I slammed my fist against the truck door as the segment ended.
“Hey!” Landon switched off the radio. “Take it easy!”
“‘By all rights’? I own the place. And ‘money grab’ is a complete joke. Money pit is more like it.”
“You do know Motebarkle has been begging the city council for money to expand the historical museum for years? It gets under his skin that the city is supporting your plans for the house.”
“It’s not like they’ve approved a grant yet. They’re giving us some nice PR and fast permitting, maybe.”
“Believe me, that’s huge,” Landon said. “Don’t let it get to you. Your plan will respect the history of the house and will allow controlled public access. You could even have an open house once in a while, maybe in conjunction with the historical society.”
“The last thing I want to do is work with that guy! And what if the city decides to shut us down after that little diatribe?”
“Don’t worry about it. They’ve clearly demonstrated their support for you. Give the haters a little time to appreciate what you’re doing. One thing you learn in construction is patience.”
“At this point, I’m more worried about Motebarkle tanking my ticket sales.”
Landon flashed me a brief Fireworks smile. “Wait and see.”
He pulled into the drive of Milkweed Mansion and parked among the other cars under the trees. We were working with a nearby office building to offer event parking and a shuttle once we opened Friday, but these were all our friends. I was nervous and excited to see what they’d wrought.
Darkness was just settling in, and the gauzy creature atop the tree stump, the huge skeletal wraith, was shifting in the breeze, looming over us as we walked up to the porch.
“Damn if that thing doesn’t look alive,” I said.
“Maybe you should leave it there after the haunted house.”
“Ha. Oh, look. It’s Jace. I think.”
An elegant vampire awaited us on the front porch. Damn. Lean, tall, dark-haired and impossibly handsome, Jace in vampire garb was enough to make me want to offer up my neck for immortality. Penelope had won the boyfriend lottery with this one.
“Welcome, my friends. Would you care for a drink before you go in?” He offered us a metal goblet that looked like it was brimming with blood.
“Um, yuck?” I said.
“I’ll try it,” Landon said, and I stared open-mouthed as he drank from the goblet. “Mmm, cranberry juice.”
“Are you going to do that at showtime?” I asked Jace.
He grinned. “We’ll have disposable cups, but I wanted you to get the best impression.” Then he stood taller, sweeping his cape over his shoulder, and assumed his character with a sultry voice. “I understand the Realtor sent you. In the market for a haunted house?”
I laughed. “Absolutely.”
“Then come right this way.”
The chandelier in the foyer was dimly lit and complemented by undulating colored lights. My own anticipation worked against me here. Nothing chased us, but the general decay of the space increased my sense of dread, especially with the weird sounds coming from the rest of the house — pounding music. Moans?
I glanced at Landon, whose eyebrows were raised at the ambience.
“Perhaps you’d like to see the parlor,” Jace purred as he took us that way.
In the as yet untouched parlor, furniture was covered with blood-spattered sheets under dim, undulating, atmospheric lighting, as if a murder scene was frozen in time. And then one of the “chairs” leapt up at us — a person covered in one of the bloody cloths. We both jumped, with me grabbing Landon in an embarrassing display of terror.
“Nice,” I muttered.
“Thanks,” came Wyatt’s muffled voice. “By the way, Cali took pictures already.”
“Thanks,” I said, and couldn’t help a giggle. It was hard to have a conversation with a bloody sheet.
We skipped the kitchen, which, while not renovated yet, would be used to stage provisions for the party and a small concession during the rest of the tours. The dining room was next, and it was amazing. “Floating” candles (battery-operated LEDs, my analytical mind determined) hung above a cloth-covered table covered with all manner of disgusting dishes, including a “body” with its innards spilling out. Skeletons and a couple of costumed ghouls were eating the macabre feast, and there were a lot of squishy sounds in the background that enhanced the queasy scene.
In the middle of the table was one of those chocolate fountains, only this looked like it was gushing with blood. One of the ghouls stood and moved closer, sweeping a finger through the liquid and holding it out to us. “Want a taste?” he asked in a low, gravelly voice.
This time, Landon said no, and we threw ourselves back when the ghoul stuck the finger in our faces and screamed, “We’re starving!”
“Not so scary so far,” I whispered as we got into the hallway. “I didn’t recognize those guys, but maybe it was the makeup.”
“We brought in a few of our friends from the Chamberlain Theater,” Jace whispered back, then resumed his vampiric tour guide persona. “I think you’ll appreciate the number of bedrooms we have here at the mansion. It’s very restful.” He led us up the stairs, where framed holographic photos were hung along the walls, lit just right so they seemed to be staring at us as they changed from grim-faced humans to rotten-faced creeps.
The music was getting louder, some sort of grinding, screaming metal that grated on my ears. I liked to rock out, but this was unnerving, partly because there was also a soundtrack, real or recorded, of yowling and moaning and crying layered under the death metal.
“The nursery has been decorated in such a charming way,” Jace said, showing us to the first bedroom on the long corridor.
A broken-down crib was off to one side, with a mobile hanging above it consisting of creepy dolls with eyes missing, a meat cleaver, a bloody rattle and more. Tiny coffins were stacked in another corner. With her back to us, a woman was cooing over what must have been a baby, rocking the child in her arms.
Then the woman turned toward us. Her hair was a fright (a wig?), her dress was tattered, her feet bare, and through the magic of makeup, it looked as if her eyes had been ripped out.
“Fuck,” Landon said under his breath.
The woman held out the baby toward us, and I realized that it had a bloody stump where its head was supposed to be. “Have you seen my baby’s head?” she asked in a creaky voice, and I belatedly realized it was Sloane holding the desecrated doll.
Jace guided us out the door. “That’s just disturbing,” I whispered.
“Well, that is the idea of a haunted house,” Landon said.
In the bedroom across the hall, glowing, translucent specters spun slowly. I realized they were made of chicken wire and gauze and painted with something that shone a whitish green under the blacklight. Fog rolled across the floor of the small room, and sinister sounds played from somewhere, just audible above the increasingly loud rock music. In my homeowner brain, I remembered this ceiling needed a lot of work, so a few hooks didn’t bother me, especially when the ghosts looked so cool.
In the next gloomy bedroom, piles of “bodies” littered the floor. The forms were wrapped in garbage bags and duct tape. At the center of the room was a person in a wheelchair, hunched over, moaning. “Can you help me?” came an old-woman voice. “Just come a little closer.”
“I’m not coming closer,” I said.
Landon laughed and took a couple of steps into the room, and then the figure in the wheelchair reared up with a baseball bat, screaming bloody murder.
This time we almost knocked Jace over trying to get out of the room.
“Was that Bennett?” Landon asked as we took a second to gather ourselves.
“Yeah, I think so.” I sucked in a few more breaths, then gestured to Jace to continue. “Maybe we should warn people with heart conditions against doing the tour.”
“Good i
dea,” Landon said.
The music was getting louder, but there was another sound now. Crying. A child crying.
“We had to send this child to bed without any supper, but you can see how well taken care of he is,” Jace said, gesturing to the door. This was the door that already had a hole in it, just about at eye level, so we peered through the ragged gap.
When we looked in, in the middle of the broken bed was what appeared to be a child rocking himself, facing away from us. The crying sound was the sort of thing that crept into your soul. That was sinister enough, but the child was completely surrounded by ghastly skeletons in shifting, mostly blood-red lighting.
“Realistic, isn’t it?” Jace asked.
“What is that?” I responded.
“Damien’s invention. Some sort of robotic movement. Pretty freaky, right?” Then Jace assumed his smooth, low tour-guide voice again. “This way, if you please.”
Past the bathroom, which had crime-scene tape over the open door and a lot of fake blood scattered around, was the last bedroom on this hallway. Jace gently pushed us inside, where the deafening music radiating from an old-school boom box was enough to rattle anyone. There were two punked-out, scary-looking dudes spray-painting the walls. There was graffiti everywhere, a lot of it pretty morbid shit, and the colorful walls were glowing wildly in the blacklight. But it was pure art, too.
The rational homeowner voice in my head reminded me it would all be repainted, and the floor was covered in plastic. The irrational voice was shaken up by the extremely loud music and the erratic movements of the punks, who seemingly hadn’t noticed us.
Just then, one of them whipped around and charged us.
“What the hell are you doing in here?” he yelled — Cali’s brother Damien, I realized — and then he sprayed his can of paint right in our faces!
We yelled and stumbled out of the room before we realized we’d been spritzed with water, and then we had to laugh.
And then we heard Damien laughing and telling his friend — Gary, I was pretty sure — “I told you it would be awesome, man.”
Jace chuckled, too, as he led us to the other hallway, where the master bedroom was located. He opened the door to the room. A dark curtain had been set up just inside the entrance. “We have a spirit guide to lead you through,” he said. “You must hold hands.” And then a gloved hand stuck out from the other side of the curtain and beckoned.
I shot a look at Landon. He smiled and nodded. I grasped the hand, and Landon grabbed my other hand. Then we were being pulled through an almost entirely dark room, touched by all kinds of weird things, including hands that brushed my arms and shoulders. I kept twitching and startling and yelping and wanting to brush stuff away from my face, but with both hands captured, I could only follow. Besides, our spirit guide kept saying in a soft, feminine voice, “If you let go, you are lost.” That alone was eerie as hell. Landon squeezed my hand, a warm and steady comfort in the disembodiment of the dark room, until the figure led us back to the entrance and gently pushed us into the hallway.
“That was weird,” I said a little breathlessly. Landon was still holding my hand. He gave it another squeeze before letting go. When I glanced at his face, he had a strangely serious expression. “Were you scared?” I asked him.
“Terrified,” he answered, a hint of humor in his tone.
Maybe he was joking about being scared, but he was definitely thoughtful.
Jace bestowed us with a sinister look and that horror-show voice.
“The tower awaits, my friends.”
Chapter 21
Jace guided us slowly up the spiral staircase. On the curving steps, trippy, moving lights made the short climb surreal, and then we popped up in the tower room, where unsettling music played in the background. But music wasn’t what made this room amazing.
“Wow,” I breathed.
White paper cutouts dangled all over the faceted round room, hinting at layers of spiderwebs. Thea, a paper artist, was no doubt behind this design. The beautifully cut paper webs were enhanced by string and strips of gauze hanging from the ceiling and crisscrossing the space. All of this white material was lit up by blacklights, making it all glow intensely blue-purple.
From behind the layers emerged a glowing fluorescent spider. That’s right, a multicolored spider — Duncan dressed up with extra legs and crazy glasses that made him look like he had bugged-out mirror eyes.
I realized that in the middle of all the webs, Thea herself was laid out on a chaise lounge. She looked like a virgin sacrifice. While her curly red hair was loose and long, she was dressed all in white, with her hands folded over her chest, so she glowed, too.
Duncan approached her, ominous with all his legs. In two of them — his hands — he held a dagger high above her chest, poised to strike. And then her eyes flew open, she sat straight up, and she screamed that demon-raising scream.
I couldn’t help it. I screamed, too. Then Landon and Duncan started laughing, and Thea grinned.
“I told you it would be a surprise,” she said.
Jace took us down the back staircase. “The library is the last stop on our little tour,” he said. “The librarian loves visitors.”
The library was very dimly lit with fake candelabras, and scattered all around us were stacks of books much taller than we were, corkscrewing toward the ceiling in ways that defied physics. They looked like they could fall over at any minute. With a quick glance, I was assured they hadn’t been taken from the mansion’s shelves.
“How are those supported?” I murmured to Landon.
“Some kind of bendy pole stuck up through them, I think,” he murmured back, and then a violent “SHHHH!” drew our attention to the library table.
There, a ghostly librarian — Penelope, I realized, dressed in greenish-white with matching makeup, all aglow — was holding a finger to her lips.
“Your books are overdue,” she intoned in a chilling voice. “Come here and pay the fine.”
I hadn’t been a very good sport with all these beckoning spirits, so I took a tentative step forward.
And then the stacks of books began to fall over right on top of us.
I screamed and jumped back, was actually pulled back by Landon, and then we saw the three main stacks, while leaning really far over, weren’t going anywhere. They slowly resumed their erect position, thanks to a cable system controlled by a few people I finally saw hiding beneath and behind the furniture.
The ghostly librarian took a step toward us as we chuckled.
“Thank you for freaking us out,” I told her.
And then she yanked an ax from behind her and screamed, “I TOLD YOU TO BE QUIET!”
I almost ejected from my Skechers as I screamed in answer, and Jace was laughing as he pulled us out of the room. Landon was grinning, too.
“Oh, shut up,” I said, but then I had to smile back. “That was pretty great.”
“It’s my favorite,” Jace said, back in his Jace voice. “Damien again. He has a gift for mechanicals. And of course Penelope is stunning.”
With Penelope’s screech, the various ghouls began materializing in the foyer as themselves, turning off music and lights, stripping off costumes, laughing and going over what they’d done and what they could do better for the VIP opening the next night.
“I’m just looking forward to doing my vlog in that crazy spider outfit,” Duncan said.
“You all are completely fantastic,” I gushed. “How can I ever thank you enough?”
“Alcohol?” Damien said.
“Millie told you, right? First round on me at The Junction Box,” Landon said.
As everyone scrambled to get back into their civilian clothes and shut down the theatrics, I looked at Landon. “What do you think?”
“It’s really awesome. Once word gets out about this weekend, next weekend’s ticket sales are a lock.”
“Will it be enough?”
He shrugged and smiled. “It will be a good start. And the
n you have decisions to make.”
“I know. An investment partner. The thing is, I don’t want to go into a partnership only being able to pay for a tiny fraction of the renovation. That’s basically giving up all control to someone else.”
“Come here. Turn around.” He laid his hands on my shoulders and began digging into them with those magical hands, massaging all the tension out of my muscles. I flashed back to those moments we had on our couch. Lightning bolts shot from his fingers right to my lady parts. “Don’t worry,” he was saying. “We’ll make money from this. Maybe we’ll make money some other way. Business loans are always a possibility. And a good investor will make everything easier.”
I sighed and relaxed into his touch. “You’re right. No sense in worrying about step one hundred when we’re only at step three.”
“Exactly.” He gave my shoulders one last squeeze, then leaned in and kissed my cheek dangerously close to my neck, where all the little nerve endings sat up and tingled.
I sighed again, and when I turned to look at him, he was giving me the Fireworks.
A few hours later, mixologist Neil’s Mai Tais at The Junction Box had made most of the ghouls extremely happy. I was new to tiki drinks, and I could barely sit up straight. But I was as giddy as the others, and my inhibitions had made a run for the border.
“You OK?” Landon asked. He’d been drinking beer and seemed sober.
I leaned my head against his shoulder and smiled up at him. “I feel really good.”
Fireworks! Ah, that smile. “Glad to hear it. You should drink some water.”
“Always taking care of me. Why are you taking care of me?”
“It’s fun.”
“Oh, you and your fun,” I said, but I took a sip of water, followed by another sip of Mai Tai. My thick paper straw rattled the last ice in the bottom of the glass, and I frowned. “It’s gone! I need another one!”
“Are you sure? You have a big day tomorrow.”
Bohemia Chills Page 12
