Rick
2ND Floor Corridors
20:56pm | August 3
Husband clung to wife as utter terror coursed through her, Lucille's heart beat a mile a minute while her mind did its very best not to descend into total panic. Rosalie Patterson was missing from her bed and their hosts might as well have been ghosts because Colin Rathelin nor his mysterious husband had shown themselves despite the group's yelling and screaming. As soon as they'd found Rosalie's bed empty the aunts and uncle had broken off searching, had called out her name and tried every door they came to – all of which were locked of course.
"I can't find her anywhere." Announced Rick as he returned from one of the labyrinthine passageways. "She's not in the halls and most of the doors are fuckin' locked."
Eloise, who'd practically ripped the hotel room apart as if Rosalie had somehow crammed herself between a wardrobe and wall, finally gave up and went to stand by her husband.
"Her things are gone: no bag, no bear, no nothing."
"What the actual fuck is going on here?!" Demanded Heidi. "Jesus Christ, this is a motherfucking horror movie!"
"Calm down, Heidi." Groaned the black man. "If you could give up being the centre of attention for just two fucking minutes that would be great."
"Go to hell, Rick!"
With that Heidi stormed off as she grumbled something about never having wanted to make the trip anyway – odd then that Heidi was the one who'd had her things packed and ready to go first. Neither her sisters nor her brothers-in-law opted to go after her, to mention anything about sticking together, they just watched her march away childishly as they had many times before.
"Why must you two always provoke each other?" Eloise slapped her husband's arm. "Rosalie is missing."
At least Rick had the decency to look mildly ashamed of himself. "You're right, Ellie, I'm sorry. She just gets to me and always has, you know that. Everythin' always has to be about Heidi. I mean she didn't get her way at our weddin' so she threw a fuckin' fit."
Eloise held her hand up, she understood her husband's annoyance with Heidi but none of them needed it there and then.
"Can we deal with this later?"
Greg paled then and his body turned ridgid. "What if Rathelin has her? He's the only person we've seen on this rock other than the groundskeeper. Hell, maybe the husband doesn't even exist and he is actually Du'Met. I don't know, maybe the English thing was just some shitty accent – I mean did he even sound properly English?"
"Dude, you saying he's some kind of serial killer or somethin'?"
"Shut up!" Lucille suddenly screamed and all attention snapped to the crying woman. "Where's my little girl?"
Though the black man was taller and more muscular, it was clearly Greg who filled the role of family patriarch. He was the one with a mostly cool head and, being the eldest of the group, gave of a perceived aura of authority that he'd learned to use to put his family at ease. However, his only daughter had vanished from the safety of her own bed and Greg didn't know how to fix it, so that aura and confidence he displayed to calm his family did nothing to sooth himself.
"Okay, if no one's gonna come out here, we'll just have to go looking. I'll rip this fucking place apart if I have to."
Eloise gestured to the hallway her sister had stormed down only a few moments previous. "What about Heidi?"
"She'll come back when she wants a top up of attention."
"Rick-"
"I said shut up!" Lucille cut off her sister with another yell and Greg took the chance to carry on explaining his plan.
"Rick, go with Luci and check upstairs. Ellie, you come with me. I feel like seeing what's in those other rooms in the lobby and I wanna use that phone. Anyone sees Heidi, just bring her back with you."
The confused, slightly terrified, guests finally had a plan even if it was the most obvious one in the world. They had to do something even if it was the stupid, obvious thing birthed from a combination of panic and rage. None of them knew just how easily they'd played into Du'Met's hands – hell, they weren't even a hundred percent sure Du'Met was a real person.
Intent on finding her four-year-old daughter, Lucille made her way upstairs ahead of Rick toward the balcony, he'd have rather played masculine protector but a scared mother on the war path was a frightening thing and Rick doubted Lucille really needed his protection there and then.
The man and woman both knitted their brow when they saw the state of the upper floor. Though not fallen to ruin or disgusting it seemed nobody had taken care of the rooms up there. Everything had a thick layer of dust and a white-framed anatomical picture had fallen from the wall to lay face up by a door. What they took to be a library due to the empty bookshelves lining the walls, had been littered with various boxes and dust; there was also a rather alarming hole in one of the interior walls. When Rick curiously opened one of the cardboard boxes he found it filled with books and suddenly the library didn't seem so forgotten, more like it hadn't been set up. Lucille and Rick didn't linger long, Colin had told them that the hotel was essentially a labor of love so an unfinished library didn't seem too suspicious; certainly no more than the fact Rosalie wasn't anywhere to be found.
On a hook in the room with the fallen anatomical drawing outside, they found a key marked 'Balcony' and quickly let themselves through the locked door only for Lucille to call out loudly for her daughter and, much to Lucille's growing fear, no response came. That balcony had allowed her voice to carry through so much of the hotel yet still Rosalie hadn't answered.
"This place is really weird. What did Du'Met actually fuckin' say to you when he called?"
Lucille paused and dragged a hand down her face. "I don't know – he was all polite and charming, guess. I've never won anything before, especially for my digital art. I was just proud of myself."
"You should have ask more questions. Why did we think it was okay to just pack our shit and duck out for the weekend? Christ, no one's gonna notice we're gone until me and Greg don't show up for work."
"I don't care about that right now, Rick. Stop acting like we've been kidnapped. I just want to find Rosalie and then ask that Colin guy what the fuck is going on here." She gestured wildly to the balcony. "Why did we even come up here? Rosalie couldn't have gotten up here."
"No harm in lookin', right?"
"And what the hell is that creepy thing?"
Two sets of eyes, one gray and the other a dark brown, slowly approached an innocent looking bowler hat sat alone under a display light. The library had been a bomb site but this hat was clean and cared for like a museum piece, as was the old watch and necklace on display next to it. The pair peered closer to read the plaque and that was when really started to grow worried.
"H. H. Holmes. Isn't he that murderer? The one who built a castle to do it?"
Before Lucille could comment the animatronic jumped up to scare the life out of them. Lucille stumbled backward into the railing while Rick let out a series of blasphemies. They didn't stay to see if anything else would move, lunge or pop up, just cleared out from the balcony as fast as their legs would take them.
~X~
Greg
1ST Floor Corridors
21:19pm | August 3
Greg and Eloise, who'd gone back down to the lobby, had discovered two things very quickly: that phone their host has spoken of didn't work was the first, that Du'Met and Rathelin had a thing about locking doors was the second. When they had discovered an open door it had been to a dark hallway which somehow screamed at them to stay out, but they needed to find Rosalie so entered the darkness anyway.
"What's that sound?" Eloise asked quickly, fear evident in her voice. "Is that a person?"
"It sounds like, I don't know, talking. That's not Rosalie."
"Maybe it's Colin and his husband?"
With a renewed hope they carried on down the poorly lit halls until they reached a closed door behind which drifted the muffled voice they'd heard. Greg pushed the door open and they stepped inside just as Eloise spotted the glistening of a handprint on said door.
"Is that blood?"
An answer to Eloise's question never came, because a series of floodlights suddenly burst to life illuminating not only the room but the groundskeeper tied to a chair behind a wall of wire mesh. He screamed and begged not to die, thrashed about and pleaded some more.
"What the fuck?!"
They tried to back up but the door slammed shut trapping them inside staring at this poor man who'd clearly already taken a beating if the yellow rain slicker was anything to go by.
"Greg, what is this? Oh my God, what the fuck is happening?"
The two grabbed one another's hands as if it would provide some invisible later of protection and slowly approached the bound groundskeeper. Before entering that room they'd been alarmed, sure, but it was the sort of alarm one got when they'd lost their kid at the market, seeing this beaten man took them far beyond alarmed. This man had moved their things earlier, Greg had seen him. What the hell had the man done to deserve this and how were Greg and Eloise meant to stop it?
A click sounded as Greg set foot on a pressure plate and Eloise screamed when a scythe released and threatened to plunge into an innocent man's heart.
"Jesus Christ, don't move! Greg, don't fucking move." Her terrified brown eyes looked up and down Greg's body, from the pressure plate to the groundskeeper then to the scythe itself before back to Greg's feet. "I think- I think if you step off the plate that … thing will kill him."
"Kill? What the fuck is this? Why would anybody do this?!"
Out from the shadows came a man dressed in a bowler hat and leather apron, a man with deadly eyes hidden behind a half mask of H. H. Holmes. In the tall man's hand was a knife of unimaginable sharpness, a knife which had killed so many and a knife that sparked dread in the hearts of all who saw it.
Instinctively Greg went to step back as the masked killer lifted his knife, but paused because if he did the groundskeeper would breathe his last breath. The murderer watched Greg with a smirk clearly keen to see how the other man fared in this little test of bravery. The frightful blade slowly slipped through the hole in the mesh and Eloise didn't think, she simply grabbed Greg by the arm and together they fled the horrific room just as the scythe slammed into the bound man's body. Alone, the serial killer peered at the groundskeeper; it seemed clear Eloise and Greg had prioritized their own lives as most did, they'd not stood their ground like his phoenix.
~X~
Heidi
Sub Basement
20:50pm | August 3
Meanwhile, in another part of the hotel, Heidi had gotten herself a little turned around. At first she'd been positive she knew her way back to her family, but when she'd gone back along the halls she'd been met by a dead end. Her tactic of yanking on doors until she found an open one then stepping through it hadn't worked out too well for her either because she truly had no idea where she'd ended up. Heidi hadn't been able to shake the feeling of being watched either, every time she'd turned a corner she'd half expected to find someone stood there staring at her.
"Should have just stayed with the others." She bemoaned to herself as her hands itched for a cell phone she didn't have. "Fuck this place."
A click-like sound reached her then and Heidi stopped dead, she didn't know what the noise was but it seemed strangely ominous. Heidi had always put on a show of being an unshakable bitch but at her core Heidi wasn't all that brave, she wasn't strong or determined, frankly she was kind of pathetic and it was why she'd always used hostility as a defence mechanism. Heidi hadn't spent any real time with her sisters or niece in over a year so she'd leapt at the chance to sail off to some secluded hotel for a long weekend with them; now she'd come to regret her eagerness because why the actual fuck hadn't she questioned why this invitation was all so sudden?
Eventually Heidi pulled on the wrong doorknob because, with another of those spine-chilling clicks, the floor gave way beneath her feet and she went sliding. Nails painted with green polish snapped and bent as she desperately clawed for something, anything, to end her descent into Tartarus, but no purchase came and soon Heidi slammed hard into dusty concrete and everything faded to black.
Many minutes she lay there defencelessly in her unconsciousness, so defenceless in fact that she had no idea when Du'Met stepped inside the cell nor when he grabbed her by the ankle and hauled her down the chilly halls. No, Heidi didn't see any of what happened in the five minutes after she'd dropped from the tunnel of death.
After a time mascara-coated eyelids fluttered open to a dark room lit angrily by red emergency lights. Her skin shivered and, despite her headache, Heidi snapped to full awareness because somebody had stripped her down to naught but her bra and panties. She cuddled in on herself to hide her nakedness as he heartbeat grew faster and fearful. Who had done this to her? How had this happened to her? What was happening inside this insane asylum?
"Hello?" Called Heidi but no response came and she didn't know how that silence made her feel. "Is anyone there?"
Nothing, not a single sound, not even a solitary drip from a pipe. Since remaining seemed like a great way to freeze to death, Heidi pushed herself to her feet. In the corner of the cinder block room was a passageway of such extreme narrowness that the thin woman had to turn sideways to shimmy her way through. Then, as she managed to push through to another small, square room with those angry red lights, Heidi stood on something sharp. She hissed in pain and stumbled back into the wall only to rip whatever she'd stepped on from her foot. Glass, a tiny shard of glass probably from a windowpane. An accident her mind insisted, but when Heidi really looked at the ground it practically sparkled where piles of broken glass had been strewn about, so no, this hadn't been an accident, it had been carefully planned by a fucking madman. Carefully she tried to brush the glass aside with her foot, then her hand, but there was just so much that it was impossible to fully clean a section big enough to walk through and soon had to accept the constant jabs of glass from broken this and that assaulting her feet. How did she get out? There weren't any signs and each passageway was as narrow as the one before it. Some jutted off to the left, others the right and only when she found a room with glass already partially ploughed did Heidi realize she wasn't just in a trap, she was in a maze and had gone around in a circle.
"Let me the fuck out of here! You're that Colin asshole, I know who you are. Just let me out!" She demanded, screamed up at the low ceilings as if her captor would suddenly grow a heart. "Let me out, you bastard!"
No suddenly remorseful Du'Met appeared though and Heidi had always been that act first, think later type who didn't need anybody to save her, so Heidi ignored the silence and pushed on. Eventually she shimmied into a new room – a new one, it was almost circular and had two passageways instead of one. Her feet screamed at her to sit and tend to them, to ease the bleeding which steadily grew worse, but there wasn't anywhere to sit not coated in glass and Heidi couldn't just wait around hoping her sisters and brothers-in-law would find her. She'd chosen to wander off on her own like an idiot and now she had to save herself. So with a hiss of pain and tears stained black from her mascara running down her cheeks, Heidi forced herself to keep going because there had to be an exit. There would be an exit, if somebody had put her in the maze then there had to be a way out – shame she'd never seen the outline of a trap door in the room she'd awoken in.
After a few hesitant seconds Heidi opted to take the rightmost passageway but, as she approached, there was a guttural scream a woman launched out of the darkness at her screeching and with eyes as violently red as the emergency lights.
"Fuck!"
Heidi stumbled backward into the shards of glass, and sliced her elbow, thighs and lower back open on bits of broken bottles. Blood oozed from the wounds and down her skin – odd that the warmth it brought actually pleased her chilled skin. Heidi sucked in desperate gulps of air as she stared at this … thing which had just attacked her. It continued to scream but moved no closer and the longer she stared at it the less alive it appeared. The woman's face was snared in metal which seemingly kept her mouth open so she could continue screaming, but her eyes were cloudy and scraps of skin had rotted away leaving her cheekbones and jaw exposed.
"Oh my God, what did this psycho do to you?"
Ever so carefully the twenty-one-year-old woman got to her feet while the animatronic continued to scream like a rabid dog and looked over to the leftmost passage. Heidi didn't want to go, didn't want another mutilated corpse to hurtle out of the dark, but what other choice had she? Rosalie! Thoughts of her young niece rushed into Heidi's mind then and she gagged – Heidi had to get out before this deranged killer did this to Rosalie or any of her family for that matter. That thought alone renewed Heidi's courage and was what had her over the glass despite the agony and through the passage and the next one and the next one. Passed the corpses used as jump scares, the copious amounts of glass and unending loops until finally, finally, she came face to face with a metal door which reminded her vaguely of a bulkhead door on a ship. Exit! She'd found the fucking exit! Heidi's heart soared with relief, delight and gratitude to a god she'd not believed in before arriving on the island. The tears came forth anew while adrenaline wore off and the stinging pain of her cuts turned to a throbbing, then to an searing burn of torment. Ignoring the pain in her feet, Heidi rushed the last few steps to the door and pulled on the handle desperately, but then it snapped off and the sense of déjà vu had Heidi's heart drop into her stomach. Yet again the floor opened up beneath her and she stumbled down into a cone-shaped pit filled with yet more pieces of sharp glass. She cried out as the merciless glass left cuts on every inch of her pale body. Quickly she surged upward in an attempt to free herself from the glass' savage bite, but, just as Heidi's hand managed to gain purchase everything got much, much worse. The cone-shaped pit slowly started to rotate grinding the glass together and young Heidi along with it. At first hands flailed about above her head but soon the glass pit started to turn red and, eventually, Heidi's frantic and frenzied cries for help fell silent, the only indication she'd ever walked the halls at all being the various smears of blood she'd left behind and a broken door handle laying on the ground. After all, some decisions saved lives while others led to death.
~X~
Charlie Lonnit had been flicking threw the cameras as Heidi had fallen into the glass grinder, which meant he was the only person who saw her die. Since Du'Met had been off moving animatronics about, he went to the whiteboard they kept on the wall and calmly put a line through 'Glass Maze' in Heidi's column.
There were four main types of serial killer as any half-decent psychologist would know: Visionaries, who believed they were being commanded to kill by a person or entity. These killers normally suffered from some form of psychosis, often hallucinated and were very disorganized. Herbert Mullin was one such visionary serial killer who'd murdered thirteen people all to prevent earthquakes. Then there were the mission-orientated ones who chose to kill in order to rid the world of a specific group, and often thought they were doing the world a favor. Mission-orientated serial killers wouldn't stop until they were stopped and could be both meticulous and obsessive in their feelings of hate. Joseph Paul Franklin, being a neo-Nazi, took it upon himself to kill numerous men simply because of the color of their skin as well as their Caucasian girlfriends. Control serial killers were by far the most common type, and did all manner of horrendous things simply to feel powerful and dispel feelings of inadequacy inside themselves, to pretend they weren't petrified of rejection. These murderers tended to be organized and would only engage in rape or necrophilia to further dominate and control their victim; unless, of course, they had a fetish for it. They were normally surprisingly calm, charismatic and even patient – after all, everybody knew how disarming Ted Bundy had been. Lastly was the hedonistic serial killer which broke down into three subcategories: Lust, Thrill and Comfort. Comfort killers were fairly self-explanatory, they killed for money and material gain with the kill simply being a means to an end; like a husband killing his wife for the insurance. Lust killers – with Jeffrey Dahmer probably being the most famous of them – murdered to satisfy their own sexual needs and would often fantasize for years before building up enough courage to actually take a life. They'd rape, mutilate and stab all to get themselves off, and, as the killing continued, they'd have to find some new exciting way to end a life as they chased after that pleasure like a drug. Thrill serial killers were the last of the subcategories and arguably the most terrifying because they killed solely to kill, to hunt and feel that rush of excitement as their victim's fear grew and banish the inadequacy they felt just like control killers. They'd murder anyone regardless of who they were or where they came from simply to watch somebody die.
Charlie couldn't in good conscience, label himself as any of the four types of serial killer despite how many people he'd helped Du'Met to kill. Then again, Charlie had no desire to be a serial killer, he was a director, a man tasked with turning the horror into recorded art. So no, Charlie didn't see himself as a serial killer as he set the whiteboard pen down and never would. Du'Met though, he obviously fell mostly into the thrill subcategory of a hedonistic serial killer. The man prided himself on murdering people, he loved watching their last moments and knowing he was the one who'd ended their lives. Du'Met relished in the hunt. And, after slowly learning more about Lucinda Munday, Charlie had realized just how powerless Du'Met had felt around her. However, it was Du'Met's enjoyment of mutilating the bodies into his animatronics which showed he sat on the fence between hedonistic and control killer. From everything Charlie had learnt of serial killers, and what Kate had screamed at him in many of her I-know-better fits, thrill killers lost all interest in victims once they were dead, but Du'Met played with them, and ultimately Charlie had stopped trying to force Du'Met into a box because an artistic genus could never fully be categorized.
Blue eyes peered over to the blocked bedroom door where he'd left little Rosalie Patterson. She'd continued to slumber ever since Charlie had carried her in there and he had to ask himself if Du'Met's request to record anything the girl said had actually been a request or an order, because if it was an order then Charlie would have to wake her up at some point and he'd have rather avoided that. Still, because he loved the masked man and craved praise, Charlie took a recorder into the bedroom and left it running on a night stand. Her Aunt Heidi was gone but the hunt was far from over.