In an otherwise empty cinema, six seats in the front row contained occupants. They weren’t all sitting side by side; there was a vacant chair between each of them. There was a reason for this.
Given the connecting nature of movie theatre seats and their shared armrests, it wasn’t feasible for the sextet of souls to be sitting right next to each other. Each of them required space. None of them were there of their own volition. None of them had the ability to get up and switch to another seat. They were all affixed to their respective positions by bindings that kept them securely in place. Chains. Thick slashes of electrical tape slapped across mouths.
From left to right, each ensnared individual bore a number on their chests, crudely painted across their respective outfits in broad black strokes, consecutively, from one to six.
Though the cinema was dark, particularly in the ascending rows of seats that marched into shadows all the way up to the back wall, the large theatre screen was on, but depicted nothing more than a harsh white blankness. The contrast between this abrasive light and the dark shrouding the majority of the cinema innards, rendered all in myriad shades of grey.
If any of the sextet had an inkling what they were doing there, they sure as hell weren’t letting any of their restrained companions in on it. Though given the presence of electrical tape over each of their mouths, the likelihood of relating any knowledge of that nature was pretty damn minimal.
The silence in here was deathly, eerie.
Any attempts to generate noise had long since abated, the imprisoned souls acknowledging how futile they were. Screams and shouts became muffled, indistinct murmurs of nothingness, and scant other opportunity to create any substantial sound presented itself. The most any of them could come up with was minimal rattling of chains, some rustling no more stentorian than the sound of scuttling insect feet, and precious little else.
They were trapped here, limited of almost all movement, and with all ability to create noise nullified.
They’d all examined one another, at least what they could of their nearest neighbours. They did have the ability to move their heads, to the extent where they could witness those they shared this dark, silent cinema with, and they’d all concluded they were in the company of strangers.
Now, with their examinations of surrounds and company exhausted, their resignation to the fact they weren’t readily able to extricate themselves from the situation, the six of them gazed at the big blank screen, as if hypnotised by its vacuity.
If they were present here for some enforced midnight showing of some exclusive unreleased film, the feature presentation was taking its sweet time kicking off.
Finally, there was movement on that blank canvas of white. It was sudden, although given they’d all been staring hard at the screen anticipating something to happen, not unexpected. Nonetheless it made each of them jump or flinch, as an image appeared on screen. A single die thrown across a flat surface, skittering against whatever camera filmed it before bouncing back to a rest.
All black, with white number pips, the cube was in stark contrast to the formerly all-white dominating the screen. It came to a halt with six white spots aiming upwards.
***
Caitlin Hammond suspected she knew what was going on here. Had to be something to do with her brother, Craig. The crazy, reality television and hidden camera show fanatic. He was obsessed with all that candid camera, pranking people bullshit. Particularly with shows more focused on horror elements. This kind of thing would be right up his alley, and fuck knows how many times he’d sworn he was going to get her on one of the damn things, trying to loosen her up, get her out of her no-nonsense, executive, wheeling dealing money-making mindset.
Fuck that. Caitlin didn’t have time for this bullshit.
When she got out of this ridiculous set-up, she was going to kick Craig’s ass. Juvenile slacker with no ambition and no desire to do anything but immerse himself in seeing other people get punked or pranked, or scared shitless by ludicrous horror scenarios.
She guessed that simple stark image of a rolling die was meant to be in some way creepy, and supposed plenty of simpletons would have thought it was. Not her though. She just found it terribly clichéd. It wasn’t any slick filming or camera work, it was just a simple shot, a genuine cheap-ass shaky capture of a die being thrown against a lens. Some poor imitation of those found footage horror flicks that were all the rage these days.
Caitlin hadn’t been a fan of them back in the day, and they sure as hell hadn’t become any more endearing to her now that every muppet with a camera decided they were the new fad in filmmaking.
Jesus Christ. She didn’t have the time or the patience for this shit. She had money to make. Important people to meet. Things to do which didn’t involve a half-assed wannabe fool pulling some Scare Tactics rubbish on her.
The number dots on that die weren’t even normal pips. They were death’s heads. Skulls, made supersize by the massive screen.
Fuck’s sake.
“Whatever you’re all thinking this is right now, I assure you, you’ll be wrong.” The sudden voice that sounded startled Caitlin though, booming with an unearthly resonation around the darkened cinema, made her lurch with the motion of one stricken by unexpected shock. She wasn’t the only one; all of them jumped or flinched in their seats, at least as much as their bindings allowed.
The die rolling across the hard surface it had been thrown made no noise; clearly the speakers in the place hadn’t been activated then. They were now though, as a disembodied voice, made ominous by its low timbre, and apparent ability to circumnavigate the room in a flash, resounded.
“This is neither a game nor a stunt. It isn’t any desperate ransom bid, though undoubtedly several of you would command a reasonable asking price. It isn’t an exclusive midnight screening of some unknown film project, it isn’t a party, it isn’t part of some candid camera experience. What it is, is an exhibition. A demonstration. Ultimately, it’s a lesson.”
As silence temporarily descended, sinking into a shiver of white fuzz static and faint indiscernible sounds rattling around the cinema’s sound system, the sextet exchanged glances again. Most looked to their nearest neighbours, trying to gauge reactions in eyes, since that was about the only feature visible to present anything. Some spoke against their electrical tape gags, as if suddenly believing they’d be able to conjure anything more than muffled indecipherable gibberish.
“The presence of the die is important.” The voice started up again. “Though, as I said, this is not a game by any stretch of the imagination, the die plays an integral role in this demonstration. Now, unless you happen to still be in some form of comatose state, you’ll have noticed that you each have a number emblazoned upon your person. One to six. Coinciding with the sides of this die.”
Onscreen, a hand reached from pools of shadow, fingers snaring the death-head die and hooking it up to rest in an upraised palm.
As Caitlin watched, with what was mostly a mixture of minimal interest and maximum annoyance, shot through with ample frustration, she tried to place the voice. It wasn’t familiar to her at all, wasn’t her brother’s, nor one of the plethora of irritating hosts that compered his favourite television shows. Though, this person had quite plainly stated, this experience here-this demonstration or whatever the fuck-was not one of those shoddy, cheap, scare-mongering pursuits. Unless that was all part of the script.
The hand holding the die gently shook it back and forth. Considering the skull-marked cube had no partner to knock against, there was very little sound to be heard, though watching it struck Caitlin with an alarming revelation. The onscreen images weren’t anything pre-recorded. They were happening in real-time. Somewhere else in this cinema, clearly the theater’s projection room, somebody was sitting there rolling the bones for the captive audience.
“I’d assume I don’t have to spell out how dice work to the likes of you folk. So I won’t. What I’ll say is that you each have an opportunity to participate in this exhibition, but that all comes down to the roll of the die. As all of you would be aware, the luck of the draw, the bounce of the ball, the roll of the dice in life, favours some. Hampers or eludes others. Success hasn’t been hard to attain for all of you, it certainly hasn’t been scant where all of you are concerned. And well, success tends to breed contempt in some people, makes them seem elevated above the rest of the pack. Makes them think they deserve all that they have and more, and it’s easy for them to forget where they came from, or even anyone they stepped on getting where they were going. It’s funny how the successful can so easily forget those they’ve left floundering in their wake, but I’d be willing to bet, few of those left in the dust forget. However, I’m detouring here…
“Nonetheless, the die is arbitrary. Meaning the likelihood of six consecutive rolls yielding six different numbers is remote. So consequently, some numbers are liable to crop up more than once in that timeframe, while others don’t. Were this die loaded or weighted in some way to favour certain numbers that wouldn’t be the case, however, let me assure you, it is not. This is a precision die, like one you might encounter in a gambling house, a casino, or the like, to ensure that all rolls are entirely arbitrary. Flush markings, no indents. No weights, nothing to cruel the randomness of the throw. In any case, let’s get started. First throw of the die.”
The hand gently shifting the die around closed into a fist around the cube and the moderate oscillations upped their tempo, before the object was released, skittering back across the flat surface of what Caitlin guessed was a simple card table or something similar.
This time, with the sound system activated, there was plenty of noise associated; the clatter of the death-head die tumbling end over end on the table amplified and booming all around them.
The die came to a stop with three skulls uppermost.
Almost simultaneously, the sextet of folks, or at least five of them, turned their attentions to the person with the number three slashed in broad, crude strokes across the chest of his button-up shirt.
Another hand came into view, extending out of the shadows. This one contained a simple photograph, which was thrust up to face the camera projecting the images. Here, Caitlin realised she was correct. None of this was pre-recorded, it was happening as the captive audience watched, from the theatre projection room.
The clash of light from the screen and the dark gathered in the rest of the room, in conjunction with the tape shrouding the lower portion of his face, meant it was difficult to see too much of Mister Number Three, but there was enough to distinguish that he was indeed the same person as the subject in the photo pressed up for the camera’s benefit.
“Meet Brad Klemmer. Brad’s a successful guy, maintains and runs his own security firm, named appropriately enough, after himself. Klemmer Security. He contracts guys out to nightclubs, warehouses, private functions, all kinds of things. He started small, doing a spot of bouncing and so forth, built himself up to his own business. Though, it’s a little ironic, the head of such a reputed security firm getting so easily blindsided and ending up here.”
Here, the unseen narrator broke into a laugh, a low, wheezing chuckle that bubbled around them. The clichéd dice, the real-time camera, none of that was creepy to Caitlin in any way, but that guttural laugh, sounding like rank water bubbling from an overflowing sewer drain…that was fucking creepy.
So too was the sudden rustling of sound behind their row of seats. Heads snapped around as far as possible, to witness a figure cloaked in a black hood traversing the row behind them and emerging in the aisle. This person moved past Caitlin-number six-and continued along the row to where Brad Klemmer sat.
“Brad, the die selected your number first, so you must be feeling pretty lucky. You’re first to be released. Let’s see if success in life continues to follow you.”
The large hooded shape went silently about business, removing the chains and bindings securing Brad Klemmer in place in his seat, though once he was free, Caitlin noticed, the tape gag wasn’t removed from the man’s mouth. She also noticed Klemmer’s expression as he eyeballed the rest of the captives, as he was hustled before the bulk of the person in the black hood. A spiteful glint of glee was in Klemmer’s eyes, an indication of malicious joy that his number came up first, leaving the rest of them to sweat on whether their number would be rolled at all.
For all her disdain and despising of the horror shit her brother was so enamoured with, Caitlin had a very bad feeling that Klemmer’s celebratory antics were a little premature.
There was momentary silence in the place as the sounds of footsteps moving along the aisle, then ascending the various flights of steps to the back of the cinema faded, then the voice broke it once more.
“I know all your names, obviously, so I suppose it’s fair for me to give you a handle by which to know me as. For the purposes of this exhibition, I’m Shooter. Yes, it’s a dice game reference, and yes I did say, this isn’t a game, but since outcomes hinge on the throw of a die, Shooter it is.”
More silence swept in, deep and uncomfortable. Bar shuffling around to a limited degree in their seats, shifting feet enough to rattle chains, there wasn’t much any of the remaining fivesome could do to make noise in any case, so the quiescence grew deeper.
Presently, the screen, now white again, with the pair of seemingly disembodied hands complete with Brad Klemmer’s photograph and the skull die having retreated, displayed new images. Brad Klemmer himself, was moving into the frame.
His hands were free, he no longer wore his tape gag. He plastered a big sarcastic smile on his face and jerked a thumb up in the air, playing to whatever camera was beaming him out onto the movie screen though he looked as though he wasn’t exactly sure where that camera was.
“However,” Shooter’s voice cut the tense silence again. “Brad hasn’t always been working security. En route to that he spent myriad stints in random occupations, including warehousing. He always was a knucklehead though. That, quite evidently, will never change.
“Brad used to work with VS Transport. Shoddy company, not well-maintained at all. With shoddier staff. Like Brad, working in one of the warehouses. One night, working late-shift, Brad had the duty of showing a new employee the ropes. Remember Newbie Nev, Brad? Not his real name, of course, but none of you would have remembered his name anyway-to you, he was just Newbie Nev. In any case, Brad had more pressing concerns on how to spend his working evening, and they didn’t involve training some clueless new hireling. No, banging the brainless bimbo from inventory, also on late-shift was far more imperative. So, Brad, always thinking ahead, convinced Newbie he needed something from one of the storage lockers-mind you, a long disused, decrepit, freezing entity containing nothing-and the impressionable young fellow went right ahead to comply. Where he found himself locked in for the duration.
“Having left his jacket behind, Newbie proceeded to just about freeze to death while Brad was off getting his dick wet. Then came the rats, the spiders, scuttling vermin…
“Suffice to say, by the time Brad remembered he’d locked his young charge away in hypothermia hell with a plenitude of pestilence, Newbie was just about half-dead, covered in bites of all variety and bordering on insanity. Brad, you’ll probably only be vaguely dredging this up from your vacuous memory banks now with my prompting, but I daresay you’d have never given that a second thought. Like I said, it’s funny how the more successful people get, the more they forget these little blips on their old radars, these insignificant nobodies that drift in and out of their past. But I’m willing to bet that Newbie sure as hell never forgot about you.”
“Hey!” Brad Klemmer shouted now, his smug, satisfied look eclipsed by a combination of confusion and rage, a vein throbbing in the centre of his forehead. He ran forwards, coming closer to the camera, then abruptly disappeared from view, dropping out of sight before the eyes of the captive watchers. More shaky-cam motion followed, then a better picture beamed onto the screen, clearly a shot from a new camera positioned in whatever place the security boss ended up.
He was in an even smaller room than he’d previously been, a dark, dank place that Caitlin could just about smell, merely by gazing upon it. Moss encrusted the walls, fetid liquid of an indeterminable colour covered the majority of the floor.
Just as Klemmer struggled to his feet, something else dropped from above, smashing into his dome and shattering around him, in shimmery fragments. At first Caitlin thought it was a pane of glass, until she realised it was a thick sheet of ice, breaking apart as it connected with his skull.
“Just a little memory jog for you, Brad. Something to break the ice.”
Blood welled up in the man’s thick hair, and begin to stream in rivulets along the shelf of his forehead, dripping into eyes, channelling along the lines of an otherwise handsome visage. Had it occurred to a more slightly-built person, chances were they’d have been pole-axed by it, laid out flat on the murky floor, but the powerful Klemmer managed to get himself upright and stay upright, albeit swaying, his eyes glassy and unfocused.
Then Caitlin and her captive companions noticed that Klemmer was not alone in this dank pit. Those moss-encrusted walls were alive with teeming scores of indeterminable insectile vermin. And the floors… From the dark pockets of shadows surrounding the rough circle of the room, myriad sections of shadow detached themselves and crept forward. Some hesitant, testing the atmosphere, others bolder and scurrying from their shadow sanctuaries out into the scant light afforded from above. Rats. Hordes and hordes of rats.
***
The death-head die rattled across the table in a forceful throw, skulls chasing one another as it tumbled. When its motion finally ceased, a solitary skull stared from the object’s uppermost plane.
***
“Meet Thomas Cappell, Chief of Police in neighbouring Burnside. Thomas is pretty much everything he always was, only now he gets to bully around folks in the name of authority. He rose to prominence using the very same tactics he’s used his whole life, so he’s essentially just an extension of the memory we’re about to travel right back to now.”
Thomas Cappell, as broad-shouldered and big as security guru Brad Klemmer, albeit running to fat where Klemmer was all muscle, stood in what looked like nothing more than a cupboard of a room, all strict grey and sterile. Unlike Klemmer, his hands were not free. They were stretched above him, connected to a long length of wire. This wrapped around each of his podgy wrists, to the point where it wasn’t even visible beneath the rolls of flesh that swallowed it. His tape gag was removed and he bellowed impotent obscenities and threats, trying to chase the fear evident in his eyes away with wrathful bluster. Yanking on the wire did little but gouge incisions into his skin, and trickles of blood begin to emerge, oozing out of the wire gouges and dribbling in fat trails of red along his arms.
By the time a figure, shrouded in dark attire, joined him in this vertical shoebox of a room, his underarms were drenched in dark stains, making it look as though he’d been sweating up a storm. Though, Caitlin surmised, frozen in terror in her cinema-chair-prison, he’d probably been doing a fair amount of that too.
“We’re rewinding back to when Thomas was around ten years old. Always a stout boy, a solid kid, Tommy was much bigger than any of the other kids his age, and he used that to cruel advantage. He threw his weight around like the authoritarian bully he is today, making life hell for all and sundry. But in particular, one kid. He had a name too, but to all the schoolkids, he was known as Bug, so that’s what we refer to him as. Bug. Scrawny, geeky little sonofabitch with Coke bottle glasses. Perfect target for a big hero like Tommy to chase around and kick ass on. Nothing really out of the norm for bullying I guess, just the standard abuse and mistreatment that grinds a kid down, shreds the soul piece by piece, destroys them a little more each day.
“Until the day Tommy thought it would be a grand lark to take Bug’s spectacles away. Not just to tease him, to toss them back and forth with his thuggish mates, or to hang them somewhere Bug would find difficult to get to. No, Tommy never does anything half-assed. No point taking away a nerd’s glasses unless you’re going to smash them to smithereens with a rock. Now, of course, given Bug’s glasses were thicker than Tommy’s neck, try and imagine how his eyesight is without them. That’s right, not very good. In fact, fucking useless. This poor blind sonofabitch can’t see shit a couple of inches in front of him, let alone anything distance. Consequently, making the issue worse by a cascade of tears, Bug stumbles his way into the lake. To make matters worse, this kid can’t see-and he can’t fucking swim either.
“He was fished out before he drowned, but only just. And that still didn’t alter Tommy’s trajectory in life. Just strengthened it. Reinforced his ability to reign supreme over the weak.
“Remember that, Tommy? How do you suppose it feels losing your eyesight? Having your eyes taken away, then almost drowning as a result? I bet Bug remembers to his dying day, even if it’s just a haze of indistinct recollection in the back of your head.”
As Shooter spoke, his voice insinuating its way into the horrified ears of the listeners, the figure sharing Thomas Cappell’s current space moved in closer to him. This person lifted a curious implement which Caitlin belatedly realised was some form of melon-baller. As Cappell too acknowledged the item, he doubled his efforts to yank himself free, sending fresh rivulets of claret coursing down his arms. The hoarse shouted insults and threats became an almost indecipherable mantra of pleas and forgiveness attempts.
The larger of the two curved metal scooping heads on the double-headed instrument was pressed against his left eye. Despite his best efforts to keep his eyelids squeezed tight, it was easy for the horrified onlookers to see this was no ordinary melon-baller at work here. The rims of the stainless heads had been sharpened to a razorblade fineness, and the pressure applied by the wielder sheared with little resistance right through the closed eyelid.
The glint of shiny steel was obliterated by the onset of streaming blood and viscous optic fluid, as the melon-baller was thrust deeper in. This was no surgical operation so there was no care taken to remove the eye in any singular motion; it was a brutal, relentless endeavour that hacked the organ up as much as it shifted it, before a final vicious scoop achieved the desired result. Trailing red strings and all manner of unidentifiable mangled gunk, Cappell’s left eye popped free and bounced away from the tortuous steel invader.
Caitlin, feeling on the verge of passing out,, and desperately hoping she wasn’t about to throw up, only to be forced by her tape gag to swallow that noxious shit, was expecting the released eyeball to splatter like an egg when it hit the floor. It didn’t, it actually bounced, before disappearing from view.
Cappell’s screams, penetrating her eardrums with a hideous intensity, were one of the worst sounds she’d ever heard in her life. They didn’t let up when the melon-baller went to work on his remaining eye.
Maintaining silence throughout, the eyeball remover completed the task and absconded from the room, almost as swiftly as he’d arrived.
And once he’d departed, this time, as the helpless-and eyeless-man flailed around like a whale on a hook, more out of sheer agony than any real exertion to free himself, there was a new addition to the room. Water poured from above, perhaps switched on from Shooter’s vantage point. Definitely triggered by that yanking and jerking on the wire.
With two bloody holes as eye sockets, still streaming trails of red down his sweaty, ruddy face, Cappell seemed oblivious to how swiftly the small, claustrophobic room was being inundated with water. Even as it started to rise, swelling around his ankles, then creeping steadily upwards, he was none the wiser. Perhaps, he’d thought he was pissing himself. Perhaps he actually was pissing himself. Whatever the case, Thomas Cappell wasn’t about to just feel the helpless blindness of the victimised kid Bug from Shooter’s story. He was going to feel the drowning sensation too. Without being fished out before his lungs filled with deadly liquid.
***
The death-head die careened across the table again. This time five white skulls stared up from the black surface of the top-facing side.
***
“Meet Cherry Lane. High class escort. Nightly companion to the ultra-rich. Body and face, all paid for, to cater to those with expensive taste in whores. Not an occupation she was forced into, or turned to out of desperation; this was solely her choice and the only thing she ever aspired to be, from a remarkably young age. She craved the attention, to have cash lavished upon her, and why not get paid for doing what she loved to do, and was good at? If you have the bucks, you can get the fucks, with this saucy slut who commands a hefty price for her company. You can take a stroll all along Cherry Lane, all night long. No exceptions. Or is there? Well, in fact, there are myriad. If your skin is the wrong colour, your ethnic background doesn’t match hers, if you are a less than desirable looking specimen, then Cherry Lane is a street you’ll never be walking upon.
“Let’s skip the stroll down Cherry Lane for now, in favour of a stroll down Memory Lane. A rather more recent one, than let’s say, the throwback way to the youthful days of Tommy Cappell. After all, the die doesn’t follow chronological order, it lands where it rolls, completely arbitrary.
“Cherry, do you recall a quite recent encounter with a fellow by the name of…well, again, there’s no point with names, is there? You’ve never dealt in names, never had any inclination to learn names. Hell, Cherry Lane isn’t the name you were born with, it’s the moniker you bestowed upon yourself. We’ll call this person, Mister X. Mister X is not a man of good looks, in fact, quite the opposite. He is grotesque in appearance, mostly due to a plethora of things happening to him over the course of his life, but also the simple fact that he was just born most unfortunate looking. Quite the opposite to Cherry Lane, who is jaw-droppingly beautiful, though she’s uglier than sin on the inside.
“Mister X, as you might understand, has difficulty obtaining dates. He has difficulty being able to hold a conversation with a woman, let alone being able to engage in sexual relations with them, so you can appreciate why he might turn to the only real option available to him. Prostitutes, callgirls, escorts. And with abundant money at his disposal, that should have been an easy enough feat, but not when he crossed paths with Ms Lane. No, the booking as it were did not pan out in Mister X’s favour.
“Firstly he was denied the services he sought on the grounds of extreme ugliness-I think the word repugnant might have been bandied around-and humiliated, degraded and derided, then our classy heroine suggests the only service he’d be eligible for is golden showers. Performed not by her however, but by a pack of dogs. She then summoned members of her thuggish entourage and wrongfully informed them Mister X tried to rape her. Rather than spending the time he thought he’d been making love to a beautiful woman, albeit for a price, he instead found himself suffering a brutal beat-down in a back alley, followed by surprise, surprise, the aforementioned golden shower. Courtesy of his attackers, and then, as mentioned, by the guard dogs they used to maintain security around the establishment. As hideous in appearance as Mister X was prior to his encounter with Cherry Lane, he came away from it looking even more grotesque.”
Cherry Lane was as described, jaw-droppingly beautiful. Even under the harsh light of the simple room she was sequestered in, she was flawless, no imperfections or blemishes highlighted by the glare. It might have been, as Shooter announced, all paid for, countenance and body alike, but nonetheless, she was a perfect specimen. All blonde hair, statuesque build, ample curves, full pouty lips.
Even after witnessing the horrendous fates that had befallen Thomas Cappell and Brad Klemmer, or currently were befalling them off-screen, she either didn’t wear an expression of fear, or perhaps wasn’t able to. Maybe she had so much collagen injected in her face or so much plastic surgery done that it was physically impossible for her face to form any kind of expression. Or possibly, she, a stunning woman used to getting her own way, was of the opinion she could somehow use those feminine wiles to wangle her way free of whatever fate Shooter consigned her to.
“You probably don’t even recall anything about Mister X. He’s most likely just another in a long line of losers you’ve wrongfully accused then sent on his way for a back alley kicking and a shower in urine. You’d never dream of having to be looked at the way he was, never a concern for having folks gaze upon you with the type of awe that can only come from clapping eyes on somebody so ungodly ugly that it took your breath away, and not in a good way.”
Cherry was no longer alone in her room. The same dark figure, Shooter’s silent offsider, the one who put ultra-violent, horrifying actions to the narrator’s words, was present too.
“It must feel a little like this, to be so physically repellent.”
As Cherry swivelled around, acknowledging that she had company, the quiet tormentor raised a canister with a spray trigger on it. He triggered a burst and a jet of liquid splashed against her face, drawing an immediate scream of agony. She recoiled, arms flying up to either ward off the spray or claw ineffectually at her skin.
Caitlin guessed she wasn’t just being shot with a water pistol; instead, she was the recipient of sustained bursts of a corrosive acid, either sulfuric, hydrochloric or nitric. Being no expert on any of those, Caitlin hadn’t a clue which, but she could see enough to observe what a horrific effect the assault had on the woman’s visage. Her formerly impeccable skin was corroded away, the flesh beneath melting like grilled cheese. A fine mist of smoke sizzled around the woman’s head, as her beauty dissolved right before the remaining horrified sets of eyes trapped in the cinema. The radiant became the grotesque in the blink of an eye as bare bone was revealed beneath pockmarked holes in flesh, facial features slumped and drooped, the nose suddenly hosting one gaping nostril rather than two before collapsing in on itself. Reddening skin bubbled and rippled in horrendous fashion as the caustic material wreaked havoc, burning not just flesh, but locks of hanging blonde hair too.
Cherry, possibly blinded by the full face acid shower, staggered like a drunk marionette released from its strings, bouncing off the walls of the narrow room.
There wasn’t any need for the dark figure to fire any more acidic weaponry, and he didn’t. He retreated, vanishing from the room, and upon his departure more liquid was generated. This time it came from what must have been a sprinkler system built into the ceiling and walls. It showered all over, an off-yellow spray that drenched the screaming, stumbling woman.
The trio still watching didn’t have to be rocket scientists to realise Shooter wasn’t raining a shower of more acid down on the beleaguered Cherry Lane. No, she was being saturated in gallons of urine, adding hideous insult to the deadly acid disfigurement.
***
The death-head die completed a fourth roll, filtering out of Shooter’s hands to display another number. A triumvirate of skulls stared up from the top die-face.
“Ah, there we go. Our first double-up.” Shooter sounded delighted. “Let’s go check in on Brad.”
***
Brad Klemmer was not doing too flash at all. In fact, Brad was doing pretty fucking badly.
In his dismal, subterranean enclave of mossy walls and filth-ridden floors, he was unbelievably still standing, as though massive shock had rooted him in one place and prevented him from even keeling over. He looked like some insane hobo’s idea of a Christmas tree, festooned not with baubles and bright trinkets, but with scuttling insects and rats. The former scurried and crawled through the blood-matted nest of Brad’s hair, trailing through the gore streaking his face, burrowing into his ears, invading his nostrils, and making their way in and out of his mouth.
It was even worse below his general head region.
The blood from his cranium wound had traversed right down his body, soaking his clothes and clinging them to his skin, and the hordes of rats emerging from the shadows went straight for these areas. They’d clambered up him, as if ascending some great tower of food, and set about gnawing with a savage fervour that saw teeth shred through material, through skin, through flesh. Scratches and bites upon exposed skin became bloody fissures, then widening rends as the ravenous rodents sought more bloody sustenance. They dug deep, ripping with clawed feet as they scrambled into the warmth that was the interior of Brad’s abdomen, and now his stomach, ripped wide open, contained a host of vermin, continuing to feast upon what they discovered in this treasure trove. Loops of intestine and myriad unidentifiable mangled meat segments flopped lazily out of the expanding hole, uncoiling and spooling in the filthy water eddying around the man’s feet.
It was impossible to fathom how he could still be frozen still and standing upright, but he was.
Below his waist, rodent teeth had sheared through his trousers as well, baring his extremities to the pestilent horde. Even now, a furry fiend was swinging from the flesh ribbons of his mutilated penis, gnawing away with a ferocity that drenched it in blood. It scrabbled for purchase as it shredded more flesh away, with claws digging into the ruins of Brad’s testicles as it did so.
He finally wobbled, and capsized, measuring his length in the mire beneath him, a cornucopia of blood, dirty water, rat shit and dead insects, but by then, Scooter had blackened the screen, shifting focus to another die roll.
***
Roll five took them back to Cherry Lane. There wasn’t much to see there, certainly not the grisly spectacle that was displayed in Brad Klemmer’s quarters.
She was no more than a sodden lump on the floor, still being inundated with the golden sprinkler system. A ruddy stain spread out from around her head, coalescing into the dirty yellow mess that puddled the cold concrete she was curled up on. She’d either succumbed to the agony of the acid eating away at her face, and passed out in shock, or she was dead. Whatever the case, there wasn’t any movement. Soon enough it would be irrelevant. If the sprinkler system kept punching foul liquid into the tiny, narrow expanse of the room, with her melted, gaping nose-hole pressed to the floor, she’d drown.
Shooter blacked out the screen.
***
“Only one roll left. Odds have been running hot tonight, not an even roll in sight. What are the chances of the three of you left riding this out completely?”
Caitlin jumped in involuntary shock as Shooter’s voice sounded again. This time it wasn’t the amplified, exaggerated boom brought about by him speaking from his sadistic viewing den. It was quieter, closer, realer. From right behind them.
The unseen man responsible for bringing them all here was standing several rows back up in the shadowy realms of the cinema, addressing them as he neared.
“Just on the off-chance none of you are as clever or perceptive as you might like to think, or give yourselves credit for, let me just provide some clarification. Yes, the poor bastard kid Bug, Newbie Nev and Mister X are all one and the same. They are all me, at certain points of my life. As you can see, life has been something of a cunt to me. One big, sadistic, evil, hard-hearted, gleefully wrong motherfucker of a cunt. But more importantly, the people in my life have seen fit to fuck with me in ways that shouldn’t really happen to anybody once, let alone over and over again.”
The presence of the faceless fiend kicked renewed panic into Caitlin, as if she needed any more incentive to be terrified. She strained without success to loosen any of her bonds, just as she, and the rest of them, had been doing for quite some time. Particularly after the bloody, visceral hells begin being unveiled in hideous technicolour on this cinema screen of atrocity. Her thoughts were a chaotic jumble of paranoia, terror, hopelessness, but she tried to muster up her organisational brain and put some order to them. She dug deep into the recesses of her memory banks, trying desperately to conjure up some situation where she’d hurt somebody who’d bear such a vengeful grudge. Of course she’d stepped on a multitude of people, cast them aside, swept them beneath her as she single-mindedly clawed her way up the corporate ladder to become the powerhouse in the boardroom she was today, but she couldn’t honestly summon up thoughts of anything that put her on a parallel with what her fellow captives had done.
Then again, maybe she hadn’t done anything. Maybe none of those souls emblazoned with the even numbers had really done anything worthy of Scooter’s ire. Maybe it was a test for them, a brutal exhibition warning them to learn to treat people better in the future. Or some such shit. She didn’t know. Maybe there were no even numbers on the die. At least, no six.
Caitlin inwardly prayed to a god she’d never believed in, and didn’t believe in now. She prayed to anything, or anybody, who cared enough to be paying her any attention.
“Here we go.” Shooter was in the row right behind them. Caitlin stared resolutely at the blank screen ahead of her, fighting the urge to turn and look at him, to see if his image jogged her memory and brought forth some recognition. Her two remaining companions were doing likewise, as if by not looking at him in some strange way increased the chances of their numbers not coming up on the final throw of the die.
There was a sudden rustling, a swish of fabric, and Caitlin knew it was the man shaking the death-head die in his hand, the material of whatever he was wearing moving against his skin as he did. Then the little black cube came tumbling out from beneath the vacant seats between her and number four, a bald man with a neatly manicured moustache.
It bounced on the floor, tumbling end over end, and came to rest several feet away, highlighted in the sullen glow of the screen. Six white skulls sat on the uppermost face.
The breath punched out of Caitlin. Her stomach tightened into a jumble of knots, all feeling like they were comprised of ice. Nausea, fear, panic, and disbelief all jostled with one another, fighting to take prime position in overwhelming her.
“My name,” Shooter apparently had more to say, prolonging any introduction he had for Caitlin. “…is Barnaby Swain. Despite life constantly kicking me in the nutsack repeatedly, I, like you lot, eventually became successful myself. At least in terms of the fact that I made money. A lot of money. And with some of that accumulated wealth, I bought this cinema. I modified it to suit my needs, as you’ve seen demonstrated with the various rooms our late, and unlamented friends, found themselves in. Unlike the lot of you, I never forgot the faces, the names, the people from my distant, and recent, past. Not a one of them. Certainly not you, Meredith Summers. AKA Number Two. In fact, it’s you who I lay the blame for me being unable to talk to women, find any success with women, or even look at women without feeling the old terrible feelings ballooning up inside me. After all, your story mirrors that of Cherry Lane, in your treatment of me. I quote, ‘There’s no chance in hell, a gross, small-dicked, scrawny, ugly as fuck little piece of shit like you is ever going to get to nail me.’
“Now, dear Meredith, as you well know, I, a desperately miserable, lonely, bullied kid with no friends, had merely asked you to be my lab partner in class. I wasn’t after anything more, because hell, at that stage, I barely knew about masturbation, let alone anything else. Yet, you, a promiscuous slut who must have banged the whole neighbourhood and their dogs, assumed that was all I was after. Which only intensified the torment for the rest of my schooling years. You remember what they called me in between bouts of dunking my head in the toilet? Or kicking my ass? Or any one of the many, many injustices perpetrated on me? Nailure Failure. That was me. That name haunted me through school and beyond. It became the root of my problems in even being able to communicate with women, let alone seek anything further.”
Shooter was standing in front of the first rows of seats now, but like his silent black-clad partner, he was hooded, and against the blank canvas of the cinema screen, he just looked like a malevolent silhouette. He lifted his hand as he continued speaking, and Caitlin saw what he was holding.
“So, alas for you dear Meredith, after all these years, Nailure Failure is going to have to prove you wrong. I do get to nail you after all.”
He brought the propane combustion-powered nailgun in his hand up, and levelling it at Meredith’s stunned face, triggered bursts that released a series of lethal projectiles. These weren’t tiny little brads or tacks, they were three inch behemoths that punctured flesh, stabbed into eyes, hit and lodged in bone. Blood puffed out around each nail as they chased one another into differing parts of her face, slamming her back in her chair. One popped an eye like some tough, rubbery egg, squirting fluid in conjunction with bloody ooze, another caught her flapping tongue and pinned it to her chin.
By the time Shooter had expended his full clip of nails, Meredith looked some grisly mockery of a porcupine, or a Halloween Pinhead costume gone inexorably askew.
***
Caitlin couldn’t even recall what happened to Number Four, what his name was, anything. By then she’d disappeared inside herself in a maelstrom of panic and terror, searching as deep as she could for any reservoir of information that had anything to do with a Barnaby Swain. Her eyes stayed locked on the death-head die, so tiny and incongruous on the floor below the cinema screen, as opposed to its larger than life appearance onscreen.
She heard Shooter running through his brief litany of how Number Four had wronged him, but it was all white noise, background static, as if her escalating dread had somehow managed to destroy her ability to understand simple words.
All she knew was that none of them were destined to leave without atoning for their hideous past behaviours in the most final and brutal of ways, even those whose numbers hadn’t been rolled on the six-sided death dealer. Apparently the only concession to those latter folk was they didn’t have to suffer the protracted cinematic tortures of those wearing painted-on odd numbers.
She barely even registered the presence of the second black-clad apparition around her, hunching down before her, busying himself nearby. She only drifted back to the horrific reality she was entrenched in when she heard her name being uttered by Shooter.
“Caitlin…Caitlin, come back to us. Where have you gone? Plumbing your memory bank trying to pull my name out of the scores of insignificant people you’ve filed away for reference at a never date?”
Shaking her head, as if that motion was enough to shake the vestiges of fog away, Caitlin realised her tape gag was gone. Her hands at her sides were no longer in restraints. She was, impossibly, free.
“Caitlin Hammond. Super-motivated business woman. Tyrant in the board-room. Corporate queen. Eschewed family and relationships of all variety, bar the infrequent one-night-stand, in favour of rising to the top and crushing perceived enemies or rivals underfoot. Little people be damned, Caitlin has no time for any of you, and that includes her own kin. Now, Caitlin, I apologise if this stroll down memory lane for you is a little impersonal, but you will appreciate the nice touch I’ve added to this whole scenario to make it more personal. See, you aren’t exactly a figure from my life in the vein of the others, rather you’re one who crashed through my life and made it infinitely worse in the way you’ve bulldozed through most of your dealings. Let me drag you back to a night not really so far back, six months or so at best.
“Late for a business meeting, or a coffee date, or a contract signing, or an I-don’t-know-what, Caitlin slams her Mercedes through late evening traffic like she’s a Formula One driver, cutting people off, running red lights, basically applying her ruthless board-room persona to her road sense. What she doesn’t need is some shambling fool, malformed from a lifetime of cruelty and pain, blundering out in front of her car, unable to move quick enough to escape. Nor does she attempt to brake or slow down. The only time she actually does stop and get out is to examine the damage to her car, and that result throws her into a fury that either causes a brain explosion, or more appropriately, brings that cold, calculating evil in her soul bubbling to the surface.
“Before she leaves the scene, she has one more thing to do. As the stricken soul, broken, but still alive, struggles to get up, she throws the Merc into reverse. Bounces him off the back-end with a force designed to wipe out any witness to the indiscretion. Then she’s off. Unfortunately for Catlin, I do survive. I’m like a cockroach, Ms Hammond. I survived Cappell, Meredith, Klemmer, Wally the dodgy doctor, and Cherry Lane, so of course I’m going to survive anything Caitlin Hammond has to throw at me.”
Caitlin wasn’t going to sit around listening to any more. Not when they’d-unbelievably, maybe stupidly-cut her free, unshackled her from the cinema chair. Memories of that hectic evening were already swimming back in a deluge. She recalled that grotesque, hunched, dishevelled mess of a person blundering right into her path. It was irrelevant that the light had just gone red; she could have slid through no problem. There was no other traffic around, she knew there was no red light camera at the intersection. She was home free until that abomination set himself on a crash course date with the front end of her Merc.
She hauled herself upright, swaying unsteadily. Her limbs felt like lumps of clay, bloodless and clunky. That wasn’t enough to slow her progress. Her escape. She stumbled as she moved from the seat, then fell to her knees, throwing a panicked look back over her shoulder.
There was Shooter-Barnaby Swain-standing back where he’d been before, making no effort to follow. His hood was cast back from his head now, hanging in thick dark folds around his neck. She barely recognised the face, but then again she’d taken no time to peer closely at it after cleaning it up twice with both ends of her Merc. Faces of nobodies meant nothing to her, particularly one that had fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. Then headbutted the ugly ground and gotten half-buried beneath it.
With all the money he proclaimed to possess, Swain had taken no steps to somehow rectify the damage caused to him over his life, or the hideous features birth bestowed on him. No, he seemed to prefer wearing those markings as some insane badges of honour.
“Go ahead, Caitlin. Run. Keep on running. You’re good at running from people. From responsibility. From family. All the corporate power in the world can’t change that. But, hey, remember when I said I added a personal touch to this whole fiasco to make it that little bit more intimate for you?”
Caitlin didn’t bother looking back at him again. She crawled, then found her feet again.
“Meet my dedicated assistant. Throws himself into his work with a fervour I’ve rarely seen before. He’s flourished under my guidance, finally accepted by somebody when his own family couldn’t care less about giving him the time of day.”
The silent, black-clad tormentor appeared several rows up, alongside a door, Caitlin presumed led to the house of horrors elsewhere in this deadly cinema. He mirrored Shooter’s unveiling, and tossed his hood back. The unhinged grinning face of her brother, Craig, was beneath that black shroud, streaked with blood.
“Hi sis. Told you I’d get you involved in one of my obsessions one day, one way or another. This is no television show though. This is much better. A much more fitting way for you to be portrayed too. The cold-hearted cunt with no family values and no regard for anybody else.”
Caitlin thought she’d be more shocked than she was, but somehow there was nothing. As if all shock and disbelief had already been seeped out of her as each act of the evening played out, unravelling in sequences that grew more horrifying.
Her eyes had already left Craig, were already scanning elsewhere in the cinema. Accustomed to the dark now, she could see much better, could pick out where things were. Directly in front of her, on the other side of the room beyond the rows of seats on the other side of the aisle, was another door.
As Craig disappeared from sight, back into the door he’d emerged from, she summoned up all the desperate strength she could muster and ran.
Shooter followed at a sedate, leisurely pace, stooping to regain his death-head die. He tossed it from hand to hand, as Caitlin hit the door and smashed it open, hurling herself from the darkened cinema.
The rush of cold night air smacked into her, filling her lungs with an icy blast. Temporarily disoriented, she stood frozen for a second, coming to the realisation that the side door had thrown her right outside. Out of the cinema complex completely. Free.
Then she moved.
And the throaty roar of an engine and the screech of tyres ripped through her ears. Her own Mercedes shot like a bullet from the crowds of shadows clustering the wall of the towering cinema monolith. Craig’s lunatic face grinned at her from behind the wheel as he slammed the vehicle into her with an impetus that bounced her up on the bonnet, then dropped her off in front. Tyres screeched in protest as the Merc stopped on a pin, and Caitlin’s broken body smacked against the unrelenting surface of the road.
In the glare of the headlights, all she could see was the last number of her licence plate, splattered with droplets of new blood.
Six.
[bctt tweet=”OCTOBER TERROR 2018 Short Story Award – Entry #43 ‘SIX’ by Jim Goforth – Enjoy all this terrific, disturbing material you have in your hands, lots of horror stories at your disposal for your dark delight and vote!” username=”theboldmom”]
On October 23rd we’ll close submissions and open a poll for the readers to choose their favourite one! You’ll have a week to make your choice and on October 31st we’ll announce the winner!!!
