This make up is driving me crazy. It’s been on me all night. 11:46 now. I was supposed to be gone an hour ago but here I squat behind this fake tombstone. Don the prick decided to let an extra group go through the house last minute, so we all have to stay. I must say this gets tiring. Nobody checks our hours online. They just show up when they show up. I’m not getting paid enough to scare these people.
The group was just god awful of course. Hoard of bratty teenagers who keep bumping into everything on purpose and have to be told not to. They’re at the age now where they feel invincible and they act like it. They talk smack to the actors, try to touch them. The group coordinator, usually Mike the Vampire guy, gives a very explicit warning at the beginning of each haunted house tour not to touch the actors. They don’t touch us; we can’t touch them. Those are the rules. The teenagers don’t want anything to do with rules at this age though.
Dons irrepressible drive to make money wins out and they let the group come through. Don takes chances which are questionable. Mom or Dad gave a big tip and we’ll definitely see some of that so I guess I can’t be that mad. The family looks rich, brand new Ferrari, probably a North Shore bunch. The kids came in with open candy in their pockets. What’ll happen is they will forget the candy is in there and when we scare them they’ll jump and a little will spill each time. We’re going to be finding Skittles and M&M’s around here for weeks. Don’s supposed to tell them they can’t bring that stuff in but does he? Come on!
The kids brought all their damn friends so it’s like 14 people going single file through a haunted house, mom and dad included. The scares aren’t even good. The group has to move like a train through narrow hallways and that kind of thing. By the time you’ve scared the first person or two in the front everyone else knows about it and it’s no good.
My spot at least is wide and a bit bigger. It’s toward the end. I have that section pretty much to myself. I hide in what looks like a graveyard, lots of fake tombstones everywhere and more than one path you can take. It’s more open but you can’t see great, light fog machine. Most of the stones have no one behind them, which puts people at ease. Then right before the next turn…
BAM!
Gotcha’ Mom!
There’s a bit of a maze to go through right before the graveyard, it separates people up a bit and I can scare maybe half the group instead of just two or three people. I like that. This one woman, mom I think, drops her goddamn purse and it’s just great. I near piss myself laughing. You can sort of tell she doesn’t want to be there and got dragged along so it makes it even better. She yells at her husband after I scare her: “Frank! Oh Christ Frank! I’m done! I’m done!” “Honey, it’s just a guy in a suit. It’s okay.” Jesus, if this woman sees a rat at night she probably hits the speed dial for the local police department.
12:30 rolls around and Don says it’s okay for me to go. Relieved until 4 PM the next day when this shit will start all over again, the make-up, the set-up. Jesus, I’ve been doing this gig for 8 years now and the make-up still annoys me as bad as it did the first night. Heavy grays and blacks. Tim the make-up artist usually spends a few minutes with me rubbing cold cream on there but the rest I just have to work off in the car on the way home, in the bathroom when I get home, sometimes it’s on the pillow when I wake up in the morning…pain in the ass. I’ll admit I’ve had some fun with this in the past. Some nights I wouldn’t ask for a face clean. I’d just get in the car and drive to a Burger King. I’d pull up to the window and then turn away like I was looking for something. I’d hear the attendant behind me and then I’d spin around really fast. Then they’d see it, the dead grey make-up, the long white hair, the red eye contacts…one night I did a little growl and the guy in the window spilled my Dr. Pepper all over himself. By the time I get home it’s close to 2 AM. I have a beer and try to clean the rest of my face off. It’s colder now, November 2nd. 2 weeks until close and then I’ll collect unemployment for a few months. There’s a seasonal Valentine’s Day event where I dress as Cupid. I wish I could do Santa at the Flemingham Village mall, but I don’t have the mannerisms for it or the gut. If I could make my two beers a night into a six pack maybe I could. I’ve heard they pay cash usually at the mall gig so I can lump that onto my government money. Not a bad chunk of dough for a struggling guy. I sit at home in my easy chair with my beer and a napkin. I face a mirror. They’re re- running an old Svengoolie episode. It’s the bit where the host does comedy “Berwyn?!?!!” the studio audience yells.
It’s an okay film, The Mummy’s Hand. Honestly, the better part of the show is when the guy does his comedy bits. I rarely like the feature. Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman. That’s not real horror to me. That’s play acting. It’s the stuff of the theater. I appreciate the artwork and the set design because it’s beautiful. I’ll even go so far as to say at least with a black and white film you’ve got a certain mystery about it that can be attractive. None of my emotions even approach fear though. True horror isn’t anything you want to actually encounter. People kid themselves when they walk up to the ticket lines and ask to be terrified. No one actually wants to be terrified. A thrill yes, momentary fear maybe. But nothing like true horror. I like films like They Shoot Horses Don’t They? or Midnight Express. That’s horror to me. Midnight Express is about a kid who tries to deal drugs in Turkey and gets sent to a Turkish prison for years where they make him walk around naked all the time and beat the piss out of him. That’s true horror. That could happen, but it’s the kind of situation most people don’t want to talk about or see; precisely because it could happen…and who knows how bad it would be? Real life is worse than the movies, almost always. I change the channel. Some old SNL episode. Eddie Murphy is in it. I put it on mute and keep cleaning my face. I look better. Almost human now. A human. A dog. Dog. Christ, what was I talking about again? Oh yeah! Most people don’t even want to consider true horror. Hell, you look at Linda Blair in The Exorcist. People see that movie and freak out. All I can think is Pea Soup and Corn Syrup. Child possessed by the devil. Really? Okay, I’ll say the biblical aspect of it lends it maybe a touch of creepiness just by virtue of being ancient. But it’s kid stuff.
I’ll give you an example of real horror. My cousin Allen. His family had a farm out in Indiana, not too far over the border from Chicago. It was just outside Gary if I remember right. I remember it used to smell like noxious egg farts going to visit them because of all the factory smoke. Allen’s family had this dog. Really cute mid-size fellow named Midas, but Midas was stupid. Midas was a labradoodle. So, one summer I spent the week out on the farm with my parents. At night, I slept on the top loft, right by the sky light. The barn was within ear shot of my window. For three nights I heard this sound like yowling, crying really. It was a bit soft but unmistakable. It was a crying dog. Went on for a couple hours every night. So, the fourth night, I left my room and wandered downstairs. You had to climb this ladder to get down from the bed and when I got down I saw that Allen’s bed was empty. So, I snuck out the backdoor and wandered towards the barn. I don’t know how no one heard the dog yelping, it was loud that night. Anyway, I go in there to find Allen with a propane torch and Midas tied up to a post in the barn. Allen, the sick fuck, was trying to burn the dog. I don’t know that he really meant to burn him, but the suggestion was torture enough. I promptly left the barn and went to wake my parents. Oh, who the hell am I kidding? I didn’t do that. The guy had a fucking propane torch. I thought maybe he was going to light me up next! Alright, so I helped him a little. Maybe played with the torch a minute or two, maybe singed the tail, but nothing compared to what he did. That guy was a monster. I just sat in the corner and watched…I never told anyone. Midas was fine anyway. I don’t know if he even remembered it happening. He was playing with Midas the next day like nothing had happened. He was throwing around the ball and Midas…
Well, actually, Midas wasn’t really going near him or the ball. He seemed hesitant to play. He warmed a little more to me but not much…weird. I didn’t really play with Midas or Allen for the rest of our stay. I just walked around the cornfields and got lost. At the end of the week I went home, and we didn’t see Allen again. My beer is empty, and my face is clean. I should sleep soon. There’s an opera on TV now. Phantom of the Opera I think. When I was in high school my theater troupe did that. I played the masked man. That role was great fun. I thought I might go into acting back in those days. I had a good time in theater, especially in that play. I had to rehearse the main songs with this girl Ashley. She played the part of the possessed muse. She was petite, pale blue eyes, very much an hourglass figure…Christ I still think about singing that one song with her… Nighttime sharpens, heightens each sensation Darkness stirs and, wakes imagination Jesus that song makes my blood stir even after all these years. She had these beautiful breasts that pushed out from her like a balcony. She was one of the people at the time who told me I should do theater. I tried for a while. I went to a real acting school for a while, a good one. I went out for a few commercials, bit tv parts. I went into debt paying for those classes and the commercials barely paid a fraction of what I owed. I must say my parents weren’t very supportive and that it made it harder. I landed a show on a very early web series, but unfortunately it was a bit before it’s time and the thing never really took off. I only did the pilot episode. There only ever was a pilot episode. It was early 2000’s cheese, bunch of guys sharing an apartment and getting into these random situations that had no meaning. It was a direct rip off of Seinfeld.
I started with the odd jobs playing characters after that and that was what eventually led me into the hiding behind the gravestone business. Sometimes I’m not even sure why I still do it. I’m grateful that it’s seasonal. I think if I did this job all year I might not be sitting here right now… Jesus this is depressing. Let’s have another beer. One more for the road. I can stare out the window for awhile and look at the half moon. I drink beer in the warm silhouette of the moon. This apartment is really the pits. It’s dirty and it’s small: close walls, low ceiling. But, hey, it’s home. Also, there are these weird eye bolts in the walls you know. You could run chain through them. You could lock whatever you wanted to the wall I suppose, just keep someone for as long as you wanted. Hell, the walls are good here. Almost soundproof. I’ve left my stereo on blast a few times and stood in the hall. It was like a dull roar. Neighbors would find it hard to discern a real human cry from imagination. There was this one time…shit, I don’t know if I’d even want to admit this to anyone, but I guess since it’s just me and the moon now so I can talk freely. This one time in high school I actually kept a kid in a dog cage. Kid was named Randy and he was a classmate. My parents weren’t home and I invited him over after school. Randy was kind of dumb and he’d do anything for a dare. Eh, there’s not much to tell I suppose. Getting him to go in the thing was the hardest part. Then I just clicked the lock shut and sat there watching him. The guy was trying to figure out what happened for a while. He thought it was a joke for the first ten minutes or so…then he saw I was serious.
I just kept him like that. Couple of hours. It got dark out the window while we sat there. I never hurt him. Never touched him even. I just sat there and watched what happened. I was curious to see what a person did when they were locked up that way. He cried, he wet myself at one point. The part that got really interesting was when he started begging. I made sure he wouldn’t tell anyone, but I won’t tell you how I made sure of that…no…not even the moon knows that one. I lay in bed and wait for sleep to come. It will. I’ve never had trouble sleeping soundly. I always go to sleep instantly. Tonight, I’m just a bit keyed up. Maybe it’s from too many years of doing this job. Too many years of laying there like that by the tombstone, waiting for them to come. You know they’ve never moved my position. All these years in the haunted house and you’d think by now they would have given me a new station, new role. Nope, I’m tombstone guy every year. To be honest, I’m glad they haven’t moved me. More and more I’ve been noticing this little hutch in the walls, not ten feet from my official hiding spot. You could grab someone and put them there if you really wanted to. You could just drag them away and knock them out. It’s dark in there and there’s a fog machine so people might not notice. These people, these families, these teenagers…they walk through the place with such trust. Don’t they realize how easy it would be for someone to just… Sleepy now, sleepy time.
I wake up at 2 PM. I find I sleep longer and longer these days. I get up to work and that’s it. Otherwise I sleep and if I don’t sleep I just stare out the window at the moon all night cause it’s so… Sun outside today. Standing in the kitchen and it shines on me. Shower, shower, shave, shave. Brush the teeth. Clothes on. Need to remember to get those chains and padlocks out of the car at some point. Blood in the soup…there was blood in the soup, I think. Go to work and get food on the way. Will I grab them…not grab them…who knows??? That’s the fun.
Back at home now. Drinking beer, wiping my paint stained face. Another horror flick comes on. There’s this station that shows them every night, all night from like 11 PM until 4 or 5 the next morning. It’s usually B movie black and white. Garbage, but mindlessly entertaining, nonetheless. You wonder about the people who watch this. They actually fall for this garbage. They look at someone in raggedy clothes, with long scraggly hair, dirty face and they think, that’s pure evil! Meanwhile, some guy in the middle of Wisconsin who looks like a farmer kills 3 or 4 women and makes lamp shades out of their skin. You take the scary make-up off a guy and he looks normal; but he’s the most dangerous fuck alive…Know why? He looks like everyone else. I should have another beer…