Free The Cellar by Richard Laymon

supposed to be the paw of a monkey. Lilly Thorn stuck it here. She was partial to monkeys.”
    Maggie opened the door. The group followed her inside. “One of you get the door, if you would. Don’t want the flies to get in.”
    She pointed her cane. “Here’s another monkey for you.”
    Donna heard her daughter groan, and didn’t blame the girl a bit. The stuffed monkey, standing by the wall with its arms out, seemed to be snarling, ready to bite.
    “Umbrella stand,” Maggie said. She dropped her cane into the circle of the monkey’s arms, then snatched it up again.
    “Now I’ll show you the scene of the first attack. Right this way, into the parlor.”
    Sandy took Donna’s hand. Sandy looked up nervously at her mother as they entered a room to the left of the vestibule.
    “When I came into this house, way back in ’31, it was just the same as Lilly Thorn left it the night of the beast attack twenty-eight years before. Nobody’d lived in the house since then. Nobody’d dared.”
    “Why did you dare?” asked the chubby, critical boy.
    “My husband and I were duped, pure and simple. We were made to believe that poor Gus Goucher did the dirty work on the Thorn people. Nobody let on about no beast.”
    Donna glanced at the man from the cafe. He was standing ahead of her, next to his white-haired friend. Donna lifted her hand. “Mrs. Kutch?”
    “Yes?”
    “Is it definitely known, now, that Gus Goucher was innocent?”
    “I don’t know how innocent he was.”
    Some of the people laughed. The man looked around at her. She avoided his eyes.
    “He might’ve been rowdy and a sneak and a nogood. He was surely a stupid man. But everyone in Malcasa Point knew, the minute they clapped eyes on the poor man, that he didn’t attack the Thorns.”
    “How could they tell?”
    “He didn’t have claws, sweetie.”
    A few in the group tittered. The chubby boy arched an eyebrow at Donna and turned away. The man from the cafe still looked at her. She met his eyes. They held her, penetrated her, set warm fluid spreading in her loins. He didn’t look away for a long time. Shaken, Donna tried to recover her composure. She finally returned her attention to the tour.
    “…through a window out in the kitchen. If you’ll just step around the screen here.”
    As they moved to the front of a three-paneled papier-mâché screen that partitioned off a corner of the room, someone screamed. Several members of the group gasped with shock. Others mumbled. Some groaned with repugnance. Donna followed her daughter around the screen, glimpsed an outstretched bloody hand on the floor, and stumbled as Sandy bolted back.
    Maggie chuckled at the group’s reaction.
    Donna led Sandy around the end of the screen. Lying on the floor, one leg propped high on the dusty cushion of a couch, was the form of a woman. Her shiny eyes gazed upward. Her bloody face was twisted in a grimace of terror and agony. Tatters of her stained linen gown draped her body, covering little except her breasts and pubic area.
    “The beast tore down the screen,” said Maggie, “and leaped over the back of the couch, taking Ethel Hughes by surprise while she was reading The Saturday Evening Post . This is the very magazineshe was reading at the time.” Maggie stretched her cane across the body and poked the magazine. “Everything is just as it was on that awful night.” She smiled pleasantly. “Except for the body, of course. This replica was created in wax by Mssr. Claude Dubois, at my request, way back in 1936. Every detail is guaranteed authentic, down to the tiniest bite mark on her poor neck. We used morgue photos.
    “Of course, this is the gown that Ethel actually wore that night. These dark places are made by her blood.”
    “Was there sexual assault?” the white-haired man asked in a strained voice.
    Maggie’s pleasant eyes hardened, flicking toward his face. “No,” she said.
    “That’s not what I heard.”
    “I can’t be responsible for what