Another chapter….
"Hey Jon!" Louise greeted her boyfriend with a warm hug, putting down her several bags and letting him pull her closer.
"It's great to have you back!" He said eventually. "But I still don't see why you didn't let me go with you…"
"You wouldn't have enjoyed it. The others got really bored – you'd have been killing yourself."
"I suppose not…" The young man glanced at the clock, wincing. "Hey babes, I have to get home. See you later?"
"Sure!" Louise grabbed her suitcases again, and pretty much bounced up the stairs of her house to her room.
The entire chamber was a shrine to Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. One wall was painted with various blood-encrusted torture devices, one was a huge block of varying shades of red (looking uncannily like blood to the naked eye) and the other contained a huge larger-than-life-sized mural of Nny himself, which Louise regularly worshiped. She had painted it all herself, since nobody else would actually enter it – Alex refused to on the grounds that it freaked her out, Holly because the wall of blood made her feel ill, and Jon because he thought it was unhealthy for Louise to have a picture of another, fictional, man on the wall.
He wasn't far wrong.
Even the harmless gophers painted there were strange and twisted – since Louise had discovered that Nailbunny upset her own rabbit, she had been forced to change the five pictures into those of gophers. Nailgophers.
Louise lay one of her suitcases, the largest, down on the floor. In one movement she had opened it, and she looked down gloatingly at her prize: the unconscious body of Jhonen Vasquez. It was easy for her to chain him to the bed (she had the chains all ready), and soon he was slumped on the floor behind her, completely unaware of her in his chloroform-induced state.
"Sammy was a chemist. Sammy is no more. For what he thought was H2O was H2SO4." Alex chanted idly, occupying herself with drawing a red nose on the picture of the mole in her chemistry book.
"H2SO4? What's that?"
"Sulphuric acid, I think…"
Louise shook her head. "You're strange."
"Not as strange as you! Remember…"
"I thought we agreed not to mention that?"
"True, true…hey, can I come over tonight? I brought chocolate for making brownies!"
The goth looked slightly shifty. "Umm…OK. But I'm painting my room, so no coming up there."
"Would I anyway?" Alex shuddered dramatically. "Just as long as I never have to see that Wall of Blood again…."
"You've got brownie mix all over your trousers."
"Thanks, Alex. Thanks a lot."
"Hey! It wasn't me who put it there! I'm not the one who spilt it all…"
Jon sighed, and pulled a ream of paper towel off the roll. "I suppose so. Where did Louise get to?"
"Back in the kitchen."
They were in the living room at the Kitchen house, Jon standing up and ministering to his chocolate-covered clothes, and Alex cross-legged on the sofa. The girl looked irritably over to the kitchen door, where she could hear rustling. "What's she doing in there?"
As if on cue, Louise appeared – holding a bag. "OK guys, time for you to go!"
"What?" Alex and Jon stared at her.
"I have things to do." And with that she turned and walked up the stairs, leaving a very confused pair of people looking after her.
"Has she ever done that before?"
"No…" Jon shook his head. "…Weird."
"Do you think it could have something to do with all those bottles of chloroform, and all those IV drips in the kitchen?"
"I'm sure there's a logical explanation for them."
"Like what?"
Jon paused. "Alright, I don't know. Let's go and see."
They crept up the stairs, quietly so as not to make too much noise. Putting her ear to the door, Alex motioned for Jon to stay where he was. "I can hear…groaning…and very, very dodgy sounds…"
"Like what?"
"I'd rather not say. Louise!" She yelled. "What are you doing in there?"
"Jhonen Vasquez!" Came the cheerful reply.
"Oh my GOD!" Jon looked as if he might faint. "Did she just say that?"
Alex looked faintly ill. "Yes. It explains the noises…"
"Oh God, poor guy…"
"I'll kill him."
"Locked up like that…"
"He will be very, very dead."
"She must have kidnapped him at the comic convention…"
"Dead…very dead…lots of pain…violating my girlfriend…"
Jon and Alex turned to look at each other.
"We have to get him out of there."
