Red, white, and blue lights danced on the walls of the house, like an American flag in motion. In every other way, the house was dark. No streetlamps stood nearby to brighten it from the outside, and no lights shone from within. Dark windows like jet-black eyes glared at us, broadcasting a clear and ominous message. Go back. There is danger here.
Jeff turned off the lights, and he and I climbed out of the car. Our breath fogged in the bitter cold as we exchanged a nervous glance. Dispatch had informed us the caller had been panicked, saying someone was in her house. There had been a scream, and then someone hung up the phone.
Now we were here, and the house was dark. Quiet. Dead. Was this a home? Or a tomb?
Packed snow crunched beneath our feet as we headed up the walkway, past a trio of cardboard skeletons and unlit jack-o’-lanterns. We climbed the porch steps and walked to the door. An age-worn mat read, “Welcome Home.” Jeff stepped on it and knocked. The sound briefly echoed through the space beyond, before silence resumed. We waited, hoping to hear it broken again, this time by the sound of a footstep, a lock turning, or any sign at all that someone was alive inside. Nothing.
Jeff and I nodded to each other. No more waiting.
I kicked the door with the heel of my boot. The hinges protested with a groan and a snap but didn’t give way. A second kick met the same result, but the third did the trick, and the door swung open with a bang. The hallway beyond was dark. We stepped inside, and I found a light switch on the wall to our right, but it didn’t work.
We flicked on our flashlights. The beams revealed entryways to various rooms, any one of which could be hiding a deranged killer. I felt myself begin to sweat despite the cold.
Into terror’s tenebrous domain we proceeded, scouring one room after the next. The house was small, but anxiety transformed it into a vast, dreadful maze in which unspeakable horrors lurked beyond my flashlight’s reach. Did I just see someone duck behind the living room couch? Did a sneakered foot just retract behind the kitchen counter? Christ, was that the gleam of a knife blade down there at the end of the hall? How many times could a man’s heart stop, I wondered, before it gave up and decided not to start beating again? I could see it now—Jerry Belmuth, age thirty-six, died of fright in the line of duty. Like a fucking rabbit.
Then, we entered the living room.
A Halloween prank. Some dumb kids screwing around, playing a joke on the police. They’d get charged with wasting police resources, and Jeff and I would go home to our families, with a story to laugh at over cocktails years down the road. Christ, how I’d hoped it was something like that. But the body on the couch was real. The gory sludge oozing from the man’s head onto the cushions, the coppery scent of blood, and the stink of bowel discharge—all real.
Jeff doubled forward, opened his mouth, and unloaded his guts on the carpet. I stared at the body, unable to move. Unable to take my eyes off it no matter how bad I wanted to. A scream rose in my throat—I suppressed it. Who knew who would hear it?
Jeff wiped his mouth and said, “This must be the husband. Mr. Chekhov.” His voice was sapped of any fortitude. “I’ll call.”
He lifted his radio and spoke into it. “369, dispatch.”
“369, go ahead,” a woman from dispatch responded.
“Code 6 at 1964 Lakewood Drive. I have a signal 27. Suspect’s identity and whereabouts unknown. Send me units to the area.”
Signal 27—a body. Seven years on the force, and I’d never encountered one on a call. It’s one of those things you know can happen, but you never really think it will…Christ. All at once, my stomach caught up to Jeff’s, and I threw my dinner up next to his. A series of loud, consecutive beeps could be heard over my retching—emergency tones from Jeff’s radio.
The tones ended, and the woman at dispatch continued. “All units, copy signal 27. Available units, check the area of—”
The woman’s voice went silent.
“Dispatch?” Jeff said. “Dispatch, do you copy?”
Nothing.
“What the fucking hell…,” he muttered.
I got up. The room was doing an impression of a merry-go-round.
“Let’s get this fucker. Make him pay,” Jeff said.
“Don’t assume it’s a him. Could be a her, or—”—I swallowed—“them.”
“Well, let’s fucking hope it’s just one.”
“Help!” someone screamed.
Upstairs. A woman’s voice. Mrs. Chekhov? Had to be. I sprinted up the stairs after Jeff.
A hallway extended to the right. My flashlight’s beam illuminated two doors—one on the left, at the middle of the hall, and one at the end, on the right. The latter stood partway ajar, the sound of someone softly sobbing leaking from inside. I took a step toward it—
Crash!
It came from downstairs.
I spun around and shone the flashlight back down. “Show yourself!”
No answer.
“I’ll go,” Jeff whispered. “You check out that room over there.”
Splitting up. Great. But I nodded, and the two of us went off in separate directions. I approached the partially open door and reached for the doorknob, when I heard the creak of a floorboard behind me. I spun, gun raised and ready to fire.
I lowered it. Jeff stood in front of me, shaking.
“I—I went downstairs,” he stammered. “I fucking went downstairs. How did I get back up here?”
He must have gone down, come back up, and snuck by me, and all this was getting to his head so bad he didn’t even realize he’d done it. But that was impossible. I’d have noticed him go by—and the floorboard creaks.
“Let’s try not to think about it too much,” I said.
I turned back to the door and, slowly but surely with shaking hands, pulled it open. Light flooded the space beyond. Empty.
Creak.
I whipped around. Jeff was gaping into the closet, and behind him was a mad-eyed man with a mane of wild gray hair and a hunting knife.
“Get down!” I shouted.
Jeff ducked, and I fired. Two shots. The first hit the killer in the shoulder, and the second took him right between his two mad eyes. Down he went, his head cracking as it hit the wooden floor.
Jeff spoke into the radio, stammering, “369, di—dispatch. One suspect neutralized.”
Again, no response. Behind me, that hair-raising sobbing started up again, and I returned to the closet to face what I already knew was there. Nothing. But there had to be something. I dug my hand into the pockets of coats until I found it—a recorder. The sobbing poured from the device’s speaker.
I turned it off. Nobody could make me listen to a second more of that shit.
“Killer wanted to separate us, then lure one of us over here alone so he could attack from behind. Or so I’m guessing,” Jeff said.
I nodded. “Lucky for us, this floor creaks.”
“Listen,” he said. “I did go downstairs.”
“Forget about it,” I said. “Fear got to our heads. That’s all.”
“Yeah,” Jeff said. “Maybe so.”
I’m pretty sure we both knew that was bullshit.
I looked at the guy on the floor. Five minutes ago, I’d never seen a dead body, and now I’d seen two—and this one I’d killed myself. The reality of that would probably set in soon enough, but right now, I could barely think straight.
“This guy nearly killed me,” Jeff said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Jesus.” He leaned against the wall. “One second more and…Jesus. Thank you. You saved my life.”
I bent down and put my fingers to the guy’s neck—no pulse. “He’s definitely dead. Let’s go try to find Mrs. Chekhov.”
“Only a few rooms we haven’t checked,” Jeff said. “The ones up here, and…”—he gulped—“the basement.”
The room at the middle of the hall was a bathroom. Nothing was out of place, but we did find an unused pregnancy test on the counter.
“Do you think…,” Jeff said.
“Let’s just hope she’s okay,” I said.
The last upstairs room was the master bedroom, and that was normal too. We returned to the first floor, where the basement door was across from the living room. Jeff put his hand on the handle.
Bang!
Jeff fell to the floor, blood gushing from his head like wine from a busted gasket. The mad-eyed man stood grinning at the end of the hall, gun in hand. He pointed it at me.
“Bang,” he said.
I fired, but he vanished, and my bullets hit the wall behind him. I stooped and felt Jeff’s pulse—dead. Fucking hell. What the fuck just happened? Did the guy upstairs have a twin? That would be the only explanation that made sense, but I had a feeling if I went back upstairs, I wouldn’t find a corpse on the floor. What exactly were we—what was I—dealing with here? And where the fuck was backup?
I could get an answer to that last question, at least. I just needed to go outside and radio from the car, since our personal radios weren’t working. I ran out of the house and threw open the car door.
“Officer down at 1964 Lakewood Drive!” I screamed into the radio. “Where the hell is—”
“Hey there, Jerry,” Jeff’s voice replied from the speaker. “What’s up? Oh, how am I doing? Just great, of corpse! Hold on, I think I’ve got a maggot in my eye.”
“How are you doing this?” I hissed. “Why doesn’t the radio work?”
“I dunno, pal. Maybe cause that’s not a radio?”
I looked at the thing in my hand. Not a radio—a baguette. And I was standing by the kitchen fridge.
“You high or something, Jerry? If you’ve got drugs, you really oughta share!”
I threw the baguette aside. I’ll kill you, bastard.
Movement in the living room. I fired, and the gun’s booming discharge resonated through the hollowed-out bowels of the house. The echo seemed to continue within my head, but no. That was the beating of my heart. Baboom, baboom, baboom.
I took a deep breath to calm myself—and the beating persisted.
“Here, here!” the killer shouted, his voice seeming to come from everywhere at once. “It is the beating of his hideous heart!”
“To hell with your clownery!” I bellowed.
The noise abruptly stopped. “I am a magician, not a clown.”
Sore spot, huh?
“I don’t give a shit what you call yourself,” I said, creeping up to the living room entryway.
My flashlight shone over every inch of the space, and I noted that Mr. Chekhov was gone—but the killer wasn’t in there, or was hiding. I stepped inside.
Slam! The door shut behind me. A door I could have sworn didn’t exist a moment ago, but there it was all the same, wooden and sturdy and—locked. Of course it was locked. I turned away from it.
I was no longer in the living room. This new room was small, cube-shaped, bereft of furniture, and lit by an eerie red glow. Each of the four walls had a door. I went through the one straight across from me and came to another four-door room, green this time. I tried the door on the left next—it led to a yellow room. Right, left, forward. Blue, green, purple. Left, left, forward, right…over and over, the same damn thing. Only the color ever changed. A hurl-inducing, maniacal medley of colors blended together as I ran from door to door.
Eventually, I opened a door and found something that wasn’t a unicolor box that could have been lifted straight from the set of the movie Cube. Never one to pass up a hilarious jape, my tormentor recited the Monty Python catchphrase. “And now for something completely different!” It was a concrete cell in which a woman was chained to one wall.
Her eyes went wide when she saw me and she cried out, “Help!”
“Mrs. Chekhov!” I shouted. It had to be her, who else could it be? “Hold on, I’ll help!” I raised my gun and aimed for the metal plates which held the chains to the wall.
Mrs. Chekhov screamed, and the hem of her dress lifted, pushed from beneath by a tiny hand. A plastic baby doll climbed out of her, dropping to the floor in a coat of slime. The doll held a knife and leapt into the air, slicing Mrs. Chekhov’s neck in a spray of blood. Then, it turned to me.
The cell and the doll and Mrs. Chekhov melted away, and I stood in an orange-lit room. Jeff’s head sat atop a pedestal in the center, and though his forehead still leaked blood, his eyes were open and focused on me.
“Hey again, Jerry,” he said.
I went past him to another room, but he was there too.
“Come on, Jerry, don’t be like that. Stay a moment and chat.”
“Sorry, Jeff,” I said.
In the next room, he was scowling. “You’re an asshole, Jerry, you know that? Guess I shouldn’t expect better from a guy who cheats on his wife.”
Next room. No scowl on his face, just a grin. “It’s okay, Jerry. We all have our demons. I raped a girl in college. Just flat-out raped her, you know what I’m saying?”
“Is that what this is about, you sick fuck?” I asked. “Are you trying to make some point about moral equivalence between cops and criminals? Punish us for shit we’ve done?”
Jeff laughed. “You’re reading way too deep into this, Jerry. You ever hear that joke about a man who shows up to jury duty in a clown suit?”
“No.”
“This guy goes into a jury in a clown suit, rainbow hair, tomato-colored nose, you know, all that shit that clowns wear, and he gets chastised by the judge. ‘This is a court of law, sir,’ the judge tells him. ‘Have some respect!’ The defense and the prosecution proceed to spend the next half hour bickering with each other like children, while the jury laughs and the judge pounds his gavel over and over, demanding order in the court. It turns out, the man in the clown suit was the only one in appropriate attire!”
“That’s a joke?”
“It’s funny that we’re so serious all the time, when everything in the world is so goddamn ridiculous! A rapist becoming a cop? It’s funny! So laugh!”
“Are you the clown in this analogy? I thought you said you weren’t one.”
“I’m here to bring humor and joy to this insipid world. Clowns have a similar role, but I am not a clown.”
“So, killing people. Slitting their throats, shooting them? That’s funny?”
“That’s slapstick.”
I tried the next door, but it wouldn’t open. I shook the handle, kicked it even. Nothing. Then the door across from me opened, and in charged the mad-eyed man, with a knife raised high above his head. I fired three bullets into his skull, and he kept coming. Jeff’s head roared and cackled with glee.
I grabbed the killer’s arm as he swung the knife down, and we wrestled awkwardly for a moment, each fighting for the upper hand.
Jeff shouted in the background, “Get him! Slice him up!”
The killer sunk the knife partway into my arm, and I shrieked, but I kept him in my grip. I drove my knee into his balls, and when he reeled away, I sprang on him with all my weight, knocking him to the ground. The knife fell from his hand and clattered on the floor.
I proceeded to empty my gun’s clip into his face. Then, I picked up the knife and stabbed him I-don’t-know-how-many times. Finally, I fell to the floor, adrenaline yielding to panting, sweaty exhaustion.
“Well look at you, getting all psycho and stabby,” Jeff’s head said. “I think you’re learning.”
I gave him the finger. “Shut the fuck up.” ___
I sat there until the door opened and backup arrived at last. An officer asked me if I was all right. I blinked, and I was no longer in the red room but in the front hallway. Just the officers and me. No body. I squeaked an affirmative from my moistureless mouth.
On the lawn and in the street stood half a dozen or so more officers. Among them was the mad-eyed man—cuffed but unharmed. He looked my way and grinned his mad grin. “How was it, friend? Did you have fun?”
“I hope you rot in prison for the rest of your life,” I spat.
He chuckled. “I hope you know the best is yet to come.”
I’ve gotten a letter. It reads like this: “Hello, friend! I hope this letter finds you well. You sure had a blast as a pilot tester for my SUPER FUN HAUNTED HOUSE™, didn’t you? I’m glad to let you know that, thanks to the valuable feedback of you and your partner, I have dramatically improved the experience and am ready to bring the public in on the fun! Won’t you come to my GRAND OPENING EVENT? Don’t worry about the time or place—you’ll know soon enough! I hope to get the chance to play with you again!”
I want to dismiss it as nonsense. Just a joke to get under my skin from a man who’s never getting out of prison.
But I got a call this morning. He’s not in prison anymore.
They told me he disappeared from his cell—like some kind of magician.