—not since the sheriff had fired off that gunshot.

  Hoyt stood waiting by the open side door, waiting for the city boy to take his sweet little time. What these kids didn’t seem to quite understand was that Sheriff Hoyt was the law round these parts. He did things his way. There were no other officers for miles. So if he said, “Jump,” then they better learn to goddamn jump.

  Still holding the revolver, Hoyt stood aside to let the boy climb aboard the van. Not a word passed between them as Morgan entered through the side door.

  The boy tried to read Hoyt’s face. What were the sheriff’s thoughts? Was he enjoying this? Was he one of those sadistic lone-gun Deep South cops you had heard about? Or was he really just trying to do his job? Was this just his backwoods way of doing things, like some testosterone-fuelled gunslinger?

  Morgan couldn’t tell. But, whatever Hoyt was thinking, the boy was determined to do nothing to piss him off. He would do anything and everything Sheriff Hoyt told him to. And maybe, just maybe, they’d all see their way out of the woods.

  Morgan sat on the corner of the back seat as far as possible from the blood. There was a lot of mess that he and Pepper hadn’t got round to cleaning before Erin showed.

  Through the open door, he could see the two young women lying face down on the ground. It was crazy.

  There wasn’t much light in the van. The moon was good, but other than that they had to rely on the small interior door lamp.

  “Is that where she was sitting?” asked the sheriff, standing half in and half out of the side door.

  “Yeah,” replied Morgan. He couldn’t be sure but, now that they were closer, he thought he could smell liquor on the sheriff’s breath: bourbon.

  “Then how did her brains wind up on the window?”

  Morgan turned round to look at the bloody hole in the glass. It was clear that the trajectory didn’t add up from where he was sitting now.

  “She might have been more to the middle,” he offered.

  “Well?” prompted the sheriff. “Then sit more to the middle.”

  Morgan looked at the blood on the seat. Bone chips and morsels of brain were still clearly visible. “But . . .”

  “C’mon. It’s just blood.”

  Morgan closed his eyes for a moment then reluctantly slid right over onto where the girl had been sitting when she shot herself. The round red crack in the rear window was dead center behind his head. It was freaking him out.

  “Okay,” nodded the sheriff. “Then what?”

  “Th . . . then . . .” muttered the boy, shaken by the recall. “She sh . . . sh . . . shot herself.”

  Hoyt leaned back, withdrawing his face into shadow. “How?”

  Morgan couldn’t see him. “What do you mean?”

  From out of the darkness, the sheriff offered the suicide gun to Morgan, holding it out, pointing the barrel straight at the boy.

  Morgan tried desperately to see the sheriff’s face, but it was impossible.

  “Show me,” said the sheriff.

  “What?” asked Morgan, incredulous.

  It was clear what the sheriff wanted him to do, but the boy couldn’t believe it. He left the gun right where it was, in Sheriff Hoyt’s hand.

  “It helps me clarify things if I have a distinct visual image,” Hoyt explained matter-of-factly.

  No response.

  “Take the gun!”

  Morgan looked at the gun in bewilderment. His emotions had been on a ballsack of a coaster ride all day. He didn’t need this.

  Hoyt tried to make the decision easy for him. “Either you’re gonna cooperate or I’m gonna arrest you for obstruction.”

  The gun was still pointed at Morgan, the barrel aiming straight for him. If the sheriff wanted, he could shoot the boy here and now.

  Morgan tried to see the sheriff’s face, to get a measure of him, but Hoyt made sure he stayed well back in the darkness. Morgan was terrified. He’d seen enough cop shows to know that if he took the gun, his prints would be all over it. What if the sheriff was trying to frame him? Why couldn’t the idiot simply accept it had been a suicide?

  The sheriff pushed the gun forward, almost all the way into Morgan’s hand.

  Morgan looked at it—the gun that had sent their day spiraling down into madness. He had no choice.

  Slowly, with a trembling hand, Morgan reached out—

  His jittering fingers touched the barrel.

  “That’s it,” said Hoyt encouragingly. “Take the gun.”

  Morgan pulled on the end of the revolver.

  It wouldn’t move.

  The sheriff wouldn’t let go!

  Hoyt leaned forward into the light, his broad face creasing with sadistic relish. And when Morgan saw the sheriff place a callused finger on the trigger of the revolver, the boy knew he was dead.

  The game was over.

  Someone turned a TV on. It was loud—loud enough to stir Andy’s consciousness into feeling the searing pain of the rock salt, and the deep rending agony of the meat hook.

  And the horror played on.

  Mask-skin flailing, the blood-shitting freak scurried about the clutter of his domain—neatly tearing a sheet of brown paper from a dispenser, testing a pair of meat shears, oiling and taking careful, methodical care of the them.

  He snipped off a length of brown twine, bustling through the corroded symbols of his spiritual pathology, working, laboring and pounding for some ultimate goal. Some senseless act of visceral human reduction.

  Morgan sighed, waiting for the inevitable, when the sheriff relaxed his grip and placed the gun fully inside the boy’s hand.

  The bastard!

  “Show me,” said the sheriff, suddenly a picture of formality carved in razor edge uncertainty.

  “You want me to . . .”

  Morgan left the question unfinished. He knew what the sheriff wanted him to do, but he was determined not to do it. He couldn’t.

  But the sheriff nodded.

  He wanted the boy to put the gun inside his mouth. Just like the girl did. He wanted Morgan to place his own lips around the same cold metal she had kissed just before she died.

  Morgan’s hand started to tremble even more. He couldn’t do it. He saw her in his mind’s eye. It was this gun. She used this same damned gun!

  He started to cry.

  “Come on, you can do it,” said the sheriff. “Show me.”

  Only the sound of his voice wasn’t supportive or reassuring. If anything, the police officer sounded greedy. And now there was that hungry look in his eyes again
, the same look he’d had when he’d teased the boy by keeping hold of the gun.

  Just what did this bastard want?

  Shaking, terrified, and humiliated, Morgan swallowed hard and began to raise the gun. He tried to lift it right up, to get it all over with, but he couldn’t. He just couldn’t bring himself to place the suicide weapon anywhere near his mouth. And he kept his fingers well away from the trigger.

  Hoyt began to grow impatient. “Quit wasting my goddamn time!”

  “Please . . . No, I—”

  “Morgan?” called Erin from outside. “Are you all right?”

  The guys had been in the van a long time and they were talking low—the girls had no idea what was going on.

  Shivering with fear, Morgan forced himself to bring the barrel under his jaw. His teeth had begun to chatter and his hand was shaking wildly. Once, twice, the end of the gun flicked up and hit him on the chin. How far did the sheriff want him to go?

  Oh my God—

  Morgan lifted his gaze from the deadly weapon and looked into the sheriff’s eyes. Hoyt was watching him the way the spider watches a fly, all the while preserving the thin veneer that separated investigation from intimidation, inquiry from insanity.

  “You sure she did it like that?” he asked slyly.

  “Y . . . yes,” stuttered the boy, his jaw still rattling freely.

  Hoyt paused, watched Morgan tremble, then, “How’d she shoot herself without her finger on the trigger?”

  “Oh God, please—”

  “Put your finger on the trigger.”

  “Please stop.”

  “Put your finger on the trigger.”

  A flood of warm tears streamed down Morgan’s face and he started to weep uncontrollably, verging on hysteria, with the gun still held close to his mouth.

  Sheriff Hoyt had broken him. He’d used his authority and strength of will to completely crush the kid. And he’d been able to do it because everything about the sheriff made it clear that he was comfortable with violence. He’d lived with violence, had used violence, and wasn’t afraid of violence—and that’s what made him different from the three of them. And, in Morgan’s eyes, that’s what made Sheriff Hoyt inhuman. The threat of violence underscored everything the sheriff said and did.

  So, although it was Morgan who held the gun, it was the police officer that had all the power.

  The bedroom was a dark, depressing hovel laden with memories.

  Nothing had changed over the years, not since childhood. The wallpaper was a peeling, faded print of cowboys at a rodeo. And there were old school pennants stuck on the walls. Except the pennants were stolen.

  The boy who’d slept in this room never went to school. He wasn’t allowed. When all the other kids saw him, they’d screamed. Even the adults had screamed—they still screamed. The only people who didn’t scream were family; and when family were home, it was the boy who’d screamed, over and over.

  His mind had grown out of a morass of retarded savagery where fighting, wounds and suppurating meat had held sway. They had beaten each other—all his family—screaming, fighting, cutting, feeding.

  No, the school pennants weren’t his; they’d belonged to the cute, clever kids he’d murdered, disemboweled and worn. He’d taken everything the kids had, and their families. Now that he was much older, he still heard the squealing of the animals.

  Like when he’d got a job at the slaughterhouse—the only thing he’d been good for. Where he’d beaten the animals over the head and killed them. He’d strangled them with his bare hands. He’d stabbed them in the eyes. He’d put a sackcloth over their heads and rammed a chainsaw straight through their mouths.

  He’d defeated, slaughtered and ruled them simply because he could, just like family. Like people, where violence and death put food on the table. Where death created meaning and power.

  Every day since he’d been born he’d lived in a slaughterhouse and this was his room, his room at the Hewitt farmhouse.

  He had worked hard today—there had been a lot to get done—but it was almost all over. He could draw the brown drapes and sit down to work by the sputtering electric lamplight.

  No one could see him as he sat alone, unmasked, the profile of his face horribly indented where his nose should have been.

  Alone, the harvesting butcher stuffed one of his cankerous hands into a deep bowl of moist animal fat. He then scooped up a thick gobbet of shit-grease and smoothed it into the flesh resting in his lap. A newly cut face. Caressing, massaging, lubricating.

  He sat in an armchair, the flaccid red skin lying softly in his groin, fingering the face, and the new expression that he might put on.

  Slowly now, he wrapped the tender skin round his face and pulled the thick scalp of hair over his head. Then gently, savagely, excitedly, he took up needle and coarse thread and began to sew the new encasement tightly around his head.

  As his stitching pulled the different sections of severed skin together in a suffocating helmet of murdered flesh, he began to pant with delirium. Soon he could barely move, his head firmly restricted in the new leather mask, yet still he pulled more tightly on the thread. It was smothering him, thrilling him, becoming him.

  A few moments later and the job was complete. He broke the needle free from the final length of catgut with a grunt, then sank back in his chair, spent.

  And for a moment he felt very, very tired.

  “What’s going on in there?” shouted Erin as she lay facedown on the ground.

  Pepper gave her a look of concern. They couldn’t hear everything that was going on between Morgan and the sheriff, but they’d heard enough to know that something wasn’t right.

  Erin began to climb up to her feet, but the sheriff had seen her.

  “Don’t you dare get up,” he threatened her, his face turning right round to scowl at her through the open side door.

  She lay down again, leaving the sheriff to carry on where he’d left off. But when Hoyt turned back to look at Morgan again, he found himself staring down the barrel of a gun. Morgan was holding the revolver, point blank in the sheriff’s face.

  “YOU SON OF A BITCH!” shouted Morgan, terrified yet furious that the sheriff had driven him so close to the brink of his own mortality—and sanity. “Get on the floor!” he shouted, and now his finger was on the trigger.

  The sheriff didn’t budge, “Easy, boy.”

  “Morgan?” called Erin—what the hell was going on?

  “I got his gun!” shouted Morgan. “I got his fucking gun!”

  The two young women got up off the ground. None of this was real. It couldn’t be happening.

  “What the hell are you doing?” called Erin. She could see Morgan was shaking from head to toe with uncontrollable fear. He was a loaded gun full of dangerous adrenaline.

  “I don’t know,” said the boy. “But he’s a fucking whacko!”

  The sheriff calmly stared down the business end of the shooter. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t budge. He didn’t do a thing.

  “You girls see this, right?” he said calmly. “You’re witnesses.”

  Another dilemma, another crazy dilemma. All day long it had been confusion and choices. And now they had to choose between backing their friend or talking him into handing the gun over to the sheriff. Sure, Hoyt had acted like a total lunatic, but he was still the law.

  Of course, neither Pepper nor Erin knew what the sheriff had done to Morgan and the boy’s mind. And now the sheriff seemed to be trying to play all three of them off against one another so that he could regain the advantage. Which might have worked if Morgan hadn’t got the measure of the sick bastard. Morgan knew what the sheriff was doing.

  “I told you to get on the floor!” shouted the boy, moving the gun right up between the sheriff’s eyes.

  Hoyt ignored the threat and continued to study the boy’s irresolute face, reading his every scared emotion.

  “He pulls that trigger,” said Hoyt loudly, “you girls are accomplices. You know
that?”

  Erin and Pepper didn’t know what to do—it was all too much. They’d had the suicide, Kemper had gone missing and Erin had seen that maniac up at the farmhouse, and now what was happening? Was Morgan gonna be a cop killer?

  “What should I do?” cried Morgan, almost screaming with fear.

  “I don’t know!” answered Pepper, her voice torn with unrestrained emotion.

  “Should I shoot him?”

  Erin stepped forward. This had gone too far. They had to work things out with the sheriff. He was the law. They had to convince him to go up to the farmhouse—for Andy’s sake.

  “Put down the gun, Morgan.” She tried to sound calm, but her voice cracked.

  Hoyt pushed his head forward, ramming his brow into the cold steel barrel of the gun.

  “You shit heel!” he shouted. No cocksucker was going to mess with the sheriff in his own town.

  Morgan wavered, the gun suddenly heavy in his hand.

  “I already got you for assault,” Hoyt raged.

  But the boy shouted over him, “YOU’RE LYING!”

  The sheriff sniffed and eyed him calmly. “Pull the trigger, you little shit, and find out.”

  Erin could see it all: Morgan brandishing the gun, scared out of his wits and capable of anything; the sheriff goading Morgan, urging him on, pushing his face into the weapon. There was only one tragic way this could end.

  “Morgan! Put it down!” she shouted.

  The boy looked at the two girls—Pepper and Erin were now standing right up by the open side door. And he then looked at the sheriff and his leering, domineering, fat Texan fuck of a face.

  “Go ahead,” sneered the Sheriff. “Pull it. If it’s loaded, you’ll get away scot-free. But folks around here don’t like cop killers.”

  Tears ran down Morgan’s cheeks. “You motherfucker.”

  Erin could see it coming, almost as if time was slowing down. “Morgan! Don’t!”

  The sheriff’s sneering face pushed closer. “Do it, you pussy! Pull the fucking trigger! Pull it! PULL IT!”

  The moment—freeze frame—

  Eyes, Erin, Pepper, Hoyt, the gun, fear, mockery, panic.

  The boy’s finger went tight.

  The barrel was on the sheriff’s head.