18. Wtf?!
Ron
"What is it, buddy? Do you need to go again?"
I look down at Ollie, but it doesn't look like it. His ears are pinned back and he's bracing his paws in the damp morning grass, throwing his entire weight against the leash, pulling straight toward the front door of the estate.
"Okay, okay, we're going in, take it easy," I humor him, letting him drag me up the steps of the creaking porch. "I just wanted to let you stretch your legs in the fresh air."
I watch my dog wag his tail restlessly and whine at the solid wood. Maybe he misses Selene.
I push the heavy double doors open. And the second I step over the threshold, voices and chaos wash over me, nearly making me take a step back.
"See? It was him!"
Emerson's whiny, irritating voice acts as my welcoming committee.
The entryway is a madhouse. Practically everyone is down here, huddled together in their pajamas. They're looking around, babbling, pointing outside.
"No, it wasn't him," Emma shoots back, her voice high and trembling as she peeks out through the living room window panes, pulling her oversized sweater tighter around herself.
"No offense, beautiful, but... I don't think there's anyone else here besides us," Emerson insists, pushing his glasses up his nose with his usual, insufferably smug air.
"I'm telling you, I'm positive it was someone else! He didn't have a hat!" she continues, visibly panicking as she takes a step back, moving away from the glass.
"Hey. If she says she saw someone, she saw someone."
Levi's commanding voice cuts through the air, immediately grabbing my attention. He inserts himself between Emerson and Emma, acting as a human shield.
What the hell is going on here?
"And now we just have to figure out who it was," Levi continues, dropping his voice just for her. "Don't worry, Emmy... I've got you." And, as if sealing the promise, he wraps a solid arm around her shoulders.
"Yeah, well, don't worry," Cole chimes in. Or Cade. I still haven't figured out how to tell the twins apart. "Assuming something goes wrong, in horror movies it's always the blonde and the nerd who bite the dust first." With a cheeky grin, he points unmistakably at Emerson and Susan.
Carolina, standing next to Indya, claps a hand over her mouth in a poor attempt to hide a laugh that slips out anyway.
"Excuse me?" Susan, wrapped in a silk robe, frowns, visibly irritated by the joke. "Cade, that is seriously idiotic."
"But... I'm blonde, too!" Emma squeaks at the same time, looking at her hair with pure terror painted on her face. Levi, by her side, shakes his head with a reassuring smile, rubbing her shoulder as if to say, I told you I've got you.
"No, hold on a second, darlin', I am Cade," the other twin steps forward, raising a hand with an outraged look and pointing an accusing finger at his brother. "Don't confuse me with my idiot twin."
"Okay, okay, quiet!" I cut in, raising my voice over the overlapping chatter. My brain is about to explode and I can't follow a damn thing. "What is going on?"
The group falls silent, turning toward me.
"We heard a noise and we all came downstairs to check it out," Levi gives me the rundown, quick and concise. "Then Emma saw someone out in the woods."
I take a breath. I don't think it's anything to panic about. We're on a reality show, for fuck's sake; it's probably just a crew member who showed up early, or maybe one of us stepped outside for a breath of fresh air.
But despite logic, somehow my brain goes on high alert anyway. A sudden chill grips my stomach.
I quickly scan the crowded room, taking in the tired faces around me. Levi, Emma, the twins, Carolina, Indya, Emerson, Susan, Josh, Lizzie, Sam, Katherine.
"Where's Selene?" I ask. My voice comes out hard, tense, as my boots are already moving toward the main staircase.
"She didn't come down..." someone murmurs, I think it's Indya, glancing upstairs.
Before I can take the first step, the leash is yanked right out of my hand. Ollie pulls in the opposite direction, planting himself in front of the wide archway leading to the old formal living room, and starts barking furiously. Barking at empty air.
Dammit. I know perfectly well it's nothing. But for some fucking reason, I feel a burning urge to get upstairs and make sure Selene is okay.
Ollie keeps barking, growling with bared teeth as he pulls toward the room.
And then, suddenly, from the dark living room... the old grand piano starts playing all by itself.
The slow, metallic, sinister notes float through the cold air of the house. We all look at each other, stunned and freaked out.
"What the fuck?" Sam exclaims, his eyes going wide.
"Okay, guys, calm down. It's Für Elise... a textbook horror cliché," Emerson declares, huffing and crossing his arms. "Someone from production is just fucking with us."
"And how exactly is a piano supposed to play by itself?" Carolina shoots back, her wide eyes betraying a feverish excitement that looks a lot more like enthusiasm than fear.
"There's gotta be some fucking internal mechanism hooked up to a remo—"
Emerson's logical explanation is wiped out.
A scream tears through the air. Coming from upstairs.
Selene.
Fuck.
I drop the leash. I don't even need to pull Ollie, because he bolts right alongside me.
We start taking the stairs three at a time. I hear the others' footsteps thundering behind me. My heart is beating with painful force against my sternum. My mind is wiped clean of all logic. I NEED her to be okay.
"SELENE!" I yell, my voice cracking with panic.
The second I round the corner on the second floor, skidding on the smooth hardwood with the rest of the group right behind me, I see her.
She's standing in the middle of the long hallway, wrapped in her black cardigan. Her face is pale as wax, her hands pressed over her mouth. She's okay. She's unharmed. But her eyes are wide open, fixed to her left.
I follow her gaze, and the blood freezes in my veins.
The door to Dustin and Sierra's room is wide open. And from under the threshold of their bathroom, a thick, massive pool of water and dark red liquid is slowly spreading across the antique hardwood floor.
"What the fuck is that?!" Josh yells, coming up behind me and stopping dead in his tracks.
I don't answer. I close the distance in two strides, grab Selene, and pull her tight against my chest, wrapping my arms around her shoulders to turn her away. I press her face into my shoulder, blocking her view, shielding her with my entire body, feeling her tremble.
Levi tries to bolt forward to enter the room, but Emma, in a full-blown panic, grabs his arm. "No, please! Don't go in there!"
Holding Selene tightly against my chest, I look up. Finally, Sam and Josh muster the courage. The two hockey players cross the threshold with clenched fists, tiptoeing to avoid the dark liquid.
The silence in the hallway is dead and heavy.
"It's coming from the shower," Josh yells from inside, his voice tight as a violin string.
Sam reappears in the bathroom doorway, his face pulled into an unreadable mask. He looks down the hall, then drops his eyes to his feet.
"No sign of Dustin and Sierra," he declares. He crouches down slowly, staring at the ever-expanding puddle.
His voice drops to a chilling whisper. "Guys... is this blood?"
The silence that follows is so heavy it crushes our eardrums. I feel Selene stiffen against my chest, her fingers clutching the fabric of my t-shirt.
"Don't be absurd, Sam." Emerson's voice cuts the tension, cracking just a bit.
With a trembling index finger, he pushes his glasses up his nose, shaking his head.
"This is a reality show. It's clearly a sick joke. It's corn syrup. Fake hemoglobin, food coloring. A basic chemical reaction mixed with water for dramatic effect..."
"...is it Dustin and Sierra's blood?" Emma murmurs, her voice barely a thread.
"Nah," Cole scoffs, running a hand through his hair, desperately trying to lighten the mood. "Those two couldn't keep their hands off each other. They're probably fucking somewhere else in the house and forgot to turn the water off."
"Yeah, and..." Carolina echoes him, though her bubbly tone falters, "why would the water be red?"
Oooohhhh...
A wail echoes. It's a broken, gurgling sound.
Emma violently flinches and hides her face in Levi's neck. "Oh my God... is it a ghost?" she stammers, terrified.
"Don't say stupid shit, Emma. Ghosts don't exist," Emerson snaps, his rational stubbornness clashing with the cold sweat beading on his forehead. "It's a hidden Bluetooth speaker, I'd bet my degree on it."
But before Emerson can take a step toward the room, the temperature in the hallway drops drastically.
The wall sconces above our heads flicker, emitting an electrical buzz, before snapping off completely at the end of the hall.
And right from that sudden darkness, behind the group, a shadow emerges.
A man wearing a long slicker raincoat. His face is covered by a raw leather mask, crudely stitched together with dark twine. In his right hand, he grips a lumberjack axe. The blade is dark, dripping. He advances toward us slowly.
Josh, who had been petrified on the bathroom threshold alongside Sam, whips around at our gasps. Then he lunges forward.
"You sick son of a bitch, the joke's over!" he roars.
He winds up his swing, aiming straight for the intruder's masked head.
But... he just punches air.
There is no impact.
His fist passes right through the masked figure's skull, as if the killer were nothing but thick smoke and holograms. Josh loses his balance from the force of the empty swing and stumbles forward, slamming into the opposite wall.
"What the fuck...?" Josh pants, looking at his hands.
Pure panic seizes the group. The illusion vanishes.
"It's a spirit!" Emma screams. Her voice is shrill, on the verge of hysterics, as she clings desperately to Levi's shirt.
"Don't be absurd, Emma, calm down!" Emerson fires back. He pushes his glasses up with a trembling index finger. "It's clearly an optical illusion. A high-definition 3D holographic projection! A lighting trick from production to scare us..."
"It wasn't a trick!" she cries, shaking her head. "We woke it up!"
"I'm telling you, it's just smoke and mirrors, there is physically no one in this house capable of hurt—"
Emerson's rational explanation chokes and dies in his throat.
From the absolute pitch-black end of the hallway comes a noise. Like a wet sack of meat hitting the hardwood.
It rolls. Thud. Rolls. Thud.
Something rolls out of the shadows. It slides across the wood, bouncing with a squishy sound, and slowly comes to a stop, smearing the floor with stains until it bumps right into the toe of Josh's boot.
Time freezes. The air in my lungs turns to lead.
A head.
It's Dustin's severed head.
His hair is a dull, matted tangle, soaked in fresh red. His eyes are wide open, glassy, staring blankly ahead in an expression of pure, blood-curdling terror. The jagged edges of his severed neck leave an unmistakable dark trail.
No one has time to scream. No one has time to process the horror.
Because, from the dark end of the hall, footsteps begin to echo.
Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.
This time the wood creaks, groaning under a massive, physical weight. The sound is unmistakable: heavy boots. A man emerges from the thick shadows.
He is wearing the exact same long, black slicker raincoat as the hologram, but this one is gleaming with real blood.
The same raw leather mask covers his face, but now we can hear him breathing.
It's a harsh, animalistic rasp filtering through the eyeholes.
In his right hand, protected by a thick rubber glove, he grips a lumberjack axe.
He drags the blade against the wooden wall, producing a metallic scrape that makes my skin crawl.
He is solid. He is armed. Emma lets out an ear-splitting scream.
"RUN!" Levi roars.
And it is absolute, total chaos. Hell.
Survival instinct kicks in—the group breaks apart in a split second.
It's a blind, irrational, deafening scramble.
The twins, Cade and Cole, bolt toward the service stairs at the back of the hall.
Carolina and Indya scream, running blindly toward the west wing of the estate.
Emerson is petrified, his logic completely collapsing, and Susan has to grab him and drag his dead weight away.
Sam snatches Katherine around the waist and shoves Josh and Lizzie forward to get them moving.
"Selene, let's go!"
I grab her hand tightly. Her fingers are like ice. With my other hand, I grip Ollie's leash; he is growling furiously, the hair on his back standing straight up.
I pull them both with desperate force, sprinting in the opposite direction of the carnage, plunging into the east wing of the second floor.
We run blindly, guided only by instinct. Somewhere, in the bowels of the massive, labyrinthine estate, I can hear doors slamming, terror-muffled screams, heavy and fast footsteps.
My heart is exploding in my ears. Adrenaline burns through my veins. I need a safe haven. I need to get Ollie and Selene safe right fucking now.
I feel along the carved wooden wall in the dark until I find the recess of an inset door at the end of the hall. I grab the old brass handle, throw my shoulder against the wood, and shove it open, pushing them inside.
I walk in last and slam the door behind us.
Fumbling frantically, I find the heavy iron deadbolt and slam it into place with a metallic clack, then turn the key in the lock twice.
I turn to face the room. The enclosed silence of the bedroom is broken only by the violent sound of our ragged breathing and my dog's frightened panting.
We are alone. We're locked in, separated from everyone else.
And I have no fucking idea what is waiting for us out there.