Chapter 21 Patrick
Patrick
Patrick hurriedly turned off his flashlight and glanced around the room.
There had to be something he could use to fight off the Slasher.
The assorted knickknacks at hand were laughable in comparison to that axe.
What could he do with them, anyway? Lob them at the Slasher like snowballs?
They would buy Patrick only a few minutes before that solid blade buried itself in his body.
Wedged between his joints, the way he’d been taught to break animals into palatable cuts.
To the Slasher, Patrick and his friends were merely meat.
What else could he use to fight off a killer?
The main room and kitchen had already been raided.
Patrick shouldn’t have dropped his prized chef’s knife, even if the thought of touching that sticky handle made him want to gag again.
Anyway, if he went to grab it or ran upstairs to get his other knives, whoever was coming to the front door would see him.
There was one place left he could check.
Renters normally weren’t allowed to access the cellar, but Patrick had sweet-talked—okay, begged—the rental manager on duty into letting him have a key.
The manager remembered Patrick and how respectful the Jumpscare Society had been of the cabin grounds and had relented.
After Patrick had slipped her an extra hundred under the table and assured her that Carrie Zhao hadn’t been invited.
It was supposed to be his final surprise for his friends: a tour of the forbidden cellar where the Slasher memorabilia was stored.
None of them had ever been down there. Except for Jen and Carrie, the night Carrie had borrowed props to use in that ill-fated photo.
That machete she’d posed with had been real.
If it was still there, it might give him a chance against an axe.
Patrick dashed to the cellar door, taking his key ring out of his pocket.
Hands sweating, he fumbled the right key into the keyhole and twisted.
The tumblers gave no resistance. A hundred dollars, and the cellar was already unlocked.
If he hadn’t been in a life-or-death situation, he might have admired the rental manager’s hustle.
The screen door squawked. Patrick was grateful for its telltale squeaky hinges now. He slipped inside the cellar and quietly turned the lock. Breathing heavily in the pitch black, he leaned against the door to collect his galloping thoughts.
At the forefront of his mind was Clare. He’d always wished she’d fought harder, like a cornered Final Girl.
Now he understood, as the fear shimmered across his skin and urged him to run down the darkened stairs and make himself as small as possible.
When it came to fight-or-flight instincts, it seemed flight was in his family’s blood.
After Clare’s death, Dad had fled with him and Mom from the supposedly dangerous city of Fairvale to Cedar Lake.
Mom had escaped her grief through self-medication.
Didn’t Patrick himself avoid conflict at all costs, acting as the peacemaker in all his friend groups, including the Jumpscare Society?
Patrick shook as he leaned against the cellar door, wracked with guilt and terror. He’d wasted so much time being angry at Clare. And, God as his witness, he didn’t want to meet her fate. He was going to fight.
The cabin’s hardwood floors creaked, betraying that the mystery guest was moving around.
There was the possibility Patrick had misjudged, and it was one of his friends.
He listened carefully above the pounding of his heart.
The footsteps were even and deliberate, even though the person must have seen Freddy’s eviscerated body.
It had to be Ranger Russ. Tiffany and Carrie would have screamed bloody murder.
Mikey and Jason would have at least stopped and made a noise of shock.
But the footsteps betrayed no surprise, no fright, no sorrow.
They were unrelenting. Like the Slasher.
The owner of the footsteps knew Freddy’s body was there.
The footsteps grew louder. Shit. Russ was heading down the hallway.
Patrick froze, afraid to even blink in case Russ heard his eyelashes flutter.
A trickle of cold sweat traced its way between his shoulder blades as he pressed them against the wood.
Marking the spot where the axe might bury itself if Russ decided to chop through the door like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
But Patrick dared not move, terrified he’d give his presence away.
Below his elbow, the doorknob rattled.
It was the longest minute in Patrick’s life.
He couldn’t see a thing as Russ attempted to enter the cellar.
He was only a consciousness suspended in darkness, the vibrations from the shaking door passing through him like shock waves.
Maybe he was already dead. If Patrick let himself relax, Russ would open the door and walk through him as if he were a ghost.
Just when Patrick thought he was going to spontaneously combust from the stress, the footsteps moved away. He doubled over, gagging on a silent scream of fear and relief.
When he managed to get his breathing under control, his determination to find the Slasher machete returned.
But there was no way he was descending into the cellar in total darkness.
He hadn’t come this far, only to break his neck on the stairs.
How could he turn on his flashlight without the light giving him away?
Patrick had never been good at pivoting when plans went south.
He liked all his avenues determined well in advance.
To get himself out of this dilemma, he needed to channel his inner Final Girl.
The trouble was that he didn’t think he had an inner Final Girl, despite all the classic slashers he’d watched.
In those movies, the Black characters tended to die first, so he’d always identified as an unsuspecting victim. Like Clare.
Think, he berated himself. Thinking was one thing he was good at. What would Nancy Thompson do? Sidney Prescott? Or Jordan Knox?
As soon as he thought of Jordan, the solution came to him.
He unbuttoned his Oxford shirt, stripping down to his undervest. It was identical to the white tank tops Carrie had worn when she’d played Jordan at the Rialto.
When they’d had two shows a night on busy summer weekends and no time to do laundry, the theater’s manager bought her the Fruit of the Loom three-packs at the Main Street department store.
Patrick smoothed the ruined Oxford shirt along the crack of the door. There. That would hide his activity from Russ. Feeling accomplished, Patrick turned on the flashlight.
The open staircase plunged into a black hole. He should’ve known the cabin would have the classic creepy cellar. Bad things happened when people went down stairs like these. People who went into basements in horror movies rarely came out again.
Carrie did, he reminded himself, and only her reputation had suffered.
As long as he didn’t find any dead mothers, reel-to-reel tape players, racist brain-swapping neurosurgeons, boilers stoked by scarred custodians in striped sweaters, or secret passages inhabited by naked, feral women, he’d be okay. How creepy could it be?
Very, it turned out.
Patrick stepped off the wooden steps and onto the ground, the coldness of the unfinished concrete seeping through the soles of his deck shoes.
The walls were unfinished, too, nothing but skeletal wooden frames and semi-opaque plastic sheeting.
His nose itched from the musty smell of untreated lumber and cement.
He nearly jumped out of his skin as he took another step forward and a hanging cobweb swatted his face. Clawing wildly, he discovered it was the string from a naked lightbulb. He tugged until it clicked, but the light didn’t turn on. The power was still out.
He abandoned the lightbulb and passed through a doorway, sidestepping a large dehumidifier, and shone the flashlight around.
He was met by row after row of industrial shelving units.
At the last second, he pulled his lips out of the whistle he’d been about to issue.
Russ might be able to hear him upstairs.
Patrick couldn’t believe his eyes. He knew there was Slasher memorabilia in the cellar, but he hadn’t expected so much of it.
Stunned, he found himself drawn to a clothing rack in the far corner instead of starting his search for the machete.
Several coats in the Slasher’s signature red buffalo plaid hung on the rack, in various states of wear and tear.
Patrick thumbed through the hanging garments, reverently brushing his hand over Derek’s bloodstained football jersey and Heather’s fringed leather jacket, shredded in the back where the Slasher had stabbed her.
There had probably also been multiples of that jacket, but some stylish actor or crew member must have nicked the original.
As Patrick got to the end of the rack, a dark shape loomed out of the corner of his eye.
He swung his flashlight to the left, and did a double take as he spotlit the glossy cardboard face of the Slasher.
A couple of standees leaned against the wall, next to a stack of large boxes.
The top box was open, a black T-shirt spilling out between the flaps.
Patrick picked it up out of curiosity, and discovered it had Slasher Summer printed on it in a font that looked like dripping blood.
Holy shit. There weren’t just movie props down here. He’d found a hoarder’s dream of festival swag. Another time he would’ve stuffed his pockets with fridge magnets and pens and squishy axe-shaped stress toys, all printed with the Slasher Summer logo.