Page 84 of Girl, Haunted

As they crept deeper, the details began to resolve out of the murk. Framed posters hung at off-kilter angles, faces peering from beneath jaundiced glass. Jaunty, old-timey letters invited them to:

EXPERIENCE REAL HORRORS IN THE FLESH!

And below that:

ONCE YOU ENTER MARROW MAZE, YOU MAY NEVER LEAVE.

‘Load of crap,’ Ella whispered. She unlocked the door and dived into what she guessed used to be a horror maze but was now just piles of old crap in a place nobody visited. And just like that, she and Redmond were in a whole new world of deeply wrong.

The narrow hall opened up into a churning vortex of visual delights. A forest of rotting corpses impaled on wooden stakes. Burn victims with visible ribcages. Spindly metal cribs splattered with blood. Cabinets overflowing with jarred fetuses suspended in murky brine.

And the smell grew stronger as Ella made her way through the rooms.The metallic bite filled the back of her throat and oozed into the darker recesses of her brain. This wasn't some two-bit carnival attraction. This was Vincent Marrow's personal purgatory, where he'd tried to exorcise those demons.

Don’t look too close, she told herself. Breathe through your mouth. Follow the gasoline and let it pull you deeper into the bowels of this black little Wonderland.

A T-junction up ahead. The hall branched both ways. Ella pulled up short, neck swiveling as she tried desperately to game out which path of least resistance would spit them out closest to Luca.

‘Should we split up?’ Redmond whispered.

No time to clear every nook and cranny. ‘You take go left, I’ll go right.’

They went their separate ways, and Ella found herself in a room with no particular theme. One side had mannequins dressed up like the great alternative figures from history –Ted Bundy, Adolf Hitler, Aleister Crowley. The other side featured a priest with his head replaced by a dog’s.

More rooms followed. Three, four, five. Ella stumbled through a post-apocalyptic biohazard scene, then what looked like an exploded Russian bordello complete with a deformed corpse on a stained mattress. But she had to keep moving. Put her back to the crazy on the walls and pray there was still something left to save.

Hold on, Luca. She didn't let herself finish the thought – just ran, full-tilt boogie, following the music to wherever this place ended.

But the deeper she dove, the more sideways it went. Halls branched and twisted like diseased arteries, doubling back and dead-ending in pockets of awful that bore zero resemblance to her point of entry. Ella skidded to a stop, breath coming ragged, panic surging from head to toe.

Ella was lost. Utterly, irretrievably lost in this black hole. She scanned the T-section she’d stumbled into, each wing promising untold fuckery and zero forward momentum. A sob rose in her throat only to die stillborn as Redmond crashed into the same clearing, one ham hock of a hand plastered to his thigh, wheezing like the little engine that couldn't.

'Dead end,' he gasped.

No. This couldn't be it. There had to be a way through, around, under. Ella spun in a tight circle, headlights on high beam, searching for…

There.

A door, sunk into a shadowed alcove. Paint-scrawled letters, barely legible:

EMPLOYEES ONLY.

CHAPTER FORTY THREE

Luca had stared down the barrel of his own gun a thousand times, but never from this angle. Never as the unlucky victim on the business end. Cassius waved it in front of him like it was a new toy on Christmas morning.

‘I've always found guns so... impersonal,’ Cassius said as he ripped the tape off Luca’s mouth. He spat out an oily rag and breathed deeply.

‘Nobody asked for your opinion.’

The words came out raspier than he'd intended. His throat felt like he'd gargled glass and chased it with battery acid. How long had he been tied up here? Minutes? All night? Time had a funny way of stretching when you were waiting to die.

Cassius’s lips twitched in what might've been a smile on a human face. On him, it looked more like a crack in cheap plaster. He turned away and ambled over to the second of two barrels standing beside them. Luca's nostrils flared as Cassius pried off the lid – another tub of gasoline. Judging by the smell, enough to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge.

‘You know, detective, I wasn't always like this,’ Cassius said as he upended the barrel. Fuel sloshed across the floor in a widening pool. ‘Once upon a time, I was just a boy. A boy with a vivid imagination.’

‘Imaginary friends? Monsters under the bed?’

Cassius’s eyes flashed. ‘If only it were that simple. No, what I saw... what Iheard... it was far worse than any childish fancy.’

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