CHAPTER 7 #2
Once John is at the back of the group, we move toward the other side of the room.
There’s fewer crude barricades blocking the way, less blood covering the walls, and I catch sight of the hallway when I look around Wes’s shoulder.
It’s dark, lit only by overhead lights that make Serendipity’s signature red walls a deeper red.
Residual light from the upper level shines down on the staircase in a cool, white block, and the symbolism isn’t lost on me.
Where’s the chorus of angels when you need them?
This is our saving grace—if the killer doesn’t decide to retrace their steps and finish us off before we can reach it, that is.
I let go of Laurie’s hand and point around Wes to the bottom of the stairs. He rolled his sleeves up when we were figuring out the order of our elephant parade, and my bare forearm brushes against his as I gesture out to the hall. His skin is… warm. The muscles underneath look… taut.
Goddamn it, Jamie, there’s a killer on the loose.
“The corridor goes around the entire bar down here,” I say, then clear the huskiness out of my throat. Drawing my finger in a straight line across from the bottom of the stairs to what mistakenly looks like a wall in the darkness, I add, “So there’s going to be a long hall running back that way.”
He doesn’t turn around when he asks, “You come here a lot?”
“I did. Enough to know it’s literally a maze. There’s a lot of places to hide, so just make sure you cover all your angles, you know?”
That makes him let out a darkly amused breath. “Yeah, I know.”
Shit. I hope that didn’t sound condescending.
It’s taking everything not to retreat into myself and avoid him after I showed him too much of an unfiltered version of myself.
I bet he suspects I’m living out my wildest fantasies.
I could live with the idea of him thinking I’m a bitch.
I’m starting to accept that he thinks I’m a nutcase.
But I draw the line at him believing I’m both.
“Wes, I just mean be… careful?”
It seems like a meaningless word and an obvious request, and I’m ready to try a more direct apology when he looks back at me and…
he’s smiling. The same smile he had when we first locked eyes and I told him what made me happy.
It’s almost like he’s forgiven and forgotten the whole word-vomit thing.
Which is a possibility considering verbal diarrhea pales in comparison to—I glance behind us—this.
“I’ll do my best.”
His voice is low, quiet, as warm as the arm that’s still pressed against mine even though either one of us could have—should have—moved away by now.
He leans forward, popping his head out of the entryway to survey both ends of the hall, and the cold air that slides in between us makes me shiver.
I retract my arm from the doorway and rub at the goose bumps, watching Wes’s hair turn a deep pinot noir under the lights before he leans back.
He glances over his shoulder to see some of the others are still psyching themselves up to leave the room before dropping his gaze down to mine. His head dips until we’re closer than during any part of our date. “Are you okay?” he asks. “I mean…”
He doesn’t have to elaborate. I had a front-row seat to the start of this madness.
“I think so.”
It’s hard to tell with so much adrenaline running through my body.
“If I just pretend it’s a scene from a movie and not actually happening in real life, I can make my legs move.”
The side of his mouth tilts up a little, and even though we’re armed with DIY weapons and my hands are sticky with someone else’s blood, my heart beats faster at the sight of it. He really is drop-dead gorgeous.
“Keep thinking that then. We’re gonna get out of here, okay?”
It’s funny. I believe him.
“Okay.”
“And Jamie?”
“Yeah?” I need to tilt my head back to maintain eye contact, and he’s not looking at me with that guarded expression anymore.
Nor has he gone back to the gratifying appraisal from the good part of our date.
This look is new, and I hope it’s not wishful thinking that has me interpreting it as something better.
“You… the way you’re handling this… Like, with Laurie… it’s—”
“Sociopathic?” I say without thinking, and he grins. Maybe the true crime talk wasn’t as big a turnoff as I’d initially thought.
“I was going to say it’s impressive,” Wes says. “It’s the kind of thing that’s gonna keep us alive.”
Keep us alive. That’s the goal of every survivor in a slasher, isn’t it? And I’ve seen enough of them to know that the choices characters make either lead to their demise or land them a spot in the sequel. I know the formula.
I just hope I know it better than the killer.
It’s too easy.
Our path up the stairs, around the boundary of the dance floor, into the entrance—it’s far too easy. The first level is such a stark contrast to the devastation beneath us (completely undisturbed, as clean as a nightclub can be) that I know something isn’t right. It’s too quiet. Too still.
The men try to push open the heavy front doors, but they don’t budge.
Then they turn to grasping the huge ornate handles and pulling.
Again, fruitless—they’re giant, heavy, and don’t have a visible lock.
Then John spots something on the wall next to the coat check window and strides over to it.
He digs his fingers into the top of a black rectangle and it flips open.
I spot a red light, buttons that probably are numbered, then he slides in front of it and blocks my view.
I don’t need to see it to come to the right conclusion, though.
That box is our way of unlocking those doors.
Even before his shoulders droop and he turns back with a frown, I know what he’s going to say.
“It needs a code.”
The killer always isolates their victims and makes it impossible for them to escape.
So that means that all those daters who ran up here had nowhere to go with a guy who just killed four people on their tails.
I do the math, subtract Curtis from the equation, and figure there are eleven people who made it up here.
Then I remember the scream we heard… More likely ten.
Plus the killer. While there’s always a possibility some stranger crept in during that first blackout, I don’t know if they could’ve left the room again before the lights came back on.
Returned to their seat, maybe. Hidden a knife, sure.
But somebody would have mentioned an unfamiliar face.
Then when you consider the proximity they had to have to Curtis before the blackout, the way they targeted the host and the bartenders…
Whoever did this has to be one of the daters.
So, nine. Nine terrified people who are strewn across the club.
“Where’s the girl who was on coat check?” Stu asks, and it looks like he has half a mind to click his fingers in the air to conjure up her services. It makes me frown and I can’t help but look at Laurie, quirking an eyebrow when she meets my eye.
Really? This guy?
She glances at him, tilts her head to the side to try and see him from my angle, and then just shrugs. We will be having a serious talk when we get home.
Colette is the closest to the entrance of the coat check. It’s cordoned off by a velvet rope the same color as the stains on her dress, and when she unhooks it, she makes it three steps into the room before stopping short, her gaze drawn to something on the ground.
“Oh.”
“What?” Campbell, the Norman Bates lookalike, asks.
Now that he’s away from the bloodbath downstairs, he’s become more talkative.
Not by much, though. He’s skittish, flinching at the most banal sounds.
Maybe if we’d had our date, I would’ve had a chance to have a more neutral first impression of him, but I’m still keeping an ear out for any mention of his mom.
“She’s here.”
Colette’s voice seems to be set to a sweet, high-pitched tone that people who work with children always have. The one where, no matter the subject, no matter the situation, they always sound upbeat and pleasant.
There’s a pause, and then Campbell says, “Is she okay?”
“I don’t think so.”
I move into the coat check after her. There’s not much room, and when we stand shoulder to shoulder, I can smell the blood on her, a coppery tang that goes straight through my nostrils and onto the top of my tongue.
I can’t concentrate on it too long, though, because I look down to where Colette is still staring and—“Oh.”
“Jamie?” Laurie prompts.
“No…” For a second, I think I’m going to throw up, but then I remind myself I’ve seen this before. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. “She is not okay.”
The woman in the coat check room was the one we heard scream. And it makes sense why, considering there is a meat cleaver stuck in her forehead. A meat cleaver. This place doesn’t even have a kitchen.
“Phones,” I say, and look away from where her face is split open like an uncooked roast. “We need to find the phones.”
I find the key to the lockbox easily. It’s right on top of the desk and it has a tag, with only a little bit of blood on it, that clearly identifies it as the counterpart to the box holding our phones captive.
Dani and Laurie join Colette and me on the hunt for the black metal box, but even with all of us squeezed into the room, we can’t find it.
It’s not here. The coat check attendant’s phone isn’t anywhere on the table or in her pockets.
I duck down to check, try not to gag, and still come up empty.
The iPad she was using earlier in the evening is missing, too. There isn’t even a landline.
“Nothing,” Laurie mutters from the back of the tiny room, extracting her hand from the pocket of a coat, pulling out the lining as she does.
The satin pocket is red, spilling out against a tweed-looking material and it reminds me of…
a lot of things I’ve seen tonight. She shakes her head, face ashen as she repeats, louder for those who can’t fit in the room, “Nothing.”
The thing is, I’m not even surprised. This is Slasher 101.
The killer cuts off your ability to communicate with the outside world.
Mrs. Voorhees did it in Friday the 13th.
Killer Santa did it in Silent Night, Deadly Night.
And now this one is following the same format.
“Is there a break room farther back?” I ask. “A door to outside?”
Laurie and Dani pull the coat racks away.
There’s red velvet hanging along the wall, and when Dani wrenches it back like a theater curtain, all it reveals is bricks.
This room is so small there is only one way in and out.
There was no chance the coat check attendant could have avoided that meat cleaver. She may as well have been in a cage.
“See if the code for the door is in there,” says Wes from the other side of the counter, and I turn back to the desk with a new mission, searching for a piece of paper with numbers scribbled on it, or some manual that could detail a way to bypass the lock.
But there’s nothing. The drawers are just filled with stationery, an obscene amount of rubber bands, and tickets used to identify our belongings.
The only thing in the whole room is the rack of coats… and the coat check girl. Woman.
“There’s got to be another way out of here,” Dani pants as we all file out of the room and join the men to form a ragged circle by the front entrance. She’s trying not to hyperventilate and is failing miserably.
She’s not wrong, though. There will be another exit, but while I remember the hidey-holes and the dead ends of this place, my drunk girl memories do not extend to anything helpful like a back door or a fire escape or even a window. If we want to find an exit, we’re going to have to search for one.
The rest of the group comes to that conclusion at the same time, but it’s Stu who proves just how incompatible we are by planting his fists on his waist and saying, “We should split up.”