“Wow, it was cool!” the boy immediately confirmed.
“Keep the ticket,” the worker smiled at him. “You will be able to ride again at a discount. And if you also bring a friend…”
“No riding again!” the woman angrily interrupted. “And you, Cyril Parker, I’ll talk with you at home! About what you read and what you watch if you can like… such…” she, at last, coped with her dress and stepped from the platform to the ground. Immediately after that she turned towards Mike and Jane. “Get out of here before it’s too late, you two,” she uttered categorically. “It’s… disgusting. Now I probably won’t be able to eat for several days…”
But Mike didn’t look at her. He was looking at the second car which, at last, left the “cave” at high speed, crashed with a clang in the already vacated first one and stopped.
The car was empty. And all splashed with blood.
On the seat where the guy once had sat, sleekly gleamed a whole pool which seemed almost black. And from the board of the car something hung down, long and fibrous… Hair. Black tufts stuck together with blood.
That’s not real blood, Mike reminded to himself. Just paint. All this is scenery, part of the attraction. But where did the guy go?
“Ma’am!” Mike called the woman who was already stepping away, without looking back, dragging her child by hand; even her back expressed outrage. “Where is the young man who sat behind you?”
“But isn’t he…” she turned back; her glance fell to the second car, and her eyes widened, though from such a distance she hardly could have made out the details. “I don’t know what’s going on here,” she murmured. “You had better demand your money back.”
“Didn’t you hear his scream? It was he who screamed, wasn’t it?” Mike insisted.
“There were many screams… Come on, Cyril!”
And they disappeared among high bushes.
“Okay then,” the young man turned to the “coffin maker.” “Let’s consider that you almost frightened us. Now where did you put that guy after all?”
“I am afraid that he has gone,” the “coffin maker” made a helpless gesture with an apologetic smile. “This happens sometimes.”
“What do you mean by ‘has gone?’ Where has he gone?”
“It is a cave of horror, you know. Sometimes people don’t come back from there. Especially if the car detaches or gets trapped in the tunnel.”
“Bravo!” derisively praised Jane. “‘Never break character,’ huh?”
The “coffin maker” smiled again, this time silently.
“I don’t like all this,” Mike muttered.
“Chuck it, Mikey!” the girl exclaimed. “The guy is a shill, don’t you understand? He probably exited through a back door. Or stayed inside, quickly put on makeup, and will frighten us now as a ‘blood-stained corpse.’ A clever idea,” she praised the “coffin maker.” “I’ve seen ‘rooms of horror’ with live actors, but never those who pretend to be casual visitors.”
The worker continued smiling silently.
“Yes, but I don’t want to ruin my clothes with that mess,” Mike nodded at the “blood-stained” car.
“Do not worry about it,” hastily said the “coffin maker.” “We will clean it up. And you meanwhile please sit down in the forward car.”
Jane didn’t make the worker ask her twice and stepped over a low board. Mike willy-nilly sat beside her. The “coffin maker” lowered the safety bar which latched and pressed them into their seats, as if they were going to ride on steep hills instead of a flat floor.
“Don’t try to stand up or to grab anything during movement. Inside it is forbidden to take photos or to make other records,” he warned them and turned the knife switch. The car lurched forward, having unmercifully jarred the passengers, and several seconds later dived into thick darkness.
At first they moved in total darkness and silence; the silence was unnaturally dense, wadded, absorbing even the sound of the electric motor. Then suddenly from the darkness ahead a desperate shriek came, this time female; now both Jane and Mike shuddered. Almost immediately from somewhere at the left a groan full of pain and hopeless despair responded to it; it slowly faded away and then on the right someone moaned as if trying to beg for something through a gag—probably, it was a very young girl… or even a child? And then Mike smelled a heavy, sticky stench and at the next moment—still in the same utter darkness—his face plunged into something like a dense web.
Mike had arachnophobia since his childhood and would rather have put his bare hand into a dirty toilet bowl than touch a web; his throat immediately spasmed in disgust and he desperately jerked his head, trying to escape from the nasty thing. As if having caught this movement, the car abruptly stopped, then rolled back a bit and stopped again. At the next instant a bright flash lit up what they had just ridden into.
And it was not a web.
Over the rails a long-ago decayed and dried-out corpse hung heels over head; most likely it was a women, or maybe a young girl—at such stage of decomposition it was difficult to discern an age. In any case, the victim had once had magnificent, voluminous, and long hair. Now only thin, fragile locks covered with dust remained; that was “the web.” The victim was tied by barbed wire which deeply gnawed into the decayed flesh; here and there yellowed bones showed through ruptures in the browned skin. But the most terrible was the overturned face covered with a wrinkled parchment of dried-out skin: the mouth, open in a silent scream, showed rotten jaws; in place of the decomposed nose, there was a triangular hole divided by a vertical partition; gaping eye sockets resembled nibbled burrows. And the main thing, everywhere—in the mouth, in the nose, in the eye sockets—writhed small white worms. The head actually swarmed with them.
Yes, they weren’t just motionless fake worms as it would be natural for a dummy. They were moving—in those three or four seconds when the light shone, Mike and Jane saw this clearly. And then the car jerked forward again, and they had to pass through her hair once more, now seeing distinctly what it was. And, no matter how they tried to turn their heads away, the dusty locks touched their faces again (mostly Mike’s; Jane was only lightly brushed on her cheek). And then the light went out again.
From somewhere of the cave depths new groans sounded.
“Damn”… murmured Jane in the gloom while the car carried them further. “You were right, we shouldn’t have…”
Someone’s cold and wet hand touched her shoulder. The girl screamed. And the other hand at the same time touched Mike’s shoulder.
The car stopped again and then suddenly turned in place—obviously, here the rails passed through a turntable. Again a directional light flashed, pulling out from the darkness what they had just disturbed.
It was a corpse, too, but this time, seemingly, male (though its back was turned to them, so it was difficult to say with full confidence) and not dried out but, on the contrary, inflated. The dead person had been rather fat even during his lifetime, but now his swollen body covered with cadaveric lividities and, apparently, ready to burst and splash out the purulent swill which had accumulated under its skin, looked especially disgusting. It was also suspended heels over head—or, more exactly, heels over neck, because the head was absent. Two meat hooks, hanging down from a ceiling on long chains, pierced its ankles from behind, having snagged the sinews. The dead man hung on these sinews stretched from its flesh by the weight of the bulky body like on terrible slings and long stains of dried-up blood—extending from the hooks covered with brown crust down along his legs which were like huge sausages—showed that he had been still alive when his flesh had been pierced.
His hands, which had touched Mike and Jane, still slightly waved, weaker and weaker. Then they stopped. The car stayed motionless, too. Then the light again went out.