Chapter 16 Wren Arthur Survive the World’s Scariest Haunted House #2
“Hello,” a little girl’s voice echoed out from the cage.
“Goddamn it,” Arthur said.
The figure, the girl, stepped into the light. She was dressed in a sepia-tone dress, with makeup to match, looking like she had just been plucked from Pilgrim times. The woman wore her hair in pigtails and skipped closer to the bars.
“Will you please play with me?”
“Hi, whoever you really are, I want to talk to the human being. Is that OK? Can we have a conversation?”
The woman, playing the role of psychotic little girl, stared at him blankly. Then she began to cry.
“Why won’t you play with me?”
“No, shh.” Arthur tried soothing her. “Don’t cry. Listen, I just…I have to get out of here. Do I just keep going this way?” He pointed down the hallway, which curved to the right. “Is there a drooling clown or something waiting to jump out at me over there? Just tell me.”
The little girl woman sobbed and sobbed until finally she took a deep breath and opened her mouth to scream: “DADDY!!”
“Daddy?” He didn’t know who Daddy was, and he definitely didn’t want to find out.
Arthur followed her eyeline. Behind him, where he’d just come from moments ago, was a towering, terrifying figure, illuminated from behind by a flickering strobe.
It had to be ten feet tall, whatever it was, and without any warning at all, it was coming toward him, lumbering and skittering across the floor like a giant alien spider, all gangly legs and unnatural, jerky movements.
“Nononononono.” He scrambled, losing his footing, hurrying down the hallway, wherever it led, freaky clown be damned.
He had to get away from the thing. One look back and all was revealed as the creature stepped into the light: a psycho mime on stilts, holding an ax.
Its eyes glowed red, fixated on him and only him.
Arthur ran. Yeah, he saw the signs: No Running. But, respectfully, fuck that.
He should have held the goddamn tarantula. He should have run the red light. Jail would be better than this.
What was he supposed to do with this mutated giraffe-like apparition bearing down on him, ready to swing his terrible ax?
It’s an illusion, it’s all an act, he tried to remind himself.
If the horrible mime caught up with him, the actor would let out a terrible scream to maximize the scare and then scurry away into the shadows.
He couldn’t really hurt him. Could he? Arthur hadn’t really read the waiver carefully.
What had he unwittingly consented to? No, this wasn’t that kind of place. He would be fine.
Except Arthur’s poor, trembling body wasn’t buying it.
Arthur ran and ran. Soon he entered a new room.
Strange shadows danced along the walls, coming from slow swaying objects all over.
It was a meat locker, great slabs of meat hanging from gruesome hooks.
Plastic? Rubber? Surely, not real. Right?
They did seem a little moist, a little too sticky.
Arthur didn’t stick around to find out what the slabs were made of.
He ran through the gauntlet of dead cows like the football players running drills at training camp when Wren forced him to watch Hard Knocks.
He just had to get through to the other side and he’d be free of the creature, still shrieking out horrifying hisses and squawks in the darkness behind him.
Running full speed now, he collided with a slab of beef and fell to the floor.
His hands and knees stung like fire. But something was hot on his tail, so he peeled himself back onto his feet and examined the wounds.
A bright white substance, illuminated by the black light, was covering his hands.
Blood. Oh God. He was bleeding. He absolutely had to get out of here.
Seek medical attention before he fainted in this hideous place.
But first to find an employee. (Not the stilts mime. No, anyone but him.)
Arthur staggered forward and found himself in a new room.
“Oh good,” he said, staring into a hall of mirrors. The octagon-shaped room loomed before him, tricking his eyes almost immediately. It was impossible to see the path forward. He would have to use his hands to feel it out.
Suddenly, there was a brutalized ballerina dancing in one of the reflections. She performed perfectly haunting pirouettes, her slashed and bloodied leotard flashing across each of the mirrors.
Arthur really, really did not want to go in there.
But the only way out was through.
He followed the dancing specter. “Ma’am!” he cried. But she spun away, and he smacked his nose on one of the mirrors.
“Miss, I’m hurt,” he cried. He couldn’t see her anymore.
She’d disappeared. He picked a direction and walked.
BONK! That was a mirror. He tried another.
BONK! His nose stung, eyes watering. In the warped reflection and the flickering lights it was impossible to tell, but he worried it might be broken, his body bleeding in several different locations now.
Grainy music-box music played over the speakers, some haunted circus tune. He tried another path. BONK!
It was then that Arthur sat down on the ground, examined his bleeding hands one more time, stinging like fire, and curled up into the fetal position.
He suddenly found himself envious of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.
There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, he repeated in his head, even clicking his heels once or twice just for good measure.
But nothing happened. The chilling music didn’t stop, and he was not lucky enough to open his eyes and find himself in his own bed.
He’d have even settled for a random farmhouse in Kansas.
Without warning, the ballerina was standing over him. He looked at her. She stared back, emotionless. Like a dead person. He opened his mouth to speak, ready to forfeit, but…
What was the goddamn safe word?
“Fettucine,” he said.
She blinked at him.
“Rigatoni?”
Nothing. She opened her mouth and bared her teeth, including razor-sharp fangs. She was a vampire. Of course she was.
“Spaghetti?! I don’t know, I can’t remember the safe word, I just want to get out of here!!”
She leaned in as if to bite his neck and transfer the eternal curse, when he finally remembered the safe word, coming to him as if delivered directly from the pages of an Olive Garden menu, divined by the Gods of Italian Pasta. They were here to save him. Tortellini.
But he wasn’t going to say it.
No. He had a choice, and he was going to make the right one for once. It was as if he suddenly remembered that he was not a frightened little boy. He was practically someone’s father, for crying out loud. And this pathetic display would just not do.
He had a vision of crossing the road, a tiny person holding his hand and trusting him implicitly to lead the way safely. Trust him with their life, the grown adult male child currently crying about a few raspberries on his palm.
What if his son or daughter inherited Wren’s unfortunate love of all things gruesome and horrific?
What if they were holding his hand right now, clinging to him with their eyes closed with full faith that he would guide them out safely?
He could not be curled up in a shivering little ball on the floor. He had to be stronger than that.
Arthur found the strength to climb to his feet.
The ballerina hissed in his face, threatening him with her fangs again.
But he felt very much like Neo when he was finally able to read the source code of the Matrix.
It didn’t scare him anymore. He could see the flaking makeup on the edges of the girl’s face, the little gap between the prosthetic fangs and her regular teeth.
He could hear a hint of that townie twang in her growled threats.
The illusion was crumbling before his eyes.
“No,” he said simply.
She stopped. Taken aback at his subtle breaking of the fourth wall, his shattering of the illusion. “No?”
“Just no.” He dusted himself off and walked calmly past the bewildered ballerina, staggered his way through the rotating vortex tunnel of doom, gently stiff-armed a demented granny holding a butcher knife, and made his way to the door clearly marked Exit.
But. There was one final trial, and it was a doozy.
Someone had strung a gob of spiderwebbing across the hallway leading to the door and dotted it with fake rubber spiders.
Arthur examined it and realized there was no way under or around, by design.
He’d have to walk through. And if there was anything he hated more than clowns and mimes, it was spiders.
Their webs, in particular. The unsettling tickle of feeling it on your body and not being able to see it, the frantic pulling and swiping and swatting of trying to get it off before the spider at the end of it grabbed hold of you and sank its fangs in, or laid its eggs in your ear canal.
The humiliation of knowing you looked like an absolute loon to anyone watching you struggle and flail.
It was why he often walked with his arms stretched out in front of him, swirling them in a circle, or batted at the air with a stick when strolling in nature. It was why he only took the well-traveled paths and never strayed where someone hadn’t gone before him to clear out all the spiders.
It was all fake, but his heart pounded the same, anticipating the feeling: a caught fly waiting for the slow, painful end to come.