It was deja vu. He had just walked down this damn hallway without making a sound, or at least had made an attempt not to. He approached the top of the stairs and began his descent to the small landing before he would step down into the living room once more, chasing ghosts that breed off of the storm and their fears. Hesitating for a few seconds at the landing, Justin looked for anything out of the ordinary, before walking into it like he did earlier. As he stood there, straining to see into the black pit below him, he bent down to see beyond the overhang that had blocked his view. Lightening flashed at the key moment and gave him his first real taste of the deep pit of fear that gnaws at everybody’s stomachs and forces our hearts to beat against our chest cavities like Morocco drums.

A shadow, that may be confused at first with a plant or anything else sane, was lurking behind the kitchen wall leading into the living area and house’s foyer. It was of what appeared to be a large figure of a person and to his shock, an instrument or tool of some sort that bore a long wide width and pointed angle held in its grasp. Justin’s eyes got wide as he focused on the thing in the person’s hand long enough to determine it appeared to be a big motherfucking knife, like a machete.

“...oh my good God...” Justin whispered under a scared breathing pattern. He watched as the figure hiding there had somehow sensed he was watching that very spot, because it peeked around the corner of the wall divider, straight into Justin’s oval-shaped eyeballs and buried deep into his very soul. Justin saw the glint of the blade it held and it was what he feared as he noticed the dark figure staring at him through what he thought was a full face gas mask... the very type he told his girl about in the mass murderer tale. “...son-of-a-bitch...” He tried to keep quiet as he bolted up the stairs to the second floor, uncaring that the maniac below him started for the same stairs.

Backing up the hallway with his hockey stick firmly in both hands now, Justin began to sweat as his heart went into overtime. From his view of the top of the stairs, he watched as the figure ascended in an eerie silence, except for the creaking of the stairway and the occasional flash of lightening and thunder that did nothing to change the situation he found himself a part of. Frantic to escape from what he perceived as a threat, Justin rushed to the bedroom door once more and opened it as he felt the person in the mask rushing to greet him from behind. Stepping into his room, he ignored his girl long enough to slam the wooden door in whatever face it was.

Justin quickly locked the door and backed away from it as she got to her feet as well. “We... we have to call the police!!” She ddidn’t question him as she grabbed the phone receiver near his bedside, knocking the lamp over that sat on the table there and frantically began to dial 911.

She listened for a dial tone after nothing happened and heard only dead silence coming from the line. “It’s... it’s dead...” She began to cry as she dropped it and allowed the receiver to dangle off the side of the bedside table to the floor. Unknown to them both, the maniac that wanted to stop by and say hello, had already taken the liberty of severing the phone line that ran alongside of the house with one direct blow of a machete blade, cutting them off from the rest of the world.

“Dead!!” He spit out as he tried to reason of what to do. “What do you mean, dead!?” Before she could answer, his bedroom door knob began to rattle with an attempt to turn as the person outside tried to get in and found the door secure. As soon as it happened, it seemed to be over. The door knob stopped trying to turn and there was silence replacing the last several seconds of chaos and disorder.

Justin approached the locked door and slid down on one knee as he tried to see the person on the other side through the keyhole below the door knob, but saw nothing standing there. Getting back to his feet, he leaned in and placed an ear against the imitation wood grain door to try and pick up any sort of activity going on. As he did, he let out a one word scream. “SHIT!” He allowed it to flow out from his mouth in surprise once the paper-thin hollow door lost a piece of its interior as the machete blade was sliced through it just as an ax would. Any moment now, Justin was sure that the Joker himself was going to press his face up against the splintered grain and retort, ‘Here’s Johnny!’, but he didn’t. The tip just missed his ear and slid into the room’s interior, almost kissing the bridge of his nose. His eyes got wide as he pulled away from the blade that remained there for a second, before it withdrew back out into the hallway. Before he could think, the door buckled slightly from weight placed upon it from the other side. The psycho was trying to bust the door down with his shoulder blade by ramming it full force.

“SHIT-SHIT-SHIT!!!” Justin screamed over and over again as his girl joined in on trying to stop the murder or murders that were surely about to take place.

“LEAVE US ALONE!!” She screamed in rhythm with Justin as she backed against the window, with her hands covering her ears this time, to drive the sound of particle board breaking, away. The hinges on the door frame began to creak and twist as the maniac continued to try and push the door in on itself and gain entry.

Justin looked left and right and noticed the window. It was their only chance now he thought as he pointed towards it and shouted for his girlfriend to unlatch it. “OUT THERE! NOW!!” They both moved to the window and lifted it from its place, awarding their efforts with a gust of wind and rain that drenched them. Justin knocked the screen loose as the door continued to break inward. Instinctually, he started to help her out of their only escape route when the door finally gave way. Justin spun around to find the figure standing there in the doorway with the biggest damn knife he had ever seen in his life. “FUCK!” He shouted in both disgust and fear as he managed to avoid the psycho’s machete as it was brought down and connected with the window sill, just missing Justin’s girlfriend as well. Forgetting about her for a second, Justin dodged to the left and pulled back a fist to clobber the asshole, but managed to connect with air only. His girlfriend meanwhile, pulled herself back into the room and slid down onto her butt against the baseboard just under the open window.

Justin grabbed his hockey stick and tried to pull it back for leverage, managing to hit a hanging mobile in one corner of the room as the psycho took the time granted to him to loosen the blade from the wooden flesh of the window long enough to bring it back around to Justin. He pulled back and stabbed with its blade into Justin’s right arm that caused him to drop the hockey stick to the bedroom floor as the agony of the wound burned through him. His girl, who was far into hysterics, was still able to crawl over behind the figure in black and fetch Justin’s lost hockey stick as she got back to her feet.

Justin fell against one wall, bleeding from his injury as he looked into the mask of the mad man who was raising his machete up as if to hack Justin with it in one death blow. Justin watched in both disbelief and gratitude as his girlfriend swung the hockey stick around like he had tried to do and connected with it up against the psycho’s head, shattering the stick into two splintered pieces of wood. The curved head flew across the room and dropped to the floor as she continued to hold onto the longer staff on the other end for a second before she discarded it and rushed to the busted in bedroom door that led into the hallway. “COME ON JUSTIN!! COME ON!!” She insisted as the maniac lost his grip on the machete and it fell to the floor and became lost in the mess that covered most of it. The maniac staggered about, trying to orient himself as Justin began to regain his strength.

“YOU SON-OF-A-FUCKING-BITCH!!” He screamed as he took his uninjured arm and swung it back to punch the living daylights out of the intruder that appeared drunk on his feet, but was lost in a daze from being hit by the hockey stick. Justin lost his footing and fell to one knee, shattering his kneecap as he hit. A God awful moan sounded from his lips as he tried to fight the pain that shot through his nerves and up into his brain.

That was just enough time for the maniac to find the broken hockey stick lying at his feet. Forgetting about his blade or where to even look for it, he bent down and plucked the stick from the carpet that began to get bloody from their struggle. Through his intense agony and discomfort, Justin screamed for his girlfriend to get out of the house, to run. “GET OUT!! RUN!!!” It was some of the last words he said as he managed to pull himself back up to his full height by cradling the wall behind him with his back and crept up its surface. In one almost effortless thrust, the killer plunged the sharp, broken end of the hockey stick up into Justin’s stomach and past his pink internal guts before it lodged deep inside of him with part of it coming in contact with the wall beyond his cloth and flesh. “I... I just made it up... the killer in the story was just a... a... it was just a story...” A low gurgle followed by a tinkle of blood came from one corner of his mouth and seeped down his throat as death spasms claimed his body.

In a moment’s time, his fingers stopped twitching and his eyes became dead stares as the killer let go of the stick to allow Justin’s body to slump down to the floor, further impaling him onto the protruding wood that was sticking out of his body. Appearing a little disappointed that his suffering was not prolonged, the psychopathic killer turned to the girl that still stood frozen in the doorway, unmoving and in shock that her boyfriend was now a piece of meat on a stick.