Fool's Ride (The Jenkins Cycle Book 2) (2 page)

I
stayed
in my room for the remainder of the late afternoon and evening, hoping to catch up on television. There were a lot of great movies to rent. But as I was scrolling through all the stuff I’d missed since my last ride, I felt a small, halfhearted tug from my conscience. I’d made a gentleman’s agreement with the Great Whomever that I’d work a little harder when I was back in the world—me being the gentleman. Now I was extending my stay in DC, when whatever Ernest had done was likely buried in his garden at his New York address.

I remembered my disastrous ride as Nate Cantrell, who lived not twenty miles away. I’d been so busy spending Nate’s fortune and fornicating with his fiancée I’d gotten the poor guy shot. I partially blamed the Great Whomever for that one—none of my other rides had been good people, only Nate. Well, Peter after that—barely (drug habit, stole my girlfriend)—but Nate had been a major departure from the rinse-and-repeat cycle of life and death I’d become accustomed to.

With a feeling of dejection and a sense I should do something, I flipped through Prescott’s book. What could be so great that it had capitalist rivetheads mingling with strange old ladies and knife-wielding maniacs? Despite my aversion to horror, I turned to page one and began to read.

It opened like an eighties slasher movie: college cheerleading squad en route to a competition, forced to detour through a creepy town filled with religious fanatics. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, shockingly, surprisingly, their bus breaks down in the middle of town, and the only mechanic in a hundred miles is a limping leering inbreedy guy. He offers to fix it if they’re willing to “pay the price.” Which, of course, they agree to pay—anything to get them back on the road the next day so they could make it in time for the competition.

I saw it coming a mile away. I wanted to shout at Rhonda, the head cheerleader who was secretly a lesbian, to stay out of the shower, but she wouldn’t have listened. When it comes to taking showers alone in strange old hotels, cheerleaders are like moths to a bug zapper. Rhonda got in the shower, blood shot out of the showerhead, she screamed, and then she ran out. Or she tried to—the door wouldn’t open.

The same thing happened to the rest of the showering, weed-smoking, boy-crazy cheerleading team, and all of them got locked in their rooms just like poor blood-soaked Rhonda.

By around the third naked cheerleader, I was getting into the story. Prescott, for all the clichés he was tossing around, had an engaging way with words, and his characters were funny or sad or human in all the right ways.

The story took an even darker turn when the doors to each room proceeded to open, one at a time, and that’s when I got my first taste of what made Prescott such a popular horror novelist.

V
eronica entered
the dimly lit ballroom gripping the knife in front of her, desperately trying to remember she was the co-Captain and not some spineless freshman flinching through basket tosses and hurting people.

Suddenly the overhead lights came on, momentarily blinding her. When her vision cleared, she saw them. Unlike the other rooms she’d tried on that floor, hoping to find the girls so they could escape, this one had been unlocked. Now she knew why: the ballroom was filled with people.

There was a woman with red hair wearing a nurse’s outfit, standing stiffly with her arms at her sides. Veronica’s eyes widened and she stifled a scream. The woman’s face looked to have been removed and then stitched back onto her skull. Except … no, that didn’t make sense. The photograph displayed on the easel next to her had the same red hair, but the face was different. A caption under the photograph read, “Vice.”

A few feet away, the mystery of the missing face was cleared up when Veronica saw it stitched on another woman. Beside that corpse was a portrait captioned, “Versa.”

Two women with their faces removed and switched. Vice Versa.

Veronica began to cry. She couldn’t go back the way she’d come. The manager was out there with his suped-up cattle prod and electrified body armor. She needed to keep moving, but he’d strung a twisting pathway of razor wire through the room. From each jagged steel blade, a sinister unknown substance glistened, daring her to try and slip past.

Corralled by the deadly barrier and unable to turn back, Veronica moved forward through a parade of people preserved through taxidermy. They were all female, their faces masks of the terror they’d experienced before death.

Each woman was propped and positioned to awful effect:

A young woman with her musculature removed, turning her into a human stick figure with a normal-sized head. Her title read, “Bug.”

An older woman suspended by a wire, her legs and arms sewn to her stomach so that they hung down. This one was titled, “Florero.”

Another woman had been literally turned inside out in a red, gory display of viscera. Next to her was a photograph of an old black lady shopping in the produce section of a grocery store. Her caption read, “Healthy.”

As Veronica went through the makeshift gallery, the razor wire narrowed to less than three feet wide, forcing her progress to a crawl and pushing her closer to the gruesome things.

It soon became apparent the manager had gone through a transformation over the course of his career. Near the back of the room, closer to the exit, the corpses were better preserved. Unlike Vice Versa, these had no accompanying portraits. Each had cardstock signs hung from their necks with names like “Audry” or “Waitress” or “Bookworm.”

Sometime later, having reached the far exit, Veronica blinked dazedly. She’d come upon the last corpse in the collection.

“No,” she said, shaking her head.

She sank to her knees, paralyzed with fear, revulsion, and pity for the doll-like figure of a young girl with platinum blond tresses. The manager had posed her daintily in a frilly white chiffon dress. Unlike the bodies of the women, there wasn’t a mark on her. No hideous stitches or anatomical modifications. Her skin was white like porcelain, preserved through the awful alchemy of a master at the height of his talent.

The girl’s sign read, simply, “Missing.”

D
espite my dislike
of literature where children were hurt, I kept reading. The author focused his attention primarily on the college-aged cheerleaders. To my shame, he kept me reading throughout the night and into the early morning, when I eventually closed the book a little more than halfway through.

Sick to my stomach.

The manager turned out to be an insane taxidermy hobbyist with a plan to add the cheerleading squad to his collection, posing them with their severed heads and teased-out hair as pompoms. Awful stuff, but that wasn’t the worst. The girls were electrocuted before they were stuffed—the voltage calibrated to kill slowly without setting them on fire. As the manager said, “The better to preserve your peppy beauty, my dears.” In a special twist of psychological torment, he offered to spare anyone who volunteered to throw the switch.

Prescott’s descriptions of the eventual torture of the switch-throwers, and the cutting and stuffing of the manager’s “electro-cuties,” were incredibly real—right down to the rainbow sheen of fried human skin floating in puddles of blood and urine. In my mind’s eye, I saw each girl snuffed out while her friends watched in horror, awaiting their turns.

“Man,” I said, getting up.

I put the book over on the table next to the TV and wiped my hands. Then I went and brushed my teeth again, feeling tainted and somehow used. I regretted having stuck with the book so long, because now that nasty stuff was in my head forever.

How anyone could write such books, let alone read them—avidly, adoringly, and then say they were “amazing”—was beyond me. Whoever read
Electro-Cute
wasn’t doing so for the contrived cheerleader story, either. When Daphne told the girls she broke up with her boyfriend because “it just wasn’t working out,” nobody would confuse that with high literature. Ernest’s stock and trade was snuff, pure and simple. Blood, gore, and humiliation. Terror, torture, and despair. And death. Up close, macroscopic, eyeball to skin.

Mrs. Sandway said she and Jacob had discovered Ernest—built him up, made him successful. I wondered what kind of people would willingly set loose something so awful into the world, and if I was expected to do something about it.

These weren’t 3 a.m. questions. Besides, it was 4 a.m. I was tired and wanted to sleep, but I needed to get all the icky out of my head or I’d have nightmares.

I turned on the TV and flipped around for a while. Pundits arguing, infomercials, reality TV, music videos—I barely registered any of it, and the TV was still on in the morning when I woke up.

Yawning and feeling achy, I rooted through Ernest’s suitcase and discovered he didn’t have much in the way of variable attire. Black socks, black pants, black shirts, and nary a polo in sight. I supposed it went with the whole death and torment vibe, but it seemed a bit dull. After careful consideration, I chose a black shirt and some black pants, then went downstairs to the hotel restaurant and enjoyed four eggs, six strips of bacon, two Belgian waffles, and four tiny glasses of orange juice.

Halfway through my meal, a boy of about thirteen walked up and said, “Excuse me, sir, can I have your autograph?”

Mingled feelings of flattery and disgust warred within me as I contemplated the sandy-haired boy. He had a mesmerizing mohawk haircut. I’d always wanted a mohawk, but Mom hadn’t wanted me to be cool so I never got one.

“You read my book?” I said.

“Well no, not actually,” he said, then seemed to realize the potential for insult. “Sorry. But I totally saw
Sliced
. Way cool special effects. Don’t worry, though—my mom made me close my eyes for the naked scenes. It’s R-rated, so…”

“Is that right?” I said.

A woman in her forties came up behind the boy and said, “Hi, I’m Trish—it’s so wonderful to meet you. Everyone at the office is reading your books. I hope Bobby’s not bothering you?”

I shook my head.

Bobby held out a piece of paper and a pen—which I took, because that’s what you do when people hand you pens and paper and stare at you with hopeful eyes. I signed it and handed it back to him.

Trish’s voice grew stern and responsible. “What do you say, Bobby?”

“Thanks a lot, sir,” he said.

“Anytime,” I said.

When they left, I glanced around and saw everyone in the hotel restaurant staring at me. Some obliquely, some openly, but all of them collectively. It was a feeling quite unlike any I’d ever had before. In high school, I’d wandered the student-packed halls, unseen—a chubby ghost in no-name shoes. Every morning, before the bell, I’d arrive at class with moments to spare—as if hanging out with my friends had nearly made me late again.

Being the center of everyone’s attention was a heady experience, and I liked it. Even if it was in the body of someone I might have to kill in the next few weeks.

I
’d almost forgotten
I was supposed to switch rooms today. If the hotel made me wait until the afternoon, it’d mess up the exciting day I had planned.

A quick call to Guest Services set my mind at ease.

“They had you staying on five,” the man said. “But if you don’t mind going down a floor, you can move now.”

“Wonderful,” I said, and looked around at Ernest’s luggage and books, his flowers and champagne. “I have a lot of stuff. The guy yesterday said I could get some help.”

“Certainly, Mr. Prescott,” the man said. “Anything for you. I’ll send somebody up right away.”

The way he said it, I was sure he knew what a big deal I was.

“Why thank you, my good man,” I said.

“No problem at all, sir.”

“Indubitably,” I added before hanging up.

The move was quick and painless, and I tipped my bellhop a twenty. I had a rep to protect. I said
indubitably
to him, too.

After he left, I got out Ernest’s laptop. Just my luck, the thing was password protected and wouldn’t let me in no matter how many gross things I entered.

Undaunted, I went to the hotel Business Center, accessible with my room key, and sat down at one of the public computers. I searched online for any information about my ride, and it didn’t take long to find something.

Prescott’s admirers had whole websites devoted to his grisly horror novels. Numerous sites had fan fiction forums dedicated to his work. I clicked around and learned his latest movie,
Sliced
, was the impetus for a wildly popular fan fiction game called “What if she lived?” These were stories written about the characters in his books, particularly
Sliced
, where the reader got to imagine what life would be like if the main character had somehow lived past the ending. I skimmed some of the stories—lots of fantasizing from the victim’s armless/legless/faceless/fleshless perspective, begging people to kill her (always female), hating humanity, turning into a monster herself, and a lot of hopelessness and sorrow and shame.

The forums covered every conceivable piece of trivia or Prescott-related news. It was there I figured out why that old woman at the book signing had wanted that macabre dedication, “We only slice the ones we love.” It was a catchphrase from
Sliced
, the movie. Fans in the forum raged back and forth about its appropriateness because the line hadn’t been in the book.

I abandoned the fan sites and searched for Ernest on Wikipedia, where I learned he’d gotten a B.A. in psychology and a minor in English literature. He’d then leveraged that into a marketing position at a non-profit association. In the evenings and on weekends, he wrote his first book,
Clench
, which he published through a vanity press that, in his words, “Made me pay for dinner and then dry humped me behind some dumpsters.”

Things turned around for Ernest after he met Lana Sandway—fashion model turned soft-core porn star turned reality TV dominatrix. When her husband, an aging millionaire businessman, died amidst a flurry of tabloid speculation about his heart attack, she fed the frenzy by hooking up with Ernest, an unknown writer at the time. Claiming to love his work on an “intensely personal level,” she purchased the rights to
Clench
and spent a fortune running full-page advertisements in newspapers around the world.

After a while, I browsed news sites and ran searches for other things I wanted to know, like who’d won the last World Series, random celebrity news, and searches on various people I’d ridden over the years. Not a lot of news there, mostly stuff I’d already read.

I hadn’t checked my free email account in over six months. A lot of spam had accumulated in my time away. There was also a reply to the email I’d sent the minister, the ex-priest who knew about my strange afterlife:

Hello Dan. Your story was fascinating, if a bit tedious in places. What’s this fixation of yours with food?

I’m disappointed in your treatment of Peter—and most of the things you’ve done, if I’m being honest. The more I consider your tale, the more I think you should stop coming into the world until you’re ready to be responsible. Make no mistake: this tendency of yours to murder your “rides” is an evil. There’s always another way.

I snorted quietly and typed a reply:

Easy for you to say, padre. I could recite your Bible back to you in reverse, so please don’t lecture me about evil. Anyway, how’s Nate doing?

Then I sent it.

There were three more emails from the minister, spaced months apart. The first one asked where I was. The second one
also
asked where I was, but he’d added more question marks on the end like he was shouting at me. The third one included a phone number and instructions to call him on my next ride.

Still smarting from being called
evil
and
tedious
in the first email, I decided I didn’t want to talk to him. Also, I had a big day ahead of me: the Air & Space Museum, the Natural History Museum, probably not the Holocaust Museum, and oh yeah, walking up and down the National Mall staring at people. Because one can never get enough of that.

T
hough my feet
were killing me, it had been a great day. I’d gone through the gem room at the Smithsonian twice. They had the Hope Diamond. Sort of interesting, seeing something cursed that didn’t look like me. I’d half expected it to pulse with a ghostly light only I could see, but all it did was sit there. Big for a diamond, yet small for something so famous.

Later, while I was sitting on a bench wondering what those big plops of metal were out in front of the Modern Art Building, Ernest’s cell phone kicked in with Chopin’s funeral march.

Smiling, I hit the green button and said, “Hello?”

“You didn’t get on your plane.”

It was Mrs. Sandway—
Lana
Sandway.

“Hi, Lana,” I said, trying it on for size and thinking I liked Mrs. Sandway better.

“This is a very important time for us. You need to stay reclusive, out of the public eye—except for book signings, of course, and anything else we come up with.”

“Because of the movie?”

Talking over me, she said, “Jacob and the boys really did good by you this time. Just the thing to jumpstart your next book. You don’t want them to think you’re ungrateful, do you?”

This was the second time she’d brought up the mysterious Jacob. I hadn’t found anything about him on either Ernest’s or Lana’s Wikipedia page.

“What’s the surprise?” I said.

Lana chuckled quietly. “Now, Ernest: we
do not
talk shop over the phone. Be a dear and catch the next plane out. If you do as you’re told, I might allow you to … do what you want with me again … and again…” Her voice lowered to a breathy purr. “And
again
.”

“I was thinking of driving.”

“You can’t be serious?”

“Can too,” I said.

“Are you feeling all right?”

I opened my mouth to answer but she cut me off.

“What’s wrong with taking a plane?” she said. “Your driving record is atrocious, frankly. I’ll be damned if I let you kill yourself out there. Do you
want
to be a bum again? We can arrange it. We—”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “You pulled me out of that hole and can put me back, totally got it. I’ll go home when I’m ready. Say hi to Jacob for me—maybe let him beat you up or something?”

I hung up without saying goodbye and wondered if she’d call me back. She didn’t. Probably be too submissive for a pro-dominatrix.

In retrospect, I knew I’d gone too far with that last crack. But for once, I really did feel in charge of this thing. The ride. I had the power here, not her. Whatever she had over the real Ernest didn’t apply to me.

And yet, I knew I needed to check out Ernest’s house, and maybe meet this Jacob character—if for no reason other than Mrs. Sandway held him in high enough regard to mention him again.

T
he next day
, body aching from walking through all those museums, I slept late. When I got up, rather than going out, I forced myself to finish Ernest’s book—hideous and predictable, pompoms and blood all over the place.

I wouldn’t have minded more museums, but my feet hurt too much. Instead, I asked the lady at the front desk to call me a cab.

“Where’s a good movie theater?” I said to the man who picked me up.

“What kind of theater?” he said in an accent I could have sworn was Nigerian.

“A big one,” I said. “You know—lots of screens, stadium seats that recline, cup holders, clean carpets, ushers that tell people to shut up. Nothing but the best.”

He smiled knowingly. “Ah yes, the Hoffman Center. But there is a small problem.”

“What’s the problem?”

“It is in Alexandria!” he said, laughing like he’d told a funny joke. “Old Town. I can take you there, but it will be thirty dollars. You want to go? You should! I love that place.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said, smiling despite myself. He was sort of upbeat.

The ride out of the city was a blast. Most of the memorials had been too far to walk to on yesterday’s hike, but my cabbie drove by the Lincoln and the Jefferson, and of course the Washington was visible the closer we got to the river.

I paid by credit card and tipped him my last twenty.

“When you want to come home,” he said, “give me a call. I’ll pick you up—no problem.”

He wrote his phone number on the receipt and handed it to me.

“Thanks a lot … Sam,” I said, reading it.

He smiled cheerfully. “Don’t forget.”

The theater Sam had taken me to was enormous, with twenty-two screens spanning two levels. The polished granite floor was inlaid with famous quotes from movies like
The Godfather
and
Casablanca
. A pair of glass-walled escalators ascended to cinematic heaven, providing visitors a close-up look at the huge movie panels of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and other iconic stars from movie history. Easily the coolest theater I’d ever seen.

If Sam kept his promise and picked me up, I’d write him a bigger tip.

Despite having read one of Ernest’s books and finding it appalling, I was curious about his movie. Maybe it wasn’t as sick as
Electro-Cute
. Maybe the producers had tamed it some. After all, hadn’t that woman at the restaurant let her son see it? And weren’t some of my favorite movies pretty violent?

Giddy like a kid staying up to watch Creature Feature, I bought my ticket to
Sliced
and sat five rows from the front
with
a big bag of popcorn—butter in the middle and on top—chocolate-covered raisins, and an enormous Coke.

No napkins.

The previews were for more horror movies. None of them seemed particularly scary, though the crowd gasped in all the right places. The audience was a little noisy at first, lots of talking and inappropriate laughter, but when the movie began they quieted down.

The basic plot was: an interrogation specialist for the US government, working overseas, returns home after the War on Terror has been retired as a foreign policy. But something’s happened to him—he can’t quite let go of the things he’s seen and done. Sort of like Rambo, but with a government torturer instead of a Green Beret with amazing pecs.

The interrogation guy returns home to his surprisingly large family, and he’s happy to be there—at first. Over the course of a few days, he begins snapping at his wife and kids, accusing them of things. Deep down, he suspects they’re all involved in a terror conspiracy. He abducts them, one by one, secreting them to an abandoned government warehousing facility.

Then came scene after scene of cutting, agony, and cruel depravity, carefully orchestrated to wring the maximum emotional effect from the audience. No slice was too deep, no rip too excruciating, no desecration too degrading.

Other than that little bit near the front about the government guy coming home and going crazy, there was no movie. Just torture scenes, back to back, endlessly. And the daughter we sort of liked in the beginning because she was sweet and pretty and kind to animals—she has her jaw surgically removed. Then she’s given a razor blade and a mirror and told she can live if she wants to.

Spoiler alert: she doesn’t want to.

I sat through the whole thing, waiting for a plot that never happened. When the credits stopped rolling, I noticed my popcorn and candy remained untouched. I flinched a little at the sound of clapping—from the audience. I wanted to stand up and yell at them or something, but held off. It wouldn’t do any good, and when it got out that
the
Ernest Prescott had gone to his own movie and made a scene, all I would have done was bring the film more publicity.

As I made my way to the aisle to dump all my uneaten junk food, I saw a curious sight: the audience was still sitting down. Mystified, I watched them watching the credits. Perhaps four minutes later, after the world’s most boring credits ever, the screen changed.

The killer’s son from the beginning—the one who’d been too busy in the big city to see his dad—called and left a message: he’d finished his project early and was coming home on the next flight. Family was too important, he said.

Cut to the goose bumps and rueful laughter from the breathless audience, and ready the sequel for more of the same. Even the red glowing eyes from the Terminator’s robot skull had been a better sequel teaser, and nobody had to wait four minutes to see it.

Somewhat surprised at how awful the experience had been, I left the theater. For the life of me I didn’t know what the Great Whomever wanted. So far, there wasn’t anyone for me to kill. He couldn’t want me to kill the guy for being a depraved writer, could he?

I wouldn’t kill someone for that. Shun him, maybe. Talk bad about him. Point him out in public and hurl insults and boycott his movie merchandise, sure. But kill him? I saved stuff like that for rapists and murderers and the monsters who hurt children.

Ernest’s movie and books were dumb and sad and they weren’t real. Maybe a copycat would get inspired and try to hurt someone, like that idiot at the book signing with the face tattoos and the knife. But if such meanness could inspire a person to violent acts, they’d find a way to hurt people anyway.