Creating a Haunted House: V
This is not a guide.
Painting: The Old Hall, Fairies by Moonlight by John Anster Christian Fitzgerald, c.1875
V
Façade
Past the painted-brick walls, beyond the limestone monstrosities to either side of the entrance, into a semi-dark the same color as a mouth, through the façade we went.
The entry chamber beyond the archway was lit dark reddish-pink. This lighting seemed to come through the ceiling, a ceiling a little like a semitransparent screen with ridges between that may’ve been horizontal beams, or may not have been. The teeth at the back of the room—I couldn’t tell whether they were made of cardboard, wood, or something more like teeth—somehow seemed to work, as though they were intentionally recessed within the mouth. The teeth at the end of the room were giant-sized, like stalagmites and stalactites. An object was caught between two of them.
I thought it was a dummy or other prop. That is, until it moved.
There was a person trapped in a hank of wet, brownish-white meat. A morsel. My mind told me it had to be fake. Poking out from the meat or whatever it was, they wore a white coverall with a hood, with everything covered but the face. At first they squirmed. Initially, they appeared to be in distress.
“Oh my God, are you okay?” Jennifer said to this person.
They groaned at the attention and then more frantically tried to work themselves loose.
They were able to come out from the teeth a little ways, but the meat stretched behind them like they couldn’t fully detach. It was as though there was a line of gunk attaching them to the rest of what was stuck in the teeth. One of those stringy bits like a tendon that just won’t let go.
This person in the coveralls, attached to the morsel in the teeth, started shouting at us for help.
Jennifer and I moved forward to try get them loose. My guess then was that maybe it had been some unfortunate soul who had wandered in or been lured into this house and become its food, like our house had its food.
Patrick, who was carrying Sally then because we had left her wheelchair above, told us to hold on a second. He asked the person stuck in the teeth, “Are you working for the house? You an actor?”
I watched as that person’s face changed. It was already a circle of gunked flesh squeezed by a hood, but then the lips pulled back into a grin, showing more teeth. Then came a run of laughter.
Even as bound by the piece of meat or whatever it was they were stuck to, they got an arm up and pointed to our left.
Along a wall that seemed to be mucous membrane, or decorated to look like such, an opening billowed out a current of air. Twitching along its frame were thick sheets of what I hoped were spray painted plastic strips like you’d find segmenting off meat lockers. A different kind of light flickered in the room beyond.
Patrick gave us a look while the person stuck in the teeth spouted a fresh batch of laughter, this one tinged more malicious than playful. Then they went back up the line towards the larger morsel in the teeth like a spider to its web.
Don’t touch the actors. Was that one of Patrick’s rules, the secret ones that presumably each of us had been given but were forbidden to share with the others? When we nodded, Patrick returned that nod.
“Okay,” Sally said, one arm slung around his neck while he carried her.
And we returned her okay. I began to think we might be able to do this without a line back ourselves.
In the next room, where there were strobe lights flashing in the dark, there were beds with sleeping people—I’ll call continue to call them actors for now—lots of beds, maybe a dozen, and they were arranged in a way that our path weaved between them. Of course, none of those actors were really sleeping, and some of them would bolt up and jerk their heads towards us so quickly that it made my neck hurt to look at. They did it so identically that it was like a choreographed dance. I may’ve mistaken them for animatronics if they hadn’t been so real. Slathered on their beds were fleshy growths; slathered on their faces were fabric-y growths.
It recalled something I’d once read about people shedding so much skin on their beds that, even after washing the sheets repeatedly, it made those beds like another part of their bodies. Maybe that was especially true for the bedridden.
“There’s someone behind us!” Jennifer shouted. She had taken the rear. We wheeled, Patrick halfway and more carefully because he was the one carrying Sally then.
Just behind us was someone with a spidery gait. At first I thought maybe they were the person who’d been stuck in the teeth, finally free to torment us, but this was someone else. They were hunkered low to the ground, dressed in a dark, sheer body sleeve that covered them head to toe. They made wave motions of their arms, as if to say keep going before something else, and worse, washed us the rest of the way down.
We were right before the end of that room, just after the actor pressing us onward seemed to have vanished as though they found a hidden hole in the wall to pop into, when a pull-down bed snapped out next to the opening.
It sailed down to greet us, and there was a snow-colored demon inside with glowing eyes, strapped to the bed. The amber glow of the demon’s eyes made a weird popping trail of color in the midst of the strobing light. Maybe it was a prop, but as we were passing by into the next room I could’ve sworn, when the bed was down, that its upper body jerked up. But by then all of us were passing into the next room with no intention of going back to see.
In the next room were fish tanks filled with dark red water, and something moved in those tanks, but I couldn’t tell what it was because of the murkiness. This all seemed familiar, like a room in our imagined haunted house, almost. The strobe light had given way to a bare bulb hanging out of a crude cut in the ceiling. The fish tanks were on big cabinets. Sloshing, gurgling sounds came from the water.
Another actor slowly revealed himself from behind one of these tanks. He stood up from behind it. He was wearing a snorkel and covered in a fluid about the same color as the tank. He chased us, laughing like a maniac, into the next room before easing off.
The next two rooms were smaller, oblong shaped. One was reddish-brown on the inside. The other was light red. Going in and out of these two rooms there were veiny pipes, by that I mean the pipes themselves resembled veins but also had veiny structures seeming to grow upon them. And there were holes in the pipes. I think we kept expecting something to jump out at us. It never did. But we could hear things scratching and scurrying along in them, and it felt like a matter of time before something showed its face.
That last room before the one with the stairs leading down, that one was tough. It was broken up into segments that got progressively narrower. The walls were mirrored like some kind of funhouse, but slopped over with fleshy growths. It never got tight enough that we had to squeeze through, but it went around and around, each time getting narrower, so that the effect was psychologically unnerving. Seeing our expressions of dread distorted back at us in the funhouse mirrors as we went, we were sure we’d get trapped like cave divers caught in a narrowing passageway, but it never happened. Getting stuck between funhouse mirrors seemed less fun than getting caught between two teeth.
We emerged into a final room that was mostly dark and shriveled-looking with a hole in the ground and stairs heading down from the opening, into what seemed, compared to where we were, blinding white light. But when I stepped down onto what I assumed would be the first stair (I was still taking point then), I got a surprise that twinged my heart more than my ankle. I felt like a bird flying into a clear window. Over the hole beneath which appeared to be stairs, there seemed to be a thick, clear plastic cover in the way. It was fixed to the floor, and it didn’t have a handle or latch or other mechanism for opening it that we could see.
Searching around the room, whose walls were mostly, or at least pretending to be, shriveled muscle of some kind, in one dark corner that was almost an alcove we found three wooden boxes of different sizes sitting on stone pedestals of different heights. The largest box was on the medium height pedestal, the smallest box was on the highest pedestal, and the medium box was on the smallest pedestal. The boxes were stuck to the pedestals and each box was locked with a different lock. The largest box had a number-combination lock with four numbers going to nine, the medium box had a shape combination lock with circle, triangle, diamond, square, and the smallest box—which was no larger than a shoebox and not a whole lot stronger—had a key lock. We searched up and down the room for a key, felt along walls that seemed to be more plasticky than damp and muscley like they looked, but we were having trouble finding a key and began to think about what number or shape combinations we might use on the other locks.
#
I could smell the fresh lumber RSY Construction had just put in, and I thought I could hear echoes, still, from hammers driving nails into wood. Six feet beneath my basement, these were the bones of the haunted house’s first floor. Soon enough, my friends would be back in town, and we’d go over it with the blood and flesh. Fitting, I thought, that the theming from our imagined haunted house’s first floor was the human body and the terrors it held.
We’re all trapped in our bodies, thoughts bouncing around inside skulls with nowhere to go. You can’t run from your own body.
We called it back then, even though we were kids. I never got the chance to see Greg after the wreck, but I’d noticed the closed casket at the funeral—of course there were many reasons for a casket to be closed—and the strange light in Sally’s eyes that seemed to go in and out like a flickering bulb anytime Greg was mentioned. Had she remained conscious? What had she seen when glancing over at him, with metal and plastic crunched in towards them and the divider between broken?
The human body and what could happen to it. The first floor.
I did a walk through, even though it was all bones for now, no paint or props just yet.
The mouth, where the first actor, the morsel, would be lodged between two teeth. The teeth would need to be recessed and that had to make sense, like there was something very off about this mouth, something unnatural. Like it belonged to an entity we were too scared to get the entire reckoning of just yet. Piece by piece. Floor by floor. Surprise at the bottom like a toy at the bottom of a cereal box.
I walked into the next room, which was longer, where we would put beds and actors pretending to sleep in them. The esophagus. Next room, the stomach. Liver. Kidneys. Intestines. Sphincter. Not everything was represented, but just enough and a few parts themed more on digestion. There were some people who believed, still, that consciousness resided in the gut, memories rising up like bile.
A memory rose up then as I traipsed into the sphincter, a recent one that for some reason or other had already been forgotten. Weird how sometimes that happened.
This time we were eating pizza. I could’ve sworn it had been lasagna, but maybe I’d been mistaken. Greg’s journals were stacked on a corner of the craft table. The blueprints, the floorplans, were still waiting.
We were talking about the house within the house, weighing whether or not it should factor into our real haunted house’s design.
“Wait, they were separate,” Jennifer said, “but does that make either one more real than the other?”
“Both houses were made-up,” Patrick said. His arms were folded and the corners of his mouth were stained red with sauce.
“But the one inside the other, that one was more fake than the other, right?” Jennifer persisted. She was standing, leaning over the table, leaning partway over Sally in her wheelchair, who she took a moment to half hug with an arm around her neck.
“Nah, the one on the outside was the façade,” I said.
“Neither of them exist,” Patrick said. “One being inside the other doesn’t make one less real than the other.”
“Alright,” Sally said, “but if we’re theming for the design, we should be clear about something: This one we’re designing takes inspiration from Greg’s journals and the other inside fictional Greg’s sketchbooks we’re not touching, right?”
They all looked at me, I guess since it was my basement we were scheming inside, and my basement we were insanely planning to build beneath floor after floor until we hit hell. That was a joke we bandied about, but the truth of it was that the haunted house façade within a façade in Greg’s journals had been our take on a hellmouth, with some architectural flairs ripped straight out of Ancient Mesopotamia down to the limestone lamassu like the ones guarding the citadel of Sargon II. We got some mileage back then out of the history texts assigned for Ms. Gallagher’s Ancient History.
“Sorry, got myself caught in a never-ending cheese pull.” I set down a slice of what had to have been cheese and spinach with extra mozzarella. “Why not we start with the outer house first?”
“And if we come to find our house is a façade of the other,” Sally added, “maybe we’ll discover some surprises within like the fictional us in Greg’s journals did.”
We all laughed at that. But Sally didn’t. It only occurred to me a few months later when I was remembering, alone in the hollowed-out place beneath my basement, peering absent-mindedly into an alcove where some boxes on pedestals would be if all went as planned. It only occurred to me then that it was the same Sally who had been deep in the shadows of a cypress tree at Greg’s funeral.
