Free THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story by Carlton Kenneth Holder Page B

immediately
drags his hands across the board to the letter P, then another letter. Then
another. The teen should be scared. Instead, he's fascinated.
    “Play - it - backwards,” Henry
says, putting the letters altogether. Momentary confusion. Then his eyes drift
to the record on the turntable. A smile peels slowly across the teenager's
face.
     
    Two thirteen year old trick-or-treaters,
a CLOWN and a VAMPIRE, have no idea of any of this when they arrive at the
house nearly an hour later. The hand-written sign stuck to the outside of the
stained-glass window reads: HAUNTED HOUSE. Below that: COME ON IN. The dwelling
is dark, moonlight bleeding through the curtains of the many windows in the
home. The trick-or-treaters enter. Wandering around the immense house, the
clown quickly loses sight of his friend. Clown's POV: There are no decorations.
There are no hanging ghosts made out of white bed sheets, no atmospheric
lighting, no scary howling sound effects. There is just darkness. From the
expression on the boy's face, he doesn't think much of the haunted house.
"This blows." Muffled sounds come from the living room. Looking for
the vampire, the clown follows the sounds back. "Hey, man. Where ya at?
Let's get out of here. Place is lame."
    No answer.
    The clown makes out a bowl of
cookies on an end table and helps himself. He stops, makes a face, spits the
cookies out. The cookies are damp, salty. "What the-?" The clown
turns on a nearby lamp. He gags vehemently. The cookies have been doused with
fresh blood.
    The lamp light illuminates
something else, on the couch.
    The clown approaches slowly,
scared, but still hoping this is some kind of elaborate Halloween prank being
played on him by the older Henry and his vampire friend. However, the boy
vampire sits motionless on the couch covered in a clear plastic tarp. Through
the plastic, the clown can already see that the vampire’s throat has been cut
from ear to ear, his eyes blankly staring outward, a frozen expression of
horror permanently etched on his face. Under the tarp, blood still continues to
gush out of the fresh wound. On the floor table between the couch and an easy
chair that sits across from it in a dark corner, a hunting knife sticks up out
of a jack-o’-lantern, blood congealing on the blade.
    Mathaluh’s slow haunting “Dark
Ballad” begins to play, starting low. It’s at that moment that the clown,
frozen in place, senses someone sitting in the easy chair in the pitch black
corner. Henry leans forward, out of that darkness and hisses, “Trick or treat, smell
my feet, give me something good to eat.” The silver revolver in his hand gleams
as he lifts the gun out of his lap, eyes full of murderous intent, and glee.
    The music grows louder now as the
clown begins to run. The front door swings shut in his face. It won’t open. The
house won't let the clown leave. It wants him. The boy hears the chair creak as
Henry rises from it in the living room. The music fills the house now as it
distorts into something ugly. Something perverted. It begins to play backwards.
In between the unholy gibberish, the clown can make out, “Kill In the name of
Mathaluh. Kill in the name of Lord Satan. Kill to live. Live to kill.” It isn’t
just one voice. It seems to be different voices, many voices, all at once,
disjointed, echoing, rising and falling in pitch. These voices are male,
female, old, young. The words seem to follow the scared clown like a wraith.
    Desperate, the clown scrambles up
the nearby staircase. In the upper hallway, he tries a number of doors. All
locked. The bathroom door isn’t. The clown rushes inside. He pushes aside the
window curtain to let moonlight in. That’s when he sees HENRY'S MOTHER, hanging
from the shower curtain rod like a grotesque marionette, covered in blood from
multiple stab wounds. The clown can hear Henry’s creaky footsteps coming up the
stairs. The boy backs out of the bathroom, tries more doors. They're all
locked. The clown