Chapter 20 Patrick #2
An explosive sneeze took over Patrick’s face, jarring him out of his shock.
He wiped his itching nose with the back of the hand that held the flashlight.
Sniffling away the tickle, he was able to identify the other scents.
Sandalwood and pot. Classic eau de Freddy.
Patrick’s nerves lit up with alarm. Carrie had been afraid of Freddy, and Patrick had just found one of his prized knives on the floor, covered in blood. What had Freddy done with it?
A buzz suddenly crescendoed in his left ear.
He jerked in surprise, and swatted at a fly that must have gotten in through the open windows.
That was the source of the hum he’d heard earlier.
As he moved, he jerked again as something warm dripped onto his head and slid through his curls to his scalp.
Was there a leak in the cabin’s roof? He touched the damp spot and stared at the dark stain on his fingertips.
Slowly, very slowly, he looked up.
One of the cooking classes Patrick had taken was butchery fundamentals.
He’d learned how to break down poultry and pigs into cuts of meat that were unrecognizable from the animal they’d come from.
He’d cracked bones, pulled sinews free, separated muscles from fat.
He’d thrust his hand into many a wet, gaping cavity and emerged with slippery fistfuls of offal.
It was different—and yet not so different—when the parts were human.
A body hung over the banister like a wet towel.
It seemed to Patrick that the quiet cabin had become deafeningly loud.
A heady thrum filled his ears, and he forced the arm that held the flashlight to move.
The light illuminated mussed black hair and staring brown eyes that didn’t squint at the sudden brightness.
“No,” Patrick croaked.
Freddy’s striped T-shirt had ridden up to his chest, and his mouth gaped almost as wide as the incision across his belly.
Glossy loops of intestine had spilled free, dangling in parallel with his hanging arms, as if Patrick’s presence below was drawing them out.
A handful of flies crawled down these lengths, tasting their shine.
So much blood. More than Patrick had ever seen on a cutting board.
The Slasher, he slashes, Freddy screeched in Patrick’s head. The Slasher certainly had.
Freddy was never going to finish his screenplay now. The knife dropped from Patrick’s limp fingers and bile surged in the back of his throat. “Oh God, no.”
When the man dressed as the Slasher had stalked Patrick through the woods, even though he’d been terrified out of his wits, it had felt abstract. Surreal. Like he’d been acting out a play or a childhood nightmare. The Slasher was a bogeyman from a movie, after all.
But this was real—Freddy’s blood on his hands, the smell he now recognized as urine and fecal matter from Freddy’s loosened bowels, the burn in his esophagus as he fought the urge to vomit. The Slasher was real. Death was real, his senses told him. Real, ugly, and imminent.
The shock sent Patrick staggering to the main room, stumbling over the scattered throw pillows and crooked furniture as he frantically wiped his sticky fingers on his shirt.
He nearly had a heart attack as his shaking flashlight found the antler chandelier.
For a moment he thought the skeletal shape was another body hanging from the rafters, and he had to swallow down bile again.
He paused to lean against the sofa, gulping great breaths of air and willing his stampeding heartbeat to slow down.
He needed to resist the urge to run screaming from the cabin.
His friends were still out there. Jason was out there.
And none of them knew Russ was capable of this. He couldn’t abandon them now.
Help. He had to get help. He snatched up the heavy receiver of the rotary phone.
The rental office had said it was the only phone in the cabin, and at the time he hadn’t thought much of it.
He and his friends were coming to disconnect and have fun without distractions.
Movie fans flocked to the cabin for the eighties experience. The Slasher experience.
It seemed the Jumpscare Society was getting a more authentic stay than they’d bargained for.
The telephone let him down. Still no dial tone, which didn’t make sense because it had delivered the Slasher’s message earlier.
You’re all going to die tonight. And just as quickly, it had stopped working.
Patrick pressed his lips together, trying to think through the haze of panic.
It was an old phone, a vintage set piece. Maybe a connection was loose.
He wiggled the cord at the back of the phone’s base.
It snaked down the table leg and along the sofa.
He kept pulling, unearthing the cord from under a floor runner.
The middle of a room behind a sofa was an impractical place to put a corded appliance, but that was where Jordan Knox had received the famous phone call in the movie.
Framed by the support beams beneath the peaked ceiling, it made for a good scene.
A-plus for cinematography, but a fail for practicality.
There. Patrick spotted where the cord was plugged into the wall, next to a bookcase. He dropped his end and checked the plug. It seemed to be firmly in its socket, but he unplugged and plugged it back in, just in case.
He grabbed the receiver, silently uttering a prayer to the telephone gods. They didn’t answer.
Shit. Patrick tugged on the cord again. With the floor runner flipped up, the cord had slackened considerably.
He gathered its length in his hands until he came to a mangled part that would’ve been hidden by the edge of the runner near the socket.
Chewed by a mouse, he guessed. Most of the cord’s innards had been severed, and the whole thing hung together by a single wire.
Like Freddy, the skin was only a case for its inner parts.
Patrick had no idea how old phones worked. Maybe that single wire was why they’d been able to receive that call but not dial out. He peered at where the cord had split, and the drumming of his pulse rose to a thunderous volume.
The casing had been sliced cleanly. What the hell?
The cord slipped out of Patrick’s suddenly boneless fingers as his racing thoughts were interrupted by footsteps dragging up the front porch.
His breath scratched inside his chest, as if his lungs were full of sand.
He didn’t recognize the footsteps. He knew Jason’s gait like his own heartbeat, and Tiffany and Carrie’s step would be lighter, more anxious.
Mikey moved like a puppy who hadn’t mastered full control of his legs yet.
Jen had hopefully found her way to the Cedar Lake Motel, and anyway she walked with sprightly self-assurance.
The person coming up the steps was very calm, very sure, possessing a confidence that none of Patrick’s friends would have under these circumstances.
It was the confidence of a masked man holding a bloody axe.