The Haunting

John, better known to the scared public as Jigsaw, was sound asleep.

Amanda was snoozing in her own little nest not far from where John slept.

Amanda was dreaming of the new "game" they would play tomorrow with some pathetic overweight bitch that ate too much and cut herself, despite having all the blessings of a happy life.

She was suddenly jerked awake by a thudding just outside the room. It sounded like footsteps.

"John?" she called. Sometimes he needed her during the night.

No one answered. The footsteps grew louder. Amanda listened to them.

Thud. Thud-thud. Thud. Thud-thud.

The person walking had a limp. A bad one, it sounded like.

Watching the doorway, Amanda slowly sat up and took the knife from next to the head of her small bed. She would kill any intruder that stumbled upon John's ingenious workshop.

The door swung open. Squinting in the darkness, Amanda stared at the visitor.

This man was in his mid-forties, handsome for an older man. His blonde hair was stained with blood, sweat making it cling to his forehead. The white T-shirt was saturated with blood. There was a bruise on his cheek. His black pants were filthy with grime and blood. Blood covered the man's hands. Amanda looked down and saw the reason for the man's limp. His left foot was gone, blood dribbling from the stump of the leg.

It was the ghost of Lawrence Gordon, a doctor who had everything he wanted in life, but threw it all away for some tramp. John had put him to the test, but Gordon had failed. He had cut off his foot and shot a man to save his family. It had saved the family, but not Gordon.

"Amaaaaaandaaaaaaa!" Lawrence wailed in the voice of a ghost from some B-horror movie. "Youuuuu kiiiiiiilled meeeeeee!"

"Dr. Gordon?" Amanda said. She was not remotely scared. This was stupid. "What the fuck are you doing? I didn't kill you. You killed yourself."

Lawrence stopped wailing. His brow furrowed as he thought back to the events of his death.

"Oh, yeah, right," he said. He then put the voice on again. "But youuuuuuu maaaaaaade meeeeee!"

"Would you stop with the fucking ghost shit?" Amanda demanded. "It's not scary. And besides, you deserved it. You deserved to die, with all the shit you did."

Lawrence laughed a long bitter laugh. "I deserved to die? What about you?" His eyes narrowed maliciously. "Miss Pathetic Poor Me Druggie." He put on a high-pitched girl voice. " 'He helped me.' ". What's that crap? Sounds to me like dear old John made you a worse monster than him."

"That's true, Larry." said another voice.

Amanda looked up and saw Carrie, the female cop that had been the victim of one of Amanda's own traps. Blood poured from both side of her body, where Amanda's inescapable contraption had pulled her rib cage clear out of her body.

"This bitch is a worse monster than old Jigsaw. She's gonna go his way in the end." Carrie frowned at Lawrence. "Why'd you use the door? I came through the wall. We are non-corporeal."

"Dammit," Lawrence said. "I was trying to make a dramatic entrance. I didn't realize."

"Shit, Larry, Adam said that you were smart." Carrie said, shaking her head.

"Adam?" Lawrence said. "He didn't make it?"

"Nope," Carrie said. "That bitch killed him. Suffocation." She pointed to Amanda.

"Hey, that was a mercy killing!" Amanda said indignantly.

"Oh, yeah, it's a real mercy having your goddamned air squeezed outta you." A third voice said sarcastically. "I swear, there's nothing like gasping for air through a sheet of plastic. Feels great. A real picnic."

The ghost of Adam Faulkner appeared on Lawrence's right. Like Lawrence, Adam's shirt was stained with blood from the gunshot wound in his shoulder. His young, handsome face was puffy and blue from Amanda's attack.

"I'm so sorry, Adam," Lawrence said, looking at his young friend, the person with whom he had been trapped.

"Hey, man, not your fault," Adam said, shrugging his bloody shoulders. "You didn't cause my death. This bitch did."

"OK, OK," Amanda said, annoyed. "You dead guys are pissed, I get it. Why bother me? Why not bother the mastermind behind it all? He's the one who thought those traps up."

"You helped him," Carrie said. "If it wasn't for you, we'd never be put into those traps. Jigsaw would've thought them up, but none of us would've died if you hadn't dragged us to our deaths. We would've kept living-"

"-pathetic lives none of you were grateful for," Amanda spat. "John was trying to do you a favor."

"And look where it got us," Adam said bitterly.

"With scum like you gone, your families, or lack thereof, are happier! Especially yours," Amanda snapped, looking knives and daggers at Lawrence.

"Sure, my son and Diana have no fathers. That's fantastic."

Eric Matthews appeared next to Carrie. Like the others he was pale, and like Lawrence, his left foot was useless, Eric having crushed it to escape the same bathroom that had imprisoned Adam and Lawrence.

Eric, scowling, looked at Larry. "Would you say our children are happier without their fathers? If they are, they've got a weird way of showing it. Never thought that uncontrollable sobbing was a way of showing wild happiness."

"I know," Lawrence said. He looked down at Eric's crushed foot. "What happened to you?"

"Toilet tank lid to the foot. Had to crush it to escape. Fuck, that hurt. You?"

Lawrence held up his stumped leg. "Hacksaw," Lawrence said simply. "No other way." Another person appeared. At least twenty, the young man was covered in blood. Judging by the deep scratches all over his arms, legs, and torso, he had been the victim of a brutal animal attack. Looking puzzled, he looked around at the other spectres.

"Do you mind?" Lawrence asked curtly. "We're trying to condemn this woman to Hell."

"Brigitte?" the young man asked, looking at Amanda.

"Who the fuck's Brigitte?" Amanda asked, scared at last after hearing Larry's words. "Who the fuck are you?"

Sam took a second glance around the room and looked embarrassed.

"Sorry, wrong movie," he said, and vanished.

"Now, where were we?" Lawrence asked the others, following the popular Ginger Snaps character's departure.

"Lare, we were gonna take the murderous bitch to Hell," Carrie said.

"Right," Lawrence said.

The spectres looked at Amanda. Their eyes radiated their hate and anger as they malevolently came closer.

"No! I'm not going to Hell!" Amanda screamed. "What about John? I wanna live!"

"So did we," Adam spat. "But we're gonna show you the same 'mercy' you so kindly showed us."

"Your life is more worthless than ours were," Eric said. "Why do you deserve to live? John's almost dead. With you and the old fucker dead, no one else has to die."

The dead seized Amanda, Adam and Lawrence taking her arms, Eric and Carrie taking her legs. Amanda cried out when she felt how cold their hands were.

"We're taking you to Hell, where no one escapes," Carrie said.

"And believe us when we say that it is not all fire and brimstone," Adam sneered.

"It's not?" Amanda whimpered, petrified now.

"Nope," Lawrence said. Evil smiles lit the dead's faces. "Hell is what you make of it."

A bright light flashed. Amanda found herself lying in a larger, lumpy bed.

She looked around. This room was familiar.

With a jolt of horror, she realized that this was the room she had slept in when visiting her grandmother, the Jewish one who was constantly pinching her cheeks and calling her names that she had made were never heard by her former friends.

She had hated this place.

Adam, Lawrence, Carrie, and Eric stood in a corner and watched as Amanda's grandmother came in. She beamed when she saw Amanda.

"Oh, my little bubeleh! My darling Mandy-moo! I've missed you! I must do up that hair! Do you remember the pink bows you used to wear?"

She brandished a photo under Amanda's nose. In it, Amanda was wearing a revolting pink dress and had her hair in two matching pink bows. With a jolt of horror, Amanda realized she was now wearing that same hideous outfit. She looked at the ghosts in the corner of the room. All four of them were sniggering at Amanda's abject humiliation.

"Fuck!" Amanda shouted. "This truly IS Hell!!!"

As she screamed, the maniacal laughter of the four ghosts rang in her ears. Laughing, one by one, Adam, Eric and Carrie vanished. Lawrence came to Amanda's bedside.

"I told you," he whispered to Amanda in a cold voice as the old woman began force-feeding her cookies that tasted like air freshener. "Hell is what you make of it."

With that, Lawrence vanished, leaving Amanda to her own personal Hell.