The House by the Cemetery

by John Everson

  Lucio’s makeup this week was that of one of Fulci’s zombie creations, and featured an eyeball hanging down his face. He’d flipped from wearing the murderous crone mask when one of the other haunters had developed a rash from the zombie makeup. The hanging eyeball was a particularly gruesome bit of makeup that Jeanie wished she had done. But June had designed it.

  Outside the door, they heard steps moving quickly in the hall. “You better walk,” he said.

  She nodded, and exited the room, just as a new group rounded the corner of the hall. She held her arms out to them, and a girl with blond hair laughed and shook her head upon seeing Jeanie’s guts. “That’s so gross,” she said. But her friends dragged her into the room Jeanie had just left, and within a few seconds she heard a scream.

  Jeanie smiled.

  “Ninety-eight,” she murmured, and walked toward the stairs to the attic. She wanted to check out how Bong and June were doing.

  The eerie keyboard-driven music of a band – that Argento had once impatiently explained to her was called Goblin – jittered and added to the creepy atmosphere as she walked up the stairs. She abandoned her shambling gait to reach the top floor before a new group caught up to her from behind.

  She slowed for a moment though, as she saw a lone girl with blue hair walking up the stairs ahead of her. Jeanie stopped on the stair and waited. Someone upstairs yelled, “What the fuck,” and Jeanie grinned. Probably the blue-haired girl meeting up with the old crone mask…and the sickle. A guy named Ben was playing that part tonight, and he loved to wave his weapon.

  Jeanie counted to thirty, and then walked up the rest of the stairs. The blue-haired girl should be through the costume aisle and past the old hag slasher and in Bong and June’s room by now. Another few seconds and she’d be on her way back down the stairs to head toward the basement.

  When she stepped onto the floor of the attic, the room appeared empty; she headed toward the costume racks. She waved off Ben and walked down the clothes aisle and into the room that Bong was haunting. But when she stepped inside, neither of them were to be seen.

  “Bong?” she called.

  There was a creak on the other side of the room.

  A second later, the black hair and white face of Bong emerged from the space behind a large old projection television set. Someone had donated it from their basement since it didn’t work well anyway, and it was a great prop for an ‘Asian ghost’ to hide behind, since it brought back thoughts of The Ring. They ran a loop of TV static on it to help set the mood.

  “Hey,” Bong said. He pursed his lips like she’d taught him to spread his black lipstick better. “I was just talking to June. It’s been a while since anyone came through…is someone behind you?”

  Jeanie frowned. “Didn’t a girl with blue hair just go through here?”

  Bong shook his head. “I don’t think that was the last one.”

  June walked out from behind the TV then, and pulled down the hem of her white, bloodstained dress. Her milky eye was creepy even to Jeanie, who knew it was just a contact.

  “Do either of you need a break?” Jeanie asked.

  June shook her head and looked at Bong. “I think we’re both okay right now.”

  He nodded quickly. “Yeah. You’d better head down before the next group gets here.”

  “No worries,” Jeanie said. “I won’t blow your scare!” She stepped up to Bong and pecked his lips lightly. He instantly rubbed his finger over his lips to smooth out the black. Jeanie frowned before walking to the back stairwell beyond them. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

  “Cool,” Bong said. “We’ll be here.”

  As Jeanie walked down the back stairwell, she had a cold feeling in her stomach that had nothing to do with scares and haunting. She couldn’t help but feel as if she’d just been pushed out of the attic room.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Emery stood next to the blue-haired girl in the basement. She held the docile girl’s arm out over the coffin on the back wall, and massaged the biceps until ribbons of red dripped out of the cut she’d made and onto the bones below.

  The house had been closed for a half an hour now, and Mike had turned off all of the upstairs lights before descending into the basement. When he arrived, he found Katie and Emery whispering strange words together as Katie walked round and round the punk girl, who stared off into some space that nobody else could see.

  It was eerie to see, but also something he was used to by now. He’d helped Emery for the past two weeks to pick off lone victims toward the end of each haunted house night. The women somehow quieted and calmed their ‘bleeders’ and kept them hidden away in the secret room until the house was closed. Then they bled them in the basement over the casket, before bandaging them up and sending them back out in a confused and disoriented state to the world. Mike had helped drive a couple of them down the road to the parking lot of a strip mall, when the victims lacked any car keys. If the lot was empty when they took the bleeder out of the house, they knew that they’d picked on someone who’d been dropped off or had come with others, even if he or she had been walking the house solo.

  He stood back and waited until whatever magic the two were spinning was spun; he’d learned quickly to stay out of their way when they bled their victims.

  Emery slid her knife across the girl’s arm in another spot, an inch or so away from the first cut, and fresh blood surfaced on the white skin of her lower biceps instantly. They cut every victim in a slightly different place. Katie smiled and nodded, and the two began a chant once again.

  Mike pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, and skimmed his email. It was hard to believe, but after watching this strange ritual night after night, he no longer was fascinated or repelled by it. This was just what Katie and Emery did…and he would be there at the end, ready to help take their ‘bleeders’ outside to safety, so that they weren’t missed. His biggest fear was that sooner or later one of them would remember how and where he or she was cut…and the whole thing would be blown before Katie’s resurrection was complete. But Katie assured him that none of the victims remembered a thing. He had to believe her, since so far not a single one had come back to the house with the police in tow the next day.

  He looked up from his email, which was empty other than spam from banks that he didn’t hold accounts at, and coupons from White Castle and TGI Fridays.

  What if this was all just bullshit? he wondered. What if, after a month of cutting people, Katie remained a ghost, a phantasm who slipped through his fingers when he went to hug her?

  The thought made his stomach churn. Since the night that he’d discovered Katie and Emery’s ritual, Katie had remained noncorporeal to him. Emery had kept the locket from him, and Katie used it as a bit of sexual blackmail. “I need you to help Emery make me whole,” she’d said, when he asked for the necklace back. “I want you to remember that I can’t really touch you until we’re done with all of this. So, for now, Emery is going to keep the necklace.”

  He’d not been happy. Every night, he asked the same question: “Can we be together tonight, please?”

  Katie only looked at him with wide, sad brown eyes and whispered, “Soon.”

  Having sex with her again was bait – so he would keep bringing her people to bleed. Mike thought about it a lot at home, in his bed at night. But every time he questioned himself, he came to the same conclusion. She was worth it.

  But now, as Emery moved the girl away from the coffin, and beckoned him over to help her bandage the wound, Mike found himself doubting again.

  “Is all of this really doing anything?” he said, as he held the gauze in place and Emery taped it down.

  Katie’s eyebrows creased, and her ethereal fingers stroked his forehead. He couldn’t really feel her, but there was still some connection, some spark that his skin felt as she brushed her spirit over him.

  “Y
ou still don’t believe me?” Katie whispered. Her voice sounded girlish. And hurt.

  Mike licked his lips and clenched his fists before he answered. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing. He didn’t want the necklace to be withheld forever. “I believe you,” he said. “But I just worry if something doesn’t go right….”

  Katie smiled. “Everything is going fine,” she said. “Come here and see for yourself.”

  She motioned him closer to the coffin, as Emery led the punk girl away.

  “Look at me,” Katie said.

  “I am,” he said.

  She shook her head and pointed into the open coffin. “No, look at me,” she insisted. He leaned over to peer inside the wooden box.

  “Do those look like the bones you brought here?” she asked.

  As Mike peered into the cavity, he gasped.

  He’d expected to see white bones stained in blood, because they’d been drenching the coffin in it every night.

  He hadn’t expected to see bones with sheathes of…meat covering them. In fact, there was so much pink in the coffin now, he could barely see the shards of white where Katie’s skeleton had once lain dry and white. The bones of her feet and hands still were clearly naked in the box, but even those had a spiderweb haze of something starting to grow on them.

  “It’s actually working,” he whispered.

  “You doubted me?” Katie asked.

  Mike shrugged. “I didn’t know what to think. It all seems so unlikely.”

  Katie smiled, sort of, but her lips stretched thin. “You have to learn to trust me,” she said. “Relationships are built on trust, right?”

  He nodded, and the words hit him. He had a relationship. Sure, it was with a ghost but…he hadn’t had a relationship with a woman since his wife had left him. And arguably, he hadn’t really had one with her for months, or maybe years, before that life-decimating event.

  Mike found himself smiling for the next fifteen minutes as he walked the blue-haired girl to the lone remaining car in the parking lot, fished out her keys from her purse, and then drove her a few blocks down the turnpike before putting the car in park, and moving her over to the driver’s seat. He knew from past experience that by the time he locked up the last rooms of the house and drove past here himself, the girl would have woken up, and the car would be gone.

  When he walked back into the haunted house, it was silent. Emery and Katie had disappeared. But it was late and Mike knew that he’d see them again tomorrow. And that was one day closer to the day when he could hold Katie in his arms again and actually feel her. He felt better about that day coming than he had before. Because…they had a relationship, right?

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Jeanie wondered if she really had a relationship. Over the past couple weeks, Bong had grown increasingly quiet. Admittedly he was always quiet; it was just his nature. But the past couple nights, he hadn’t even come inside with her when he’d dropped her off after the house had closed.

  “I’m really tired and tomorrow is going to be a long day,” he’d said last night. He’d planted a kiss on her cheek and sat back, waiting for her to get out of the car. As she did, she’d seen his phone light up with a notification. “Who’s texting you?” she wanted to ask. But she didn’t dare. It probably wasn’t even a text, just a Facebook notice or something.

  The problem was, she’d wanted to ask.

  She had never felt like that before with Bong. And that sucked. She wasn’t really sure what had changed. She knew he’d never wanted to do the haunted house, and had agreed to do it for her. So, he had been a little grumpy for the past month or more. But she figured that would pass and he’d have fun with it, the same as she did.

  But instead, he’d just grown quieter.

  And then last night, when she’d seen him talking animatedly to June, when he’d not said more than a few sentences to her all day, well…that’s when her heart suddenly screamed a warning klaxon. Was he just unhappy with her, or was he getting happy with June?

  Fuck.

  June was her ‘boss’, and she seemed really cool. She knew more about monster makeup than Jeanie had ever dreamed of knowing. Jeanie had already learned a ton from her.

  So she didn’t want to think that June was making time with Bong. She wouldn’t do that, right?

  Jeanie walked back into her kitchen and pulled a Milky Way bar from the cabinet. She always craved chocolate when she got upset. She ripped the paper wrapper off and bit down hard.

  When Bong rang the doorbell a few minutes later, the candy bar was gone and Jeanie sat on the couch in a worse funk than before.

  “Ready to go?” he asked through the screen door.

  She didn’t answer, just stood and grabbed her purse.

  “How was your day?” she asked once they were on the road.

  Bong shrugged. “Same as ever. Wish it was Friday night.”

  “Me too,” she said. “Maybe you can stay over this weekend.”

  “Maybe,” he said, staring straight ahead.

  Her belly felt a pang of ice, and she said nothing else for the rest of the ride.

  * * *

  “Okay, it may be hump day, but I don’t want to see any humping going on in these halls tonight,” Lon said. He was giving their nightly pep talk in the Nightmare on Elm Street room. “I want to see people too creeped out to kiss,” he said. “So, let’s get our game on and keep the blood flowing fast. Less than two more weeks to Halloween, you know that?”

  Lon pulled his phone out of his front jeans pocket and thumbed it on. He hit the touch screen a couple times and then held the phone in the air for everyone to see. Not that anyone really could.

  “Last week, you know that Lucio took home the scream prize. So far Lucio is poking out Argento’s eye this week. He’s already ahead 77 to 49 on the scream-o-meter. Maybe people just aren’t a-scared of black-gloved, leather-masked killers these days. But they still do love their zombies. At least, that’s what these two are reporting. Maybe neither one of them is getting the scream on, I don’t know.”

  “Hey, hey, hey!” a voice called out of the crowd. It was Lucio, wearing his trademark Zombi 2 shirt, with maggots crawling out of a decaying face’s eyeball.

  “I have earned every one of those screams. And you can audit me if you want. Maybe you’ll scream too while you’re at it.”

  “Somehow, I doubt that,” Lon said with a grin. “All right, the point is, let’s give ’em our best tonight and make ’em wanna come back and do it again. And good luck catching up tonight, Argento. Creeps dismissed!”

  “See you later,” Bong said, and reached down to fondle her fake intestines. “Maybe suck it in?”

  “Ha ha,” she said, and grinned in spite of herself. That was more like Bong.

  But then she watched him walk through the crowd to catch up with June. And she saw June’s face light up with a smile before the two of them exited the makeup room to head upstairs to their spots.

  All of a sudden, her stomach felt like her guts were all twisted up again. The weird thing about it was…if she looked down at her waist, they were.

  Jeanie realized suddenly that this wasn’t fun anymore.

  And that sucked.

  * * *

  “How are your knees?” June asked.

  Bong shrugged. “Dreaming of the day after Halloween,” he said.

  She snorted. “Not enjoying your nights as a Korean ghost?”

  “I think I’m supposed to be Japanese,” he said. “But what difference does it make? I mean, jet black hair, slanty eyes, we’re all the same, right?”

  “You don’t think Jeanie knows the difference?” June asked. “C’mon, I don’t think she’s that clueless. She really likes you.”

  “All she thinks about is this place,” Bong said. “That’s what she cares about.”

 
June shook her head. It was a little disconcerting to see the bloody gash in her neck twist in the flickering red light. “She’s living a dream right now,” June said. “But in a couple weeks, she’ll be all yours again.”

  Lon’s voice echoed up the stairs. “Get your spook on!”

  June gripped Bong’s arm and leaned in close to him. Close enough that he could smell the faint flower scent of her deodorant. “Of course, in a couple weeks, you may be in a wheelchair,” she laughed.

  “You’re evil,” he said with a grin. “Now go…slit yourself.”

  * * *

  Argento adjusted the black leather hood over his head. Damn thing was hotter than hell, and the sweat dripped around his ears and down his cheeks. But no matter how uncomfortable the getup was, he was bound and determined to get ahead on the count tonight. Truth be told, he wasn’t aggressive enough on the floor. He knew it. He loved decorating the rooms and setting the lights and coming up with the ‘look’. Because every ‘look’ was really a homage to his favorite movies and director. But when it came to playing a part…he was, by nature, too shy. And shy monsters didn’t scare people.

  Lucio wasn’t that much more outgoing than he was, but he had more disgusting makeup. That trumped a ‘quiet killer’ every time.

  “Not tonight,” Argento whispered. He walked to the back of the room and reached behind the set tapestry to turn up the Goblin soundtrack to Suspiria two more notches. Music helped set the mood.

  So he’d let the masters talk for him. He just needed to act the part more.

  He just needed to be more menacing with the (fake) knife.

  The first footsteps sounded in the hallway outside, and he held out the knife and assumed the position.

  Tonight, he was going to freak people out.

  Or he’d sever his own neck on a broken window.

  * * *

  Tonight’s bleeder, according to Emery, was a forty-something guy with a long ponytail and a Dio t-shirt with ripped sleeves.

  Mike wasn’t real happy when he saw the guy stomping up the stairs. Emery had done her usual quiet appearance behind him and pointed at the stairs. Meaning, corral the next person who came up here. But railroading a big dude was way different than scaring a thin girl into the hole in the floor where Emery waited. Hell, how did Emery even think she was going to carry this guy down her secret ladder?