He leaned forward, smiled. Kendra noticed one of his incisors came to a sharp point, like it’d been purposely filed down to look animal.
“So, let me start with the bragging,” he said. “Let me start with all the stuff that makes us phenomenal.”
“Sure,” Bryan said, looking down at the table. “Whatever.”
“Okay then,” John said. He drew in a deep breath, let it out, then discussed how Quigley had been featured on national television shows, how it’d won international Scare Awards, how it’d frightened and amused (and, according to many, harmed) thousands and thousands of tourists. Even celebrities made appearances, he said. Stephen King called it “by far the freakiest place [he’d] ever been” and Wes Craven said, “You need a stronger disposition than mine to make it through even one cell at Quigley.” The application for admission was ten pages long, mostly questions about allergies, past medical procedures, current medical concerns, anything that might flag a participant as a health risk.
“We’ve had exactly zero problems health-wise,” John said. “We have a medical professional on-site during all tours. We take safety seriously.” He sipped his tea. “Everyone who works here is family,” he said. “I’m sure Cory told you that.” He placed his hands on the table, in front of his teacup. He stared hard at Bryan. Bryan looked away.
He motioned to the wall behind him, upon which hung three framed black-and-white photos, descending diagonally. One showed a man, maybe twenty-five, standing alone in a field of dirt, looking out into the horizon, hands on hips, muscles straining against a stained white T-shirt, boots and jeans striped with soil. The middle showed a curly-haired woman, around the same age as the man, seated on the front stoop of the house, caught mid-laugh, her eyes, inflated with joy, staring straight at the camera, her milky legs marching out from a pair of shorts. The final picture showed the man and woman together in front of the house, the man’s arm around the woman’s shoulder, the woman leaning into the man, her head resting squarely on his left pectoral, both of them looking confidently out on the horizon—a staged picture, but beautiful nonetheless, a definitive snapshot of pioneer tenderness. John identified these people as his great-grandparents.
“This house,” John said. “They worked so hard.”
“They look happy,” Bryan said.
“They were,” John said.
He told them about the house, the changes it’d undergone, how he’d started with nothing—no staff, no infrastructure, no money—but had had a vision for the place, a lucrative vision, and he’d pieced together the haunt slowly, the first opening just him and six of his friends in the basement, boom boxes everywhere, painted plywood, dollar-store streamers, dollar-store masks, dollar-store Halloween décor, his first visitors comprised mostly of friends and family, screaming out of politeness, telling them what a wonderful place it was, how absolutely terrifying their tour had been. Martha Quigley lore hadn’t existed back then, and neither had the “big game”; all that had existed was a bunch of dudes in masks popping out from behind random places, pretending they didn’t know almost everyone who came through.
“We all knew we could do more,” he said. “So we did. Over the years. Slowly.”
But even after the haunt started gaining some local popularity, the six friends, and his girlfriend at the time, a woman named Charity, quickly tired of the extra volunteer work, so they dispersed, got married, had children, moved away. John, however, because it was his house, his vision, his dream, continued on, hiring managers, designers, electricians, plumbers, sound people, light people, the whole works. Every penny he earned from his day job (in a past life, he said, he’d been an insurance agent) he fed to the Quigley House, and when that wasn’t enough, he borrowed, went into massive debt; soon, collectors called him every day, and he had to forgo opening for three consecutive years because he’d grown so poor he’d become malnourished, sometimes subsisting on oatmeal and toast. But then things changed, seemingly overnight. A journalist with the Washington Post, visiting his alma mater over homecoming, played the Quigley game, loved it, and called John after he returned home, told him that he was doing a special feature on nationwide haunts—would he be interested in an interview? John was interested. And from that article sprang an entirely new subset of people, a national subset: men, women, teenagers, all obsessed with horror, all looking for the next best thing.
“Quigley was, and still is, the next best thing,” John said.
“Just one article?” Bryan said. “That’s all it took?”
“Just one little article. Isn’t it weird how one seemingly small thing can change your life forever?”
“Yeah,” Kendra said, thinking about her dad.
She looked past the dining-room table to the wide living room. It was strange, she thought, so livable. It was comfy, even: antique everything—rugs, lamps, furniture—and the art, well, it definitely wasn’t horror; it was that mess on canvas that rich people propped up as high-end that looked done by a five-year-old. But outside there’d been chipped paint, uneven steps, weeds, old, pathetic trees. A façade. She turned back to John, her stomach unknotting.
“Fear is the purest emotion,” John was saying, maintaining strong eye contact with her cousin. “It’s what’s left when everything else is stripped away.”
“But aren’t other emotions pure?” Bryan said.
“In their own way,” John said. “But not in the way fear is.” He scratched his leg. “Fear reminds us that life is an illusion. If you’re afraid enough, you’ll do and say things you never thought you’d do or say. All the things we’re taught about respect, ambition, loyalty, honesty, love—fear takes all those teachings and gorges on them, then spits out the bones. And in my observation, there’s only one thing that can triumph over fear, at least temporarily.”
“What’s that?” Bryan asked.
“Well,” John said, “greed, of course.”
Bryan asked if they could see the haunt itself, and John looked down, shook his head. “Only contestants and employees can see that,” he said. “But if you want, I’ll show you upstairs.”
He took them up a flight of stairs, down a dim hallway to an airy room filled with monitors, keyboards, microphones. The gray faces of each screen stared back at them accusingly. “This,” he said, grinning, “is the control room.” He looked at Kendra. “You see, this is all an illusion, just an illusion taken one step further.”
Kendra didn’t think actual assaults with shock wands and dowels could be categorized as an illusion, but she stayed quiet: she had an uneasy sense, walking through this house with this man, that it wouldn’t be wise to ask too many questions, at least not yet. John, while less explicitly foreboding than she’d expected, still commanded a deep authority, and she didn’t want to annoy him on their first meeting.
She looked around the room. A Jason hockey mask stared down at her from a shelf above the monitors. Above the mask, mounted on the wall, a machete gleamed.
“Those were my first ever props,” John said, following her gaze. “That machete is plastic, but you can’t tell, can you. Even in the light.”
Kendra walked to the row of monitors, still staring up at the mask. She’d watched Friday the 13th I, II, and III with Shawn, and while unnerved, she’d been even less scared of Jason than she’d been of Pinhead. Jason wasn’t frightening, just big and dumb, but he didn’t talk, and that was freaky, because if a serial killer didn’t speak, they could be something other than human, like a wild beast. And the mask without a human behind it? Just hovering above a bunch of monitors and keyboards? Well, that looked sinister, like some disembodied ghoul that watched over all the normal people, directing and controlling them. She shivered.
“Does anybody wear it anymore?” she said.
“The Jason mask?” John said. “No. Things have evolved since then. Our contestants—they expect a little more.”
“So what do they wear?” Bryan asked.
“Well,” John said. “Let me show you.”
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They exited the control room and walked two doors down. Inside, John switched on a light. Kendra gasped. It was a department store: rack after rack of clothing extended every which way, some splattered with color, others crunchy and black. Mirrors lined every wall—spotless, brilliant—and in one corner of the room were seven green dentist chairs, each illuminated by a series of lightbulbs surrounding a mirror. On the shelves by the mirrors were cases and cases of lipstick, rouge, powder, foundation, and tubs and tubs of stuff simply marked blood.
“You wouldn’t believe how much fake blood we go through,” John said, coming up behind Kendra. “I mean, you expect it, but it’s really crazy how messy we are actually.”
“Shit, what is some of this stuff?” Bryan said. He was at a rack, riffling through costumes. “A gigantic ladybug? Who’d be scared of that?”
“You’d be surprised,” John said.
“I don’t think you’d ever get me to be scared of a damn ladybug,” Bryan said.
“Well,” John said, putting his hand on a rack, petting a gorilla costume, “admittedly, that’s not the number one choice for actors.”
“They get to choose?” Kendra said.
“I’m no dictator,” John said.
“And all those masks?” Kendra said. She pointed to the perimeter of the room, which was lined with an assortment of severed monster heads.
“Yeah. Mostly, they can choose.”
“Mostly?” Kendra said.
“Within reason.”
They walked about a bit more. Kendra touched as many costumes as she could. Here was a spider. Here was a ghost. Here was a bloody clown. Here was a plain pair of jeans, splattered in blood. She remembered one year, for Halloween, her father took her to a costume shop in Dupont Circle. It’d been small, cramped, and the costumes had been chaotically placed—it’d taken them an hour just to find the young person’s section. She’d gone that year as a princess, not because she liked the idea of waving a wand and dressing in glittery pink but because everything else she’d wanted—the skeleton, the mummy, the devil—hadn’t fit her. To make up for the girliness of the costume, she’d insisted that her father let her wear horns and circle her eyes with heavy shadow: She’d be a demonic princess, she’d told him. She’d cast spells of treachery. Her father laughed, and despite protests from her mother, gave in.
“So the parking-lot people,” Kendra said, running her hands along the fabric. “They can wear—”
“They can wear anything,” John said. “They’re uninhibited. Out there, no restrictions.”
Kendra smiled. She thought of taking pictures, sending them to Shawn. Rate them, she’d say. Tell me your favorite. If he chose the more revealing ones, she’d know he at least thought about her from time to time.
“This is awesome,” she said.
Outside, on the porch, after John had said goodbye and told them Cory would be in touch, Bryan said, “Damn, what’s up with that dude?” They stood looking out at the dark. The rain had stopped. Moths batted against the porch light. Fft. Fft. Fft.
“I like him,” Kendra said, still thinking of Shawn’s reactions to her outfits. You’re a sexy freak! he’d say. Wish I could be there to show you off.
“What was that?” Bryan said.
“This’ll be fun,” she said.
“What will be fun? Damn, Kendra, that dude is weird. He kept looking at me. Seriously.”
“He’s fine,” she said, blinking away the mist. “He’s just running a business. He has to put out that weird vibe. I mean, that’s his whole thing. But he’s smart. He’s successful. He knows what he’s doing. You can just tell.”
“He’s weird as fuck. This place creeps me out.”
“It’s supposed to.” In the distance, thunder growled.
“People just come into his house? Like, through the front door here? Where’s all the boogeyman shit?”
“The main entrance is on the side of the house. Didn’t you see? It leads to the basement where everything happens.”
“I didn’t notice,” he said.
A moth flapped around her face. She waved it away. She felt hot, itchy. “Let’s check it out,” she said.
“Now?”
“Why not?” she said, suddenly irritated.
He looked at her for a moment, his face half-lit by the porch lights. He looked back at the front door, shook his head. “Let’s go,” he said.
“Come on,” she said, walking off the porch. “I’m sure it’s locked anyway. Come on.”
Without looking back, she trudged through weeds, across the gravel driveway. Around her, everywhere, crickets hollered. She walked slowly, her hands out in front of her. The porch light wasn’t effective on the side of the house. It was dark. She stood still, waiting for her eyes to adjust.
“Bryan,” she whispered. “Come on.” In the distance, she heard footsteps. “Hurry up.”
She stood in front of something enormous, a man-made creature guarding the haunt entrance. She walked closer, her arms still outstretched. The creature crystallized, the painted wooden planks cohering into the skeleton of a fifteen-foot child with bleeding eyes. Draped over the child was a shock of black cloth, dangling from shoulder to leg. It fluttered in the breeze, hitting the child’s thigh with an insistent whap. To her right was a door: the entrance. It loomed tall, steel with a large, glistening handle, like a vault. She wrapped her fingers around the handle, felt its prickly cold. She pulled. Nothing. She pulled harder.
Suddenly, her father appeared in her head, his face taking up her entire field of vision. She was moving, floating—no, flying—and he was there below, grinning up at her, his thick, toned arms straining against a red T-shirt, his deep-set brown eyes with their dark flecks just outside the iris, the whites dull, webbed with red. He panted as he whizzed around their house, and from some distance, she heard herself scream in delight.
“Shit,” she said, letting go of the vault door.
“Hey.”
She turned around. Bryan’s silhouette stood next to her.
“It’s locked,” she said.
“Obviously.”
“I thought maybe . . .”
“That thing is fucked up,” Bryan said, looking at the giant bleeding baby. “Really, let’s get out of here.”
“Bryan,” Kendra said. “Tell me the truth.”
“Come on. Walk. He’s gonna come out here, I can feel it.”
“Tell me the truth,” Kendra repeated. “Do you think my dad was a good guy?”
Bryan didn’t answer.
“Tell me the truth,” Kendra said.
Bryan sighed. “I don’t know. I didn’t know him all that good. Anyway, this isn’t the place for a conversation like this, okay? Let’s go.”
“I was just wondering what you thought.”
“I know.” They walked. “And we’ll talk more later, but right now, I just want to get out of here.”
As they turned out of the driveway, a shadow appeared on the porch. It was John, the house a blaze of orange-yellow light behind him. His face was hidden, a black outline, but Kendra could tell, as they rolled away, that he was smiling. She looked out the back window. He raised his hand and froze, his fingers spread against the light of the house, his arm a beautiful ninety-degree angle, his body stretched and tall; he was reaching for the sky, she thought, laying claim to his synthetic asylum, concocting, brooding, creating: he was, forever, harvesting the night.
Cell Two
A bedroom. Two king beds with musty floral cheap-motel comforters, damp, brown, stained. Ten different bureaus surrounding the beds—brown, cracked, covered in thorny vines. The bureaus and vines crawl up the walls, fifteen feet; the bureaus contain hundreds of small drawers: an enormous card catalog. A small bathroom off the bedroom, the tub, sink, and toilet filled with blood. Smell of mold. Bryan turns, coughs. The fake blood on him continues to dry, harden. This can’t be good for you, he says.
The scoreboard reads:
# Envelopes Total: 8
# Envelopes Needed to Proceed: 6
CONTESTANTS WHO ATTACK WILL BE DISQUALIFIED
FIRST-AID KIT BEHIND CLOCK
The time clock counts down from 10 minutes.
They huddle. Bryan says: Jane, you’re the shortest so you’ll open the lower drawers. Jaidee, you’ll help her. Victor, you’re gonna get the top drawers, and unless you wanna get all torn up, you’re gonna have to jump from the bed as high as you can, grab a drawer, pull it out. I’ll help you out after I search the bathroom. Bryan stares hard at Victor. You ready for this? he says. Victor nods.
A door opens and in walk three people, presumably triplets—disfigured, older, male. The men look straight from the swamp. Bulging, mismatched eyes, blood-stained overalls, abnormally large mouths upturned into exaggerated grins. Each of them holds a different type of stick—one a long dowel, one a blue wand, and one a simple tree branch. Bryan watches as they wander aimlessly, sluggishly, as if half-blind. He inches toward the bathroom.
A deafening alarm rings—EEEEEE-RRRR-EEEEE-RRRRR. The lights fall red, and the inbred men, triggered, chase everyone except Bryan. Jaidee zips by (whoosh), Jane zips by (whoosh), Victor zips by (whoosh), and Bryan stares out at it all, feeling momentarily disconnected from himself. From somewhere far away he hears his teammates’ shouts mixed with demonic laughter, but nothing specific registers. His head, for a moment, is simply a cloud.
And then: BRYAN! MOVE!
It’s Jaidee, his roommate, shouting in his face. Behind him, a man is hitting Jaidee with a branch.
Bryan rushes to the bathroom, shoves his hand down the blood-filled toilet. He moves his fingers all over the interior, searching. Somewhere above, a chain jerks and an enormous gush of wind plasters his shirt to his skin. His arm sticks in the toilet. He screams, and longs, briefly, for a few moments of detachment. Just a few more. But he’s not gonna get them. He’s here, alone. And time’s ticking.
Blood sprays his face. His hand is lodged in the hole, pulled in by a colossal current. Fffffsshhhhhhh. He wiggles his fingers, feels only three of them—ring, index, middle. Are the others still attached? He screams again. The wind abates. He pulls his arm out. It’s all gore, but still intact. He sighs. There’s no envelope. He goes to the bathtub. He holds his breath and puts his hand into the tub. Nothing happens—nothing sharp, nothing sucking, nothing grabbing, just red-black syrup. He exhales, moves his hand all over the bottom, finds a plastic bag. He grabs it, pulls it out—
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