Haunted House Hazards
Emery Hazard was trying to keep his mouth shut.
His son, on the other hand, didn't seem to feel the same need.
"Just don't do anything to embarrass me," Colt said, his volume dropping as they approached the haunted house. It was a large, pseudo-Victorian fa?ade on what had been, until three weeks ago, an abandoned fireworks warehouse. Faux wrought-iron gates screeched in the wind. Polyester batting had been pulled and stretched to near translucency and then draped over the narrow windows and the cockeyed turret as imitation spider webs. Dim yellow light glowed "inside" the house, and at ninety-second intervals, the blue-white of simulated lightning flashed overhead, followed by the toll of thunder and a prerecorded evil cackle.
"Of course not," Emery murmured. "Not in such a classy establishment."
Colt stopped. "That's what I mean. Nothing like that."
"Fine."
"No jokes about how dumb this is."
"All right."
"About how it isn't scary."
"Ok."
"Ash worked really hard."
"Colt, he's an hourly employee being paid to pretend he's a vampire. It's not like this is his brainchild."
Colt said nothing. Intensely.
"I will behave," Emery said.
"I knew I should have brought J-H," Colt said to himself. "He wouldn't let this happen."
Before Emery had to respond to that, a dad-bod type (dressed, in defiance of the deep chill this October, in blue plaid shorts and a blue t-shirt that came almost to his knees) shouted, "We're here to see Booberella!" His friends, more of the dad-bod-and-plaid-shorts crowd, whooped and hollered, and one of them screamed like a hyena. Then, collectively, they hit their vapes. Emery wondered how funny they'd find prosecution for possession of a controlled substance.
"I think you should wait in the car," Colt said, examining his face.
"Don't be ridiculous. Let's go."
They paid the outrageous admission fee. Emery was ready to ask if, for thirty-five dollars, they were planning on exhibiting world-class pieces of art, or if the haunted house were built atop a World Heritage site, or something similar that might justify the extortion, but when he saw Colt's face, he remembered his promise. They went into a plywood vestibule, and then, when a teenage girl in truly impressive orthodontia indicated it was their turn, they started into the haunted house.
Flickering fluorescent lights led them into an ancient operating theater: dingy checkerboard tile, a battered and scarred surgical table, everything huddling under the darkened observation rows above. A body covered by a sheet lay on the surgical table, but Emery suspected that was a decoy. The scare would come from above.
Colt bumped him, and when Emery glanced over, he caught a grin on the boy's face that bordered between amused and nervous. It gave Emery something of a start to realize that not only was his son genuinely enjoying this, but he also was—if only a tiny bit—scared. And because he was scared, he was walking extremely close to Emery. Which a lesser man might have let go to his head.
Caught up in those thoughts, Emery was unprepared when the doors to a medical supply cabinet flew open. An engine whined, and a masked man in bloodstained apron and scrubs stumbled out. He lifted a chainsaw overhead, the blade spinning, and charged.
Colt screamed. He grabbed Emery's arm and yanked him forward, and they ran through the next door and into a darkened hallway. The sound of the chainsaw faded behind him, and after a few steps, Colt let out a nervous laugh, and his iron grip loosened.
"Holy shit. That scared the shit out of me."
"Language."
"Were you scared?"
"He needs to adjust the carburetor on that chainsaw; it's running too slow."
Colt turned a look on him.
"If he doesn't have a tachometer, he could do it by ear."
Colt was still looking at him.
"I expected him to come from the observation area."
Excitement lit up his son's face again. "I know, right? God, that was so fucking awesome when he kicked that door open. I swear to God, I almost peed myself."
Fortunately, they reached the next door before Emery had to address the question of toilet training.
They found themselves at the bottom of a winding staircase, the carpet spongy underfoot, walls covered in mold-spotted wainscotting and peeling strips of paper. At the top, a cramped mezzanine level had been decorated as a library. Bookcases slanted across their path, spilling broken-backed volumes onto the floor and forcing them to duck and scoot sideways. A handful of old-fashioned lamps left deep pools of shadow. One of the dark recesses behind a fallen bookcase, Emery suspected. That's where the surprise would be.
But as they crossed the destroyed library, no one jumped out at them. A cold draft made Emery break out in goose bumps, and he thought he heard something, but when he turned his head, he decided it must be the wind.
Colt, however, had taken a death-grip of his arm again and was pulling him forward. He wore that same tightrope look of pleasure and fear.
"Is something whispering?" Emery asked.
With a scandalized look, Colt shushed him and then said, "That's not funny."
"What?"
"Pops! It's, like, evil. Eat your eyes and dance in your skin and—can you really not hear it?"
"Of course I can't hear it. It's practically silent. Did they consider the fact that someone older than the age of twenty-one might actually pay the blood-price this place charges and—"
He stopped at the look on Colt's face.
The eldritch whispering of a cosmic horror faded as they approached the next door. Colt made Emery go first, which was the only sensible thing he'd done all night. They stepped into an antiquated parlor: a sagging chesterfield, a fireplace black with char, an oxidized mirror. In the center of the room, sawhorses supported a sarcophagus, its lid askew, and within, Emery glimpsed a figure wrapped in linen.
"It's a mummy unwrapping party," he said to Colt. "The Victorians absolutely loved—"
But before he could finish, a linen-wrapped hand shot up from inside the sarcophagus, forcing the lid to the side. It clattered and fell, and Colt let out a squawk. His fingers bit into Emery's arm even more tightly, and he dragged him into a run. Again.
They were forced to sprint across the room, past the mummy rising from its sarcophagus. Emery only got a quick look at the figure: not linen after all, but a cotton sheet cut into strips, with an Eye of Horus amulet. The mummy moaned and raised its arms, apparently not yet at the stage of actually leaving the sarcophagus, but before Emery could point this out to Colt, the boy had pulled him through the next door.
Another stretch of dark hallway waited for them.
Colt let out another of those nervous laughs. "Did you see him to try to grab me? God, that would have been so awesome if he had."
"It would have been awesome if they'd managed some semblance of historical verisimilitude," Emery said, "instead of that anachronistic debacle. Anyone can tell that's an Old Kingdom mummy—for Christ's sake, they didn't even use resin in the mummification—but I'm supposed to believe he was wearing an Eye of Horus amulet, when that didn't become popular until the New Kingdom period."
Colt yanked his hand back.
"What I mean is," Emery tried, "it would have been awesome—"
"You're going to get us kicked out. Do you think everybody else going through the haunted house wants to hear how stupid it is?"
"Hold on."
"Just like you did at that church."
"In my defense, that pastor was asking for it."
"And I asked you to do one thing and be cool for one night!"
"Colt, come on."
But Colt strode down the hallway, one hand held behind him to ward Emery off. Emery gave him a few yards of courtesy space and followed. They wound their way down the staircase at the end of the hall—bare metal, this time, and judging by how it shook under every step, Emery thought the clear need for a structural engineer was probably the scariest part of the evening yet.
At the bottom of the steps, another room waited for them. They stepped into darkness.
For the first few moments, the darkness was absolute. Then Emery's eyes adjusted. Faint lights—glowsticks, he guessed—had been placed in various parts of the room. He took a step forward, and his shins thwacked against a barrier. Swearing, he turned, put a hand out, and fumbled a few steps. One of the lights was directly ahead of him, not far, and—
His hand met the cold slick of glass.
"God damn it," he said under his breath.
It took him several minutes to navigate the maze, and when he finally emerged into the hallway on the other side, Colt wasn't there.
Emery followed the hall and checked the next room. It had been done up to look like a cemetery, complete with fake hills and trees and a moon swinging on a silver rope. No Colt. He backtracked to the maze again, opened the door, and whispered, "Colt?"
The sounds of movement came back to him.
A little louder: "Colt?"
"Hey, buddy, you're ruining this for the rest of us."
It sounded like the dad-type who'd been looking for Booberella.
Emery made his way through the fake cemetery. When Wolfman came bounding out of the shadows, Emery said, "I'm looking for my son, Colt. He's about my height, thin, still trying to grow out his hair."
Wolfman rubbed his snout. "Sorry, Mr. Hazard. Colt didn't come this way."
"Thank you, Jesse."
The next room was full of glycerin-sweet fog and ghosts that whipped past him on theater rigging.Emery batted them away as he crossed the space, and when he emerged on the other side, he found himself in another plywood vestibule. The cold damp of the October night reached him, and a teenage boy with too much eye makeup said in a dead voice, "Thank you for coming, have a spook-tacular Halloween."
Emery poked his head out and scanned the parking lot. No Colt.
"You can't go back in," the boy said. "And there are no refunds."
"I lost my son." He repeated his description of Colt.
"Nobody came out, mister."
A bit of haggling—John would have called it threatening—produced the manager, a sloe-eyed woman in middle age who had the good sense to wear cargo pants and carry a clipboard with two backup pens. Emery liked her immediately.
"We'll do a quick walkthrough," she said. "This way."
She led him through a door, and they moved quickly along a backstage route. They passed two ghosts who were sharing a SoBe tea. They almost crashed into a Bride of Frankenstein who was trying to curl her eyelashes.
"While we walk," Emery said, "a couple of notes."
He told her about the carburetor. He mentioned the volume of the eldritch horror. Delicately—oh so delicately—he raised the issue of the anachronisms.
She jotted everything down as they walked. "This is really good stuff."
"In that case, you might also reconsider your Wolfman. Real wolf's fur would have a mix of guard hairs and undercoat. Oh, and you're cheaping out on the fog machine. I could see the sneakers on one of the ghosts. It might cost a little more to run the fog machines at a higher setting, but it'll pay off with a better customer experience."
"Gold, pure gold," she said as she pushed open a door marked DRESSING ROOM. "Hey, do you want a part-time job? Our Frankenstein walked out on us this afternoon."
"Technically, it's called a Frankenstein's monster," Emery said.
"You, sir, are a godsend."
"How committed are you to that Edwardian bone saw—Colt!"
Colt was straddling a bare-chested vampire in a director's chair, and the two of them were in the midst of a serious make-out session. Colt's head whipped up, his eyes wide with horror. A mixture of pancake makeup and lipstick had transferred to his face and neck.
"Um, hi, Mr. Hazard," Ashley said as he tried to cover his nipples with one hand.
"Ashley!" the manager shouted.
"Please don't fire him," Colt blurted. "It was my idea!"
That didn't seem to do much to assuage the manager's temper. In short order, Emery and Colt found themselves in the parking lot. Ashley skulked behind the manager, trying to disappear inside his satin-lined cloak.
"Ashley is a good worker," the manager said, "for the most part. But I'm not going to have a repeat of tonight."
"I won't come back. You can ban me. I'll never come back."
"No," the manager said. "You won't. For a long moment, the manager seemed to wrestle with what to say next. "You're lucky," she finally said, "your father has been so helpful."