Page 19 of Scaredy Cat
I grit my teeth together, feeling my friends’ eyes on me from just a few feet away. After I stumbled through telling them most of what happened, we immediately tracked down the manager I saw bully the dad into leaving earlier. I hoped she’d be sympathetic, at the very least. Though part of me had really hoped she would charge in with her weaponized walkie and golook for the guy who cornered me and spread his blood on my lips.
“Yes, I understand that,” I say slowly, like that’s the issue here. “I get he’s not an actor here. I think maybe he snuck in, or?—”
“It would be really hard for a guy in a mask to sneak in, go upstairs, and wait for you. Are you saying he wasspecificallywaiting for you?” she adds, looking me over as if to say I don’t seem special enough for a crazy guy to put in that much effort to find me.
Suddenly, I can’t decide whether to be offended or just affronted. I roll my eyes up at the sky, as if I’ll get some help, and let out a breath. “He had a knife,” I say. “He smeared blood on my face.”
“Fake blood,” she assumes, and I shake my head.
“Realblood. He cut himself, and?—”
“Cuthimself?” Her brows jerk up in surprise. Voices coming from the haunt get her attention, and the moment she looks away, I know this is a battle I’ve lost. “Listen, I have to take care of whatever’s going on with the fog machines. I’m sorry you got scared, and I’m sorry if any of our actors freaked you out, even though that’s sort of what they’re here to do.”
I officially hate walkie-talkie manager.
“But I need to make sure my outlets are still working.” She gives me a quick, distracted smile, reaching a hand to the walkie-talkie on her belt, and before I can answer, she’s gone, striding away in her no-nonsense shoes to catch up to the two firefighters walking out of the building. My eyes narrow as frustration tingles up my spine, and I cross my arms over my chest as her attention fades from me completely.
“You know, I liked her until about now,” I mumble to Madison as she comes up to throw an arm over my shoulders. “I’m not kidding, or making this up, by the way.”
“Obviously,” Brynn agrees. With her hands on her hips, she watches the manager laughing with the firefighters, looking unimpressed. “It’s clear to anyone with a brain you aren’t making it up.” She hesitates, then adds, “What do you want to do?”
“We could report it?” Madison offers. “We could go to the cops and at least have a report made, just in case—” She breaks off as I shake my head, a scoff on my lips.
“You think they’d take me seriously? I’d be in there telling them, ‘A masked man at a haunted house cornered me in a slaughterhouse room and scared me.’ Do you know what they’d think?” Glancing at both of them, I can see that they do, in fact, know what the police would think of me in that scenario.
“I just want to go home.” Adrenaline still rushes through my veins, causing my hand to shake as I run my fingers through my hair. “Not that I’ll ever sleep again. But I want to go home and drink too much coffee and just be anywhere but here.”
They don’t argue with me, which comes as a bit of a surprise. Though I have to assume that they know there’s really nothing else I can do about it. Immediately I shoot down their offer of coming back to my place with me. I’d feel bad if they did, since Brynn works in the morning, and I don’t want them to have to deal with the drive back to Chicago at some ungodly hour when the sun has just risen.
“I’ll be fine,” I sigh, giving both of them a quick hug when we’re back to where our cars are parked on the street. My little sedan looks dingy next to Madison’s shiny Charger, the blue paint gleaming and reflecting the flashing lights of the firetruck a few yards down the street. “I love you guys, and I appreciate you almost as much as iced coffee.”
Brynn snorts and pulls me in for another quick hug, her arm going around my shoulders. “Just forget about it, okay?” she advises. “It was probably some weirdo just looking to scaresomeone. No offense to your favorite activity, but haunted houses don’t usually attract pillars of society as employees.”
I bite my lip, stopping my response that Dusk House isn’t really the same as the haunts I normally go to. It’s filled with volunteers wanting to make a kid’s night better. Not adults with an addiction to scaring people and seeing the terror on their faces. No, this feels…different. But I can’t figure out what about him is sounding alarm bells, considering the way I can still feel my heart beating just a little too quickly in my chest.
Calm down, Persy,I silently reprimand myself as I slide into the driver’s seat of my car.Just calm down, and think.
But the best I can do is turn on my engine and blast my music, hoping it wipes away the last of the fog that seeped into my brain so I can process the event clearly during the hour drive home.
Even with the hour drive I spend with music filling every crevice of my brain, I’m not much better when I get home. As soon as I’ve parked, my hand comes up, fingers running over the blood stained on my lips. It’s dried now, though I managed to clean most of it off with my sleeve, and I’m sure I’ll need to scrub my face with a sponge to remove the last of it that’s stubbornly sticking to my skin.
I refuse to eventhinkabout the idea that he could have some blood-borne illness, or a parasite that he could’ve transferred to me. The idea isn’t something I can really focus on right now, when the rest of me is in overdrive and trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do after what happened at Dusk House barely an hour and a half ago.
Walking into my house, I swear I can still feel the brush of his lips against mine, which prompts a shiver to go up my spine, giving me the sensation that someone is watching me. I even stop, unable to convince myself otherwise, and roll my stiff shoulders as I turn to look back at my driveway, the street, andthe lit front window in Mrs. Elmore’s house. I don’t see any movement there tonight, but it’s late enough that she might be in bed.
Or, I suppose, there’s always the chance that the ancient woman who was probably around to see the fall of the dinosaurs has finally had enough of life and simply perished on her kitchen floor. But if that’s the case, I will not be the one finding her.
Tonight I double-check the lock on the door behind me, then give it one more tug just to be sure. I do the same with the patio door that leads from my kitchen to the small, worn deck beyond. While I’m usually not someone who needs to repeat the ritual more than once, I find myself walking between them and checking again as if they could have magically come unlocked.
There’s nothing to be afraid of,I promise myself, finally tearing myself away from the curtain-covered window where I’m peering out to the street beyond. On my quiet little street in Town of Pines, Indiana, there’s no traffic at this time of night. Then again, there’s not much traffic atanytime of day or night. Off the beaten path and away from the town’s small center means that the only ones coming back here are residents, who are usually home by a reasonable hour instead of cruising the pothole-laden street outside at night.
But it still takes me too long to pull away, and even longer to finally convince myself that I need to shower away the remnants of blood and the creeping, crawling feeling making my skin itch.
The shower is hot and inviting, and I duck under the water with a grateful sigh. It’s enough to help clear my head, at least for the most part, and I can feel the anxious tension in my shoulders slowly fade as I relax with my face turned up to the spray. The water is the only thing I can hear, and my ears are full of the rushing, echoing sound, no matter how hard I listen.
There’s nothing to be afraid of,I tell myself again, even mouthing the words to make them more real, more solid in theconfines of my dimly lit, cozy bathroom. Whatever happened at the haunt didn’t follow me back here. The man in the wolf-skull mask doesn’t know where I live, or anything about me except?—
Scaredy Cat.
