Hall of Horror

Killing was more than an occupation for Wolf, it was a passion. It was an art that could be refined over time with experience to the perfect point akin to how a whetstone sharpened a blade. To be honest, his name wasn’t actually Wolf, it was Otto, but ‘Otto’ didn’t inspire the same fear and respect in the public’s heart as ‘Wolf’ did. 

Just think about it! ‘Wolf’ inspires thoughts of feral, blood-thirsty beasts tearing hunks of flesh off the bone with no remorse or humanity getting in the way of the gruesome killing sure to come. ‘Otto’, on the other hand, sounds like the son of a potato-farming German peasant (which he most secretly was not). Maybe an argument could be made for Otto being a crazed butcher’s name at best, but no. 

He would never get that first impression of horror when he grunted out “Wolf” when his victims asked in terror for the name of the man about to kill them. Not to mention how the newspapers just ate up how he signed the ‘o’ of Wolf with a paw print, in glistening red ink, of course. 

His taunting letters and his victims’ family members’ tearful statements dominated the front page of most major newspapers in his heyday. They even started giving out warnings at the end of radio programs in his active areas to not invite strangers into their home for fear it was really a ‘Wolf in sheep’s clothing’ they were unwittingly allowing inside.

Even with the warnings in his active areas, which he affectionately referred to as his ‘hunting grounds’, he never had a problem finding a victim. He had even heard his warning playing on the radio, turned down to a whisper when some old dear bustled over to the door to answer his knock. Sometimes he would see the newspapers with printed copies of his boastful, taunting letters opened and lying discarded on the table as they sat him down to offer him a drink. 

No, finding a victim was never a problem for him. He was just that kind of guy when he played the role of Otto, the friendly German immigrant. He just had to flash his charming smile and meld himself into whatever type of person the victim answering the door wanted him to be. He would say whatever he needed to to be invited inside; knowing what to say was part of the art of killing, and he had, in his professional opinion, perfected his art. 

He could claim he had a car breakdown, say he just needed to use the telephone, he was a traveling salesman, imply they won a contest of some kind, or say he was looking for work. He was occasionally unsuccessful, it was true, but that was the joy of the hunt. He would simply try another door, and one thing was guaranteed: On the nights Wolf was on the prowl there would be killing. 

It was true, every waking thought of Wolf’s had to do with the death and dying of his fellow man in some capacity. It was his passion, his art, his professional interest, his very reason for being. For someone who spent so much time and effort on the subject he put shockingly little thought into his own death. He hadn’t really been concerned about it at the time, he simply felt as though he was put on this earth to kill as many as possible for as long as he could. 

The lack of planning on the nature of his own death was a shocking oversight. He realized this as he lay bleeding in an alley, looking up at the fading night’s stars. The sound of sirens was wavering in and out as he began to lose consciousness. His clothing felt damp with the hot blood gushing out of the multiple bullet wounds peppering his chest and abdomen. The year was 1923.

He tried to breathe in a last lungful of cool night’s air but it leaked out of the innumerable holes in his chest, his last breath frothing and bubbling the blood saturating his shirt. There was no pain, that sensation had tapered off a few seconds ago. He waited for the last rush of his life flashing before his eyes he was promised but it never came. 

That disappointed him more than dying, to be honest. He had been looking forward to briefly reliving his favorite kills one last time. Everything faded to black and he felt a sensation of dropping out of his own body. He faintly wondered if he was descending into hell, but couldn’t really bring himself to care in his wounded state. The next thing he knew he was seated in a chair staring back at a figure shrouded in a black hood.

“So are you Death?” Wolf asked the figure before they could speak for themself. 

It wasn’t really a question; he could tell perfectly whom it was that he looked at. He stared at Death openly, not worrying if he would offend the creature. It was not like he had anything to lose anyway. He was already dead. He tried to discern a gender out of the hooded figure but found he could not. Death was neither a man nor a woman, they were just a thing to him. 

“You have given me a fair amount of business, Otto,” Death stated, not answering his question. Wolf felt a pang of annoyance at being addressed by his birth name. 

“It’s actually Wolf,” Wolf said in a tone of confidence. The hooded head cocked to the side as Death considered him. He felt his confidence wavering under Death’s gaze. It was hard to gauge the time as it passed in this strange room but after a length of not speaking he relented. “O-Otto is fine,” he stammered. “It doesn’t really matter, does it?” he asked, grappling for a hint of his prior bravado, trying to put on a casually disinterested expression.

“I hand-pick certain souls out of the chaos of the void, interrupting their cycle of reincarnation to bring them to this room.” 

“So, were the Buddists right after all, then?” Otto asked. 

“None of them were right,” Death responded. Otto looked around the room. The ceiling, walls, and floor were all white. The lack of variance made his eyes start to water a bit, they didn’t have anything to focus on except for Death’s hooded figure before him. 

“So you are a fan of my work, then?” Otto asked with a cocky grin. 

“Few have killed as many as you,” Death stated. “Precious few. I have an offer for you which will allow you to keep killing.” 

“I accept,” Otto said automatically. Death appeared taken aback at this, which pleased Otto immensely. 

“Do you not wish to hear the details?” Death asked, their voice barely a whisper behind that hooded cloak.

“A deal with the Devil is kind of my style, and I get to keep killing? What else is there to be said?” Otto asked, his tone oozing arrogance. 

“I am not the Devil. I am Death. There’s a subtle difference.”

“The difference doesn’t matter to me,” Otto said. 

“Perhaps it doesn’t. I will take an impression of your soul to have for my personal collection. Your reincarnation cycle will be broken. You will never be reborn again and will remain exactly as you are forever more. You will not notice any change in your physical or mental form after the impression is made, now or ever again. You will no longer be free to grow and change. You will reside in my hall until the anniversary of your death, where you will be free to roam the earth unbidden and kill to your heart’s content until the sun rises.” 

“You want to turn me into some sort of mindless, killing servant? Is this supposed to be some sort of punishment?” he asked with a toothy grin, laughing openly in Death’s face. “If it is, it isn’t a very good one. I can’t imagine anything I’d like more than that. It sounds like my own personal heaven.” 

“You will not be mindless. Your mind will be as intact as it is unchanging. Your modus operandi cannot be modified.” 

“Still, I’m not seeing any negatives from my viewpoint. My M.O. has always worked for me before, it made me successful enough to earn a place in your hall.”

“My offer only stands while you remain killing,” Death stated. They held up a hand and a door materialized behind them. 

“That won’t be a problem,” Otto said quickly, but Death continued speaking as if they hadn’t heard him.

“If you cannot bring me at least one soul a year you will no longer be welcome in my hall. I will give you the first soulless year as a sign of goodwill, but after that, on the second soulless year you will have to leave.” 

Otto laughed heartily at this. As he looked back on this conversation in the years to come he realized perhaps this had been a mistake. Perhaps he should have listened to Death more closely. He should have asked some clarifying questions, asked what would have happened if he chose to move on instead, asked if Death’s offer was an illusion of a choice or if he could truly refuse him. Has anyone ever refused Death before? He’d never know because he hadn’t asked. 

He had stood up from the chair that dematerialized the moment his feet supported his weight and walked to the door without another word. He pushed himself through it without another glance back at Death and woke up here, in the Hall of Horror. He wasn’t sure who had christened it thus, or if that was its actual name, or if it even had a formal title, but it’s what everyone called it. By everyone he meant the hall’s other residents. 

The Hall of Horror was just that, a long hall lined with rooms each labeled with a placard denoting the name of the killer who resided there. As the hall’s newest resident his room was closest to the door entering the hall from Death’s office. The door dematerialized after he passed through it. He was not pleased to see his placard naming him “Otto” instead of “Wolf” but he wasn’t going to let it upset him. He had a hall to explore, after all.

He did not know when Death founded the hall, or if it had always been here, but there were seemingly endless serial killers from all over history residing here. Initially he thought he must have been granted access to his own personal heaven. For the first time in his life he was surrounded by similar-minded individuals. 

At the beginning he filled his days and nights with interviewing the other residents of the hall, attempting to catalog the killers from all over history both well-known and forgotten. It was nothing short of a miracle in his eyes, to look up to some of these killers his whole life and then be able to actually meet and interact with them. The further down the hall he traveled the older the residents became. 

Most of the killers near the front of the hall seemed to want to do nothing more than boast about their crimes. They were still giddy with Death’s deal, feeling like they cheated the universe into getting to exist after their deaths in some way. It was like having their cake and eating it too, getting to continue on their work in their afterlife. Otto whole-heartedly agreed. 

None of the other residents knew about Wolf’s crimes, of course, as the hall’s newest resident the other killers were all before his time. This was an added bonus, as they were all eager to hear every detail about how he killed. They hadn’t already heard half the story from the newspapers. His first few months in the hall were filled in this manner, oozing excitement and feeling like the luckiest man in the world with the newly appointed killers at the start of the hall. 

Eventually rehashing out old kills with the newer residents got old. You could only hear the same story so many times, after all. This wasn’t a problem, as the hall seemed endless. He worked his way down the hall, knocking on doors and seeing who would answer. Nobody seemed to mill about in the hallway except for the newest ten residents or so. He couldn’t help but notice none of the longer-term residents were quite as enthusiastic as he was about Death’s deal.

Perhaps the novelty had worn off for them, some of them appeared to have been residing in the hall for hundreds of years, after all. Most of the hall’s residents seemed to do little more than sleep in the time off between trips to the mortal world. They would answer his questions when roused, and seemed to get a glimmer in their eyes when revisiting their glory days, but then it was right back to sleep. At a certain point in the hall the residents did not awaken when he knocked, or at least they didn’t open the door, anyway. 

The oldest residents of the hall he did not see except for their one night a year when that door materialized out of nothing to lead them to earth for a night of killing. It only lasted long enough to lead them away and then it reappeared when the night was up to lead them back. You could not pass through to the human world through another killer’s door. He had tried sometime during his second month of residency. 

Yes, time still passed by here in a quantifiable manner. The hall was not timeless. Time continued to move on here the same as it did in the mortal world. The noticeable passage of time was admittedly irksome but did not truly affect him until he had resided in the hall for a few years. There was a calendar in the hall marking off the days as they passed. Eventually he found himself staring at it for hours at a time as if in a trace waiting for that one time a year he could return to earth and feel that fleeting happiness again for one short night. 

By the ten year mark he began truly dreading his existence. At this point, living in the hall was like living in a waking nightmare, if you could even call existing in such a manner ‘living’. His whole life was centered around that one visit to the mortal world a year. He counted the days, hours, and minutes that stood before him and his next visit. While on earth he killed as many as he could, and he started his countdown for his return the moment he got back. 

By the fifty year mark he was starting to feel the appeal of endless sleep but he fought against the urge, forcing himself to stay present in his mind. He didn’t fear the endless sleep exactly but the concept of it deeply disturbed him. He did not like the idea of hibernating between trips to kill.

He tried not to spend a lot of time mentally revisiting his previous trips anymore. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, every year he seemed to be less successful than the last. The world was changing, people were not answering the door when he knocked. They were less friendly when they did open their doors, never inviting him inside or seeming to care about anything he had to say. 

He still managed to bring Death back a handful of souls a year but he had to work twice as hard for half as many. He questioned what was wrong with the world these days. He could only see glimpses of it one night a year, of course, but things had changed so much in the fifty years or so he had been dead. He was still the same, forever unchanging trapped in this loop with his only source of pleasure steadily dwindling. Thankfully something happened around this time to distract him from the horrendous cycle his life had become. 

Several new residents trickled their way to the Hall of Horror. Fresh faces came in in droves as the mortal world went through some sort of serial killer boom. Otto listened to their stories with glee and felt a renewed passion for his work. He was filled with an eagerness he had not felt since the first few years as he waited for his door to materialize. 

The boom quickly fizzled out, however, and with it the new faces. None of them lasted more than ten years before their methods became ineffective and they vanished from the hall without a trace. Hitchhiking, it seemed, was not the golden ticket they had presumed it to be. People stopped picking up the stragglers in the human world, and so the new faces disappeared rapidly as they failed to bring Death souls. 

For the first time, Otto felt true fear in regards to their fate. Not that he actually cared about the new faces who had disappeared, of course, but fear of the same thing that happened to them happening to him. By the sixty year mark, he had only managed to bring Death back two souls. 

By seventy years, he was only managing a soul a year, and struggling for even that. People just weren’t answering their doors, why were they not answering their doors? He just wanted to kill them. It wasn’t even about the art anymore, it was about survival, but still, he could not change his ways. He felt like a caged animal, the dread building within him as he felt his deal with Death coming to a close. The fear he thought he knew before was nothing compared to this. 

The seventy-fifth year was his first soulless year. He stalked the streets until the light of day shined down upon him. He closed his eyes and basked in it, feeling like the rays were the blade of a guillotine slicing his soul in two as he was enveloped by their warmth. Instead of the familiar sensation of being deposited back into the Hall of Horrors, he felt a curious pulling sensation he had only experienced once, exactly seventy-five years before. 

He opened his eyes, and he was back in that room with Death. Nothing had changed in the seventy-five years they had been apart, but that didn’t really surprise him. He hadn’t changed, either. Perhaps Death was as unchanging and stagnant as he himself was. He wrung his hands nervously in his lap as he felt Death’s stare on him. 

“You’re frightened,” Death commented. Otto stilled his hands, but was unable to unclasp them. 

“A trick of yours,” he accused, finally able to verbalize his suspicions. “I was never frightened before, when I was alive. This sensation is new to me, some torture you’ve added to throw me off my game. You’ve cheated on your end of the deal, Death.” 

“You were always frightened,” Death said in a disinterested sort of way. “This is nothing new to you. You cannot lie to Death.” Otto’s chest heaved, but he couldn’t bring himself to argue against Death. 

“So, what now?” Otto asked. 

“I will give you this first year,” Death began, but Otto interrupted. 

“As a sign of goodwill, yeah, yeah, I remember,” he said. “But, what happens after? If I have another soulless year? Does the clock reset eventually, or do I just get thrown back into the chaos of reincarnation, or-” 

“You will no longer be welcome in my hall,” Death stated simply. “You will not be reincarnated, as you are just an impression of a soul. Neither will you cease to exist, for your impression cannot be broken. You are an unchanging imprint of what once was, understand this.” Otto scoffed. 

“I understand it perfectly well,” he said. “If I could just make a few changes, I could bring you more souls. I can pick locks, kick down doors, break windows, I can kill for you. I want to kill for you, it’s just that knocking on doors isn’t working anymore.” 

“You are an unchanging imprint,” Death repeated, and Otto growled at him. Actually growled, like the Wolf he once was. This appeared to amuse Death more than anything else. They raised a hand and the door materialized behind them, same as before, and there was no more discussion to be had on the matter. 

The seventy-sixth year was a turbulent one. Otto refused to leave his room, much like the other old souls in the Hall of Horrors, which he supposed he kind of was now. Occasionally a new face would knock on his door, but he refused to answer their call. The only thing on his mind was killing and fear and killing and fear, on a constant repeat. His mind flickered from homicide to panic like flipping from one page to another in a newspaper. When it all boiled down, perhaps those two emotions were all that he was really composed of. 

He managed to kill two that year, and he wished bitterly that he would get some sort of credit for the extra soul he gave Death. He wondered, faintly, why he ever did more than the single soul minimum required. Why was he doing Death any favors by delivering extra souls? What had Death ever done for him, besides curse him with this endless cycle of panic and killing? 

He obtained a false sense of security from the double-homicide the year prior, and was much more relaxed in his seventy-seventh year when his feet hit the ground of the human world. He faintly noticed a newspaper crumbled in a bin labeling the year as 2000. He might have been more interested in that, but it was time to get the job done. 

He knocked on door after door until he felt like his knuckles would bleed from pounding against wood, but nobody would answer his call. The hours ticked by much too fast, like grains of sand pouring through an hourglass and he began to lose hope. He raced the sun, wanting to tear the throats out of the early morning passersby on the street like an animal but was frustratingly unable to, the strange magic of Death’s deal inhibiting him. 

He needed them to answer the door, that was his unchanging M.O., but damn these people! They ignored his knocks or would not welcome him inside. It was like they didn’t want to be killed. If only they could experience an ounce of the fear filling his body with every passing hour they would understand. It wasn’t personal, he just didn’t want to know what happened when he was no longer welcomed inside Death’s hall. 

His eyes fell upon a house, an unsuspecting two-story colonial. His mouth was curiously dry as he noted the rising sun on the horizon. He approached the home, his hands balled into fists long before he made it to the door. He knocked and waited. 

He saw the silhouette of a woman behind the curtain-drawn window and he licked his teeth. He wanted so badly to kick the window in and close his hands around her throat but he was unable, trapped to perform the same song and dance he had been for the last seventy-seven years. 

He knocked again, more urgently this time (or as urgently as he could), but she did not come to the door. He peered through the window, finding a small gap in the curtain he could glance through. He could do no more than glance, as he occasionally peeped while still alive, but never took the offensive in finding a kill like he craved to do today. Death’s deal was so binding he could not go against it even to save himself. 

He saw the woman holding something up to her ear and recognized it from what he had seen other humans use in recent trips to the human world. A telephone! Some sort of portable talking device! Why, this one wasn’t even tethered to the wall! Could she even hear his knock? With the way her lips were moving as she partook in what was clearly an animated conversation he doubted it. 

He attempted to pound the door again, his foot itching to kick it in. He saw her silhouette pause and the telephone lower a fraction of an inch as her head inclined to the door. He hit the door with as much force as he could muster, feeling like he was putting all his strength behind the blow but it only translated to his fist politely rapping the door. 

For a fraction of a second the woman looked as if she would answer his knock, but then she chose to raise the telephone back to her ear instead, and thus sealed his fate. The sun rose on his back and he couldn’t even turn to feel its rays against his face for one last fleeting moment before he was kicked out of Death’s hall. If he could have, he would have cried, but instead he felt an existential fear so all-consuming it smashed every other possible emotion flat against the sides of his head. 

He felt the now-familiar sensation of falling out of his body, and everything went black for a moment. He landed on his feet somewhere new, somewhere foreign, but the blackness surrounding him continued. His eyes were shut tight, and he was afraid to open them. He sucked in vast lungfuls of air (truth be told, he wasn’t even sure he still needed air, but the habit of breathing was hard to break, even after being dead for so much longer than he was ever alive) and waited for his impression of a heart to slow its rapid beating. 

His mind whirled as it tried to anticipate where he could be. He was horrified to face whatever hell awaited him outside of Death’s hall. Too horrified to even look, so he stood there with his eyes shut tight for an indeterminate amount of time, for once he opened his eyes and comprehended where he was, he would know his fate. Once he knew his fate it would be forever, and so, he couldn’t bring himself to look.  

He would have likely stood there with his eyes glued shut for a week or more (he could still, even here, wherever here was, and even in his horror, feel the inescapable passage of time), but a voice sounded, and the words were so confusing, so out of place, that his eyes flew open so he could stare incredulously at the person who spoke them. 

“Look friends, we’ve got another one! This one is kind of strange, do you think the drop sort of scrambled his brains a bit and we should just throw him on the pile now or- Oh! There we go, he’s opening his eyes, hello, new friend!” a very large, very round man standing before him stated jovially. Otto glared at him, his chipper tone offensive to him, and then felt as he was pulled into a crushing hug.

“What the hell?” Otto snarled, trying to flail his arms to claw at the large, round man like the wolf he was, but he was held too tightly to permit such movements. 

“No need to be like that, we’re all friends here,” the large, round man chortled. “Well, the ones who aren’t scrambled, at least.” The strange man released him, and Otto was too shocked to attack him as he looked around. 

The hall he was in was devoid of anything but a collection of chairs arranged in a circular pattern. Each chair was occupied by a human, if such a term could even be used to describe the occupants. They seemed… off. Some were tearful, sniffling messes, some had depressive, blank-slates for faces, and some had manic smiles, eerily similar to the one on the large, round man’s face as he observed Otto. 

“Great, isn’t it?” the large, round man said, his smile growing ever more. “You came just in time for group discussion, lucky you. I’m Clankers, by the way.” 

“Clankers?” Otto asked with a deepening frown. 

“Yeah, it’s what the kids called me when I was alive. Clankers the Clown! Also, when I killed, it was the noise my weapon made when I…” Clanker’s smile faltered for a moment, but he hitched it back up so fast Otto thought perhaps he had imagined its absence. “Anyway, my name is Clankers. Why don’t you have a seat, we’re just getting started.” 

Otto eyed two empty chairs in the arrangement. He looked around again. The walls, ceiling, and floor were seemingly empty.

“No rooms?” Otto asked, and Clankers waved off his question with a smile. 

“We don’t have those here, we have nothing here but each other. So, we’re together all the time, always. Well, except for the pile.” Together all the time? Stuck in a blank hall forever with nothing but his fellow man? 

“Is this hell?” Otto asked, and Clankers gave a good-natured belly laugh. 

“No, no, not hell! We’re all just like you, killers on the other side of Death’s deal. We failed to pull through on our end, and we wound up here, just like you. We’re all here, in the same boat! There’s no shame in failure. It’s one of the many topics we discuss in our group discussion sessions, which we are late for,” Clankers said with a little wink, tapping a fictional watch on his wrist. “We run a pretty tight schedule down here, you should know.” 

“A tight schedule?” Otto asked, feeling too shocked to do much more than repeat Clankers’ words back to him like a parrot. 

“Of course, our schedule is the only thing that keeps us from getting scrambled,” he said, his eyes twitching slightly as he hitched up his smile. “After group discussion we split off into pairs, half of us are the killers and half the us are the victims, and then we switch! We can’t actually harm each other, but it really helps us relive our glory days. Let’s sit down, our friends are waiting for us.” 

“I’m not sitting down,” Otto said defiantly. This had to be some sort of sick joke, this was like a sad support group for failed killers! He didn’t belong here, he wasn’t like them. He just needed another chance. 

“Well, it’s a bit early for you to join the pile, but, if you insist, it’s right this way,” Clankers said, wrapping an arm around Otto’s shoulders and steering him toward a door he hadn’t previously noticed.  

Clankers threw the door open, and the room at first appeared to be full of nothing but concentrated blackness, too dark for his eyes to comprehend. He scooched closer to the room, peering inside to get a look. Clankers shoved him, and his feet teetered on the threshold, and he found that it was a clean drop. This room had no floor, and he was at the precipice of falling inside. He would fall, too, if Clankers didn’t still have a firm hold on the back of his shirt. 

Looking directly down into the dark pit of the room he saw, and he wished he didn’t, the pile. Bodies upon bodies entangled in layers so deep he couldn’t tell where one person started or another began. Horribly, he found he recognized a few faces at the top of the pile. Faces that had disappeared from the Hall of Horror before him. The pile was largely unmoving, but there was a bit of squirming here or there and Otto realized in terror that the people, or impressions, rather, were still alive. 

“Hi Otto,” a sad voice said, and Otto recognized the mouth that spoke it. It had been a hitchhiker killer that had only lasted five years in the hall. The man lifted a hand to wave up pathetically, his hand emerging from the pile smashed between two unfamiliar, grimacing faces. 

Otto’s arms windmilled as Clankers let him lean further into the room, his feet slipping slightly on the clean drop of the threshold. Just as he was sure he would fall into the pile, Clankers pulled him back. Otto twisted and clung to him, his heart galloping wildly in his chest, and Clankers gave him another wide smile. 

“Group discussion?” Clankers asked. 

Otto looked from the empty chair in the arrangement to the pile. The failed killers were looking over at him expectantly, with their tearful and blank and manic eyes. It was like they were all phases of the same illness that ended… with the pile. He looked around this blank, empty hall and realized that this was the true Hall of Horror.