I pressed the button and was treated to the sound of a female shriek, followed by some maniacal laughter that sounded like it had been generated from a computer. Then a sound bite that I recognizedfromTheExorcist , a demonic voice proclaiming "This sow is mine!"
A chorus of children: "You'regonnadiiiiie , you'regonnadiiiiie ."
A musical sting, the kind you hear right as the monster bursts out of nowhere.
An old man speaking in a careful, calculated tone: "True horror exists deep beneath the surface."
Another female shriek.
A hysterical man: "Blood! Blood everywhere! It covers the walls! It covers the ceiling!"
TheTwilightZone theme.
A whisper: "Look beneath...look within..."
The recording ended.
It took me several seconds to remember to breathe. Sweat was pouring down my sides, and I was getting the kind of headache I always got before a really difficult test in college.
"It's nothing," I said aloud. "Just some guy with a bit of a twist in his personality trying to mess with my mind, that's all."
"DIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIE !!!"
I dropped the picture in shock, and then willed my stomach to untangle itself from my spinal column. Just a little bonus sound bite, like the hidden tracks you can find on some CDs.Nothing to keel over dead from.
But I also had nothing to go on.
Okay, "true horror exists beneath the surface" was probably a clue. I didn't like that clue, because it implied that I was going to have to dig up another grave, and I was trying to cut down.But where? The Love's site certainly didn't look like anything had been added to it recently. Was I going to have to wander around, shining my flashlight all over until I found a patch of ground that looked recently-filled?
"Look beneath...look within..."
It had to refer to digging up another grave.Or else the tombstones of Mr. Beneath and Mr. Within. The only other thing I could look beneath was the picture.
I picked up the frame, half expecting it to tell me to DIE! DIE! DIE!again . I removed the picture and found another note behind it.
"Good guess. But wrong."
What a prick.
Okay, fine, it wasn't behind the picture. Where else was I supposed to look? I wandered around the nearby tombstones, searching for an area that might have something newly-buried underneath it, but there was nothing.
Maybe I was supposed to smash open the picture frame.
I turned it over. Better idea. Look in the battery compartment.
I pried open the compartment and saw four tiny batteries.
Then one of the batteries fell out, revealing a very small, folded piece of paper. I unfolded it and letters I could barely even see spelled out "OLE."
Ole?Spanish for Bravo? What was this, congratulations for not going absolutely berserk up to this point?
I shook the frame and the other batteries dropped out. Three more pieces of paper fell to the ground. After I retrieved and unfolded them, I had the following fragments: "US," "MA," and "UM."
Great.Another puzzle.And I was the kind of person who cheated at Scrabble.
"Us" and "Ma" could refer to people, I guess, but what were "Um" and "Ole" supposed to mean? Was I supposed to be searching for a Mexican couple who lived with their mother and used verbal tags?
Maybe these could be unscrambled to form another name.
No! I had it!
With a little rearranging the fragments formed...MAUSOLEUM.
I headed over to the closest mausoleum, which was also the larger of the two. The door was chained shut with a shiny new padlock, but when I walked around to the back there was a patch of earth, about as long as a coffin, that, while firmly packed, could easily have been replaced recently.
Jennifer could be down there.
If so, she'd probably been there since last night.
This was not going to be pretty.
Now I decided that the best course of action was to run to the car, drive to the nearest phone, and get the police. If Jennifer was buried alive, every second might count, and I wasn't going to get very far trying to dig with my bare hands. But I took a moment to shine my flashlight around the area, just in case I'd missed something, and there it was. Another one of those notes, taped to the mausoleum wall near the ground. I tore it free and read it. "13 left, 27 right, 4 left."
I hurried to the front of the mausoleum and turned the dial of the padlock to that combination. It popped open, and I threw it aside. I pulled open the heavy wooden door, shined the flashlight inside, and immediately saw what I was supposed to find. Two shovels.A lantern.A Walkman. And yes, a note.
"Dig her up yourselves or suffer the consequences," the note read. "But you may want to hurry."
I grabbed one of the shovels, the lantern, and the Walkman and rushed to the back of the mausoleum. Opening the Walkman, I saw that the tape inside was labeled "MusicTo Dig Up Graves By." Oh, yes, this guy was certainly a prick.
I spent the next half hour digging as rapidly as I could. I kept the Walkman volume low so that I could hear if anyone approached, but I got to listen to songs like "Digging in the Dirt" by Peter Gabriel, Perry Como singing "Dig You Later," Randy Travis singing "Digging Up Bones," They Might Be Giants singing "Dig My Grave," and "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" by AC/DC.
Then I struck coffin.
I quickly removed more dirt until the lid was exposed enough that I could open it. This was made a bit more difficult because I was trying to keep myself in a position where I wouldn't get shot if bullets started firing through the lid.
I knocked on the lid with the shovel. "Jennifer?"
Silence.
I could think of so many things I'd rather do than open this coffin. Root canals, alligator wrestling, parent-teacher conferences...bring `emon!
But I got the shovel in place, and then pried it open.
There was not a corpse inside.
There wasn't a live body inside, either.
The only thing inside the coffin was a video camera.
Great.I'd spontaneously generated six ulcers over a stupid video camera. I picked it up, and then shut the lid. It was an older model, heavy and clunky. Probably not something that would be missed if it were taken out of the Ghoulish Delights office.
I sat down against the wall of the mausoleum and examined the camcorder more thoroughly. I ejected the tape inside and saw that it was labeled "You'll like this." I stuck the tape back in, and then unplugged the headphones from the Walkman and inserted them into the headphone jack of the video recorder. I peered through the viewfinder and pressed "play."
A black-and-white image appeared. It was Jennifer, her hair much longer than when I'd met her. She wore a black leather outfit and high heels. As she walked onto the empty stage, the camera zoomed in on her face, and she gave a spank-me-you-bad-boy smile.
"WelcometoGhoulishDelights , " she said, sounding like she was on a commercial for a 1-900-DO-ME-NOW line. "I'm sure you'lllooooove what we've got in store for you. But before we get to the good stuff, let's hear a word from our sponsor, Profit Jewelers. You know, nose rings, lip rings, navel rings, and a wide variety of otherpiercings are the fashion right now, but Profit Jewelers, always the innovator, has taken things one step further."
The camera panned over to where a woman I didn't recognize sat on a chair, smiling broadly and waving at the camera like a professional model. She was very attractive except for the ring protruding from her left eyeball.
"Yes, eye rings," said Jennifer. "They're what all the top stars are wearing, and as an extra-special bonus, theyhuuuuuurt when they go in." She purred these last words, but for some reason I still wasn't convinced to go get my eye pierced.