BLOOD MANOR

The haunted house was a cartoon castle made out of mottled fiberglass, where life-sized paintings of ghouls and monsters menaced their terrified victims in the vaulted windows. From twin turrets on either side, sculpted figures of a weather-beaten hag and a demon beckoned to carnival goers in stiff, mechanical motions.

The hag looked especially old and worn, almost colorless in the harsh Florida sun. A giant bat loomed over the ride entrance with outstretched wings while empty coffin-shaped cars disappeared below, into the dark mouth of the ride.

A grotesque image of a Transylvanian Count painted on a giant plywood silhouette towered over the attraction. Blood dripped down from his fangs to form the gothic red letters of the sign:

BLOOD MANOR!!!

Pete couldn't believe his eyes. A classic, undiscovered spookhouse smack in the middle of a seedy Tallahassee fairground. Practically in his own backyard.

"My God. It's incredible." Pete looked at Aileen in disbelief. He could tell by the distinctive ride cars this was an authentic Pretzel Amusement Company production---the holy grail of dark ride enthusiasts. "I can't believe I never heard of it before."

"Well, look around." Aileen gestured at the attractions. "I don't know how this dump stays in business."

Across the midway stood a Wild Mouse ride that looked to be at least thirty years old. The loud, irregular clacking was enough to keep most people away from it. Next to that was an empty Tilt-A-Whirl with a chained off queue. A hand painted sign read Closed until further notice. The sign looked like it had been there for a while.

"Yeah. It ain't Disneyworld, that's for sure." Pete rubbed his hands together. "Well, let's go."

"Hold on a sec. I want to get a few shots." Aileen got her little Powershot out and started snapping away. Pete stood behind her in the sparse crowd, contemplating the impact this discovery would have when he posted the article.

His web site, The Dark Rider, was the definitive site for vintage dark ride enthusiasts. There were detailed listings of all the old-school dark rides in every amusement park known to man, from Miami to British Columbia. Pete knew every gag, every stunt, and every last monster on every ride by heart.

But he had never heard of Blood Manor. He felt like an archeologist stumbling across an undiscovered pyramid. Who knew what cheesy horrors waited inside?

"Ready?" Aileen smiled and put her hand on Pete's shoulder. Normally that would have made him uncomfortable---he wanted their relationship to stay casual. But he was too delighted with the new discovery to care.

"I was born ready." He looked again at the gaudy plywood Count, staring down at them with bloodshot eyes. "I love how they actually used exclamation points in the name."

Aileen laughed. "I know, right? Like they thought plain old Blood Manor might be too subtle."

The line for Blood Manor was short, just a few teenagers and a nervous-looking Korean family. Pete and Aileen boarded one of the cars and it banged through the giant bat doors. Blacklights flooded the dark interior as pre-recorded shrieks and moans blared from hidden speakers.

The first gag was a dummy in a vampire costume, mechanically lifting its arms to spread a cloak attached to the claws.

"Velcome to Blood Manor! Ve've been dy-ingk for new blood! Ha-ha-ha-ha!"

"Oh, my God! Didn't see that one coming!" Pete nudged Aileen and they both laughed. They rolled past a few standard haunted house gags: a moth-eaten werewolf chained to the wall, some day-glo spooks circling overhead on a track. Pop-up ghoul heads, fired by air-powered actuators, made random appearances along the track.

Pete noted the werewolf didn't move, even though an actuator rod was visibly attached to its back. Instead of tilting menacingly toward them as they passed, it just stared into the dark with a frozen snarl.

So far, the lost ride was turning out to be a minor disappointment. There weren't any gags steeped in high strangeness, the kind that left you more confused than frightened. Like at The Haunted Shack in Oakdale, which held one of Pete's all-time favorite monsters: a giant chicken with huge, bulging eyes and a beak full of twisted fangs. It popped out of a bathtub for some inexplicable reason, which was why Pete loved it. That kind of horrific non sequitur was rare, but if Blood Manor could pull off something equally bizarre it's kitsch factor would shoot up dramatically.

"It sounds like the speakers are blown!" Pete shouted over the racket. Aileen nodded as they rounded the corner then grabbed his arm. She started laughing and pointed at the next montage.

A gigantic rubber bat was latched onto a female victim, lying on top of her. A barely-concealed piston arm drove the bat at high speed. It frantically humped up and down on the victim as it fed.

Paydirt, Pete thought.

"Good lord! Raped by a vampire bat!" Aileen's flash went off as she recorded the sight for posterity.

Pete laughed. "Man! Look at him go!"

The rest of the three-minute ride was the usual lot of poorly articulated monsters and spooks. Most of them were covered in dust and needed touching up. As Pete and Aileen rounded the corner for the finale gag they were still laughing about the rapist bat.

The car lurched to a stop, leaving them face to face with an enormous Grim Reaper. The hooded figure, a skull mask in a worn, black robe, swung out to face them with a sinister laugh. As the Reaper took aim at them with his plastic scythe, a high-speed strobe light began firing. Pete wouldn't have thought it could actually startle him, but he jumped. It was actually a good gag---the strobes gave the Reaper a realistic motion.

He waited for the skeleton to swing back out of their way, but nothing happened. The Reaper's recorded laugh seemed to go on far too long, until Pete wondered if the ride was stuck. He turned toward Aileen, trying to shield his eyes from the pulsing strobes. He couldn't seem to find her in the blinding flash of the lights. The lights...

His temples began throbbing and he felt dizzy.

"Aileen? I think something's wrong. I..." There was a sudden, nauseating rush of delirium and pain. Pete squeezed his eyes closed and leaned forward, trying to fight the urge to vomit.

Then the laughter stopped, and the blaring noise of the haunted house was gone as well. Blood Manor was perfectly quiet. He rose up and opened his eyes, slowly. Everything was dark.

"Aileen?"

No answer. No sound, anywhere.

Should I get out and try to find an exit?

"Hello? Anyone?"

His voice seemed to fade away in the darkness, like the last flicker of a dying ember. Pete turned in the car to look around. He could barely make out the motionless animatronic figures in the gloom, but there didn't seem to be anyone else but him.

When he turned back, the Grim Reaper still stood before him. Pete looked out the side of the cart to see if there was a safe place to step down, but it was too dark to see the floor. He noticed something---a motion in the corner of his eye.

The Reaper had moved. Pete's gut twisted in a brief spasm of fear, then calmed almost as quickly. No---the figure hadn't moved. It still stood there, motionless.

Then a much greater fear gripped Pete. The Reaper wasn't a skeleton mask in a cheap robe.

Leathery scraps of flesh lined the right side of the skull from the eye socket to the bared teeth. Exposed bone looked mineralized with age, almost green. A single dead, pale eye rolled in the left socket.

A death’s-head grinned down at him from beneath a rotting black cowl.

Pete felt a scream forming deep in his chest, but he had no breath. He couldn't make a sound.

The Reaper began to laugh, but it was no longer a cheap recording. The voice was a dusty, ragged hiss, like a ruined pipe organ. It swirled through Pete's brain as creaking skeletal jaws began moving in the horrible face.

Peter. Let us out.

The Reaper stretched a tattered arm towards Pete. Talons of bone clutched empty black air, inches from his face.

Let us out.

There was a high-pitched screaming. It took Pete a moment to realize that it wasn't him. The screams came from the loudspeakers over the queue for Blood Manor.

He was back outside, in the light of the midway, leaning over the exit railing and puking his guts out. Aileen was holding his shoulders, saying something he couldn't understand.

Pete tried to straighten up and look at her, but everything was spinning and he couldn't focus. He gripped the handrail tighter until his head began to clear. Aileen's fingers dug into him.

"Pete! Can you hear me?"

He nodded his head but couldn't speak. A small crowd of gawkers watched him. The teenagers that had gone through ahead of them were laughing, jostling each other. He wanted to flip them off but his hands were too shaky.

"Let's go sit down." Aileen guided him out of the exit queue and over to a bench. They sat there for a moment as Pete took some deep breaths. Aileen pulled a bottle of water from her bag and gave it to him.

Pete took a swallow of the water and rinsed his mouth with it, spitting the sharp taste of vomit to the ground. He shook his head.

"Christ...what happened?"

"As soon as those strobe lights hit us, you started shaking. Like you were having a seizure." Aileen nervously pulled a strand of hair from her face as she gazed at him. "They had to stop the ride so I could get you out of there."

"But...I've been under strobe lights before. Lots of times." Pete tried to sound normal, but he felt ghastly.

"I don't know. Maybe those were blinking at just the right speed or something." Aileen felt his forehead. "God, you're ice cold."

"I...I'm okay now. I think." Pete took another deep breath, slowly. He turned to Aileen, meeting her worried eyes as she looked him over. He started to tell her about the Reaper, but stopped. What would he say?

Also, the Grim Reaper was real and wanted me to let him out?

Instead he forced a laugh. "Well, I don't think I'll be going back to Blood Manor anytime soon."

"No kidding," Aileen shivered. "You scared the piss out of me. It was like you weren't even there anymore."

"I'm sorry. I..."

Pete looked back to the haunted house and felt nausea rise up in his throat. The kitschy charm of the place was gone. He could feel the manic eyes of the Count blazing down at him from the plywood sign.

Let us out.

***

That night Pete logged on to Wikipedia to look up strobe light seizures. What he found was encouraging, at first:

Photosensitive epilepsy seizures are triggered by visual stimuli that form patterns in time or space, such as flashing lights, bold patterns, or regular moving patterns.

Okay, Pete thought. That sounds like what happened to me. Kind of.

But as he read further he found: Symptoms generally first appear during childhood or adolescence, peaking around the onset of puberty. People rarely develop symptoms after the age of 20.

He followed a link to the Epilepsy Foundation site but it told him pretty much the same thing. It was almost unheard of to develop epilepsy out of the blue---especially if you were in your thirties.

And there wasn't anything about hallucinations. Apparently, most seizures involved a loss of consciousness, or amnesia about the event. Not vivid, tripped-out nightmares.

Aileen had made him promise to see a doctor as soon as he could make an appointment. As it was, he barely convinced her not to take him to the emergency room after the trip through the haunted house.

Pete wasn't ready to see a doctor, though. Something happened to him in there, something bad. But he didn't want to find out it was the onset of a brain tumor.

Or maybe...mental illness. Insanity.

An image of Blood Manor popped into his head. But instead of the vampire on the cut-out sign, it was Pete in a straightjacket sporting fright-wig hair. Laughing maniacally.

The dripping red letters underneath read CRAAAZY!!!

No, God damn it. I'm not crazy, Pete thought. It was the strobes. I wigged out because of the strobes.

He sat at his desk, tapping the side of his laptop for a moment. Then he pulled up the Dark Rider site in a morbid desire to test himself. As soon as he saw the index page, covered with animated GIF's of spookhouse monsters, he had to close it. Pete felt a sharp flutter of panic that ran from his stomach to his throat.

Too soon. Well, that was understandable.

He sat at his desk for a while trying to think if anything similar had ever happened to him before, even if it was minor. Nothing came to him. No seizures, no hallucinations.

His thoughts were interrupted by a popping sound behind him, followed by a soft hiss. It was a sound he knew all too well; from every creepy amusement house he'd ever been to.

An air-powered actuator. The kind used to make scary heads pop up from behind styrofoam tombstones.

Pete spun in his chair just in time to see a grotesque papier-mâché mask sink below the side of his bed. He recognized the mask, a crude demon with leering yellow eyes set in a blunt, red face. It was old and worn, with fading paint. Flakes of paper peeled off like decayed flesh. It was from Witch Castle, a defunct ride at Salisbury Beach, in Maryland. The place had been closed for years - Pete knew because he wrote the article about it.

He felt stabbing panic again, but this time it flared through his entire body. His muscles turned rigid, frozen, like they were carved from marble.

Let us out, Peter.

Another head sprang up, trailing a dirty white sheet. This one had the face of a screaming victim: horrid, bulging painted eyes stared at him as it dropped slowly behind the bed with a soft hiss. The sheet trailing the head caught on the bed's comforter; a little piece of horror that didn't have the good grace to disappear.

Something unseen pulled the corner of the sheet the rest of the way down.

Pete desperately wanted to run, screaming. But he couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. After a long time---a very long time---he managed to stand up. For a brief moment, despite his horror, he wanted to look behind the bed. Just to see. Maybe...maybe it was all a joke. A prank Aileen had worked up.

Don't look, his mind warned him. Don't you dare look. Flashes of light went off in his head, as if he'd rubbed his eyes too hard. Everything felt like it was spinning, but at least now he could move. That was the important thing---to move. Get away.

Get to the hospital. Now.

He backed away from his desk, never taking his eyes off the spot where the pop-up heads had disappeared behind the bed. At his bedroom door, he turned to flee. He sprinted down the upstairs hallway towards the staircase.

He stopped. Something was climbing up the stairs, something that threw a hideous shadow on the wall from below.

"No. No...it can't..."

A mannequin creaked stiffly around the staircase with sharp, jerking motions, punctuated by soft hissing and pops. Pete recognized it at once---the headless barker from The Haunted House, on the Ocean City boardwalk.

The body wore a cheap synthetic cape around its shoulders, a string tie hanging limply down its bloodstained white shirt. It carried its rubbery, severed head in one hand as it lurched towards him, slowly.

The mouth of the dummy head began to twitch. Electric servos forced the lips up and down mechanically, like the mouth of a carp. A recording echoed through the hallway, distorted and cracked as if played through old loudspeakers.

“Step right this way for the scariest ride on Earth!”

"Go away," Pete whispered. "Please, go away..."

“Once you enter, you may never leave! Ha ha ha ha!”

The lights went out and from nowhere, blacklight filled the hallway. The barker's shirt blossomed in a bright violet glow. The painted red bloodstains turned to black as it climbed the stairs.

“Let us out, Peter. Before we make you go CRAAAZY!!!”

A scream finally tore from Pete's throat. More shadows were massing below on the stairway, all lurching and shuffling with mechanical stiffness. The clacking of metal gears filled the hallway. Pete turned to run but the hallway was gone.

He found himself on a vortex tunnel--a bridge running through a giant, rotating barrel, lined with day-glo skulls and bats. It stretched on for what seemed to be infinity, the vanishing point stopping in pitch dark.

Behind him, a crowd of dark shapes clambered up the stairs, hissing and rattling. He knew all of them, every misshapen horror he had ever rode past in a cart. There was the green-skinned hag from Spook-A-Rama in Coney Island, cackling as her head swung from side to side. Next to her a giant rat from The Ghost Ship clawed fitfully at the dark. Its moth-eaten fur was falling out in patches, revealing crude seams in the creature's plastic hide.

The chicken monster from The Haunted Shack hobbled towards him with long, twisted fangs in its beak.

"Oh God. Someone help me."

Pete turned and ran across the vortex. Pop-up heads followed him alongside the bridge with a rat-tat-tat of compressed air bursts. Behind him the mob of creatures scraping and shuffling. Drawing closer.

Peter.

A dusty, hollow voice stopped him. He looked up, into the rictus of the Reaper's dead face. Pete dropped to his knees. He didn't have the strength left to scream.

"Please. Leave me alone."

We'll leave you, Peter. If you let us out.

The Reaper towered over him, leaning on his enormous scythe. A milky eyeball rolled down to fix him in a cold stare. One long, bony finger extended out to him.

We know what you long for. All the things you've lost.

Pete held an arm up defensively against the hideous gaze, almost in tears. "W-what things? What do you mean?"

Once we haunted the shadows. The lonely places. Your kind clung to each other in the dark hours, praying for the light.

The Reaper laughed, malice in its breathless voice. But your fear diminished over ages. We became an amusement.

"No. You...you're not real," Pete moaned. "None of this is real."

Fear is real, Peter. And you gathered it up. Inside you.

A chill of ice came over Pete as the Reaper leaned in close, the rotting face just inches away.

Now, let us out.

From out of the gloom came the flicker of rapid-firing strobes. Pete's head began to throb and a rush of nausea overtook him. He tried to cover his eyes but he fell into a sickening delirium almost immediately. Falling forward, Pete felt his stomach curdle and heave. He thought he was going to vomit. But instead of bile, something was crawling from Pete's mouth.

Something alive.

A pitch black river spilled out from deep inside him, like a drop of ink branching out through a glass of water. The force of it threw Pete backward and he landed on his back. All he could do was watch as his life drained out along with the black torrent.

Every clumsy horror from every haunted house he had ever known came clawing out from him, in their true forms. And they were eager to renew their ancient work.