Liz Jasper - Underdead 02

by Underdead in Denial

  “It was nice of you to bring them, Becky.” As Carol said that, she surreptitiously slipped the cookie half in her free hand into the trash.

  “What, um, made you decide to bake last night, Becks?”

  Becky shrugged and started picking at a dusty model of Saturn that one of my students had made last fall for the astronomy unit. It was one of my better classroom props, but as Jim Baxter had liked glue and shellac as much as he liked Saturn, I let her pick.

  “This your way of saying you’re getting tired of my cooking?”

  I wasn’t sure how I wanted Becky to answer that question. Nearly two weeks had passed since Will had suddenly reappeared in my world and I hadn’t seen him since. The stress of waiting and constantly looking over my shoulder would have turned me into a crazy person if I hadn’t started baking like one. Cookies, brownies, cakes, mousses…if it contained chocolate, I’d made it.

  I had also eaten it. My lust for chocolate had, if anything, increased since I’d become Underdead. At the rate I was “testing” my baked goods, I’d soon have to bump up my running to five miles daily or shop for larger clothes. As it was, I barely had time for my three-mile running loop between sunrise and the time school started. And I hated shopping. Hated. They do not design clothes with tall people in mind. Cute on a five-foot-two woman is not at all attractive stretched out on my five-foot-ten frame.

  “God no. I love everything you make. It’s just that…” Becky’s face suddenly crumpled in misery. “On Dan’s site it says they’re his favorite cookies.”

  “You’ve been stalking his blog,” I said incredulously.

  “I knooow! What’s wrong with me? I’m so pitiful.”

  “No, that’s normal.” I scowled at the lumpy blob in my hand. “Your cookies are what’s pitiful.”

  “Becky, you know you don’t need to impress Dan with cookies,” Carol said firmly. “You are smart and beautiful and a wonderful person.”

  I agreed and said so. Becky nodded but she didn’t look convinced.

  She looked panicked.

  “Oh, for crying out loud.” I rolled my eyes. “If it’s that important, I’ll make them for you.”

  It was hardly selfless. It would help me pass the time in a non-chocolate and thus non-fattening way, until I had to show up at the theater tonight for the “dress rehearsal” for the haunted house. We were having a test-run for friends, family and anyone who had noticed our ad in the local free paper. The big crowds would start tomorrow—Thursday—when the early Halloween guides came out in the daily papers. In Southern California, Halloween season ran from mid-October to the end of the month, and the Milverne was taking full advantage of the trend.

  Becky sniffed back a tear. Another thing I’d never seen her do. “Thanks, Jo.”

  Carol crossed her arms over her twin set-clad chest and gave me a disapproving over-the-top-of-her-glasses look. “You’re helping her? I am washing my hands of the both of you.”

  “Oh come on, Carol. You would do the same thing except your cookies aren’t any better.”

  Carol tightened her coral-colored lips and harrumphed.

  “What time is it?” Becky looked up at the clock over my whiteboard and let out a gasp. “I’m late! Dan wants us there at four for our pre-dress rehearsal run-through.”

  “It’s barely three,” I protested to her departing back.

  “Becky is going early so she can primp,” Carol said. “Becky.”

  “Don’t look at me like that. It’s just cookies. She’s fine.” I stepped out into the hallway in time to hear Becky muttering to herself about needing to stop by the mall for more makeup as she pushed through the door onto the landing. I turned back to Carol, who didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. “I’ve helped create a monster, haven’t I?”

  *

  Looking in the mirror of the women’s dressing area at the back of the theater, I adjusted my black sateen bodice for the fifth time and finally accepted that it wasn’t going to go any higher. There was not a doubt in my mind that my Halloween costume had been designed by a male. A filthy-minded male who had watched way too many bad Hollywood vampire movies.

  “I can’t go in public like this,” I muttered, wondering if it was too late to come down with food poisoning.

  “Did you say something?” Next to me, Becky, dressed in what looked like scraps of old army togs, leaned forward and smudged on ghoulish black circles under her eyes with black eyeliner. She widened her eyes, squinted, and widened her eyes again. “This mirror sucks! I can’t see a darn thing. It’s like putting on makeup by Braille.”

  “It’s not so bad.” That was a lie.

  While Becky had been in a final pre-haunted house meeting with the rest of the “cast”, I’d sneaked into the tiny “guest star” dressing room Becky had nabbed for us and swapped out the pair of hundred watt bulbs with a single forty-watter. I’d also rubbed a thin layer of cheap hand cream on the mirror. It was an effective trick—usually. The brand of hand cream I’d brought was new and untested in this capacity. Instead of being merely blurry, our reflections had gained a wavy quality. It was a little like looking in a fun house mirror.

  She tugged a piece of her sleeve down over her elbow and rubbed at the mirror.

  It didn’t help. Glass cleaner might have done the trick, but there wasn’t any in the building. I’d made sure of it.

  “Please,” Becky said. “It’s almost as bad as that crap mirror in the girl’s room by your classroom.”

  I kept an industrial-sized tub of lotion hidden in a cupboard in my classroom, just for that mirror. The janitorial staff and I were in a constant secret battle over the state of the mirror. Mr. Rushall, the aged janitor, came by regularly to my classroom to take a breather and complain about how it mysteriously fogged up all the time and I listened and guiltily fed him cookies.

  With a grumbled curse, Becky gave up on the mirror and rooted around in her bag for her compact.

  “Ocean air is hard on mirrors,” I said lamely, aware that at a mile from the coast, the ocean air would have negligible caustic effect. Especially on a mirror in a small room in the bowels of the theater.

  She turned to me with a what-kind-of-scientist-are-you? look but her scowl disappeared as she took in what the underwire bustier was doing for my cleavage. Or rather, what all the chocolate I’d been eating lately had accomplished, once it had been redirected from around my waist into my bra cups by virtue of tight corseting.

  “Wow, Jo, you look great. Here, turn around.”

  I did and she wolf-whistled. “See? Look at how good you look when you’re wearing something sexy instead of those shapeless khakis and button down shirts you always wear to work.”

  “I teach eighth graders. No one cares what I wear to work.”

  “You keep telling yourself that.”

  “Oh come on, Becky. Who even notices what I wear? Besides you. And the Bayshore librarian dress code police. Though you’re hardly on the same page.”

  Becky made a noise of disgust at my mention of the librarians. “Trust me. The students notice and care what you’re wearing. Are you going to tell me you didn’t make fun of your teachers’ outfits? Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t secretly keep count of the number of plaid golf shirts Don Goodman has in rotation.”

  Three, my brain immediately supplied. It was bad, even for a math teacher.

  “And what about when you leave school? What if you run into some hot guy in the supermarket on the way home, and you’re wearing Dockers and your hair’s in that stupid bun with disgusting classroom pencils sticking out the back? Speaking of which…”

  She reached up and yanked at my hair. I dodged her hands.

  “Stop it! Why do you always do that? It hurts.”

  “Well, let your hair down. You look like you’re hosting a schoolmarm version of The Weakest Link. Or like you’re going for dominatrix teacher of the year. Actually, that’s not so bad, if you want to become the newest fantasy in the high school boy’s
locker room.”

  “That’s disgusting.” I pulled the remaining two giant bobby pins out of my hair and down it all came. I have a lot of hair, which is part of why I keep it up most of the time. It wasn’t a bun so much as a hair restraint system. “Fine. You win.”

  Grinning smugly, Becky leaned toward the mirror and added another coat of mascara to her lashes. “By the way, you never said—what happened with that incredibly hot guy sitting next to you at the play the other night? He looked familiar.”

  Great. Just when I thought I was out of the water, Becky comes out of her Drama Dan hormone fog and remembers Will.

  “Huh. No idea.” I pulled a disposable plate, piled high with cookies, out of my bag. “Here are the gingersnaps you made Dan. I gotta go. I’m supposed to be manning the door to make sure no one sneaks into the haunted house before it opens at seven.”

  I headed for the door in a swirl of black cape. It was long and heavy with a silky crimson lining and I couldn’t help but feel oddly powerful in it. If some little punk thought he could get by me tonight, he had another think coming.

  “Hold on! You forgot these.”

  I turned, and with a fumble of hands, managed to catch the object Becky threw at me. Immediately, I wished I’d missed. It was the plastic vampire teeth.

  “Thanks.”

  I stood stupidly for a moment, wondering what to do with them. I was not putting them in my mouth. My costume didn’t have pockets. Not that I could have put anything in them if it had. The tight black satin shorts were just as form-fitting as the bodice.

  Holding the teeth by an incisor, I headed down the hallway toward the shallow staircase leading down to the theater. Any noise coming from the tiny one or two person dressing rooms was dwarfed by all the giggling and chattering in the large community style women’s dressing room. Though to be fair, the volume from the men’s changing room at the other end of the hall was just as loud.

  The door to the women’s changing area was open, and as I passed I was greeted with a few wolf whistles from Bayshore students.

  “Go Ms. Gartner!”

  “Woo woo!”

  I paused in the doorway. I recognized nearly everyone inside, either from working with them the past couple of weekends constructing the haunted house or because they were students. A few amateur thespians were industriously packing on makeup and adjusting costumes, but most everyone inside was killing time before the event. Fast-food bags and drink containers littered most surfaces and someone had brought in a platter of supermarket cookies to share.

  The Bayshore Academy was a small school and I knew most of the teenagers in the room by sight, if not by name. “Hey, girls, you all set?”

  Heads nodded. “Oh, yeah.”

  “We’ve got cookies if you want some,” someone offered.

  “We’re going to scare the pants off people. I bet Conner Wong twenty bucks we’d get more people then the boys.”

  Conner was the high school drama club’s co-president.

  “How’re you going to keep count?” I asked, curious.

  “Screams.”

  “Number of people wetting their pants.”

  “That’ll work.” Laughing, I continued on down the stairs.

  I realized I was having a good time. The hum of excitement backstage before a performance, even for a silly haunted house, was infectious. Instead of continuing down the corridor to the lobby, I hooked a left into the theater.

  The Long Beach Players, with the considerable help of an enthusiastic volunteer crew, and some less enthusiastic volunteers dragged along by their lovesick friends, had done an amazing job transforming the space into a haunted house. If I hadn’t been there to see the theater disassembled, I never could have imagined how impermanent every part of it was. The whole audience seating area had been cleared in about an hour. Each row of seats was set on a movable platform, and it was only a matter of flipping a few security bars and rolling row after row of velvet seats into a storage space under the stage.

  From another storage area had come dozens of plywood sets, of which they seemed to have an endless supply. They used these to mark the haunted house’s route, which started at the double doors off the left side of the lobby, wound through the theater in a meandering horseshoe-shaped path, and ended at the theater double doors on the right.

  The path itself was varied, alternating eerie narrow passageways and wide room-like sections that housed the usual selection of scary dioramas. Coffins with dead bodies popping back to life. Cackling witches swirling cauldrons full of dry ice. Ghosts that materialized out of walls, or in this case, from behind opaque black sheets that, in the dim light, looked like walls.

  And then, because this was a playhouse and actors couldn’t just let stuff be, there were little vignettes along the way. Becky and Dan’s Frankenstein bit was one example. Dan, dressed in a lab coat and a fright wig, would “zap” Becky to life, and then as she got up, zombielike, off her lab table to go get Dr. Frankenstein another body from the crowd to experiment on, the tour guide would hurry the group along to the next thing. Along the plywood lined route, they’d left hidden gaps big enough for actors dressed as various ghouls and goblins to randomly pop in on the groups, waving things like death scythes, axes and absurdly large knives.

  They’d deliberately worked some of the Bayshore drama club kids into the act. My favorite was when a student pretending to be a regular paying customer got eaten by a giant spider, only to get spit back out at the end of the haunted house.

  It probably would have taken regular people weeks to set up and rehearse something of this magnitude, but for this group, putting on a haunted house was like holding an improv night, only more fun because they got to scare the audience. Over and over. The last groups of the night would be in for it.

  I walked through slowly, delighting in the fact that I was in a position to see the proverbial zippers in the monster suits. As I reached the start of the haunted house, I threw the vampire teeth into a witch’s cauldron “steaming” with dry ice and pushed through the double doors into the lobby.

  The moment I appeared, Marty Milverne, the portly third-generation owner of the theater and acting House Manager, summoned me over with an agitated wave of his arm and a loud sigh of relief.

  “Good, you’re here.”

  I hadn’t quite decided if Marty was the glue that held the Milverne together or a tornado threatening to tear it apart. Probably a little of both. Holding a checklist in one plump hand, he looked me up and down. His brow wrinkled under what was either a terrible haircut or a cheap toupee.

  “What are you supposed to be?”

  “A vampire.”

  “Where are your teeth?”

  I made a show of patting myself down looking for them. “I don’t know. I must have lost them somewhere.”

  “That’s okay. We have tons in the back. In fact…” He went behind a desk and rummaged in a drawer. “Here we go.”

  He held out a fresh pair of plastic vampire teeth, identical to the ones I’d tossed into the witch’s cauldron.

  “A Halloween costume store donated all their leftover stock to us for the tax break. Unfortunately, most of what they had left was teeth. We had so many bags of them we gave them away as door prizes when we did Dracula last year. Did you see it? Excellent reviews. Well, put ’em in. Let’s see how you look.”

  I fit the plastic vampire teeth over my own and gave him a weak smile.

  “Perfect.” All at once, his roly-poly form came violently to life. Legs shaking, body quivering, he reared back in an owl-eyed travesty of fear.

  I understood now why he was behind the desk and not on stage. Chortling in delight, he dropped the pose, winked and proceeded to remind me in painstaking detail exactly what my duties were.

  I couldn’t possibly have forgotten anything since his equally lengthy instruction the night before but there was no way of stopping him.

  I tried anyway. “They pay for the tickets outside and come in here to w
ait. When the next tour guide is available, he or she will come through the doors to collect the next group. I take tickets and let no more than fifteen people through at a time.”

  “Exactly. Now, you must be sure to not let any more than fifteen through, otherwise, we might have stragglers, or some won’t be able to see the tableaux, or…”

  Why had I bothered? I was trying to maintain a look of rapt attention, lest he feel the need to start over, when a loud, shrill scream came from somewhere in the haunted house.

  Marty glanced at his watch.

  “Final rehearsals, right on schedule.” He rubbed his hands excitedly. “This is going to be good. Look!”

  One of the theater’s ornate front doors was propped open, giving Marty a view of the box office outside. He pointed at the crowd gathering behind a velvet rope.

  “Did you see that? The girl at the front practically fainted at the scream. If all goes well tonight, that crowd will come back again tomorrow.” His voice rose an octave. “And bring all their friends. This is going to pull in more money than a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical!”

  Humming to himself, he crossed the lobby, moving remarkably fast on feet too small for his embonpoint frame. In his flapping black suit, he looked a little like one of those cartoon penguins when they do that sprinting tiptoe thing. Throwing open the other outer door with a flourish, he worked the crowd for a few minutes until it was precisely seven o’clock, and then let them in. The first ones came at a run.

  I positioned myself behind a velvet rope strung a few feet in front of the double doors leading into the haunted house.

  “Stay here. A tour guide will—” I forgot I still had the fake teeth in my mouth. I pulled them out. The saliva that had puddled in the incisors sprayed out in a wide arc that effectively stopped the crowd.

  There was a brief moment of shocked silence and then someone said, “Eew!”

  I grinned. “If that’s more than you can handle, you might as well go home right now.”