The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

by Stephen Hand

  Henrietta had talked about Leatherface like he was some kind of victim, and Luda May seemed to treat him like a no-good layabout son, but Thomas Brown Hewitt was screaming . . . fucking . . . terror.

  “No!” wailed Erin, but she was wasting her stupid breath.

  Soon she was out in the main hallway, going right past the bathroom where the old cripple had faked his fall, past the weird kitchen with its hanging strips of meat and down towards—no—the sliding metal door.

  The door was already half open, revealing the sickly green light from within.

  Erin screamed and tried to dig her heels into the ground, but the wooden floor was too well polished, and for a moment she was sliding in the grip of the maniac. But suddenly he shrieked—showering her face with spit—and slammed her up against the wall, pressing his body against hers, his apron of dried human skin scraping her bare arms and shoulders.

  She could feel tremors of excitement shaking through his fat as he crushed his twitching mass against her, screaming full on in her face before finally picking her up and hauling her right across his shoulders.

  She was helpless, her back on his back, as he bulldozed down the hall and lugged her flailing limbs through the sliding door. She had no idea where he was taking her. When Leatherface stood at the top of the basement stairs and threw her over his head, down the long staircase, she couldn’t even guess what was about to happen to her.

  At first she was falling through midair, but when she finally hit the steps, the impact knocked all the wind out of her and suddenly her bones were crashing against wood and concrete in a whirlwind of uncontrolled descent.

  As she fell, her head cracked against the wall, leaving behind a mat of bloody hair and it seemed as if something in her body would break at any moment. But when she finally crashed into the water-covered floor of the basement, she was amazed to find herself conscious and in one piece. And terrified.

  Ignoring the pains erupting all over her body, she rolled over onto her back, got up on all fours and moved, crab-like, away from the foot of the stairs. She splashed backwards through the filthy water, not knowing if he was going to be coming down after or not.

  For the moment, adrenaline was masking the agony of her fall. She didn’t seem to have broken any bones, but she was coming up in bruises, and she’d definitely damaged some muscles.

  Suddenly the whole house shook with a colossal booming of metal. It was a sound she’d heard before—when she’d been trapped in the bathroom with Old Monty. She’d heard that same loud crash and had known something had gone wrong with Kemper. So she’d gone looking for him only to draw a blank . . . right outside the sliding door!

  Crying with panic, she struggled to her feet and staggered over to the bottom of the stairs. She looked up. Hewitt wasn’t there, but the metal door had been closed—and that’s what she’d heard.

  Hard to believe it had been only a few hours ago. But that must have been when the Hewitts had taken Kemper. While Monty had kept her tied up in the bathroom, his son—Leatherfuck—must have gone out and killed Kemper. The murderous freak was probably bringing her boyfriend down here to the basement when she’d heard the door slam.

  Erin cried.

  Ankle deep in shit water, she cried.

  Time passed.

  Erin dried her eyes and began to feel just how banged up she was by the fall, though she was lucky not to have a broken neck. She could easily have died the way he just threw her over his shoulder like that—the bastard.

  Her clothes were soaking wet from the foul-smelling water on the floor and she was bleeding, tired, and in shock.

  They’d locked her in the cellar of the Hewitt house and, if she was right about the sound of the metal door, then Kemper was down here as well. But Hewitt had skinned her boyfriend’s face, so if Kemper was somewhere in the basement, what condition would he be in? How could he be the father of her child if he hadn’t got a face? Would he have to wear . . . a mask?

  Now, like Andy and Kemper before her, Erin took her first good look at the ramshackle deprivation of the slaughterhouse basement.

  It was dark. There seemed to be a flickering light—a fire—just round the corner, but most of the place was bathed in shadow. And there was so much insane clutter strewn all over the place that Erin found it hard to take any of it in.

  She closed her eyes, pushed her long hair back behind her ears, and tried to relax. She needed to pull herself together if she was going to search this place. She had to be ready for anything she might find, anything.

  When she opened her eyes again, the first thing she noticed was how much stuff was up off the ground: pipes, chains, hooks, pulleys, shelves with jars and tools of all kinds.

  The second thing that hit her was the smell—and she vomited, her puke splashing into the water around her feet, washing up against her calves. She raised a forearm up to her nose, but couldn’t block it out. It smelt as if someone had taken a month-old dead cow and drowned it in its own putrescent shit. But all Erin could do was get used to it.

  She thought she was going to puke a second time but she hadn’t eaten all day, so all she did was spasm, racking her already bruised and battered rib cage.

  A minute or two passed before she got it under control and then she slowly stepped deeper into the basement.

  Up, down, left, right—her eyes flinched at the realization that she had just walked into an unholy butcher shop with strips of flesh, meat, bones, blood and organs. The soiled butcher block, crushed viscera and sweet dripping blood with needle and thread lying by the cleaver and knives—so many razor-sharp knives—the needle again, attached to a length of fishing line. And the floor was awash with blood.

  She couldn’t go on. She didn’t want to know.

  There were buckets of blood standing on the floor and nearby were sets of slaughter irons and meat hooks and bone scrapers and chopping blades, covered in rust and stained with decades of murder. Lying on a rack were a series of precision blades: scalpels, delicate surgical bone saws, cold steel probes. There was nothing in this godforsaken pit that spoke of painless death.

  The basement squatted like a cancer at the heart of the Hewitt house and every damned square inch of the place was a physical expression of the sick ingenuity at the core of Thomas Hewitt’s depravity.

  Erin stared with utter disbelief at a length of human intestine wrapped around the head of a sledgehammer and realized she may already be looking at what was left of her dead partner. It must have been Hewitt who had made all those revolting things they’d found back at the mill.

  She shuddered and drew her hands in close against her aching body. She didn’t want to touch a single revolting thing, not even by accident. The basement had already cut a bleeding scar deep into her memory and she was convinced that the entire nightmarish day was affecting her mind. How else could she function down here in this dejected murder hole?

  A gentle noise came from somewhere over to her left. Afraid, Erin crept round to see a rumbling fire burning in a cast iron grate. There was a cauldron suspended over the flames and above the cauldron hung some torn strips of meat nailed into a wooden beam.

  Melted fat ran down the pieces of dead flesh and collected in the sizzling pot, the whole thing oozing with meat grease and stinking like an infected pig. Despite the heat of the fire, Erin shivered. In fact, she hadn’t been able to keep her hands still since she woke up in the Hewitt living room.

  And now she could hear another sound emanating from somewhere behind her. Faint. Bizarrely like a piano tapping notes, repetitive, tuneless and discordant. Almost like the unstructured practice notes of a brain-damaged child.

  It was a piano!

  Erin turned to see where the sound was coming from.

  “Oh my God.”

  It was Andy. She wept uncontrollably—her hair, body and clothes already soaked and lank from having earlier crawled along the wet basement floor.

  Her first thought was that he’d been crucified. He was hanging up in
the air, his intact left leg dangling some three or four feet up above the ground. His shoulders seemed to be resting against a thick old pipe that ran just below the ceiling of the room, and his arms were fully outstretched, making it seem as if his hands had been nailed to the pipe.

  But as Erin took a horrified step nearer her tortured friend, she realized—oh God, she realized—that he was hanging from a meat hook buried deep within his back. He’d pulled his arms back and rested them on the pipe in a desperate effort to try and take some of the weight, to relieve his agony.

  And then, in the flickering light of the fire, Erin registered the condition of Andy’s left leg. His right leg was fine, though strangely bare foot. Suddenly she remembered seeing Jedidiah wearing the left shoe, and the shoes for sale at Luda May’s.

  But his left leg—dear Christ—his left leg had been cut off below the knee and someone had taken the trouble to wrap the butchered stump in brown paper and twine, to staunch the bleeding. Which didn’t make any sense to Erin. Why bother to stop the bleeding, unless . . .

  Andy’s right foot twitched and she heard another melodic note.

  He was hanging over an old busted-up piano, the white keys thick with deep red blood, the black keys even blacker in the darkness of the basement. Each time his foot jerked spasmodically, he hit another note. Larger, heavier drops of blood and internal fluid also managed to get a sound from the delicate, light keys.

  Erin was hearing the young man’s death march. Not the tune played at his funeral, but the threnody that was a personal orchestration of his actual death, notes performed in the very act of his dying. It was a hollow, edgy song for the murderers to dance to.

  But was the movement of his foot a nervous reflex or . . .

  His eyes opened, not by much, but they opened.

  The boy had been hanging there on the meat hook for hours, and yet he was still alive. She could not begin to comprehend how he felt, the poor, poor bastard.

  “Andy—”

  He stared down at her. His eyes were vapid, filmy and almost unable to see. They were the sharpest measure of the dwindling life force that remained within him, but he had seen her.

  Erin could barely bring herself to look at him. It broke her heart. She’d known they must have got him, and part of her had wanted to know for sure what had happened to him, but she couldn’t bear to see her friend like this. She couldn’t bear to see anyone like this, except maybe those Hewitt bastards.

  Andy tried to talk, but nothing came out save for a slight hiss of coagulated breath. All she could hear was the faint plinking of the piano. She wanted it to stop.

  Seizing her courage, Erin hurried forward and grabbed hold of Andy’s good leg in both her hands. Then she braced herself and lifted him up, hoping to help get him off the hook.

  She didn’t know how badly injured he was—the boy looked pretty far-gone—but she had to do something. Even if they couldn’t get out of this place, at least she could try to relieve his pain, or give him some dignity.

  But the truth of the matter was that Erin was thinking more and more about escape. It wasn’t a rational thought. It wasn’t based on any special plan or knowledge. No, her desire to break free was driven by the pure primal passion for revenge. She wanted to do everything she could to get out of there, save her friends, then see the Hewitts burn in Hell.

  With each push and strain Erin tried, Andy cried out in pain. He could feel the sharp end of the hook twisting his vertebrae apart, the temperate curved metal scraping new furrows in his guts. He could barely breathe.

  She tried again—he screamed.

  She twisted—he cried out.

  She gave up.

  The hook was buried too deep and she just didn’t have the strength. Maybe if she could actually reach the damned thing.

  Erin saw a round stool standing next to a workbench. She quickly went to fetch it, and didn’t even pause when she saw that someone had nailed animal bones around the rim of the wooden seat. After what she’d seen today, a few broken bone sculptures really didn’t bother her any more—and that scared the hell out of her. Was she becoming like them?

  No.

  No fucking way.

  She dragged the stool over and managed to get Andy to put his right foot on it; again, the movement made him cry out. But once he was in position, he no longer felt his entire weight depending from the cruel barb gradually ripping upwards through his torso. The relief was immeasurable. Careful not to knock into him, Erin stepped up onto the footrest of the stool and reached up for the hook sticking out of a dark crimson patch in the back of Andy’s gray top. The rusty chain clattered as she took hold of it and slowly began to pull it out.

  Almost immediately, the basement echoed with the staccato notching of breaking vertebrae, followed by Andy’s mournful wailing—an understated lowing that bespoke of a suffering most men never have to endure. Erin’s help was killing him.

  Quickly she stopped.

  Blood was on her hands, but the hook was just as embedded as when she began. It was impossible.

  She tried again, but only succeeded in hurting him even more.

  Erin had hoped, she’d really hoped, to be able to help him. She thought she could get him down and then work out what they’d do next. But hope had been denied to her. She couldn’t even get the damned hook from out of his back. It was just like the rest of this never-ending nightmare of a day: offer hope and then take it away.

  She stepped back off the stool, her face streaked with a mud of dirt and tears.

  “I’m sorry,” she cried.

  He tried to cough but it hurt too much.

  His vision was fading in and out, and his eyelids drooped as he tried once more to speak.

  “What?” she asked, leaning closer. “I couldn’t—”

  Just like before, she couldn’t hear a thing.

  Andy seemed to lose all energy. His chin dropped onto his chest and his whole body went limp. But this was necessary. He had to pause, to muster up enough strength to make sure that the next thing he said did not go unheard.

  “Do it,” he whispered.

  Sweat dripped from his hair and landed on her bare forearm.

  She looked at him, at Andy, her friend, Kemper’s best buddy. She looked at Andy and died inside because she knew what he’d just asked her to do. There was only one thing he could mean.

  Do it.

  She couldn’t get him down, lift him off the hook or pull the bloody thing out of his back. Which left only one alternative. Erin could relieve his pain and give back some dignity the only way open to her—she could kill him. That’s what he’d asked her to do: kill him.

  Her mind went back to that sunny day on her school vacation when she’d found that orange tomcat hit by an automobile. Fine enough for mommy to talk about animal heaven, but the cat wasn’t dead when Erin found it. Half its head had been crushed, but it was still mewing and pawing pleadingly at thin air.

  It was her daddy who put the thing out of its misery; he said it was for the best. So the cat had only got to animal heaven because her dad had sent it there.

  Tears stung her eyes and she wondered if there were any pets in people heaven.

  Erin had no trouble finding what she needed—there were cutting tools scattered everywhere about this death chamber—and, in a moment, she was holding the knife. The blade was long and thin. It ended in a cruel point and was slightly curved to ensure a good sweeping cut across the edge. Both the cracked wooden handle and the knife’s corroded blade were encrusted with dried carnivorous remains, the tangible echoes of a thousand murdered screams.

  Erin gripped the knife in both hands and held it up in front of her chest as she walked back to stand directly in front of the impaled victim. Her arms trembled, causing the blade to shake as she raised it above her head. She took a deep breath—

  And froze.

  “I can’t,” she wept, and she began to lower the blade, unable to do what he’d asked her.

  “Erin, please .
. .” he croaked.

  Desperation ripped his voice apart. He tried to open his eyes to look at her, to implore her. He arched his back, almost as if trying to throw himself forward onto the knife she held before him.

  She couldn’t leave him like this. He was her friend but she couldn’t kill him. If she did, how would she be any different from poor sweet little Tommy?

  Erin was not a killer, she was human.

  And it was her humanity that now had her gritting her teeth and struggling to fight back her tears. It was her compassion that made Erin step back, look away and then rush in towards him. And it was mercy that drove the knife into his chest, the hard blade breaking through the sternum and then pushing smoothly into the vulnerable soft tissue beneath.

  Yes, it was love that spilled tears onto Andy’s chest as he died.

  Erin stood back and looked long and hard at what she’d just done. She prayed with all her heart that there really was a heaven—no man should end his days in such pain, fear and despair—and she begged God to show mercy for what she had just done. And she wasn’t even religious.

  Once the tears had almost subsided, Erin withdrew the knife from Andy’s body. The feel of the blade sliding out through the neat pocket it had made in his moist dead flesh made her feel sick, but she couldn’t leave him like that. She couldn’t just leave him to hang with the knife in his chest.

  Erin looked at the blood on her hands.

  Had she just deprived Hewitt of another victim, or had she just saved him some time?

  She could never know what went on in that bastard aberration of a mind, no matter how far she fell. Andy had begged her. He’d begged.

  She thought she hadn’t any tears left in her, but she was wrong.

  The basement lay in grim silence all around her, stretching out into corners and alcoves, daring her to look further. Would she find a way out? Would she find a weapon she could use against Leatherface? Or would she discover something else that might quicken her descent into mental oblivion?

  Erin looked at the knife in her hand. She knew she couldn’t stop Hewitt that way. He was too big, too powerful and if he used the chainsaw again . . .