Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1796yuq/a_serial_killer_is_copying_horror_movies/
Part 6: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/17f0n41/a_serial_killer_is_copying_horror_movies_part_6/
On the phone, the killer told me to go to the church on our town’s main street. He said almost nothing else, ignoring every question I shouted, every concern I had about Chris’s well-being.
“Get there in the next fifteen minutes,” the killer said. “Or I’ll stab him seven times.”
I didn’t go to church often, but I knew where the church in question was. I estimated that, on a day without traffic, it was probably about ten minutes away from the hospital. So I had around five minutes to get out of the hospital, and ten to drive to the church. If I was right, that left me no time to get out of my car, no time to climb the church steps, no time to burst through the doors and…do what? Confront the killer. Stop him.
There must be hundreds of horror movies where someone is killed in a church. I couldn’t think of any, all I could think about was the killer’s obsession with the number seven.
I looked at the clock on my phone screen. I had wasted an entire minute.
I grabbed my uniform off the chair in the room. They’d taken my gun and flashlight. One of my deputies was probably holding it for me, but I didn’t have the time to find one and ask them for it. Hell, I couldn’t even risk one of them seeing me. If they did, they might ask me where I was going, or why I needed my gun, or why I wasn’t in bed. They’d probably try to convince me that I needed rest. That conversation could very well take ten minutes, or even fifteen.
I couldn’t risk it.
My hospital room was on the first floor. The room’s window didn’t open, but the bathroom window did. I pulled it open, climbed on the cabinet, and pushed myself out of the small window and onto the parking lot below.
How many minutes had that taken? Too many.
I found my car keys in my jacket pocket and unlocked my car. There was a gun in my glove compartment. I grabbed it, stuck the keys in the car’s ignition, started the engine, pulled out of the driveway, and drove.
I don’t know how long it took me. I just know that I turned on the lights and the siren and drove like a madwoman. I never hit the brakes. Not once. I swerved and blasted the horn and ran a few red lights until, finally, my car was in front of the church. I didn’t have the time to drive around the block and into the church’s parking lot. No. I drove onto the curb and onto the church’s first steps. Then I pushed the driver’s side door open, fell out of the seat, and ran up the stairs.
I burst through the church doors and saw it.
My stomach dropped. My heartbeat was a pounding, overpowering presence. I could see it in my eyes, could feel it in my trembling, tingling fingers as they held a gun that felt cold and wet.
Chris was lying on the altar, trying to squirm away as a hooded man held him in place. There was a knife in the man’s hand. He held it above his head, the thin blade glinting, frozen in place. Then it started to move, to slice down in an arch, to drop closer to my son’s chest.
I didn’t think. I just moved.
I raised my gun and shot the man.
The first bullet hit him in the shoulder. The next one hit him in the neck. I don’t know where the others hit him, I just know that none of them missed.
The man dropped, twisting as he fell.
My adrenaline turned the world into a slide show. Every time I blinked, I moved without knowing it. I blinked once and I was at the altar, reaching out to Chris and asking him if he was okay.
I blinked again and I was lifting his shirt to check for blood or cuts or wounds…nothing.
I blinked once more and I was standing over the man, kicking the knife away from his hand.
I took a deep breath and the world seemed to steady. I reached down and pulled the man’s hood back…
And it was Mark. My ex husband. Chris’s father.
My deputies arrived on the scene a few minutes later. They didn’t ask me anything. What had happened was obvious.
And that’s when it hit me.
The crime scene was obvious. It left no doubt or room for interpretation. Anyone who saw it would understand that my ex husband had kidnapped my son and was going to kill him on the church altar. The knife was near his hand and there were six other blades laid out next to my son.
It was ritualistic. Strange. Sick. Satanic, maybe.
They put Chris in an ambulance and gave him something for the shock. He was unhurt. Not even a scratch, as far as they could tell. He was just shaken up and still groggy from whatever the killer had given him to knock him out. Chloroform, most likely.
I didn’t think about horror movies on the ride over to the hospital, I just thought about Mark. We had gotten married in that church. I kept seeing him in a tux, kept hearing him laughing because he’d said “yes” instead of “I do,” kept seeing him shooting nervous glances at his father, as if he was willing to stop the whole thing if my very-soon-to-be father in law shook his head, gave him a disapproving look, or frowned.
Mark was behind it all. It seemed unbelievable. Like a bad twist. A bad ending. Something I should’ve seen coming. A few people had guessed in the comments. There were only so many suspects, after all, and this was like a movie, wasn’t it?
In Se7en, undoubtedly the killer’s favorite movie, one of the detectives shot the serial killer. It had been part of the serial killer’s plan. He won, in a way, because his plan was to reference the seven deadly sins.
Is that what had happened here?
But in Se7en, that scene had taken place in a field outside the city, and the killer hadn’t kidnapped the detective’s son. It wasn’t a reference. Seven movies in total, right? We were up to six. Se7en. Scream. The Ring. The Exorcist. Saw. A Nightmare on Elm Street. Whatever the movie was, the scene had to be similar.
I couldn’t place it, and it didn’t even matter anymore. Mark was dead.
Vivi came to see me later. She was fine. Ready to be released. She gave me a hug.
“I can’t believe it was dad,” she said.
That made me think of what had happened again, of what I had done. I had shot Vivi’s father. Chris’s father. Chris wasn’t talking and he probably wouldn’t talk for a while. I couldn’t imagine what he must be feeling. His own father had tried to kill him in a sick, sacrificial, ritualistic way, and then his mother had killed his father right in front of him and…
He’d get through it. I’d help him. We all would. As a family.
The next few days were a blur. That’s why it’s taken me a while to update this, that’s why the days are off. It’s taken me more than seven days to write and publish the story, but all of the events happened exactly in seven days. Writing with only one hand didn’t help either.
Our lawyer came to see me at my apartment, later. He was holding a sealed envelope. He said it was Mark’s will. He’d written it a few years ago and never updated it. In it, he left me his house, all his belongings, all his money, and the properties he rented out.
Vivi and Chris were in the room when the lawyer read the will. Vivi hugged me. Chris was still shaken up, sitting away from us, staring off into empty space.
Later that day, Vivi and Chris insisted that I stay with them in Mark’s house…our house now.
The lawyer said that, with Mark gone, and especially with the circumstances he had gone in, I’d get full custody of Vivi and Chris. No one would question it, he said. It had only been a few days, but people in town were already calling me a hero.
I was sure that I would get fired, exposed for not revealing the evidence sooner. One day, I walked into my office and there was a woman sitting at my desk. She was from the Bureau. She’d read the things I posted online.
The world lurched. My stomach dropped.
This was it.
I’d just gotten Vivi and Chris back and now I was going to lose them and lose my job and everyone in town was going to know that I’d hidden this from them. If I had revealed the horror movie thing, maybe some of the victims could have lived, maybe the town itself would have been more careful, more alert, known what to watch out for.
“I know what you’ve been going through,” the woman said. “The letter. The game. The manipulation.”
I didn’t ask her what she meant. I got a feeling that I shouldn’t.
“We found it when we were looking into the crime scenes and your place, of course.” She handed me a typed in a plastic sleeve. Evidence.
I started reading.
“Hello, Sheriff,” the letter began. “I want to play a game. Over the next seven days, I will kill seven people. If you don’t play along, I will kill many more. You see, I’ve always loved horror movies, and I want to make one of my own. Each one of my murders will be a reference to one of my favorite horror movies, and I expect you to play the role of the cop. My adversary, in a way. I want you to play your role well. If you reveal these letters to anyone around you, or if you share anything about my love of movies to your deputies or the people in town, I will choose to reference a movie with a much higher kill count.”
I imagined the killer chuckling at that. A sick laugh, like the killer’s in Scream.
“Did you know that, in the old movie, the Invisible Man kills 120 people by derailing a train? Maybe I’ll do something like that, if you don’t play along. I want you to type up what you find in each crime scene and post it. Make it like a horror story. I’ll provide the link below. Make it suspenseful. Don’t mention this letter. Don’t mention the threats. Make it a surprise.”
I had never seen that letter before, but it was how I was gonna get away with everything. Writing these posts. Not telling anyone about the horror movie connection. The killer had thought of everything. I wasn’t to blame. I didn’t hide the evidence because I was selfish and scared, I didn’t obstruct justice by posting the stories on here, I was just following a sick killer’s directions, right?
Except that I wasn’t. I hadn’t been. And the killer and I both knew it. So why was he protecting me?
I thanked the agent and drove back home.
I was settling into my room when I decided to go into Vivi’s. She was at school at the time. I hadn’t been in the room, in the house, since they’d found her in the bathtub. Vivi had insisted on painting her room with dark purple walls and a black ceiling. Each wall was covered in horror movie posters. Halloween. Friday the 13th. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. House of 1,000 Corpses. There was a poster that caught my eye.
It was a black and white poster of a woman wearing a strange contraption on her head. “How much blood would you be willing to shed to stay alive?” it read. “SAW” was written on the bottom in red.
I looked around the room again. There was a black shelf in the corner. Vivi had filled it with books, movies, and those little Funko pop toys. I walked over to it. There, near the wall, was a row of DVDs and one VHS tape.
Se7en. Scream. The Ring. The Exorcist. Saw. A Nightmare on Elm Street. And a black VHS tape with no box.
I remembered, suddenly, the Polaroid picture I’d found in Mrs. Mayhew’s abandoned house. I was expecting a room filled with hundreds of notebooks explaining the killer’s motives, like in Se7en. Instead, I’d only found one picture. Of this. A picture of Vivi’s shelf.
I grabbed the VHS tape and pulled it out.
The Omen.
I’d seen the movie many years ago. In theaters. It was an old movie even when I was a kid, but they’d re-released it. I’d actually seen it with Mark first. Vivi, Chris, and I watched the remake too, a few times.
How could I have missed it?
The movie’s about a boy who’s revealed to be the Antichrist. People die around him in freak accidents, and his father discovers his true nature. The boy’s father takes him to a cathedral, sets him on the altar, and is about to kill him by stabbing him with seven sacred daggers.
Just as he’s about to stab him the first time, the cops burst in and shoot him. Saving the boy. The villain wins, just like in Se7en and the first Saw movie and The Ring and a Nightmare on Elm Street.
But that wasn’t the pattern. The real pattern, the one I had been looking for, was that the killer had picked the movies out for a reason. To emulate Vivi’s shelf. To pay homage to it.
Or maybe not.
What do I know, anyway? I don’t know horror movies.
I went around Vivi’s room with a garbage bag. She didn’t need the clutter, didn’t need to look at anything that could remind her of what we had all gone through. So I put all her horror movies in the bag and the Polaroid and any receipts I found. Her horror movie posters, too. I found some old shoes with mud so I threw those in there. A black hoodie. Gloves. She didn’t need them.
Then I put the bag in one of the gated community’s dumpsters and hung out with Vivi and Chris for a while. She wasn’t mad that I’d thrown her stuff away. She looked relieved, actually.
She was happy for the first time in a while.
We made small talk.
She showed me her tattoo. A missing puzzle piece. She said she’d get it filled in, to show that what was missing was now back in her life. I could tell she meant me. It made me happy.
Maybe that’s how this story ends. A happy ending, all things considered. The killer dying by my hand, referencing a horror movie in his final moments. Mark had access to Vivi’s room, after all. He would’ve seen that shelf a lot. Mark didn’t own a black truck, didn’t know horror movies, didn’t know Reddit, but so what?
Maybe he did.
Or maybe there could be another ending.
I’m just making it up here. Like an alternate scene, you know? Something on the special features of a horror movie’s DVD?
In it, maybe Jordan comes to my new home and tells me he found a tape in Mark’s pocket. Maybe I ask him if he showed it to anyone and he says no. Maybe I play the tape and it’s the killer, telling Mark to go to the church and to raise a knife over Chris. If he does it, Chris will be unharmed. He has to trust him.
Maybe I get worried, so I go to the tattoo parlor. Maybe I ask the artist who did Vivi’s tattoo if she was with someone. Maybe he tells me it’s a boy from one town over. A loner type. Wears grunge style clothing. Drives a black truck.
Maybe I hide outside Vivi’s school. Maybe I wait for a black truck to drive by. Maybe I follow it.
Maybe I run it off the road. Maybe I force the guy out and walk him over to a field.
Maybe, like so many of you mentioned, I say that we’re going to reference Se7en again, the killer’s favorite movie.
Maybe he begs. Maybe he tells me it was all Vivi’s idea. That she was Jigsaw and he was her apprentice. That she wanted all this. That she hated her dad.
Maybe I shoot him in the head and then empty the entire clip into him. Maybe I put him in one of the many holes that lead to old mine shafts, or down an old well, and drive his car into a lake or a pond.
Maybe, just maybe, I want to reference a movie too. One of the ones that ends on a happy note.
Maybe I don’t even care who’s behind it. I’m just happy I got my kids back, after all. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost them.
Maybe, one day, I’ll delete this story and any reference of it.
Anyway. I have to go. I’m taking Vivi to the tattoo parlor. She wants to get her tattoo filled in. She said it’s a loose end. That the tattoo artist would remember that her tattoo was unfinished, would have it in her records, or on video. Loose ends are no good. Vivi says she’ll think of a horror movie on the way, or make one up on her own.
“If it’s a slasher movie,” she said. “There’d be lots of ways to kill someone with a tattoo gun.”
Thanks again, Reddit.