She wondered if this was what he’d done to Vince. Lance lowered his head and opened his eyes again. He must have been practicing the art of mind power just then, mentally stopping the blood and ignoring the pain.
“I’m gonna have to do a latex mold of your face,” said Lance. “You can’t move. If you move I’ll do something to you that won’t give you half the pleasure nailing this ruler to my rod gives me. You want to cry like Tough Guy over there, you just fuck with the latex and the plaster. I fuckin’ dare you.”
She shook her head. “I won’t.”
“I didn’t think so, but,” he grabbed the ruler and lifted it to examine his handiwork, “I had to do this so you would know I’m serious, and, of course, ’cause I like it. I fuckin’ love this shit, man.”
Maneuvering around the room butt-ass naked with a ruler dangling from his painfully stretched penis, Lance gathered what he needed and whipped up a small batch of latex. He slathered the sticky substance over Ronnie’s face and followed that with an eighth of an inch of plaster, being sure to leave holes for her nose and mouth.
“I do appreciate your cooperation. Your face is going to turn out great and soon enough the big day’ll be here. You’ll do fine, I just know it. Meathead next door, though, I don’t know. He gives me any shit I’ll fucking knock his ass out and get a decent mask.”
Ronnie said something that came out too muffled to be understood.
“How long?” said Lance, guessing at what she had asked. “Not too much longer, but I don’t want to pull the plaster too soon or I’ll fuck it up. In the mean time…”
Lance placed the ruler back on the desk and produced two more nails.
This time Ronnie closed her eyes when he pounded them in. She wished she could do the same with her ears.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Calvin knew the initiation would be tough, but he couldn’t have prepared himself for what he was to experience on the other side of the door to this crumbling façade. The guy who drove him there had a face as pale as a grave worm. Wasn’t much for conversation, but he did tell Calvin that they were headed to a place called the Dungeon of Lakeside. It wasn’t that the “dungeon” was located at a lake’s shore or that it was indeed a true-to-life dungeon. Named for the rarely used street that marked its locale, it was nothing more than a title attached to a dilapidated building in Lakeside, a town some considered the redneck Riviera of San Diego County.
Though he had speculated, Calvin didn’t know what to expect. The moon was but a paper-thin sliver in the black sky beneath which stood a large building, perhaps a mini mansion, the kind of place someone took a lot of pride in once upon a time. Someone who wanted the peace and quiet that only comes from isolation. Or someone who chose isolation as a result of extreme paranoia.
Faint light glimmered through the cracks of boarded windows and fragments of shattered glass. Candlelight. The front door was ajar, a beam of light shivering on the ground outside. Calvin looked back at the marshmallow-faced creep sitting in the car who looked straight ahead as if in a trance. No help there. Calvin pushed the door open. It creaked on rusted hinges.
Inside, candles lit the room in dim, flickering light. Cloaked in darkness and shadows was a tall man that Calvin assumed to be Mr. Ghastly. Always concealed in shadow, Calvin began to recognize Ghastly by silhouette.
“Hello, Calvin,” said Mr. Ghastly. “I’m glad you made it this far. Too many promising pupils bow out in the eleventh hour. What you will go through in the next hour or so will prove whether or not you have what it takes to be one of us. If you don’t make it… well…
Suicide.
The idea that Calvin would somehow be damned to suicide if he didn’t pass the tests was absurd, and yet looking into the dark and vacant holes of Ghastly’s eyes made it all too real. Having witnessed the Wall of Suicide made it real. He didn’t want to find a place in eternity there with the others in some perpetual state of agonized animation.
“I’m ready,” said Calvin. His voice was a mouse’s squeak in the quiet of the crumbling building, a reminder of how insecure Calvin had felt all his life, that tiny voice of his always overshadowed by everything around him. That very insecurity was partially responsible for his love of death. He could watch the most bizarre death scenes and it thrilled him. He could watch the most violent horror films or surf the web for sites that showcased grisly murder scenes and it made him feel like somebody. Bearing witness to the dead made him feel a sense of superiority, as if by viewing their corpses he obtained God-like power. He’d forgotten that feeling for a time, but this man before him… he brought it all back in spades. God-awful, black-as-death spades.
“Very well,” said Mr. Ghastly. “There’s no turning back now.” He crossed the room to the door Calvin had entered through and locked the deadbolt from the inside with a key. “There are only two ways in or out of this place; now, only one. You will have to go down that hallway,” Ghastly pointed toward a dimly lit corridor, “and follow the candlelight. You will meet a series of challenges supervised by senior members of the Gorehounds. You must do what they ask to make it through each test. At the end we will be reunited—if you make it that far. Then you will ride the dead.”
Calvin smiled like a hatter. It wasn’t necessarily how he felt inside, but what he thought Ghastly wanted to see. Inside he was scared. Suddenly the idea that he had to roam through the ruins of an old building to face a series of challenges was terrifying, but he would never let on to his insecurities. Adrenalin coursed through his body releasing endorphins, which helped to quell his reservations.
There was another moment of uncomfortable silence. Calvin wasn’t sure whether he should say something or begin his walk down the hallway. Ghastly’s eyes were trained on Calvin’s as he backed into the shadows and seemed to disappear. Calvin squinted but couldn’t locate the strange man who seemed to be mystery defined. Again, Ghastly had simply vanished.
The quiet screamed in Calvin’s ears like some kind of hissing or what he assumed it would be like to be deaf. Even the sounds of scurrying rats would comfort him, but no, the building was devoid of noise as if even the beams and framework had been there for so long that they no longer creaked.
Calvin’s footsteps echoed off the hardwood floor louder than life as he walked toward the hallway. The walls glimmered in fractured light dimly illuminating the black mold that found refuge there like dancing specks of ink. Part of Calvin was excited, yet there was something in his mind that shunned everything about the building.
He did his best to banish his fears and took to the hallway.
Three-wick candles lined the floor intermittently. In between each candle was enough of a stretch to create a darkness that caused the mind to wander. The candles led Calvin through a series of rooms and corridors in such a desperate state of disrepair that he wondered how long this place had been abandoned.
His musings were immediately disrupted when he stepped into another room, this one heavily illuminated with a light source other than that of a candle. There was a coffin upended and leaning against the wall, the top portion open displaying an old television that showcased a screen swimming with snowy, soundless fuzz—a familiar sight, this coffin. In front stood a solitary chair, clearly a refugee of the building by the rickety look of it and the peeling lacquer like leathery dried flesh.
Calvin sat in the chair, wary of its structural stability. It proved stronger than it appeared. The television flashed on displaying a room that looked similar to the one Calvin sat in. The walls were in ruin, paint flaking off in jagged sheets, fissures like miniature canyons stretching from floor to ceiling. The camera began to pan left to a decrepit wheelchair seating what appeared to be a homeless man who would have fit nicely in Charles Manson’s Spahn Ranch. The man’s glossy eyes screamed true terror, something undeniable, as if he was witness to something off camera that put the fear of God into him.