Slasher Summer(66)
The owner of the footsteps knew Freddy’s body was there.
The footsteps grew louder. Shit. Russ was heading down the hallway. Patrick froze, afraid to even blink in case Russ heard his eyelashes flutter. A trickle of cold sweat traced its way between his shoulder blades as he pressed them against the wood. Marking the spot where the axe might bury itself if Russ decided to chop through the door like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. But Patrick dared not move, terrified he’d give his presence away.
Below his elbow, the doorknob rattled.
It was the longest minute in Patrick’s life. He couldn’t see a thing as Russ attempted to enter the cellar. He was only a consciousness suspended in darkness, the vibrations from the shaking door passing through him like shock waves. Maybe he was already dead. If Patrick let himself relax, Russ would open the door and walk through him as if he were a ghost.
Just when Patrick thought he was going to spontaneously combust from the stress, the footsteps moved away. He doubled over, gagging on a silent scream of fear and relief.
When he managed to get his breathing under control, his determination to find the Slasher machete returned. But there was no way he was descending into the cellar in total darkness. He hadn’t come this far, only to break his neck on the stairs. How could he turn on his flashlight without the light giving him away?
Patrick had never been good at pivoting when plans went south. He liked all his avenues determined well in advance. To get himself out of this dilemma, he needed to channel his inner Final Girl. The trouble was that he didn’t think he had an inner Final Girl, despite all the classic slashers he’d watched. In those movies, the Black characters tended to die first, so he’d always identified as an unsuspecting victim. Like Clare.
Think, he berated himself. Thinking was one thing he was good at. What would Nancy Thompson do? Sidney Prescott? Or Jordan Knox?
As soon as he thought of Jordan, the solution came to him. He unbuttoned his Oxford shirt, stripping down to his undervest. It was identical to the white tank tops Carrie had worn when she’d played Jordan at the Rialto. When they’d had two shows a night on busy summer weekends and no time to do laundry, the theater’s manager bought her the Fruit of the Loom three-packs at the Main Street department store.
Patrick smoothed the ruined Oxford shirt along the crack of the door. There. That would hide his activity from Russ. Feeling accomplished, Patrick turned on the flashlight.
The open staircase plunged into a black hole. He should’ve known the cabin would have the classic creepy cellar. Bad things happened when people went down stairs like these. People who went into basements in horror movies rarely came out again.
Carrie did, he reminded himself, and only her reputation had suffered. As long as he didn’t find any dead mothers, reel-to-reel tape players, racist brain-swapping neurosurgeons, boilers stoked by scarred custodians in striped sweaters, or secret passages inhabited by naked, feral women, he’d be okay. How creepy could it be?
Very, it turned out.
Patrick stepped off the wooden steps and onto the ground, the coldness of the unfinished concrete seeping through the soles of his deck shoes. The walls were unfinished, too, nothing but skeletal wooden frames and semi-opaque plastic sheeting. His nose itched from the musty smell of untreated lumber and cement.
He nearly jumped out of his skin as he took another step forward and a hanging cobweb swatted his face. Clawing wildly, he discovered it was the string from a naked lightbulb. He tugged until it clicked, but the light didn’t turn on. The power was still out.
He abandoned the lightbulb and passed through a doorway, sidestepping a large dehumidifier, and shone the flashlight around. He was met by row after row of industrial shelving units. At the last second, he pulled his lips out of the whistle he’d been about to issue. Russ might be able to hear him upstairs.
Patrick couldn’t believe his eyes. He knew there was Slasher memorabilia in the cellar, but he hadn’t expected so much of it. Stunned, he found himself drawn to a clothing rack in the far corner instead of starting his search for the machete. Several coats in the Slasher’s signature red buffalo plaid hung on the rack, in various states of wear and tear. Patrick thumbed through the hanging garments, reverently brushing his hand over Derek’s bloodstained football jersey and Heather’s fringed leather jacket, shredded in the back where the Slasher had stabbed her. There had probably also been multiples of that jacket, but some stylish actor or crew member must have nicked the original.
As Patrick got to the end of the rack, a dark shape loomed out of the corner of his eye. He swung his flashlight to the left, and did a double take as he spotlit the glossy cardboard face of the Slasher. A couple of standees leaned against the wall, next to a stack of large boxes. The top box was open, a black T-shirt spilling out between the flaps. Patrick picked it up out of curiosity, and discovered it had Slasher Summer printed on it in a font that looked like dripping blood.
Holy shit. There weren’t just movie props down here. He’d found a hoarder’s dream of festival swag. Another time he would’ve stuffed his pockets with fridge magnets and pens and squishy axe-shaped stress toys, all printed with the Slasher Summer logo.
There was no sign of the machete, however. Shit. Someone must have reorganized the artifacts after Carrie had disrupted them. Patrick searched the shelves feverishly, wondering if he’d missed it. Most of the props were innocuous, like a pile of generic school backpacks and outdated textbooks, but Patrick spotted one of Cindy’s red-and-white cheerleading pom-poms and the baseball cap the doomed hunter had worn in the first scene.