Halloween Carnival Volume 2

by Brian James Freeman (ed)

  She stepped forward, surprising even the guides, I think. The one on the left lost her hold on Kate’s arm. The house had a white front door with a giant ear-shaped brass door handle that flashed in the icy moonlight. Kate closed her hand over it and glanced back one more time. She was still smiling. Then the door was open and the blackness inside seemed to spill, for just a second, into the lawn. The door closed and Kate was gone.

  “It’s not even fair,” Tricia said. “I’ve been here longer than you guys.”

  “How long have you been here, anyway?” I muttered, unable to pry my eyes from the door. The dark in there had seemed almost solid.

  “Half an hour, maybe? There doesn’t seem to be an order, though. They just come and get you. They got Robert maybe fifteen minutes ago.”

  “They make you go alone?”

  “Some people. Some get to go in groups of two or three. Just not anyone you came here with. Think that’s part of the plan? A way of making you uncomfortable or something?”

  If it was, I thought, it was working. “Show me the game booth,” I said, mostly because I didn’t like standing staring at the door. And somehow I suspected I wouldn’t be summoned as long as I did so.

  I had my hands in my pockets, my arms tucked in tight at my sides, because I thought Tricia might take my elbow or something, and I didn’t want her to. But she just flicked her head in the direction of the backyard, smiled at me, and walked off. I followed, watching the house, listening for screaming, but there was none. There was no sound at all. Other people, I thought, must have gone in before Kate and joined her to form a group, because there were only four or five hauntees left in the yard now.

  A long folding table lined the back of the first game booth, and on the table sat a row of foot-high stuffed elephants, all crouched back on their haunches with their trunks in the air. The elephants seemed disconcerting only in their ordinariness. Once again, I was confronted with the contradictions of this place, the completely unique and elaborately controlled atmosphere and the utterly prosaic imagery. Surely finding and playing this particular game deserved more significant reward.

  Leaning against the table, smoking a cigarette, stood a gray-haired, stooped old man in a cloak. He had his chin tilted back, his eyes aimed at the roof of the booth. For a second I thought he might be impersonating the stuffed elephants, and I started to smile. The old man lowered rheumy, red-streaked gray eyes and looked at me, then Tricia. “Only one play per traveler,” he said, his voice more smoke than sound.

  “I’m not playing,” said Tricia, cheerful as ever. “He is.”

  The old man dropped his cigarette to his feet, where it hissed in the grass. “Spin the wheel,” he said to me. “Test your fate.”

  The wheel sat on another folding table that ran along the front of the booth, looking as though it had been ripped from a Life game board and enlarged. It was made of white plastic roughly three feet in diameter. Positioned underneath the indicator was a circular piece of black construction paper. There was a single wedge of red paper taped over the black at roughly high noon, with white lettering on it. The lettering read spinner wins elephant. There was lettering on the much larger black section of the circle, too. It said dealer loses hand.

  “I won Robert an elephant,” Tricia told me.

  I put my fingers on the wheel, then jerked them back. The spinner wasn’t plastic; it was bone. And freezing.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “Oops,” said Tricia, laughing happily to herself. “Forgot to mention that, didn’t I?”

  The gray man was no longer looking at us. He was looking beyond us. Remembering his training, I supposed. I put my hand back on the spinner, glanced at Tricia, thought of Kate, and spun the wheel.

  Around and around it whirred. It made no sound. The indicator circled the grid and eventually glided to a stop deep in the black.

  “No elephant for me,” I said.

  Sighing, the old man dropped his arm on the table in front of me. With his other hand he withdrew a hacksaw from inside his coat, sighed again, shrugged. Then he drove the hacksaw straight down into his wrist, straight through to the table, where it vibrated a few seconds in the frozen wood.

  “Holy fuck,” said Tricia, and flew backward.

  I stared at the hand on the table, severed now, a single long tendon dangling from it like a tongue. The old man was staring at the hand, too. Mouth working, I took a step back. It had happened so fast that I couldn’t quite grasp it yet. But there was no blood. No blood. An exquisitely realistic tendon but no blood.

  “You’re awfully good,” I said to the man.

  He nodded, lifted a garbage bag from under the table, and swept the severed hand into it with his stump. Then he retreated to the back of the booth, placed a fresh cigarette between his lips, wiggled the stump into a pocket in his cloak, and reassumed his position.

  “Oh my God,” Tricia said, and now she did grab my arm and held on to it as she went on laughing. Her laughter was irresistible, infectious, like a tickle. I felt myself burst into a smile.

  We stayed arm in arm, watching the carnival booth, waiting to see what happened when the next traveler, as the man had called us, came to play. I at least wanted to see if the gray man had new fake hands in his cloak and could attach them without turning away and blocking our vision. But a scant minute later, the nightgown ghosts appeared, one on either side of us.

  “Finally,” Tricia breathed.

  “You’re sure you’re up for this?” I asked, feeling almost giddy now. I couldn’t wait to tell Kate about the booth. I couldn’t wait to find her again. Besides, teasing Tricia was as irresistible as laughing with her.

  Of course, she was better at teasing. “I’ve got my big, bad prof,” she said, squeezing my arm. I blushed, and she looked at me, and we let the nightgown ghosts lead us back around the long, red house toward the white door, the waiting dark.

  I had two wild, ridiculous thoughts as I was led up the stoop. The first was that I’d just met Judge Albert Alouisius Dark, that he’d found the fountain of youth somewhere and decided to spend his eternity huddled away on the plains, plotting yearly appearances with selected friends. The faintly perverse, perpetually bored Santa Claus of Halloween. The second thought I said aloud.

  “Where’s the exit?” I said.

  “What?” said Tricia.

  “You said Robert went in, what, twenty minutes ago now? Where did he come out?”

  “I thought of that.”

  “Did you think of an answer?”

  Tricia grinned. “After you, Professor R.”

  One last time, I considered the possibility that this was all a hoax, the best ever perpetrated, at least on me. God, even Brian Tidrow could be a hoax, I thought, then dismissed the thought. I glanced at Tricia’s face. Her red mouth hung open just a little, and her blue eyes were bright. This was no joke. None she was in on, anyway.

  I took the handle, which, to my relief, felt like a door handle, and shoved. The door didn’t creak but swung smoothly back. I glanced over my shoulder and gasped and stumbled forward, dragging Tricia behind me. The nightgown ghosts had been right on top of us, brushing against our backs. One of them smiled blankly at me, put her hand on the handle, and pulled the door closed.

  For a minute, maybe more, we just stood in the dark. I kept waiting for my eyes to adjust, but there was nothing to adjust to. This was blackness and silence, plain and simple. My ears almost stretched off my head, searching out sounds of people scrambling into place, spring triggers being set. Then they searched for just plain breathing, the tap of snow against outside shingles, anything at all. But there was nothing. Stepping into that foyer was like stepping into a coffin. Worse, actually. It was like walking completely out of the world.

  “Professor R.?” I heard Tricia whisper. Somehow, I’d lost her elbow, but I felt her hand crawl up my sleeve now, take hold of me.

  “Right here,” I said, though I was at least as happy to hear and feel her as she
must have been me. I found myself hoping, desperately, that Kate had been allowed some sort of group to go through this with. The idea of her standing here this long, with Brian Tidrow’s blown-apart head leering under her eyelids, was more than I could bear.

  The house’s first overture was a touch. It was so subtle that I mistook it, for a moment, for Tricia’s breath near my cheek. But then I realized I could feel it on my hands, too, a gentle, intermittent rushing of air. The first warm anything I’d encountered since the car heater.

  It did feel like breath, though. As if there were dozens of people crouched right up against us, just breathing.

  “Hey,” I said, because even as I’d had that thought, I knew it wasn’t true. Because I realized I could see a little. Something, somewhere, was casting a faint, green glow. I glanced toward Tricia, saw her outline.

  Tricia glanced back at me. “I can see you,” she said.

  “Feel better?”

  “Nope.” Even in that dim light, I could see her teeth.

  “Smart girl.”

  We were in a sort of hangar-style chamber, long and wide and empty. There was a doorway, however, fifteen feet away on the left. The glow came from there. The little puffs of air came from everywhere, but the glow was on the left.

  I tugged Tricia’s arm, and we started that way. Nothing dropped out of the ceiling. Nothing moved at all. As we approached the opening, I noted the crawling pace we adopted. Walking a haunted house properly is a lot like making love, I’d decided years ago. Maximum enjoyment requires concentration, the patience to allow for moments of electric, teasing agony, a suspension of disbelief in your own boundaries, and, most of all, a willingness to pay attention. Despite my yearly visits to every spook joint in Clarkston, I hadn’t paid so much attention since high school. In spite and because of everything, I smiled.

  We stepped into a hallway that ran ahead for fifty feet or so and then jogged to the right.

  “See, they understand, these people,” I said. “You don’t need fog. You don’t need rubber hatchets in your head and things lunging out and grabbing your hair. You just need the dark and the silence and some imagination and—”

  “No lectures, Professor,” said Tricia.

  My smile widened unconsciously. “But lecturing makes me feel better.”

  “Exactly,” said Tricia, and I could see her eyes flashing. Her concentration on this moment was total. She led me forward, and I let her.

  We’d gone perhaps fifteen feet when my foot hit the floor and sank, and I jerked it back. I hadn’t sunk far, but I didn’t like the squishiness where wood or concrete should have been. I’d seen and felt and imagined too many bones tonight. I thought of the soft spot on a baby’s skull and shuddered. I lifted my foot again, put it down to the left of where I’d put it before. It sank again.

  “Is this carpet?” Tricia asked.

  “No idea.”

  “Feels gross.”

  “And you didn’t even know Brian Tidrow.”

  “What?”

  “Just walk, Tricia. Let’s walk.”

  It was like I’d imagined stepping onto the moors would be as a child, after I’d been read my first story with quicksand in it. For weeks afterward I’d been terrified of walking in the grass. I’d had such total, unwavering faith until then in the ground.

  Sometimes our feet hit solid surface. Sometimes the surface gave, depressing downward a little. This might not even be an intended effect, I decided. This could just be old, rotting wood. I didn’t believe it, though.

  As soon as we reached the spot where the passageway veered, the glow became a full-fledged spill of light from another doorway ten yards ahead. Without a word, we turned that way and crept forward. The floor beneath us became solid again. The rushes of air diminished, then disappeared altogether. But there were other sounds now. Rustlings from down the hall, and a sort of drip and slosh from nowhere in particular. If the night had been warmer, I’d have assumed that ice was melting off the roof outside.

  No sound came from the room with the doorway, though. We reached it side by side, turned toward it together, and Tricia said, “Oh,” and started to giggle and stopped. The effect was delayed on me, too, because the whole thing had been so studiously constructed to look real rather than ghoulish.

  On the ceiling in the center of the room, right where a light fixture should have been, a shining metal hook glinted in the seemingly sourceless green light. From the hook, not swinging, hung a slightly pudgy, pale boy, maybe eight years old. The noose around his neck, right above the collar of his Minnesota Twins baseball jersey, appeared to have bitten straight through his skin into his muscles and veins, which you could just see, little red tangles in yellow twists of twine. His tongue didn’t bulge and it wasn’t blue. It just drooped out the side of his lips in a peculiarly childlike way, like the untucked tail of a shirt. The boy’s bare feet were at least half a yard off the floor.

  A red velvet rope barred Tricia and me from entering the room. But we stood awhile, waiting for the kid to blink, yell “Boo,” jerk forward, do any of those comforting haunted-house things. But he didn’t. He just hung.

  Back down the hall, I heard the thud of boot on floor. I looked that way, saw a person-shaped bulk detach itself from the massing shadows and step toward us.

  “Time to go, I think,” I said.

  “Professor R.?” Tricia said. For the first time in my experience of her, she sounded like a teenage girl.

  “Let’s just keep walking.” I’m not sure which of us took the other’s hand. “Just imagine the stories we’re going to be telling on Monday.”

  “Monday?” said Tricia. “Shit, I’m calling everyone I’ve ever met as soon as I get home.”

  Twenty steps ahead, the passageway ended in a T. To the right, we could see one more strip of light, flickering and yellow, down near the floor this time, so we went that way. Soon we realized we were approaching a plain wooden door pulled most of the way shut. My least favorite door position. At least when a door is completely closed, you assume that nothing will come out to you. I heard footfall again, glanced back, saw the person-shaped shadow reach the T in the hallway and turn in our direction. Whoever he was moved just slightly more slowly than we did. But he kept coming.

  We were a few feet from the door when the grunting began. For a single second, simply because we’d heard virtually nothing since we entered, it startled me. Then I started to smile. The grunt was distinctly human. Human playing ape.

  “Oooh,” it went. “Oooh-oooh.”

  I started to say something to Tricia and finally noticed the pajama child cloaked in the black shadows near the door. As soon as I saw him, he took a step forward. He was a bit older than the hanging boy, with long hair that lay in a black, wriggling mass on his shoulders and made his head look like it was encased in snakes. It could have been a wig. His pajamas were yellow and baggy.

  “Watch the gorilla,” he said flatly, pushed the door open just a bit more, and stepped back into the shadows, his movements as precise and mechanical as those of the robot pirates at Disneyland.

  “Gorillas scare me,” said Tricia.

  “Now, have you ever taken the time to sit down and talk to one?” I said, and she elbowed me in the ribs. The pressure of my coat against me reminded me that I wasn’t warm. The house had not been heated, apparently.

  Right as we reached the door, I saw the cage on the other side of it and for the third time experienced a flicker of disappointment. The cage had been dug into the wall, lit by torches that guttered in sconces. In the cage, ooh-oohing, was a tallish person in an old and painfully obvious gorilla suit.

  “Okay,” I said, and started forward, pushing the door all the way back. The gorilla guy lunged at his bars, jammed one rubber arm through at us, grunted. My pride was up. I stared right into his eyes, tugged Tricia beside me, strolled past. When the second gorilla dropped on us from behind, I flew fifteen feet down the hall and shouted. Tricia screamed. Then both of us whirled, stu
nned, laughing.

  The second gorilla stood in the passageway, hunched, huge, panting. He did not say “Ooh.” His skin still didn’t look quite real, but it didn’t look rubber, either. Mostly, it looked unhealthy, clinging in strips to whoever was underneath there like black, desiccated mummy wrapping.

  “Classic misdirection,” I panted. “That guy was just sitting there on the wall if we’d looked, see? But they got us focused on the one in the cage.”

  “You’re doing it again, Professor.”

  “That’s because that scared me shitless, Tricia.”

  “I noticed that.”

  The door behind the gorillas creaked. Something else was pushing through. The shadow that had been herding us along, I suspected.

  “On we go,” said Tricia, pulling me forward, and we continued down the hall.

  We walked twenty paces, then twenty more. I began to wonder just how big this house was. It hadn’t looked forty paces long in any direction from the outside. Nevertheless, we’d gone nearly a hundred before we hit the stairwell.

  The architects of this funhouse had thoughtfully provided a single torch, licking the wall at eye level, to alert passersby that they could plunge to their deaths here. Maybe this house had been built on the prairie because it was outside the jurisdiction of Clarkston’s increasingly specific and stringent haunted-house safety code.

  “We in the right place?” Tricia said.

  I thought about that. “The only way to know for sure is to wait and make sure the big thing behind us catches up.”

  “Or we could keep going.”

  The stairs were concrete, but ten steps down, the walls lost their comforting wooden skin, became dirt. Ahead was a floor, or at least a landing, and the stairwell banked to the left into total darkness.

  I stopped, listened, hissed for Tricia to stop, too. For the second time, and much more loudly now, I heard the dripping, sloshing sound. It came from ahead of us.