Vivi and I sat across from Jordan’s hospital bed. The doctors said he should be alright. He only suffered cuts and bruises. The killer hadn’t hit him in the back of the head, like the other victims. They’d used chloroform. They were learning. They didn’t want Jordan to die from a hit that was meant to render them unconscious, like what happened to Dylan and the Exorcist victim. I had gotten a call from the asshole ME and he confirmed it, another brain hemorrhage. In that girl’s case, I was glad she was dead before the killer got to work, undressing her and dressing her in what they’d brought, posing her like a cheap haunted house prop.

“The last thing I remember was unlocking my front door,” Jordan said. “Then I woke up in that bathroom.”

“With Paul?” I asked.

“Paul and the man.”

Vivi and I shared a look.

“What man?” I asked.

“A man wearing a black hood,” Jordan said. He was still groggy. The doctors had given him something for the shock. “A pig.”

“A pig mask,” Vivi said. “Jigsaw’s helpers wear them in the movies. They kidnap people.”

I rolled my eyes. “I hate horror movies.”

“Don’t blame the movies,” Vivi said. “Blame the crazy guy who’s bringing them to life.”

I leaned in to Jordan’s bed. He looked bad. Groggy. Pale. Sedated and anxious at the same time. “What makes you think it was a man.”

“He had a very deep voice,” Jordan whispered, looking around nervously as if the killer could walk into the room at any moment.

“Probably a voice changer,” Vivi said. “Like the killers in Scream. Jigsaw’s copycats use them in the sequels and—”

“Vivi,” I said. “Maybe you should wait in the hall.”

“Fine,” Vivi said. “If you don’t want my help—”

“I do want your help,” I said. “And you’re helping a lot, but I shouldn’t even be here. The only reason the doctors haven’t kicked me out is because I’m the sheriff.”

“Alright,” Vivi said. She walked out of the room and shut the door.

I turned back to Jordan. Part of the reason why I asked Vivi to step out of the room was because I didn’t want her to hear what Jordan would say next.

“What happened to Paul?”

Jordan’s eyes met mine. They were wide with what could only be fear. I could practically hear his heart pounding. His breaths became quick and shallow and strained.

“He kicked Paul awake,” Jordan said. “He was worried he’d used to much to knock him out. But Paul came around. The guy walked around the room, looking at everything. The lights. A clock on the wall. He was angry it didn’t look perfect. He brought someone else in too. Unconscious. Wearing black clothes. He set him down next to me and put this metal thing next to it. He’d painted it to look like something you put on the toilet.”

Suddenly, I wanted Vivi in the room after all. This was becoming very confusing, very quickly. There had been no unconscious guy in the bathroom, only Jordan and Paul. Was there something like that in the movie?

“He wanted me to smash his head with the thing,” Jordan said. “He told me it was meant to be the lid of the toilet tank, but that he tried smashing something with one and it broke too easily. It had to be like in the movie, he said. I had to kill the unconscious man with it by smashing his…but he said not yet. He said that, in the movie, the doctor cut his foot off and dragged himself to the other side of the room. So he walked over to Paul and he…he handed him a saw.”

Jordan kept going. His voice was a whisper again. Every time he took one of his shallow breaths, his whole body shook.

“It’s alright, Jordan,” I said, reaching out to grab him by the shoulders. “You don’t have to tell me this now. Just rest. Just try to calm down.”

But Jordan ignored me. He kept talking, as if I hadn’t said anything at all.

“He had a gun. He pointed it at Paul and told him to cut his foot off at the ankle. Paul was really calm. I don’t know how. Paul told the man that, if he did what he wanted, he’d bleed to death very quickly. ‘In one or two minutes,’ he said. The man didn’t care. He told Paul he’d live if he did what he asked. All he had to do was crawl to me then crawl outside, and the man would cauterize his wound and he’d live.”

Jordan took a deep breath. I was glad that he paused, and glad that he was breathing a little more regularly now.

“Paul said no. He tried to tackle the man. He almost got his gun. Almost. The man got very angry. He took a blackjack out of his robe.”

I shuddered. If you don’t know what a a blackjack is, they’re retractable metal batons with a very hard tip. You can kill someone with them very easily, depending on where you hit them. They’re illegal in our state.

“He hit Paul. Paul went limp. Then the man tied a blue shirt around Paul’s ankle and—”

“I know what he did next,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me.”

Jordan nodded. “There was a lot of blood. A lot. That worried him. He tried to stop it by pulling the shirt tighter, but it didn’t work. Then he started checking for a pulse, started doing chest compressions. But Paul was dead. Even I knew that.”

I took a deep breath. It felt like I hadn’t breathed since Jordan started talking.

“The man started shouting. He broke a mirror. He walked over to me and took the unconscious man out of the room. Then he walked back in, dragged Paul over to me, and left. I thought I heard him whisper something before he left.”

“Game over,” Vivi said.

“What did I tell you?” I asked.

Vivi was pale. Her eyes wide.

“Yeah,” Jordan said. “That sounds about right.”

“From the movie?” I asked.

Vivi nodded.

The doctors gave Jordan something so that he’d sleep, and Vivi and I walked out of the hospital, into my car, and drove home.

We didn’t talk the rest of the day. Whatever illusions I had about this being fun, about a sheriff and her daughter teaming up to catch a killer, were a distant memory. This was ugly. It made me sick. I scrolled through the “horror” category on Netflix and I had to run across the room and puke in the kitchen sink.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch another horror movie again.

I can tell that Vivi feels something similar. I asked her a few questions, mostly about the unconscious man that the man wearing a pig mask wanted Jordan to kill. She just told me to read about Saw online. She sent me a link to a wiki.

I couldn’t even look at it. Maybe someone can explain what the reference was in the comments. I’m having a hard time reading them either, especially the ones telling me to look at Vivi or her boyfriend as suspects. She’s my daughter, not a character in a movie. There’s no twist because there’s no writer. This is real, as much as I wish that it weren’t. I raised Vivi. She and Chris are my life.

Which is why this next part took me so long to write.

Vivi said she wanted me to drive her over to her dad’s. At the time, it seemed like a great idea. Mark had been blowing my phone up with dozens of missed calls, asking me where Vivi daughter was and, when I told him that she was with me, he said that that’s exactly what he was afraid of. He’d heard about Paul, of course. He knew about a few of the other ones too. But he didn’t know they were done by the same person, like most people in town. I hadn’t shared the horror movie references. As far as they were concerned, there was a string of strange murders taking place, culminating in Paul and Jordan being kidnapped and tortured.

I drove Vivi over and dropped her off a few houses down. I didn’t want to see Mark. I was afraid I’d punch him if I did.

“Be careful, Mom,” Vivi said. “The killer always goes after the detective in the movies.”

“I’m not a detective,” I said. “I’m a sheriff/police chief. Remember?”

Vivi smiled at that. It was a weak smile. Not one of her best, but I was glad to see it.

The next morning, I woke up to the my door practically banging off its hinges. Someone was knocking on my front door frantically.

I opened it to see Monica. She rushed into my apartment, pushing past me. What was she doing here? She’s always down at the station doing…oh no. Something happened. Something bad. Really bad.

“Where were you?” she asked.

“I fell asleep,” I said, reaching for my phone. I’d left it on the couch, under a cushion. The screen lit up with about a million calls from Mark, Monica, and practically everyone else in town.

“Don’t say it,” I said.

Monica covered her mouth. Her hands were shaking. Her eyes full of tears. She said the very thing I was dreading. I thought that, because I knew it was coming, the words wouldn’t be that bad. I was wrong. The fact that I’d guessed them, that I’d imagined Monica saying them in my worst nightmares, just made it all ten times worse. A hundred times. A million times.

“It’s Vivi,” Monica said. “They think she’s going to pull through…”

I pushed past her and ran outside.

Monica drove me to Mark’s. I was glad she did. I would’ve ran every red light, would’ve slammed into every car in front of mine, would’ve tried running through everything in my way.

Instead, I just sat in the passenger’s seat, looking dead ahead. In a daze. Sedated. Terrified and numb at the same time.

We pulled up to Mark’s house.

I stepped out.

Mark rushed me immediately, slamming me against Monica’s car. Slapping me across the face. Shouting in my ear.

“You did this,” he said. “This is your fucking fault.”

My deputies pulled him off me. One of them, Trevor, pinned Mark on the ground and threw cuffs around his wrists.

“Let him go,” I said. Trevor got off Mark, but Mark didn’t move. He just lay there, burying his face into the grass and sobbing.

I walked upstairs, went into Vivi’s room, ignored the horror movie posters on the walls…and saw a pair of EMTs rolling her out on a stretcher with an oxygen mask on her nose and mouth.

She was wet and wearing nothing but the towels they’d wrapped her in. But she was awake, her eyes half-open. The EMTs kept tapping her on the face, kept telling her to stay awake.

“She’s alive,” I said. “She’s okay. Is she…will she…”

“Ma’am, we need to wait for the blood work to know for sure.”

I rode in the ambulance with Vivi and Monica. The EMTs filled me in. Mark heard a noise and saw someone jump out the window. He found Vivi in the bathtub, unconscious.

The EMTs told us that she wasn’t out for long, as far as they can tell.

For the next few hours, I sat in Vivi’s hospital room, waiting for her to get back. The doctor said they’d flush her stomach, run some tests, start her off on an IV drip.

One of my deputies found a sleeping pill bottle on Vivi’s bedroom floor.

They brought Vivi in. Still groggy. She was in and out. It’s a small town. They know me and they know her. The doctors are good and they watched her closely. Her blood work came back. Sleeping pills. Higher dose than recommended but not lethal. She should make a full recovery. No signs of brain damage, no respiratory depression, and she didn’t ingest any water or vomit.

“You’ll be alright,” I said, kissing Vivi on the forehead.

Chris and I sat together through most of it. He was quiet. Distant. His phone was out and unlocked. He scrolled through it, staring past the screen, eyes unfocused and glazed. His phone screen kept turning off. Going into sleep mode. Chris would bring it up to his face and unlock it, only to stare past it once again. Then it locked up, and he’d do it again.

We held hands. We hugged each other, and cried, and hovered over Vivi while she slept.

Chris kept asking the doctors if it was okay for her to sleep. He wanted her to be awake.

The doctors said all the sleeping pills were out of her system. That she needed rest, oxygen, and the IV.

Chris didn’t like the oxygen. He told me he’d only seen it in movies, when someone was about to die.

My phone buzzed.

A photo message.

I unlocked my phone and opened it.

It was a photo of Vivi’s bathtub, sent by one of my deputies. They’d drained the water out and found something on the bottom.

Knives. My first thought was that it was knives.

But it wasn’t. It was a glove. The thumb was normal, but the other four fingers were knives.

The bastard. That fucking bastard.

“It happened just now!” Monica shouted, rushing into the room.

“What?” I asked. “The glove?”

“What glove?” Monica ask. “No! It’s Jake Marino.”

“My daughter’s boyfriend?”

I stood up so fast, my head swam.

“He did this?”

“No. I don’t know! I don’t think so. His parents were out but a neighbor saw a man running out of the driveway. He called us and a deputy went in and…”

“What?”

“They said he was killed in bed.”

“Stay with Vivi,” I told Monica. I walked out of my daughter’s hospital room

I don’t even remember driving there. I only remember walking into Jake Marino’s room and seeing the blood. I’d never seen so much blood before. It was all over the bed, on the floor, on the walls. There was a lot of it on the ceiling, too. There was a hole in the bed. Deputies and the asshole ME were standing around it, looking like they were gonna be sick.

“We didn’t know if we should wait for you,” one of them said.

I shone my flashlight into the hole. Jake Marino was inside.

I don’t know horror movies, not even famous ones.

I’ll need your help for this one, Reddit. Tell me what movies he referenced. It has to be two, right? Maybe if we find out, we can solve this somehow, but without Vivi’s help…I’m lost. I’m tired. And I just want this to be done.

Thank you all. I’ll post again tomorrow, if I can.

Part 6: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/17f0n41/a_serial_killer_is_copying_horror_movies_part_6/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

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