Heather Farthing's Blog - Posts Tagged "gas-mask"
Masquerade
(C) Heather Farthing 2023, all rights reserved
I WILL BE POSTING THIS STORY ON ROYALROAD.
Chapter one
The world had ended.
I suppose it doesn’t matter how.
The first way it could have ended is with the computer, a wall-sized, steam-powered behemoth of glowing diodes and greenish screens. A supercomputer, built to help mankind, it instead decided mankind would be better off serving it, some as mechanically-enhanced soldiers, some as twisted genetic experiments.
The nineteenth century denizens of Steampunk Singularity, it what is ordinarily the Metropolis zone of technology-themed thrill rides, are preoccupied with the service of their Master, of bringing new flesh for upgrades. People who wand there are likely to disappear, reappearing as a loyal and dutiful servant, body parts replaced by machinery, or distinctly nonhuman features, such as claws, tails, or fangs.
The second way it could have ended is…to have just stopped.
It could have been nuclear war. It could have been a mass coronal ejection. Perhaps it was some kind of disease or pollutant, and it every well could have been all or none. The point is: it ended, and left nothing but blackened ash behind.
The buildings are crumbling. The trees are nothing more than brittle charcoal sticks. Bodies burn, but don’t decay. What little sun still shines is angry, red, and capable of leaving third-degree burns.
The are some that would think that nothing could live in such a place, and they would normally be right, but something yet moves in the dark. Somehow, the plague doctor-like carrion birds have managed to survive, dressing themselves in full-body coats, flat hats, and snouted or beaked masks.
Curious by nature, the carrion birds are fascinated by humans, our bare skin, or shiny jewelry, or the logos on our clothes. Masked and silent, sometimes the sneak up behind, sometimes they slide on their knees, kicking up sparks in their wake.
Maybe, instead, the world ended with some kind of pathogen, not like the one that nearly closed the event and sent people behind masks. This pathogen, thought to be some kind of prion, is more insidious. Found in tainted cotton candy, popcorn, and circus peanuts, it began with laughter that never stopped, a wide grin, alterations to the pigmentation in skin and hair.
The affected became clowns, driven mad by the disease eating their brain. Always searching for new acts and new playmates, the world has become one giant circus, and the performers aren’t picky about safety practices. Step one foot inside Psycho Circus and you’re the audience volunteer.
The final way was through agriculture. Astro Adventure is usually the home of outdated sci-fi, flying cars and jetpacks, and stuff, 1950s values under a veneer of rayguns and martians. The animals decided that this wholesome family dynamic should be theirs, and so they took it, herding humans for fun and profit.
Consider the way humans treat animals, for better or for worse. Now imagine that your beloved pet, curled loyally on your bed by your feet, has decided that a spay or neuter would improve your quality of life, or that it would be kinder to put you down, now that you’re getting on in years.
Now imagine that the cows in the field have decided to throw a barbecue, and ask yourself: where did they get the meat?
There’s also Lost Garden, set between Kiddie Carnival and Metropolis, where the imagined becomes real. While Kiddie Carnival becomes Psycho Circus and Metropolis is split between Steampunk Singularity and Soul Survivor, Lost Garden’s haunted roots have taken hold. They say the castle is haunted, and a headless horseman can be seen on the path to the pirate adventure.
I’m a giggling mess after the dragon dark ride, the one in the castle. I’ve never been inside the park before, and it was everything I hoped it would be, even if the scares are a bit light this year.
It’s about sunset now, and I’m getting ready for dinner. The diner just at the edge of Metropolis, where Soul Survivor meets Steampunk Singularity, is supposed to be really good. The burger’s are cheap, but to die for, and on Halloween, that really means something.
The haunt sliders are out. They were originally designed as plague doctors, and I would be walking through a village that died out due to plague in a matter of hours, but someone found that distasteful, so the outside artist group they brought in had to suddenly retool everything at the last minute. The remnants still show, in their sparking canes and flat hats, the common design of the masks being largely birdlike.
A female, with a black tulle skirt and a feather-print cloak, follows behind a group of men, watching them from the shadows. When they notice her, she drops to her knees and slides headlong toward them, stopping just short of knocking them over, her knees and the tip of her cane sparking.
A taller one, a man with a vulture-inspired mask, slides toward the group in front of me, sending them scattering. Upon seeing their luminous blue bracelets, he loses interest, moving past them toward me, where he bows gracefully, dragging his cane along the ground to show me the sparks.
A clattering in my ear makes me jump. It’s a smaller haunt slider with a more trench warfare-style gas mask, clicking the sheathes of his fingers together just behind my ears to make me jump, which the three of them find hilarious, heaving with silent laughter. The photo opportunity with the vulture one was a distraction.
The short one paces a circle around me, evidently examining my tail, then holds his hands up over his hat to mimic my eared headband. His costume looks familiar, the shape of the mask, circular filters on either side, and the faux leather coat and empty rucksack, a prop shovel slung through the loops. I think it’s the one that doesn’t stay on the hanger.
I smile politely, forgetting I’m wearing a mask, as I move through the crowd. The taller vulture has found new prey, the shorter one is posing, leaning against a park bench, pretending to examine a blackened skeleton to the delight of picture-taking onlookers.
The blackened, ruinous wasteland of Soul Survivor gives way to the cobblestone streets and Victorian facades of Steampunk Singularity. The smell of popcorn from Psycho Circus fades away, giving way to the greasy, fried foods of the 80s-style diner.
Between it and me is a carriage pulled by a beautiful, black stallion. His legs from the knees down are glass and clockwork, with gears and pulleys. He turns to look at me, revealing a spiraled, glass and bronze horn, and the metallic sheeting that makes up the left side of his face, a single red light inside a camera-like aperture where the eye should be. He stands next to a sign that reads “Repairs while you wait,” and then a list of body parts and pricing.
One great, black hoof stamps the dirt. I’m impressed, because I didn’t know it could do anything but turn its head. Air blows out of its nose in agitation, raising steam in the chilly, October air, another convincing effect.
A woman has her skirt pulled up over her knees, revealing brass and clockwork under glass casing, not terribly different from the horse.
“I can’t feel my legs,” she whimpers.
“Funny,” I smile politely, waiting for the crowd to move so that I can move on.
Beyond her, a soldier in a dark blue greatcoat shoves someone, who must be plant, against a wall, raising his brass rifle and firing. The squib goes off to great effect, and what looked like a regular parkgoer drops to the ground.
Apparently startled by the noise, the horse raises up on his hind legs, screaming. Transfixed, I watch how convincing the moment is, the ripple in the muscle. Whoever their outside consultants were, they really outdid themselves.
The horse comes down in slow motion, like it’s actually moving forward, like I might actually get it. I’m swept into strong arms, smelling strongly of leather and pumpkin spice, pushed to the cobblestones just in time for the horse to clear us, shooting off into Soul Survivor at breakneck speed, heavy leather covering me to protect my head.
That seems…really dangerous. All the power to them if they made a fully-independent robot, but letting it shoot off into the crowd like that seems like a lawsuit Wonderland isn’t going to want to deal with.
“Flesh for the Master!” a soldier shouts, discharging is rifle into the air, sending the crowd scattering.
I climb off the ground, dusting myself off. A hunchbacked mutant with extra, stunted arms on its back slams a meaty fist into the nearest parkgoer, shouting the same battlecry.
Have I wandered into some kind of show? Shouldn’t there be a warning?
The one that knocked me out of the way, it’s the short haunt slider, the one with the World War Something-era gas mask, coughing lightly, probably from the smell of gunpowder.
“What’s happening?” I ask him. “Is this part of the show?”
“This isn’t us,” he replies, sounding worried.
A mutant with one large arm dragging the ground lifelessly grabs at me, sending me back to the ground, pain erupting from my back, chanting, “Flesh for the Master!” Hissing, I spray venom toward his eyes, but it’s the haunt slider, lashing out savagely with his shovel that drops the creature, dazedly moaning about its master.
A volley of gunfire goes off somewhere. There’s screaming, now, the smell of blood. A smell of burning and ash like black snowfall is blowing on a frigid breeze from Soul Survivor. Something with a human head and eight spiderlike legs made of rebar is striding purposefully towards us, pausing to spin its head in a circle, casting a red light from its eyes.
“Flesh for the master!” it cries mechanically.
“Get behind the diner!” the haunt slider insists, pulling me up and pushing me toward the glowing neon.
A nozzle emerges from the spider’s mouth. Flames erupt. Flesh burns. People scream.
“Flesh for the master!”
Without another word or second glance, I follow the haunt slider into an alcove where the restaurant hides the entrance to the service tunnels, where parkgoers won’t see it. The good news is: that means we’re out of the flow of the crowd. The bad news is: the door doesn’t have a knob on this side.
“What was that?” I whimper. “You’re going to get someone killed!”
“That’s not us,” he repeats, still holding his prop shovel. “That’s…”
He stops talking long enough to cough behind his mask, and press a button on his shovel, extending it from about a foot to just long enough for him. Without completing his thought, he jams it into the doorframe, about where the knob would be on the other side, and wedges it open.
“That’s cool,” I tell him. “I thought it was just a prop.”
“It is,” he replies, sounding a bit confused or distracted, pulling it out of the door and pressing the button. The shovel’s handle slides in on itself, putting it at its original length. One of the edges on the bowl is serrated, I hadn’t noticed that before.
“Do you have a cell phone?” I ask, patting down my hips with a stab of panic. “I think I dropped mine…”
Using his shovel, he taps one of his metal knee-plates.
“Right…probably would have broken it…”
As the spider-thing approaches, I follow him inside, stepping down a ramp toward the service tunnels. The lights come on automatically, responding to our movement, lighting up the room in sickly florescent lighting. He slams the door closed, leaning against it, still holding his shovel one-handed, trembling slightly, gasping for breath and coughing lightly.
“You shouldn’t have come into work with a cough…” I mumble.
He draws in ragged air, a plume of candy corn-scented gas emanating from the side filters in his mask. I taste blood, tangy and metallic, under the sweet vapor.
Something slams hard against the door, making him jump. Next to the ramp is a mostly-empty vending machine. Acting on impulse and instinct, I start trying to lift it from the bottom, just enough to tip it. The haunt slider appears by my side, lifting from the bottom. There isn’t room enough for both, so I push from higher up, and it topples over, pinning the door closed, the plexiglass front crack and all the snacks knocking loose.
Coughing, the haunt slider moves to the folding table in the center of the room, leaning on it, groaning in pain and rubbing his throat and chest, like you do when you have a bad cold and lots of congestion.
His hands are shaking, his shoulders trembling. He looks like his knees might give out at any second, but he manages to hold himself steady, but just barely.
“What’s happening…to us…?” he asks vaguely, staring down at his upturned palms, flexing his fingers, like he’s never seen them before.
A wracking coughs send spasms throughout his body, driving him to the floor. A bit of red sprays with the amber of the burning leaves-scented smoke pouring from his mask, dissipating into the air.
“You might breathe better without that,” I tell him, kneeling beside him to help him get the mask off, hands at the straps holding it to the back of his snood.
His fingers wrap around my hands, the metal sheathes cool against my cheap Halloween gloves. The leather clings to his hands like a second skin, supple and buttery, as he pushes me away.
“No…touching…please…”
His voice is hoarse and raspy, the vapor still with a bloody taste, autumn leaves giving away to pumpkin spice.
“How are you doing that?” I ask, looking for tubes to connect to some kind of sprayer, maybe inside his rucksack. Wouldn’t that be bad for his back, during his sliding?
“He…just…does…?”
Looking a bit dazed and somewhat confused, his focuses on the overturned vending machine. He scrambles to his feet and with a powerful kick from feet that don’t quite look right, smashes the plexiglass in, then starts filling the inner lining of his coat with snack cakes and candy bars.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Something’s wrong…” he mumbles, pausing in his scavenging. “We feel…what’s happening…to him?”
The hoarse rasping in his voice fades into something more like poisonous fog crawling insidiously across a barren wasteland. He’s staring at his hands again, confused, but then shakes his head and goes back to filling his pockets.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
He looks up at me with a moment of something approaching clarity.
“We know you…you’re the girl with the vacuum…that puts him back on…his hanger when he falls…”
A shiver runs down my spine, causing my hood to spread again. It’s possible he’s seen me on the job, as he was getting into costuming, but that has to be some of the creepiest way to phrase that imaginable.
There’s a phone by the door to the tunnels. I grab for it, dialing the emergency line. It rings…and rings…and rings, and then disconnects.
Must be a busy night. I didn’t even know they could do that.
“Was…that…helpful…?” the masked man asks, having finished emptying the already sparse vending machine.
“No, not really.”
He pauses, falters, as if having forgotten what he’s supposed to be doing, then shakes his head like he’s trying to clear it. I see the remote on the tabletop and grab it, turning the television on as he moves to the refrigerator, loading up on water bottles.
The television lights up with a news broadcast, something about civil unrest, which is pretty common these days. It describes rioters disguised as Halloween merry-makers, and then the feed cuts out abruptly.
Something heavy slams against the door, making me jump. The haunt slider, driven by some sort of compulsion, continues his scavenging.
“Hey,” I tell him, placing my hand on his shoulder.
“No…touching…please…” he wheezes through candy corn smoke, never looking up.
I have no idea where he’s putting those water bottles. They just disappear into the coat, apparently adding neither weight nor bulk.
“They’re going to come through the door,” I whimper. “We can’t stay here.”
He falters. The coughing has stopped, but he still doesn’t look right. He seems distracted. I’ve only known him for, like, five minutes, but it seems like he’s…not himself.
I give him a harder shove, which draws his reproachful attention. He stares at me, a capsaisin smell like cutting fresh peppers showing his displeasure.
“We gotta go,” I plead. “It isn’t safe…”
Never looking away from me, he places one more bottle in his coat, and then retrieves his shovel from the floor next to him. His vapor fades from candy corn to a purplish mist of lavender and chamomile, and he holds his shovel defensively, nodding to me in a placating sort of way.
I feel the tension relax. Already I feel a bit calmer, whether it’s the sight of him ready for action, or the calming effect lavender is supposed to have.
Taking point, he opens the door to the downward incline of the tunnels. Someone screams and something else roars, but we’re caught between a rock and a hard place, and the only direction is forward.
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
I WILL BE POSTING THIS STORY ON ROYALROAD.
Chapter one
The world had ended.
I suppose it doesn’t matter how.
The first way it could have ended is with the computer, a wall-sized, steam-powered behemoth of glowing diodes and greenish screens. A supercomputer, built to help mankind, it instead decided mankind would be better off serving it, some as mechanically-enhanced soldiers, some as twisted genetic experiments.
The nineteenth century denizens of Steampunk Singularity, it what is ordinarily the Metropolis zone of technology-themed thrill rides, are preoccupied with the service of their Master, of bringing new flesh for upgrades. People who wand there are likely to disappear, reappearing as a loyal and dutiful servant, body parts replaced by machinery, or distinctly nonhuman features, such as claws, tails, or fangs.
The second way it could have ended is…to have just stopped.
It could have been nuclear war. It could have been a mass coronal ejection. Perhaps it was some kind of disease or pollutant, and it every well could have been all or none. The point is: it ended, and left nothing but blackened ash behind.
The buildings are crumbling. The trees are nothing more than brittle charcoal sticks. Bodies burn, but don’t decay. What little sun still shines is angry, red, and capable of leaving third-degree burns.
The are some that would think that nothing could live in such a place, and they would normally be right, but something yet moves in the dark. Somehow, the plague doctor-like carrion birds have managed to survive, dressing themselves in full-body coats, flat hats, and snouted or beaked masks.
Curious by nature, the carrion birds are fascinated by humans, our bare skin, or shiny jewelry, or the logos on our clothes. Masked and silent, sometimes the sneak up behind, sometimes they slide on their knees, kicking up sparks in their wake.
Maybe, instead, the world ended with some kind of pathogen, not like the one that nearly closed the event and sent people behind masks. This pathogen, thought to be some kind of prion, is more insidious. Found in tainted cotton candy, popcorn, and circus peanuts, it began with laughter that never stopped, a wide grin, alterations to the pigmentation in skin and hair.
The affected became clowns, driven mad by the disease eating their brain. Always searching for new acts and new playmates, the world has become one giant circus, and the performers aren’t picky about safety practices. Step one foot inside Psycho Circus and you’re the audience volunteer.
The final way was through agriculture. Astro Adventure is usually the home of outdated sci-fi, flying cars and jetpacks, and stuff, 1950s values under a veneer of rayguns and martians. The animals decided that this wholesome family dynamic should be theirs, and so they took it, herding humans for fun and profit.
Consider the way humans treat animals, for better or for worse. Now imagine that your beloved pet, curled loyally on your bed by your feet, has decided that a spay or neuter would improve your quality of life, or that it would be kinder to put you down, now that you’re getting on in years.
Now imagine that the cows in the field have decided to throw a barbecue, and ask yourself: where did they get the meat?
There’s also Lost Garden, set between Kiddie Carnival and Metropolis, where the imagined becomes real. While Kiddie Carnival becomes Psycho Circus and Metropolis is split between Steampunk Singularity and Soul Survivor, Lost Garden’s haunted roots have taken hold. They say the castle is haunted, and a headless horseman can be seen on the path to the pirate adventure.
I’m a giggling mess after the dragon dark ride, the one in the castle. I’ve never been inside the park before, and it was everything I hoped it would be, even if the scares are a bit light this year.
It’s about sunset now, and I’m getting ready for dinner. The diner just at the edge of Metropolis, where Soul Survivor meets Steampunk Singularity, is supposed to be really good. The burger’s are cheap, but to die for, and on Halloween, that really means something.
The haunt sliders are out. They were originally designed as plague doctors, and I would be walking through a village that died out due to plague in a matter of hours, but someone found that distasteful, so the outside artist group they brought in had to suddenly retool everything at the last minute. The remnants still show, in their sparking canes and flat hats, the common design of the masks being largely birdlike.
A female, with a black tulle skirt and a feather-print cloak, follows behind a group of men, watching them from the shadows. When they notice her, she drops to her knees and slides headlong toward them, stopping just short of knocking them over, her knees and the tip of her cane sparking.
A taller one, a man with a vulture-inspired mask, slides toward the group in front of me, sending them scattering. Upon seeing their luminous blue bracelets, he loses interest, moving past them toward me, where he bows gracefully, dragging his cane along the ground to show me the sparks.
A clattering in my ear makes me jump. It’s a smaller haunt slider with a more trench warfare-style gas mask, clicking the sheathes of his fingers together just behind my ears to make me jump, which the three of them find hilarious, heaving with silent laughter. The photo opportunity with the vulture one was a distraction.
The short one paces a circle around me, evidently examining my tail, then holds his hands up over his hat to mimic my eared headband. His costume looks familiar, the shape of the mask, circular filters on either side, and the faux leather coat and empty rucksack, a prop shovel slung through the loops. I think it’s the one that doesn’t stay on the hanger.
I smile politely, forgetting I’m wearing a mask, as I move through the crowd. The taller vulture has found new prey, the shorter one is posing, leaning against a park bench, pretending to examine a blackened skeleton to the delight of picture-taking onlookers.
The blackened, ruinous wasteland of Soul Survivor gives way to the cobblestone streets and Victorian facades of Steampunk Singularity. The smell of popcorn from Psycho Circus fades away, giving way to the greasy, fried foods of the 80s-style diner.
Between it and me is a carriage pulled by a beautiful, black stallion. His legs from the knees down are glass and clockwork, with gears and pulleys. He turns to look at me, revealing a spiraled, glass and bronze horn, and the metallic sheeting that makes up the left side of his face, a single red light inside a camera-like aperture where the eye should be. He stands next to a sign that reads “Repairs while you wait,” and then a list of body parts and pricing.
One great, black hoof stamps the dirt. I’m impressed, because I didn’t know it could do anything but turn its head. Air blows out of its nose in agitation, raising steam in the chilly, October air, another convincing effect.
A woman has her skirt pulled up over her knees, revealing brass and clockwork under glass casing, not terribly different from the horse.
“I can’t feel my legs,” she whimpers.
“Funny,” I smile politely, waiting for the crowd to move so that I can move on.
Beyond her, a soldier in a dark blue greatcoat shoves someone, who must be plant, against a wall, raising his brass rifle and firing. The squib goes off to great effect, and what looked like a regular parkgoer drops to the ground.
Apparently startled by the noise, the horse raises up on his hind legs, screaming. Transfixed, I watch how convincing the moment is, the ripple in the muscle. Whoever their outside consultants were, they really outdid themselves.
The horse comes down in slow motion, like it’s actually moving forward, like I might actually get it. I’m swept into strong arms, smelling strongly of leather and pumpkin spice, pushed to the cobblestones just in time for the horse to clear us, shooting off into Soul Survivor at breakneck speed, heavy leather covering me to protect my head.
That seems…really dangerous. All the power to them if they made a fully-independent robot, but letting it shoot off into the crowd like that seems like a lawsuit Wonderland isn’t going to want to deal with.
“Flesh for the Master!” a soldier shouts, discharging is rifle into the air, sending the crowd scattering.
I climb off the ground, dusting myself off. A hunchbacked mutant with extra, stunted arms on its back slams a meaty fist into the nearest parkgoer, shouting the same battlecry.
Have I wandered into some kind of show? Shouldn’t there be a warning?
The one that knocked me out of the way, it’s the short haunt slider, the one with the World War Something-era gas mask, coughing lightly, probably from the smell of gunpowder.
“What’s happening?” I ask him. “Is this part of the show?”
“This isn’t us,” he replies, sounding worried.
A mutant with one large arm dragging the ground lifelessly grabs at me, sending me back to the ground, pain erupting from my back, chanting, “Flesh for the Master!” Hissing, I spray venom toward his eyes, but it’s the haunt slider, lashing out savagely with his shovel that drops the creature, dazedly moaning about its master.
A volley of gunfire goes off somewhere. There’s screaming, now, the smell of blood. A smell of burning and ash like black snowfall is blowing on a frigid breeze from Soul Survivor. Something with a human head and eight spiderlike legs made of rebar is striding purposefully towards us, pausing to spin its head in a circle, casting a red light from its eyes.
“Flesh for the master!” it cries mechanically.
“Get behind the diner!” the haunt slider insists, pulling me up and pushing me toward the glowing neon.
A nozzle emerges from the spider’s mouth. Flames erupt. Flesh burns. People scream.
“Flesh for the master!”
Without another word or second glance, I follow the haunt slider into an alcove where the restaurant hides the entrance to the service tunnels, where parkgoers won’t see it. The good news is: that means we’re out of the flow of the crowd. The bad news is: the door doesn’t have a knob on this side.
“What was that?” I whimper. “You’re going to get someone killed!”
“That’s not us,” he repeats, still holding his prop shovel. “That’s…”
He stops talking long enough to cough behind his mask, and press a button on his shovel, extending it from about a foot to just long enough for him. Without completing his thought, he jams it into the doorframe, about where the knob would be on the other side, and wedges it open.
“That’s cool,” I tell him. “I thought it was just a prop.”
“It is,” he replies, sounding a bit confused or distracted, pulling it out of the door and pressing the button. The shovel’s handle slides in on itself, putting it at its original length. One of the edges on the bowl is serrated, I hadn’t noticed that before.
“Do you have a cell phone?” I ask, patting down my hips with a stab of panic. “I think I dropped mine…”
Using his shovel, he taps one of his metal knee-plates.
“Right…probably would have broken it…”
As the spider-thing approaches, I follow him inside, stepping down a ramp toward the service tunnels. The lights come on automatically, responding to our movement, lighting up the room in sickly florescent lighting. He slams the door closed, leaning against it, still holding his shovel one-handed, trembling slightly, gasping for breath and coughing lightly.
“You shouldn’t have come into work with a cough…” I mumble.
He draws in ragged air, a plume of candy corn-scented gas emanating from the side filters in his mask. I taste blood, tangy and metallic, under the sweet vapor.
Something slams hard against the door, making him jump. Next to the ramp is a mostly-empty vending machine. Acting on impulse and instinct, I start trying to lift it from the bottom, just enough to tip it. The haunt slider appears by my side, lifting from the bottom. There isn’t room enough for both, so I push from higher up, and it topples over, pinning the door closed, the plexiglass front crack and all the snacks knocking loose.
Coughing, the haunt slider moves to the folding table in the center of the room, leaning on it, groaning in pain and rubbing his throat and chest, like you do when you have a bad cold and lots of congestion.
His hands are shaking, his shoulders trembling. He looks like his knees might give out at any second, but he manages to hold himself steady, but just barely.
“What’s happening…to us…?” he asks vaguely, staring down at his upturned palms, flexing his fingers, like he’s never seen them before.
A wracking coughs send spasms throughout his body, driving him to the floor. A bit of red sprays with the amber of the burning leaves-scented smoke pouring from his mask, dissipating into the air.
“You might breathe better without that,” I tell him, kneeling beside him to help him get the mask off, hands at the straps holding it to the back of his snood.
His fingers wrap around my hands, the metal sheathes cool against my cheap Halloween gloves. The leather clings to his hands like a second skin, supple and buttery, as he pushes me away.
“No…touching…please…”
His voice is hoarse and raspy, the vapor still with a bloody taste, autumn leaves giving away to pumpkin spice.
“How are you doing that?” I ask, looking for tubes to connect to some kind of sprayer, maybe inside his rucksack. Wouldn’t that be bad for his back, during his sliding?
“He…just…does…?”
Looking a bit dazed and somewhat confused, his focuses on the overturned vending machine. He scrambles to his feet and with a powerful kick from feet that don’t quite look right, smashes the plexiglass in, then starts filling the inner lining of his coat with snack cakes and candy bars.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Something’s wrong…” he mumbles, pausing in his scavenging. “We feel…what’s happening…to him?”
The hoarse rasping in his voice fades into something more like poisonous fog crawling insidiously across a barren wasteland. He’s staring at his hands again, confused, but then shakes his head and goes back to filling his pockets.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
He looks up at me with a moment of something approaching clarity.
“We know you…you’re the girl with the vacuum…that puts him back on…his hanger when he falls…”
A shiver runs down my spine, causing my hood to spread again. It’s possible he’s seen me on the job, as he was getting into costuming, but that has to be some of the creepiest way to phrase that imaginable.
There’s a phone by the door to the tunnels. I grab for it, dialing the emergency line. It rings…and rings…and rings, and then disconnects.
Must be a busy night. I didn’t even know they could do that.
“Was…that…helpful…?” the masked man asks, having finished emptying the already sparse vending machine.
“No, not really.”
He pauses, falters, as if having forgotten what he’s supposed to be doing, then shakes his head like he’s trying to clear it. I see the remote on the tabletop and grab it, turning the television on as he moves to the refrigerator, loading up on water bottles.
The television lights up with a news broadcast, something about civil unrest, which is pretty common these days. It describes rioters disguised as Halloween merry-makers, and then the feed cuts out abruptly.
Something heavy slams against the door, making me jump. The haunt slider, driven by some sort of compulsion, continues his scavenging.
“Hey,” I tell him, placing my hand on his shoulder.
“No…touching…please…” he wheezes through candy corn smoke, never looking up.
I have no idea where he’s putting those water bottles. They just disappear into the coat, apparently adding neither weight nor bulk.
“They’re going to come through the door,” I whimper. “We can’t stay here.”
He falters. The coughing has stopped, but he still doesn’t look right. He seems distracted. I’ve only known him for, like, five minutes, but it seems like he’s…not himself.
I give him a harder shove, which draws his reproachful attention. He stares at me, a capsaisin smell like cutting fresh peppers showing his displeasure.
“We gotta go,” I plead. “It isn’t safe…”
Never looking away from me, he places one more bottle in his coat, and then retrieves his shovel from the floor next to him. His vapor fades from candy corn to a purplish mist of lavender and chamomile, and he holds his shovel defensively, nodding to me in a placating sort of way.
I feel the tension relax. Already I feel a bit calmer, whether it’s the sight of him ready for action, or the calming effect lavender is supposed to have.
Taking point, he opens the door to the downward incline of the tunnels. Someone screams and something else roars, but we’re caught between a rock and a hard place, and the only direction is forward.
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Masquerade--Chapter two
(C) Heather Farthing, all rights reserved
Chapter one
Chapter two
Lost Garden used to have an animatronic dinosaur on the log flume, but it was too close to a waterfall and stopped working. Somebody took it off the ride and put it next to East Props and Makeup, and it’s a tradition for zone ambiance to pat his nose for a good performance, causing the teal scales to fade to a sickly gray.
I know this because I’m the one that dusts it, and I know for a fact it’s nothing but latex scales over a cheesy metal endoskeleton.
I also know for a fact it’s chasing a tall man dressed for Steampunk Singularity at breakneck speed as he tries to fend it off with the stream from fire extinguisher.
The haunt slider, true to his assignment, drops to his knees and power slides toward the dinosaur, taking its legs out from under it with the shovel. Before hitting the wall, he’s back up on his feet, spinning with the shovel and smashing the skull with a heavy crunch. For a split second of abject silence, he trembles all over and then sinks to his knees, gently stroking the creature’s head as bruising forms around the left side of its face, it moaning in pain, and something sweet that numbs my tongue flowing freely from the gas mask.
“Has everyone here completely lost their minds?” the tall scareactor shrieks.
At over six and a half feet tall and very thin, no older than his early thirties, he’s a striking figure in black and white stripped pants, black combat boots, and an olive drab with brown suspenders, hanging loose at his narrow hips. His brown hair is cut short, his long, pointed teeth crowded. There’s a noticeable swideways curve to his spine and a dip along his sternum, his arms and legs too long for his comparatively short torso. A silver bracelet with a medical alert symbol jangles at his right wrist.
“Crazy tall…creepy flexible…soft-hearted…” the haunt slider muses, looking up at him.
The tall man flinches, training the extinguisher on the masked figure, then sighs, “Oh, great, you’re cuckoobananas, too.”
“Wrench…would be…more…effective…” the slider wheezes, indicating the prop wrench at the tall man’s hip.
“It’s a prop,” the tall man replies, taking it from the holster. “It’s plas…that does have some heft to it.”
The slider has a breathy laugh, lemon entering the lavender/chamomile mix of his smoke. I’m staring transfixed at the tall man’s hands, long palms with foot-long fingers, blackened in color, writing and moving like octopus tentacles, a tail at the base of his spine to match.
“Your hands…” I whimper, then immediately feel bad for having pointed it out, like observing another person’s deformities in public.
“Yeah, I know,” he grins, showing his elongated canines and sharpened incisors. Were those even meant to be seen inside the leather and mesh mask around his neck?
Looking up at him, I stifle a squeak of surprise and alarm. He has no eyes.
None.
Whatsoever.
There’s not even an indent where they’re supposed to be, like he closed his eyes and they stuck that way. It’s all empty skin between his cheekbones and eyebrows.
“What’s happening here?” he asks.
Tearing away from his lack of eyes, I gesture at the dinosaur. “That’s the one they put in Props and Costuming, isn’t it? The one that used to be on the log flume?”
The tall man looks down at the whimpering creature. The haunt slider gently slides open its lip and pries free a few loosened teeth, placing them inside his breast pocket.
“That’s a robot,” the tall man replies. “It doesn’t have a power source, and when it did all it could do was turn its head and hiss.”
“Yeah, well, we were…um…just upstairs and it’s…” I start, not sure how to finish that sentence.
“What’s happening?” the tall man asks cautiously.
“…Gunpowder…screaming…bad things…” the haunt slider answers. “Collecting…flesh…for the…Master…”
“It could be a terrorist attack,” I suggest. “Something in the fog machines?”
“This is not a terrorist attack,” the tall man growls, holding out his hand, the tentacles hanging limp and lifeless, like he doesn’t know how to use him. The tip of his tail flicks, like cats do when they’re ornery.
Impulsively, I reach out to touch the appendage, to see if they’re flex or latex, but he pulls away from me like I ran at him with a hot poker.
“No touching, please,” he chides, then sort of stares at his hand, flinching as if to offer it to me in handshake before thinking better of it. “I’m Isaac.”
“Is…that supposed to be funny?” I ask quietly.
“I See You…” whispers the haunt slider.
“I’m sure someone thought it was.”
“Sherene,” I reply, keeping my job quiet, because I know I don’t belong here, not in the park and not with them.
“Snake…Charmer…”
“What about you, Locomotive Breath?” the tall man asks. “You got a name?”
There’s a whiff of something like bleach and an undercurrent of candy corn. The haunt slider doesn’t answer, just staring.
“…Right,” Isaac sighs. “Are you seasonal? With the art collective? Who are you?”
The slider’s hands pause in their dinosaur-petting, the scented smoke from his mask skipping, as if he doesn’t know how to answer or…just doesn’t know.
“Um…we were up top,” I tell the tall man, fidgeting with my fingers, feeling the scaleprint of my gloves. “The…the unicorn…ran away…and then there was gunfire.”
“That’s a puppet, too, you know that, right?” Isaac asks, frowning. “It can’t do anything but turn its head and neigh.”
“Well…it…um…took off, into the crowd. And then the soldiers started firing…and the spider-legged thing…”
“That’s just a puppet. It just lights up.”
“Should tell…it that…”
Despite having no eyes, I can see the wheels in Isaac’s head turning, adding up things I haven’t seen.
“Do either of you have a ride out of here?”
“I think I dropped my cellphone, he doesn’t have one,” I explain, patting my hips again. My legs are cold.
“So, new plan…I’m going to drive you two home, if that’s okay with you,” he says. “Employee parking is that way.” He points in front with his wrench.
“Yeah…I don’t want to be here anymore,” I murmur, as unsure about going back into the park as I am about getting in a car with two men I don’t know.
“Props and…Costuming…Valuable things.”
I took a bus to get here. I’m not so sure of my options, but at least these two haven’t tried to kill me. Yet.
From deeper in the tunnels there’s a noise. It’s like the howling laughter of madmen, the kind they describe from insane asylums, back when they had those, and the honking of bicycle horns.
And it’s getting closer.
“We need to move,” Isaac growls, chewing his bracelet.
The haunt slider looks down at his feet, hidden under the hems of his coat. He moves to stand, but doesn’t quite succeed.
“You hurt?” the tall man asks.
“…Feet…legs…”
Kindly, the tall man leans down, so they’re something close to eye level. “Do you want to show me?”
The haunt slider shakes his head, looking a little embarrassed, but it’s hard to be sure under all the leather.
Leather? The costume was faux, made of plastic. It was convincing enough, but definitely not real. I picked it up enough to be sure, plastic fittings and faux leather material. What he’s wearing now is real, more than just convincing, it’s real, and he never had a chance to change clothes.
“Do you think you can get up?” Isaac asks.
I offer my hands to help him, but he looks at them as if my touch might burn him, instead using his shovel to support himself, a hand balanced on the wall as needed. His boots look like gloves, splitting five ways, three load-bearing toes and two opposible digits, one on the inner ankle and one on the outer. The boots buckle all the way to the knees, and the heels are raised above the ground, like an animal. Each toe has its own metal sheathe, like his fingers, and a small, round puck of sparking material. He wiggles his toes, like fingers, demonstrating grasping ability.
It’s seamless, like he’d always been wearing them, and he definitely wasn’t before. High-heeled boots would be murder on his joints and bad for the haunt sliding.
“What is happening here?” Isaac breathes, watching the haunt slider tentatively learn to find his balance.
“…Obvious…” the haunt slider wheezes.
Something cackles in the distance.
“You gonna be okay?” I ask, beginning to move away from the approaching crowd.
“…Neat…” he replies in a cloud of candy corn-scented vapor, following behind with a growing comfort.
Me, I feel a bit sick, like I’m looking into something my brain just literally can’t understand. Human legs don’t bend like that. We walk on the flats of our feet, not the tips, and his boots definitely didn’t look like that earlier.
Ahead of me, there’s the tall man, Isaac, and his octopus-like hands and missing eyes. He can still see, and the fingers writhe like living things, his tail lightly swinging with his steps. Reality has somehow fractured and they’re turning into what they’ve been wearing.
I step down bad on my right foot, the ground rushing up to meet me. The both of them turn and stare, fumbling at reaching up to help me, as if touching me might poison them. Shockwaves run up my knees to my hips, the ground cool and smooth beneath me.
“…Okay?” asks the haunt slider, blank-faced masked tilted slightly, offering me the handle of his shovel.
“What did you trip on?” the tall man asks, kneeling to get a better look at me, again halfway reaching out to offer me a hand but stopping short.
Maybe it’s the tentacles? He’s afraid I’m grossed out?
“Just my feet,” I reply, pulling himself up on the slider’s serrated shovel, rubbing my knees, my glove scratchy against me. “Clumsy.”
A touch of vanilla flows from the slider’s mask as he looks deeply into me. It’s creepy, being unable to see his eyes or face, but knowing he’s staring into my soul.
A bicycle horn honks from behind us.
“Run!” the eyeless man orders.
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter one
Chapter two
Lost Garden used to have an animatronic dinosaur on the log flume, but it was too close to a waterfall and stopped working. Somebody took it off the ride and put it next to East Props and Makeup, and it’s a tradition for zone ambiance to pat his nose for a good performance, causing the teal scales to fade to a sickly gray.
I know this because I’m the one that dusts it, and I know for a fact it’s nothing but latex scales over a cheesy metal endoskeleton.
I also know for a fact it’s chasing a tall man dressed for Steampunk Singularity at breakneck speed as he tries to fend it off with the stream from fire extinguisher.
The haunt slider, true to his assignment, drops to his knees and power slides toward the dinosaur, taking its legs out from under it with the shovel. Before hitting the wall, he’s back up on his feet, spinning with the shovel and smashing the skull with a heavy crunch. For a split second of abject silence, he trembles all over and then sinks to his knees, gently stroking the creature’s head as bruising forms around the left side of its face, it moaning in pain, and something sweet that numbs my tongue flowing freely from the gas mask.
“Has everyone here completely lost their minds?” the tall scareactor shrieks.
At over six and a half feet tall and very thin, no older than his early thirties, he’s a striking figure in black and white stripped pants, black combat boots, and an olive drab with brown suspenders, hanging loose at his narrow hips. His brown hair is cut short, his long, pointed teeth crowded. There’s a noticeable swideways curve to his spine and a dip along his sternum, his arms and legs too long for his comparatively short torso. A silver bracelet with a medical alert symbol jangles at his right wrist.
“Crazy tall…creepy flexible…soft-hearted…” the haunt slider muses, looking up at him.
The tall man flinches, training the extinguisher on the masked figure, then sighs, “Oh, great, you’re cuckoobananas, too.”
“Wrench…would be…more…effective…” the slider wheezes, indicating the prop wrench at the tall man’s hip.
“It’s a prop,” the tall man replies, taking it from the holster. “It’s plas…that does have some heft to it.”
The slider has a breathy laugh, lemon entering the lavender/chamomile mix of his smoke. I’m staring transfixed at the tall man’s hands, long palms with foot-long fingers, blackened in color, writing and moving like octopus tentacles, a tail at the base of his spine to match.
“Your hands…” I whimper, then immediately feel bad for having pointed it out, like observing another person’s deformities in public.
“Yeah, I know,” he grins, showing his elongated canines and sharpened incisors. Were those even meant to be seen inside the leather and mesh mask around his neck?
Looking up at him, I stifle a squeak of surprise and alarm. He has no eyes.
None.
Whatsoever.
There’s not even an indent where they’re supposed to be, like he closed his eyes and they stuck that way. It’s all empty skin between his cheekbones and eyebrows.
“What’s happening here?” he asks.
Tearing away from his lack of eyes, I gesture at the dinosaur. “That’s the one they put in Props and Costuming, isn’t it? The one that used to be on the log flume?”
The tall man looks down at the whimpering creature. The haunt slider gently slides open its lip and pries free a few loosened teeth, placing them inside his breast pocket.
“That’s a robot,” the tall man replies. “It doesn’t have a power source, and when it did all it could do was turn its head and hiss.”
“Yeah, well, we were…um…just upstairs and it’s…” I start, not sure how to finish that sentence.
“What’s happening?” the tall man asks cautiously.
“…Gunpowder…screaming…bad things…” the haunt slider answers. “Collecting…flesh…for the…Master…”
“It could be a terrorist attack,” I suggest. “Something in the fog machines?”
“This is not a terrorist attack,” the tall man growls, holding out his hand, the tentacles hanging limp and lifeless, like he doesn’t know how to use him. The tip of his tail flicks, like cats do when they’re ornery.
Impulsively, I reach out to touch the appendage, to see if they’re flex or latex, but he pulls away from me like I ran at him with a hot poker.
“No touching, please,” he chides, then sort of stares at his hand, flinching as if to offer it to me in handshake before thinking better of it. “I’m Isaac.”
“Is…that supposed to be funny?” I ask quietly.
“I See You…” whispers the haunt slider.
“I’m sure someone thought it was.”
“Sherene,” I reply, keeping my job quiet, because I know I don’t belong here, not in the park and not with them.
“Snake…Charmer…”
“What about you, Locomotive Breath?” the tall man asks. “You got a name?”
There’s a whiff of something like bleach and an undercurrent of candy corn. The haunt slider doesn’t answer, just staring.
“…Right,” Isaac sighs. “Are you seasonal? With the art collective? Who are you?”
The slider’s hands pause in their dinosaur-petting, the scented smoke from his mask skipping, as if he doesn’t know how to answer or…just doesn’t know.
“Um…we were up top,” I tell the tall man, fidgeting with my fingers, feeling the scaleprint of my gloves. “The…the unicorn…ran away…and then there was gunfire.”
“That’s a puppet, too, you know that, right?” Isaac asks, frowning. “It can’t do anything but turn its head and neigh.”
“Well…it…um…took off, into the crowd. And then the soldiers started firing…and the spider-legged thing…”
“That’s just a puppet. It just lights up.”
“Should tell…it that…”
Despite having no eyes, I can see the wheels in Isaac’s head turning, adding up things I haven’t seen.
“Do either of you have a ride out of here?”
“I think I dropped my cellphone, he doesn’t have one,” I explain, patting my hips again. My legs are cold.
“So, new plan…I’m going to drive you two home, if that’s okay with you,” he says. “Employee parking is that way.” He points in front with his wrench.
“Yeah…I don’t want to be here anymore,” I murmur, as unsure about going back into the park as I am about getting in a car with two men I don’t know.
“Props and…Costuming…Valuable things.”
I took a bus to get here. I’m not so sure of my options, but at least these two haven’t tried to kill me. Yet.
From deeper in the tunnels there’s a noise. It’s like the howling laughter of madmen, the kind they describe from insane asylums, back when they had those, and the honking of bicycle horns.
And it’s getting closer.
“We need to move,” Isaac growls, chewing his bracelet.
The haunt slider looks down at his feet, hidden under the hems of his coat. He moves to stand, but doesn’t quite succeed.
“You hurt?” the tall man asks.
“…Feet…legs…”
Kindly, the tall man leans down, so they’re something close to eye level. “Do you want to show me?”
The haunt slider shakes his head, looking a little embarrassed, but it’s hard to be sure under all the leather.
Leather? The costume was faux, made of plastic. It was convincing enough, but definitely not real. I picked it up enough to be sure, plastic fittings and faux leather material. What he’s wearing now is real, more than just convincing, it’s real, and he never had a chance to change clothes.
“Do you think you can get up?” Isaac asks.
I offer my hands to help him, but he looks at them as if my touch might burn him, instead using his shovel to support himself, a hand balanced on the wall as needed. His boots look like gloves, splitting five ways, three load-bearing toes and two opposible digits, one on the inner ankle and one on the outer. The boots buckle all the way to the knees, and the heels are raised above the ground, like an animal. Each toe has its own metal sheathe, like his fingers, and a small, round puck of sparking material. He wiggles his toes, like fingers, demonstrating grasping ability.
It’s seamless, like he’d always been wearing them, and he definitely wasn’t before. High-heeled boots would be murder on his joints and bad for the haunt sliding.
“What is happening here?” Isaac breathes, watching the haunt slider tentatively learn to find his balance.
“…Obvious…” the haunt slider wheezes.
Something cackles in the distance.
“You gonna be okay?” I ask, beginning to move away from the approaching crowd.
“…Neat…” he replies in a cloud of candy corn-scented vapor, following behind with a growing comfort.
Me, I feel a bit sick, like I’m looking into something my brain just literally can’t understand. Human legs don’t bend like that. We walk on the flats of our feet, not the tips, and his boots definitely didn’t look like that earlier.
Ahead of me, there’s the tall man, Isaac, and his octopus-like hands and missing eyes. He can still see, and the fingers writhe like living things, his tail lightly swinging with his steps. Reality has somehow fractured and they’re turning into what they’ve been wearing.
I step down bad on my right foot, the ground rushing up to meet me. The both of them turn and stare, fumbling at reaching up to help me, as if touching me might poison them. Shockwaves run up my knees to my hips, the ground cool and smooth beneath me.
“…Okay?” asks the haunt slider, blank-faced masked tilted slightly, offering me the handle of his shovel.
“What did you trip on?” the tall man asks, kneeling to get a better look at me, again halfway reaching out to offer me a hand but stopping short.
Maybe it’s the tentacles? He’s afraid I’m grossed out?
“Just my feet,” I reply, pulling himself up on the slider’s serrated shovel, rubbing my knees, my glove scratchy against me. “Clumsy.”
A touch of vanilla flows from the slider’s mask as he looks deeply into me. It’s creepy, being unable to see his eyes or face, but knowing he’s staring into my soul.
A bicycle horn honks from behind us.
“Run!” the eyeless man orders.
Chapter three
Chapter four
Masquerade--Chapter three
(C) Heather Farthing 2023 All rights reserved
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
“Killer clowns? How cliché can you get?”
I immediately turn red, afraid the scareactor thinks I’m insulting him.
“I don’t know, I thought Factory Farm was novel…”
Isaac’s long legs can really carry him, and despite the wheezing, the haunt slider doesn’t seem to be having any trouble, either. That stops when the oversized net shoots out of the open office door, snaring Isaac and sending him crashing to the floor, like a fallen pine tree.
“Strays!” snarls an orange tabby cat so big I think it’s a tiger. “Strays belong at the shelter!”
From the ground, a bewildered Isaac gasps, “What?”
Aiming for the eyes, I spit venom into the creature’s eyes, blinding it. The haunt slider is giving off that pepper spray smell, smashing his shovel into the creature’s skull, knocking it silly. I’m on my knees, helping the tall scareactor work his way out of the netting.
He avoids my hands as I offer to help him up, his disproportionately long limbs at angles as he makes his way to his feet. He winces, holding his ribs, which draws the haunt slider’s attention, grabbing at one of Isaac’s wrists, who just pulls away, looking down at the broken figure beneath him.
“She was getting out of makeup as I was going in,” he murmurs, nibbling his medical bracelet, long fingers dangling like old string. “What happened to her?”
“…Furry…” observes the haunt slider, gesturing at the orange and cream fur, matted with blood, trickling from the side of its head. It’s not a shirt or part of a costume, it’s real fur, growing from the skin.
“I see that,” the eyeless man growls dryly, as I get up. “How? Why?”
Dazed, the cat creature seems to be coming to, mumbling, “Aggressive humans, scheduled for euthanasia…”
The slider, immediately understanding the situation, attempts to herd the tall man with his shovel.
“Move…can’t be…helped…”
“You just dropped her with a shovel, we can’t leave her here!”
“If she’s like what’s going on upstairs,” I say, following the haunt slider, “she’s can’t be reasoned with. Let’s go.”
“Wait!” Isaac demands, tearing away from the haunt slider. He rolls the cat creature, who starts hissing and yowling, even taking a limp swipe at him, into the office, locks and door and closes it.
Without another word, we keep moving, through the apparently endless tunnels of the service area. Isaac looks down at his hands, the blackened fingers hanging limply down the backs, as if they’re a puzzle he can solve.
“I just got chased by a glorified statue,” he murmurs. “My prosthetics are real…half my coworkers have gone nuts. What’s happening?”
“Are you alright?” I ask quietly.
His fingers come to life, like eels dozing in a pond suddenly disturbed by nearby prey. They move, writhe, and wriggle, each one separately, like each one is an organism to itself. They look longer than they did before, too.
“I…yeah…” he replies tentatively. “It doesn’t hurt…nothing hurts. It’s just…weird.”
“Those weren’t squibs I saw upstairs…” I say mutely. “Those soldiers were firing on people.”
The tall, eyeless man goes quiet, as if processing what I just said.
“Those are prop guns. They’re just shells. There’s nothing to fire.”
“And the dinosaur and the unicorn just turn their heads. And the cat-catcher is just wearing a furry shirt,” I grumble sullenly
.
“So on Halloween night…all the costumes and the props come to life?” Isaac laughs. “That’s…that’s a movie plot. It doesn’t happen in real life.”
I look pointedly at his hands, but then immediately feel bad, like staring at a deformity or disability, and then even worse because I start wondering if the s-shaped curve in his spine is just him or part of the costume.
The fittest population, the Master Computer made those into soldiers. He replaces parts of them with machinery, usually limbs, but I did see an otherwise good-looking one with a red diode inside an aperture, like the unicorn, and another whose lower face was just a bronze radio speaker.
The others were experiments. The promotional material did really say if it was through breeding or exposure to mutagens, or what, but they were called “mutants” and were basically a repository for whatever unhinged character design this year’s artists could manufacture.
His fingers coil on themselves, spiraling like snails until they’re at a reasonable length, and he tucks his hands inside his pockets, obviously disturbed. I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything at all.
Beside us, still brandishing his serrated shovel like a weapon, the Haunt slider fumes candy corn and burning leaves with an undercurrent of something like bleach. I’m about to ask him if he’s okay when Isaac turns a corner and stops.
I taste blood.
A deer has hoisted a regular human by the legs, using a rope and ladder to make a pulley, and is currently field dressing them. Stripped naked, gutted from stem to stern, organs discarded on the floor, along with some arrows.
Isaac wretches. I’m not feeling so good myself. There’s a mustard smell coming from the haunt slider, which makes my nose run and my eyes sting.
Isaac motions backward, moving silently so as not to disturb the creature. Fortunately, it’s involved in its task, and we take a different tunnel, only to be stopped once again.
One by one, half a dozen white-painted, rictus-grinning faces turn toward us. There’s a distinct feeling of “You come to the wrong neighborhood” as the clowns ready their clubs and hammers, getting up from where they were seated or leaning against walls, having evidently been readying themselves for a performance.
Isaac steps backward, one foot behind the other. The slider tightens his grip on his shovel. Isaac, his long legs making him faster, is in front of me and the slider is beside.
The first clown lunges with his hammer. Ozzy blocks it from hitting me with his shovel, spewing out bleach and pepper spray, enough to make the eyes sting and the nose run, planting a heavy, animalistic foot in the clown’s chest and sending him flying.
It’s on now.
Braining the second clown with his wrench, Isaac pulls me out of the slider’s blinding fog, using his tail around my wrist to lead me. Through blurry eyes, I see the slider, the savage way he uses his shovel, how going down on his knees or parkouring off a wall means little to him.
“Run!” the eyeless man shouts.
Chapter four
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
“Killer clowns? How cliché can you get?”
I immediately turn red, afraid the scareactor thinks I’m insulting him.
“I don’t know, I thought Factory Farm was novel…”
Isaac’s long legs can really carry him, and despite the wheezing, the haunt slider doesn’t seem to be having any trouble, either. That stops when the oversized net shoots out of the open office door, snaring Isaac and sending him crashing to the floor, like a fallen pine tree.
“Strays!” snarls an orange tabby cat so big I think it’s a tiger. “Strays belong at the shelter!”
From the ground, a bewildered Isaac gasps, “What?”
Aiming for the eyes, I spit venom into the creature’s eyes, blinding it. The haunt slider is giving off that pepper spray smell, smashing his shovel into the creature’s skull, knocking it silly. I’m on my knees, helping the tall scareactor work his way out of the netting.
He avoids my hands as I offer to help him up, his disproportionately long limbs at angles as he makes his way to his feet. He winces, holding his ribs, which draws the haunt slider’s attention, grabbing at one of Isaac’s wrists, who just pulls away, looking down at the broken figure beneath him.
“She was getting out of makeup as I was going in,” he murmurs, nibbling his medical bracelet, long fingers dangling like old string. “What happened to her?”
“…Furry…” observes the haunt slider, gesturing at the orange and cream fur, matted with blood, trickling from the side of its head. It’s not a shirt or part of a costume, it’s real fur, growing from the skin.
“I see that,” the eyeless man growls dryly, as I get up. “How? Why?”
Dazed, the cat creature seems to be coming to, mumbling, “Aggressive humans, scheduled for euthanasia…”
The slider, immediately understanding the situation, attempts to herd the tall man with his shovel.
“Move…can’t be…helped…”
“You just dropped her with a shovel, we can’t leave her here!”
“If she’s like what’s going on upstairs,” I say, following the haunt slider, “she’s can’t be reasoned with. Let’s go.”
“Wait!” Isaac demands, tearing away from the haunt slider. He rolls the cat creature, who starts hissing and yowling, even taking a limp swipe at him, into the office, locks and door and closes it.
Without another word, we keep moving, through the apparently endless tunnels of the service area. Isaac looks down at his hands, the blackened fingers hanging limply down the backs, as if they’re a puzzle he can solve.
“I just got chased by a glorified statue,” he murmurs. “My prosthetics are real…half my coworkers have gone nuts. What’s happening?”
“Are you alright?” I ask quietly.
His fingers come to life, like eels dozing in a pond suddenly disturbed by nearby prey. They move, writhe, and wriggle, each one separately, like each one is an organism to itself. They look longer than they did before, too.
“I…yeah…” he replies tentatively. “It doesn’t hurt…nothing hurts. It’s just…weird.”
“Those weren’t squibs I saw upstairs…” I say mutely. “Those soldiers were firing on people.”
The tall, eyeless man goes quiet, as if processing what I just said.
“Those are prop guns. They’re just shells. There’s nothing to fire.”
“And the dinosaur and the unicorn just turn their heads. And the cat-catcher is just wearing a furry shirt,” I grumble sullenly
.
“So on Halloween night…all the costumes and the props come to life?” Isaac laughs. “That’s…that’s a movie plot. It doesn’t happen in real life.”
I look pointedly at his hands, but then immediately feel bad, like staring at a deformity or disability, and then even worse because I start wondering if the s-shaped curve in his spine is just him or part of the costume.
The fittest population, the Master Computer made those into soldiers. He replaces parts of them with machinery, usually limbs, but I did see an otherwise good-looking one with a red diode inside an aperture, like the unicorn, and another whose lower face was just a bronze radio speaker.
The others were experiments. The promotional material did really say if it was through breeding or exposure to mutagens, or what, but they were called “mutants” and were basically a repository for whatever unhinged character design this year’s artists could manufacture.
His fingers coil on themselves, spiraling like snails until they’re at a reasonable length, and he tucks his hands inside his pockets, obviously disturbed. I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything at all.
Beside us, still brandishing his serrated shovel like a weapon, the Haunt slider fumes candy corn and burning leaves with an undercurrent of something like bleach. I’m about to ask him if he’s okay when Isaac turns a corner and stops.
I taste blood.
A deer has hoisted a regular human by the legs, using a rope and ladder to make a pulley, and is currently field dressing them. Stripped naked, gutted from stem to stern, organs discarded on the floor, along with some arrows.
Isaac wretches. I’m not feeling so good myself. There’s a mustard smell coming from the haunt slider, which makes my nose run and my eyes sting.
Isaac motions backward, moving silently so as not to disturb the creature. Fortunately, it’s involved in its task, and we take a different tunnel, only to be stopped once again.
One by one, half a dozen white-painted, rictus-grinning faces turn toward us. There’s a distinct feeling of “You come to the wrong neighborhood” as the clowns ready their clubs and hammers, getting up from where they were seated or leaning against walls, having evidently been readying themselves for a performance.
Isaac steps backward, one foot behind the other. The slider tightens his grip on his shovel. Isaac, his long legs making him faster, is in front of me and the slider is beside.
The first clown lunges with his hammer. Ozzy blocks it from hitting me with his shovel, spewing out bleach and pepper spray, enough to make the eyes sting and the nose run, planting a heavy, animalistic foot in the clown’s chest and sending him flying.
It’s on now.
Braining the second clown with his wrench, Isaac pulls me out of the slider’s blinding fog, using his tail around my wrist to lead me. Through blurry eyes, I see the slider, the savage way he uses his shovel, how going down on his knees or parkouring off a wall means little to him.
“Run!” the eyeless man shouts.
Chapter four
Masquerade--Chapter Four
Chapter four
“Props…should go to…Props…”
“And if everything there has come to life, too?” Isaac growls, pointing us toward a turn that leads into a meeting room.
“Stock up…prepare…keep…”
Isaac barrels through the double-doors, holding them open as the two of us follow closely, then engages the lock and slides beneath the door, sitting below the windows, his extinguisher tossed in a corner. The haunt slider is bent over his knees, rubbing his chest and throat again, tail flicking the air in an irritated manner.
His tail. It’s wrapped in the same leather as his pants, the underside lined with scutes like his knees, the tip with a line of sparking material.
The whole of it is as if he always had them, the grasping feet and the tail. There’s no difference in detail or design, like he was always this way.
His blank eyes meet mine, lost in the shadows of his gas mask.
“Snake…charmer…” he muses, smelling of fall leaves and a note of something chemical. Bleach?
Behind me, Isaac has one knee drawn up close, his lean arm slung across it in thought, bracelet in his mouth. It’s hard to judge, but I think he might be deliberately avoiding looking at his hands, or the twisting, tentacular tail beneath him.
The haunt slider seizes the eyeless man’s wrist, placing two fingers on the soft spot above the joint. Isaac jerks his arm free, making it clear he doesn’t want to be touched.
“This is…just nuts…” he growls, balling his fingers into a knotted fist, like those ball-shaped sailor ropes.
“Reality…is…broken,” wheezes the haunt slider, moving to the back of the classroom, past the folding tables and chairs, under a television, where someone stacked some boxes, probably hastily-placed overstock.
Isaac watches him pensively, the adjusted shape of his feet, the lifelike motions in his tail, which he uses to slide his serrated-edged shovel back into position at his rucksack.
“Your friend…isn’t right, is he?” the eyeless man asks quietly.
“He’s not…I mean…he’s a haunt slider in Soul Survivor and stopped me from being trampled when…things got real,” I explain, finding a succinct way to say it. “I don’t…actually know him.”
“You got friends, family, somewhere safe to go? Someone you can call? Either of you?” Isaac asks with nearly parental concern.
“Not really,” I admit. “I’m from out of town.”
A sudden thought grips my chest. If this is going on here…
I push it to the back of my mind. I can worry about that when I can get near a phone…or something.
“…So…what do we do now?” I ask.
“Props…and…Costumes,” the haunt slider repeats.
“Or we could skip whatever night terrors are there and go straight to employee parking,” Isaac shrugs, chewing his bracelet.
“Weapons…and…valuables…”
“Yeah, and whoever was in the makeup chair when…things got real,” Isaac argues.
I take a seat next to the eyeless man, under the windows and hopefully out of sight, but scanning the room and tasting the air, just in case. I smell pumpkin spice, probably coming from the haunt slider.
“I need candy corn,” I blurt out suddenly, then stifle a giggle. “I don’t know why, I just really, really want candy corn.”
“Pumpkin spice,” smiles the eyeless man. “Doesn’t matter what—a pie, a cake, a latte, I’ll take what I can get.”
The smell of pumpkin spice gets a bit heavier, with a note of lemon, almost like amusement.
I glance down at Isaac’s hands. He’s trembling slightly, the fingers knotted together as if to hide it.
“How…are you feeling?” I ask cautiously.
“Not…terrible,” he admits, chuckling dryly. “It could have been worse, I guess.”
“And you know about…the…the other…thing?” I asks, indicating my eyes.
“Yeah, I…can’t feel my prosthetics anymore. Or my contacts.”
“But you can still see?”
“Good as with my contacts. Or better, actually, but only straight ahead. I can’t…move my eyes. I don’t think I have those muscles anymore. How bad is it?”
I lean a little closer. “You know that seen in Goonies where he pulls the eyepatch off the pirate’s skull?”
He draws in air over his teeth.
“That bad?” he asks.
“It’s… um…” I stammer.
“And you know about your…whole situation?” he asks. “I mean, they didn’t let you into the park like that, did they?”
Confused, I look down at myself. It’s just jeans and a t-shirt. I mean, the t-shirt’s a bit racy, with the drawing of a curvy pumpkin fairy’s torso, like those cheesy tourist bikini shirts. The mask and gloves, orange and black, came in a set, in the bargain bin with the ears. They didn’t have any orange and black tails left, so I grabbed a snake off the shelf and pinned it to the back of the silly illusion shirt.
Except, I’m not wearing that. Any of it. Of anything, really.
I look like the pumpkin fairy, a green miniskirt that barely covers anything, an orange crop top that’s little more than a particularly covering bra. The orange and black socks I had under sensible walking shoes and now mottled black scales, like a gila monster, with raised heels and three splayed toes, a reduced pinkie, and prehensile inner thumb, under vine-like strappy sandals like the character on my shirt wore. The gloves have also became scales and long claws, sparkly with glitter like the fake ones the gloves had, and when I reach up to my ears, I find nothing but skin and hair, until I reach the top of my head, soft, velvety, and very sensitive, tickling at my fingertips and shying away from my own touch. Something not quite shoulder muscles flexes, making a rustling noise, pumpkin-leaf shaped wings, I’m guessing.
I don’t know which is worse, the permanent costume accessories, or that I’m practically in my underwear in a locked room with two men I don’t know.
I make a startled squeaking noise, trying to pull down my skirt, which the haunt slider seems to find hilarious, keeling over from his box in a fit of pumpkin-scented giggles, which causes Isaac to join in.
“I’m glad you two find this so funny,” I growl, folding my arms across my chest, face getting hot.
No wonder I’ve been so cold. And to add insult to injury, I think I’ve gone up a cup size, or two.
“Take off your mask, let’s see how bad it is,” Isaac smiles crookedly.
Obliging, I pull down the grinning, jack o’lantern mask, bracing myself for the worst.
“Normal, I think,” Isaac says, sounding a bit relieved himself.
Thinking of his own newly-acquired fangs, I run my tongue over my teeth. I feel a groove at each canine, and a bit of swelling on either side of the roof of my mouth. Did I crack something when I fell? Nothing hurts.
“Should…start…a club…” the haunt slider suggests, reaching back into the boxes that have his attention so locked in.
“What?” Isaac asks, looking over the table at the wide, flat hat, just visible above the table.
“For…people…with tails…”
“I knew it,” Isaac growls, grabbing at his new appendage, like a longer, larger version of his fingers, largely indistinguishable otherwise, hanging limp in his grasp.
“I don’t have a…”
I can feel it.
New muscles at the base of my spine. I can feel them tense, feel them release, feel the tongue flick and taste the scents the haunt slider puts into the air. I can see myself, looking back at me, like mirrors facing one another. My tongue flicks, not the one inside my mouth, but the one in the snake’s mouth, the cobra.
“I…see…you…snake…charmer…”
“I am tripping balls,” I murmur, looking into my own eyes, slitted black pupils and vivid orange eyes, both the ones in my skull and the ones on the snake. “They put something in the smoke machines and I am blitzed.”
Isaac laughs.
“This…this doesn’t make any sense!” I shriek, watching myself watch myself.
“I have dead octopi—”
“–Octopodes—”
“—for hands, nothing about this makes sense.”
“Yeah, but I’m…a catgirl, not a…a snake-butt!” I protest.
“A…snake-butt…would…be a…naga.”
“And these are supposed to be claws, but the material didn’t cure right,” Isaac explains, waggling his fingers like limp noodles at me. “I don’t make the rules.”
“But…catgirl,” I protest, barely able to form words. “Where did…snake?”
The cobra’s hood spreads with my alarm, revealing the telltale mark in vivid orange against the black scales.
“How did you make the costume?” Isaac asks.
“Just some…bargain bin pieces,” I explain. “They were out of cat tails, so I…snake doll and a safety pin.”
I wince. “This is what I get for shopping bargain-bin.”
“What about you, Locomotive Breath?” the scareactor calls across the table. “What are you supposed to be?”
“He’s a carrion bird,” I say flatly, still staring into my own eyes. “Soul Survivor?”
“Well, the mask and the hat and the coat, that’s just what you see,” Isaac elucidates, getting up to walk over to the haunt slider and look closer at the mask and coat.
“The real costume is what’s underneath. They’re something pretending to be something else, a costume within a costume, as it were. The gloves and the boots, that’s all to protect them from the wasteland, but the carrion birds aren’t human. The real creature, the real costume, is what’s wearing the slider gear. So what are you, Locomotive Breath?”
“He is…many things…phantom…anesthetist…Death Korps of Krieg…a fortress…of dead soldiers…fighting off…the men that killed them…plague doctor…”
“And it’s not like you had a tail when you went into costuming…what are you looking at?”
Isaac peers into the box, then jumps back, crying out in alarm.
“What in Monsterland is that?” he shrieks.
“What?” I ask, jumping to my feet, back against the door, ready to unlatch and run.
The haunt slider stands, revealing his arms covered in…tiny pumpkin creatures, like a scarecrow covered in ravens. He makes a cooing sound of delight as the little creatures climb along his arms, grabbing one another in an acrobatic display.
They have jack o’lanterns for heads, yellow light emanating from orange skin. Their hands, necks, and other exposed skin is green, woody and vine-like, pumpkin vines. Some have leaves coiling from stems or under belled bats.
“Jester and Harlequin?” I ask incredulously, stepping closer.
Holding his arms out, some of the figurine-sized little pumpkin people, jibbering in what I can only call “pumpkin language,” climb from him to me, scaling my shoulders and tickling my ears.
Jester is the boy, in a jester outfit, with a belled hat and black and white checkered clown pants, black pom-poms down his white shirt. Harlequin is the girl, in a white tulle skirt with black and white horizontal striped leggings and no pompoms or hat. They’re kind of mascots of Wonderland’s Monsterland Halloween event, sold as resin figures in some of the gift shops.
And apparently put back here as a mistake, and now doing whimsical cartwheels across the snout of the haunt slider’s gas mask.
“Those things are going to rip us to shreds,” Isaac hisses, recoiling, making a noise not unlike an angry cat, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
“They’re…harmless,” I smile, feeling one stroking my left ear. “Look at them, they’re adorable.”
“The teeth and claws’ll come out any second now,” Isaac insists. “You’ll see. We’re about to be a red smear on those windows.”
“He seems to like them,” I point out, where the haunt slider is making puffs of lemon and pumpkin spice, allowing himself to be climbed on like a jungle gym.
“Artists are psychotic,” the eyeless man retorts. “Did you see those character designs upstairs? Did those look like they came from a rational mind?”
“Innocent,” the haunt slider insists, several dangling from his hat.
“Right, no, not this year, not this night,” Isaac growls, stepping back. “You’re nuts, the both of you.”
“Look at them!” I breathe, watching them gallivant and play, some finding their way to the table for more space.
Cartwheels, tumbles, contortionism, everything a traditional jester or harlequin would do, and impromptu performance given free of charge, free of heart, just for us.
“Yeah, I’m looking at them,” Isaac growls. “You don’t know what those are, put them back.”
“We will…protect them…with our life…” snarls the haunt slider defensively, angling himself between Isaac and the little figures.
“I’ve wanted to collect them for years, but they want an arm and a leg…” I murmur.
“And those thing’ll take an arm and a leg, seriously, have neither of you seen a horror movie ever?”
“Cute,” declares the haunt slider, holding out a smiling little pumpkin girl, kneeling trusting on his palm, looking up at Isaac with utmost love and no judgment.
The corner of Isaac’s mouth twitches. The little pumpkin girl waves sweetly, her fingers like pumpkin leaves.
“You’re both nuts,” he sighs, rolling eyes he doesn’t have, but letting the little pumpkin girl climb his hands, nestling on his shoulder at the curve of his neck. “With zero self-preservation instinct.”
Something laughs in the hallway.
“Get the lights!” Isaac practically screams, his long legs carrying him swiftly across the room, flipping the switch and crouching beneath the door.
Lost in the shadows, the haunt slider has his rucksack on the table, ushering all of the little figures into it, several leaping off my arms, shoulders, and the top of my head to join the rest of them. When safely put away, he drops to his knees, serrated shovel primed across his knees as he slinks across the floor, a sharp, burning capsaicin smell pouring from his mask as he passes me the rucksack, making my nose run.
“Snug…as…bugs…” he whispers, indicating the little figures, except for the one still hanging onto Isaac’s shoulder.
The three of us quietly peer through the window, watching the laughing figure approach. It’s a clown, with wild, curly, bright green hair, a large red nose, a white face, and a big red smile that’s always fixed, no matter the situation. A black and white striped shirt is under a blue denim jacket and black cutoff denim shorts, dragging a red and black poker-themed “clown hammer,” its head bent, left cheek and shoulder jammed into the far wall, giggling to itself as it passes by.
Wonderland’s solution was to incorporate the masks. The clown makeup was done with special printed half-face masks, the steampunkers were given half-face masks with printed mesh filters and cog patterns, now very real leather and copper at Isaac’s throat (the pumpkin girl, heedless of any danger the clown may possess, nesting in it like a hammock), most of the Factory Farm scareactors in full-face masks, and the carrion birds speaking for themselves.
The clown’s hand traces the corner of its mouth as it giggles, feeling the curve of muscles permanently locked into place. The hammer grinds along the floor, just behind jerky, unsteady feet, several sizes bigger than normal.
After the clown is out of sight, Isaac breathes the exhale he’d been holding.
“Well, that was the creepiest thing I’d ever seen,” he murmurs.
“Can’t stay…Props…and Costuming…”
I tug at my skirt, holding onto the rucksack, simultaneously pulling what could generously be called a shirt up and down when I have a free hand. The haunt slider’s smoke smells like vanilla.
Nimbly, he peels the leather away from the skull-shaped buttons and shucks it off, the leather pooling behind his tail and across his raised heels, sliding like silk across his modified boots as he hands it to me, the mask hissing slightly.
“Um…thank you,” I mumble, trading him the rucksack for the coat.
I’ve never felt leather so soft, and try not to blush when I realize it’s a lot tighter across the chest for me than for him. The buttons are cool to the touch, the outer layers a bit damp from his constant spray of smoke or vapor or whatever he uses to scent the air.
“Props and Costumes is between us and the employee parking,” Isaac muses, pinning the chain of his bracelet between his canines, still cautiously watching the wire-laced windows for clowns. “If it’s still there, we can grab a few things, and make our way to my car.”
“And…if someone beat us to it?”
“Strategic retreat.”
As Isaac undoes the lock, I feel a bit…well, exposed, when compared to the haunt slider’s serrated shovel and Isaac’s wrench. I guess I have claws, and cobra venom, probably, but I think I’d feel safer if I had something, like a really dangerous security blanket.
The haunt sliders were built for silence conditionally. They’re meant to be difficult to hear coming under the ambient sounds of a theme park haunted attraction in full-swing, on asphalt. His sparking pucks and toe-sheathes clack loudly against the cement flooring, causing Isaac to visibly wince.
“Maybe you should…” Isaac starts, cut off by a low hum that fills the air with a disconcerting stillness. For a moment, everything is black, and then red lights pop on at distant intervals, usually in front of a door or hallway junction.
“Yeah…that’s about right,” Isaac moans.
“Props…should go to…Props…”
“And if everything there has come to life, too?” Isaac growls, pointing us toward a turn that leads into a meeting room.
“Stock up…prepare…keep…”
Isaac barrels through the double-doors, holding them open as the two of us follow closely, then engages the lock and slides beneath the door, sitting below the windows, his extinguisher tossed in a corner. The haunt slider is bent over his knees, rubbing his chest and throat again, tail flicking the air in an irritated manner.
His tail. It’s wrapped in the same leather as his pants, the underside lined with scutes like his knees, the tip with a line of sparking material.
The whole of it is as if he always had them, the grasping feet and the tail. There’s no difference in detail or design, like he was always this way.
His blank eyes meet mine, lost in the shadows of his gas mask.
“Snake…charmer…” he muses, smelling of fall leaves and a note of something chemical. Bleach?
Behind me, Isaac has one knee drawn up close, his lean arm slung across it in thought, bracelet in his mouth. It’s hard to judge, but I think he might be deliberately avoiding looking at his hands, or the twisting, tentacular tail beneath him.
The haunt slider seizes the eyeless man’s wrist, placing two fingers on the soft spot above the joint. Isaac jerks his arm free, making it clear he doesn’t want to be touched.
“This is…just nuts…” he growls, balling his fingers into a knotted fist, like those ball-shaped sailor ropes.
“Reality…is…broken,” wheezes the haunt slider, moving to the back of the classroom, past the folding tables and chairs, under a television, where someone stacked some boxes, probably hastily-placed overstock.
Isaac watches him pensively, the adjusted shape of his feet, the lifelike motions in his tail, which he uses to slide his serrated-edged shovel back into position at his rucksack.
“Your friend…isn’t right, is he?” the eyeless man asks quietly.
“He’s not…I mean…he’s a haunt slider in Soul Survivor and stopped me from being trampled when…things got real,” I explain, finding a succinct way to say it. “I don’t…actually know him.”
“You got friends, family, somewhere safe to go? Someone you can call? Either of you?” Isaac asks with nearly parental concern.
“Not really,” I admit. “I’m from out of town.”
A sudden thought grips my chest. If this is going on here…
I push it to the back of my mind. I can worry about that when I can get near a phone…or something.
“…So…what do we do now?” I ask.
“Props…and…Costumes,” the haunt slider repeats.
“Or we could skip whatever night terrors are there and go straight to employee parking,” Isaac shrugs, chewing his bracelet.
“Weapons…and…valuables…”
“Yeah, and whoever was in the makeup chair when…things got real,” Isaac argues.
I take a seat next to the eyeless man, under the windows and hopefully out of sight, but scanning the room and tasting the air, just in case. I smell pumpkin spice, probably coming from the haunt slider.
“I need candy corn,” I blurt out suddenly, then stifle a giggle. “I don’t know why, I just really, really want candy corn.”
“Pumpkin spice,” smiles the eyeless man. “Doesn’t matter what—a pie, a cake, a latte, I’ll take what I can get.”
The smell of pumpkin spice gets a bit heavier, with a note of lemon, almost like amusement.
I glance down at Isaac’s hands. He’s trembling slightly, the fingers knotted together as if to hide it.
“How…are you feeling?” I ask cautiously.
“Not…terrible,” he admits, chuckling dryly. “It could have been worse, I guess.”
“And you know about…the…the other…thing?” I asks, indicating my eyes.
“Yeah, I…can’t feel my prosthetics anymore. Or my contacts.”
“But you can still see?”
“Good as with my contacts. Or better, actually, but only straight ahead. I can’t…move my eyes. I don’t think I have those muscles anymore. How bad is it?”
I lean a little closer. “You know that seen in Goonies where he pulls the eyepatch off the pirate’s skull?”
He draws in air over his teeth.
“That bad?” he asks.
“It’s… um…” I stammer.
“And you know about your…whole situation?” he asks. “I mean, they didn’t let you into the park like that, did they?”
Confused, I look down at myself. It’s just jeans and a t-shirt. I mean, the t-shirt’s a bit racy, with the drawing of a curvy pumpkin fairy’s torso, like those cheesy tourist bikini shirts. The mask and gloves, orange and black, came in a set, in the bargain bin with the ears. They didn’t have any orange and black tails left, so I grabbed a snake off the shelf and pinned it to the back of the silly illusion shirt.
Except, I’m not wearing that. Any of it. Of anything, really.
I look like the pumpkin fairy, a green miniskirt that barely covers anything, an orange crop top that’s little more than a particularly covering bra. The orange and black socks I had under sensible walking shoes and now mottled black scales, like a gila monster, with raised heels and three splayed toes, a reduced pinkie, and prehensile inner thumb, under vine-like strappy sandals like the character on my shirt wore. The gloves have also became scales and long claws, sparkly with glitter like the fake ones the gloves had, and when I reach up to my ears, I find nothing but skin and hair, until I reach the top of my head, soft, velvety, and very sensitive, tickling at my fingertips and shying away from my own touch. Something not quite shoulder muscles flexes, making a rustling noise, pumpkin-leaf shaped wings, I’m guessing.
I don’t know which is worse, the permanent costume accessories, or that I’m practically in my underwear in a locked room with two men I don’t know.
I make a startled squeaking noise, trying to pull down my skirt, which the haunt slider seems to find hilarious, keeling over from his box in a fit of pumpkin-scented giggles, which causes Isaac to join in.
“I’m glad you two find this so funny,” I growl, folding my arms across my chest, face getting hot.
No wonder I’ve been so cold. And to add insult to injury, I think I’ve gone up a cup size, or two.
“Take off your mask, let’s see how bad it is,” Isaac smiles crookedly.
Obliging, I pull down the grinning, jack o’lantern mask, bracing myself for the worst.
“Normal, I think,” Isaac says, sounding a bit relieved himself.
Thinking of his own newly-acquired fangs, I run my tongue over my teeth. I feel a groove at each canine, and a bit of swelling on either side of the roof of my mouth. Did I crack something when I fell? Nothing hurts.
“Should…start…a club…” the haunt slider suggests, reaching back into the boxes that have his attention so locked in.
“What?” Isaac asks, looking over the table at the wide, flat hat, just visible above the table.
“For…people…with tails…”
“I knew it,” Isaac growls, grabbing at his new appendage, like a longer, larger version of his fingers, largely indistinguishable otherwise, hanging limp in his grasp.
“I don’t have a…”
I can feel it.
New muscles at the base of my spine. I can feel them tense, feel them release, feel the tongue flick and taste the scents the haunt slider puts into the air. I can see myself, looking back at me, like mirrors facing one another. My tongue flicks, not the one inside my mouth, but the one in the snake’s mouth, the cobra.
“I…see…you…snake…charmer…”
“I am tripping balls,” I murmur, looking into my own eyes, slitted black pupils and vivid orange eyes, both the ones in my skull and the ones on the snake. “They put something in the smoke machines and I am blitzed.”
Isaac laughs.
“This…this doesn’t make any sense!” I shriek, watching myself watch myself.
“I have dead octopi—”
“–Octopodes—”
“—for hands, nothing about this makes sense.”
“Yeah, but I’m…a catgirl, not a…a snake-butt!” I protest.
“A…snake-butt…would…be a…naga.”
“And these are supposed to be claws, but the material didn’t cure right,” Isaac explains, waggling his fingers like limp noodles at me. “I don’t make the rules.”
“But…catgirl,” I protest, barely able to form words. “Where did…snake?”
The cobra’s hood spreads with my alarm, revealing the telltale mark in vivid orange against the black scales.
“How did you make the costume?” Isaac asks.
“Just some…bargain bin pieces,” I explain. “They were out of cat tails, so I…snake doll and a safety pin.”
I wince. “This is what I get for shopping bargain-bin.”
“What about you, Locomotive Breath?” the scareactor calls across the table. “What are you supposed to be?”
“He’s a carrion bird,” I say flatly, still staring into my own eyes. “Soul Survivor?”
“Well, the mask and the hat and the coat, that’s just what you see,” Isaac elucidates, getting up to walk over to the haunt slider and look closer at the mask and coat.
“The real costume is what’s underneath. They’re something pretending to be something else, a costume within a costume, as it were. The gloves and the boots, that’s all to protect them from the wasteland, but the carrion birds aren’t human. The real creature, the real costume, is what’s wearing the slider gear. So what are you, Locomotive Breath?”
“He is…many things…phantom…anesthetist…Death Korps of Krieg…a fortress…of dead soldiers…fighting off…the men that killed them…plague doctor…”
“And it’s not like you had a tail when you went into costuming…what are you looking at?”
Isaac peers into the box, then jumps back, crying out in alarm.
“What in Monsterland is that?” he shrieks.
“What?” I ask, jumping to my feet, back against the door, ready to unlatch and run.
The haunt slider stands, revealing his arms covered in…tiny pumpkin creatures, like a scarecrow covered in ravens. He makes a cooing sound of delight as the little creatures climb along his arms, grabbing one another in an acrobatic display.
They have jack o’lanterns for heads, yellow light emanating from orange skin. Their hands, necks, and other exposed skin is green, woody and vine-like, pumpkin vines. Some have leaves coiling from stems or under belled bats.
“Jester and Harlequin?” I ask incredulously, stepping closer.
Holding his arms out, some of the figurine-sized little pumpkin people, jibbering in what I can only call “pumpkin language,” climb from him to me, scaling my shoulders and tickling my ears.
Jester is the boy, in a jester outfit, with a belled hat and black and white checkered clown pants, black pom-poms down his white shirt. Harlequin is the girl, in a white tulle skirt with black and white horizontal striped leggings and no pompoms or hat. They’re kind of mascots of Wonderland’s Monsterland Halloween event, sold as resin figures in some of the gift shops.
And apparently put back here as a mistake, and now doing whimsical cartwheels across the snout of the haunt slider’s gas mask.
“Those things are going to rip us to shreds,” Isaac hisses, recoiling, making a noise not unlike an angry cat, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
“They’re…harmless,” I smile, feeling one stroking my left ear. “Look at them, they’re adorable.”
“The teeth and claws’ll come out any second now,” Isaac insists. “You’ll see. We’re about to be a red smear on those windows.”
“He seems to like them,” I point out, where the haunt slider is making puffs of lemon and pumpkin spice, allowing himself to be climbed on like a jungle gym.
“Artists are psychotic,” the eyeless man retorts. “Did you see those character designs upstairs? Did those look like they came from a rational mind?”
“Innocent,” the haunt slider insists, several dangling from his hat.
“Right, no, not this year, not this night,” Isaac growls, stepping back. “You’re nuts, the both of you.”
“Look at them!” I breathe, watching them gallivant and play, some finding their way to the table for more space.
Cartwheels, tumbles, contortionism, everything a traditional jester or harlequin would do, and impromptu performance given free of charge, free of heart, just for us.
“Yeah, I’m looking at them,” Isaac growls. “You don’t know what those are, put them back.”
“We will…protect them…with our life…” snarls the haunt slider defensively, angling himself between Isaac and the little figures.
“I’ve wanted to collect them for years, but they want an arm and a leg…” I murmur.
“And those thing’ll take an arm and a leg, seriously, have neither of you seen a horror movie ever?”
“Cute,” declares the haunt slider, holding out a smiling little pumpkin girl, kneeling trusting on his palm, looking up at Isaac with utmost love and no judgment.
The corner of Isaac’s mouth twitches. The little pumpkin girl waves sweetly, her fingers like pumpkin leaves.
“You’re both nuts,” he sighs, rolling eyes he doesn’t have, but letting the little pumpkin girl climb his hands, nestling on his shoulder at the curve of his neck. “With zero self-preservation instinct.”
Something laughs in the hallway.
“Get the lights!” Isaac practically screams, his long legs carrying him swiftly across the room, flipping the switch and crouching beneath the door.
Lost in the shadows, the haunt slider has his rucksack on the table, ushering all of the little figures into it, several leaping off my arms, shoulders, and the top of my head to join the rest of them. When safely put away, he drops to his knees, serrated shovel primed across his knees as he slinks across the floor, a sharp, burning capsaicin smell pouring from his mask as he passes me the rucksack, making my nose run.
“Snug…as…bugs…” he whispers, indicating the little figures, except for the one still hanging onto Isaac’s shoulder.
The three of us quietly peer through the window, watching the laughing figure approach. It’s a clown, with wild, curly, bright green hair, a large red nose, a white face, and a big red smile that’s always fixed, no matter the situation. A black and white striped shirt is under a blue denim jacket and black cutoff denim shorts, dragging a red and black poker-themed “clown hammer,” its head bent, left cheek and shoulder jammed into the far wall, giggling to itself as it passes by.
Wonderland’s solution was to incorporate the masks. The clown makeup was done with special printed half-face masks, the steampunkers were given half-face masks with printed mesh filters and cog patterns, now very real leather and copper at Isaac’s throat (the pumpkin girl, heedless of any danger the clown may possess, nesting in it like a hammock), most of the Factory Farm scareactors in full-face masks, and the carrion birds speaking for themselves.
The clown’s hand traces the corner of its mouth as it giggles, feeling the curve of muscles permanently locked into place. The hammer grinds along the floor, just behind jerky, unsteady feet, several sizes bigger than normal.
After the clown is out of sight, Isaac breathes the exhale he’d been holding.
“Well, that was the creepiest thing I’d ever seen,” he murmurs.
“Can’t stay…Props…and Costuming…”
I tug at my skirt, holding onto the rucksack, simultaneously pulling what could generously be called a shirt up and down when I have a free hand. The haunt slider’s smoke smells like vanilla.
Nimbly, he peels the leather away from the skull-shaped buttons and shucks it off, the leather pooling behind his tail and across his raised heels, sliding like silk across his modified boots as he hands it to me, the mask hissing slightly.
“Um…thank you,” I mumble, trading him the rucksack for the coat.
I’ve never felt leather so soft, and try not to blush when I realize it’s a lot tighter across the chest for me than for him. The buttons are cool to the touch, the outer layers a bit damp from his constant spray of smoke or vapor or whatever he uses to scent the air.
“Props and Costumes is between us and the employee parking,” Isaac muses, pinning the chain of his bracelet between his canines, still cautiously watching the wire-laced windows for clowns. “If it’s still there, we can grab a few things, and make our way to my car.”
“And…if someone beat us to it?”
“Strategic retreat.”
As Isaac undoes the lock, I feel a bit…well, exposed, when compared to the haunt slider’s serrated shovel and Isaac’s wrench. I guess I have claws, and cobra venom, probably, but I think I’d feel safer if I had something, like a really dangerous security blanket.
The haunt sliders were built for silence conditionally. They’re meant to be difficult to hear coming under the ambient sounds of a theme park haunted attraction in full-swing, on asphalt. His sparking pucks and toe-sheathes clack loudly against the cement flooring, causing Isaac to visibly wince.
“Maybe you should…” Isaac starts, cut off by a low hum that fills the air with a disconcerting stillness. For a moment, everything is black, and then red lights pop on at distant intervals, usually in front of a door or hallway junction.
“Yeah…that’s about right,” Isaac moans.
Masquerade--Chapter Five
Chapter five
What I hadn’t expected was what the haunt slider had kept hidden under his trenchcoat. I sort of expected not to see any exposed skin, but the intricately brocaded leather waistcoat over a high-collared shirt and tie, tucked snugly around his snood, was a bit of a surprise, as was the skull-shaped buttons along his abdomen and matching skull and crossbones belt buckle, reminiscent of a poison warning label. I’m not sure what the long-sleeved shirt, tucked into his elbow-length buckle gloves, is made of, but it looks sturdier than cotton or silk, silver buckles up his forearms, metal scutes at his elbows,
The tooling in the waistcoat is hypnotic, like swirls of mist. I could lose myself, following the pattern for hours.
He seems wrong without his coat, too small, like a bird without feathers. I feel bad for having taken it, watching a slight tremor form in his shoulders, like he might be cold despite the leather gloves and long sleeves. Even his tail seems to coil into itself for warmth, fretfully stroking the studs of his belt at his hip, making nervous little tapping noises.
A cheer went up when the lights went out, the sound of clowns excited for the show to start, from the sound of it, mistaking it for a curtain dropping. We knew it was taken as a sign to start performing, because we turn a corner to find the show in full swing, the helpless non-costumed administrative and backstage personnel for Wonderland as the audience participants.
Some enterprising individuals have brought out a knife-throwing wheel, the test of strength thing with the bell on top, and part of a dog’s agility course. Naturally, it’s the clown throwing the knives while the regular, uncostumed human spins, the clown wielding the hammer and clapping delightedly as the regular, uncostumed human slides up the town and bangs their head on the bell, and the giant, human-like pitbull leading the regular, uncostumed human along the agility course by a leash, shoveling popcorn from an overflowing machine into their mouth when they do it right.
Isaac takes a step forward, I grab his arm and pull him back, which makes him flinch and pull away like I stuck with with hot iron.
“No touching, please!” he snaps.
“Don’t,” I whisper pleadingly, trying to figure out why I’m thinking of hamburgers, fear gripping my chest so tightly that I can barely breathe.
“That’s my supervisor on the wheel,” he hisses. “He’s got kids.”
“They’re not right,” I whisper back, somewhere at a Fourth of July picnic in the back of my head. “And they’ve got knives. And hammers.”
My hood is spread defensively, wings outstretched under the heavy leather coat, a bitter taste in my mouth. There’s a familiar smell in the air, that warms my stomach and reflexively makes me hungry.
I remember asking once, why the air above the grill looked like water, seated on my mother’s lap. It’s the cooking gas, the propane.
The air around the haunt slider’s mask looks like water.
“Осовец,” Isaac breathes quietly. “Don’t move.”
The haunt slider stands stock-still, staring down the hallway toward the impromptu circus performance, at the lady clown lying languidly on her belly as she uses her feet to throw knives at the wheel, the male clown’s merry dance when he strikes the bell, the big dog’s hackles raised when his leash-bound captive misses the mark.
“Ozzy,” Isaac whispers again. “Calm down…and don’t move.”
I look down at the haunt slider’s dinosaur-like feet, the claws hidden inside protective metal sheathes, the round puck of sparking material at the spot between his soles and his toes.
“…Don’t…move…”
The haunt slider’s gaze never leaves the sadistic display before us. He makes no noise except the wheezing beyond his mask.
“Ozzy,” Isaac pleads urgently. “Ozzy, look at me…deep breaths…don’t…move…”
The haunt slider raises his left foot less than an inch above the ground, and Isaac’s wrench collides with his thin chest, bending the smaller figure nearly in half, the smell of propane giving way to frying oil, perfume, and bleach. In one motion, Isaac has the haunt slider over his shoulder, a cloud of roses, ammonia, and butter in his wake.
“Run!” Isaac shouts.
He doesn’t need to tell me twice, seeing as the clowns have realized there’s new playmates and dogs chase things that run.
“First left!” I shout after him. “Second door on the right!”
Pleasebeopenpleasebeopenpleasebeopen…
It’s supposed to be lock, but it can be a pain in the ass to track down someone with a key to open it, so some, especially Wonderland employees, leave the door open, or stopped with a box.
Isaac dashes into the room, slamming the door with a kick of his boots, engaging the auto-lock and sealing us inside. He immediately finds a stepstool and leans the haunt slider he called Ozzy down on it, bent in half and hissing orange blossom, pine cleaner, and bitter almond, silently bearing his pain, using his shovel to hold himself up.
The eyeless man drops to his knees and seizes the haunt slider’s right boot, growling, “Get this stuff off of you before you blow us all to kingdom come.”
The haunt slider kicks him with his free foot, slapping him with the tail for good measure.
“How were you exhaling propane?!” I shriek as something heavy collides with the bolted door behind me, making us all flinch.
Isaac, nursing a forming bruise on his cheek and a cut lip from one of his fangs, jumps up in alarm.
“It auto-locks,” I explain, grateful, for once, that someone violated the rules by leaving the door open for easy access. “They can’t get in.”
“And we can’t get out,” Isaac growls.
“Service hatch,” I reply, pointing upward at the ladder leading toward a vacant space, and the ceiling beyond. “Goes up to the roof, I think.”
Ozzy’s smoke has a bloody smell to it, coppery, under notes of cherry blossom and rubbing alcohol. He inclines his head, looking at his surroundings, his smoke starting to cycle into a more reasonable combination of lavender and chamomile.
“Are you alright?” Isaac demands, stern but a touch of apology, letting the haunt slider groggily seize his arm and place two fingers at his wrist. “You could have…I’m…sorry.”
“Supply…closet…” Ozzy murmurs, dropping the eyeless man’s wrist, evidently starting to notice his environs. He stands up off the stepstool and begins rummaging in the nearest first aid box, reaching to place bandages and alcohol pads in the coat he doesn’t have, pausing in apparent confusion, and then stuffing them into his leather waistcoat.
A flash of embarrassment warms my face. I shouldn’t have taken his coat.
“How did you know this was here?” Isaac asks, looking up at the hatch. “Do you work for Wonderland, too?”
I blush, looking away, not wanting to admit that I don’t really belong here, not in the park, and not with them
.
“Not…really…” I mumble.
“No, you’re the girl that cleans the makeup tables,” Isaac says, snapping his fingers…somehow. “He thought he recognized you.”
I blink, pretty sure I’d recognize Isaac as he was coming out of makeup, a figure like that being hard to miss, over six and a half feet tall with definite scoliosis. When I realize he knows what I am, I turn a few shades redder.
“We really appreciate it, makes things go smoother the morning after a busy night,” he smiles. “The makeup artists always seem to find things a little faster after you’ve been working.”
“He…doesn’t like…being on…the floor…” Ozzy murmurs, examining the first aid box for what he can fit in his pockets.
Feeling self-conscious in his coat, I take it off and hold it out to him.
“Here…um…it’s yours,” I say as he turns his vacant gaze in my direction.
“…Cold…” he replies, still holding a box of bandages, not reaching for the coat.
“It doesn’t matter,” I tell him, shaking my head. “There’s worse going on out there.”
My exposed thighs seem a small thing to complain about, when I’m not the one on a knife wheel, or taking wrenches to the gut.
“…Kind…”
Ozzy puts the bandages down long enough to shrug into his coat, feeling the material in a way that makes him look like he’s welcoming an old friend back. Once buttoned back up, he goes back to his foraging.
“He seems to like you,” Isaac observes, watching the haunt slider’s magpie-like hoarding, chewing his bracelet thoughtfully.
“Huh?”
“Giving you his coat,” Isaac shrugs. “The carrion birds…the world they come from is dead. The air will kill you. The sun will kill you. They dress like that to keep everything out, to protect themselves, a side effect of the haunt slider safety gear. It’s basically his skin, and he took it off for you.”
I twist my clawed hands in front of me. The haunt slider called me kind, but I haven’t really done a single kind thing in his presence, not like offering someone the coat off my back, or carrying them to safety when I could have just left the potential incendiary device behind. I didn’t even try to help those people, talking someone out of it, in fact.
“You’re a professional scareactor?” I ask, changing the subject.
“Zone ambience, I’m regular, not seasonal,” Isaac replies proudly, letting his voice slip into a Bostonian accent. “Most days I’m a reporter in front of Full Throttle’s facade, disguising guest surveys as hard-hitting news reports.”
“Did you do the stage show? For Monsterland, this year, I mean.”
He shrugs, his accent going back to normal. “Understudy. I’ve done one or two.”
“I might have seen you. Online, I mean. Someone recorded a showing.”
The eyeless man shrugs, Harlequin peeking out from her nest at his throat. “Might have been.”
“And um…him…” I ask. “You know him?”
“Not that I know of,” Isaac answers, reclining his chin on his long fingers, Harlequin shaking them playfully. “Most of the haunt sliders this year are outside consultants or seasonal workers, especially in Soul Survivor.”
“You called him by name.”
“‘Осовец,’ it’s the fortress he mentioned that inspired his costume. World War One story, Germans gassed it, then, thinking they killed everyone, went to claim it. Then, about a hundred pissed-off Russians, covered in chemical burns and coughing up their own lungs, chased them back out. The ‘Attack of the Dead Men.’ Seemed as good a thing as any to call him. You good there, Ozzy? You up for climbing the ladder?”
The haunt slider puts the cover back on the now-empty first aid kit, gingerly climbing to his feet and leaning on his telescopic shovel.
“He…will…manage…”
“…Right,” Isaac sighs, placing his braclet back in his mouth.
Before either of us can approach the ladder, in a corner by the mop drain, Ozzy pulls open a cabinet and starts staring at industrial-strength cleaning products.
“Nope!” Isaac barks, shooing the haunt slider away and toward the ladder.
His clawed feet grasp the ladder’s rungs as he makes his way up, his tail clacking as it brushes by. Isaac’s tail slides along the ladder’s sides. I look down at my own feet self-consciously, adjusting a strap starting to burn against my newly-formed scales.
“You got it, Sherene?” Isaac asks, kneeling from above and offering me his hand, pulling back slightly as I approach.
“Yeah, I got it,” I answer, immediately slipping when one of my sandals slides off the rung, my face getting hot again.
The service hatch leads to a small, unfinished room with a door on one side. Ozzy closes the hatch and turns the wheel that bolts it closed, keeping the clowns from following, even if they figure out how to wedge the door open like he did.
Isaac unlatches the door and steps out onto the roof, into the frigid, October breeze and a light pattering of rain, his lanky form outlined in moonlight. Far from the sound of a theme park at peak, the sound of screaming and gunfire flows into the little room.
I follow him out onto the rooftop, smelling smoke and gunpowder.
“What…is happening…?” Isaac breathes, looking down onto the park below.
It looks like someone ripped chunks of other places and threw them haphazardly into a pile. The relatively-untouched set pieces for Metropolis collide sharply with the barren and decayed Soul Survivor, butting straight up against the Victorian gaslamp Steampunk Singularity. At first, I think the power might have come back on, but it’s literally gaslamps lighting up the area near the steel Full Throttle coaster.
Over on the other side, the facades for Kiddie Carnival, now Psycho Circus, have changed from fiberglass and concrete to canvas and tarps. Deeper into the park’s Lost Garden, where the Dragon’s Breath coaster resides, what’s normally a soundstage from this angle is an ominous, dark castle with something large and reptilian curled on top.
“Full moon…unmasks…stranger in us…all…” Ozzy says, walking toward the edge of the building, head and hands raised to the sky. “Shadow…is cast…on who…you used to be…”
“You see that, right?” I ask Isaac, looking at the seams of cobblestone in Steampunk Singularity to the cracked asphalt of Soul Survivor, pointing over to where a circus tent sharply becomes a Victorian manor house along the barrier between the two sections.
“It’s like…it all became real,” Isaac breathes, turning his attention to Full Throttle, where a full-sized race track sits where the steel coaster used to.
Below us, a partially glass and copper unicorn has joined a herd of brightly-colored, circus-themed horses from the Kiddie Carnival carousel, a color palate of fur no horse was ever born with. Pirates, armed with cutlasses and flintlocks, have barricaded themselves in one of the collapsed Soul Survivor buildings, in an apparent standoff with steamborg soldiers.
“Are those the pirates from the whitewater ride?” I ask incredulously.
“…Halloween…full moon…very rare…” Ozzy rambles, still looking skyward, dropping to his knees, hands and head still held high.
“What are you…” I ask, following his gaze. “Isa…Isaac, look up.”
“What now?” Isaac whimpers, clearly expecting to see WW1 fighter planes from Kiddie Carnival’s plane ride, or an invasion of UFOs from the simulator ride, or some such.
The full moon, which rarely falls at the end of October, is a massive, orange jack o’lantern, its yellow gaze surveying the chaos bellow with a mirthful grin. It isn’t a color projection, it’s like the moon turned into a pumpkin, and then someone carved it and placed a candle inside
“Well…that…is some nonsense right there…” Isaac mumbles.
What I hadn’t expected was what the haunt slider had kept hidden under his trenchcoat. I sort of expected not to see any exposed skin, but the intricately brocaded leather waistcoat over a high-collared shirt and tie, tucked snugly around his snood, was a bit of a surprise, as was the skull-shaped buttons along his abdomen and matching skull and crossbones belt buckle, reminiscent of a poison warning label. I’m not sure what the long-sleeved shirt, tucked into his elbow-length buckle gloves, is made of, but it looks sturdier than cotton or silk, silver buckles up his forearms, metal scutes at his elbows,
The tooling in the waistcoat is hypnotic, like swirls of mist. I could lose myself, following the pattern for hours.
He seems wrong without his coat, too small, like a bird without feathers. I feel bad for having taken it, watching a slight tremor form in his shoulders, like he might be cold despite the leather gloves and long sleeves. Even his tail seems to coil into itself for warmth, fretfully stroking the studs of his belt at his hip, making nervous little tapping noises.
A cheer went up when the lights went out, the sound of clowns excited for the show to start, from the sound of it, mistaking it for a curtain dropping. We knew it was taken as a sign to start performing, because we turn a corner to find the show in full swing, the helpless non-costumed administrative and backstage personnel for Wonderland as the audience participants.
Some enterprising individuals have brought out a knife-throwing wheel, the test of strength thing with the bell on top, and part of a dog’s agility course. Naturally, it’s the clown throwing the knives while the regular, uncostumed human spins, the clown wielding the hammer and clapping delightedly as the regular, uncostumed human slides up the town and bangs their head on the bell, and the giant, human-like pitbull leading the regular, uncostumed human along the agility course by a leash, shoveling popcorn from an overflowing machine into their mouth when they do it right.
Isaac takes a step forward, I grab his arm and pull him back, which makes him flinch and pull away like I stuck with with hot iron.
“No touching, please!” he snaps.
“Don’t,” I whisper pleadingly, trying to figure out why I’m thinking of hamburgers, fear gripping my chest so tightly that I can barely breathe.
“That’s my supervisor on the wheel,” he hisses. “He’s got kids.”
“They’re not right,” I whisper back, somewhere at a Fourth of July picnic in the back of my head. “And they’ve got knives. And hammers.”
My hood is spread defensively, wings outstretched under the heavy leather coat, a bitter taste in my mouth. There’s a familiar smell in the air, that warms my stomach and reflexively makes me hungry.
I remember asking once, why the air above the grill looked like water, seated on my mother’s lap. It’s the cooking gas, the propane.
The air around the haunt slider’s mask looks like water.
“Осовец,” Isaac breathes quietly. “Don’t move.”
The haunt slider stands stock-still, staring down the hallway toward the impromptu circus performance, at the lady clown lying languidly on her belly as she uses her feet to throw knives at the wheel, the male clown’s merry dance when he strikes the bell, the big dog’s hackles raised when his leash-bound captive misses the mark.
“Ozzy,” Isaac whispers again. “Calm down…and don’t move.”
I look down at the haunt slider’s dinosaur-like feet, the claws hidden inside protective metal sheathes, the round puck of sparking material at the spot between his soles and his toes.
“…Don’t…move…”
The haunt slider’s gaze never leaves the sadistic display before us. He makes no noise except the wheezing beyond his mask.
“Ozzy,” Isaac pleads urgently. “Ozzy, look at me…deep breaths…don’t…move…”
The haunt slider raises his left foot less than an inch above the ground, and Isaac’s wrench collides with his thin chest, bending the smaller figure nearly in half, the smell of propane giving way to frying oil, perfume, and bleach. In one motion, Isaac has the haunt slider over his shoulder, a cloud of roses, ammonia, and butter in his wake.
“Run!” Isaac shouts.
He doesn’t need to tell me twice, seeing as the clowns have realized there’s new playmates and dogs chase things that run.
“First left!” I shout after him. “Second door on the right!”
Pleasebeopenpleasebeopenpleasebeopen…
It’s supposed to be lock, but it can be a pain in the ass to track down someone with a key to open it, so some, especially Wonderland employees, leave the door open, or stopped with a box.
Isaac dashes into the room, slamming the door with a kick of his boots, engaging the auto-lock and sealing us inside. He immediately finds a stepstool and leans the haunt slider he called Ozzy down on it, bent in half and hissing orange blossom, pine cleaner, and bitter almond, silently bearing his pain, using his shovel to hold himself up.
The eyeless man drops to his knees and seizes the haunt slider’s right boot, growling, “Get this stuff off of you before you blow us all to kingdom come.”
The haunt slider kicks him with his free foot, slapping him with the tail for good measure.
“How were you exhaling propane?!” I shriek as something heavy collides with the bolted door behind me, making us all flinch.
Isaac, nursing a forming bruise on his cheek and a cut lip from one of his fangs, jumps up in alarm.
“It auto-locks,” I explain, grateful, for once, that someone violated the rules by leaving the door open for easy access. “They can’t get in.”
“And we can’t get out,” Isaac growls.
“Service hatch,” I reply, pointing upward at the ladder leading toward a vacant space, and the ceiling beyond. “Goes up to the roof, I think.”
Ozzy’s smoke has a bloody smell to it, coppery, under notes of cherry blossom and rubbing alcohol. He inclines his head, looking at his surroundings, his smoke starting to cycle into a more reasonable combination of lavender and chamomile.
“Are you alright?” Isaac demands, stern but a touch of apology, letting the haunt slider groggily seize his arm and place two fingers at his wrist. “You could have…I’m…sorry.”
“Supply…closet…” Ozzy murmurs, dropping the eyeless man’s wrist, evidently starting to notice his environs. He stands up off the stepstool and begins rummaging in the nearest first aid box, reaching to place bandages and alcohol pads in the coat he doesn’t have, pausing in apparent confusion, and then stuffing them into his leather waistcoat.
A flash of embarrassment warms my face. I shouldn’t have taken his coat.
“How did you know this was here?” Isaac asks, looking up at the hatch. “Do you work for Wonderland, too?”
I blush, looking away, not wanting to admit that I don’t really belong here, not in the park, and not with them
.
“Not…really…” I mumble.
“No, you’re the girl that cleans the makeup tables,” Isaac says, snapping his fingers…somehow. “He thought he recognized you.”
I blink, pretty sure I’d recognize Isaac as he was coming out of makeup, a figure like that being hard to miss, over six and a half feet tall with definite scoliosis. When I realize he knows what I am, I turn a few shades redder.
“We really appreciate it, makes things go smoother the morning after a busy night,” he smiles. “The makeup artists always seem to find things a little faster after you’ve been working.”
“He…doesn’t like…being on…the floor…” Ozzy murmurs, examining the first aid box for what he can fit in his pockets.
Feeling self-conscious in his coat, I take it off and hold it out to him.
“Here…um…it’s yours,” I say as he turns his vacant gaze in my direction.
“…Cold…” he replies, still holding a box of bandages, not reaching for the coat.
“It doesn’t matter,” I tell him, shaking my head. “There’s worse going on out there.”
My exposed thighs seem a small thing to complain about, when I’m not the one on a knife wheel, or taking wrenches to the gut.
“…Kind…”
Ozzy puts the bandages down long enough to shrug into his coat, feeling the material in a way that makes him look like he’s welcoming an old friend back. Once buttoned back up, he goes back to his foraging.
“He seems to like you,” Isaac observes, watching the haunt slider’s magpie-like hoarding, chewing his bracelet thoughtfully.
“Huh?”
“Giving you his coat,” Isaac shrugs. “The carrion birds…the world they come from is dead. The air will kill you. The sun will kill you. They dress like that to keep everything out, to protect themselves, a side effect of the haunt slider safety gear. It’s basically his skin, and he took it off for you.”
I twist my clawed hands in front of me. The haunt slider called me kind, but I haven’t really done a single kind thing in his presence, not like offering someone the coat off my back, or carrying them to safety when I could have just left the potential incendiary device behind. I didn’t even try to help those people, talking someone out of it, in fact.
“You’re a professional scareactor?” I ask, changing the subject.
“Zone ambience, I’m regular, not seasonal,” Isaac replies proudly, letting his voice slip into a Bostonian accent. “Most days I’m a reporter in front of Full Throttle’s facade, disguising guest surveys as hard-hitting news reports.”
“Did you do the stage show? For Monsterland, this year, I mean.”
He shrugs, his accent going back to normal. “Understudy. I’ve done one or two.”
“I might have seen you. Online, I mean. Someone recorded a showing.”
The eyeless man shrugs, Harlequin peeking out from her nest at his throat. “Might have been.”
“And um…him…” I ask. “You know him?”
“Not that I know of,” Isaac answers, reclining his chin on his long fingers, Harlequin shaking them playfully. “Most of the haunt sliders this year are outside consultants or seasonal workers, especially in Soul Survivor.”
“You called him by name.”
“‘Осовец,’ it’s the fortress he mentioned that inspired his costume. World War One story, Germans gassed it, then, thinking they killed everyone, went to claim it. Then, about a hundred pissed-off Russians, covered in chemical burns and coughing up their own lungs, chased them back out. The ‘Attack of the Dead Men.’ Seemed as good a thing as any to call him. You good there, Ozzy? You up for climbing the ladder?”
The haunt slider puts the cover back on the now-empty first aid kit, gingerly climbing to his feet and leaning on his telescopic shovel.
“He…will…manage…”
“…Right,” Isaac sighs, placing his braclet back in his mouth.
Before either of us can approach the ladder, in a corner by the mop drain, Ozzy pulls open a cabinet and starts staring at industrial-strength cleaning products.
“Nope!” Isaac barks, shooing the haunt slider away and toward the ladder.
His clawed feet grasp the ladder’s rungs as he makes his way up, his tail clacking as it brushes by. Isaac’s tail slides along the ladder’s sides. I look down at my own feet self-consciously, adjusting a strap starting to burn against my newly-formed scales.
“You got it, Sherene?” Isaac asks, kneeling from above and offering me his hand, pulling back slightly as I approach.
“Yeah, I got it,” I answer, immediately slipping when one of my sandals slides off the rung, my face getting hot again.
The service hatch leads to a small, unfinished room with a door on one side. Ozzy closes the hatch and turns the wheel that bolts it closed, keeping the clowns from following, even if they figure out how to wedge the door open like he did.
Isaac unlatches the door and steps out onto the roof, into the frigid, October breeze and a light pattering of rain, his lanky form outlined in moonlight. Far from the sound of a theme park at peak, the sound of screaming and gunfire flows into the little room.
I follow him out onto the rooftop, smelling smoke and gunpowder.
“What…is happening…?” Isaac breathes, looking down onto the park below.
It looks like someone ripped chunks of other places and threw them haphazardly into a pile. The relatively-untouched set pieces for Metropolis collide sharply with the barren and decayed Soul Survivor, butting straight up against the Victorian gaslamp Steampunk Singularity. At first, I think the power might have come back on, but it’s literally gaslamps lighting up the area near the steel Full Throttle coaster.
Over on the other side, the facades for Kiddie Carnival, now Psycho Circus, have changed from fiberglass and concrete to canvas and tarps. Deeper into the park’s Lost Garden, where the Dragon’s Breath coaster resides, what’s normally a soundstage from this angle is an ominous, dark castle with something large and reptilian curled on top.
“Full moon…unmasks…stranger in us…all…” Ozzy says, walking toward the edge of the building, head and hands raised to the sky. “Shadow…is cast…on who…you used to be…”
“You see that, right?” I ask Isaac, looking at the seams of cobblestone in Steampunk Singularity to the cracked asphalt of Soul Survivor, pointing over to where a circus tent sharply becomes a Victorian manor house along the barrier between the two sections.
“It’s like…it all became real,” Isaac breathes, turning his attention to Full Throttle, where a full-sized race track sits where the steel coaster used to.
Below us, a partially glass and copper unicorn has joined a herd of brightly-colored, circus-themed horses from the Kiddie Carnival carousel, a color palate of fur no horse was ever born with. Pirates, armed with cutlasses and flintlocks, have barricaded themselves in one of the collapsed Soul Survivor buildings, in an apparent standoff with steamborg soldiers.
“Are those the pirates from the whitewater ride?” I ask incredulously.
“…Halloween…full moon…very rare…” Ozzy rambles, still looking skyward, dropping to his knees, hands and head still held high.
“What are you…” I ask, following his gaze. “Isa…Isaac, look up.”
“What now?” Isaac whimpers, clearly expecting to see WW1 fighter planes from Kiddie Carnival’s plane ride, or an invasion of UFOs from the simulator ride, or some such.
The full moon, which rarely falls at the end of October, is a massive, orange jack o’lantern, its yellow gaze surveying the chaos bellow with a mirthful grin. It isn’t a color projection, it’s like the moon turned into a pumpkin, and then someone carved it and placed a candle inside
“Well…that…is some nonsense right there…” Isaac mumbles.
