"BOdY PArTs"
The Final Chapter
Original thriller written by: Stacey L. Bolin
Copyright 10/5/2013
All rights reserved
Sound enhancement for the story.
At that moment Candace didn’t know what to do
except go back to her clothes with the hopes that they were done drying. The
digital display now read 9 minutes.
“This is going to be the longest nine minutes
of my life! Forgot the laundry I want out of here!” she sputtered out loud. “How in the world can something so simple
as drying clothes at a laundry mat, become so intense that a person would
rather leave their things behind rather that to deal with this craziness?”
She was correct
in thinking it would be the longest nine minutes of her life as her brain began
to buzz with a deep seeded wonder and concern as endless questions, as to what
she had seen, slammed into her thoughts. While she stood staring into the drum
of the spinning dryer trying to fathom some sense to this madness, the lights
began to flicker on and off, and then, as the dryer display read 6 minutes, the
lights went out leaving Candace and the tenant in the silence of the dark for a
brief moment until 3 of the five emergency generator lights partially illuminated
three small areas, while the rest of the spaces appeared as black as night.
“WHAT NOW!” screamed Candace, now frustrated
more than ever.
She could hear the tenant sputtering and
fumbling her way across the room, dragging what appeared to be an oversize lawn
and leaf type garbage bag, to the back of the store. She hoped that maybe the
tenant was just trying to get the store cleaned up before it closed and there
was another generator that all you had to do was hit a button and the lights would
magically come on. If only it could be that easy, then she could finish with
her laundry and go home.
It was an eerie feeling to be standing alone
with only the sounds of the wind and rain against the windows.
“This is
crazy.”
Candace thought, “Dry clothes or not . .
. I’m going home.”
She gathered up her laundry baskets and did
her best to separate items accounting to their proper location in her home and
what was still damp and what was dry. She stacked all the baskets into one
store laundry cart and made her way across the room, fumbling the same way as
the tenant. As she round a corner one side of the cart did not clear the bench
which caused the top basket to begin to tip over. Candace quickly caught the
basket with the exception of two kitchen towels that fell on the floor. As she
got the basket balanced again and bent down to pick up the fallen laundry, her
eyes were able to focus on the dark, wet; dragline that appeared too had gone from
the cloaked strangers washers to the back room.
Immediately Candace did her best to
rationalize why the floor appeared that way, but her curiosity was far too
great not to try to determine whether it was water or blood. She was sly in her
attempt, so not to be discovered if the tenant just happened to be watching
her. As she grabbed for the towels, she extend her index finger out to run it
across the floor and then curled her finger inwards so that whatever she
collected, would be protected until she could examine it closer.
Without any words to signal to the tenant that
she was leaving, Candace left the building and made her way through the storm
while protecting the wetness she had retrieved from the floor. It was tricky
trying to load her car, but when it came to wanting to know something, Candace
would find a way to get the answers even if it meant protecting a finger swipe
sample from a laundry mat floor. Her laundry was loaded and she quickly got
herself safely out of the weather. Shock was the new mask she wore as her
breath immediately left her body when she turned on the dome light to investigate
what was now feeling think and sluggish on her finger – blood.
Just then a body ran against her car, she
screamed locking the all the doors. It
felt like hours as she tried desperately to get her key into the ignition to
get away. The car rocked side to side while the sounds of fists pounding her
roof echoed like a quarter stick of dynamite going off in a metal fifty gallon
drum. With every hit and shake she screamed louder and louder.
“God HELP ME!” she yelled out as she finally
got the key into the ignition and started the car. At this point she wasn’t
about to wait to see who or what was doing their or its best to get to her. She
threw the car into reverse and stepped on the gas. The wheels spun out on the
wet pavement, before catching. Then she threw it into forward gear and quickly
drove away.
“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!” she yelled out
over and over, while trying to keep her car safely on the road, at a high rate
of speed, in the rain. “I don’t understand! Someone please help me understand!”
The rain was coming down so hard that even
the fastest of windshield wipers could not keep the visibility clear, but was
clear enough that even though the distortion of the sheet of water beating on
her window, she could see that the light at the intersection ahead had changed
from yellow to red. She came to a stop and just sat there trying to regain her
composure. Never in her life had she ever been this terrified. Even the worst
or worst horror films, had never had this great of an impact as she was feeling
that that very moment.
She began to calm down and thought, “If only Glen had been there to help her, or
if he had been there, maybe none of this would have ever happened.”
The light turned green and away she went. There wasn't a soul around, just
herself and her laundry - homeward bound. She was
thrilled to finally be on her street and knew that in a few more house numbers
she would be home, but when she finally came upon her house a growing sense of
fear began to take over once again. The storm had not only taken the power out
at the laundry mat, it had also hit a section of her community as well – so she
thought.
One by one she got all of her laundry back
into the safety of her home. She grabbed her emergency lantern that she always
kept next to the front door for moments like these and found her way to her
dining room to light the candles on her table and her mantle. As she slowly
light each candle, and dark shadowy image became clearer in corner of her eye.
She struggled with the choice of screaming or pretending not to see anything. A
familiar shuffling filled her senses – she had heard it before – the clocked
stranger in the laundry – it was now in her home!
“GET OUT!” she screamed “GET OUT! GET OUT!”
She ran out of the room, running into walls
and knocking things off of her shelves. The clocked stranger slowly made its
way after her. She knew that she had to get out of the house and the only other
way out was the downstairs family room as her back door was a two-way dead
bolt. She quickly ran down the stairs, nearly losing her balance. All she could
think was to get out of the house and get to a near-by neighbors home. As she
stepped on the last step, all the lights in the basement came on and about
three dozen people yelled out – “SURPRISE! HAPPY BIRTHDAY CANDACE!
She felt to the floor, still in disbelief of
all that stood before her and exclaimed, “It’s in the house we have to get out –
get out! Save yourselves!”
“Candace . . . sweetie what’s wrong!?” questioned
her best friend Michelle as she tried to give her a big birthday hug, “Breath
sweetie you’re going to give yourself a heart attack.”
“The stranger in the cloak, the blood, the laundry
mat, my finger . . .” all Candace could do was ramble on.
“You mean Glen?” said one of the guys Glen
worked with. “That big ugly guy over there, you’re afraid of him.” The guy
laughed.
She turned around as Glen removed the dark
hood from his head. “I wanted to surprise you and I know how much you love
those scary Halloween movies, I wanted to add some fun to the gag.” He commented
in a genuinely sincere voice coupled with a sinister smile. “But then we realized we had gone too far, when
you almost ran me over in your car at the laundry mat.”
“That was you!?” she exclaimed.
“Well Lori and I. Lori was the tenant who
pretended not to speak English and yelled at you when we put the fake Halloween
body props in a red pillow case and added food coloring and a piece of wire so
that the washing would drip and bubble looking like blood. You handled yourself
better than I would have expected. We even unhooked the heating element from your dryer
so that we could get you out of the house, but you surprised us by doing
laundry a bit later than you’ve normally had done it in the past.”
Candace was able to smile again when
it had finally sunk in that she had been the survivor of a prank/birthday
surprise. The party was great and the food was fantastic. But the best part was
when they turned on the lights and got her dryer element hooked up again - that
was the best gift of them all.
***
The next morning, as Candace got out of bed
and let Glen sleep in, she realized that she had laundry that was still damp
and decided that running it in the dryer would be the best thing to do, before
a mildew smell began to develop.
She sorted through all the closes that had that
wet/damp feeling, which was only about eight pieces, and took them downstairs to be put in
the dryer. She chucked when she saw a big lawn and leaf trash bag sitting
on the floor and a pool of blood surrounded it.
She laughed and jokingly said, “Oh Glen, got to
get in one more of those crazy pranks.”
She put the laundry in the dryer and hit the
button for ten minutes when she heard, what sounded like a cell phone ringing from the bag. Then her good old trust worthy curiosity took a grip on
her again when she decided to opened Glen’s back of Halloween body part props so
that she could clean up the red food coloring on the floor.
As she took the tie off the bag and opened
it, she was met with a smell of rotting flesh.
“Wow, he really was going all out.” She laughed
again. She placed her hand into the bag and was met by the feeling of another
hand, while a phone that was in it, was ringing. She was only able to grip the phone at first and immediately recognized that it belonged to the tenant from the laundry mat.
"Dumb chick must have dropped it in the bad while making Glens gag look real. But I didn't know that rubber would smell so realistic." she pondered. She set the phone down and proceed to reach into the bag again. While gripping the body part, as she pulled it out of the bag, she was met
with a sound behind her, like the cloaked stranger in the laundry mat.
“Oh Glen, you just don’t know when to quit.”
As she pulled the body part out of the bag,
it was then she was met with the deep gut wrenching fear she had all along – body parts, legs, arms, hands, - It was a real human body. She stood up and slowly
turned around. Their before her stood the cloaked stranger with a knife held
high above his head.
A screamed filled the house and then nothing more, except the sounds of a dryer - with only 6 minutes left to go.
