Rob Zombie - Lords of Salem

No , a part of her cautioned herself. Don’t go in there. Whatever is in there, it’s not something that you want to see. But another part of her, a stronger part, was too concerned about her dog, too curious to know what had happened to be able to hold back.

Near the bedroom door there was a slick patch of blood, as if something had died there. She stepped over it with her bare feet, trying not to slip on the blood, and went in.

There was something in the bed, a shape there. She called out her dog’s name, but he still didn’t answer. Slowly, she approached the bed, tried to see what was in it, but whatever it was it was completely covered by the blankets, was impossible to see.

She reached out and took hold of the edge of the blankets. She pulled them back.

In the bed was a woman with blond hair who resembled her in every particular except that she was dead. Her wrists had been slashed and her skin had started to go gray. A syringe hung loosely from the vein in one of her arms, empty. She reached out and brushed the woman’s hair back, but it still looked exactly like her. But it can’t be me, she told herself. I’m still alive. I’m here.

She pulled the blankets back farther, and there, near this false Heidi’s feet, was Steve. He was covered in blood, and the fur and skin had been stripped away from his head, leaving it a pulpy bloody mess, a slick and shiny skull poking through here and there. His paws, too, had been severed and placed in a little pile near his belly, as if they were puppies ready to feed. He snarled when he saw her, his eyes mad with rage or pain, and when she reached out to him, he snapped, bit her.

Oh God , she thought. Oh God , and stepped away from the bed, backing toward the door. Her mind was fleeing in a thousand different directions at once, and she slipped on the blood in the doorway and fell, hard. She crawled her way back into the living room, as quickly as she could manage, dry heaving, and pulled herself onto the couch. She reached again for the phone, this time dialed 911.

She was just raising the phone to her ear when something cuffed her hard on the side of the head, making her ears ring and sending the receiver flying. Standing over her was the woman she had hallucinated meeting the night before. Margaret Morgan, she had said her name was, and seeing her like this now, her skin unnaturally white, water dripping off her, Heidi realized as well that this was the woman who had tried to kill her in the tub.

For a moment they just stared at one another, neither moving, Morgan’s eyes calm but hard. And then Heidi tried to scramble up and Morgan shoved her back hard with one hand, seemingly without effort. When Heidi started to struggle up again, Margaret screamed, her mouth opening unnaturally wide to reveal a shining black mouth, darker than Heidi thought possible. When Heidi struggled to get up a third time, it was not Morgan who kept her back but rather a long pitch-black arm; it held her, wrapping tightly around her waist. It seemed to shoot up from the couch, pushing up through the middle of a cushion, and she couldn’t see a body attached to it. She struggled to break free, but just as she did so another pitch-black arm pushed its way through another cushion and clamped onto her thigh, digging clawed fingers in. Then another, pulling on her shoulder, and another still, this one clamping over her mouth.

She tried to cry out, all sound muffled by the hand. She struggled to break free, but there were too many arms, a dozen of them now, each of them grabbing hold of her body and tugging at it, restricting it, pinning her to the couch. And then there were several dozen pitch-black hands clinging to her everywhere, arms looping around her like darkness, tightening, cutting off her breath, dragging her back tight against the couch. She kept fighting, but then a hand clamped over her eyes and there was nothing but darkness. She could hear the sound of her muffled breathing, her muffled cries, and then something settled over her ears and all she could hear was the sound of breathing inside of herself and the furious beating of her own heart.

She felt herself lifted, propelled into darkness. The hands holding her began to feel less and less distinct, slowly thinning and changing into something else, something still restrictive, and at times disappearing altogether. The pressure on her mouth went away and she found she could breathe freely again. It slowly vanished over her ears as well and she could now hear her own panicked, desperate breathing. And then it faded over her eyes, but she still could not see. She blinked. No, there was nothing covering her eyes, but she was surrounded by darkness.

She tried to move her arms, her legs, but they were held fast, held spread far from her body. She struggled, but whatever held them was too strong and secure for her to escape from. She tried to calm down, tried to slow her own breathing, and slowly and gradually she did, listening to the sound of it easing and relaxing until she hardly could hear it at all.

But that was a mistake as it turned out. For as she slowed her own breathing, she began to hear an awful sound. It was a deep, vibrating sound, the kind of inhalations an animal might make, and it seemed to be wandering at some distance from her, slowly moving closer. What is that? she wondered. As images of a slavering mouth filled her mind, she tried desperately not to imagine the body that could be attached to it. It came closer still, the breathing very loud now, and she could feel its hot, fetid breath against her bare skin.

A crackling sound came from overhead, and a red light began to flicker. There, far above her, in the midst of darkness, she saw a neon Jesus Saves sign begin to flicker, bringing her surroundings to her in flashes of light. Only there weren’t any surroundings. It was as if she were floating, suspended in an abyss, darkness pooling all around her. She was lying on a wide, long board that seemed to slowly tilt back and forth. Her arms, she saw, were strapped to the top corners of the board; her feet were spread wide and strapped to the bottom corners. She watched her body flash in and out in the strobe, as if it were deciding whether or not it would continue to exist.

The animal breathing had receded again, but she could still hear it, somewhere in the darkness, circling around her. In a flash from the malfunctioning sign, she thought for a moment she saw Margaret Morgan standing there beside her, a circle of women joining her and surrounding Heidi, but in the next flash they were gone again and there was nothing but her, the sign, and the darkness.

Slowly, very gradually, the breathing grew louder. She lifted her head, trying to locate its source. A flash of light came and she caught a glimpse of something monstrous, like a man but much larger, and bent over and deformed, and lumbering toward her.

The light flashed on again, and it was there, closer now. She could make out its deformed head, one large eye and one smaller one, two horns winding up from its skull, one of them to twist back down and burrow into the bone. And then it was close to her. She could hear the breathing as loud as the wind now, and could feel its hot breath and smell its fierce musky odor. When the Jesus Saves light flickered on again, the creature was standing between the sign and her, blocking it, so that all she could see was its silhouette, huge and monstrous and looming over her, and the strange reddish glow of its large and small eye.

It stood there watching her. She opened her mouth and screamed as loud as she could but the sound seemed just to drift off into the darkness and vanish. And once she had finished screaming, the figure opened its own mouth wide and offered a resounding, demonic laugh.