Chapter 9
We veer to the left, follow the hall to a set of aluminum swinging doors into the kitchen.
“Hi. Hello,” Wyatt says. “Is anyone back here?”
I wait for Evan to make a sarcastic comment, something about how we’re woefully unprepared for a masked murderer situation, about Wyatt’s Minnesotan manners—if he wants to go ahead and ask our assailant if it’s easier for him if we stand still with our hands behind our backs.
But Evan says nothing. He has Wyatt by the arm, pulling him close.
Platters of food congeal under heat lamps. Giant bowls of grilled peppers go cold and waxy on the counter. There are pots on the stove, gas burners still glowing purple underneath.
“Everyone probably bailed when they heard the screaming,” Luke says.
“Where’s the door?” Danny asks.
I look around, my eyes frantic and refusing to focus. I spot a knife gleaming on the counter and pick it up. It’s nowhere near as big as the man in the mask’s, but it’s something.
I don’t know how to hold it. I feel fucking ridiculous.
“Do you have my keys?” I hear Evan ask Wyatt. Wyatt shakes his head. “Does anyone have their car keys? Wills?”
“At the cabin.” Why didn’t I grab them when I had the chance? Would it have made a difference?
“I’ve got keys,” Luke says, holding up a fob. “I can get the van. We all get out of here. Get help.”
“No,” Cassie says.
“It’s one guy, Cass.”
She huffs. “We don’t know that for sure, do we? We’ve been over this. I’m not risking it. And at least one of us would have to stay behind to lock up so whoever’s out there can’t get in. I don’t like that. We should stay together.”
“The door,” Danny says. “Where’s the door?”
“Hmm…back there?” Wyatt says, pointing. He walks past the double oven and rounds a corner. The moment he’s out of view—a thud, followed by a sharp intake of air.
“Wyatt!” Evan runs after him.
“I’m okay,” Wyatt says. “I stepped on him. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
There’s a body on the floor in a pool of blood. A member of the waitstaff—black shoes, black slacks, black shirt, throat slashed, no eyes.
Wyatt, Evan, Cassie, and Luke all freak out. Howl. Retch. Panic. But this isn’t the first horror scene that Danny and I have witnessed tonight, and we’re somehow already desensitized. He steps over the body to get to the back door.
He turns around, and his expression churns my stomach.
“What is it?”
“It’s locked. The door is already locked.”
No one else is paying attention—they’re all preoccupied with the slaughtered body at their feet—so they don’t get it, don’t understand what this means.
I lean down and touch the dead man’s forehead with the back of my hand, trying to avoid the leakage from his empty sockets. He’s still vaguely warm.
He hasn’t been dead for that long.
“We have to go,” I say.
Danny unlocks the door and pushes it open. “Come on.”
“No!” Cassie screams.
“Cass,” I say, dropping my voice to a whisper. “He’s not out there. He’s in here. With us.”
“We don’t know that,” she whispers back.
“Yes, we do,” Danny says.
No one screams. No one moves. The shock of him, of the mask—I tried to prepare them, but how could I?
He stands near the stove. He’s enormous; he must be nearly seven feet tall.
His eyes have multiplied. I count five, six.
And they…oh God. I don’t think they’re fake.
They’re not. They’re not fake eyeballs. Not anymore.
Now they’re fucking real. Gooey. Dripping.
Adhered haphazardly with double-sided tape.
He holds his obscenely giant knife in one of his obscenely giant gloved hands. He waves with the other.
Wyatt grabs Evan by his collar and shoves him out the door. Luke picks up Cassie, throws her over his shoulder, and takes off. Barefoot, I slip in the blood on the floor, and Wyatt catches me. He pushes me over the threshold. Danny next.
Wyatt makes it out, but he doesn’t get far.
He lurches forward, his brow furrowing.
“Let’s go,” Danny says, taking me by the wrist and pulling me across the lawn toward the path.
“But—” I start.
Wyatt goes down. He’s such a big guy and he hits the ground so hard without even trying to break his fall.
There’s a knife sticking out of the back of his head, buried deep in his skull.
Evan screams his husband’s name over and over and over again as he runs to where Wyatt lies still in the grass.
“Get up, you oaf!” Ev says. “Get up! I love you. I love you. You have to get up!”
He’s so busy pleading he doesn’t see the masked figure striding toward him. Or maybe he does and just doesn’t care.
“Fuck off,” he says, as the masked man lifts the hammer from his utility belt.
“Evan! Run!” I know he won’t. He won’t leave Wyatt. He’s about to die. He’s about to get a hammer to the head. I’m about to watch another one of my best friends die.
I can’t.
What good story starts with a retreat?
The fog of fear lifts for a moment of clarity.
I’m holding a kitchen knife. I picked it up for a reason.
Now I’m pulling away from Danny, and I’m running as fast as I can, and I’m not breathing because the eyes are on me, so many dead eyes, and I’m not thinking—obviously I’m not thinking—until I’m close enough to wonder if knife beats hammer. Rock paper scissors.
The man swings his hammer and this caveman survival instinct puppets my body. I flinch and lean back at the last second, and the hammer just clips my shoulder, and I drop the knife, lose my balance, fall to my knees at the masked man’s feet.
He hooks his fingers around my jaw and my neck.
His glove does nothing to soften his grip, and I can feel the bruises forming from the blood vessels breaking.
He lifts me up with one hand like I’m nothing, like I have no weight at all.
My feet are off the ground. He holds me so I’m eye level with the layer of mesh under his balaclava.
I still can’t see his real eyes, his face. It’s too dark.
“I see you,” he wheezes. “I see you, I see you, I ssseeeeeeee you.”
I should be fighting back, but it’s hard to do anything other than panic when there’s a hand around your neck, and I wonder if I should just surrender to this fate because maybe it’s what I deserve. Because this all feels like my fault.
“I saw you.” My voice is weak, strangled. I saw you and I did nothing. I convinced myself that you weren’t real, that this wasn’t happening. I sat back in my denial, and I allowed this to happen. There is literally blood on my hands.
My fault.
Suddenly, his grip loosens. He wavers, and I drop.
The kitchen knife sticks out of his calf.
Evan stabbed him.
“Go!” he tells me. “Run, you dumb cunt.”
The ultimate term of endearment coming from him.
I stand on shaky legs. “Not without you.”
The man removes the knife from his calf without hesitation. He flips the knife into the air and catches it by the handle.
Evan looks up at me with his wonderful, handsome face, his smart mouth frowning, and just shakes his head.
I don’t see what happens next. Danny has me. His arm is linked through mine and he’s running so I’m running. We get up to the path and step right into the yellow glare of headlights.
It’s Luke and Cassie in their van. Engine on. They’re not driving it, though. It’s just stopped there a few yards away, growling at us.
“Tires are slashed,” Danny says as we get closer.
“Of course they are,” Evan says. Only he doesn’t, because he’s not here.
“I left him,” I say. “I…I left. I left him. And Stephanie. I left…I left them.”
Luke pulls the van forward. The hubcaps scrape the ground, making the most heinous racket. Cassie opens the side door. “Where’s Evan? Where’s Wyatt?”
“They didn’t make it,” Danny says, pushing me toward the van. “What’s the plan? We get as far away as we can on hubcaps?”
Luke puts the van in park and opens the driver’s side door.
“Where are you going?” Cassie says.
“Back for Evan and Wyatt. Danny, get Cass and Willa out.”
Cassie takes off her shoe and throws it at Luke’s head. “Theo. Our son. I’m not explaining to him that Daddy’s not coming back. Get in the fucking car.”
Luke stops. He sniffs the air. “Do you smell…”
“Smoke,” I say.
“Where’s it coming from?” Danny asks. “Do you see it?”
I think of the burners in the kitchen. The gas stove left on.
I think of Ravi’s frustration that time we were in the car on the way to the airport, and I asked him to please turn around and go back home, because I couldn’t remember switching the burner off after I made my tea, because what if our house blew up like that beloved West Village chicken spot?
Because my anxiety was too loud. Because it always has to ruin everything, and to save me from nothing.
“We have to get everyone out,” I say.
“Shit,” Danny says.
“Where’s the guy? The guy in the mask?” Luke asks.
Great question.
“Get back in the van!” Cassie says, throwing her other shoe at him.
He does what he’s told.
“You two go,” I say. “Maybe you can get far enough that you’ll have cell service. Get to the road and flag someone down.”
Cassie nods and closes the side door. She has a singular focus. Theo. She needs to get back to her son. She’s in survival mode. I admire it, but it hurts me, a little. That she doesn’t say goodbye.
She has a family. That’s her priority. I’m not part of it. I’m second tier. It’s a selfish, insecure, ugly thought. But it’s there.
My friends have families. I’m on my own.
Luke slides into the driver’s seat and shuts the door. He reverses the van down the path. It makes that hideous noise again—metal grinding dirt and rock—so awful it scrambles my brain, leaves me woozy.
“Hold on,” Danny says. “What are we doing? You should go with them.”
“You should go with them. It’s not too late. I can get everyone out.”
“I told you I wouldn’t leave you.”
“And I won’t leave you. So, let’s go.”
We run to the front of the reception hall.
Vicky’s body is still in the grass, but her head is now resting on the steps, near the eyeless man in the bloody suit.
It’s intentional placement, meant to frighten anyone coming out of the reception hall, to cause commotion.
Fear makes people do stupid things. Make bad choices.
If they open the doors and the first thing they see is Vicky’s decapitated head, they’ll run back inside—fish in a barrel, until that barrel starts to burn.
“We should move them,” I say, lifting the dead man’s legs. He’s heavier than I was expecting.
“Look.” Danny points to the deck. Smoke whorls up from underneath. “No time.”
I drop the man’s legs, muttering an apology under my breath.
Danny bangs on the door. “Hey, it’s me. It’s Danny. You need to get out. There’s a—”
“Wait.” I cover his mouth. “If we tell them there’s a fire, they’ll panic.”
“Okay, yeah. Okay,” he says, gently moving my hand away. He bangs on the door again, this time with both fists. “Hey. Hey! Open up! You guys all need to leave. Okay?”
There’s quiet on the other side.
“Hello?” he says.
They don’t trust us. They’re too afraid.
“Ravi,” I shout through the door. It hurts to speak, my neck bruised, throat raw. “Ravi, you have to listen to me. You have to trust me. You need to get everyone out.”
Why would he listen to me? Why would he trust me?
“Please,” I say. “Ravi?”
Mumbling. Movement. They’re talking it over.
“We’re wasting time. We have to tell them,” Danny says. He grabs the knob and rams his shoulder into the door. “There’s a fire!”
The smoke billows up from under the deck. I can hear the crackle and hiss of flames.
“Ah, shit!” Danny starts to pace, hands on his head. “A window. We’ll break a window. We’ll—”
He’s interrupted by the click of a lock.
The doors open.
It’s Ravi.