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.