Chapter 9
The woman with a walkie-talkie glued to her hand very clearly doesn’t believe me.
In her collared shirt and khakis, she leans against the large tree wrapped in caution tape, fog billowing from the now-open windows of Dusk House.
Lights from the fire truck that pulled up during my first rant about the slaughterhouse event still reflect on every available surface, and it’s dark enough that her face is half-hidden in the shadows while only briefly being lit up by the red and white lights behind me.
“You said it was a man in a wolf-skull mask?” she asks slowly, like maybe I’m just a little stupid.
I left out the part about him kissing me, though her eyes keep flicking to my bloody mouth like she just knows and is judging.
Well, definitely judging, or she thinks I’m off my meds.
“We don’t have anyone here working in a mask like that. ”
I grit my teeth together, feeling my friends’ eyes on me from just a few feet away.
After I stumbled through telling them most of what happened, we immediately tracked down the manager I saw bully the dad into leaving earlier.
I hoped she’d be sympathetic, at the very least. Though part of me had really hoped she would charge in with her weaponized walkie and go look for the guy who cornered me and spread his blood on my lips.
“Yes, I understand that,” I say slowly, like that’s the issue here. “I get he’s not an actor here. I think maybe he snuck in, or—”
“It would be really hard for a guy in a mask to sneak in, go upstairs, and wait for you. Are you saying he was specifically waiting for you?” she adds, looking me over as if to say I don’t seem special enough for a crazy guy to put in that much effort to find me.
Suddenly, I can’t decide whether to be offended or just affronted. I roll my eyes up at the sky, as if I’ll get some help, and let out a breath. “He had a knife,” I say. “He smeared blood on my face.”
“Fake blood,” she assumes, and I shake my head.
“Real blood. He cut himself, and—”
“Cut himself?” Her brows jerk up in surprise.
Voices coming from the haunt get her attention, and the moment she looks away, I know this is a battle I’ve lost. “Listen, I have to take care of whatever’s going on with the fog machines.
I’m sorry you got scared, and I’m sorry if any of our actors freaked you out, even though that’s sort of what they’re here to do. ”
I officially hate walkie-talkie manager.
“But I need to make sure my outlets are still working.” She gives me a quick, distracted smile, reaching a hand to the walkie-talkie on her belt, and before I can answer, she’s gone, striding away in her no-nonsense shoes to catch up to the two firefighters walking out of the building.
My eyes narrow as frustration tingles up my spine, and I cross my arms over my chest as her attention fades from me completely.
“You know, I liked her until about now,” I mumble to Madison as she comes up to throw an arm over my shoulders. “I’m not kidding, or making this up, by the way.”
“Obviously,” Brynn agrees. With her hands on her hips, she watches the manager laughing with the firefighters, looking unimpressed. “It’s clear to anyone with a brain you aren’t making it up.” She hesitates, then adds, “What do you want to do?”
“We could report it?” Madison offers. “We could go to the cops and at least have a report made, just in case—” She breaks off as I shake my head, a scoff on my lips.
“You think they’d take me seriously? I’d be in there telling them, ‘A masked man at a haunted house cornered me in a slaughterhouse room and scared me.’ Do you know what they’d think?
” Glancing at both of them, I can see that they do, in fact, know what the police would think of me in that scenario.
“I just want to go home.” Adrenaline still rushes through my veins, causing my hand to shake as I run my fingers through my hair. “Not that I’ll ever sleep again. But I want to go home and drink too much coffee and just be anywhere but here.”
They don’t argue with me, which comes as a bit of a surprise.
Though I have to assume that they know there’s really nothing else I can do about it.
Immediately I shoot down their offer of coming back to my place with me.
I’d feel bad if they did, since Brynn works in the morning, and I don’t want them to have to deal with the drive back to Chicago at some ungodly hour when the sun has just risen.
“I’ll be fine,” I sigh, giving both of them a quick hug when we’re back to where our cars are parked on the street.
My little sedan looks dingy next to Madison’s shiny Charger, the blue paint gleaming and reflecting the flashing lights of the firetruck a few yards down the street.
“I love you guys, and I appreciate you almost as much as iced coffee.”
Brynn snorts and pulls me in for another quick hug, her arm going around my shoulders.
“Just forget about it, okay?” she advises.
“It was probably some weirdo just looking to scare someone. No offense to your favorite activity, but haunted houses don’t usually attract pillars of society as employees. ”
I bite my lip, stopping my response that Dusk House isn’t really the same as the haunts I normally go to.
It’s filled with volunteers wanting to make a kid’s night better.
Not adults with an addiction to scaring people and seeing the terror on their faces.
No, this feels…different. But I can’t figure out what about him is sounding alarm bells, considering the way I can still feel my heart beating just a little too quickly in my chest.
Calm down, Persy, I silently reprimand myself as I slide into the driver’s seat of my car. Just calm down, and think.
But the best I can do is turn on my engine and blast my music, hoping it wipes away the last of the fog that seeped into my brain so I can process the event clearly during the hour drive home.
Even with the hour drive I spend with music filling every crevice of my brain, I’m not much better when I get home.
As soon as I’ve parked, my hand comes up, fingers running over the blood stained on my lips.
It’s dried now, though I managed to clean most of it off with my sleeve, and I’m sure I’ll need to scrub my face with a sponge to remove the last of it that’s stubbornly sticking to my skin.
I refuse to even think about the idea that he could have some blood-borne illness, or a parasite that he could’ve transferred to me.
The idea isn’t something I can really focus on right now, when the rest of me is in overdrive and trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do after what happened at Dusk House barely an hour and a half ago.
Walking into my house, I swear I can still feel the brush of his lips against mine, which prompts a shiver to go up my spine, giving me the sensation that someone is watching me.
I even stop, unable to convince myself otherwise, and roll my stiff shoulders as I turn to look back at my driveway, the street, and the lit front window in Mrs. Elmore’s house.
I don’t see any movement there tonight, but it’s late enough that she might be in bed.
Or, I suppose, there’s always the chance that the ancient woman who was probably around to see the fall of the dinosaurs has finally had enough of life and simply perished on her kitchen floor. But if that’s the case, I will not be the one finding her.
Tonight I double-check the lock on the door behind me, then give it one more tug just to be sure.
I do the same with the patio door that leads from my kitchen to the small, worn deck beyond.
While I’m usually not someone who needs to repeat the ritual more than once, I find myself walking between them and checking again as if they could have magically come unlocked.
There’s nothing to be afraid of, I promise myself, finally tearing myself away from the curtain-covered window where I’m peering out to the street beyond.
On my quiet little street in Town of Pines, Indiana, there’s no traffic at this time of night.
Then again, there’s not much traffic at any time of day or night.
Off the beaten path and away from the town’s small center means that the only ones coming back here are residents, who are usually home by a reasonable hour instead of cruising the pothole-laden street outside at night.
But it still takes me too long to pull away, and even longer to finally convince myself that I need to shower away the remnants of blood and the creeping, crawling feeling making my skin itch.
The shower is hot and inviting, and I duck under the water with a grateful sigh.
It’s enough to help clear my head, at least for the most part, and I can feel the anxious tension in my shoulders slowly fade as I relax with my face turned up to the spray.
The water is the only thing I can hear, and my ears are full of the rushing, echoing sound, no matter how hard I listen.
There’s nothing to be afraid of, I tell myself again, even mouthing the words to make them more real, more solid in the confines of my dimly lit, cozy bathroom.
Whatever happened at the haunt didn’t follow me back here.
The man in the wolf-skull mask doesn’t know where I live, or anything about me except—
Scaredy Cat.
Thoughts click into place like pieces of a puzzle, and my hands still where they’re rinsing the conditioner out of my hair. He called me Scaredy Cat, and I know that’s not a coincidence. He’s seen my blog, and I suddenly feel stupid for not realizing it.
That’s how he knew where I’d be, not once, but twice. I post my schedule publicly to let my followers know when they can expect me to write about where I’ve gone, but I’ve never considered the idea that it might be a hazard to my safety.
But that still doesn’t explain why someone is following me around to haunts. His end goal eludes me, especially since the person is a stranger. I suppose one of Squad Ghouls’ fans could be the culprit, just trying to get a rise out of me. Or maybe…
My thoughts trail off, and I mentally recap the last couple of weeks, trying to go through and think of anything prominent.
And then it hits me, making me feel like an idiot. Really, I must be the dumbest person to ever run a blog, because I should’ve realized way before this who’s behind the mask.
Well, sort of.
There’s no way him showing up after I got the comments about wanting to scare me is just a coincidence.
Not in my mind, at least. Finishing my shower, I step out and wrap a towel around myself, grumbling under my breath.
It’s a joke. A bet, or something that this guy created in his mind for some reason.
I bet I could scare you, but there should be a prize involved.
That’s what he said. I remember the comment as if it’s burned into my brain, etched into my memory now more than ever. I just took it as a one-off at the time, since I get weird comments once in a while.
But it’s more than that, clearly.
This feels like a game, only I don’t know what the rules are, or how to win.