Calvin left the machete the way he found it. His chest heaved, a wild roar of white noise slowly dissolving through which he could hear the woman’s voice from behind him. She sounded pleased.
“Very nice. I think you’re ready to ride the dead. Someone with your savagery will fit in nicely with our little group of fuck ups.”
Calvin hardly heard her words. He stared at the minced body, the red of it seeming to cloud his mind like chum-blood spreading in still ocean water. Oh… shit. He’d lost it. He’d had enough. Yet he couldn’t turn around and kill the crazy bitch, or the skinny fuck, or ol’ Mr. Ghastly himself.
Because he was them as they were him.
Calvin was a murderer, a sadist, a soul killer, a monster, a necrofascist, a misfit, a lunatic…
A Gorehound.
A hand clasped his shoulder. It would have scared the shit out of him only a moment ago, but now he was a certifiable madman. “You have one more test—the final test.
“You’re going to ride the dead.”
Calvin nodded as if he were a hardened warrior going into a grave battle, one he had little chance of winning.
“Follow me,” said the woman. “Mr. Ghastly is waiting for you.”
Calvin followed the woman into the hall and through a pair of double doors that led outside. The air was as fresh and chill as he had ever breathed. By the time he realized how strange it was that the final test was outside the dreary mystique of the building, they came upon yet another building, this one much smaller in scale. More like a cottage or barn in equal disrepair.
Calvin followed the woman into the barn where Mr. Ghastly and the now-clothed Mr. Spindle were waiting like grim statues cloaked in darkness. Candles lit the room to reveal a steel gurney where a man lay as if waiting for an operation. To Calvin’s surprise, he was breathing. On a table beside the gurney was what looked like a man’s skin that had been carefully peeled away from the body and cleaned.
Mr. Ghastly emerged from the shadows to join his counterparts. “How are you feeling, Calvin?” he asked. “Are you ready to ride the dead?”
Calvin’s eyes caught the woman. She looked like death in blue jeans, a real man-eater, literally. He then looked to Mr. Spindle, a skinny freak with powder-toned skin who probably hadn’t seen the light of day in a dog’s age, spending far too many nights fooling around with dead things. And then his gaze landed on Mr. Ghastly, the ringleader of this bizarre trio of third-rate carnival outcasts. Real winners here. Homicidal maniacs.
“It’s rather simple,” said Mr. Ghastly. “And like nothing you’ve ever dreamed of. I guarantee you that.”
Calvin didn’t feel at home with these crazy fucks, but he was involved now and there was no turning back. His mind twitched like a hair on a sixteen-millimeter film that was a moment away from melting. He wondered if he was allowed to leave right now whether he would be able to go back to the regular world. He couldn’t of course. He was a murderer, a wanted man. Life as he knew it was gone no matter how he sliced it, so why not ride the dead? Why not enjoy it, whatever it was?
Calvin nodded. “Yes, I’m ready to ride the dead.”
At the table with the strange skin, Mr. Ghastly said, “What I have discovered is something amazing and unparalleled. You have to swear secrecy, Calvin. What I have discovered is something so precious and dangerous that we have elected to keep it to ourselves. The world isn’t ready for this, may never be. Are you? Can we trust you to secrecy?”
“I don’t have a life in that world anymore. You know that.”
Mr. Ghastly nodded and cocked a sly grin. “You understand that due to the seriousness of what we are about to divulge to you, you will become one of us, and you will be not only bound to secrecy, but you will be torn from this world in the most unusual and sadistic manner were you to have loose lips. Something worse than the Wall of Suicide. There may not be many of us, but there are enough for us to exact a sweet, grim revenge to anyone who crosses us. You have to be one of us, Calvin. You have to commit.”
Calvin nodded his agreement.
Mr. Ghastly gestured to Calvin. “Come here.”
Calvin crossed the room, what appeared to be an old barn fancied up to resemble a makeshift hospital, and approached the steel gurney with the human husk.
As he towered over the table with the strange skin he realized that it wasn’t a skin at all. His brow wrinkled in confusion when he recognized the contents of the table as a latex body suit. At least that’s what he thought it was. He’d never been on a movie set or anything.
“What’s this?” asked Calvin. Suddenly all the madness he had endured became surreal. In his mind he could see and smell the dead as if he were still there, but the colors began to bleed like a watercolor in the rain. The corpses seemed like fakes now, far too pliable to be real. The latex suit was an indication of this rationalization. Calvin’s heavy breathing eased a bit, but his ass was still firmly clenched and his balls wanted to crawl up inside of him.
“I’ll explain how riding the dead works,” said Mr. Ghastly as his duo of creepy counterparts looked on like silent sentinels. It was clear who was in charge here. “You see, I discovered something many years ago. I had always been fascinated with death, the dead, and the mechanics of dying. I learned how to replicate the human anatomy in makeup and latex, worked on horror films for years before they found my presence to be distasteful, my morbid insight disgusting. I discovered that there was no better way to learn about death than to kill, and so I lived out of a suitcase learning the craft of death. I became engrossed with learning about the soul, and then something very strange happened to me. I was replicating a man I had bound and gagged, making a mask of his agonized face with detail that would fool his mother. I had this crazy idea about killing him while wearing the mask, that way the last thing he would see before the reaper took him was his own face. I had to wonder what it was like dying by your own hand without committing suicide. Would it fool his maker into thinking he committed the ultimate sin?”
Ghastly paused. He looked into Calvin’s eyes, but clearly he saw the past. Calvin couldn’t believe what he was hearing: the confessions of a serial killer. For a moment there he regarded the latex and thought it all really was a façade, and then this was dropped on him. They were all murderers. Every one of them. A cult of killers. They weren’t Gorehounds; they were Murderhounds.
“I looked into his eyes, saw the fear that was so familiar to me. I had seen that fear so many times in so many people, had mimicked it with latex time and time again. An actor could very well learn something from observing someone fearing for his life. I cut him, stuck a knife in his gut while staring into his eyes. I wanted to see what he was thinking in that moment when he took his last breath, and then it happened. His soul escaped his body, confused. I couldn’t see it, but it was there, and it recognized me as him and jumped into my body. Have you ever experimented with hallucinogenic drugs, Calvin?”
“Maybe some pot, but…”
“Doesn’t matter. Riding the dead is unlike the wildest acid, mescaline, mushroom trip, unlike your most vivid dreams, unlike anything I could properly articulate. The very realms of what we perceive here on Earth, the very laws of human life are bent. It takes every sense you thought you knew and propels them into something so exhilarating, so beautiful…” He sighed heavily. “Ah, but you have to find out for yourself.”
“Well,” said Calvin, wishing his confusion wasn’t showing so much, “what exactly happens? What is riding the dead?”