Sam and Colby: The House

28

"Here, can I get on your shoulders?" I asked Colby.

                "Yeah, of course," he replied, stooping down so I could climb up onto him. I got onto his shoulders, having to slouch so that my head wouldn't hit the ceiling.

                "Let's just go to this corner closest to the doorframe, I guess," I said, pointing at the corner nearest the water stain. Colby carried me over and I got to work scratching at the paper. Contact paper was of course thicker and stronger than normal paper, but some classic wear and tear would break it down pretty easily. I scraped at it for a minute, my acrylic nails helping the process since their material was a little stronger than the keratin composing my fingernails.

                I finally wore through the paper, the waxy sealing deteriorating enough for the paper fibers to thin and fall onto the floor in little clumps. I kept scratching until I felt my nails hit the actual ceiling, which was painted a bright red color.

                "Hm. Well that's a paint choice. Shit looks like blood," Jake said.

                "Yeah, it really does," I said. I kept working at the corner of the ceiling until I was finally able to peel off a piece that I could grab and rip off in a big sheet. We all spent the next twenty minutes standing on things or lifting each other up to peel off the entire massive sheet of paper expertly and flawlessly applied to the ceiling. The edges were all painted that same deep red, but as we got closer to the center, the red seemed to take on an ombre style and fade into some lighter pinks.

                "Is this like, a painting up here?" asked Corey.

                "No," Sam said. I looked up as he ripped off the final sheet of paper from the ceiling. "It's a... an inventory list? A reminder?"

                I hopped off of the dresser I'd been crouching on and walked over next to Sam and stared up at what he saw. We all went silent for a few minutes, staring up at the terrifying ceiling.

                Painted on the ceiling were three women. One of them had a perfectly normal left half while their right half was completely slack and drooping.

                "That's his mom. She died from a stroke," I said, pointing up at it. The second woman had a hammer in her hand, but she was only drawn from the waist up. "And that's Bernice Worden. She was a hardware store owner and he sawed off her bottom half." The last was a painting of a woman with a bullet hole in her chest and her face missing, a bottle of booze in her hand. "And that'd be Mary Hogan. Tavern owner he killed."

                "Where's her face?" asked Jake.

                "In an evidence room somewhere," I said. "Dude cut it off and turned it into a mask. He never wore her face, though. He just kept it around the house. He did wear his mother's face, though," I said.

                "What the fuck!" Corey said.

                "He cut his mom's face off and turned it into a mask that he then wore around?" Sam asked.

                "Yup. And he made a skin suit from women's bodies that he wore around, too," I said.

                "I thought he only killed the two people," Corey said.

                "Oh, no. The police could only identify and prove the two people. But they found so many body parts and stuff that there's no way he only killed two people," I said.

                "What, so police just ignored all of these missing women cases and didn't put two and two together that Gein was probably hoarding their bodies for sport?" Colby asked. I shrugged.