Spooky Stacks: Four Horror Tales

  * * *

  Daylight.

  The house and immediate vicinity was crawling with cops and evidence techs. The authorities had been summoned by the concerned night manager of a Pizza Zone restaurant. One of their delivery boys had gone out on a run last night and never returned.

  Detective Mitch Roth suspected no one would ever see the pizza boy again. He was officially missing, but he had a feeling his body would be discovered in a ditch or ravine sometime in the coming hours.

  He leaned against the archway leading into the blood-splattered living room.

  He was trying to stay out of the way of the evidence techs--Lord knew they had their hands full with this one.

  He heard footsteps on the hardwood floor behind him.

  Detective Cooper moved into his field of vision. “Looks like some shit out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

  Roth nodded. “Yeah, what they did to the one guy, the big one in the leather pants...you just don’t want to believe people capable of sick shit like that are out there.”

  Cooper grunted. “You know they are, Mitch. The world’s fulla scum.”

  One of the evidence techs gagged behind his mask.

  Another tech leaned over his shoulder, grimaced at what he saw, and looked at the detectives. “You guys should see this.”

  Roth and Cooper exchanged wary glances.

  Both men started moving toward the techs.

  The first tech said, “Careful where you step. Stay off the marked areas.”

  Roth said, “So what is it?”

  They were looking at a pizza box.

  The lid was emblazoned with the familiar red and green Pizza Zone logo. Someone had scrawled PEEK-A-BOO across it in big letters with a marker.

  A tech lifted the lid.

  Cooper shuddered.

  Roth could barely breathe. “Oh...Jesus...”

  The remains of a barely-eaten pizza were at the bottom of the box. Stretched from crust to crust was something that resembled a mask.

  Except it wasn’t.

  Cooper said, “It’s the big guy’s face.”

  There was more.

  Two bloody orbs that had to be eyeballs had rolled into the corners of the box.

  Roth couldn’t suppress what happened next. He upchucked all over the box and coffee table, tainting a shitload of evidence and soiling his new suit.

  He tendered his resignation later that afternoon.