Our House of Horrors (unanun and Peregrine)

[unanun]

"AH!"

Erin spun and caught the side of the locker with her shoulder (that would bruise later, for sure). The dull throb matched her pounding heart as her eyes swept the room before finding the pair of cat's eyes in the corner. She caught her breath and relaxed her white-knuckled grip on her headband of horns.

"Ah .. it's you .. miss ghost." She realized that she did not know the ghost's name. "Y..yes! This is the house. The horror house!" Erin shuffled around the shadow, nervously pinching the seam of her pants. "Do you need a shadow to move around in? Like .. are you stuck in there and you need to connect to my shadow?" The time of the day did not let her shadow overlap with the corner of the room, but she raised her arm to try and cast a bridge. "H-here .. you can ride with me, if you that's what you like .."

 

[Peregrine]

A feminine scoff came from the shadows as Erin extended her hand. "Ride a shadow?" the ghost repeated, voice filled with faint traces of mockery. "What, do you think I came here last night? I'm a ghost, not some sort of parasite."

As though to prove her point, the shadows began to stretch out from the dark corner, waving back and forth like ripples in the water. The moment they overlapped with the shadow cast by Erin's fingers, something cold and clammy began to crawl across her skin for a moment. However, the sensation was only a light touch, a strange greeting before the shadows flowed back to their corner. The glowing yellow eyes opened again, staring expectantly at Erin.

"Well, contractor?" she asked, before falling silent, waiting for a reply.

 

[unanun]

"R...right.." Erin rubbed her arm, both in uncertainty and nervousness, with her shoulders bunched. She reached for the handle to the locker room, hesitated and looked back behind her, saw nothing, and with a deep breath stepped out of the nondescript side door into the heart of the house of horrors.

It ... wasn't much. What was originally a low stakes toddler-friendly roller coaster had been converted into a slow, enclosed ride. To Erin's credit, she had patched up holes in the rickety structure to prevent any sunbeams from leaking in, and had also fixed some leaky tiles when she first arrived. But under the sickly glow of the service fluorescents, the condition of the ride was laid bare.

"So .. here are the animatronics!" They rode on a service cart, and through a control box she guided the werewolves, vampires, zombies, and some assorted gory horrors through their cycles. She slowed to highlight the zombies pulling guts out of a dead body: the blood was off in colour and the tank needed to be changed. She winced when a couple of them squealed, and leapt from the car, apologizing, squirting oil into the joints, and apologizing again.

"Here are some of the jump scares!" They passed through a section with ghosts and other monsters popping up from behind cardboard cutouts, kind of like those amusement park games where you shoot targets moving left and right, or the games where you shoot a water gun at a target to get the horse to win a race.

"And ... some .. ghosts .." They traveled through a section perhaps more adequately described as a love tunnel, with flickering string lights and zip lines that would yank cloth and other things at high velocity around the ceiling. She had tried to rig a crawling Alien, from that movie, but gave up.

Erin fell silent as the cart neared the end of the ride, and finally buried her face in her hands. Oh god. Oh lordy lordy.

She was a terrible manager for a horror ride.

 

[Peregrine]

The ghost remained utterly silent through the strange tour. However, even Erin's faltering voice showed how the atmosphere was steadily growing more and more tense. Nothing the young, pink-haired woman displayed did anything to lessen the one, simple thought that was growing more and more obvious.

This was... absurd.

Silence reigned for several moments after the cart came to a halt. The ghost's amber eyes stared at her contractor as the young woman buried her face in her hands.

It was almost enough to make her wish that she hadn't come out from under the bridge.

Almost. But not really. Anything was better than remaining trapped forever in that squalid reminder of the most terrible moment in her existence.

"What..." the ghost's soft voice seemed somewhat strained, as though only partially succeeding at forcibly repressing any trace of emotion. "Exactly are you trying to accomplish here?"

 

[unanun]

She remembered that tone of voice, that tone the dean had when she was summoned to his office. That tone set off a series of events that ended up with her here, explaining to what was likely a hallucination, a psychotic breakdown from thinking that taking LSD could save her from getting fired from Lakeside, what her job was. That was the likely explanation: the coiled, feminine ghost in front her, terrifying in its beauty, was a classic Freudian manifestation of all her fears and insecurity, and it scared the fuck out of her.

She felt a lump in her throat, the kind when she was about to cry, or the kind when she woke up in the middle of the night with a parched throat, or the kind when she choked on a piece of hot food. No matter the cause, she could feel her nose stuffing up, the welling of tears in the corner of her eye, the blurring of the vision.

No, no, she wasn't going to cry to herself. She had done that plenty of times before, yeah. She had even cried on many bad trips. But something about the mocking tone didn't sit right with her. She wasn't going to make fun of herself, not again.

"I'm .. " her voice came out quiet. She mustered up strength in her belly. "I'm .. "

"I'm trying to run a House of Horrors."

"Are you going to help me?"

 

[Peregrine]

The ghost lifted one hand out of the shadow, using thumb and pointer finger to cradle the bridge of her nose, glowing golden eyes momentarily obscured by lowered lids.

It had been a very, very long time since she'd made such a human gesture. There'd been no reason to before now. But even with all that was lacking, without the solidity of bone, without the heat of skin, without the faint soothing sensation of pressure to ease a non-existent headache, it made the ghost feel connected.

Connected to life, connected to humanity. Connected to the world that existed outside the bridge.

Anything was better than that. Her eyes flashed open once more, hand vanishing into shadow.

"Yes, contractor. I am going to help you."

That had been their promise, after all. Even if she had... misunderstood what exactly those words meant.

"...We're going to have to work on your communication skills," she muttered faintly, before her lamp-like eyes surveyed the room once more. "You are attempting to create... entertainment? Out of horror? Have I understood this correctly, contractor?"

It seemed like nonsense to her. Such things would have been utterly scandalous when she was still alive. They might have been past the age of burning witches at the stake, but actively seeking out the grotesque would likely have become a great scandal, gossiped about in high society for months, the victim too embarrassed to show their face until the rumors faded.

"I am going to need a better example, contractor. Because clearly what is here is not your goal."

 

[unanun]

There it was. The metaphorical hand, reaching out to her, and it had been oh so long since she had seen one. She could feel the excitement and reached out for it like a dog to a bone. "Examples? Yes .. yes! I can show you plenty of examples!" She reset the ride and made a show of taping up some of the more egregious holes. Evil grinned despite herself as she took the horns and wig off in the dressing room. Maybe the ghost was being judgy, but somehow that negativity fled her like water off an umbrella. After, Erin practically whisked the ghost off to her home, with a broom if she could, and sped through her after work routine including dinner, shower, and skincare. At last, three hours earlier than scheduled, she was in bed in her pajamas, her phone was plugged into a flexible grip fastened to the top of the headboard, and her head lay comfortably on the pillows gazing up into the expectantly lit screen. She squirmed into a more comfortable position, and finally looked around for the ghost, patting the pillow next to her in expectation.

"We're going to watch movies!"

 

[Peregrine]

The ghost faded back into near non-existence as her contractor began to bustle. And part of her attention was always on the young woman, who had become her lifeline to the outside world.

Yet, most of her gaze was turned away, studying the world itself in fascination. The automated ride, the moving contraptions, the computer that controlled it all. The vehicles outside in the parking lot, the lamps that glowed overhead. The interior of Erin's apartment, the refrigerator, the stove, the heater, the shower, the large, smooth surface of the glass mirror. The entire world was a new place for her.

Everything had completely changed.

Of course, she'd seen some of it change. Construction workers had once rebuilt the bridge, and she'd been forced to hide under rocks, watching as monumental mechanical earthmovers shifted the ground. And the lives she had stolen gave her some clues into the outside world, hints among the chaos. She'd found it more than distasteful to rummage through a man's memories, but some of it had surfaced anyways.

Yet it was all so much different experiencing it for herself, even separated by the veil of death.

She watched her contractor pull a thin computer, snuggling down into blankets before vaguely inviting her over. Black shadows crept across the pillar, eyes looming over the headboard. Their light was dim compared to the brightness of the screen. And inside that screen, a whole new world began to play out.

It was intriguing, watching it happen. Yet, at the end, the ghost couldn't help but blink in trace confusion. "If you wish to imitate this... you hope for three quarters of the people who pass through the house to die, and the remainder to barely escape with their lives?"

Were people in the modern day so foolish, to so recklessly enter such dangerous areas?

 

[unanun]

No! was the first word that was about to come out of her mouth, but she paused with the air in her throat, and turned her head on the pillows to face the ghost, almost looking like she was pouting.

"It's the thrill!" She grasped in front of her, trying to pull the concept out of the immaterium. "It's the same reason why people ride rollercoasters. It's the rush of fear, and the end of fear, stepping out and feeling your heart race ..."

Her arms fell limp to her sides and she did look to the left again, at the Ghost, "like you .. escaped death .. " and she felt the fear too, the quickening of pulse, rubbed her clammy palms, remembered that just yesterday (or was it two days ago?) she was tripping and about to down face down in a ditch but a ghost came to save her and now she was trying to be friends with a ghost, instead of throwing herself into the corner of the room and screaming with hands over her mouth like in the movies ...

A smile cracked out of her lips and made its way up to her eyes; the absurdity of it all!

 

[Peregrine]

The end of fear.

The escape from death.

Such simple terms to express such a painful subject.

She wished she'd had that moment. She wished that man's hands had unclasped from around her throat, that someone had lifted her out of the water, that her heart had been able to continue to beat, strong and vigorous. But all that had awaited her was darkness and stillness. There was no heart to race anymore.

But even if she had escaped, she could never imagine seeking it out again.

And that was the moment when she understood the connection between the movie on the computer's screen and the dark, rundown house where her contractor worked. It was fake. No matter how scared a person was, they had the safety, the refuge, of knowing none of it was real. And that safety was what made people brave. Brave and reckless, to think they wanted to know death.

She let out a ghostly sigh, the breeze ruffling the edge of the blankets. "Very well. Let us continue, contractor. I fear I have much learning to do on the subject of why people would seek out fake death."

 

[unanun]

"Okay okay." Erin checked the time on the phone: ten pm. Battery, fifty percent. No problem. The balance on her phone wallet was strong enough to withstand another rental.

"I've heard that this movie is the greatest horror film!" The movie poster briefly flashed on the screen.



"It's a story of an alien that can perfectly imitate other organisms. It will infiltrate an Antarctic research station. There will be a lot of psychological thrills, about trust - oh, don't give me that look!" Erin twisted her head. "It's not always about spoilers, sometimes the journey is the real experience!"

She was peeking through her fingers when the infected dog from the crashed helicopter transformed into the alien horror, all glistening and inverted. When MacReady tested the blood with a hot wire and Palmer-Thing revealed itself, Palmer's head splitting in half to devour and infect Windows, she mewled from behind her hands and had to push the phone further away from her face. Sometimes she laughed. Sometimes she pointed out some vagaries.

Finally, the end of the movie came. MacReady and Childs sat in front of the blasted Antarctic station. They acknowledged the futility of their distrust, and shared a bottle of scotch, neither knowing if the other was the Thing ...

 

[Peregrine]

She was supposed to be watching the movie. And, under ordinary circumstances, it likely would have been a fascinating experience. Capturing another world and putting it behind a pane of glass, and then bringing it right into your room. It was a miraculous experience, something far beyond the bound of anything she'd ever experienced.

Yet, it wasn't the movie that intrigued her.

Instead, more often than not, her eyes were on her contractor's face, watching the expression that roamed across them. Her actions, her behavior, her emotions. Her fear.

Ghosts were experts at creating fear. No creature that remained behind was a peaceful one. They were filled with grudge, misery, and anger. How often had she worked to see those men suffer before they died, making sure that their souls would come away unclean at the end of the experience.

Yet there was nothing unclean about Erin right now.

"It is... interesting." It was all she could say. "What you wish to create isn't the experience of those... people," she waved vaguely towards the computer. "But instead yours. Is that not correct? A small pocket of fear in a situation with no true danger."

 

[unanun]

Erin gave pause at that question. She closed her eyes and hummed and hawed, and sometimes grew still long enough that she might have appeared asleep. But she did finally open her eyes, and looked to the ghost next to her. She turned her whole body sideways, and gave the ghost as much dignity as she could, speaking clearly in the spotlight of the phone, eye contact unflinching, treating the ghost as a human (and not a hallucination from an abnormally long trip).

"I learned some things at drama school. They taught me so many shortcuts and different ways of acting, things that would have taken me decades or genius to know .. uh, things like how to get into the mind of any character, how to bring out the human in the script, how you have to exaggerate some emotions, the core features of every human feeling. They basically tried to teach me how to imitate any human being."

Erin paused again, chewing her lip.

"Watching a movie is like that. The director, script writer, actors ... they know something we don't. And they try to teach us how we might behave in that situation. Sometimes they fail, sometimes they succeed .. but when they succeed, we know! We feel like we learned something!" She brought her fists up to her face, full of determination. "And that's what I want to do! Teach people about fear!"

 

[Peregrine]

Had she been anything other than a ghost, the contractor's slow waffling and deliberation might have been frustrating. However, in the life of a ghost, these few moments were nothing but the fleeting passage of time. Inconsequential. Darkness and glowing golden eyes waited, doing nothing but blinking to match the passage of time.

And then Erin spoke, and the ghost's eyes narrowed in deliberation and a trace of... surprise.

In truth, she had little hope for this contractor. They might have made an agreement, but the more she had been shown the more the ghost had grown uncertain as to whether or not this woman actually knew what she was doing. What she wanted. It was a fine way to waste time, to spend some days out from under that darkened bridge. But it hadn't seemed meaningful.

Until this moment.

It made sense. As strange as the comparisons had been, as questionable as the examples had been for comparison, her contractor's wish made sense.

"You are either very foolish or... very kind," the ghost finally decided. Surely it would be no one but a fool who would send themselves face to face against ghosts for the sake of other people, not for themselves. Yet who was she to question her contractor's will. "Very well. Tomorrow, we go back to your House of Horrors, and we shall create your 'lesson in fear.'"

She had much to think about tonight.

 

[unanun]

"That's .. nice .." Relief drained the adrenaline, and Erin's eyelids became extremely heavy. "I'll .. let's get started ... ... ... tomorrow ..." She fell asleep with the end credits of the movie frozen on the screen, shining bright onto her face.

...

"AH!" Night became day and Erin awoke to a dead phone slapping her in the face. The rays were squarely in her eyes, and seem to have vanquished her ghostly companion as well (unless the ghost had fled under the bed, or somewhere with shadows). She spared one peek under the blankets ("where are you?") before she leaped out of bed and ran to the bathroom.

Toilets flushed, toothbrushes came and went, toast flew in and out of the broiler and buttered into her mouth, and she scrambled back from the doormat - shoes still on - to give the blanket a hasty flip, somehow ending up looking worse than when she had woken up in them, then she was out the door, jogging lightly to work before the depression of the whole situation caught up with her and she slowed to a contemplative stroll.

Some hours before there was enough dark to flip the master breaker on the House of Horrors, Erin sat in the breakroom, pink wig and horns on, cross contacts in, and click the top of a ballpoint pen.

"So .. uh .. I guess we can start .."

"With your name?"

 

[Peregrine]

The amusement park was a land of the night. Its lights and sounds designed to create a whirlwind of emotion, like its inhabitants had gotten lost in a different realm. She'd seen it, that strange impression it created amongst the neon pink and blue lights.

During the day, it lost its majesty. The worn rides and damaged yard sculptures that were covered up by the shadow of the night were highlighted in stark relief under the light of day. The place felt tired and worn.

The house of horrors was no exception. Tattered and worn down, the paint practically peeling. No matter how much they called it the atmosphere, it seemed on the edge of falling apart. It lacked majesty, lacked dignity. It simply seemed old.

She tried not to think too poorly of it. No matter what, it was better than the underside of a bridge.

In the back room, the ghost watched from a dark corner. Watched as her contractor seemed to prepare for their 'lesson in fear'. Was the outfit supposed to help with the mood?

"My... name?"

It had been so long since she'd thought about it. For so long, she'd simply been nameless terror in the darkness. The ghost of lurking shadows and creeping terror.

Since when had a ghost had a name?

"...Elizabeth. My name was Elizabeth."

 

[unanun]

Erin was about to write down "Elizabeth", but scratching the ghost's name out on a piece of paper somehow didn't feel right. The idea of scrawling the name across a cheap paper notepad with a cheap ballpoint pen felt irreverent, and her mind wandered to an ornate gravestone somewhere on the European continent. She wondered if that gravestone even existed, if their family had grieved over her or bothered to erect one, if she had died of natural causes or an accident, or maybe if ... no way ... what if she had been murde-

The sun had moved just enough in the sky to move a point of light from the corner of her eye to the center. Erin flinched against the brightness and found herself looking into the (expectant?) yellow eyes of Elizabeth. The ghost might have been pretty, but pretty was a generous word, as black tendrils and smoke continued to obscure all but only a vaguely suggestive outline of a human.

"So." Erin cleared her throat. Ahem.

"E..."

"El..."

"Elizabeth." Her voice rang clear with an actor's heft.

"This will be the second time you've seen this place. I know it's not great. But surely we can start somewhere, right? At least we can patch the holes, keep the place dark ... is darkness essential to fear? What ... what is essential to fear, come to think of it?"

 

[Peregrine]

The name sounded almost as awkward coming off her Contractor's tongue as it did echoing in the ghost's ears.

If she'd still had a throat she might have swallowed, still had lungs she could take a deep breath. Instead there was nothing but for the ghostly tendrils of her hair to momentarily sway through empty air, before they were on to the next question.

"Fear..." the word lingered in her mind. The echo of screams. "Fear is when you feel risk to yourself."

Water against her skin. Pressing against her lips. The burning of her lungs. The pain as she desperately flailed her limbs, as her skin rubbed raw against the hands clasped against her throat, against the rocks and soil of the creekbed.

"And when you have no way to control the outcome."

 

[unanun]

Erin pursed her lips, eyebrows going up in surprise - she did not seem to have expected that kind of response, but upon a quick reflection, it made sense given the circumstances of their meeting. A silence passed between them. She kept opening her mouth with the beginning of a thought, but swallowed it to look down at her notepad again, filling it with doodles and scribbles, random shapes that spiraled off to nowhere, the beginnings of a flower that was erased with an enormous amount of ink, and an octopus.

Finally, she huffed loudly and started to speak, though she kept her eyes down on the paper.

"If you're talking about rollercoasters, I've been on those. And Splash Mountain. A lot of amusement park rides are built on that, where they drop you off a cliff but you still have a cord attached to you, or they put you in a cart that rolls off the edge of a mountain, but you're still on the rails so you are always saved at the end. But ... I don't think we can build one of those here."

She was starting to run away with her thoughts, and continued. "But the problem with a haunted house is that most people know its harmless. So you can have jumpscares real or animatronic and some people just don't seem to care. It's not like we can scare them with philosophy or other kinds of existential horror, y'know, like The Thing. The ride just ends up being more cute than scary."

"Maybe we could make it like walking inside the ship of the Alien? Have the Alien run around the ceilings, dip close to your face, or have a holographic face hugger jump at you?" She began to scrub her pink dyed hair, and was distracted examining the roots of one strand she had pulled out. "Need to dye it again ..."

At length, she ran out of words and was reduced to mumbling. Several times the beginning of a word was caught in her throat, and a blush slowly spread from her ears to her cheeks.

"Do..."

"Do you t-think ..."

"You could try scaring the guests?"

 

[Peregrine]

The ghost sighed slightly as she listened to her Contractor's rambling. Still, her faint sigh ghosted around the room like little more than a breath of wind.

She could tell that her contractor had never lived with her life at risk. Never known what it truly meant to feel like situations were outside your control, spiraling inevitably towards catastrophe no matter what you did to fight it. That wasn't adrenaline, and it certainly wasn't the rush you get from a situation that sent your body into overdrive. It was paralysis. Crushing, certain doom that lead to nothing but stillness and blankness.

That wasn't jump scares, either, although the ghost herself had put those to use at time. Jump scares were also a form of rush, one that came and went in an instant. That was not fear either.

Had her client, one who ran a house of horrors and watched scary movies late into the night, ever really experienced fear? Or had it always just been a game to her?

At the very least, she knew the woman had felt fear once. Under the bridge, in the darkness, with glowing eyes trapping her in place. There, Elizabeth had seen fear seize her body.

And it seemed that same memory gradually surfaced to her Contractor as well.

The ghost's large, golden eyes blinked in the shadows.

"Do you want me to?"