“How much?” Calvin asked.
“Comes with admission, and don’t worry ’bout a tip. Hall of Hell don’t work like that.”
Calvin brought the drink to his lips and said, before taking a sip, “You sure?”
“You’ll get it sooner or later, if you stick around. Ain’t gonna last all night, kid. Better have yerself a look-see.”
Calvin nodded, turned and walked away. He sipped his drink. It tasted mostly of whiskey with a pungent undertone that must have been the formaldehyde. Not too rough on the palate.
Of the three rooms, Calvin was most intrigued by the one that said Death’s Door above it, but he wasn’t ready to go there yet. He still had his reservations not only about that particular chamber, but the entire Hall of Hell. There was a feeling like walking through water in a dream, like maybe he would turn around and everything would change and he would be off on some other eerie adventure before waking up in bed just as things were getting good.
Calvin stood there for a moment sipping his drink and deciding where to begin. People walked in and out of the three chambers, some of them stopping for a refill or to grab a shitty domestic beer. Some of them sized Calvin up as they passed by; others nodded a curt, unspoken hello, but none of them as friendly as the woman he met when he walked in.
All of the rooms frightened Calvin. Though he’d been invited to this charade, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being set up, and if he was, he knew the stakes were high. Life high. Death high.
“You’re amongst friends,” said Mr. ghastly.
Calvin turned, expecting Ghastly to be standing behind him, but no one was there. If the old man who had gestured to him from the opening of the drainage ditch had been Ghastly himself, he was nowhere to be seen.
Calvin lingered in front of the Photo Gallery, peeking in and sipping his drink. From what he could see, the walls were lined with framed pictures. Some of them were bodies, most likely dead ones, and others were too obscured from his vantage point to see clearly. When he spotted the woman he’d met earlier, he decided to go inside.
There were three people in the small chamber examining pictures on the walls that were exactly what Calvin had thought them to be. The first one he set his eyes on was of a woman’s torso lying atop a pile of bloodied hay. The photo was black and white and appeared to be authentic. The next one was a gruesome close-up of a suicide aftermath: shotgun to the head. Something about that one didn’t strike Calvin as the average police photo. It was in vivid color as if taken with a high definition camera.
“Oh, there he is,” said a familiar voice.
Calvin gave the goth chick a nervous smile. It felt awkward to be examining such morbid photographs with other people. Wasn’t so different from the Museum of Death, but that had been a long time ago. Now Calvin was older. He wasn’t as comfortable sharing the intimacy of the dead with strangers.
He offered his hand. “Never did properly introduce myself. I’m Calvin.”
She licked her lips seductively. “Hazel.”
Wrapping her pale fingers around his outstretched hand, she gently shook in a most feminine way that almost defied her dark nature.
They slowly shuffled along together looking and commenting on a myriad of death scenes like snobs at an art gallery.
Calvin noticed that she was drinking a beer. “Not into the whole Helldahyde thing, are you?”
“Not sure I want to put embalming fluid in my body. Not until I’m dead at least.”
He took a sip. “Not so bad really. You’d be surprised.”
She nodded to a particularly gruesome photo. “Dental records,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Probably how they had to identify the body.”
“Ah. Hey, have you heard the term Gorehound?”
“Hmmm. I think that’s what Christians refer to people like us as.”
“People like us? What do you mean?”
They stopped perusing photos and stood in the middle of the room facing each other. Hazel took a drink of her beer, which left black lipstick residue on the mouth of the bottle.
“You dig the gory shit, right?” she said. “Hostel, Aftermath, Evil Dead, Nekromantic, stuff like that?”
Calvin nodded, though he’d been drifting further and further away from those types of films since dating Ronnie. He hadn’t seen Human Centipede or any of the ultra violent stuff coming out of Japan. Even before meeting Ronnie his tastes had been changing.
“Oh yeah,” he said, “I love the gory stuff. Spent a lot of time at the Museum of Death back in the day.”
“You too! I thought I was a weirdo. I used to bus downtown and hang out in there on summer days. Eat my lunch watching Traces of Death ‘n’ shit.”
Calvin nodded and grinned. This was one crazy chick. “Have you checked out the Freak Show yet?”
“No. I peeked in when I got here.”
“Let’s check it out.”
She took a drink of her beer and said, “Sure.”
On their way to the Freak Show Hazel grabbed another domestic beer, but Calvin passed on freshening his Helldahyde. It wasn’t quite as good as he tried to convince himself.
Inside the Freak Show chamber there were two people nestled into the corner playing ghostly tunes with a bongo and the wind instrument Calvin had heard on arrival. The bongo player was tattooed with scales like a lizard man. The flute player had undergone a massive plastic surgery transition and an alarming series of body modifications that made her look like a human cat. There were lumps in her head and some kind of lip implants that gave the appearance of a cat’s lips, complete with a cleft down the middle. Whiskers dangled from her cheeks like snipped guitar strings. She wore contact lenses that gave her glowing green cat eyes.
Dancing to the strange music were three human abstractions, two women and one man. After getting an eyeful of them, Calvin looked at hazel and was stunned to see that she was truly enjoying this.
What kind of sick … ?
The woman on the left side of the trio was wearing a tattered shroud that looked as if it had been wrapped over something that had been buried for a long time. Her hands were missing and the stumps didn’t look right. They were all twisted and wrinkled like the dried ends of a homemade sausage cased in animal intestine. Her dance was awkward yet she flowed with the creepy music, head lolling this way and that as if her spine were made of gelatin. The eyeless cavities were perhaps her most gruesome affliction, well, almost. Her hands, for whatever reason, were dangling from huge rings in her earlobes like the most surreal and gaudy earrings ever.
In the middle was the man, towering over the women a good two feet, skinny like maybe he was a skeleton that someone wrapped in pizza dough. His arm and leg joints bulged like burl wood knots. It looked as if he would inadvertently break a bone while doing his stiff little dance. He had an impressive array of screws protruding from his head in all shapes and sizes as if they had somehow been administered through his skull from within.
Calvin shuddered, again. He couldn’t remember shuddering as much as he had tonight. He insisted that he wasn’t scared, but…
Hazel whispered in Calvin’s ear, “Wow. Look at her.”
The woman to the right of the skinny screw-headed man was something else altogether. She stood there naked, her flesh decorated in a maze of intricate fine, puffy lines. It took Calvin a minute before he realized that the puffy flesh was the result of some kind of branding, but not the typical branding that leaves thick designs. The maze-like pattern that covered the woman from head to toe was as fine and delicate as if drawn on with a ballpoint pen.