by Stephen Hand
Henrietta sniffed, blew one last puff of smoke into the baby’s face and stubbed the cigarette out in an overflowing ashtray lying on the bed. But she said nothing. And the phone was plain to see. It was there, right beside her on the bed stand.
“What the hell’s going on?” Erin demanded, but suddenly she was feeling very weak and her legs started to buckle beneath her. She stomped, putting a foot behind her to try and prevent her knees from giving way.
“C’mere and lie down,” said Henrietta, patting a space on the bed cover. “B’fore you faint dead away.”
Erin gripped the side of the open doorway. She could barely stand upright.
What the hell was happening to her? Where was the guy with the chainsaw? Why hadn’t he attacked her yet? The photos.
Her head was spinning.
Henrietta was with him in the photos. That was him—the maniac as a child. No, not those photos.
Her memory struggled to tell her something, something important.
The other photos. The baby. The baby right here in the trailer, not the baby in the Christmas photo—the baby in the Polaroid, THE BABY IN THE POLAROID!
Suddenly it was clear.
That’s what had been niggling her about the baby—
She’d seen it before!
Henrietta’s baby was wearing the same pajamas as the baby in the Polaroid they’d found at the automobile graveyard. Morgan had picked up that jar from inside the smashed-up Californian station wagon, and he’d found two Polaroids suspended in amber fluid. One of the pictures was a portrait of the girl who’d shot herself, but the other was a picture of the dead girl’s family. The baby in the family photo and the baby here in the trailer were one and the damned same!
Which meant Henrietta’s baby was the suicide girl’s younger sister.
Jesus Christ!
Erin fought hard to remember everything she saw on that Polaroid. She had to understand. There was more. There were the parents, the teenage girl, the baby and someone else. Yes, there was a young boy and he wore a Felix the Cat T-shirt . . . just like . . . Oh my God . . . just like Jedidiah.
The family! The whole fucking family!
Erin began to cry, her tears an uncontrollable expression of sorrow fused with anger.
Just as her own day had been an unbelievable string of terrifying events, another story now started to unfold within her mind—a story about a family heading for California, who took a wrong turn in Travis County, Texas. A story about a mother and father, savagely murdered. And about their daughter, driven insane with fear but able to escape her captors before taking her own life with a revolver.
A story about their eldest son, stranded in the wilderness, surviving as best he could in a decrepit abandoned mill, adapting to whatever fate threw at him. And a story about their youngest daughter, a baby fostered by a lying fat maniac bitch—a baby who would never know her real family.
The whole damn bastard story was becoming clear to Erin and with it came one final unbearable revelation.
Jedidiah’s constant fascination with the dead teenage girl—it wasn’t morbid curiosity. She was his sister. They’d driven up there to Crawford Mill with her dead body in the back.
And—
Oh no.
The teenage girl had panicked because she’d seen that sign by the side of the road:
DRIVE SLOW, SEE OUR CITY
DRIVE FAST, SEE OUR SHERIFF
She’d panicked because she’d seen the sign before and she knew where it would take them. So she’d run forward and tried to force Kemper to turn around, but Andy had overpowered her, and Erin had tried to calm her down. And that’s why she’d killed herself. Because they’d ignored her. They didn’t listen to what she’d tried to tell them. So she blew her own brains out rather than risk being caught by that face-cutting freak again.
Erin could still hear the gunshot.
They’d killed the girl.
They’d ignored her.
But maybe—please God—maybe there was a way Erin could undo some of the harm. That poor little baby could not be allowed to grow up among these crazy bastards.
Still holding on to the doorframe, Erin lifted her head and glared at Henrietta.
“That . . . is not . . . your . . . CHILD!”
Fear spat across Henrietta’s piggish eyes, the bright eye shadow doing nothing to lift them from the bulbous wall of fat that was her face.
“She’s mine!” she shouted, clutching the baby tight to her breast.
The can of beans fell to the floor, spilling onto the carpet.
“YOU STOLE HER!” screamed Erin.
She took a step forward and reached out to snatch the baby, when everything suddenly moved. The floor tilted and rocked beneath her feet, while the walls of the trailer rippled and revolved, expanding out of all proportion.
* * *
“I don’t . . . I don’t . . .” Erin fell to the floor as the drug took hold.
She looked up.
Henrietta had relaxed her grip on the baby, but was still carrying the little girl as she stared down at Erin sprawled across the bedroom floor.
“Everything’s going to be fine real soon,” said Henrietta sweetly. “I promise.”
Then she shifted her flabby, round head out of the way, unblocking a view up to the skylight.
Though there was a bright lamp in the bedroom, Erin could see up through the clear hatch, right up to the stars. And now she knew she’d been drugged because the stars all seemed to be moving.
A moment later and Erin was fast asleep, knocked out cold.
But the stars continued moving.
Outside, the trailer had been hitched up to a truck and the whole damned thing was on the move, rolling and bumping along the unpaved moonlit trail.
THIRTEEN
She was the last.
Kemper had vanished. He’d gone with her up to the farmhouse and just disappeared. When she saw him again, it was a few hours later in the horrifying form of a death mask.
Andy had also been lost up at the Hewitt place. Erin couldn’t be sure, but she thought she’d heard him get cut up by the chainsaw—either way, he never came back.
Pepper, she’d seen for herself. She saw how that bastard churned up her insides and wore them like freaking body lotion.
Only Morgan had got away, and he’d been arrested, which was kinda ironic.
Which just left Erin.
And even she had no idea how truly alone she was.
Liquid was splashing down onto her face. It was lukewarm and it stung her eyes. Some of it burned the tiny cuts on her lips, and surged forward into her mouth, causing her to choke. She coughed and began to heave up from the abyss of a deep sleep, shocked awake by the fluid poured all over her.
She was lying on her back.
And then there was the light. At first it hurt her eyes, so she blinked and raised her hands to shield them. But someone kept knocking her arms away, making sure that her head got thoroughly soaked.
Gradually, she began to see that she was staring up at a large rotating fan, set in the middle of a water-stained ceiling high above. She couldn’t feel any draft from the fan, only the damned splashing liquid.
She spat some of the liquid back out, and tried to move her head out of the way. It was killing her eyes, and it stank. It was bourbon. Someone was pouring liquor all over her face, and suddenly the memories of the day came rushing back, depriving her of the reassuring ignorance of sleep. Almost immediately, she knew she wasn’t in the trailer any more. The ceiling was too high and—
Jedidiah’s face popped into view.
“She’s alive,” he called out, a wide smile on his face. “Grandma, she’s alive!”
The boy was pushed aside and suddenly Erin’s view was full of Sheriff Hoyt, laughing and pouring bourbon all over her face.
She cried out.
“Give her some room,” said a voice from somewhere off to the side. It was a voice Erin recognized—a grating, old woman’s vo
ice.
The sheriff sneered and spilled one last dash of stinging booze into Erin’s left eye before stepping away.
Erin struggled to make sense of it all.
Where the hell was she? What was the boy doing here? And why was the sheriff—
Her fear knew all the answers even before she did. Erin barely had time to articulate even a fraction of all the questions running through her brain, when suddenly she knew where she was.
No longer under the influence of the drug put in her tea by Henrietta, Erin nevertheless felt dazed and confused as she sat up and looked all around the living room of the Hewitt house.
They were all here, all of them, the whole damn town.
Jedidiah stood to the side and watched her excitedly. He was holding the baby from the trailer—and so he should; it was his little sister. But what the hell were they both doing here? Had Jedidiah hooked up with these crazy bastards? Didn’t he care that they killed his parents?
Then she saw the sheriff. Sheriff fucking Hoyt. The sadistic backwater cop was a cliché in his own uniform.
At least Erin now understood how the Hewitts had been getting away with it all for so long. There was no way they could have hidden all those wrecked cars out in that clearing all these years without at least someone becoming suspicious. And all the reports of missing people that must have come through here? Hoyt probably wiped his ass on them.
Henrietta was nowhere around, but the fact that the baby was here meant she must be someplace nearby.
And finally that voice. The voice that had told the sheriff to give Erin some room . . .
Erin turned round and saw Luda May sitting across the room from her in an armchair. Almost the last piece of the jigsaw. Suddenly Erin understood the game they’d all been playing.
From the moment Luda May had sent the van up to Crawford Mill, Erin and her friends had been delayed, confused, separated and slaughtered. In a couple of days, the little witch would be selling their clothes, luggage and their fucking auto parts down at the store. The ruthless old bitch.
Just beyond Luda May’s chair was an open doorway into another room. There was a TV on and she could see Old Monty watching it. The show had a laugh track but Monty looked as miserable as sin. He reached down and scratched his nuts, parting his knee-stump thighs to make sure he got his fingers in the crevice good and proper.
Suddenly she tensed. Where was—?
One person was still missing, the freak Erin hoped never to see again in her life. Where was he? And why had Henrietta brought her here? What did they want?
Dumb question. Erin knew what they wanted; they wanted her dead. Only they had no intention of getting it over with quickly. If they simply wanted to kill her, they could easily have slit her throat or shot her while she was drugged. But no, that was too quick for them, too clean.
From what she’d seen so far, the way it had all been drawn out, these hillbilly bastards got off on fear and intimidation. It wasn’t just about meat or death; it was also about abuse and the sheer extremities of gratuitous terror.
Erin wiped her face and blew her nose, trying to clear away the liquor. She could see the sheriff watching her, eyeing her, checking her over.
Morgan!
If the sheriff was here, where was Morgan?
The last Erin had seen of her friend was when the sheriff had arrested and taken him away in the squad car. Was Morgan here as well? And would she ever find out what had happened to Andy and Kemp—
Kemper.
Oh God, the face . . .
He’d been wearing Kemper’s face while butchering Pepper’s remains.
Suddenly, Erin was shaking. Snot dripped over her lips and tears began to fill her eyes. She looked across at Luda May but the old woman stared right back at her like she was nothing more than a bobcat turd.
And yet when Luda May had told Hoyt to move away from Erin, the broad-necked sheriff had done so, almost as if the old woman was in charge. Maybe Erin could . . .
“Please let me go,” the girl begged. “I’m pregnant.”
Perhaps she could connect with Luda May in some way—woman to woman. Maybe she could get her to feel some sympathy, or anything.
But the old woman was having none of it.
“I know you and your kind,” she spat. “You never had nothing but cruelty and ridicule for our son, and even here you don’t leave him alone.” She raised a gnarled fist and began to pound on her own sternum. “Does anybody around here care about me and my son? Huh?”
Her son?
That was it!
They were all family.
Old Monty and Luda May were man and wife, Mister and Missus Hewitt and the sideshow killer was their son. Which could have made Henrietta their daughter—Erin remembered seeing the photographs of Henrietta standing with the boy before and after his debilitating facial condition. Erin wasn’t sure where Sheriff Hoyt belonged, but she was sure of one thing.
There was no way on God’s good earth that either Henrietta or her psychopathic freak of a brother was ever going to have a family. So if nothing else ever happened to these bastards, they’d at least die of old age and take their sick mental disease with them.
“Please, Grandma,” called Jedidiah. “She’s got a baby inside her.”
The boy was actually trying to help, but what he said almost tore Erin apart. Suddenly she realized that Jedidiah and the baby were the future of the Hewitt family. They’d raise the kids up to be as perverted and evil as them. They’d probably even get Jedidiah to fuck his younger sister, just to make sure there’d be more little Hewitts on the way.
Still sitting on the floor, Erin looked pleadingly at the boy and she began to cry hard. Partly she was crying for herself, and partly she was crying for what Jedidiah was going to become. Even his name. What Californian kid would choose such an old-fashioned bible-thumping name? Somehow this madness had to end.
Jedidiah watched her sob, but there was no expression on his face other than enthusiasm for Erin’s pregnancy.
“What if it’s a boy,” he said out loud. “I could have me a brother.”
Erin sank, her head drooping to see that Jedidiah was wearing mismatched shoes. The left shoe in particular was way too large for his foot because it came from Andy.
“You just forget about that right quick,” Luda May warned the boy.
The chilling implication was obvious. Erin’s pregnancy was never going to happen. Both the girl and the baby were going to be terminated—the old fashioned way.
Jedidiah bawled and then ran crying out of the room. But Erin only had eyes for the left shoe, the one he’d stolen from Andy.
Everyone she’d spoken to, everything she’d seen and heard, everywhere she’d looked all day long, Erin had been staring into the dripping sores of madness.
The commotion was getting to him. TOO MUCH had been happening around the house these last few days!
He shuffled about the room in tight disordered circles, his breath ruffled and distorted by the loose skin flaps of Kemper’s lips. His bedroom was next door to the living room and he could hear them all TALKING AND SHOUTING through the wall because it was cracked.
He was cracked and he wanted it to stop. He had things to do and he wanted to do them to the girl.
He placed an eye up to a small, crumbling hole in the wall and panted AT ERIN in the living room.
Erin didn’t know what they wanted from her.
Luda May just stared while the sheriff started to grab at her and shove her around. She didn’t dare move or get up; she just sat there on the living room floor with her legs stretched out in front of her. But it was getting too much.
The insanity of it all, the unbearable tension, waiting for the moment when the whole situation would turn on the head of a pin; constantly skating close to the edge of violence that was sure to happen. Finally, she snapped.
“What’s wrong with you fucking people?” she cried, she just couldn’t take it any more.
Sheriff Hoyt
just sniggered but Luda May shook her head disapprovingly. Those kids had shown they got no manners down at the store, but if they thought they could bring their dirty mouths into her own home, then she’d have to teach them otherwise.
“Tommy!” she called. “Thomas Brown Hewitt! Come here, now!”
Erin wept. There was only one person Thomas Brown Hewitt could be. One person.
No.
The footsteps came from just down the hallway. They were heavy, loud and forceful, making the floorboards creak under the strain. Yet the steps were also fast and irregular, almost as if the person wasn’t walking but having some kind of orgasmic fit.
He was almost inside the room. Erin could hear his breathing now, but she didn’t want to look. She didn’t want to see that mask made from Kemper’s face. She didn’t want to touch his bloodstained leather apron.
She didn’t want to be smothered by his rippling, murderous fat. She didn’t want those hands to touch her breasts. She didn’t want the smell or the rotting teeth, and, oh God, she didn’t want him to kill her.
Leatherface hurled his massive quivering frame in through the open doorway and stamped his feet all around the young woman crying on the floor.
Luda May got up and pushed the ugly bastard right at Erin.
“Get her out of my sight,” she said disgustedly, and then the dam broke.
His hands were suddenly all over her, grabbing, pulling, tugging and gripping. She could feel his rank breath on her face and she could have died each time she heard him rant and squeal from inside Kemper’s face.
His thumb accidentally caught her in the eye, jabbing her with a long, dirty nail caked in corpse shit. Just like Kemper, Andy, and many others before her, Erin found there was nothing at all she could do to stop Leatherface misusing her.
Despite all her kicking, punching and screaming, he dragged her out of the living room like an old sack of potatoes—and the full horror of her ordeal returned to her. No longer could she pretend that it wasn’t real. She couldn’t hide in Henrietta’s trailer and somehow think that all the rules had changed. It was just like it was before, when she came here with Andy and when the industrial sliding door had first fired open.