CHAPTER NINETEEN
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WHEN ADAM PULLED up to the Heartbreak Hotel, he didn’t expect such a crowd. A barbarian horde fresh off their first hit of hormones stood outside the gates, rattling their phones like sabers and baying for blood.
He’d followed the stragglers from the parking lot up a dark path through a field of dead corn.
His fears of being mutilated by a zombie harvester had faded once he’d spotted the lights streaming into the night from a large door that was still closed.
Two gargantuan statues stood on both sides of the doors.
They had the head of a minotaur and the build of Hercules.
When Adam noticed the veins carved into the flexed muscles on the biceps and thighs, he had to take a moment to fan himself.
The main door opened with a loud creak, and the crowd surged closer. Instead of dashing for the forbidden entrance, they all jerked back to a stop as a single man slipped out. The formidable door closed again.
“What the hell?” someone shouted, setting off a chorus of the same refrain.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Poor Raj stood there, his sleeves up to his elbows, which were stained with black grease. “The haunt is not yet ready.”
“This is bullshit!” a boy screamed near Adam.
“We’ve been waiting for an hour!”
“You were supposed to open at seven!”
The crowd’s restlessness had found its target.
“I’m sorry,” Raj repeated. “There’s been a problem. We’ll get it up and running soon. Just have to fix a few things.”
The collective groan nearly blew Raj into the plywood door.
Fearing the appearance of torches and pitchforks, Adam pushed through the crowd. Some tried to close him off, but he called out, “Move aside for your king!” The shock was usually enough to get them to go limp so he could slip on past.
By the time he made it to the front, Raj was too busy offering appeasements to the people ready to draw and quarter him. “Having troubles?” Adam called.
Raj jerked in shock, stared down at him, back at the crowd, then he lingered on Adam’s face. “A few.”
Chuckling, Adam unhooked the rope to join Raj at the top of the stairs. It also left him in the mob’s sights. If they didn’t solve this fast, there’d be more flying fruit.
Raj twisted his head, his hair falling into his eyes. “How are you…?” Wincing, he groaned. “The date. It’s Thursday.”
“As we never decided on a place, I thought I’d pick you up. But it seems you have bigger problems.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t forget, I just—”
“Shh.” Adam nearly took Raj’s hand before his skin twitched from the thousand angry eyes glaring both of them down. “We should appease the masses first.”
Raj nodded and haplessly swung around a wrench.
From the side of his mouth, Adam said, “I’ll punish you later.”
The wrench clattered to the ground, just missing Raj’s foot.
“People. Please!” Adam strode dead center, taking most of their wrath. Rather than wilt under it, he spun that anger into a cloak of fire. “As we all know, good things come to those who wait.”
“This had better be the best fucking haunted house in the world!” someone shouted.
Adam pursed his lips. “I don’t think we can get the permits for that.”
“What?”
Shaking off his banshee bordello joke, Adam smiled. “Never mind. We only need another ten minutes, then you will be free to be terrified until you piss your pants.”
“Ha! You can’t scare me!” one of the boys most likely to throw his girlfriend to the zombies shouted.
“Shall we?” Adam asked, extending his hand to Raj.
“You…but you’re dressed nice. And you smell so good.” His cheeks burned, and he shook his head. “I mean, I don’t know if we can fix it in—”
“Ten minutes,” Adam shouted. He wiggled his fingers between the gap in the door and frame, then pulled it open. “That’s all we need.”
“All we need,” Raj repeated as they slipped into the horror of a broken haunt.
Despite his profession and creepy hobbies, Adam had never been backstage at a haunt. It was barely a foot’s difference from macabre butcher shop to plywood facades and teenagers in pancake makeup.
“Mr. Choudhary?” One of the girls in a fright wig looked up from her phone. She tried to stand, but he waved her back down. “Are we going tonight?”
“Yes,” he insisted, before pursing his lips. “At least I pray so.”
Turning a corner, they passed a seance room. As they did, the lights flickered and UV pentagrams glowed all across the ceiling, walls, and floors. “And there’s the room to do it in,” Adam said off-handedly. “So, what’s gone wrong?”
“I swear, the whole thing was working not even an hour ago. All the electronics, the cues, even the fog machines.”
A blast of white smoke sputtered between Adam and Raj. Coughing, Adam removed his pocket square and covered his mouth. Raj raised his sweater, and they stared at each other through the fog. “Now it goes off whenever it wants. It’s like this place has a mind of its own.”
“Perhaps it’s actually haunted. Was this perchance a barn where a carnivorous farm couple communed with Satan?”
“It was a dirt lot that grew watermelons.”
“The most terrifying of melon,” Adam said, getting a momentary chuckle from the man about to have a panic attack. Poor Raj kept darting his eyes around like he expected the teenagers to burst through the wall and take him.
“Look.” Adam clasped his palms to Raj’s shoulders, getting the man to focus on him. “There’s got to be a logical answer. We’ll find it.”
“You promise?” His plea rang out like an Ave Maria in the middle of a poltergeist attack.
“I do.”
“If this doesn’t work…”
“It will. You just need the Stein touch.” Adam raised his arms in dramatic fashion.
The lights went out.
“That wasn’t it.”
“Damn it. Not this half too. Come on. I swear, it’s got to be the breaker.”
Clinging to Raj’s shoulder, Adam was led through the back alleys in the pitch dark.
Every once in a while, Raj would call out “Duck” or “Move to the left” just before a large hand would try to crush him.
It was like he knew the place better than the inside of his eyelids.
“I don’t get it. I’ve tested every fuse, every light.
It should be working. The draw’s good. We’re not overloading.
But if I leave the place running for longer than an hour, it does, well… this.”
They descended the cement steps into a makeshift bunker.
Cold bit at Adam like he was on the wrong side of a grave.
Raj beamed his phone’s flashlight at the command center of the damned.
A table was set up below a fuse box. On it was a laptop hooked up to what looked like a server or some kind of mechanical doodad.
It quickly hit Adam that he had no idea what any of this was. Raj babbled to himself about all the whooseits and whatsits galore while Adam kept nodding, not understanding a thing. After pushing a button on the laptop that made a lot of little buttons turn red, Raj glanced back at him.
“What do you think?”
He didn’t have a damn clue how to help him. It’d be so easy to walk away, leave Raj to the mandibles of the un-entertained outside. When did helping someone ever not bite him the ass? “Maybe there’s a loose plug?” Adam said, grimacing for the groan.
Raj’s heavy head fell. “Maybe,” he said, brimming with dejection. “This is it. If I can’t get this to work, then…I don’t think the haunt will happen.”
“What? But there’s still…a couple more weekends left in Halloween. And next year too.”
“Assuming there is a next year,” Raj mumbled. He’d said it so quietly, Adam suspected he wasn’t supposed to hear. But concrete bunkers had amazing acoustics.
Adam’s heart fluttered like a butterfly with wings of razor blades. Was the hotel in trouble? Was Raj? No. He couldn’t pack up and go back to California. Not now, not when…
“We’ll find it,” Adam said, taking Raj’s hand.
He stared up at him with such hope in his eyes, Adam couldn’t help but cup his cheek.
“Whatever’s messing his place up, we’ll find it and fix it.
” Holding him tight, Adam pulled the beleaguered man to him for a kiss.
The touch sealed his promise to not only help, but stay for the worst of it.
Raj gave a sputtering breath as he kept running his fingers through Adam’s gelled hair. He finished by circling Adam’s ear with a finger and gazed at him. “Really?”
“And if we can’t, we tell them a ghost is fucking it all up.”
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Raj cracked open his toolbox and inspected his weapons. “Here, for sticking something that’s supposed to stick.” He placed a roll of duct tape in Adam’s hands. “And for unsticking something that’s not supposed to be stuck.”
Adam cracked open the jar, his eyebrow rising in surprise. “Crisco?”
“It’s digestible,” Raj said without thinking.
He got a knowing smile from the man, then closed the jar before slipping it into his pocket. “Oh, and this is so we can communicate.” Raj handed over one of the walkie-talkies and hung the other on his belt.
“I’ll have you know I’m an exemplary communicator, according to my grade school counselor. I use my words and not my fists. Well, not unless someone asks for one.”
Raj tried to focus, but he couldn’t stop his jaw from dropping. Bundling all those thoughts away for much later, he pointed to a path. “Take that, check the wires you find as you go. I’ll do the other side. We should be done in…”
Not ten minutes. Well, they’d already waited an hour; what was another fifteen minutes more?
Adam gave a little salute, then he walked backward into the dark.
Suddenly, Raj raised a hand to his mouth and called out, “If you see any jerking, add a bit of grease.”
“Just like my last Saturday night,” Adam called with a laugh.
At least he seemed to be enjoying himself…
Raj hustled as fast as his weary legs could take him. Somewhere inside of him, that fifth cup of coffee was working overtime. He’d woken at five, bright-eyed and certain this would be the day. And now he had his date traipsing through plaster forests and plywood graveyards to try to save his ass.