3. Something’s Wrong with the Mascots
SOMETHING'S WRONG WITH THE MASCOTS
GRACE
The wet knock comes again behind me.
The stabby fork remains aggressively foam.
We retreat deeper into the fish part. It smells like chlorine and fish sweat. Which is what I expected.
The whole zone is designed to make you feel like you're underwater even though you're very much on land and paying fourteen dollars for a smoothie.
The main corridor splits into three paths ahead of me.
Left goes to the splash pad and outdoor exhibits, which is a no.
Right goes to the fish tubes, which sounds promising but also sounds like a dead end and I don't love the word "dead" right now.
Straight ahead is the Celestial Bay Theater, home of, according to the sign, "Melody's Undersea Adventure: A Musical Journey Beneath the Waves! Showtimes daily at 11, 1, and 4."
It's 3:47. The four o'clock show isn't going to happen.
I go straight because the theater is a big room with lots of seats and probably multiple exits and right now my survival strategy is "find a dark room with more than one door" which isn't exactly military-grade planning but it's what I've got and I'm committed.
The theater lobby is empty. Popcorn machine still warm. A cardboard cutout of a cartoon mermaid named Melody stands near the door, holding a starfish and smiling with the dead-eyed optimism of someone who's never paid taxes. A sign on the door says NEXT SHOW: 4:00 PM: SEATS AVAILABLE!
Seats available. "I bet they are, Melody. I bet they really are."
I push through the double doors into the theater proper and it's bigger than I expected. Stadium seating, all facing a wide stage with a closed curtain painted to look like an ocean floor. Emergency strips glow along the aisle edges in soft blue.
I pick a row near the middle and sit down and eat my second churro and try to think.
The theater doors open behind me.
I slide out of my seat and onto the floor between the rows so fast that I bang my elbow on the armrest and have to physically bite my hoodie sleeve to keep from yelping. If it's security, I'm done.
I peek over the seat back.
It's not security.
It's a WonderSphere mascot. This one is Sheldon the Sea Turtle. I recognize him from the signage. He's six feet tall, plush green, with a big painted smile and cartoon eyes and a shell on his back that's supposed to look friendly and instead looks like a UFO crashed into a Build-A-Bear.
Sheldon is walking wrong. Not "mascot with low visibility and a private thigh rash" wrong. Wrong wrong.
Sheldon is staggering. One leg dragging slightly, the big foam foot catching on the carpet.
His arms are hanging loose instead of doing the mandatory friendship flapping required by mascot law.
His head is tilted at an angle that makes it look like his neck gave up on the whole concept of alignment.
And he's making a sound. A low, wet, gurgling sound that's coming from inside the costume and is not part of Melody's Undersea Adventure.
My first thought: heatstroke. Mascots are just crockpots with legs. This person probably needs water, medical attention, and someone brave enough to unzip the turtle before he becomes soup in there.
My second thought: the smell. It hits me three seconds after Sheldon enters. Sweet, rotten, and thick enough to taste.
I cover my mouth with my Wondie hoodie sleeve. My eyes are watering.
Sheldon lurches down the center aisle. Closer. The costume is stained. Stains that are seeping through the green plush fabric from the inside out, and my brain is doing a very fast and very unwelcome math problem about what kind of bodily situation creates that particular color palette.
One of Sheldon's foam hands is torn. And through the gap I see actual human fingers. They're grayish. They're curled in a way that fingers curl when the person attached to them isn't having a great time.
I sink lower behind the seats. My heart is doing something aggressive in my chest. My churro is threatening to reverse course. I owe Craig an apology. Spiritually, from a distance, while hiding from a rotting turtle, I can admit he may have had one or two valid concerns about letting people in.
Sheldon stops. Middle of the aisle, six rows behind me. His big foam turtle head swivels. The gurgling sound gets louder. Something is clicking inside the costume, a jaw sound, teeth on teeth.
He starts moving again. Wobbling past my row. I'm flat on the floor between seats, tote bag clutched to my chest, watching through the gap between seat bases as two big green foam feet drag past me. One of the feet has a dark trail behind it.
I don't breathe. I don't move. I don't even blink, which is a thing I didn't know I could control until right now when every single bodily function has apparently submitted to the authority of pure terror.
Sheldon keeps going. Lurches down toward the stage, bumps into the front row of seats, turns vaguely left, bumps into the wall, turns again, and disappears through a side exit near the stage.
The door swings shut behind him. The smell lingers. The wet trail on the carpet glistens under the emergency lighting.
I stay on the floor for a very long time. Probably ninety seconds but it feels like I age several years down here between the seats with my purse digging into my hip.
Then I get up. My hands are shaking. My knees are doing a thing where they feel like they're made of suggestions instead of bones.
But I'm up and I'm moving and I'm heading in the opposite direction from wherever Sheldon went because whatever is wrong with Sheldon is very wrong and very not-heatstroke and I need to be in a room with a lock right now.
I push through a service door near the back of the theater. It leads to a hallway. The hallway leads to another door marked CELESTIAL BAY THEATER ANIMATRONIC MAINTENANCE. Behind this door, I can hear the soft hum of machinery.
I open the door and I find the mermaids.
There are six of them, arranged on tiered platforms in two shallow arcs.
They're the full-size kind, detailed and weirdly beautiful in that way where they're almost real enough to be unsettling and fake enough to be safe.
Their eyes are glass and their smiles are painted and they're staring at absolutely nothing with vacant contentment.
The room is lit by the standby glow of the animatronic control panels and a few safety lights near the floor. It's warm from the machinery. It smells like electrical components, silicone, and the ghost of theatrical fog fluid.
It doesn't smell like Sheldon.
I wedge myself between two mermaids in the back arc.
One has blue hair. The other has green hair and is holding a fake shell.
The blue one is Brenda. The green one is Sheila.
I nestle into the gap between them, pull my tote bag onto my lap, rest the stabby fork across my knees, and try to become a mermaid.
"Be a mermaid," I whisper. "Fish don't have problems. That's probably not scientifically accurate, but neither is Brenda."
The park speakers, muffled through the walls, chirp their loop. But it sounds different now. The music underneath has a drag to it, like the audio system is losing power or losing its mind. Wondie comes through warped, the pitch dropping mid-sentence.
"Wonder... never... stooops..."
My phone buzzes. Fifteen percent.
A text from my mom: Did you get the sweatshirt?
I text back: Yes. Got you one too. Pink with glitter.
Oh that sounds cute. Is it warm?
Mom I think something really bad is happening.
Long pause. Dots appearing and disappearing. Then: I know, baby. The news is saying things. Just stay inside. Stay where you are. Don't open doors for strangers.
I love you. Kiss Biscuit. Phone's dying.
I love you. Be careful. Don't trip.
I put my phone on airplane mode to save what's left and I sit in the dark between two animatronic mermaids and I listen to the park fall apart outside.
Distant sounds that don't belong: a crash from somewhere in the outdoor exhibits.
A shout that starts as words and ends as something that isn't words anymore.
The walkie-talkie chatter that's been constant since I arrived is getting faster, with people talking over each other with voices that are climbing in pitch the way voices climb when professionalism is losing the fight against panic.
The lights in the animatronic room flicker. The mermaids' fiber-optic hair stutters, flashing once, twice, then goes dark. The control panels dim. The hum of idle machinery drops to a lower register.
I sit very still between Brenda and Sheila. They're my best friends now and they have excellent posture and no opinions and they're the most emotionally stable beings in this building.
Something moves in the theater beyond the maintenance door.
I hear footsteps, but not right. These are the shuffling, uneven, wrong-footed sounds of someone whose body has forgotten the original instructions for walking and is working from a bad photocopy.
The maintenance door is closed. I closed it. I know I closed it because I specifically thought "Grace, close the door behind you" and then I did it and then I checked it because I don't trust myself and checking was the right call because I did close it.
The door doesn't have a lock.
The footsteps get closer.
I stop breathing. I become a mermaid. I'm Brenda's sister.
Sheila's cousin. I was born in this semicircle.
I've always been here, between the blue one and the green one.
I have glass eyes and a painted smile and I've never once had a heartbeat, which is convenient because if I did have one it would currently be audible from space.
The door opens.
It's not Sheldon. It's a person. A guest, from the look of what's left of their clothes.
Cargo shorts. A WonderSphere T-shirt, the same shirt they sell in the gift shop where I got my hoodie, except this one isn't in retail condition.
This one has been through something. The collar is torn.
The front is stained with the same dark, wet wrongness that was seeping through Sheldon's costume.
The guest is a man, maybe in his forties, average height, average build, and he's not average anymore.
His skin has gone the color of convenience store lunch meat, that grayish-pink that says "technically this was food at some point but the warranty has expired.
" His mouth is open and his jaw is chewing-but-with-nothing-in-it, which is somehow worse than chewing with something in it, and I hate that I now have a preference.
He walks into the animatronic room, bumps into the first row of mermaids, and stops. His head turns, slow. The chewing intensifies. A sound comes out of him, like someone trying to gargle with a throat that's forgotten what gargling is for.
He's four mermaids away from me.
I'm not breathing. I'm fiberglass. I'm silicone and glass eyes and fiber-optic hair that is currently not functioning due to the power situation.
He takes another step. Then another.
He isn't wandering anymore. He's coming down the narrow space between the platforms, directly toward Brenda and Sheila and the woman between them who's made several catastrophic decisions today and would like the opportunity to make more.
My left leg starts tingling.
Not now.
The pins and needles spread through my calf, sharp little electrical pops that make every muscle want to twitch. I lock my knee. Curl my toes inside my shoe. Inform my entire lower body that betrayal will not be tolerated until further notice.
The gray man reaches Brenda.
One hand lands on her shoulder. His fingers drag through her blue hair, pulling strands of fiber-optic cable loose with a brittle snapping sound.
His head jerks toward it. Fast.
Every part of him has been slow until now.
He surges into the gap.
I grab the first thing my hand finds inside the tote and throw it toward the door.
One of my four-dollar water bottles smacks the far door with a crack and drops beside it.
The gray man's head whips toward the sound.
He turns away from me so abruptly that his shoulder knocks Brenda sideways on her mount. Then he goes after the bottle, fast for three stumbling steps before his body loses the instructions again. He hits the door face-first, claws at it, and pushes through.
The door swings shut behind him.
I don't move. I don't breathe.
Brenda's torn blue hair hangs across my face.
"Thank you," I whisper.
I sit between Brenda and Sheila and I count to sixty in my head, except I lose the numbers at forty-seven, so I start over and make it all the way through the second time.
My left leg is fully numb. The pins and needles have escalated to a full electrical protest.
I try to stand up. My left leg says absolutely not. My right leg says I'll do my best but don't expect miracles. I topple sideways off the platform.
My shoulder hits Sheila's tail. Sheila doesn't move because she's a professional. But the vibration travels down the platform and knocks a decorative starfish off its mount at the end of the row. It hits the floor with a clatter that sounds, in this silence, roughly equivalent to a cannon.
I freeze, listening for the sudden scrape of feet beyond the far door.
Nothing.
"Sorry," I whisper to the starfish.
It doesn't accept my apology. It just lies there on the floor, judging me with its five arms and zero facial features.
My leg tingles back to life. I collect my tote bag, purse, stabby fork, and what remains of my dignity, which fits in a very small container.
I stand up and look at the starfish on the floor, the door the not-a-man-anymore walked through, and Brenda and Sheila who witnessed everything and will tell no one because they're the only trustworthy beings I've encountered today.
"Thank you for your service," I tell them. "You were excellent friends. I'll come back for you."
I pick up the starfish and put it back on the platform because even in the apocalypse we clean up after ourselves.
Then I go to the door. The third one, the one I haven't tried, because my survival strategy has officially evolved from "find a dark room with more than one door" to "use the door nothing horrible has walked through yet."
I open it.
It leads deeper into the fish part. Toward the aquarium. Toward the big fish window and the glass hallway and whatever else is waiting in the parts of this park that I haven't seen yet.
Behind me, the speakers warble. Wondie's voice, stretched and distorted, barely recognizable.
"WonderSphere... welcomes... you..."
"Your timing is dogshit, Wondie," I whisper.
I step through the door.
The ground doesn't get me this time. Small victories. I'll take it.