Beyond the darkness of the room and the blue glow of the television Calvin became transfixed on the man in the wheelchair. He was strapped in tight, shifting this way and that. Then a woman appeared from behind the camera. She was third world skinny and model tall, her hair chin-length and mousy brown. Very plain save that for the machete she wielded, the object of the man’s discontent. Now Calvin knew without a doubt what had frightened him so. The man screamed, but Calvin couldn’t hear him. There was no sound on the video. The woman turned, looked into the camera and smiled. She then faced the man once again, this time raising the machete above her head. His eyes inflated like tiny bloodshot balloons in his face. Two things happened simultaneously: the machete was swung into the man’s head at the very instant loud, raucous heavy metal music erupted somewhere in the room Calvin sat in, startling him out of his seat.
Guttural vocals emanated from the coffin, drowned in a cacophony of distorted guitars and pounding drums. The machete hacked and slashed at the man’s restrained body turning him into something indistinguishable, bits of him launching from the blade, decorating the strange woman as if her body was a canvas for a revolutionary gore-spattered art movement: Post Mortem Modernism.
As much as Calvin tried to ignore it, as much as he wanted to enjoy the artistry of what he was being shown, he couldn’t deny that this unnerved him. He had never seen anything quite like it. The violent act was obviously being shown through the glory of make-up and effects, but it looked so very real. Real enough for Calvin’s stomach to lurch, and that was quite a feat for someone who had put in so many hours watching Death’s Door and it’s elusive sequel. He hadn’t felt this way while mutilating Dead Danny’s body. But that was different. Hazel was there, and together that cat of brutality seemed natural. Now, alone, fear crept in.
A smile cracked Calvin’s lips. Perhaps it was real, something a psycho filmed that had been smuggled out of police files as so many clips that he had seen on the Net were. Real like the photos he and Hazel had taken earlier that week.
The woman then turned and faced the camera. Her smile was illustrious and decorated with fragments of flesh and blood spatter. She stepped toward the camera, her eyes boring into Calvin’s as he watched. He felt unease. She was mad, crazed, like a walking effigy of a portrait that would follow people around the room of an old house.
Close enough to kiss the camera, she stared as if able to see through the lens, her maniacal grin red with blood rather than lipstick. She picked a bit of gore from her cheek and placed it on her tongue like a hippy taking a hit of acid. She closed her mouth and eyes making an expression of something akin to carnal pleasure. She quivered and then fell from the camera’s view.
The corpse lay in the wheelchair, mutilated beyond a recognizable genus. Calvin couldn’t tell whether it was real or fake, but he supposed the general showmanship of the woman’s retreat was enough to assure him that he had witnessed a very authentic bit of filmed horror. Something of a fake snuff film. There weren’t any different camera angles or cuts in the film. If it wasn’t real, it was the most amazing example of practical effects he’d ever seen.
Whatever it was, Calvin didn’t feel quite right. Sure, he had seen some fucked up shit in his time and even killed two people in cold blood, but in this strange, dark building the knowledge that he was being watched freaked him out.
Without warning, the TV turned off stifling what proved to be the only light source in the room. Calvin’s fears intensified. The candles that had been there to guide him from one hall to another seemed to have been removed.
Breathing heavily, Calvin tried to assess himself. He wasn’t much of a drinker, but he wished desperately at that moment that he had a flask for his nerves. He tried to remind himself that it was all a test, that they meant him no harm, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was in terrible trouble, that perhaps he had bitten off more than he could chew. Maybe all the conditioning was for their amusement. Perhaps they were watching him, laughing, and he would become another butcher-case at the end of the maze.
Just deal with it. You’ll get through this. It’s nothing.
He tried to sooth his nerves, but he trembled like a junkie with one goddamned big monkey on his back and no dope.
What about riding the dead? Don’t you want to ride the dead?
He didn’t even know what riding the dead was?
Faint sounds like audible illusions tickled Calvin’s mind like spirits dancing in the shadows of the shadows he was immersed in. Screams drenched in dread rose from within, only to be stifled just before exiting his mouth. He had to be strong. Had to remember the Wall of Suicide.
A door opened revealing a timeworn hallway illuminated in candlelight. Calvin took to the light like the proverbial moth, hoping there would be someone there if for nothing else than the comfort of another’s company, but the hallway was empty. Whoever opened the door was stealthy. Calvin supposed the deprivation of one’s own mind was a part of the challenge. Gorehounds enjoy darkness in life as well as mind; they swim in it via shocking horror films, grisly death scenes documentaries and over the top horror novels. And murder, of course. Can’t forget murder.
The hallway was lined with windows on the left, all of them boarded over, the outside world just beyond. Calvin had to banish those thoughts else he yearn too much for cool air and begin to feel the tight clenching of claustrophobia. He suffered from the anxiety of claustrophobia but only in the back of two-door cars or tiny cramped spaces, but if his mind got the better of him, he could just as easily have a panic attack in a dark, unfamiliar place, and that could get ugly. Were he to freak out and start screaming like a little girl right here right now he would surely be damned to a soulless existence on Ghastly’s suicide wall.
At the end of the hall Calvin entered a room dimly lit with a solitary candle in a dish at the center of a rustic, heavily blemished hardwood floor. The corners were shadowed and clustered with the random leftovers of former people and a former time. There was something that looked like a broken chair that could have been a menacing nightmare shrouded in evil, but it was likely just a chair.
Deprivation, thought Calvin. Then it occurred to him that it really was all a part of the initiation, that they were indeed trying to bring him to an elevated state of terror and paranoia to prove that he was worthy of being a Gorehound; worthy riding the dead.
He had begun to feel nervous about the experience, but now that he understood the group’s motivations, he felt a confidence that would lead him through the dark maze they created for him. He could only go forward at this point, anyway.
Faint piano music echoed off the walls, out of tune, but just slightly enough so that to the untrained ear it would sound somewhat melodious, if not perhaps a bit dreadful.
Calvin grinned. Ambiance. Eeriness. They’re trying to really fuck with my head. He felt a lot better about the experience now that he could see what they were doing to him. The idea that he was their pawn began to diminish.
The next door led to a hallway much like the previous one, lined with sporadic candles that cast a shivering glow that bounced off the peeling paint and debris littering the corners—beer cans, broken glass, papers, dead rats. It stank to high heaven of piss and defecation, as if this particular hallway had been used for a bathroom since the building became a broken down palace for teenagers, derelicts and the depraved.