“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 idea,” 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.
“Whatisthat?” 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.
