He says, “Oh, I bought this in a liquor store—I thought it was cool—but I’m sure originally it was like a cartoon meant to warn people about the dangers of alcohol.”
“I’m going to bartending school,” Nan tells him in her flat tone, her face expressionless. This is her customary manner.
“Oh, really? You seem young to be handling alcohol,” the father says, sort of kidding her. “That’s great, though.”
“Do you know what they call a bartender? A mixologist. A really good mixologist is called a professor of mixology. That’s what I’m going to be.”
“That’s awesome. I’ll, ah, I’ll have to come to whatever bar you end up working in and order a dirty martini from you. That’s my favorite drink.”
He waits for her to ask him whether he favors gin or vodka, a portion of vermouth or just “a quick glance at a bottle of vermouth” as Alfred Hitchcock preferred, but she only stares at his shirt and the horn blares that the game has come to its end. They both turn and the two young boys slip out through the hanging strips that cover the maze’s entrance.
“Well . . . thanks,” the man says, looking back at her as he starts after his kids, who have already slung off their vests and hung them up and are now rushing in search of another activity. He looks regretful, as if he imagines he’s lost the opportunity to sleep with her now that they’ve bonded over mixology. “Good luck to you with school.”
A short time later, when the father approaches the customer services counter so his sons can exchange the tickets they’ve won for gaudy trinkets, Janet leans toward him over the counter and says in a lowered voice, “Excuse me, I saw you talking to Nanette. She tells some pretty weird stories. What was she saying to you?”
“Ah, well . . .” The man peers over toward Nan, an indistinct figure in the dark of the laser tag antechamber as she straightens the illuminated blue and red vests on their holders. “All she said was she’s studying to be a bartender.”
Janet, a young woman of Nan’s exact age, chuckles and shakes her head and says, “Nanette is not studying to be a bartender.”
*
A group of boys in their early teens has emerged from laser tag and loudly departed, but without sniggering at Nan or making any little comments half behind her back, for which she is relieved. In their place, she admits through the strips into the labyrinth two young girls, maybe friends, but she prefers to think they’re sisters. After starting the timed program, she looks to the woman who stands waiting for them. She figures that this attractive, brown-skinned woman with her long matte-black hair must be from India.
She says to the mother in her monotone, “You have beautiful hair.”
“Oh, thank you,” the woman says, turning toward Nan, her surprised smile bright against her dark skin.
“I had a twin sister,” Nan says. “Named Annette. Ever since we were kids we always had long red hair, down to here.” She reaches around to touch her lower back. “We had the same black mole here, too.” She pulls her collar down a little to point to a black dot at her clavicle. “Mine is on the left, but hers was on the right. Annette said our mole was the period on the sentence of our face, where boys had to stop looking. They couldn’t go below that.”
The maybe-Indian woman smiles again and says, “Oh . . . that’s clever.”
Nan’s face remains expressionless. Today her beanie, covering her ears and pulled down almost to her eyebrows, is purple, but she wears her usual glasses with their dark frames. She says, “Annette was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was only twenty. It’s uncommon but it happens.”
“Oh my,” says the mother with long coal-black hair. “That’s terrible.”
“She had to have a mastectomy. So between the two of us we only had three breasts. I told her because we were twins she could pretend she had two breasts and I had only one. We could share one breast. Sometimes I joked we were the two-and-a-half-Fates.”
“I’m so sorry,” says the maybe-Indian woman, her eyes intense with empathy.
Nan goes on, without a twitch in her blank face, “When Annette was in chemotherapy, it was really hard for me. Like I say, we both had this long red hair, and hers all fell out. It was like we weren’t the same anymore, and I couldn’t deal with that because we were always identical. I didn’t do it consciously, but I started pulling my hair out, yanking it out strand by strand all day long. That’s called trichotillomania. I would eat my hairs, too. That’s called trichophagia. It got so bad that I finally had to have a ball of hair—they call it a trichobezoar—removed from my stomach. It weighed five pounds . . . same as a bag of sugar.”
“Oh!” was all the woman she was talking to could exclaim, appearing too thrown off center to say more.
“My head ended up looking all bald, like Annette’s, with just patches of stubble. It looks like another planet, with these strange continents. So that’s why I wear this.” Nan gestures to her purple beanie. “Because even though Annette died a year ago, I haven’t been able to stop pulling my hair out and eating it.”
“Ohhh.” The mother of the two girls inside the maze makes a wincing expression. “I have a sister, myself . . . she’s two years younger than me. I can imagine how you must feel.”
Nan nods, face impassive. “It’s hard. Now she’s gone and it’s just me, so it’s not natural.”
The electronic horn blasts and the maybe-Indian woman flinches. The recorded male voice announces the session is over.
Later, when the two young girls have emerged from the maze, they go with the woman to the customer services counter to redeem the tickets they’ve earned. Janet leans toward the mother and says in a conspiratorial tone, “Excuse me, I saw you talking to Nanette. She tells some pretty crazy stories. I saw her pointing to her head. What did she say to you?”
The mother replies, “Oh . . . she was telling me about her twin sister, who died from cancer.”
“And?”
“Well . . . how she’s lost all her own hair, too. From pulling it out.”
Janet chuckles and shakes her head and says, “Nanette has not pulled out all her hair. It’s all tucked up inside her beanie. She has long hair, just like mine.”
*
“It’s good that your kids are in there alone,” says Nan, gazing up at the CCTV monitors above the laser tag computer. Ghostly white figures dart furtively through the maze, with its partitions highlighted in paint that fluoresces under the ultraviolet lights. UFOs and alien planets in Day-Glo paint seem to float in the black void of the walls. She knows that teeth glow in there, too.
“Yeah—they have the place to themselves,” says the mother who stands outside the security tape waiting for the boy and girl who went inside, looking up from the phone she’s been playing with. She just texted her husband to let him know they’ll be home soon. It’s 8:30 and the mall closes at 9:00.
“Well,” Nan says, “what I mean is, a couple times when I was looking at the monitors I saw some strange things in there. One time I let two teenage sisters go in to play, but I saw a third girl in there, too. She didn’t have a vest or a gun . . . she was just kind of creeping around, hiding so the two sisters wouldn’t see her.”
The mother lowers her phone, her face rumpling in confusion. “Really? Was it someone who sneaked in with them?”
“No. I was here, I would have seen. And it wasn’t someone who stayed from the last game . . . I would have known they didn’t come out.”
“Are there other ways in?”
“There’s a fire exit in there, but if it opens it sets off an alarm.”
“So . . . when the game was over, how many people came out?”
“Just the two sisters,” says Nan. “After they left I turned the lights up and went in there looking, but I didn’t find anybody.”
“Oh wow . . . how weird is that? But is it possible you just misinterpreted it?” The mother gestures up at the monitors. “There are, like, multiple camera angles and all. Maybe it was just two angles of the same person
.”
“This person wasn’t wearing a vest like the two sisters,” Nan reminds the woman. “And anyway, I saw her again on another occasion.”
“What? Really?”
“Yeah. One time there was no one playing laser tag and I was just standing around out here, waiting for my shift to end. It was just about this time. And I happened to look up at the monitors and I saw, like, a girl or a young woman just standing there inside, right out in the open. I couldn’t make out her face because, well”—she nods toward the monitors—“you can see that it isn’t easy to make out the details of the people inside. But I could tell she had long hair, down to here.” Nan reaches around to touch the small of her back. “That’s when I realized who it was. It was my twin sister, Annette.”
“Ohhh,” the woman says, and laughs as if with relief. “So she was playing a prank on you both times.”
“No,” Nan says in her monotone. “My sister died a year ago.”
The electronic horn blasts, and the voice announces that the session is finished, but the mother holds Nan’s gaze for several seconds more while the two children work their way to and through the hanging strips. Nan doesn’t blink. She never seems to blink. But then she turns away and helps the girls hang up their vests and she clips the laser guns to the vests’ fronts.
The mother hustles her children away, glancing back at Nan.
At the customer services counter, Janet says to the woman, “Excuse me, I saw you talking to Nanette a few minutes ago. She tells some pretty wild stories, but I think she really believes them. What was she saying?”
“Oh jeez,” the woman replies, speaking in a low voice so her children won’t hear and be frightened, but they’re too busy anyway looking into the glass bins at all the prizes. “She told me she’s seen the ghost of her twin sister inside the laser tag room a couple of times.”
Janet smirks, shakes her head, and says, “Nanette never even had a twin sister.”
*
A husband and wife stand outside the cave-like laser tag entrance, like the family members of trapped miners waiting for some word. Three boys have gone inside: brothers or friends. The couple have been talking, but during a lull in their conversation the man notices Nan is staring at him and when he turns to her she says, “When people go inside I always think I should be like Ariadne and give them a ball of red thread to find their way out again, like she gave to Theseus. You know, in the Greek myth about the maze with the minotaur in it.”
“Oh yeah,” the man says. “The minotaur . . . right. Heh. Well, it’s not that much of a maze in there, is it?”
As if she hasn’t heard him, Nan says, “Every hair on our head could be Ariadne’s thread, you know? Every one of them a thread to another possible path in our life.”
Nan has been twisting a long coppery hair around her finger, in three loops, tightly as if she means to cut off the circulation. She notices the man looking down at this, and she says, “Oh, this isn’t mine. I don’t have any hair left, really, just stubble.” Today the beanie she wears is gray. “This is one of Janet’s hairs.”
“Janet?” the man says, sort of gaping at her. His wife is looking back and forth between him and Nan.
“My coworker at the customer services counter. Can you see her?”
The man looks over that way, but his view is partly blocked by a claw crane game. “Ahh . . .” he says.
“Janet’s always making fun of me. She thinks I don’t know it, but I do. I wouldn’t believe anything she says, if I were you. She thinks something’s wrong with me, but I think there’s something wrong with her .”
She pulls the hair too tightly around her finger, and it snaps, and the horn sounds and the recorded male voice says that the game is over.
The three boys emerge. Nan wants to ask them if they saw anyone else with them inside the labyrinth—a young woman with long red hair—but she always resists this urge. The brothers or friends wear different clothing and different haircuts and aren’t even the same height, but she thinks of them as a kind of trebled image, one boy shimmering unfocused into multiple parts.
She watches unblinkingly as the boys lead the parents toward the customer services counter. As she does this, Nan walks slowly backward into the murk of the laser tag antechamber, where the red and blue lights on the hanging vests glow like the lights of police cars lined up alongside the scene of some terrible accident. A moment later, and a person looking toward the laser tag game now would not even see her.
At the customer services counter, the three boys hunch down to contemplate their choice of prizes from the glass showcases. No decision they will ever make in their future lives will be any less or more important, on up to the day when they preselect their coffins. Wood or steel? Tiny plastic dinosaur or miniature packet of sour candy? But no one appears to be attending this station. “Hello?” says the mother, thinking someone might be blocked by the central display of large gifts no one ever wins.
Up from behind the counter, a young woman rises into view, startling the mother a bit. Perhaps she was down there restocking one of the prize bins. The attendant’s name tag reads Janet .
“May I help you?” she asks.
“Oh, sorry . . . didn’t see you. The kids are still looking.”
“No rush. It’s still half an hour to closing time.”
“Thanks.” The mother hesitates, glances at her husband, then takes a step closer to the counter and says in a hushed voice, “Um, I hate to say it, but that girl at the laser tag game is really something, huh?” She remembers her name, from her name tag, and says it. “Nanette?”
The customer services attendant is not particularly pretty but she’s young. She doesn’t wear glasses, and she has a black dot of a mole in the exact center of her collarbone, and a curtain of coppery red hair that falls almost to her bottom. With eyes oddly unblinking, she smiles and wags her head and replies, “I’m sorry, I’m not sure who you’re talking about. There is no Nanette.”
The Toll
The car ahead of Nate’s was taking so long at the toll booth, as its driver probably searched in the seat console or dug in his or her pants for change, that he ejected one CD and fed in another. He traded the best of Todd Rundgren for the best of Bread. It was the kind of music he wouldn’t dare play on his computer at work for fear of teasing from his younger coworkers, but it was the sweet melancholy stuff of his teenage years, which he had spent in one unbroken yearning mope for love and sex in their delirious and incomprehensible tangle . . . not yet knowing where emotions and lust intersected or parted ways. He knew now, only too well. Both had parted ways a long time ago and departed altogether shortly after that, with his divorce.
As the first music track started, he glanced up again through his windshield at the car ahead, positioned in front of the toll booth’s window. The red glow of its brake lights reflected on clouds of exhaust, which billowed and swirled in the frigid night air. It was almost two in the morning, and Nate was returning to Massachusetts from the Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, feeling dazed from too little sleep, too much Maker’s Mark, and losing five hundred dollars. Setting out Friday evening after work, he’d told himself he’d go easy on the drink and cards. Well, he always told himself that, didn’t he?
Things had started to look interesting tonight when an attractive Vietnamese woman in her thirties who was also playing poker began flirting with him, but she was sliding down a precarious losing streak, and when she whispered that she’d sleep with him in the casino’s hotel if he gave her a thousand dollars to continue playing, he’d withdrawn from her—crestfallen, though he should have known better.
This was getting ridiculous. Unless he’d missed it while changing CDs, he hadn’t even seen the car ahead of him roll down its window for the driver to give the toll booth attendant his or her ticket. Through the churning crimson-glowing fog—which seemed to fill the air, almost obscuring the black lines of trees that hemmed in the narrow toll plaza—Nate couldn’t make out the driver
aside from a black blurred head, and he couldn’t discern the toll booth attendant at all. Was there even anyone in there? Could that be why the driver was hesitating, uncertain? Where did toll booth attendants go, he wondered idly, when they needed to pee? Into the dark trees at the side of the road?
Nate glanced into his rearview mirror, imagining that the people behind him must be getting impatient, too. He saw that there was only one other car queued up behind him, but again he couldn’t make out the person inside because of the way his own brake lights saturated his car’s exhaust with more scarlet light.
The song “Make It with You” was cut off abruptly, in mid-wistful croon, and loud static took its place. Startled, Nate said, “Now what?” He ejected the CD, reinserted it, but it wouldn’t play. Had the radio, by some quirk, come on instead? No—he checked . . . he had his system set to CD function. He ejected the Bread CD, fed in the Todd Rundgren again. The static hissed and crackled on. Great—something with the sound system. After losing five hundred tonight, that was all he needed. He stabbed his finger into the power button and the static was gone. He let out a heavy sigh, raising his gaze to the windshield once more.
The longer the three cars idled, and the more exhaust rose up around them, the more intense grew the red glow until it seemed that soon it was all Nate would see . . . like being at the bottom of an ocean of luminous blood.
Yet then Nate spotted something moving through the red fog, coming in from the right side of the exit ramp, crossing from the vacant E-ZPass lane into this lane. The thick red mist made it ill-defined, but Nate took it to be a large deer: dark and thin, with stick-like legs. Its movements, though—somehow strangely jerky and gracefully fluid at the same time—for some reason put him in mind of an immense daddy longlegs. And then Nate realized that this creature was bipedal, striding on just two strangely bent legs. It was hunched forward over two similarly long, thin, oddly bent forelimbs. Its elongated head, which he had first taken for a deer’s snout, actually appeared to be tapered to a bony point.
Haunted Worlds Page 8
