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"Okay then," the young man turned to the "coffin maker." "Let's consider that you almost frightened us. Now where did you put that guy after all?"

"I am afraid that he has gone," the “coffin maker” made a helpless gesture with an apologetic smile. "This happens sometimes."

"What do you mean by 'has gone?' Where has he gone?"

"It is a cave of horror, you know. Sometimes people don't come back from there. Especially if the car detaches or gets trapped in the tunnel."

"Bravo!" derisively praised Jane. "'Never break character,' huh?"

The "coffin maker" smiled again, this time silently.

"I don't like all this," Mike muttered.

"Chuck it, Mikey!" the girl exclaimed. "The guy is a shill, don't you understand? He probably exited through a back door. Or stayed inside, quickly put on makeup, and will frighten us now as a 'blood-stained corpse.' A clever idea," she praised the “coffin maker.” "I've seen 'rooms of horror' with live actors, but never those who pretend to be casual visitors."

The worker continued smiling silently.

"Yes, but I don't want to ruin my clothes with that mess," Mike nodded at the "blood-stained" car.

"Do not worry about it," hastily said the “coffin maker.” "We will clean it up. And you meanwhile please sit down in the forward car."

Jane didn't make the worker ask her twice and stepped over a low board. Mike willy-nilly sat beside her. The "coffin maker" lowered the safety bar which latched and pressed them into their seats, as if they were going to ride on steep hills instead of a flat floor.

"Don't try to stand up or to grab anything during move
ment. Inside it is forbidden to take photos or to make other records," he warned them and turned the knife switch. The car lurched forward, having unmercifully jarred the passengers, and several seconds later dived into thick darkness.

At first they moved in total darkness and silence; the si
lence was unnaturally dense, wadded, absorbing even the sound of the electric motor. Then suddenly from the darkness ahead a desperate shriek came, this time female; now both Jane and Mike shuddered. Almost immediately from somewhere at the left a groan full of pain and hopeless despair responded to it; it slowly faded away and then on the right someone moaned as if trying to beg for something through a gag–probably, it was a very young girl... or even a child? And then Mike smelled a heavy, sticky stench and at the next moment–still in the same utter darkness–his face plunged into something like a dense web.

Mike had arachnophobia since his childhood and would rather have put his bare hand into a dirty toilet bowl than touch a web; his throat immediately spasmed in disgust and he desper
ately jerked his head, trying to escape from the nasty thing. As if having caught this movement, the car abruptly stopped, then rolled back a bit and stopped again. At the next instant a bright flash lit up what they had just ridden into.

And it was not a web.

Over the rails a long-ago decayed and dried-out corpse hung heels over head; most likely it was a women, or maybe a young girl–at such stage of decomposition it was difficult to discern an age. In any case, the victim had once had magnificent, voluminous, and long hair. Now only thin, fragile locks covered with dust remained; that was "the web." The victim was tied by barbed wire which deeply gnawed into the decayed flesh; here and there yellowed bones showed through ruptures in the browned skin. But the most terrible was the overturned face covered with a wrinkled parchment of dried-out skin: the mouth, open in a silent scream, showed rotten jaws; in place of the decomposed nose, there was a triangular hole divided by a vertical partition; gaping eye sockets resembled nibbled burrows. And the main thing, everywhere–in the mouth, in the nose, in the eye sockets—writhed small white worms. The head actually swarmed with them.

Yes, they weren't just motionless fake worms as it would be natural for a dummy. They were
moving
–in those three or four seconds when the light shone, Mike and Jane saw this clearly. And then the car jerked forward again, and they had to pass through
her
hair once more, now seeing distinctly what it was. And, no matter how they tried to turn their heads away, the dusty locks touched their faces again (mostly Mike's; Jane was only lightly brushed on her cheek). And then the light went out again.

From somewhere of the cave depths new groans sounded.

"Damn"... murmured Jane in the gloom while the car carried them further. "You were right, we shouldn't have..."

Someone's cold and wet hand touched her shoulder. The girl screamed. And the other hand at the same time touched Mike's shoulder.

The car stopped again and then suddenly turned in place–obviously, here the rails passed through a turntable. Again a directional light flashed, pulling out from the darkness what they had just disturbed.

It was a corpse, too, but this time, seemingly, male (though its back was turned to them, so it was difficult to say with full confidence) and not dried out but, on the contrary, inflated. The dead person had been rather fat even during his lifetime, but now his swollen body covered with cadaveric lividities and, ap
parently, ready to burst and splash out the purulent swill which had accumulated under its skin, looked especially disgusting. It was also suspended heels over head–or, more exactly, heels over neck, because the head was absent. Two meat hooks, hanging down from a ceiling on long chains, pierced its ankles from behind, having snagged the sinews. The dead man hung on these sinews stretched from its flesh by the weight of the bulky body like on terrible slings and long stains of dried-up blood–extending from the hooks covered with brown crust down along his legs which were like huge sausages–showed that he had been still alive when his flesh had been pierced.

His hands, which had touched Mike and Jane, still slightly waved, weaker and weaker. Then they stopped. The car stayed motionless, too. Then the light again went out.

"Move, damn it... " Mike murmured. As if having heard him, the car began to vibrate slightly–and suddenly the motor died again with an unpleasant metal clang. A clear smell of burned insulation added to the cadaveric stench. Engine failure? As if that wasn't enough!

"Hey!" the young man shouted into the darkness. "Hey, there's a problem! Get us out of here!"

The light flashed, lighting up again the headless body hanging ahead of them, absolutely motionless. And suddenly the hands of the cadaver stretched to the terror-numbed passengers, blindly rummaging in the air and narrowly missing their faces. From somewhere above came a grinding noise and the chains shook and began to move, dragging the ugly hulk even closer...

Jane recoiled, then tried to jump out of the stuck car, but the tightly fastened safety bar, as durable as on "Sky Ship," held her to the seat. Mike hammered his fist on the metal nose of the car as if hoping to jolt the motor to life. Certainly, it was useless. But when the hands of the corpse were just about to touch them, gear wheels clanged above, pulling the chains up and the body crept upward, still clenching and unclenching its fingers in vain attempts to seize the people remaining below. Right then the turntable turned the car again and the recovered motor carried them forward.

Only now Mike realized how fast his heart was beating. "Phew, nonsense!" he confoundedly thought. "After all it's just a doll! Very realistic, but..."

Actually, exactly these attempts of "the cadaver" to seize them should have acted to calm him at once. A headless body can't wave hands. At least, not at this stage of decomposition. So, all this is not real. To tell the truth, after the first corpse he had subconscious doubts–that body looked so... natural...

But the stench? Obviously, also a trick. As well as the smell of the burned insulation, intended to convince them that the motor was malfunctioning.

The darkness was pierced by screams again, this time a man's, and light appeared left ahead–not bright white but dim crimson. The light came from a niche inlaid with stones; the car passed it by at reduced speed, but this time without stopping, and the passengers saw a scene which probably represented a torture chamber of the Middle Ages. An emaciated man was stretched on a vertical rack and the executioner, naked from the waist up and in a round red cap hiding his face, methodically ripped off the prisoner's skin with big pincers. And it wasn't a static scene at all... The head of the unfortunate man was already skinned com
pletely, having become a wet-gleaming crimson globe; Mike saw in horror how the absolutely round eyes, deprived of eyelids, were moving in eye-sockets, watching the passing car; from a lipless mouth, together with shouts, blood splashed out–apparently, the man's tongue had been ripped out. The executioner meanwhile flayed the victim's hand, pulling the skin off like a long glove. When the car had almost passed by, the executioner momentarily interrupted his business, suddenly turned back and waved to the passengers with the pincers. Jane screamed, having realized that his red cap actually was the skin just ripped off the head of the victim and turned inside out...

Again they moved in complete darkness with an accom
paniment of screams and moans; then from the right, very close to them, came a sound like a dental drill. But, when black curtains opened near the car, it appeared to be a much larger tool.

A young man, probably even a teenager, was nailed to a wooden cross. More precisely, not even nailed. Screwed. He got more than Christ: in his arms and legs not less than two dozen huge screws were fastened. And the one who did it–a well-fed man in blood-splashed coveralls–wasn't going to stop: at that mo
ment he used an electric drill to bore the victim's knee caps. The victim couldn't even shout: a wooden gag was hammered into his mouth and fixed with nails through his bottom jaw.

The car moved further. A new scene: a kitchen table covered with a cheerful cloth, to which a heavily pregnant young woman was tied by thin wire which ripped the skin of her wrists and ankles. Her bottom jaw was completely torn off; the fallen-out tongue–unexpectedly big from the point of view of those who have never seen before a human tongue
as a whole
–resembled a fat dead mollusk. And a slovenly hairy and bearded man furiously used a long, sharp-ended kitchen knife to stab, stab, stab her huge pregnant belly. With each blow, from the torn-apart hole which once was the woman's mouth a blood clot splashed out. But this was not the most terrible. It was clearly visible as under the skin of her belly, tightly straining it now here, then there, large bulges convulsively moved. The fetus was still alive–though, in principle, even a single stab should have been fatal–and each time when the knife pierced in, the fetus writhed and wriggled. Now a hand, then a foot stretched the mother's belly so much that it appeared just about to burst–especially taking into account that it already had cuts which drew as crimson holes; and at the moment when the car started moving again, Mike distinctly saw through the skin the features of a face with a wide-open mouth, pressing from within...

Nausea was rising to his throat, but the young man still couldn't look away. When they dived into darkness again, Mike closed his eyes and decided not to open them till the exit. But when almost at his ear a strange sucking-squelching sound was heard, he couldn't restrain himself and looked.

At first the beam of light was very narrow, and Mike saw only a tender girl's belly, pierced by a steel spike. This way the girl was nailed to a concrete column. Sweat flowed down her pale skin, mixing with blood below the spike. Then the beam slipped up, and the passengers of the car saw why the victim could neither scream nor even groan: her mouth and nostrils were tightly sewn up with rough thread. In order to let the unfortunate being breathe, her throat was pierced by a tube, like for a tracheotomy; this tube was the source of that sound. She began to breathe faster when she saw that the car stopped very close to her; her eyes looked at Mike and Jane with entreaty. It seemed to Mike, according to the movement of her shoulders, that she tried to stretch hands to them... and then the beam became wider, and the passengers of the car saw with shudder that she had no hands. Her right arm was chopped off almost up to the shoulder, the left one–a little above the elbow. Her legs had been cut asymmetrically as well–only there the longest stump was the right one, reaching the knee. The skin on the ends of the stumps was pulled together by the same rough thread. The victim stretched the remnants of her limbs in a vain attempt to touch Jane who was sitting closer to her; Jane involuntarily recoiled as far as the narrow car allowed. However, the stumps lacked several inches of reaching her anyway.

And then steps were heard from behind. Someone ap
proached in a shuffling plod. Mike and Jane turned their heads round. At first they could not discern anything; then in the gloom a bulky silhouette appeared. From somewhere below smoldering crimson light beamed up; the face of the figure remained shadowed, but it was possible to clearly distinguish heavy boots, dirty jeans under an apron (once white, now covered with brown spots) and, the main thing, an ax on a long handle at the end of a brawny arm. An ax from which something seeming almost black in such lighting was dripping...

Strangely enough, seeing this person who was without any haste approaching the motionless car, Mike felt calmer again. A maniac with an ax, what a trite cliche... they could think up some
thing more original... He looked at the heavy figure with a smile, even when the latter came very close and brought his ax over his head...