Hell Awaits

 

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20:38

Christopher felt something drip onto his shoulder. Looking up he saw the body of a woman hanging limply from the ceiling, a vivid red gash across her stomach. I should've worn my old t-shirt, he thought, wiping the blood off with a tissue.

 

18:05

"You're not wearing that."

"What?"

"Christopher, this is our first night out for bloody ages, you're not wearing a t-shirt you've had since university."

Christopher looked down at his top, it was a little faded but it wasn't that bad. Plus it was his Mutter-era Rammstein shirt - a classic.

"I thought it'd fit in with the venue. And anyway we're not exactly going out out are we? You're working."

"I'm interviewing the owner, then we're going to enjoy the show, like a proper couple. And I don't care how much your shirt fits the venue, it doesn't fit you." Ruth patted his belly and walked out to the kitchen. He had put on a little weight recently admittedly...sighing, he went up to change.

 

19:17

"So, Mr Norman, you've run one of the most successful alternative circuses in Vegas for the last decade, what made you want to bring your new show to Croydon?" Ruth asked Clark Norman, the proprietor of the ScreamFreaks show they were about to see the grand opening of. 

He was a tall, slender man, with surprisingly piercing blue eyes. Possibly contacts Christopher thought. Something about the man screamed artifice.

"It was my great-granddaddy really. He was Tom Norman, the famous freak show entrepreneur."

Ruth looked at Christopher who shrugged.

"He was the English PT Barnum. They met once actually.  He ran the most successful freak shows in Britain - John Merrick, the Elephant Man was one of his performers. But anyway he had a shop in Whitechapel and lived here in Croydon, so it seemed fitting to do it over here. As for Croydon itself, well it's cheaper to rent a warehouse here than in Whitechapel." Clark Norman laughed the laugh of a seasoned bullshitter. "I'm just kidding, my grandfather always spoke highly of Croydon as his English home. So I had to choose here really."

"I didn't realise your own shows were following the family business," Ruth smiled, happy to go along with the story. Christopher thought it all sounded like a tall tale and quite frankly he wasn't invested in the whole experience enough to care. His brain wandered, only catching snippets of the rest of the interview. 

"So what's the premise of this new show?" He heard Ruth ask. 

"I wanted to combine my Cirque du Strange act with a traditional house of horrors, to weave the performance into a coherent narrative - and to scare the hell out of people - of course." 

What a load of crap.

 

19:45

 

The interview finished and Norman opened the door of his office - in reality a portakabin hidden around the back of the artfully dilapidated warehouse where the main event was to take place. Only a 10 minute walk from the tram stop and within spitting distance from Ikea's chimneys but still surrounded by enough scrubland to feel suitably isolated. At the foot of the perforated metal steps leading to the cabin stood a man, bare chested, an executioners hood covering his face. A sight made all the more surreal by the fact that the man was barely four foot tall, his executioners axe towering above him.

"This is Dr Death," Norman intoned, "he'll be your guide for this evening."

"Dr Death?" Ruth asked the executioner as they walked away.

"Yeah, but you can call me Roger," he replied, once he'd made sure he was out of Clark Norman's earshot.

"How long have you worked with Mr Norman?" 

"About four weeks now," Roger replied.

"So you're not one of his regular performers?"

"No, most of the guys in the main act are, but us hosts have just been recruited for this run only."

"You enjoying it?" Asked Christopher.

"It keeps the money coming in, while I wait for the next production of Snow White," shrugged Roger. Then he cleared his throat, pointed his scythe ahead of him and assumed his Dr Death character: "Now, step forward if ye dare, for we are about to find out what awaits us in the House of Hell."

Christopher struggled to stifle a giggle.

 

20:39

The special effects were pretty stunning Christopher had to admit. Each room of the warehouse was supposed to represent a different chamber of hell, with a different eternal torture being committed in front of the audience as they shuffled through. Most of the performances themselves were somewhat shoehorned into the theme - a man who's punishment was to swallow pool balls and then bring them up again, a man 'forced' to hammer nails into his nostrils - they were obviously these people's standard acts wrapped in hellish surroundings. It was the high production values of these surroundings that most impressed Christopher, the occasional whiff of sulphur, the unsettling flickering lights, the industrial music - Rammstein, he noted - interspersed with child's screams and maniacal laughter all adding to the lavish sets and the supporting cast of tortured souls made up to look like they'd been burnt or impaled or had limbs removed. Some cast members were obviously amputees who really had lost limbs. It was certainly an equal opportunities freak-show.

None though were more impressive than the girl above him, hung from chains attached to her back piercings, a slit across her guts dripping blood. She hadn't even blinked as far as Christopher could recall.

She. Hadn't. Blinked.

Dread crept through Christopher's bones as he reached up towards the girl's limp form. She was cold to the touch, quite clearly and quite genuinely dead. 

"Ruth," he croaked, his hand recoiling from the girl's face. "Phone the police."

Ruth was about to reply when the lights cut out, the music stopped and only the maniacal laughter remained.

"What the hell's going on?" Christopher heard Roger beside him, then a gargled scream. A generator kicked in, low level light flickered on. Christopher's eyes were drawn down, past where he expected Roger to be all the way to the floor where their host now lay, throat slit, blood pooling around Christopher's shoes. Ruth and he pulled out their phones to call the police - no signal. They heard a scream in the next room, ignoring their initial instincts they ran towards it. 

A woman - Christopher made a conscious decision not to notice how beautiful she was - stood shaking in the centre of a flaming pentagram. 

"The lights went out," she gasped, talking at them rather than to them. "Then I saw flames - it was a man burning alive. He ran right past me, I could feel the heat off him. Then the flames just came out of the floor."

Christopher edged nearer the flames, could see the pipes beneath them.

"Gas burners," he said, "they must have been ignited by the burning man. By accident or by design though, that's the question.”

"Does it matter?" Ruth asked, offering a hand to the woman helping her step over the flames. 

"Well if it's by accident then this could be a rogue psychopath sabotaging the opening night. If not then all of this - the murders, the slaughter, the terror - it's all been done on purpose it's-"

"All part of the show, Dr Hart." A voice said behind them.

 

20:59

There was no one there. Then Christopher noticed a panel on the wall had been slid back and a chubby, rather sweaty face peered through. A click, a clunk and the wall swung outwards revealing a hidden doorway. 

"Come with me, I can get you out." A chubby man said, stepping through the doorway but keeping his hand on the door as if he didn't want to fully enter the room.

Christopher and the girl from the pentagram stepped towards him but Ruth put her arms out to stop them.

"Hold on, why should we trust you?"

"Yeah that must be the way the burning man went," pentagram girl said, "I figured he just...disappeared."

Christopher shook his head at the irrationality of that statement but the whole evening had been designed to screw with your head, he could almost understand her complete suspension of reality.

"My name's Cliff Hawkins, I'm the creative consultant for the show. A glorified set designer really. The burning man was supposed to be a burning woman. Her in fact," he said pointing at one of the dead bodies on the floor. "Someone else has used her fire retardant suit." He reached back behind the door and pulled out a charred all-in-one, "as you can see it wouldn't have fitted me." He tapped his belly to emphasise the point. 

"That doesn't mean we should trust you." Christopher said.

"True. But at the moment you're locked in this room," he made sure the door he was holding was wedged open and walked across to the door Ruth and Christopher had entered by and pushed against it, it didn't budge. "Try the exit," he said. Ruth crossed to the other side of the room and tried the door.

"Locked," she said.

"It was meant to be part of the experience," Cliff explained. "As the fear and tension built the punters would find they're trapped in hell. All the staff had an override code in case of emergency, but someone's changed it. I'm as trapped as you guys."

"Then why should we go with you?"

"Because I can take you to the main control room. We have cameras watching everything, we can hopefully spot any danger before it reaches us. Plus there's a computer there. I know you're a bit of a whizz on them Miss Withers, maybe you can crack the code."

Ruth flushed slightly. She was good with computers, but she was no elite hacker, her exaggerated reputation preceded her it seemed. 

"You seem to know a lot about me."

"All tonight's guests were hand picked by myself and Clark Norman. You and Dr Hart were my personal choices. I'm sorry, if I'd known what was going to happen I'd've never suggested you."

 

21:15

They all sat in the control room, staring at the screens the horror contained within them seeming less real somehow. Each screen showed a different room, each room had at least one dead body in it and at least one 'guest' too, all of varying levels of fame. Christopher recognised the TV chef, notorious for being an emotionless bastard, curled up and crying in a corner. Ruth pointed out the actor famed for gore-porn horror movies banging his fists on the locked doors and the celebrity survival expert fruitlessly wandering around his room holding his phone in front of him in the desperate search for signal.

"So why us?" asked Ruth tapping away at the laptop that controlled everything in the room.

"Well Clark asked for some local heroes and you and Dr Hart came to mind. When I told him about your previous murder solving exploits he couldn't wait to invite you."

"He probably thought there was a delicious irony to it all," said Christopher.

"You think Clark's behind this?"

"You don't?" 

Cliff looked at Christopher the obvious truth slowly dawning on him.

"I guess he must've. It's just so insane."

"Does it matter who did it?" Asked the pentagram girl. "How do we get out of here?"

"I'm sorry," replied Christopher, "I haven't even asked your name."

"Bex. Bex Addlestone." She said it as if the name should mean something to Christopher.

"Sorry Bex," Ruth cut in. "He doesn't really watch TV. She was the Queen of the Jungle, Christopher," he was still none the wiser. "That reality show where celebrities have to survive in a rainforest?" Christopher eventually nodded, although he was far from certain he knew what Ruth was talking about.

"I impressed the public 'cos I dealt with all the challenges fearlessly."

"And that's why you're here, then. This is a pretty sick publicity stunt you know." Christopher said, turning on Cliff who held up his hands.

"If I'd've known I wouldn't have gone along with it obviously."

"If it's a publicity stunt though what's to be gained?" Asked Ruth.

"What?"

"For Clark Norman, no one's going to come to his show now. And at best he'll spend the rest of his life as a fugitive, at worst it’ll be in prison. What's the point?"

No one had an answer.

"Perhaps he's just nuts," Bex offered eventually.

 

21:43

"I can't do it." Ruth pushed herself away from the desk, "the security on the computer's too good. No way to override the code."

"There may be another way out." Christopher half whispered. "The doors are electronically locked right?"

"Right," said Cliff, "but the if you're thinking of turning the power off, we can't. The mains switch is outside the building. We can't get to it."

"But we're running on the back up generator. It came on after the power went before."

"Of course. It's in the basement, the stairs are just through there," he said pointing at a door Christopher had presumed to be a cupboard. Their route to safety had been next door the whole time. Cliff reached into a drawer beside him, pulled out a torch then headed to the basement.

 

22:00

"It must've been about 10 minutes, how big's the bloody basement?" Ruth asked. The lights were still on and there was no sign of Cliff. "I'm going to go look for him."

"Not alone. I'll come with you," Christopher stood up hoping he sounded braver than he felt. "Bex, you coming?"

"Fuck that."

"Just you and me then, baby," Ruth forced a laugh, "quite the date night."

They walked down the stairs towards the basement, there was even less light down here, but they could hear the generator rumbling on the other side of the door at the bottom. Christopher reached for the handle and twisted, a long slow turn. Inching the door open a manic laugh burst out at them, making them leap back. The laugh came again. The same one that had been played on a loop as they walked through the house of horrors. Letting out the breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding Christopher again pushed the door, meeting some resistance as he got it two-thirds open. Slipping into the room he saw what looked like a large backpack stopping the door opening fully. He bent down to inspect it, it wasn't a backpack, it was a prosthetic stomach, complete with fake navel and arm straps to keep it attached to the body.

"Oh Jesus." Ruth gasped as she stepped over Christopher into the room. Christopher turned his head to see what she saw. Slumped against the generator was Clark Norman, oversized black jeans and shirt wrinkled around his slender frame. In his hand dangled a ragged flap of hair and skin. As Christopher edged around the room he could see what it was.

"It's Cliff's face." Ruth said aghast.

"It's just latex. Just latex."

"Cliff was just another trick. Is he dead?" 

Christopher reached towards the showman's neck, no pulse. A faint almond smell lingered around the body.

"Cyanide. What the hell do we do now?"

"We still need to get out of here," replied Ruth, ever the practical one. "We cut the power, get out and let the police sort this mess out."

Christopher nodded. He picked up the torch that Clark Norman had laid by his side, clicked it on and turned the generator off. The motor whirred to a stop and the last of the power drained out of the lights. 

And the walls glowed.

"What the hell?"

In huge, fluorescent letters on the wall it said

IT'S NOT WHAT YOU THINK.

OPEN THE STOMACH.

"No," said Ruth. "We're not playing any more games."

But Christopher's curiosity wouldn't allow it. He picked up the prosthetic and rolled it over in his hands. Finding a strip of Velcro he tugged it open to find a beautifully crafted, Victorian style, leather bound book. He opened it to the first page, and read:

We the undersigned would like it to be known that this was not murder. This was a deliberate planned show. A final middle finger to those who never understood us, or never even tried. We were all complicit in our suicides. We chose to die of our own free will and we allowed Clark Norman to facilitate our desires in style. We lived as freaks and died as art. 

Through Clark we will all live forever.

 

Christopher flicked through the rest of the book, it was signed head shots of each of tonight's victims. There was Roger, and the girl that had hung above him and every other poor soul. He handed the book to Ruth, who read it in silence.

"Jesus, how desperate do you have to be to agree to your own murder?" She asked. 

"I guess you never know what hell other people are going through." Christopher replied, taking Ruth's hand and heading back to the stairs out of the basement.

"So...” she said, “where are we going to go for our next date night then?"

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