I finally tear my gaze from the empty window across the street. “There are some for adults. I’ll find one. We can get shitty before we go in.”
“But—”
“No complaining. We are going to salvage Halloween. I am not letting it end this way, not if it’s the last damn thing I do at this school.”
A.S.S. Uni. and guys like Denis can foist their religion on me all they want, but once I leave campus, there’s not a damn thing they can do to stop me from sinning.
And I certainly intend to sin.
“THIS CAN’T BE IT.”
I don’t dare agree out loud with Gavin’s dire assessment of the “haunted house” before us. It’s not a house but a barn, a barn plopped right in the middle of a big empty farmer’s field more accustomed to corn than visitors. People lounge on hay bales and eat snacks from the little gift shop off to the side.
As for the barn itself…well, they certainly tried. Bats hang from the roof. Fake cobwebs spill down the front of the barn. Spotlights bathe the structure in eerie green light, and every once in a while more lights flash in the windows. Screams and laughter erupt, igniting a fragile hope that perhaps this haunted house isn’t as lame inside as it is outside.
“Whatever,” I say. “We’re here. Drink up and let’s do this.”
I take a swig from a bottle, the burn helping to sear off some of my trepidation, then pass the drink to Gavin. He chugs before passing it along to Maurice and Juan, the only other guys from the frat who I could convince to come with us on this doomed adventure.
I get why it was a hard sell, and I don’t blame my brothers, but I do kind of wish more of them were into it. The parties on campus aren’t going to rage the way they should this year, not with campus police on high alert thanks to God damn Denis reporting us before things ever kicked off.
I shouldn’t complain, though. My frat brothers have always been good to me, since the moment Gavin and I met as freshmen and he dragged me into Greek life. He’s straight, but we were best friends right from the jump, an unlikely duo on this Christian campus. He assured me the frat would be cool with me, even as out and unrepentant as I am, but I’ll admit I was highly suspicious at first. Time has proven him right, though. No one at the fraternity has ever given me any trouble over being gay; there are even a couple other queer guys in the house. I never expected to find companionship in a fraternity of all places, but sometimes life can surprise you. Hell, I never expected to be at a Catholic university, either, but I got in and they offered me a sweet scholarship, so I enrolled. I thought it would be four years of misery, but Gavin and the frat have flipped that on its head.
Now if only we could enjoy Halloween.
By the time we finish off the bottle, I’ve got a light buzz going, not so much that I can’t think clearly, but enough that I’m actually excited about this barn-turned-haunted-house. I encourage the others to follow me to the doors, where a bored girl scans the QR codes they sent us when we bought tickets. Then we’re in a very, very dark hall, the doors to the barn closing behind us.
“Alright,” I say, “let’s do this, I guess.”
I can’t even see the guy at the end of the hall until he moves to open the door for us. He flashes bright white fake vampire teeth as he gestures us into the dimly lit room beyond. It looks like a fucked up dentist office, complete with a blood-splattered chair and an array of tools that could have come straight out of a medieval dungeon. Not half bad, certainly better than I expected based on the exterior.
The lights flicker, then die entirely. I huddle a little closer to the other guys, all of us bunching into a tighter group as we stand there in complete darkness.
Then the lights flash back on in a burst. I’m not ashamed to admit I scream—especially because the others also scream—when I find a blood-splattered “dentist” standing in the corner of the room wielding some kind of sharp-looking dental tool.
The dentist “chases” us from the room, and we burst into a red-lit hallway gasping and laughing.
“Okay,” Gavin says, “this might not completely suck.”
“That’s the Halloween spirit!” I slap him on the back before we plunge deeper into the haunted house.
We pass through more themed rooms. One is a dungeon, one is a classroom, one is a literal horse stall. They all contain actors who jump out at us or appear from unexpected places or tell us some kind of spooky legend about the space. It’s not half bad. The actors do their best to scare us, actually managing it a few times as we progress.
We’re on the second floor when the buzz starts to wear off, but I’m having enough genuine fun at this point that I don’t really mind. Gavin and the others look like they’re enjoying themselves as well. I’m beginning to think I’ve salvaged Halloween when we step into a room decked out like a graveyard.
A fog machine carpets the floor in a fine layer of mist. Acouple fake tombstones guard heaps of dirt that may or may not have come from the corn fields outside. Cobwebs hang over everything, and only a smattering of fake stars glowing on the ceiling offer us any light at all.
Then something starts clawing its way out of one of the graves.
We gasp and jump back, prepared for another actor who will chase us into the next room. The person in the dirt pushes open a coffin lid, neatly moving aside the heap so they can climb out (and likely so they can replace the dirt between guests). Deathly white hands grip the edges of the coffin, then a man sits up in the box, his face painted so starkly pale I don’t recognize him at first.
The terror on his face isn’t a performance.
“Denis?”
His eyes widen behind his glasses. He leaps out of the coffin and sprints from the room, his act entirely forgotten.
“What the hell was that?” Gavin says.
