“You okay?”
I gave Jacob a disgusted “pff” and blinked for all I was worth. “If you can still see anything, make sure no one gets the bright idea to jump out and grab me.”
“It’s okay. We’re alone.”
I blinked harder and forced a few deep breaths, but the relentless strobe kept the spots from clearing. I closed my eyes and just listened, then, and the room’s soundtrack swelled around me. What had first sounded like crackly, worn speakers was actually the recorded sound of a fire. And the sirens in the distance weren’t real, either. Shielding my peripheral vision with cupped hands, I slowly opened my eyes. Still strobing. But I could see, sort of. The balcony had received a major remodel sometime in the last few decades. The seating was gone, the floors were leveled, and it had been closed off from the auditorium below to create a long, narrow room. Sheer nylon “flames” hung from the ceiling, rippling in the breeze of a few small fans. They probably didn’t look like much with the lights on, but in the suffocating red light punctuated by the white-hot flares of the strobe, they were practically alive. Not exactly like flame—but creepier, like the way things from the other side are no longer exactly alive. The soundtrack welled around us, crowd sounds threading through the fire sounds, and behind it all, someone called out, “Women and children first! Women and children first!” Over, and over, and over…and the lights strobed, and the nylon flames danced, and all the while I struggled to determine if that voice was actually on the recording at all, or if we were walking directly through an auditory repeater.
A dry ice machine gasped out a cloud that looked eerily substantial in the strobe light. It was the perfect place for some kind of fucked-up entity to hide. “I need to get out of here,” I said.
Jacob tends to play by the rules—except when he doesn’t—and he wanted out as much as I did, whether or not he had permission from the flashing piece of plastic. “The door should be on that wall.” He strobed between the fake flames, I followed, and between the two of us, we located the door just as the stupid vibrating puck lit up.
We crowded into an antechamber. When the door closed behind us, the crackling flames and sirens fell silent. The building may have been old, but it was a theater, and the acoustics were deliberately engineered.
“This was a bad idea,” Jacob said. “Let’s turn around and go back.”
I almost slid an arm around him, but in the interest of keeping my white light to myself, I couldn’t. Which meant I’d need to articulate something that would’ve been so much easier to convey without words. “Just a few colored lights. Big deal. It’s fine. We’re fine.”
He took a breath and nodded, and I crossed the empty, darkened space to the far door, which had CASTRATION STATION painted on it in drippy glow-in-the-dark paint. The room beyond was dark—at least until Jacob broke out the flashlight. Good thing. I narrowly avoided caving in to my gut reflex of grabbing his arm and discharging the light I was hoarding. Even with the flashlight beam, the room was plenty creepy. The scent of institutional antiseptic was strong, and my gut said “hospital” before my mind even registered the beep of a heart monitor playing in the background. Given my less-than-savory history with the medical profession, the room had “panic attack” written all over it.
“That’s enough,” Jacob said. “Turn around.”
“No, I’m good.” That wouldn’t be the case if the soundtrack played the metallic clatter of a gurney, but for now I just gorged on white light and repeated not real, not real, not real. “There’s the door, straight across. Let’s keep going.”
4
A few steps in, Jacob snarled and batted at something. The flashlight beam bounced around the room, disorienting me. And then I felt it, the whisper touch against my cheek. Annoyance spiked, not fear. If a ghost was pawing me, I’d damn well know it. Something was hanging from the ceiling, that’s all. That cottony fake cobweb stuff? Or maybe sewing thread.
I stretched my awareness for anything that might truly raise my hackles, anything lingering on the wrong side of death, and came up with nothing. I stepped around Jacob to lead the way. “Keep going, just ignore it.”
And again I was looking in exactly the wrong place when the room flooded with light. An activation strip of some kind was stretched across the middle of the room, and I’d marched right up and stomped on it. “Sonofabitch.” I tried to blink away the spots, but all I could see was the afterimage of a bank of lightbulbs. I did my best to fix the room’s layout in my mind—the split second I’d glimpsed between all the strobes—and groped my way toward the far wall. I reached out with more than just my hands. My psychic feelers were out, too. But other than the fact that a bunch of really stupid special effects had thrown me for a loop, nothing had the kind of supernatural wrongness I associate with spirits lingering where they shouldn’t, tricking death.
The stuff dangling from the ceiling thickened, brushing my hair and my shoulder. I ducked my head and opened my eyes just a crack, but it wasn’t enough to really see what was going on, just erratic strobing that revealed a field of dangling stuff. Pendular. Like dozens of hairy potatoes hanging from the ceiling in stretched-out pantyhose legs. If the group running the house was something a little more innocuous, like March of Dimes, I’d figure my own sick imagination was the reason I felt like I was wading through a field of testicles. But Man-On-Man, or whatever these jokers called themselves? It had to be intentional. Maybe most people would only get their hair ruffled, but lucky me, tall as I was, the fake balls kept bopping me in the face. I’d never been teabagged by a haunted house before. Can’t say it was anywhere near as fun as it might’ve sounded.
Jacob gave an exasperated huff and began batting the danglers out of his way. “Could you stop aiming them at the back of my head?” I asked.
“Damn it.” He swatted a scrotum. I ducked and hopped forward to make sure it missed me on its return trip…only to trigger another pressure-activated mat. The strobing stopped, the room plunged into darkness, and the screaming began.
White light. I sucked it down like an ice cold fountain drink, and I reassured myself that if there was anything impinging on us from the other side, I’d see it whether or not the lights were on. But even knowing what I know, the canned screaming—combined with the meaty sawing noises and the bleeps of an EKG—had the back of my shirt soaked through with sweat and my heart rate climbing like I was attempting to tackle a Stairmaster. A single small, high-intensity light reappeared, Jacob’s flashlight. It lit on the door at the far wall. “There,” he said. “Go.”
Before he could forget the touching moratorium and short-circuit my white light, I went…right across yet another floor trigger.
The room lit up red, and a pair of animatronic figures burst into motion right beside us. Fake, I told myself, all fake. Of course it was fake. I could hear the motor whirring beneath the soundtrack of the screams.
But fake or not, the scene made my brain start pumping out panic-juice.
It was a patient and nurse scenario, played out by a couple of secondhand department store mannequins. The nurse had a rusty, blood-covered saw fixed to her hand with clear tape, wound around her wrist at least two dozen times. She was on some kind of mechanized belt that made her whole body tilt forward and back between the legs of another mannequin. The male patient was splayed on his back, hospital gown rucked up around his hips, arms and legs out stiffly…in restraints. The restraints had been made for sex-play, and not very vigorous bedroom hijinks at that. Even so, freakout mode hurtled toward me, threatening to not only take my carefully gathered white light, but my dignity. The last thing I needed was a debilitating panic attack with a football team’s worth of testicles swinging around my head.
I made myself look with my third eye. Nothing there, nothing dead. I put one foot in front of the other, and I forced my way to the door. The plastic disc hadn’t given me permission to go, but just let it try and stop me. I spilled out into a hallway, a small square passage where we could gather our wi
ts. In front of me, the next door was closing. I heard a group of guys laughing together. They were having fun.
Jacob joined me, the door on the nightmare castration hospital closed, and everything went quiet except for my pulse pounding in my eardrums. His flashlight beam traced the emptiness of the hall. I scanned too. My sixth sense saw nothing. “We should go back,” Jacob said. “It’s not worth it.”
I visualized what I remembered of the theater, its layout, the angle of the balconies. Right, center, left, each connected by an angled hallway. “No, this has got to be the last balcony coming up. It’ll be faster to go through.”
“I guess.” Jacob shone his light back toward the door we just exited, then sighed. “Castration? Seriously? If this is the new kink, then I’m getting old.”
“Good thing. I didn’t find it even remotely hot.” Call me a stick-in-the-mud, but I like balls just as nature intended, firmly planted between a pair of hairy thighs. I focused on my white light, on reinforcing the protective membrane around us both, and I caught my breath in that calm pocket of silence.
The puck lit up. Oh joy.
The word PRISON was stenciled on the door to the third (and hopefully final) room. A fake cell shouldn’t trigger a panic reaction from me, not like a fake hospital ward. Though you never know. I hadn’t ever landed myself behind bars, but as a PsyCop, I had introduced my share of residents to the system.
My inner eye told me we were all clear, so I went on ahead. The first thing I noticed was that the lighting was a lot calmer. It wasn’t exactly steady—it rose and fell to illuminate one part of the room, then another—but it didn’t flash in my face and blind me. Behind some bars made of wooden dowels, one wall was muraled with hangdog men in orange jumpsuits. Since this was Boystown, I expected at least one of the inmates to be getting his jollies in the shower with a hunky, tattooed convict. But no. All the poorly-drawn prisoners just gazed out through the bars looking pitiful and morose.
A two-dimensional cutout of a prison guard whirred toward me, set to roam back and forth along the bars on a simple parallel track. Not the musclebound type of guard you’d find in a tasteless gay prison porno, either. A woman…a woman who looked like she’d dressed as a slutty prison guard for Halloween. She stood in profile with her back arched and her pouty lips slightly parted. Her skirt was so short you could see her butt cheeks peeking out beneath the hem, and the shadows her perky nipples cast against her tight, skimpy uniform top had been painted with excruciating and deliberate attention.
Jacob passed me cautiously so as not to brush together and discharge the juju, scanning the room with his flashlight. Me, I was fixated on those lush nipples, baffled, watching the 2-dimensional guard glide back and forth, back and forth, while the prisoners gazed straight ahead. Once I could tear my eyes away from the figure, I gave the room a scan. No ghosts. Just some cutouts and murals, with a soundtrack of clinking and clanking chains. And on the wall behind us, a bunch of photocopied handbills. That must’ve been why the lights weren’t strobing, instead fading tastefully in and out—to give people time to get a look at the writing. Jacob was right up against that wall, reading intently by the beam of his flashlight. As I approached him, I passed a speaker with more high-end than the others. The whisper, “falsely accused…falsely accused…” came clear, looping through the clank of chains. Maybe if I wasn’t so juiced up I would have taken it for a repeater. But my white light was shining bright, and it was obvious there was nothing in that old balcony but a bunch of weird paintings, flimsy bars, a soundtrack, and some amateur animatronics.
What a relief. I’m not the most social guy, but I was more than ready to write off our Boystown date as a bust and get to our obligatory party when Jacob grabbed a handbill off the wall and whirled to face me. “Whoever’s in charge of this event—he’s answering to me. Now.”
Okay. Or not.
I backed up a couple paces to give him room to charge through the exit, then surreptitiously pulled down another handbill before I followed. It was a wanted poster—not the Photoshopped old west party-gag type, either, but the sort we’d see posted at the precinct. Nope, no gag. This one was authentic. The guy was wanted for aggravated sexual assault. And the word INNOCENT had been stamped beneath his photo in inch-high red letters.
I’d been so focused on keeping an eye out for the clown ghost, I’d totally missed what was really going on. Second-Class Citizens…Castration Station…Falsely Accused…. These Men 4 Men bozos had nothing to do with leather chaps and rainbow flags—their sole mission was to hate on women. No wonder the haunted house was a total turn-off.
Jacob banged through the door, leaving me to fumble along behind. Old ghosts could wait. He had fresh horrors staring him in the face.
Sometimes I feel like I’m nothing more than a bundle of baggage, and anything can set me off. The sound of a gurney, the sight of a restraint, a whiff of antiseptic. But I don’t suppose anyone lives this long without knowing things they’d rather not know, without developing a sore spot. Jacob’s put in a lot of years working sex crimes, so he’s seen a lot. Maybe too much. And he’s just as haunted by his ghosts as I am mine.
By the time I made it off the balcony and down the far stairwell, Jacob had his rage under control. He asked the worker in a perfectly nice, perfectly reasonable tone to speak to the manager. And either he was so charming—or the guys running the event were so oblivious—that maybe they even thought he wanted to pay his respects and congratulate the guy on a job well done. The worker led us to a long, narrow room that buffered the old theater from the concession stand, a disused staff break room crammed with plastic furniture stacked halfway to the ceiling, plain chairs too unhip to populate the new bohemian coffee shop, clunky tables beginning to warp and yellow, all of it peppered with old graffiti and cigarette burns. One corner of the room had been cleared and set up with a single set of table and chairs. The open laptop looked weird on the furniture of my misspent youth. And the guy tapping at the keys didn’t quite fit, either. He was Caucasian and mid-thirties, maybe a handful of years younger than me, average height and weight. Not bad-looking. His hair was neat and his clothes matched.
He didn’t seem like the type of guy who’d be involved with an anti-woman cult. He looked so…normal.
When Jacob interviews someone, his attention doesn’t waver. He tractor-beamed this guy in and began asking him questions in a tone that was very, very interested. And when Jacob’s interested, who can help but be flattered? Good-looking guy like that, nailing you with those shrewd, dark eyes. Maybe a straight guy wouldn’t find himself squirming in place as desperately as I had. But no one’s immune to the charm. And once Jacob had the guy right where he wanted him—bragging about their membership numbers, reveling in the haunted house’s attendance, taking credit for the theme of the displays—once the guy was firmly planted in the casually laid snare, then Jacob picked up the strings, and pulled.
“And this statistic….” he produced a handbill from his pocket and smoothed it onto the yellowed plastic tabletop. His voice stayed even, but its friendly tone took on a cautionary chill. “Three in five reported rapes are false accusations. From which credible source did you draw that?”
The guy froze up as he realized the adulation he’d been basking in was nothing more than bait, and he’d fallen for it, hard. “Well. We have a reference sheet.” He started shuffling papers that looked mainly like menus and random receipts to me. “A handout. A pamphlet. Somewhere.” His hands started to tremble as Jacob’s cool, collected gaze bored into him, unflinching. The moment stretched, awkward and increasingly painful. Or satisfying, depending on who you were. I personally enjoyed watching the creep squirm. “Well, I can send you the resources if you give me your address.”
“You do that,” Jacob said, voice like silk. With deliberate, slow, precision, he pulled out his badge, dropped it open in front of the rapidly paling woman-hater, and extracted a business card from a pocket in his ID. There’s nothing on his badge the guy
would recognize, and nothing on his card to indicate which agency he actually works for. But it all looks very important and vaguely threatening, just like Jacob, when something rubs him wrong. When he handed his card over, the guy flinched as if he was worried Jacob might take him out in a stunning papercut ninja-move. “And if I don’t hear from you by the end of the business day tomorrow, I’ll be in touch.”
The guy shuffled it into his stack of scrap paper. “Sorry, I’m all out of cards.”
“That’s fine.” Jacob poured on the sinister charm. “I have a database.”
I presumed he’d made up that database thing to spook the guy. But then I realized something like that probably did exist—and even if Jacob didn’t have the clearance to scan it himself, he could at least put in a request.
Jacob delivered a long, uncomfortable look, a look that was in itself a threat. He was utterly still, while the haunted house guy fidgeted and squirmed, and a sheen of sweat broke out across his upper lip. Better to let the creep imagine what he’d been caught doing—and to worry about what the consequences would be—than to spell it all out. Jacob allowed the lingering badass look to stretch a moment more, then finally turned away before the guy’s head exploded.
I tried to catch his eye for a subtle show of support. We locked gazes. Only briefly, but that was plenty. The control I presumed came so naturally? It was hanging by a thread. If the sweating guy was stupid enough to rally with a parting shot, he might end up with a black eye for his troubles. Then Jacob would be the one suffering consequences.
I shifted into their line of sight to put myself between them, and gestured toward the exit with my chin. “Let’s go. We’re already late.”
Jacob snapped around and strode out the door. To most people, he might have seemed agitated. Ticked off. Miffed. But to my surprise, I was actually pretty fluent in his body language. His posture was too rigid, his footsteps too forceful. He wasn’t merely annoyed—he was furious.
PsyCop Briefs: Volume 1 Page 11