Rob Zombie - Lords of Salem

She poured herself a glass of wine and set it on the sink next to the TV, then carefully tied up her hair, watching herself in the mirror as she did so. Tough day , she thought. And yesterday, too. But now she could just relax, wind down. The day was over.

She turned off the tap and then slipped out of her clothes. She took one last moment to position the TV and then took her wineglass and climbed into the water. Wow, it was really hot. For a moment she just stood in it, letting her legs get used to it, and then she slowly eased her way in.

She lay in the water, the steam rising up around her. Yes, now that she was in the bath the portable TV was doing better. Picture wasn’t perfect, but she could make out who was who at least. She watched Fred and Ginger twirl their way around the dance floor. Beyond, she could see the open bathroom door leading out into her dark apartment. She should have closed that, she realized, to keep the heat in, and to keep Steve out. Not that he was likely to come in anyway, considering how asleep he must have been when she came in.

She watched the movie for a while, sipping the wine, but then the dance number ended and the sound wasn’t quite loud enough for her to follow the dialogue. It took too much attention. She took a washcloth and dropped it into the water near her belly, watched it slowly grow sodden and begin to sink. When it had taken on the heat of the water, she wrung it out and draped it over her face. Ah, it felt good. Finally she could relax.

Across the room, something changed. Heidi, washcloth still draped over her face, remained oblivious, unaware. At first it was only a change in light, a strange thickening of the darkness somewhere within the frame of the door. And then the bathroom itself started to feel cut off from the rest of the world, the sounds of the outside world—the wind outside, the settling of the house, the noise of the landlady and her sisters still laughing downstairs—were simply gone. Heidi didn’t notice. Steve was awake and in the kitchen now, scratching at the outside door and whimpering, but Heidi couldn’t hear him. She continued to hear from the TV the sound of Fred and Ginger continuing to chat, filling time before their next dance number. But if she’d taken the washcloth off her face, she would have seen that the images on the screen were no longer the same.

Instead of the two dancers, the TV depicted a strange hovel-like structure surrounded by woods. In front of it was a roaring bonfire, around which danced a ring of women who one by one stripped off their clothing until they were dancing naked. Their bodies were covered with symbols, written on their flesh in paint or blood, and they cavorted around and finally fell into one another’s arms and began to rub themselves and writhe in the dirt, attempting to couple with the ground or with each other. One of them came too close to the fire and her hair caught flame and she ran howling and mad and foaming at the mouth around the hovel until that, too, caught flame. She fell on the ground and came up again with her hair burned away and the fire extinguished and her scalp blistered and smoking, a crazed ecstatic smile on her face. The hovel was soon roaring with flame and from it stumbled a figure whose body seemed made strictly of fire and who stood there in the door of the hovel, calmly burning, in the shape of a man but larger than a man should be. The women around the fire stopped dancing and prostrated themselves before the blazing figure, crying out something that could not be heard as Fred and Ginger’s voices talked calmly on.

And then the darkness in the bathroom doorway solidified, slowly coming into sharper and sharper focus. At first it was a kind of black smoke that billowed around itself and then it gathered and whitened and grew pale. It slowed and solidified and became flesh, and became a woman. And then became Margaret Morgan.

She was stark naked. Her skin was pale, unnaturally so, and crusted over, as if it were flaking and rotting away. She stood completely still, her posture stiff and unnatural, as if possessed. She stared into the room, her gaze wandering slowly here and there before coming to settle on Heidi in her bath.

Her lips parted to show her teeth. She lifted her arms and the skin at her joints cracked and began to seep a white liquid, a pus or ichor of some kind. Her lips were moving, as if reciting something, but no noise came out of them. She stayed there, swaying slightly, eyes on Heidi, but did not move forward.

Suddenly there was movement behind her and a small hand snaked its way along her thigh and up onto her belly. A body followed it, belonging to a small humanoid creature with a sickly swollen head and huge bulbous red eyes. It was deformed and almost fetus-like, but nearly three feet tall, much too big to be a fetus. And though it clung to Margaret Morgan’s leg, it moved with an awareness and intelligence that Margaret’s body did not seem to have. It, too, turned its eyes on Heidi in the bath and watched her carefully and attentively, licking its lips.

The creature pushed Morgan forward and she moved jerkily into the room. Slowly and silently, she approached the side of the tub. Soundlessly, she lifted her leg and stepped into the water. Heidi, behind her washcloth, neither heard nor felt her. The creature lifted the other foot and stepped in, standing now between Heidi’s legs, and then she began to crouch, bringing herself lower and lower, somehow still managing not to touch Heidi despite the lack of space. It was as if the tub was much deeper for her than for Heidi. She folded in on herself, hunched, and descended until she had vanished under the water’s surface. She was gone. From the doorway the creature watched, smiled.

She lay there, the steam rising around her, listening to the slow drip of the tap into the bathwater. On the television, the static stopped, to be replaced again by images of an iron mask, clearer this time. It was being affixed over someone’s head, a woman’s, and was like a kind of cage. The woman’s eyes darted back and forth as strong hands held her in place and forced the mask around her face. She was screaming. You could tell by the way her throat kept clenching and releasing, but her mouth was invisible within the metal mask.

A hand holding a spike moved forward into the shot. It brought it up to rest just above the hole in the mask for the right eye, and then held it there, just millimeters away from the eye itself. The eye below it darted back and forth, desperate to get away. But suddenly a mallet came down hard and drove the spike in. The eye burst in a spurt of jelly. The mallet struck again and the jelly was followed by a slow puddling of the socket with blood.

A moment later the hand appeared with another spike and brought it to rest just above the other eye.

On the wall high above the tub a drop of blood formed, seemingly out of nowhere. Slowly it began to slide down the wall, becoming a streak of blood and growing larger and wetter the farther it traveled. A foot or two from the tub itself it suddenly thickened, becoming a dense mixture of not only blood but ground organs and flesh, a sort of slurry of bloody flux and disjecta. The stream of bloody goo slid farther down to slop into the tub, where it slowly began to spread through the water. It curled and wound its way through the liquid almost like the tentacle of an octopus feeling its way tentatively forward. It touched Heidi’s leg and looped carefully around it, then wound past it to curl slowly around her body, crissing and crossing on itself until slowly the water became nothing but a murky red stew. Heidi, washcloth still over her face, half sleeping, noticed nothing.

The television burst into static again, silent this time, and then an image formed, this time of a woman in a tub. The tub seemed identical to the one Heidi was in, and the woman in it had a washcloth draped over her face, and the water, too, wasn’t water but a slurry of blood and flesh. But the arms were too drawn and skeletal to be Heidi’s arms.