Kill For Satan, page 6
The lying didn’t come easily because if he couldn’t make himself believe the bullshit coming out of his mouth, how could he possibly convince anyone else? At least he was usually only required to speak a couple minutes at a time. Minutes that seemed like hours. Today’s meeting was worse than usual, though, because attendance was at an all-time low. Including himself, only nine kids were at the meeting. That meant he’d have to talk more.
He was feeling intensely anxious about that as the official start time for the meeting drew near without the usual trickle of late arrivals showing up. The nine of them really were going to be the only ones here. He wished he could just leave, but his dad would find out and then there’d be holy hell to pay. Nope, he was stuck here, as always, whether he liked it or not.
A few group members retrieved some of the folding chairs stowed at the back of the basement and arranged them in a loose circle in the middle of the room. The circle was markedly smaller than usual. Seth would be much closer to the kids on the opposite side of the circle when it was his time to speak. Just thinking about the closer proximity of those faces made his armpits damp.
Something curious was going on, though, a weird vibe in the room he couldn’t quite figure out. Most other members of the group were fixated on their phones, which were usually turned off and stowed away at this point. Some of them were muttering and frantically texting away. Caitlin Winthrop was off in a corner by herself doing just that. He could see her mouthing curses. He lip-read some serious bits of profanity, the likes of which he’d never heard pass through her lips. It made him miss his confiscated phone more than ever.
He was trying to work up the nerve to ask someone—maybe even Caitlin—what was going on when the door to the basement in the far corner of the room burst open and two black-clad individuals came running in. Both looked like they were in their early twenties. The guy was tall and lanky with curly black hair to his shoulders. His female companion was in tiny hot pants and a sleeveless Cradle of Filth shirt. She was gorgeous and something in her facial features was vaguely familiar. Judging from the look of murderous rage on her face, though, he figured there was a high likelihood she was completely insane. Or pretending to be.
She raised the machete over her shoulder and screamed at the members of YALL: “Time to die for Satan, virgin bitches!”
Seth frowned.
Uh … this is pretty weird. What the fuck is going on?
His first thought was these two were playing some kind of twisted Halloween prank. It was just too obvious. Running into a meeting of a youth abstinence group and waving machetes around on Halloween seemed like exactly the kind of thing people heavily into black metal—as he assumed these two were based on that Cradle of Filth shirt and their general look—would find hilarious. They would probably take some play swipes at some of the group members with their rubber machetes, scaring the hell out of them before running out again. He had to admit it actually was kind of funny. A little smile had even formed at the edges of his mouth. Funnily enough, though, no one else in the group seemed even slightly amused. Some even looked … scared?
Seth’s frown deepened.
Huh.
Steve Combs tentatively approached the girl with his hands held outward in a placating gesture. Combs was a member of the Littleburg High football team. He was tall and had a solid linebacker’s build. It was hard to imagine a guy like Combs being afraid of a slightly built girl wielding a rubber machete, but his tentative demeanor suggested some real concern.
“Look, we don’t want any trouble here,” he told her, keeping his hands extended in what Seth now saw as a defensive or warding-off gesture. “You need to get out of here before I take that machete and—”
The girl screamed and swung the machete down, the blade slicing through Combs’s flesh and bone with shocking ease and taking his hand off at the wrist. Blood jetted from his wrist stump, splashing against the front of the girl’s Cradle of Filth shirt. The basement filled with screams. Combs screamed and gripped his wrist stump with his good hand as more blood continued to spurt out of it. The girl swung the machete again and this time it chopped deeply into the side of Steve’s neck. When she yanked the blade free of his flesh, more blood spurted from a severed artery. His head lolled to one side and in another moment he toppled over, a wide pool of blood spreading out around his head on the floor.
Another of the guys in the group let out a defiant scream and took a run straight at the Cradle of Filth girl. He’d picked up one of the folding chairs and apparently meant to swing it at her. Before he could do that, though, the crazy girl’s companion stepped forward and swung his machete. It split the face of the group’s would-be defender right through the middle, stopping him cold. The tall guy ripped his machete free and swung it around a second time. This time the blade chopped through the group member’s neck, taking his head off his shoulders as easily as it’d cut down a cornstalk. A geyser of blood erupted from the neck stump as the severed head tumbled to the floor and rolled.
More screaming ensued. Seth realized he was screaming by then, too. Any notion of this violent attack being a funny Halloween prank was gone. That had ended the instant the girl’s machete took off Steve’s hand. Aside from the occasional beatings dished out by his piece-of-shit father, he’d never seen scary real-life violence up close like this. Real danger—potentially mortal danger—was right in front of him.
The world was spinning. He felt dizzy, like he might fall over any second now, which would probably be a death sentence. He didn’t know what to do. The only way out of the basement was through the door the machete-wielding maniacs had just burst through. And they were still effectively blocking the way. Any chance of escape would require psyching up his nerve to run right past them. He wasn’t sure he could do that, even if inaction spelled his doom. His fear was that overpowering.
So that’s what you’re gonna do, huh? he asked himself. Just lie down and be killed?
It appeared so. He glanced to his left and saw Caitlin. Like him, she was standing with her back pressed to the wall. She was only a few feet away from him. He wanted to reach out and grip her hand for comfort. Even now, though, facing almost certain death at the hands of these psychos, she would probably jerk her hand away, shunning physical contact with the pathetic geek.
The machete-wielders came deeper into the room. At the girl’s direction, they spread out some to reduce the chance of any group members running around them and getting to the door. A female member of the group had tripped over her own feet in her attempt to retreat and was on her back on the floor. She was trying to scramble backward as the attackers came closer, but she kept slipping and sliding in a big pool of blood. The female attacker caught up to her and stood over her a moment before shoving the machete blade deep into her belly. This triggered more screaming mixed in with some sobs from the surviving group members, all of whom would also soon be dead at this rate.
Then the crazy girl spotted Caitlin cowering in the corner and did a thing Seth found odd even in this already bizarre and highly fucked-up context. She smiled. Then she began to laugh. Caitlin shook her head and began to mutter the word “no” over and over.
The crazy girl’s smile faded and gave way to a sneering look of explosive fury. A second later, she raised the machete and came charging straight at Caitlin. Seth spent a paralyzed instant watching her rush forward. Then he took a panicked look around and spied the closed door to the supply closet a dozen feet to his right.
You better be unlocked, motherfucker.
He grabbed Caitlin by the hand and hauled her in that direction with all his might.
TEN
The third movie in Channel 39’s all-day horror marathon was Motel Hell. With commercials added in and a few small bits of potentially offensive content edited out, its television run-time was two hours, same as all the other movies in the marathon. Regardless of the original run-times of the theatrical versions, whether they clocked in at eighty minutes or two and a half hours, all were either cut down or extended via a combination of extra commercials and longer host segments to fit a two-hour slot.
The next movie in the marathon’s schedule was Videodrome, one of Wesley Campbell’s all-time favorites. It’d be interesting to see how badly the hacks at Channel 39 butchered David Cronenberg’s early ’80s masterpiece. He suspected it would be barely recognizable, with all the fantastic transgressive elements scrubbed away. Which begged the question—why even attempt to pare down a film like Videodrome to the point of being palatable to a broadcast television audience if by doing so you were robbing it of its true essence?
All things considered, Wesley thought the movie a distinctly odd choice to show the predominantly mainstream audience watching the marathon. Most of them would have only a casual interest in horror at best. The sort of people who only became interested in spooky movies when the calendar flipped over to October. Even then, the casuals mainly only wanted to see a limited range of standard genre offerings. Various installments of the Halloween and Friday the 13th franchises. Stephen King adaptations. That sort of thing. Wesley was no genre snob. He loved those movies as much as he loved films that were more daring and experimental. They were pure fun. Nothing wrong with that.
At about the midpoint of Motel Hell, Channel 39 cut away from the movie to a Count Gravemore host segment. Cheesy organ music swelled as the count cackled in a faux-demented way. The camera zoomed in on the count’s makeup-covered face as he began to describe his own failed attempt to cultivate a human garden. He went on to explain how it didn’t work because of the “rot” in the Transylvanian soil. A lot of the count’s segments were like that, taking inspiration from the movies he was hosting. He’d weave in a lot of corny jokes and macabre puns, most of them so bad they would’ve made Forry Ackerman cringe. The actor playing the count was the hammiest performer Wesley had ever seen. He delivered his lines in a way that made him seem like a discount Vincent Price.
Wesley thought the guy was completely awesome. He hoped the man would live forever and keep hosting movies on Channel 39 until the end of time. This was unlikely, of course, but the prospect of a world without the Count and his cheesy show was a staggeringly dreary thing to contemplate.
When the segment ended and the station went to commercial, Wesley got up to go to the bathroom. He was up to five beers and it was still relatively early. Trips to the bathroom to unburden his bladder were becoming more frequent and it would only get worse as the dead soldiers continued to pile up on the coffee table. Any other day he would not be slamming back the brewskies this early, but today was Halloween, his favorite day of the year. For Wesley, it’d always been a day to celebrate, even if he mostly had to celebrate alone. It was the one day of the year when the rest of society wholeheartedly embraced the genre that’d fascinated him most of his life. The one day when the world made sense and he didn’t feel like an ill-fitting puzzle piece. An emotional crash would come tomorrow, but for now he wasn’t thinking about that.
After leaving the bathroom, he went into the kitchen to grab another beer from the fridge. He was just pulling the door open when he heard a crash from the vicinity of the back yard. Frowning, he went into the adjacent dining room to peer out at the yard through the big window there. He pulled back the gauzy curtain and took a look around. His frown deepened. No one was out there, unless they were hiding in the old shed at the back of the yard. Also out there was a small wooden deck accessible via the door in the kitchen. The red BBQ grill on the deck was tipped over on its side. He figured that was the source of the crash he’d heard, but he wasn’t sure what might have caused it to happen. The grill was of sturdy construction. Knocking it over would require something considerably more jarring than a stiff breeze. He took another look around the big yard, his heart beating faster at the unnerving thought that some intruder might have attempted to enter the house.
He went back into the kitchen for a look out the French door that opened onto the deck. His heart rate quickened again when he noticed the position of some of the lounge chairs, which appeared to have been shoved aside. Someone—or something—had definitely been out there on the deck within the last few minutes. The grill toppling over was one thing. If he’d tried hard enough, he could’ve come up with a non-sinister explanation for that. When taken in context with the changed position of the chairs, that wasn’t really possible.
Could an animal have done this?
He wasn’t sure.
A dense stand of trees stood beyond the fenced-in back yards on this side of the street. There was some fairly active wildlife out there. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t imagine some big animal coming out of the woods to hop over the chain-link fence and come up onto the deck. This was his parents’ house. He was housesitting for them while they were on vacation in Costa Rica. When he’d lived here as a kid, he never once saw a forest creature of any significant size in the yard. Sometimes he saw possums and squirrels, but that was about it.
No.
An animal hadn’t done this. There was no point in trying to explain away the disarray on the deck. A human being had done this. Probably one with some level of ill intent. It was common knowledge among their neighbors and friends that Bob and Pamela Campbell were out of town for an extended period. Some shady piece of shit criminal type might easily have become aware of their absence. What he’d heard might well have been a would-be burglar trying to get into the house, one who’d gotten spooked and run away after detecting unexpected sounds of human activity inside.
Wesley shuddered at the thought, which was more than a little creepy. Despite feeling creeped out, he was sure he had nothing to worry about. The intruder was gone and almost certainly wouldn’t be returning now that he knew the house was occupied. He could probably safely put it out of his head and go back to the horror marathon now. Still, he hesitated, wondering whether he should call the police to file a report. He rejected the idea when he pictured how the macho cops responding to the call would smirk when he told them what he suspected and pointed to the slight level of disarray on the deck as his only evidence. A smirk that would say, That’s what you called us out here for? You’re a little pussy, aren’t you?
Wesley sighed.
Nope. Definitely not calling the cops.
He decided he would grab another beer and get back to the marathon, but first he would go out on the deck and put things back in order. The intruder had scampered away and was no longer a threat. It was still daylight out for a little longer. There was nothing to worry about.
The door’s hinges squealed slightly as he pulled it open and stepped out onto the deck. It’d been warmer earlier in the day, but the air had that chilly fall bite to it now. He was wearing only a short-sleeved t-shirt and cotton gym shorts. Goosebumps rose on his exposed forearms as he hurriedly set the grill upright and moved the lounge chairs back into place. When he was done, he rubbed his hands together and stared off toward the woods, remembering childhood days exploring around out there on his own.
Wesley did everything on his own, back then and now. In those days, it was because the other kids on the street wouldn’t play with him. He was branded an untouchable weirdo early on. Even today, he was treated pretty much the same way by his supposed peers. He was twenty-three and still a virgin. In his teenaged days, his bleak prospects for ever losing his virginity had caused him a lot of inner torment. He wasn’t exactly at peace with it now, but he wasn’t quite so torn up about it anymore. There was more to life than just sex or lack thereof.
He was about to go back inside when he heard something move around under the deck. The fear he’d felt a few minutes ago came surging back. He cursed himself for not taking the area beneath the deck into consideration when assessing the possible danger level. The space down there was more than big enough for an average-sized person to crawl into and hide. The sound came again and this time there was nothing furtive about it.
Wesley started backing toward the door. He had his hand on the handle when the top of a blonde head popped into view. At first all he could see was the back of the person’s head, but already there was something familiar about what he was seeing. He knew he should get inside and lock the door, but some instinct kept him from doing it. He strongly sensed this wasn’t some ordinary intruder. A moment later, the person who’d been hiding beneath the deck emerged fully into view, getting to her feet and turning around to face him.
He gaped at the woman in disbelief.
She was Samantha Raimi, the middle-aged widow who’d lived next door for at least the last ten years. The busty blonde woman stood there in her bare feet, wearing nothing but a kimono with the sash tied tightly at her waist. Leaves and bits of dead grass were clinging to the fabric. There were more dried-up leaf fragments in her hair.
She smiled. “Hi, Wesley.”
He swallowed with some difficulty and said, “Um … hi.”
She started to climb the steps up to the deck. “I haven’t seen you in a long time. You’re looking good. Still at that community college in Monroe County?”
Wesley’s hand tightened on the handle. “I don’t think you should come up here.”
She laughed and said nothing in response to that. She kept climbing the steps and soon was up on the deck with him. There was maybe about eight feet of distance remaining between them. Not nearly enough to feel safe. In all the time he’d known this woman, he’d never thought of her as someone to fear. She’d always seemed so sweet and friendly. She’d also been his primary object of lust when he was a teenager. He still sometimes thought about her when he masturbated. Her physical proximity thus made him feel uptight for more reasons than one. She was still a powerfully attractive woman, but there was something undeniably off about her vibe. There was a strong hint of something predatory in it, which made no sense to Wesley.
