Choose
Your Own Nuthouse
Section 70
“Not the end of the world? How
can you say that?”
“Well, it’s just Har--” you break off in midsentence as
your phone beeps and the call is ended.
“Crybaby,” you mumble. You can’t
understand why Gary would go completely to pieces like that. He’s a level-headed guy. Hell,
he deals with Harlan better than most
people, and Harlan’s quite likely the most unsettling guy on the face
of the
planet.
You toss the phone back onto the passenger seat and start
off again. Boy, Gary’s gonna get a good
slapping when you get to beautiful Lake Doomhole™.
Although maybe he’s just had too much to drink, or decided to
screw with you.
But none of that solves the core problem of having Harlan
around. Rounding eighty miles per hour,
you lean over and grab your phone again.
This time you dial Dave’s phone.
You’ve known Dave longer than Gary.
He (Dave) is your best friend.
He probably won’t go all ballistic on you.
The phone rings and rings while you steer with your knee,
your hands being occupied with holding your phone to your ear and
juggling a
beer and a cigarette. Ninety-three
mph? Piece of cake, baby.
“Hey, this is Dave’s cell. I’m not
here at the moment, so leave a message. Or
don’t.
See if I care.”
Dammit. Dave must
already be frolicking at the lake. You
try Chris’s phone. Next to Dave, he’s
also been your friend for ages. But you
wind up getting Chris’s voicemail, too.
You decide to call Dave’s girlfriend.
She probably won’t be much help, though. She’s
not terribly bright.
You only have her number in your phonebook so you can dial up an
illicit
rendezvous as efficiently as possible.
On the bright side, she’s the type of person who always
has her
phone with her. You don’t believe she
has ever been more than three feet away from it. It’s
pretty much guaranteed that you’ll get an answer, and then
you can get her to hand the phone to Dave.
Or Chris. Or Zorlath the
Betrayer, or any of the other guys she might be hanging out with. Or
under,
knowing Dave’s girlfriend.
But the near-impossible happens. She
doesn’t pick up. Now, you’re a little
worried. But, optimist that you are, you
decide that
there must be a reasonable explanation.
No need to hurry. 105 oughta be
sufficient. Nice, leisurely pace.
A few seconds later, you see the sign for Lake Doomhole
Scenic Drive. Up ahead, you know, the
road turns to gravel as it curves around scenically through a scenic
forest
down a scenic (and very steep) bluff to the scenic cluster of cabins
where
you’ll be staying. As good a driver as
you are, you still don’t want to be doing--you check-- a hundred and
ten on a
gravel road. That’s just
irresponsible. And the bumpiness of the
road will make the beer you’re drinking foam up and spill out of the
can. That would be a shame.
And you’d miss all the scenery.
Your good intentions to drive safely are dashed.
A split second before you begin to lift your
foot off the gas, you see a blur that you’re fairly sure is a head
impaled upon
a pike by the side of the road. You
twist around reflexively to see, and your car hit’s the gravel and
begins to
spin out of control.
It is a head on a pike. Nobody
you know too well.
An acquaintance. This was to be
one of those weekends when everybody invites a bunch of other people,
so you
wind up with a whole bunch of people you barely know or have never met,
but who
are only separated from you by a few degrees, and from Kevin Bacon by
only a
few more than that.
But just because you don’t really know--Jarred?
Is that it?--doesn’t mean that seeing his
head impaled on a pike is no big deal.
It’s a very big fucking deal.
But just now, you’re a little more concerned about you current
vehicular
situation.
Jarringly, you ricochet off a scenic tree and careen
further down the hill. Your accelerator
sticks, your brakes fail, your steering locks, and your bladder
releases as
your car gathers speed and various axes of rotation.
Then the car ramps off a large, scenic rock, and you are
airborne. In other circumstances, such
as circumstances which are even slightly under your control, you would
think
this was absolutely bitchin’. But at
the moment, it’s a bit inconvenient.
Especially since you are airborne and sailing over the edge of a
very
scenic cliff, below which are the cabins where your friends have
gathered. Your car flips upside down, and
you smack
into the sunroof. Through it, you can
see quite a bit of the lakeshore area and the cabins.
It’s a beautiful view, marred only by your stark terror. And also by the bodies.
Oh, god, so many bodies!
Well, it would be more accurate to declare something like:
Oh, god, so many little ragged bits of bodies!
If you sewed all the little ragged bits together, you’d
have a lot of bodies. You can see that
everybody has been dismembered violently.
There is blood splattered everywhere.
Cars are burning, or floating in the lake, or both.
It looks as if a few of the cabins have
exploded. One looks like it has been
rolled across the beach by a strong wind, and is laying askew on its
roof. There are a few relatively intact
bodies
stuck to the sides, as if the cabin rolled around squishing your
friends.
Burned into the beach and the gravel parking lot near the
cabins are dozens of pentagrams of varying sizes and styles.
You can also see what appears to be a huge pile of cell
phones sitting near the dock, smoldering ponderously.
Then you see a survivor.
You squint. It’s Gary!
He’s running around in circles, clutching a
cell phone that he has apparently just pulled from the pile.
Suddenly, your phone rings. With
inappropriate calm, you extract it from your shoe and
answer. It is, predictably, Gary.
“Oh god! Oh
god! Don’t come! It’s
horrible!” He shrieks.
“I know.”
“You can’t possibly know! Oh, the
humanity!”
You want to hit Gary just for saying that.
“I know, Gary, because I’m here, and I can see you.” How long has this graceful arc from the
cliff been going on? It seems like a
long time. But abject fear has that
effect. Or so you’ve read in Steven
King novels.
“WHERE ARE YOU?!?
TURN BACK!! TURN BACK AND FLEE
NOW!!!”
“Yeah, that might be a bit difficult. Look
up…no, wait, actually….run. Run now, Gary. I’m about to…”
Gary, confused, looks up. “What the
he--” Finally, your fall ends. On Gary.
Your car skips across the beach like a stone bouncing along a
placid
body of water, leaving intermittent smears of Gary on the ground. At long last, you come to a rest in
Beautiful Lake Doomhole™. Miraculously
still alive, you crawl out of a hole in your undercarriage and struggle
to
shore. You are in pretty bad shape, but
you can manage something that might appear to be an amateur attempt at
walking
to a legless creature from another planet who has never heard of Earth,
and who
has had the concept of walking sketched out for him on a
margarita-soaked
cocktail napkin by a heroin-addicted epileptic wielding a near dry
ultra
broad-tipped Sharpie.
You do this, over the course of several agonizing hours,
up the beach and in the general direction of the road.
Though you aren’t sure which of the four and
a half identical beaches you are traversing is the real one, and which
are
by-products of your horribly damaged brain’s struggle to maintain
consciousness.
You are about to take a breather in the parking lot,
(which is a clever way of saying that you are about to keel over half
dead and
hoe that vultures don’t finish you off while you bake slowly in the sun
that
will be rising in a few hours,), when you see something that would make
you
scream if your mouth wasn’t stuck together with dried blood.
After months of agonizing surgery and
physical
therapy, during which Harlan visits you every single day, you make a
very
impressive recovery, and begin rebuilding your life.
Things seem to be going great until one of your new friends, a
pretty nurse who spoon-fed you green jello for a month during your
convalescence, asks you if you’d like to have a fun-filled weekend at
Beautiful
Lake Doomhole™. Your mind snaps
audibly, and you wind up spending the rest of your life in a nice,
comfy metal
institution.
Return to Section 31 and CHOOSE WISELY!!!