She shook her head. “God bless them, whoever it was. If those godless creatures were struck by lightning, it couldn’t a clearer sign of God’s anger.” Her eyes bright, brimming with joyful tears. “All those idolators and arrogant unbelievers, they’re gonna find out what real fire feels like…”
He could tell she saw it too, when she looked at them. Saw what they did, knew what they were… And once you saw it, how could you turn a blind eye?
The crowd simmered as the breaking news spread from their phones. Gary was thinking they could let things settle down for a half hour and then try to reopen, when the truck came.
The big old blue Ford Ranger jumped the curb, V-8 engine screaming, and pounced amid the thickest of the serpentine crowd. It bore down several dozen people, screeching wheels grabbing horrible traction on a road paved with bodies. They tried to run, but tripped over the ropes and turned to stacks of screaming meat.
Gary ran out onto the stage and screamed at Burt to stop, but he couldn’t even hear himself.
The truck stalled, the axles choked with limbs, quivering on an unsteady terrain of dead and dying sinners. The door flew open and Burt climbed out onto the bed of his old Ford with that stupid toothbrush in his scowling mouth and an AR-15 with an extended banana clip on his hip, and commenced firing into the sea of survivors.
“You’re monsters,” he kept shouting, “You’re all monsters…”
Gary looked around for someone to help him stop it, to bring order and peace, to block the damned cameras—
Four kids dressed in hippie costumes came out onto the stage. One of them lit something in the hands of the other three, and they lobbed bottles with flaming rags stuffed in the necks into the crowd. Most of the people still in the lot were dead or wounded. Burt patrolled the perimeter, shooting anyone who still moved.
Gary ran in the only direction he could, back into the haunt. Something had gone horribly wrong, the message he sent was meant to unify people against the adversary, it wasn’t meant to inspire hatred or violence.
He ran into the Black Chapel and collided with Todd.
“Hey, Pastor Gary,” Todd mumbled in a cracked voice. His hair was shot through with white, his features drained, hollowed out by horror.
“It sure as hell works,” Todd said, “this hell house of yours. Did you ever really experience it, do you know what it really does…? I went in and got lost… and then I got out, but I wasn’t really out. It trapped me in something that looked like my life…
“The first room, I got sucked into a cult, and… we… sacrificed babies… and worse… We all committed suicide when the cops came, and then… oh, God… I died, and guess where I went? To Hell, right?
“Wrong! I woke up in the next fucking room!
“I was molested by a priest… It was like a false memory I couldn’t make myself forget… and I didn’t want to do it, but I was going insane with the nightmares, the wanting. I never touched them, I just took pictures… but people found out, and I went to jail, and they really, really don’t like child molesters in jail…
“See, after the first four rooms,I realized the only way out, was to die… So I took the easy way out… but I’m still stuck… and here we both are, what a surprise!”
Gary shook his head, this was not just impossible, but wrong. “You don’t understand, Todd. You died a year ago, and everything after that…”
“No, you don’t understand, you fucking idiot! We’re inside the hell house! We went into the Black Chapel last Halloween, and we never left! The last time I saw you, I was twenty-four, but I’ve lived four fucked-up lives since then, and I still can’t find the exit…”
“Todd, get a hold of yourself. Things are a mess outside, but come with me. I can prove that God does miracles…”
“Miracles?” Todd cracked up. “You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a miracle, in here. This is a miracle, right now. How do you like it?” He pushed past Gary and ripped down a black curtain to bare a window overlooking the parking lot.
The survivors from the crowd were long gone, and the police and fire were still busy across town. The Devil’s Dungeon cast and a big mob of the faithful had gathered the bodies into bonfires, and were stringing them up on the lampposts. The faces of the ones doing the burning were monstrous, things he thought must be cemons when he’d seen them before, on Todd’s camera. They were singing a hymn he didn’t recognize as they fed the fires.
Todd took pictures.
“Do you want to know the best thing I saw, in the Black Chapel?” Todd asked. “I saw God. No shit. I was an agnostic… I guess that’s why I saw God… and heard Him… constantly. Telling me what was good and what was evil and making His miracles until I ate rat poison, just to shut Him up.
“God is just one of its masks, Pastor Gary. It never created anything but misery, but it sure likes to be called God… But you know what? The Devil isn’t God’s enemy. He’s just the garbageman. And we’re the garbage. Maybe behind our masks, we’re all God, burning ourselves….”
“That’s enough, Gary. I know you’ve been through a lot, but I won’t hear your blasphemy—”
“You already know it, Gary! You didn’t build this place to save people. You just want to rub their noses in where they’re going. But where are you going, Gary?”
No more.
Gary punched out with his fist. The box cutter made a neat slot in Todd’s neck just below his ear.
Blood sluiced down the front of his shirt. His voice was a relentless, breathless locust buzz. “God doesn’t want our love… It just wants to watch us burn… and hear us say its name… Do you know God’s true name, Gary?”
Gary stabbed him in the neck again.
Todd fell backwards, gasping, “You finally saved somebody.” He staggered out of the corridor and collided with a man in a cheap devil costume, who screamed like a little girl and knocked him down.
Gary turned and ran, rushing to the empty crimson throne that loomed over the three chutes that exited the hell house, but he couldn’t remember which was for the saved, which for the damned and which was the one for really bad kids. He dove into the middle one and closed his eyes and he was sliding and then he spilled out into darkness and kept running—
He was running, he was so scared he’d dropped his candy, somewhere back there, but he was never going back for it.
It was the first Halloween he was big enough to go trick-or-treating on his own. Dad helped him with his costume. The ones in the store were silly, he pointed out. The real Wolf Man would never run around in a rubber jumpsuit with a picture of himself on the front that said “The Wolfman” on it. He dressed Gary up in old torn up clothes, and swaddled his arms and legs in strips of an old, moth-eaten bearskin rug, painted his face with brown shoe polish.
Gary was beside himself with glee. He was scary! He was the Wolf Man! He’d never have a nightmare again, never wet the bed after watching monster movies on weekends. He was the monster, now. The world would cower in fear of him.
He went out with an old Space: 1999 pillowcase, growling in the back of his throat. He told his dad he was meeting friends, but knew Dad wasn’t fooled. Gary Horton had no friends. But the Wolf Man needed no friends.