I was sitting cross legged on the edge of a loading dock in a burned out warehouse, bored. My friend was sitting next to me, dangling her feet over the ten foot drop.
“Tell me the story again,” she requested in her insistent way.
On reflex I rolled my eyes. “Again?”
She leaned over and bumped her shoulder into me. “Yeah, again. Please?”
“All right,” I conceded and began the tale.
I always started it in the same place. The sound of sizzling meat filled the air, accompanied by two disturbed moans, and I swallowed the lump in my throat as I watched, helpless. The torture device was meticulously designed and constructed. A large steel plate hung suspended from thick chains bolted to the ceiling, allowing the whole thing to sway slightly at any motion from the two men trapped inside. Below the plate a large brazier with curving legs held a heaped pile of glowing charcoal, continuing to heat the metal above. Encircling the hanging griddle was a glass wall curving inward and open at the top, resembling a chimney from an antique oil lamp. Smears and smudges decorated the glass from the inside where the occupants tried to beat their way out with bare fists, but the glass held.
I was sitting close enough to feel the heat on my face and hands, but I was as powerless as the two trapped men. A quick glance around the warehouse we were in revealed any number of heavy objects I could use to break the glass and free the men, if only I could reach them. My right leg was chained to a bolt in the floor as securely as the ones that held the torture chamber aloft.
A giggle from my left turned my eyes away from the slow agony in the glass cage to the woman that brought this horror show together. She was sitting on a metal folding chair, arms crossed under her prominent breasts. With one slim, black gloved hand she held an electronic vaporizer, and the other dangled a semi-automatic pistol like a child would hold a toy. The tight bodysuit she wore displayed her lean muscles in stripes of bright yellow and dark red. Her pale face was painted with green triangles in twin circles around her eyes, and black paint rimmed with white obscured her lips in a drooping frown that reached her jawline. A bright red, curly wig covered her real hair.
The world knew her as Giggles, a serial killer that patterned her profile after murderous clowns, but I once knew her as Stacy Kaebrenner, a brown haired girl with sad smiles and quick wits. She never smiled now, and her wit only told jokes that killed.
The two men in the glass hopped from one slow roasting bare foot to the other. The taller man with balding blonde hair was a famous director, and the other, squat man with curly brown hair was a producer he often worked with. They both wore black pants with white buttoned shirts, but they had been stripped of their shoes, socks, belts, ties, and coats before being dropped unconscious into the glass chimney. They had been abducted from the after party celebrating their new movie based on a murderous clown.
The director’s sweaty face turned to Giggles with open mouth despair, and he tried to beg his way out. “Please, don’t do this. I know what this is about. Y-You didn’t like the movie we made about you.”
Giggles sat forward as she snapped, “You think I’m as simple as all that?” She paused to take a drag from her vape and let the sweet smelling smoke flow out of her nostrils. With an emotionless face, she declared, “I didn’t like any of your movies.”
The producer leapt at the glass and screamed, “Let us out, you crazy skank!” He winced as one foot crossed into the slowly growing circle of red hot metal, and he pulled it back to the edge.
“Skank,” Giggles repeated softly. “You would know about that. You combed through my old life for any detail you could use emphasizing the mental and physical abuse I endured and the drugs I used to numb my pain. I don’t resent you for that, though. It’s a relevant part of my story. What I despise is that you used all that to tell a story that wasn’t even about me. It was about your greed and lust for celebrity status.”
The director stammered, “W-We had to change part of the details. The movie was only based on you. Your real story was too dark to put on screen for a broader audience.”
“My mother was not my abuser!” Giggles screeched, standing from her chair and stepping closer. “She was another victim of the real villains, my father and uncle. They used me and sold me, just like you did, cheap.” She took another drag and blew it onto the glass.
“Please!” the director begged again, slobber dripping down his chin. “We’ll sign over the rights of the script to you! We’ll take the movie off the market, anything! Let us out!” Another sizzle prompted him to shift his feet again. The bright red circle in the metal had almost reached the edge of the glass.
Giggles told him, “Instead of worrying about what you did wrong, you might want to think about what you can do right in this situation. I put the two of you in there for a purpose. There’s no reason you both must suffer. If one of you stands on the other, you could get some relief from the heat.”
With wild eyes the director and producer looked at each other and leapt into a clawing grapple. After a brief struggle, the producer was thrown face down on the glowing metal, screaming as the director hopped onto his back and landed on his knees, holding his shirt. Convulsing from the burning pain, the producer shook so much that the director fell off, yelping and writhing on the searing metal. Dark puffs of smoke obscured the two twitching men, and the smell of cooking meat turned my stomach with disgust. The producer stopped moving first, but the director lay still soon after.
Staring at the charring bodies, she giggled again and turned back to me. Squinting with suspicion, she asked, “Were you looking at my butt?”
The question caught me off guard. Normally seeing a woman in a tight outfit like hers would draw my gaze to her feminine parts, but thinking of Giggles in any kind of sexual way seemed perverse. I answered honestly, “No. I was watching the . . . glass.”
Without a glimmer of affection, she shook her head. “Good old Jerry. You were the only male I ever got close to that didn’t even try to pull down my pants.”
I nodded, hoping to bring up some brighter memories from our childhood. “I loved you as my friend.”
She nodded back. “I loved you too. That’s why you have to die. I need to rid myself of any emotional attachment to this world, and you’re the last piece.”
I started to tremble. I knew she was not bluffing. “You don’t have to kill me. I haven’t seen you in twenty years. We can just go back to not being in each other’s lives. We can remember each other for how we used to be.”
She pointed at me with the vape. “That’s exactly the point. My old family is gone, I never had any other friends, and I put great effort into burning and deleting any record of my past. You, my former compadre, are all that remains to tie to me that pathetic creature I used to be.” She spun to face the glass cage again and held out her arms in delight. Flames had sprouted from the dead men’s clothes, wreathing her in a soft glow. “This is my new life! Showing the world how it really is, pain and misery with no escape. The most we can do is throw someone else on the fire so we can stand on their back and keep from burning just a little bit longer. I could have just shot those two twerps or blown them up in front of their pathetic fan base. This is so much better. This is my death art!”
While she ranted, I did look at her rear end, round and shapely like a gymnast with thick thighs to match. I could not help it; she had put the idea in my mind. Still my thoughts of her were not sexual. It was more like admiring a dangerous animal.
She twirled back around to stare at me with feverish intensity. “And each work of death art is a temporary thing. The police will dismantle this glass case after they find it to scoop out the remains. It’s a true expression of my creativity, like a snowflake that only lasts until it hits the ground, and then is absorbed into the mush.”
I looked at her face with its painted on frown, glimpsing through the insanity a resemblance of the girl I used to know. Did she have any humanity left to appeal to? I tried once more, “Look, Stacy . . . “
Giggles snarled as she pointed the pistol at me. “Do not say that name again! That’s why you’re here. You know me as that other one, the one I no longer am. You will be the second part of this elaborate display of death art, Two Follies. The first folly was those two thinking they could profit by mocking me. The second folly is you, stubbornly refusing to see me as I am. Bruiser, Crusher, put him in the hallway.”
From behind me came her two enforcers, twins of wide girth. I saw them as women from their bulbous breasts and wide hips, but their brutish faces and blonde crew cuts could have been put on a man’s head without any question of their belonging. They were not dressed in clown attire as Giggles was. They only wore plain, dark grey dresses that reached down past their knees. Like their mistress, they did not smile at all. One put her wide hands on my shoulders to hold me still while the other bent down, grunting as she unlocked my chain from the floor bolt. I had not been properly introduced when they abducted me, and I had no idea which was which.
Leaving the smoking glass case behind, the twins took me to a door set in a wood paneled wall. The one that unlocked me carried the chain in her hand, while the other kept a tight grip on my shoulder. Through the door was a long hallway with a set of railings down the center and at this end a cart with metal wheels sat on the rails. Lining the rails were piles of old magazines, newspapers, and dead leaves. That barely held my attention, though. Decorating the walls were life-sized pictures of a naked girl, brown haired and thin with abrasions over her arms and legs. I recognized her immediately. Tears began to run down my cheeks at the despondent expression captured in those images.
“You like them?” Giggles asked as she stepped up next to me.
“Of course not!” I cried, turning away from the tragic display of innocence destroyed.
“You never got to see me like this, huh? These are the pictures my father used to advertise me. Of course, he and his brother had already broken me in by then. Taught me everything I needed to know about how to please a man.” She leaned close and giggled in my ear. “I caught up to them a few years back. Whew, you should have seen what I did to them. It wasn’t nearly as quick and clean as what those twerps got tonight. That was a private showing, though. Not even Bruiser and Crusher were in on that one.” She stepped back and took another drag on her vape as she pointed the gun at me. “Lock him in.”
One of the twins directed me to sit in the cart while the other locked my chain to a bolt on the rim.
“You should have burned those pictures,” I told Giggles, unwilling to look back at those horrible images.
She nodded. “Oh, I’m going to. These are the last copies. They burn tonight, and you with them.”
The thought of burning alive nauseated me. I tried to keep my mind off the charred smell and the screams of agony I was subjected to only minutes before. My imminent demise emboldened me to challenge her twisted view.
I stood up in the cart to face her. “I’m glad you killed your abusers, but why me? What did I do? I was good to you.”
Giggles nodded vigorously, shaking her red wig. “I told you, that’s exactly why. You were good to me. The only real friend I ever had. I used to dream about running away with you. Sometimes I would fantasize that we would fall in love, sometimes not, but I knew with you I would always be safe. I can’t think about that anymore. It’s not a safe world.” She looked around with empty eyes, and pointed at the pictures with her vape. “Tonight, this girl disappears forever.”
Turning to her twin enforcers, she told them, “I’m going to get some scoops of charcoal. Stay with him.”
Giggles left the hall through the door, leaving it open. From one pocket a twin brought out a phone, vibrating from some message. After glancing at the lighted screen, she held it up for the other one to see, who nodded. The first twin stepped to the side and began to punch a number into the screen, then put it to her ear.
When she spoke, she had a remarkably high pitched voice. “Yeah, I’m calling about the reward for Giggles. I saw her with those two men she kidnapped at a warehouse on Rung Street. Yeah, I’m here, you can track my phone to this location.”
I asked the closer twin, “What is she doing?”
With a snide look, she answered in an identical voice to her sister. “We’re selling that crazy skank out. The reward is a million dollars now that she abducted those two famous guys. Helping someone kill people doesn’t pay near enough. Hang tight and you’ll live through this.”
Her sister slipped the still active phone back in her pocket. “Are you kidding? He can identify us as her co-conspirators. No, he still has to die, Crusher.”
Crusher looked back at me. “Oh, sorry.”
I saw a chance to save myself and took it. “Giggles, they called the cops!”
Without hesitation Crusher swung a burly fist into my face, knocking me back down into the cart. With my head swirling from the blow, I looked up to see Giggles standing in the doorway, holding a shovel with a pile of glowing charcoal briquets.
“Good old Jerry. Still my only friend.”
Bruiser stepped towards her, but Giggles slung the lit briquets into her face. Squealing in pain, she fell back against Crusher as Giggles slammed the door shut.
Helping her sister brush glowing charcoal from her face and clothes, she asked me, “Why did you say that? Now she’s going to kill all three of us.”
I felt blood flowing down my chin from my busted nose. “I’ve got nothing to lose here!” I croaked at her.
In reply Bruiser kicked the cart I was locked to, sending me rolling down the hallway. Working together, the twins bashed their way through the door. I heard four gunshots in rapid succession, but it hardly mattered. Whoever survived, they were not going to unchain me and let me go. Then I heard a sound much more relevant to my situation, the sound of crackling flames. I looked over the edge of the cart and some of the lit briquets had landed on the piles of magazines, setting them ablaze. It did not take long for the fire to spread and the hall to fill with smoke. Thankfully, I asphyxiated before the flames ever touched me.
I always ended the story the same way too. “And that’s how I died and ended up haunting this burned out warehouse.”
My friend nodded. “Oh, yeah. Now I remember. I was there too.”
“You were?” I turned and looked at her face with the triangles around her eyes and the frown painted over her mouth, red wig still hiding her natural brown hair. “That’s right. Now I remember. Hey, how did you die?”
Giggles’ ghost sighed before she answered. “The cops shot me.”
By Aaron Ward
Published by Aaron Ward
Copyright 2024 Aaron Ward
Edition, License Notes
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Original Literature 