“No,” Kendra said, and thought of Shawn. “No boyfriend.”
“There are some cool guys here,” Sarah said. “At the haunt? Maybe not. Probably wanna stay away from the actors and the crew and stuff, but at Lincoln High, there are a few.”
“You have a boyfriend?” Kendra said, thinking of her hickey.
“Ha, me? No way, man. I’m waaaay too busy.”
They sat for a while, listened to Hootie.
Kendra asked about the other employees. Sarah told her about Christy Bladensburg, the third parking-lot attendant.
“You just have to get used to her,” Sarah said. “But deep down, she’s really great.”
Christy, Sarah said, was a senior at North Star High School, and her modus operandi, it seemed, was to publicize the fact that when she was a freshman, her school had cast her as Fastrada in Pippin. She had blond, curly hair that floated past her shoulders, crystal-green eyes, and tan, toned arms that seemed unusually long: standing straight, her hands hovered just above her kneecaps. And though the parking-lot attendants were free to choose any costume from John Forrester’s massive collection, Christy stuck to the ostentatious and suggestive. On any given day, she’d be a sexy, gory nurse; a sexy, gory cheerleader; a sexy, gory businesswoman; a sexy, gory nun. Sarah found it odd that Christy chose these smaller outfits since the weather was cold and the nights were long, but she never said anything: Christy was Christy was Christy.
“She can be real sweet,” Sarah said. “And she’s got so much talent. She’s gonna go far. Everyone knows it.”
“Is she, like, bitchy?” Kendra said.
Sarah laughed, tossing her head back, spilling her hair down her shoulders. “You’ll meet her soon enough.”
Kendra crossed her arms over her chest. “Looking forward to it,” she said.
“We all have our things,” Sarah said.
They drove down streets that all looked the same—flanked by cornstalks, peppered with roadkill—until they turned onto Quigley Road, which was just John Forrester’s long, winding driveway. The house slowly came into view, and Kendra, expecting the same nervous awe she’d experienced the first time she’d been there, felt momentarily disappointed. Daylight stripped the mansion of its horror: the dilapidation became simple laziness, the belfry turned odd and cheesy, and the fifteen-foot bleeding baby reconfigured itself into a series of painted plywood boards and ripped cloth. Additionally, there were people around. Grizzled men in jeans and T-shirts walked in and out of the front and haunt entrances while a cloud of curly-haired middle-aged women scuttled out of the west entrance. Everyone was glaringly white.
“Yeah,” Sarah said, waving a line of women past, “all the admin people are like prototypes of each other. Just look at them.” She pulled behind the house to a gravel parking lot marked employees only and killed the engine. They sat silent in the car for a while. On the radio, Alanis Morissette screeched. Kendra reached over, turned the music all the way down. She let out a long, raspy breath.
“Are you okay?” Sarah said.
“Yeah,” Kendra said.
“No need to be nervous,” Sarah said. “We’re family here. You’re family now.”
“Family,” Kendra said.
“Yeah,” Sarah said. “Family. You’re stuck with us, no matter what.” She winked, opened her door, stepped out.
On the porch, one hand on his hip, the other holding a cup of coffee, wearing an oversized wool sweater though it was nearly seventy degrees, John Forrester stood surveying the men and women coming and going. Once in a while, someone asked him a question, and he would answer softly, keeping his gaze focused on his long, wooded driveway. When Sarah approached him, he brightened. She threw her arms around his neck, kissed his cheek, said, “Happy season!” He grabbed her by the waist, lifted her up, said, “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah.” She pulled away, giggled, then looked back at Kendra. “Here’s the newbie,” she said.
Kendra looked up at them from the bottom of the stairs, felt small. A broad-shouldered man in blue flannel walked past her, nodded at John. He was carrying a twelve-inch monitor.
“See you soon!” Sarah said, racing into the house.
John looked down at Kendra, smiled so wide his eyes nearly shut.
“Kendra,” he said, extending the n and the a, effecting a satisfied exhalation. “It’s so great to see you.”
Kendra shrugged, palms up. Here I am, she thought.
“Well, come on in,” he said. “Let’s get you started.”
She walked up the porch stairs, stood next to him. He put his arm around her shoulders, and she instinctively pulled away, but he brought her tighter to his chest. He smelled like autumn, like leaves and smoke and apples, and it reminded her for a second of how her father, toward Thanksgiving break, would take over the kitchen and cook strudel—cherry, apple, raspberry—for two days straight. After Thanksgiving, he’d retreat to his office, but for those few days, the house would smell sweet and autumnal and he’d be there, physically there, and he’d always be happy.
“Say cheese!”
A camera flashed in her face. The whine of a Polaroid exiting.
Kendra blinked and saw Cory, the scraggly man who’d invited her to his apartment. He looked down at the picture. “This’ll be good,” he said. He gave the picture to John, who waved it in the air. “Welcome aboard, Kendra,” Cory said. “Good to have you here.”
John removed his arm from Kendra’s shoulders, stared down at the square in his hands. “He does this every time,” he said, shaking his head. “Takes these pictures of new staff, catches us off guard. He says it’s more authentic that way, captures some sort of true emotion, but the only emotion he ever captures is surprise.” He chuckled. “Well,” he said. “Shall we?”
John led her inside, up the stairs, past two men in overalls, and walked to the first door on the left. He showed her the time clock (Easy, standard stuff, he said, just line things up right), and the wall behind the clock where everyone’s first-day pictures hung. In the photos, each employee, in various states of surprise, stood next to John.
“As you can see, we’re a bit of a ragtag group,” John said.
Kendra didn’t understand what he meant by “ragtag,” but she found it unnerving that he hadn’t hired a single non-white person before. Certainly Black people were available, right? Lincoln and the surrounding areas weren’t all white. And since, as he’d said earlier, people came from everywhere to be a part of his attraction, wouldn’t he at least try to diversify? Her stomach rumbled. Nebraska sucked.
“I’ve grown close to every single person up here,” John said, waving his hand around the pictures. “We really are one big family.”
Kendra searched for Sarah, found her toward the middle. Her face was partially shielded by her hands, her mouth fixed in a startled O. She looked like she was dodging a blow. John, however, looked directly at the camera, serene and placid, his eyes relaxed, arms loose by his sides.
His arm’s not around her, Kendra thought. I wonder what that means.
John pinned Kendra’s picture to the top of the wall, said, “Look at that. You’re starting a row all your own.”
The picture, still hazy, showed Kendra with small eyes, one eyebrow cocked. Her mouth was slightly open, and her right hand pressed against John’s chest. John, conversely, looked like he did in Sarah’s picture—relaxed, unsurprised, mildly amused. His left arm held tightly to Kendra’s left shoulder.
“Do we get to keep those pictures?” Kendra said.
“You want to keep yours?” John said.
“Well, not now, but maybe after the season?”
“Tell you what,” John said. “I’ll take another one, a better one, and you can have that.”
Kendra nodded. She knew that if she sent that picture to Shawn, he’d put it on his wall and look at it every day.
John led her farther down the hall, past the control room, to the costume room. She expected to see it like she’d remembered: a glittering, empty de
partment store with rack upon rack of intricate disguises. Instead, however, the room was havoc: men and women tore furiously through the clothes, some shouting, others smoking. One young woman said, “It’s not here! Where’s Cory? It’s not here!” People zoomed past, most in various states of gore, and in the corner with the dentist chairs, a line eight deep waited to be made up by one of seven makeup artists—all women, all bone thin, all sporting tattoos. The masks that’d lined the perimeter of the room were now jumbled in a single box, and people scavenged through them, trying on one then another then another.
“Here’s the thing,” John said. “You can make anything scary in the dark. But look around. Look at everything in the light. It’s not so scary, is it?”
The reason it wasn’t scary, Kendra thought, was because everything there—every person, prop, costume—was a secret revealed. A magician’s trick inspired no awe once you knew how it worked, and there, in that room, watching people paint themselves with blood and guts, apply fake appendages, scramble and be human, the magic died. Shawn would love this, she thought. He could stay and watch this room forever and ever.
“Usually, you’d pick out whatever you wanted, get made up, be on your way to the lot,” John said. “But today I’m afraid it’s a bit of a mess. First days always are. So you see that girl over there, the pretty one with the long legs? I want you to go to her, tell her who you are, let her pick something out for you. It’ll be better for today, okay? She’ll take you to the lot. She’ll fill you in on everything. She’s great. Her name’s Christy.”
“Christy,” Kendra said.
“Yeah, and look. There’s Sarah. She can help too. But Christy’s been here a little longer. So any questions? You ask her.”
John turned and left. Kendra felt suddenly exposed. She breathed in deep, inched her way toward the girl John had pointed to, a tan blonde who grabbed costume after costume, held them up to the light, threw them onto the floor.
“Cory told me it’d be here,” Christy mumbled, grabbing what looked like a werewolf suit. “He told me it’d come yesterday.”
Kendra cleared her throat. Christy looked up, froze, stared, then looked back at the rack. “It’s here somewhere,” she said. “It’s gotta be.”
“I’m Kendra,” Kendra said.
“I know who you are,” Christy said, her eyes still on the rack. “Welcome, and stuff.”
“John told me that you’d pick something out for me?”
“We pick out our own stuff.”
“Yeah, but he said just this time.”
Christy looked up, let out a long, irritated breath. “I’m sorta busy,” she said. She looked at her watch. “Fuck.”
“So should I just—”
“Oh Christ, here. Come here.” She picked up one of the costumes off the floor, held it against Kendra’s body, shoved it into her hands. “For your first day it doesn’t matter. You’ll get used to everything. Put this on.”
Kendra looked down at the costume. “Dorothy? Like Wizard of Oz?”
“Go to makeup. They’ll gore it up for you.”
“But is this the best, I mean, I definitely don’t look like—didn’t she wear pigtails?”
“Just put it on, okay? I don’t have time for this.”
So on Kendra’s first day on the job she wore a blood-splattered blue-checkered dress (a size too big) and ruby slippers (a size too small). Her toes pinched against the shoes as she walked down the dark driveway, and though she didn’t complain out loud, she silently cursed each step, thinking it would’ve been much easier if she’d just picked her outfit herself. Christy, in a low-cut vampire costume, and Sarah, in a black wedding dress and veil, directed her to the lot, where they stood beside a strangely tall lamppost. Christy checked her watch, said, “Okay, Sarah, let’s train quick,” and Sarah, smiling under her veil, said, “Okay, listen up, newbie.”
During the season, they told her, two sets of teams arrived each night Quigley was open—Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings. Many came via the Quigley Quester, the van that picked up contestants from the Claymont Hotel, but others wanted to drive themselves, untrusting of the department-store spook ride. The attendants’ job was to direct those arriving via personal car with green glow sticks, ushering the vehicles around the lot to their designated spots. The lot was small, and three girls was really two too many for the position, but John liked having that many: a young, spooky welcome committee was nice, he said, even if they didn’t speak, which he instructed them not to.
After cars were parked, the girls batted on windows, growled, made other nonsense noises, and while this was supposed to unnerve the contestants, give them a small taste of what was to come, the contestants mostly greeted the girls with anticipatory grins. Once out of their cars, they said things like: What’s it like? You think we’ll make it through? What should we be looking for? Is it gonna hurt? You look great, man. Makeup’s perfect. The girls didn’t respond, just pointed dumbly with their green glowing sticks.
The busy times in the lot were, of course, eight p.m. and ten p.m., the designated Quigley start times being eight thirty and ten thirty, but the girls couldn’t just slack off in between: they each had a walkie-talkie, and when the contestants were finished, someone would CB them to make sure their costumes were minimal (they didn’t need to wipe off their makeup between sets, but they needed to be in street clothes). It was the girls’ responsibility, once the house guide got to the lot with the contestants, to point out whose car belonged to whom. (The girls tagged each car once the contestant arrived and gave the contestant a slip with a number to make sure nobody forgot.) Many people didn’t need this close ushering—they knew their cars and could identify them easily—but some were still in shock from the experience and required extra help. If someone was too upset to drive, the Quigley Quester would take them to their hotel, and an actor from the house would return their car that evening.
“That’s it!” Sarah said. “That’s all we do.”
“It can be boring,” Christy said, looking around. “But mostly, time goes by pretty quick.”
The first night went spectacularly. Kendra directed, pointed, even startled a couple when she banged on their window, and though some people looked at her strangely (A bloody Black Dorothy? one guy said. Okay, whatever), she experienced intermittent spurts of real power: These people, these contestants, thought she had information—they thought she knew the intricate details of Quigley. And by being silent, by simply pointing with her glow stick and looking evil, she didn’t reveal otherwise. These people were nervous, and they thought she, a sixteen-year-old girl, could help quiet some of their anxieties. And maybe she could! But she wouldn’t! She definitely wouldn’t!
She’d started her shift with enormous reservations, thinking the job itself would be exceedingly stupid, but by the end of the night, understanding that she really was the face of the organization, or at least the first and last person that many contestants saw, she found herself flooded with pride and excitement. She thought, then, that perhaps Nebraska wouldn’t be such a bad place after all. The night air was crisp and the autumn night air so cleansing. She loved witnessing the giant tapestry of stars above (in D.C., she’d hardly noticed the sky), and her coworkers, for the most part, seemed pleasant enough. (She even caught Christy smiling at her once.) Things wouldn’t be as awful as she’d imagined. Just as long as she had this place.
After she punched out, after Sarah dropped her off (You have a good time? Sarah asked. Incredible, Kendra said), Kendra grabbed the cordless and dialed Shawn, her heart pounding in her throat.
“I’ve been waiting here all night,” Shawn said. “Tell me everything.”
“Shawn,” she said. “It’s all amazing. Where do I even begin . . .”
They talked until two a.m.
After that first night, Kendra quickly fell into a rhythm: She’d drive in with Sarah, arrive by seven p.m., punch in immediately, sift through the costumes, splatter herself with blood, go through mak
eup if needed, and walk with Christy and Sarah down to the lot. She wasn’t as picky about her costumes as Christy or Sarah, and was drawn, interestingly, to life-sized insects and demonic inhabitants of the underworld, and since these outfits weren’t very involved, she often found that she had extra time. On these days she’d sit on the front porch swing, reading a horror novel, waiting for the others to finish.
One evening in early October, the sun an orange strip atop the trees, John joined Kendra on the swing, sipping his coffee. He leaned back, swung hard, nearly toppling Kendra over.
“King fan, huh?” John said, nodding toward her book, Needful Things.
“Some of ’em are great,” she said.
“And that one?” he said.
“Okay so far,” she said, thinking about the poor haunted town of Castle Rock.
He smiled, looked down at his mug. “I’ll tell you a secret,” John said, abruptly stopping the swing. “This coffee is mostly Bailey’s.” He chuckled.
“Really,” she said, closing her book.
“Gets me through the season,” he said.
They sat, swung gently. Around them, actors and crew raced in and out. Chaos was always the norm an hour before each tour.
“I hope you’ve had a good time here,” John said, his face half-hidden in the dying light. “I know we sort of threw you into everything. But I had a feeling, the moment we met, I had a feeling. You were going to be just fine.”
She nodded, swung. This night, she was a demon, orange-red fire painted outside her eyes. She wore a skintight red suit, and a black prosthetic over her tongue, forking it. The prosthetic felt large and plastic in her mouth, making speech somewhat tiresome.
“So you and Bryan,” John said, staring out at the darkening driveway. “How did you find out about us? I mean, Bryan probably knew because he lives here, right? But you? How did you find out?”
“Oh,” Kendra said, sliding her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “A friend from D.C. told me.”
“A friend?”
“Yeah. I guess he’d read about you in Fangoria or something? He’s a big fan.”
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