Credible Terror by Benjamin Gorman

Sandy popped her head over the top of Brian’s cubicle and smiled down at him. “Doin’ anything for Halloween this year?”

Brian kept his eyes on his computer screen. “I don’t celebrate Halloween.”

Mike appeared over the opposite side of the cubicle. “What?”

“Is it, like, a religious thing?” Sandy asked.

“No,” Brian said. He leaned back in his chair and wheeled a few inches from his desk, then looked up at his coworkers. “Halloween is fine for kids. They get in costumes and they get candy. Great for them. But it sucks for grown-ups. What do we get? Bad movies and tacky decorations and haunted houses that aren’t even scary? It’s lame.”

“You, sir, are a party pooper,” Mike said, and disappeared again.

“You know,” Sandy said, “there’s a haunted house down at the opera house.”

Mike stood up again. “Should we go?”

“No!” Brain said. “It’s going to suck. It won’t be scary. I just said that.”

“Let’s go,” Sandy said. She was heavyset, with a round face, and when she smiled she seemed to pull an extra ten pounds into her cheeks. Because of her weight, she hated that people said she had a bubbly personality, but the term fit.

Mike beamed. He was sporting an ironic mustache that matched his loosened tie. “Yeah.”

“No.” Brian put his head in his hands and rolled his butt backwards and forwards in a dramatic display of desk-chair vexation. “Let’s just skip it and drink. That’s the way to celebrate Halloween. By doing what we always do until we’re unaware of the stupid holiday.”

“But this is Salem,” Sandy said. “Like the witch trials?”

“Salem, Oregon.” Brian rubbed his forehead. “There has never been a witch trial here. Or any witches. It’s a coincidence. Saying we’re related to witch trials is like saying you’re more artistic because you live in Paris, Ohio. Or like you’re closer to French royalty because you live in Versailles, Kentucky.”

“Do they really say it like that?” Mike asked.

“Yup.” Brian nodded. “‘Vur-sales.’”

Mike frowned and cocked his head like a golden retriever with an ironic mustache. Then he shook his head, remembering the topic at hand. “We’ll hit the bar, have a couple drinks, then go to the haunted house, then go back to the bar and make fun of Brian for screaming like a little girl,” Mike said.

“Perfect,” Sandy agreed. “I’ll call some friends and have them meet us at the bar.”

Brian banged his face on his keyboard.

An hour and a half later, he was leaving the bar, walking down Liberty Street next to one of Sandy’s friends, fairly certain that he’d had his second drink too quickly. Mike and Sandy walked ahead of him, their conversation too loud, their steps too short. Brian thought he might step on Mike’s heel and break his ankle. Then he decided that wouldn’t be very nice. Behind them, two more of Sandy’s friends, both of whom he knew from a couple other get-togethers, laughed about inside jokes from their jobs at Nordstom’s. They liked inside jokes. That’s why he’d never learned their names.

“So, you work with Sandy?” Tracy said.

Tracy was better looking than Sandy, Brian decided, though she didn’t have Sandy’s bubbly personality. Her personality development had probably been stunted when she realized she was a solid eight out of ten back in high school, maybe even a nine with those shoes on. Brian suspected he was a five, maybe a six when standing next to a mustachioed Mike, but thought that might be enough if Tracy was having an off night. He decided to try to reign in some of his earlier anti-Halloween rhetoric and general mopey-ness in hopes of scoring a few points.

“Yeah, we both started at the same time a couple years ago.”

“So, what do you guys do at the Corporation Services Company?”

“It sounds like a front, doesn’t it?”

“It does.”

Brian laughed. “It looks like it, too. Lots of cubicles and bad lighting. We do all kinds of sub-contracting work. P.R. Some minor legal stuff. Some lobbying.”

“Lobbying?”

“That’s why the company is in Salem. We talk to state reps for companies. I mean, I don’t. I do research, mostly. Some polling and data analysis. It’s about as fun as it sounds.” Brian ran his fingers through his carefully un-combed hair, then realized he was starting to sound mopey again. “How about you?”

“I’m a manager at Kohl’s.”

“Ah. The boss. Cracking the whip.”

“Not really.”

They walked in silence for a moment.

“Hey,” Brian said. “We’re here.” He decided the evening was basically shot.

They paid a cover to a person of indeterminate gender in a Grim Reaper costume and went into the opera house. The Reed Opera House had been converted into a mall years back, but the construction felt half-completed. Most of the stores were on the first floor: a coffee shop (“Napoleon’s”), a Greek restaurant (“Macedonia”), a tailor (“Master Tailor”), and a shop selling Scottish and Celtic goods (“Brigadoon”). But the sextet followed the tunnel of cotton spider webbing down the stairs into the portion of the mall called The Underground.

The walls in The Underground were all different shapes, like a challenging 3-D puzzle.  The lights were all on, for liability reasons Brian suspected. The off-white walls were trimmed with dark green, and the beams (some round and some square) were green, too. The sounds of screams and moaning were playing from a CD boom-box somewhere. Or maybe a cassette tape, Brian thought. It looked more like a cassette-tape-kind-of haunted house.

Through a short tunnel lined with exposed pipes painted white, they entered into the main cavity of the three story mall. Stores thrust into the central space like over-eager hexagons. A row of round, exposed bulbs ringed the central courtyard at the bottom of the first floor. Below those, office-grade fluorescent lights, some dead, some blinking their last gasps, lit the nooks and crannies of the strangely-shaped basement. If the flickering lights had been intentional, Brian decided he might have been somewhat impressed, since that was a horror movie trope that was a bit creepy. Considering the general dilapidation of the mall, he didn’t give them that much credit.

The Underground had a half a dozen stores, too. Brian and Tracy passed a sign advertising an art gallery (“Agape Studios”), two tattoo parlors (“Ink Underground Tattoos” and “Tigress Tattoo”), two bakeries (“Belguique Waffles” and “Little Cannoli Bakery”) and a bookstore called “Crystal Mirror” advertising “Dragons, Drums, Fairies, and Used Books.” None were open during the haunted house, but Brian couldn’t figure out how half of them stayed open the rest of the time.

The center of the courtyard was all done in earth tones. The yellow ring of exposed light bulbs around the first floor gave all the wooden furniture little starburst shadows.  The chairs and tables had been draped with more cotton spider webs with the occasional plastic spider ring tossed on them. A woman in a simple ghost costume popped out of a short hallway leading to a service elevator.

Tracy jumped, and Brian wanted to say, “Seriously?”

Inside one of the unoccupied spaces in the mall, a man in a lab coat laughed maniacally behind the plate glass window. On a card table in front of him, bowls of fake blood sloshed as he banged on them with a meat cleaver. Someone had staple-gunned some pieces of cardboard behind him, and had drawn crude dials and buttons on them. The man pulled a pink kooshball covered in dripping red gore out of a silver salad bowl, held it out to them, then threw his head back and laughed again.

Brian tapped Mike on the shoulder. “Obligatory Mad Scientist. Check.”

“Don’t be a spoil-sport,” Mike whispered back.

They turned right and headed down the first truly dark hallway. A large man stood at the far end under a red light. He held a plastic machete and wore a hockey mask. As they stepped into the hallway, he charged at them, shouting a wordless roar. He pulled up a few feet from them, waved the plastic machete, then turned on his heel and went back to his place.

For a moment, the sextet was unsure what to do next. There didn’t seem to be any other way to go, so they walked toward the man. He stood very still as they came up to him, and only moaned in a low voice as they passed by him. He sounded more bored than menacing.

“Well, that happened,” Brian said.

Mike nodded. “It was an occurrence of some kind.”

“I’m sorry, Brian.” Sandy shrugged. “I was hoping it would be scary.”

“The ghost was scary,” Tracy said.

Brian frowned but chose not to argue.

The six of them made their way back to the hallway leading to the staircase to the first floor.  When they turned the corner, Brian was genuinely surprised to see another figure in their path. He’d reconciled himself to a three-strikes-and-out haunted house. He hadn’t expected another batter.

This ghoul wasn’t dressed in a predictable costume. She wore ratty tennis shoes, gray slacks that may have been a man’s, a puffy, wrinkled shirt, and some kind of vest that wasn’t easy to make out in the darkness. Her hair was gray and thin, so thin that light from the street above filtered through it and made her look like she’d been recently radiated. Silhouetted by the streetlight, the weak fluorescents of the hallway gave her skin an ashen color. Though she was thinner than her clothes, her jowls hung low and folds of skin under her chin moved as she saw Brian and began to speak. Zombie? Brian wondered. Down-on-her-luck witch? Thrift store mummy?

Her voice was a rough crow’s angry bark. “You! I see you, unbeliever. I see you through the veil. You are a heathen, a foul creature from the pit of hell, a spawn of Satan’s loins. You want to shake the faith of all believers. You de-sanctify all that is holy. But you will not succeed.”

She was marching right at Brian, pointing her finger toward his face as she came down the stairs. She hit the last step and continued toward him, her knees wobbling with each step, but her hand held still in front of her, as though she were a real ghost floating at him, or a marionette swinging on a string. Brian hesitated, stopped, took a half-step backwards.

She kept coming. “You will fail in your mission. I curse you! I curse you! No one will believe your lies. No one will be fooled by your forked tongue. You will be alone in a prison of your unbelief!”

“Hey!” a voice shouted. It came from the guy in the hockey mask. He’d stopped groaning and had slipped over to the group in silence, which might have been terrifying, except that he’d pushed the mask up on top of his head and warned them of his approach by calling out to the woman. His voice was anything but frightening. He sounded irritated, even a bit whiny. It made his voice raise up to a register that didn’t fit with his size, but complemented the tufts of hair pointing through the hockey mask’s eye holes on top of his head, two laughable antennae. “Hey, get out of here! This is a place of business, and if you don’t stop messing with the customers, I’m calling the cops. I’m giving you five seconds to get your ass back on the street, lady.”

The woman turned without a word and walked back to the stairs. Then she looked over her shoulder at Brian one last time, sneered, and ascended out of sight.

The ridiculous ax murderer turned to the group. “I’m sorry about that. She’s been sneaking past the bouncer for the last couple nights, coming down here and telling people they shouldn’t be in here. Just some crazy homeless lady. It’s sad, but I gotta’ kick her out, you know?”

“Sure,” Brian said softly, but his comfort for the unmasked ax murderer was drowned by the sound of Mike’s laughter.

“She scared you! The whole haunted house has no effect on you, but you get freaked out by a homeless old lady!”

Tracy put her hand on top of his. “She was scary. She scared me.”

Brian felt like ripping his hand away and defending his courage. He also felt something else. He took her hand and held it. “I admit it. She freaked me out.”

Sandy clapped her hands together. “Yea! We win! Brian is human!”

“Yes,” Brian told her, “too human and now too sober. Let’s go back to the bar.”

And they did. And they drank. And drank. And when Brian awoke to an irritating sunbeam poking at his dry eyes the next morning, he was not surprised to see Tracy next to him, but he did wish he could remember the evening more clearly. He wasn’t concerned about the haunted house or anything that had gone on inside, but he was intensely worried about his performance afterwards. Though alcohol had helped him get women into bed before, it had sometimes betrayed him immediately afterwards.

Tracy rolled over, placed a hand on his face, and smiled in a way that reassured him. “G’morning,” she said. “’s bright.”

He nodded, then regretted it. He flopped back down on the pillow face first, then nuzzled her neck with his hair. “What time is it?”

She looked away, filling his face with her hair. Then she turned back, but the hair stayed. He tried to blow a hole in it to breathe through. “Six thirty,” she said.

“I don’t wanna’ go to work,” Brian said.

“Me neither.” He could hear a smile.

“It won’t be so bad for you.” Brian propped his head up on an elbow and looked down on her. “They’re not going to make fun of you at work. I’m gonna’ get hell all day.”

“What, for being hung over? I think Mike and Sandy were in a lot worse shape than we were when we left.”

“No, I mean because of the haunted house. I told them I didn’t like Halloween because it isn’t scary, and then I got scared…” He trailed off when he saw her face. “What?”

“What are you talking about?” she asked. She was smiling, but a bit uncertain.

“You remember the haunted house, right?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

He laughed. “Wow, you must have had more than I did. Don’t you remember? We met at the bar. Then we all walked down a few blocks to the opera house. They’d set up this really cheesy haunted house down in the basement. You don’t remember?”

“No,” she said, sounding far less amused. “I don’t. And I didn’t have that much to drink, actually.”

“Okay,” Brian said. “I just… There was a ghost and a mad scientists and a guy in a hockey mask? And then the homeless lady?”

Tracy rolled away from him, sat up, then started picking her clothes up off the floor. “No, I don’t remember. You are weirding me out. And I have to pee, so…”

Brian drove Tracy in to work, parking in the structure near her Kohl’s store rather than looking for street parking near his own work. They barely talked on the way, and even though they exchanged numbers in the car and said they’d get together again soon, Brian could feel the way she looked at him while he scribbled his number down. He didn’t expect the slip of paper to even make it into the store. While she went across the glass-encased bridge to her work, Brian walked down the grubby concrete stairs of the parking garage to the street, then down two blocks to his own building. The first floor of Liberty Plaza had spaces for two businesses, but both were vacant. He walked up the escalator to the second floor. The escalator wasn’t running, and hadn’t been for a while, making it an ugly and expensive staircase. The second floor held a Thai restaurant and a baseball card shop that only die-hards would have known about. He took the elevator one flight up, passed the doors to Ty-Lin International and Van Ness Mooney Attorneys at Law, to the Corporation Services Company.

Brian weaved his way through the maze to his cubicle and sat down to check his email for any new work assignments.

Sandy popped up over the edge again. “Hey, Brian! So, you and Tracy?”

“Nah.”

Her full cheeks fell. “Really? But you guys seemed so happy when you left.”

“Yeah. Everything was fine until this morning, actually,” he said.

Mike jumped up on Brian’s other side. “This morning, eh?”

“Yeah. But it was weird. As soon as I started talking about the haunted house, she acted really strange. I don’t know. Maybe it freaked her out and she repressed it or something.”

Sandy was still smiling when she asked, “Um, what haunted house?”

The oxygen molecules in the room crystalized around Brian. From a distance, he could hear the sound of Mike’s voice, but at first his words didn’t compute. “What’s a haunted house?”

Then Brian snapped back. “Oh. I get it. Ha ha.” He scowled again. “When did you guys even have a chance to come up with this? I was with you all night. Did Tracy text you while I walked over here?”

Sandy was shaking her head, but Mike ran her over. “Wait, I’m still waiting to hear what a haunted house is.”

Brian turned on Mike angrily. “Dude. It’s done. Joke’s over.”

“Brian, I’m not joking, seriously. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Brian sighed. “You know, the basement of the opera house? Last night? They converted it for Halloween.”

“They made it hallow?” Sandy asked.

“What’s a ween?” Mike asked.

“Halloween,” Brian repeated. “Ha-low-ween.” He grabbed his calendar. “Right here!”

He scanned October. The square for the 31^st was completely empty except for the numbers and his own handwriting. It said, “Staff meeting. 1:00.”

“Fine. It’s not in this one. Look.” He tapped on his browser icon, then on the Google bookmark. He typed in “Halloween.”

“No results found,” it said. “Did you mean hallowed?”

The results for “hallowed” were all articles about the Lord’s Prayer.

Mike had come around behind Brian and was looking at the screen over his shoulder. “Oo. Try ‘hallow wiener.’ See what you get.”

Sandy cracked up.

Brian’s mouth felt coated in something thick, like tasteless jelly. His jaw began to buzz, and he recognized the precursor to nausea.

“I gotta’ get some air.” He stepped around Mike, bumping him a bit as he made his way out of the cubicle. Then he stumbled toward the front door.

Mike called after him. “Hey, if you want me to keep doing your research on hallow wieners, I’m going to use your computer for that, okay?”

Brian could hear Sandy laughing as he left Corporation Services Company. He decided the elevator would just make things worse, so he found the stairs. He only went down to the second floor, then pushed out of the dark stairway into the well-lit, open heart of Liberty Plaza. He almost ran down the unmoving escalator and out the main doors to the street.

The day was entirely normal. He tried to remember if there had been any Halloween decorations the day before. No one was in costume, but then, why would they be? Halloween wasn’t for a few days. Still, he knew where he could check, where he could find proof.

He headed down Liberty Street three blocks to the Reed Opera House. It was closed. The signs said the mall would open at 11. There was no mention of a haunted house, no cotton spider webs, no orange and purple Christmas lights. Nothing.

He scanned the street again, looking for some decoration in a shop front window that would vindicate him. Nothing.

Four gutter-punk kids walked by him. “Hey, man, got a cigarette?” one of them asked.

“Halloween,” Brian said. “You’ve heard of it, right?”

“Um, sure,” the kid said. “Got a cigarette?”

“You have? You’ve heard of it?”

“It’s a restaurant, right?” the kid guessed. “A club? A band?”

Brian shook his head. “The holiday. The holiday? You know, when kids put on costumes and go door to door, asking for candy?”

The kid sneered. “Look, I don’t want candy and this isn’t a costume. I just want a cigarette, not your religion lecture, okay?”

“No, I… You’ve never? No, I don’t have any cigarettes.”

“Screw you then, freak!” the kid said, and flipped Brian off. The other gutter-punks chuckled and continued up the street.

Brian barely had time for shame or anger, because when he looked away from the kids, he saw the old woman from the night before. He caught a glimpse of her down on the next corner, just before she passed out of sight. He was pretty sure it was her, though. He went after her, walking as fast as he could, fighting the urge to run.

At the corner, he found he hadn’t made up much ground. She was bookin’ it, too, nearly to Commercial Street. He almost caught up to her there, but he got caught waiting for a light. She made it all the way to the waterfront park before he was close enough to catch her. Then he felt unsure of himself. He couldn’t call out her name, because he didn’t know it. Would this raggedy, homeless old lady respond to “Ma’am”?

He followed her to the carousel. It wasn’t running yet, but the building was open so that the coffee cart inside could make money early, selling lattes to the parents who brought their young children to play on the equipment during the school day. The old woman went right inside. Brian hesitated, then followed.

Even though the carousel wasn’t running, all the lights had been turned on for the sake of the patrons of the coffee cart in the corner. A line of three people waited for coffee, but the old woman wasn’t among them. Brian walked around the carousel, looking for her. The room was surrounded by windows on three sides, letting in the bright morning light. The lights in the gift shop were still off, but Brian could clearly see that the woman hadn’t crossed the roped-off line into the store. He walked around inside the huge space, filled mostly with the tent above the carousel made of strings of lights rising to a point high above. Brian wasn’t really examining the carousel but taking in its details in glances as he scanned for the old woman. It was all little lights and mirrors displaying the ornate wooden horses who pawed at the air, three abreast, their bridles and saddles lacquered to a high shine and inlaid with plastic jewels. Calliope music echoed through the open space around the carousel, and though Brian could see the two speakers mounted on one of the four columns that held up the vaulted ceiling housing the carousel, the sound seemed to come from everywhere. He didn’t know how the barista could maintain his sanity doing such a menial job in the midst of that pounding, horrid sound.

He passed one of the pairs of vending machines that stood in the corners selling soda and sports drinks, and started making his way around the back of the carousel, when a door behind him closed. He turned and saw the old woman coming out of the bathroom. No wonder she’d been moving so fast, he thought. She was wearing the same loose slacks, the same puffy shirt, and a vest. In the light, he could tell it was the lining to a winter coat, puffy but frayed and leaking cotton in places.

She recognized him, too, and started coming at him, raising that pointing finger. “You,” she said. “I saw you through the veil. All alone in the basement, surrounded by shadows that screamed and yelled at me. I cursed you back to hell. What are you doing here?”

Brian stepped toward her, and she stopped suddenly, dropping her hand. “Yes, I saw you, too. You cursed me, and… and you win. You win. I believe.”

“Sure, you believe now. You’ve seen the light?”

“Um, yeah, I guess.” Brian still felt confused.

“You don’t sound sure. What do you believe in?”

He looked at the floor and thought about the right answer. He knew there had to be one, something he was supposed to say that would make her lift the curse. He just had to find those magic words.

“In fear. I believe in fear. You win. I’m scared. I’m scared, okay. You win. So, bring it back, please.”

The old woman cocked her head to the side. Was she smiling? Frowning? He couldn’t tell what all those wrinkles meant. “If it scares you, why do you want it back?” she asked.

“Because no one will believe me,” Brian said. “It’s a crazy thing. Maybe a pointless, stupid thing. But at least it’s a kind of craziness we can all admit to, you know? Not like all the other craziness we have to pretend about. So bring it back, please! Please?”

Now she was frowning. “Bring what back?”

“Halloween!”

“Can’t help you,” she said. “Never heard of it.”