The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

by Stephen Hand

  Erin cut a path through the silhouettes of broken transport and led Morgan to the far side of the car cemetery. There they saw the prairie stretch out, vast and barren before them, and it seemed like there would be nowhere to hide beneath the silver moonlight—but it was open, it was free, and they ran for it.

  FOURTEEN

  It was Morgan who saw the old house first.

  The building was concealed within a clump of tall oak and there were no lights in any of the windows, yet the boy had recognized the crooked angular silhouette for what it was. Erin’s first thought was that there might be someone in there who could help them; but the closer they ran towards the place, the more it appeared that the large two-story structure was derelict.

  By now Morgan was in a real bad way. All his strength seemed to be deserting him and Erin almost had to drag him by the shoulders through the geometrically intricate wrought-iron gates in front of the house. However, they were both gulping for air by the time they reached the front door.

  Erin knocked.

  No answer.

  They hadn’t heard the chainsaw for a minute or two, not since the flat empty ground of the prairie had quickened their retreat, but they couldn’t waste a single second of their time. Either someone inside would help them, or they’d use the place to hide.

  Erin tried again, but it was clear there was nobody home—at least nobody normal.

  Not waiting any longer, Erin turned the door handle. The door opened and they crept forward into the house.

  Inside, the building was a worm-riddled heap of rotten timber. The air was thick with dust, while the floors were covered in rat shit. None of the walls looked very sturdy; one strong gale and the place would probably collapse into a useless heap of firewood.

  Surprisingly, there were glass panels in most of the windows, but there were no drapes or blinds and the panes were all coated with cobwebs and dirt. A few of the windows, however, had been boarded up. All the same, there was enough ambient light to reveal that the house was littered with scraps of broken furniture, the upholstery eaten away by vermin.

  Erin took Morgan deeper into the building, away from the bare windows and further into darkness. They could hear the chainsaw now. Hewitt was outside and heading straight for the house.

  Suddenly Erin had to cope with her own rising panic. She couldn’t deal with Leatherface any more. Why didn’t he just quit? Why wouldn’t he leave them alone? Why couldn’t he just fuck off and die?

  Morgan sighed with pain, bringing Erin back to her senses.

  Quickly, she grabbed hold of him and steered him into a room that was pitch black, except for a single hole in a boarded-up window, through which shone a laser-like shaft of pure silver.

  The corner of the room opposite the window was lost in total darkness, so they staggered over into it and froze. Maybe if they kept quiet enough, Hewitt would go right past the house. He had no way of knowing they were in there. They could have just kept on running.

  Morgan coughed hurriedly raising his cuffed hands to stifle the noise. But he needn’t have bothered, because there was no way Leatherface could hear anything over the deafening gas-rattle of the chainsaw. It was getting louder now; they could hear him coming closer and closer to the house. There was a squeak of corroded metal—the wrought iron gate!

  Leatherface was outside.

  The engine was cut. No chainsaw, no motor, no exhaust—nothing.

  Just silence.

  Erin could hear breathing but it took her a moment to realize that the breathing was her own. Like Morgan, she was trying to catch her breath from their running. They were hyperventilating with fear, but they needed to quiet down.

  As long as that bastard had his chainsaw on, they knew exactly where he was. But now . . . now that the weapon had powered down, the psychopath could be anywhere. He might be outside the house, or he might have gone to look for them somewhere else, or he might already be . . .

  The silence was killing her.

  She beckoned Morgan to stay still, then tiptoed across to the hole in the boarded window. A moment later and her terrified eye was looking out through the crack, searching frantically in all directions for—

  Leatherface was coming in through the front door!

  Their hiding place was useless. It hadn’t worked. He was inside the house. They’d hoped he’d just walk on by, but they were wrong. They’d failed and he was coming for them. He was inside the house.

  Inside!

  They ran out, down along a short hallway to another room where they found a ragged couch set down on the floor.

  He rushed in after them, his fat convulsive footfalls intimidating them as they fled screaming before him.

  Erin slammed the door shut and then she and Morgan grabbed hold of the couch and dragged it across the room, almost slinging it down in front of the doorway.

  The chainsaw spewed into life and carved its vitriol straight through the door. One diagonal slice. Then another, cutting a splintered X into the upper half of the boards. He knew they were in there; he could smell their fear.

  From outside the door, Hewitt punched the chain bar forward through the center of the cross-gash, smashing a head-shaped hole in the painted wood. Erin looked over and saw his leering masked face peering through the gap. Now he was bleating in psychotic ecstasy and thrusting his bulky shoulders up against the closed door, as if to force his whole body through the jagged breach.

  At first Erin considered escaping through another door that she could see leading out of the room, but Leatherface would only come after them. They had to get out of the house altogether.

  She ran across to the boarded window and started to pull at some of the makeshift panels. Morgan tried his best to help but, just like Erin, he found that the boards were nailed too tight.

  Hewitt’s eyes shifted uncontrollably as he looked through the hole in the door. His every twitching freak of body skin showed how badly he wanted to break in and desecrate their flesh.

  Behind them, the chainsaw throttled into high gear and proceeded to carve a horizontal line at waist-height right across the door, refashioning the timber panels into a bastard form of a Dutch door. He’d be through any second . . .

  Morgan punched the board near the hole Erin had looked through. The wood there was weak and it splintered with a satisfying crack under the strength of the blow. But there was no time to dislodge the broken wood and climb through—Leatherface was already inside the room!

  They dashed across to the other door and found themselves sprinting through a maze of corridors and rooms with no clue where they were going, except away from the unrelenting scream of the chainsaw racing after them.

  Finally they reached a room that was bare except, incredibly, for a small crystal chandelier.

  Morgan saw a closet they could hide in and threw himself inside, but there was no room for Erin. The boy did the best he could to make space for her, pressing his agonized body up tight against the wall, but it was no good—and all the while, Leatherface was bearing down on them, stomping his feet and weeping for the chainsaw’s gut-ripping sanctity.

  Erin stood back from the closet doorway and could see that one of the walls was hollow. And there was a hole in the wall leading through! If she could just . . .

  Erin dived onto the floor and, ignoring the putrid stench of rat piss, crawled feverishly through into the wall space.

  When he was sure she was safely hidden, Morgan gently closed the closet door. And waited.

  Footsteps.

  He was in the room.

  He disengaged the clutch and the saw went low, ticking over, still pumping out exhaust fumes. They could hear his obsessive breathing, his hysterical whining. He was searching for them. Looking. Listening.

  A rat crawled on Erin’s leg. She stifled her disgust and kicked it off.

  The rat squealed . . .

  The chainsaw came screaming through the thin wall, stabbing the space above her head. Then it was gone.

  Erin
managed not to scream and curled up into as tiny a ball as she could. She could do nothing but cover her head with her hands as—

  The chainsaw penetrated the wall a second time, breaking through even closer to her body. Then he pulled back for a third violent thrust, which missed her head by the slightest whisper of blood. Each lunge was getting closer. Each time he penetrated the hollow wall, he came closer to cutting open the cringing little blood bag.

  The chainsaw reached peak revs, then just as quickly went dead, the engine switched off completely.

  Leatherface had sliced the wooden partition over and over, and now the wall behind Erin was patchily illuminated with thin angled slits of projected moonlight. But where the hell was he? What was he waiting for?

  Slowly, Erin got up, her back sliding against the wall as she rose to her feet. If she could just see out through the gashes he’d made—

  TWO ARMS BROKE THROUGH THE RUINED WALL BEHIND HER AND GRABBED HER BY THE SHOULDERS—LEATHERFACE!

  With unstoppable force, the maniac seized Erin and pulled her back through the wall, the aged wood panel snapping and falling with her as she collapsed painfully into his power.

  Then, in one disordered motion, he lifted her and chucked her over his shoulder. She screamed and punched him on the back. She clawed at his face, collecting shreds of Kemper under her nails. But there was nothing she could do. Nothing. And the sense of despair overwhelmed her.

  Hewitt lumbered back into the room, Erin in one arm, the chainsaw in the other. She was struggling, trying to resist, but his attention had been grabbed by the sound of loud, rhythmic banging. Slow, continuous, repeating . . .

  Morgan was standing outside the closet and was opening and closing the door, to draw Leatherface to him. The anguished youth tried to speak but, thanks to Sheriff Hoyt, his words came out as nothing but primitive grunts. Yet still, the meaning was clear.

  There was sorrow in Morgan’s cries, there was pain in them, but there was also sheer blind hatred. He was calling Hewitt to him. He was challenging the psychopathic skin-fetishist motherfucker. He was trying to distract Leatherface so that Erin might break free.

  “Morgan, no!” cried the girl—he couldn’t possibly win.

  But Morgan ignored her and ran close to Leatherface, stepping back, dodging, weaving, and then moving closer as if going to punch him. Hewitt slammed out an arm and chopped Morgan in the throat. The boy cried out and dropped to his knees, his windpipe in excruciating pain. He’d been so winded that if he hadn’t already been struggling to breathe, he probably would’ve chucked.

  Leatherface pitched his shoulder forward and slammed Erin onto the ground where he pinned her flat on her stomach by placing one of his fat spastic boots onto the flat of her back. Erin squirmed and tried to crawl free, but he was too strong, and she felt her ribs threaten to crack under the pressure.

  Quickly, Hewitt dropped the chainsaw—it hit the old floorboards with the sound of a leather anvil—then picked the toothless little bastard up by the scruff of his scrawny neck. He hauled Morgan up towards the chandelier and hooked the boy’s arms up over one of the metal and crystal branches until suddenly the boy was hanging from the ornate light by his own handcuffs.

  Then Leatherface let go, causing Morgan to drop, and the steel bracelets to cut deeper into the already bleeding skin of his wrists.

  Morgan cried out.

  The situation was helpless: Erin underfoot, Morgan hanging like a fish on a hook and Leatherface master of them all.

  Morgan’s legs kicked and flailed in midair, the turbulence shaking up dust and traces of stinking rat fuck. He tried to shout but his jaw was broken and pain shot throughout his body.

  Leatherface wrenched on the starting cord of the chainsaw and suddenly he was back in shit-kicking business.

  Morgan wanted to scream but could only squeal like a piglet through his damaged mouth.

  Erin fought all she could and hollered in sympathy for what she knew must surely be coming, but she was like a fly on the windshield of the freeway.

  Thomas Brown Hewitt, on the other hand, roared through the serrated cylinder lips of the Kemper-face and lifted the rotating cutter straight up through the middle of Morgan’s legs.

  Up through the groin, up through the abdomen—blue sparks flying in the dark midnight room—and up through the victim boy’s chest, roaring and killing the twitching little bastard, as he shook from the chandelier in tight-lipped self-pity. The whining pathetic coon-shit.

  Blood sprayed out from the jolting corpse, splashing against Hewitt’s man-apron, forming a cologne of death on Erin’s bare neck and face below.

  She looked up from beneath the bastard’s shoe and watched him struggle, as he tugged the saw up into bone and tendon. Wrench, wrench, wrench—godammit how he wrenched—until at last the saw broke free and carved its way upwards in a fountain of red cardiovascular puke.

  But the sharp release of the saw from Morgan’s remains caused the killer to lose his balance. Leatherface toppled sideways and suddenly Erin was loose. She didn’t wait. The moment she felt the bone-breaking weight shift from above her, she crawled forward and rolled out from under him.

  He saw her, but the chain was caught in Morgan’s neck. He gave it more revs, to crack through the spinal cord, but Erin was already bursting out of the room.

  Leatherface screamed and fed the saw more and more power, so that he could disentangle it from the hanging corpse and go out after her. Flecks of neck tissue spat into his mask and he squealed, licking the blood off his lips.

  Erin hurtled down the passageway and out through the front door. They never should have stopped at that old place—how did they even begin to think they could have hidden in there from him?

  He probably knew every damned square inch of this town; it was his slaughter ground. And now Morgan was dead. Morgan, poor Morgan. She remembered him rolling his joint, smiling, without a care in the world. The poor bastard.

  Drops of Morgan’s blood were on her tank top, where capillary action blended the iron red corpuscles into her sweat, forming a chromatography of hatred.

  She was limping and suddenly realized her leg was injured. She wasn’t sure where or how. It all blurred into twelve hours of pain, and she ran.

  The chainsaw sputtered and smoked in the moonlight, his screaming obese musculature wanting to kill her—kill—kill—kill.

  Erin sucked the air in tired, desperate gasps. The land was uncultivated and thick with weeds. Wild branches and vines tore at her, but they meant nothing. Morgan, Pepper, Andy and Kemper were everything to her now.

  He saw her hit a branch and fall. She lay there still, like a dead body. He would—No. She was rising. Please let me—PLEASE!

  She heard him flick the throttle. The chainsaw ripped and roared as she got up on her feet and carried on running.

  Christ, when she just fell, she saw him coming towards her, charging like a bull elephant soaked in Morgan’s blood and wearing the face of her lover. The bastard just kept on coming. Why wouldn’t he die? WHY?

  * * *

  They ran beneath the moonlit sky, locked in the almost prehistoric truth of man hunting his prey. There was a certain perverse beauty to the image of Erin fleeing across this traditional Texan landscape with the impossibly iconic psychopathy of Leatherface chasing after her. His mask, his chainsaw and the way he moved—they were a faultless lesson in the design of fear.

  Erin came to a wire fence and vaulted over it like it was made of matchstick.

  Hewitt came soon after and tried to force his way through, but collapsed in a thrashing heap of flesh and wire. He cried out as he staggered and fell, his thigh making shocking contact with the impartial horsepower cruelty of the chainsaw.

  The cutting blades bit into his leg and he screamed. And as the skin of his thigh separated, it became a slick mouth of white fat, porous with vesicles of oozing blood.

  BLOOD!

  Leatherface screamed and thrashed about in the barbed tangle, the engine of t
he chainsaw matching his cries note for note.

  Erin stopped to see what had happened, and had to stifle an insane giggle at the sight of the murderous bastard caught up in the wire. He was just stuck there, howling and kicking like he was poor Tommy Hewitt with his skin cancer.

  Maybe Aunt Henrietta could come along and kiss his big, fat, whining ass—the stupid bitch! And while she was at it, maybe Henrietta could find a way to bring Jedidiah back to life, and the teenage girl, and all the other poor bastards they’d all killed.

  Erin suddenly remembered the image of the sheriff pouring bourbon onto her face, and realized just how much these maniacs needed to suffer. She hoped the wire fence ripped the ugly fuck into shreds.

  And then she was gone.

  Twenty, maybe thirty yards on, Erin stumbled out of the shrubbery and was amazed to find herself standing in the middle of a highway.

  Her feet were on tarmac.

  She could hear the chainsaw and Hewitt’s screaming, but she had found an artery that could take her to anywhere in America. All she needed, the only thing she needed, was—

  An automobile was heading along the road towards her, its headlights like champagne in the darkness of the hour.

  Erin ran out and waved her arms, “Stop!”

  She was begging, almost willing the car to free her from this nightmare.

  The vehicle broke hard, its tires screeching as the driver worked to avoid her. The headlights bore down on Erin, on her horrified face, on her hands and arms soaked with the blood of others.

  “Help me!” she screamed. “Help me!”

  The lights were on full beam, and they hurt her eyes as she stepped forward and gestured frantically for the car to stop. She had to squint.

  The automobile slowed almost to a walking pace, then swerved to avoid her. “Please STOP!”

  But the car just crawled past the screaming, dangerous, bloodstained lunatic and began to pick up speed again.