Choose Your Own
Nuthouse
Section 42
<>(Paul)Chris is also here, and he has knives. You briefly think about asking him how his mom is doing, but decide against it. Best not to dredge up that little fiasco. There are a lot of chicks, and some people you do not know. Also, there is Harlan. You curse under your breath. Harlan’s pretty fucked up. There’s a lot about him that just isn’t right. Nobody’s sure how he knew to be at Lake Doomhole, because everybody specifically and strenuously avoided letting him know anything about the trip. However, he seems to be talking to somebody, and not paying attention to what’s going on. You ignore the fact that Harlan is standing alone on the lake.
Well-armed, well-inebriated, and buzzing with a bloodlust not uncommon in 20-something white suburban males, you and your two cohorts head off into the forest to hunt the crazy old man. Your quarry, you know, is wily and resourceful. He has the advantage of being fully insane and thus most likely immune to pain, threats, and fear. This will be a dangerous hunt. He has killed before and will undoubtedly kill again. It goes without saying that he knows these dark woods like the back of his hand. Yes indeed, this may well prove to be a deadly adve—
Your train of thought is cut off as you trip over the crazy man’s corpse. You are not seriously injured, just a little startled. With Chris and Dave’s help, you roll the crazy guy over and see that Louis is buried to the hilt in his chest. He apparently tripped and fell on the knife. Or perhaps he just deliberately plunged the blade into his heart in mid-stride. It really makes no difference. He’s dead, and you own a wicked new knife.
“Well, I guess that solves that problem,” says Dave.
“Why the hell hasn’t he got any pants on?” Chris wonders.
You decide to burn the body, because none of you has ever burned a body before, and it’s always good to try new things. Chris has a can of gasoline with him. You don’t ask why. When the body is drenched with gas, you strike a match and toss it onto the crazy man’s corpse. With a terribly cool FWOOMP! the body erupts in flame.
Right then, Harlan drops out of a tree and lands on Dave, who fires his enormous handgun wildly into the night. This does him absolutely no good whatsoever. He is dead in seconds, but neither Chris nor yourself know precisely why. It would seem Harlan just made him not be alive anymore. Stunned, you watch as Harlan stands, brushes himself off, and picks up Dave’s Desert Eagle.
“Now I have a gun!” Harlan declares gleefully as he turns and runs spasmodically away. This, you reflect, cannot possibly be a good thing, so you shoot him in the back as he runs into the night. “Zounds! I am shot!” You hear him exclaim.
“Well,” says Chris, “this weekend has certainly taken an unexpected tun.”
“Shush,” you say, taking more careful aim at Harlan. Your first shot failed to drop the little bastard. You are choosing to ignore the fact that it was a perfect kill-shot and should have mostly liquefied his heart. You squeeze the shot off, and this time it appears that you hit Harlan’s head. Harlan falls to the ground, swearing violently in Aramaic and clutching at the bald patch you have just carved on his scalp. It’s hard to tell in the dark, but you think he might be bleeding a little.
Chris is no fool; he knows bad news when he sees it. “I think we should run away right now,” he says. Reluctantly, you agree. The two of you flee screaming into the night, back toward camp. Wisely, you do not look back to see if Harlan is following you. Although if you had, you would see that he wasn’t behind you.
Of course this only means that he is, in fact, above you.
You arrive at the lakeside, startling Dave’s girlfriend, who is standing in the middle of a pile of corpses, utterly naked. You’re sort of aroused.
“Golly,” says Chris, summing up the situation nicely.
“Okay, hold it!” You scream. “What the hell is going on here? None of this makes any sense at all! This is all just too fucked up to be real. Who’s the goddamn prankster? I’ve had enough of this shit!”
“It’s not a prank,” says Dave’s girlfriend. “I’m here to betray you!”
“What?”
“Didn’t the radio voice tell you?”
“What?”
“Oh, drat. That must be another sequence.”
You are thoroughly confused. Dave’s girlfriend sees this, and says, “Look, you were supposed to be told that one of your friends would betray you. Zorlath the Betrayer couldn’t make it, so I figured, what the hell? What’s a trip to Lake Doomhole without a little betrayal?”
You have no idea who Zorlath the Betrayer is. This is the least of your worries, though. You’re beginning to wish this would all just wrap up already; it all seems way too contrived and far-fetched. Any hope of a clean end has clearly gone straight out the window by this point. A whole lot of shit that just simply doesn’t make sense has happened, and now all this betrayal shit… it’s like something out of a parallel reality. You get the feeling that you should somehow know what Dave’s girl is talking about, but you don’t. You sit down and hold your head, trying to breathe normally.
“Does anybody know how to get to the Pit of Insufferable Misery?” You look up at the sound of the new voice and see a man with a bare skull standing near your car. You are about to ask who he is when something that looks like a monkey hurls a beer can at your head. You are dazzled with pain, which is why you fail to see the van careening out of the woods.
<> “Hey, look!” You hear Chris say, “It’s Stephen Ki-”You are dead. Part of your face in Stephen King’s tire tread, and the rest of you is carried by Dave’s girlfriend to the Ravine of Unspeakable Peril, where your tattered corpse receives an unceremonious disposal.