I pulled out my phone as we walked, then the business card which I’d stuffed hastily into my hip pocket. Unfolding the crumpled wad of paper, I stopped under a street light so that I could make out the ten digit number written there, and punched it into the phone.
“Mr. Chill,” came the all-too-familiar silky-smooth response at the other end. He couldn’t have been more of a Bond villain if he’d said, I’ve been expecting you. Instead, Falconer simply waited. Okay, I thought, I’ll bite.
“How did you know it was me?”
“Let’s just say that I had an instinct you would be calling.” His laugh hadn’t even a trace of humor in it. It was almost as if an alien had come down to Earth for the first ever time and tried to mimic a real laugh after seeing humans doing it for real, but without having the slightest idea why.
“Then I guess your instinct was correct.”
“They usually are.” Let’s add humility to the list of personality treats that Mr. Chuckles here doesn’t have a clue about. “Be that as it may, Mr. Chill, I am sure that you did not call me to discuss my instincts. How may I be of service?”
By sticking your butt in the oven until it glows so red that everybody starts calling you ‘that baboon dude.’
“That volunteer job,” I said instead, “is the offer still open?”
“But of course. We are always in search of fresh meat for the Snare, Mr. Chill.”
Yeah, I’ll bet you are.
“Then count me in. When do I start?”
Becky threw me a look that was part gratitude, part concern.
“Well, there’s no time like the present,” Falconer said, his tone flat and emotionless. “Did you perchance catch up with your friend…Rebecca, wasn’t it?”
I couldn’t believe he’d actually used the word perchance in a real conversation. I mean, think about it for a second — have you ever heard somebody talk like that who wasn’t on Masterpiece Theatre?
“Yes it was, and yes I did.”
“Excellent!” Now he sounded slightly more enthused. “Tell me, is she with you now.”
“Yes she is.”
“Please be so kind as to inform her that she is assigned to Doctor Stinson for the night. You also may assist the good doctor, Daniel. That way, you may stay within close reach of your…friend.”
I didn’t like the way he said friend, probably because I could actually hear him smirking through the phone. Becky grabbed me by the arm and pulled me towards her. Looking up, I saw that she’d stopped me from walking straight into a gaggle of trick-or-treaters that were coming from the opposite direction.
Friend. I knew damn well what Falconer was implying. More to the point, I knew damn well that he knew that I knew. It had been a verbal jab. Well, it wasn’t going to rattle me. All he’d achieve was to reinforce my idea that he was a complete and utter jerk.
“Great,” I practically grunted. “Thanks.”
“Oh, please don’t even dream of mentioning it. Farewell.”
The call dropped. Falconer must have hung up.
Dream. That was an interesting choice of word…could be perfectly innocent, I thought as we turned right into the parking lot of the Snare; but then again, it could also mean that he knew something about my dream last night.
Was Falconer the Dark Man? It was an idea that had been going round and round in my head ever since I’d first set eyes on him earlier that afternoon.
On the one hand, there were a lot of similarities: the Dark Man was creepy as all hell (check) sounded kinda British (check) and had a tall, thin build (check again); but on the other, the Dark Man was a spirit. I’d seen him appear out of nowhere on the sidewalk in Boulder. He was surrounded with an aura just like the spirits of the dead always were. Some spirits could manifest themselves physically — in fact, most of them could if circumstances were extreme enough or whenever they really, really wanted to — but I could still tell that they weren’t living, breathing people. Falconer seemed different somehow. Leaving aside the fact that Mom and I had both touched him physically, he just didn’t give off that ‘dead vibe’ to me.
Yes, there was something weird about him, but I really didn’t think he was a spirit entity pretending to be a flesh and blood person.
Something else was going on. I wasn’t sure what, but I did know one thing: it was something dangerous.
“This is where we leave our stuff.”
Other than my cell phone and a few bucks, I didn’t have any stuff to leave. Becky and I were standing in the ‘green room,’ which was basically a chill-out lounge for the small army of volunteers that kept the Snare of Souls running. We’d come in by way of a side entrance and taken the first right turn into this room, which was pretty big; maybe thirty chairs and a little kitchenette with a microwave, plus a couple of restrooms. A muted TV was bolted high up on the wall, soundlessly running tonight’s 9-News broadcast, and a soda machine offering Coke products.
Right now, most of the chairs were full of monsters. As I looked around, I had to admit that the makeup crew here was pretty freaking good. Three teenage zombies that were as good as anything you ever saw on The Walking Dead lounged on a battered old couch, talking with a dude who had a latex werewolf mask resting on his knees. Brown fur was sticking out from each sleeve of his tartan lumberjack shirt. He didn’t look nearly as realistic as the zombies, but that was under the bright strip lights of the green room; if he caught you in one of the dark corridors of this old hospital, you’d probably brown your shorts if you weren’t careful.
There was a real medical theme going on: not surprising really, considering what this place had used to be. Lots of doctors, nurses, surgeons, and patients in blood-splattered gowns.
It’s all pretend, I had to remind myself. I’d need to be careful; if I let my mental guard down, I might start having flashbacks from Long Brook.
Becky must have read my mind. “The last time we saw anything like this,” she whispered playfully in my ear, “it was way, way less fun!”
“True dat!” I couldn’t help but laugh. I felt some of the tension dissipate, and we both smiled at one another.
A row of dented old school lockers ran along the back wall. Becky went over to one with a combination lock and spun it expertly back and forth until it popped. Inside was a Safeway bag full of clothes. “The guys with the more elaborate outfits have to keep them locked up in costume storage,” she explained, indicating the zombies and wolf-man with a sideways nod of her head. “Mine’s cheap and simple enough that I can just leave it in here. Gotta go change. Wait here, ‘kay? I’ll be right back.”
Then she was gone, leaving me standing there and feeling just a little out of place. I’m socially awkward at the best of times, and with all this crap about the Dark Man on my mind, this wasn’t exactly the best of times.
“Hey.”
I turned around. The girl couldn’t have been older than twelve, thirteen tops, and she was short along with it, which made her look closer to ten or eleven. She was wearing a nurse outfit, complete with one of those little hats that nurses used to wear sitting on top of her dark brown hair; the costume was torn and ripped in places, and covered in bloodstains and random bits of latex flex.Her skin was deathly pale, and a network of blue veins had been painted on top. The net effect was already pretty freaky, but a pair of yellow contact lenses were the cherry on top.
“Uh, hey,” I said back. Those yellow eyes looked at me impassively. “My name’s Danny,” I said at last, hoping to break the ice. I stuck out a hand politely.
“I’m Rhiannon.” She took my hand and shook it solemnly, smearing my palm with dry blood flakes in the process. She cocked her head to one side and looked at me for a while. “Are you new?” she asked finally.
I nodded. “It’s my first night. I’m a friend of Becky’s.”
Rhiannon smiled. Somehow, maybe because of the yellow contacts, her face looked even creepier than it had before. The black stains painted onto her teeth might just have had something to
do with it as well. “Becky’s cool. We like her.”
Returning her smile, I asked Rhiannon what part of the Snare she worked in.
“I work the front line, mostly,” she said, bouncing enthusiastically on the soles of her feet a few times and clapping her hands together in sheer joy. “My job is to pick out the customers for the…special treatment.”
Her answer couldn’t have sounded more sinister if Rhiannon had said that her job was to take people out back, cut their throats, and dice them up into little tiny pieces. Falconer had answered that for Mom already during our tour, but the question was just daring itself to be asked though, and I didn’t want to disappoint an eager little girl, so I went ahead and did it. “Alright, I’ll bite. What’s the special treatment?”
“Oh, you know,” she said, suddenly coy. “We — me and some of the other nurses — walk the entrance line. People have already paid to come inside. Then they have to line up to get in. The Snare is pretty busy, so it can take twenty or thirty minutes to get from the registers to the starting point.”
I nodded. That made total sense. Mom and I had come in through the main entrance this afternoon. The lanes that customers queued up in were made from stained and scuffed metal IV poles that looked old enough to have been original hospital equipment, strung up with plastic IV tubing to act as ghetto handrails. There were enough switchbacks in the lanes that it could easily take half an hour to get from the front doors to the interior if they were full.
“Who do you pick out?” I wanted to know. I fed three quarters into the soda machine and thumbed the button for Diet Coke — not that I needed to lose weight, but I just prefer the taste of it to the regular stuff. After a rattle and groan, a can thumped into the metal tray. It was ice cold.
“It depends. Troublemakers for sure.” She flashed me a knowing smirk. “For whatever reason, a lot of guys like to throw their girlfriends under the bus. Don’t ask me why, but it happens a lot. They see us walking the line, looking for the next victim to pull out, and they’ll use the girl they’re with as human shields. They’ll hide behind ‘em, or take a few steps backwards and start pointing them out to us. Guess they think it’s funny.” Rhiannon’s grin broadened. “We always make a beeline for those guys. Every time. Suddenly they don’t think it’s so funny any more.”
“I’ll bet.” I laughed, picturing some big beefy dude being hauled out of the line by a bunch of teenage girls. “Karma’s never been so fast. What happens then?”
“That depends too. Some of ‘em, we just stick in the closet. It’s dark in there and smells like somebody peed. Actually, sometimes the big guys do pee themselves in there. We like that.”
“You do?”
“Oh,yes. Mr. Falconer pays out a cash bonus for any of the volunteers that can make a customer pee or poop their pants.”
“I’ve heard about that. Fifty dollars, right?”
“Yes sir. Fifty dollars.” Rhiannon agreed.
I asked her if she’d ever won herself, and she nodded enthusiastically. “A couple times now. Last Halloween, I made a big fat drunk guy wet himself. We were pounding on that door so hard, the lock broke. I got a pretty sweet pair of shoes out of it.”
“So that’s the special treatment? Being shut in a closet with nurses hammering on door?” I smiled. “Doesn’t sound so bad.”
Rhiannon suddenly turned serious. “Oh, it ain’t just that.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “See, the closet’s haunted.”
“Haunted?” I tried not to spray soda all over her in disbelief. “I’ve never heard of a haunted closet before.”
She nodded gravely. “Well, this one totally is. Everybody here knows about it, but they don’t like to talk about it much.”
“Haunted how?”
“A lot of people freak out in there for no real reason,” Rhiannon explained quietly. “Sometimes it happens to the cleaners, even one of the volunteers here. But usually it’s the customers. When we let ‘em out, they’re scared out of their minds…talking about being touched in the dark, when we know there’s nobody else in there but them.”
“It’s supposed to be a haunted house though,” I countered, enjoying the role of devil’s advocate. “Maybe their imagination is just playing tricks—”
“No way,” she cut me off. “This place really is haunted. We all know it. Usually the ghosts just mind their own business…well, some of ‘em do like to come out and play when we run the Snare at night, but we don’t mess with them and they don’t mess with us.”
“Sounds like a pretty good deal all round.”
Rhiannon fixed me with those creepy yellow eyes. She didn’t blink much, I noticed. “You don’t believe me,” she accused.
“Sure I do.” I held up my hands, trying not to offend her. “If you say this place is haunted then hey, this place is haunted.”
“Well, I do say,” she pouted, then went on to warn me: “If you meet one of the ghosts, most of them are friendly. Just be nice to them and they’ll probably be nice to you.”
“Most? Are there some not-so-nice ones?”
“Some,” Rhiannon nodded soberly. “But they keep themselves to themselves, as my Daddy likes to say. You just stay away from them, and you’ll be fine.”
“That’s good to know.” I took another sip of my soda, wondering just where Becky had got to. “Do you know where they are? Just so I can stay out of their way.”
“Uh huh. They’re mostly in the mirror maze. You gotta be brave or a real idiot to want to go in there.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
With a cheery wave, Rhiannon was gone in a flash. She left me a lot to chew on though. There it was again: the mirror maze. The more I heard about it, the less I liked it:I hadn’t even physically set eyes on the place yet, but I just knew that if I did — or, let’s face it, when I did — that it would turn out to be just like the maze in my nightmares. As my favorite Corellian smuggler would have said, I had a bad feeling about this…
Becky came back maybe five minutes later. I did a double-take, not recognizing her at first. She wasn’t the beautiful girl of my dreams any more; now she was more of a creature of nightmare, like something Clive Barker would have dreamed up. Her long dark hair stuck up at crazy angles like Albert Einstein’s, as though she’d been struck by lightning or stuck a wet finger in a power outlet. She was wearing pale blue surgical scrubs, the type you saw people wearing in hospitals and clinics pretty much everywhere; the scrubs were matted and covered in freshly-applied blood that was already drying fast, and the piece de resistance was a pair of bright red bloody handprints on the front of her chest, just below her collarbones; it looked as though somebody desperate had grabbed her. I had to admit it was a pretty cool effect.
The makeup artists had painted her skin the same color of pale white as Rhiannon’s had been, but instead of putting on veins they had gone with three latex slash marks like bloody animal claws, running from the side of her right eye down past her cheekbone to the jawline. The latex was still dripping fake blood. These guys were really good.
“Hey, no contacts?” I used my fingers to pinch open one of my eyes. Becky grimaced.
“Oh, hell no. Can’t stand the thought of anything being contact with my eyeball.”
“But they’re such nice eyeballs!”
“Freak!”
We both laughed.
“Okay, I guess maybe it’s time to see how brave you are.” Becky said with a smile.
“What do you mean?”
“Here.” She handed me a plastic bag. I took it by the handles and looked inside. There was another set of scrubs in there, their green cotton rumpled and blood-stained. “They should be about your size. Go change and then we’ll take you to makeup.”
I shrugged. Maybe this was going to be a fun night after all, despite the danger. I waited until the restroom was free, then went in and changed. My own clothes went in the bag, except for my sneakers, which went well with the green scrubs. They fit pretty good, just a little short i
n the ankle — not that anybody was going to notice that in the dark: they’d be too busy screaming and freaking out, if we were doing our jobs right.
Becky led me out into the corridor, and we joined the line for makeup. While we waited, I sent Mom a text to tell her I’d be working with Becky at the Snare tonight. I got a quick smiley-face back and a simple don’t mess up to remind me of why we had driven all this way from Boulder. Yeah, if only she knew…
I’ve seen a lot of scary movies in my time, and let me tell you, the small gang of stressed-out folks doing makeup at the Snare could give any big-budget Hollywood special effects crew a run for their money any day of the week. Their room was about the same size as the Green Room, but it smelled a lot more like paint and latex. The line of kids waiting to perform their roles in the haunt snaked down the length of the hallway and out towards the parking lot. After about ten minutes of patient waiting and chatting (Becky was keeping me company) I passed through a set of doors with a sign posted that said Makeup: Line Jumpers Will Be Fed To The Balrog. Huh, I thought with approval, somebody’s a Tolkien fan.
The guys doing makeup were super-focused and intense, running each visitor through like they were parts on an assembly line. How they managed to stay cheerful after working on so many people, I have no idea; but everybody got a “how are you doing?” or a “how did last night go?” along with their newly-paled skin makeup, gross wounds, and last but not least, the blood spray.
“Stand right there,” said the last makeup artist in line. He was about my age, maybe a little older, and dressed like a priest…except that this priest was rocking a set of gleaming vampire fangs. I shuffled over onto the tarp that was laid out on the tiles next to his table, which was cluttered with pots of paint and all kinds of brushes and little plastic tubes. He reached for a squirt bottle full of what looked like red wine. “That’s it. Now put your arms out. Awesome. Close your eyes.” I obeyed. The next thing I new, a sticky cold mist was raining down on me, slapping me in the face. Fake blood dripping from my chin and ran down my neck and chest, soaking into the fabric of the scrubs and adding to what was already there.
Last Halloween (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 2) Page 11
