“Does that really make a difference in the moment?” she asked.
“Well, I worked on a haunted hayride when I was in high school. So I think the illusion is ruined for me.”
“Really?” She seemed out-of-proportion delighted by his seasonal teenage job. “What did you do?”
“Well, I started in the support crew—mixing up vats of cooked spaghetti and red food coloring for example.”
“What?”
“Yeah, you have no idea what goes on behind the scenes to make the experience seem authentic.”
“Kind of like being a bridesmaid.”
He barked a laugh. “Yeah, well, I worked my way up over the years. My last year there I was Freddy Krueger, complete with the long fingernail-knives.”
“Oooh! I’m impressed. And then what? You graduated high school and that was the end of your haunted hayride career?”
“Nope,” Cam said. “Never graduated. Just moved on.” He had to force himself to let up on the gas pedal. They were going too fast, even for him. “Got my high school equivalency later, though,” he added, seized with the desire that she not think him any dumber than necessary. He cleared his throat. “Anyway, I can’t believe you’d do EdgeWalk one day and then let a dinky little tourist trap haunted house get the best of you. Come on. I have a professional interest.”
“No way. No. Way.”
“I dare you. Let’s make another bet.”
“Hmm.” He glanced over. She had her head tilted and one finger pressed against a cheek in an exaggerated “I’m thinking” posture. “What do I get if I do it?”
“I’ll buy you dinner.”
She pretended to think about it for a few more seconds. “No. Well, yes, you can buy me dinner, but you know what I really want.”
“What are you? A professional cock-blocker?” he said, laughing, knowing he was going to agree.
“Not usually!” she said. “But I’m deriving a strange sort of enjoyment from it in your particular case.”
The fucked-up thing was that he sort of was, too. He glanced at her again, then forced his eyes back to the road. But the image of her stayed with him, burned into his retinas. She’d worn her hair down today. She looked different without the ponytail. Softer. And her eyes had been twinkling. He liked that he could make her eyes do that.
So he stuck his hand over the center console for her to shake and said, “You got yourself a deal. You do the haunted house, and I stay pure another twenty-four hours.”
An hour later, they were lined up outside Nightmares Fear Factory, which Jane, who had studied the attraction’s Wikipedia page while he found parking, informed Cameron was the oldest continuously operating haunted house in North America.
“This is a former coffin factory, too,” she said, reading on her phone as they approached the entrance. “Its owner was supposedly killed when a stack of coffins fell on him. Now that is a nice touch.” It appealed to the storyteller in her.
A sullen teenage employee explained the rules to them. You could shout “nightmares” if you were panicking and needed out, and “something” would come get you. But from then on, your name would be forever entered on the house’s “chicken list,” which he reported was one hundred and thirty thousand names long and counting.
“I want you to know that I have absolutely no problem with my name going on that list,” she told Cameron. “They need a better deterrent than that.” She was joking to cover her fear. But actually the chicken list was kind of a deterrent. Normally, she wouldn’t care about appearing on it, but for some reason she wanted to show Cameron that she wasn’t afraid of silly things. For heaven’s sake, the man had been a soldier in a combat zone, and she couldn’t face a little fake gore?
“But what if you bail and once you’re gone, I strike up a conversation with a nice young lady?” Cameron said. It should have been a gross threat, but he was smiling as he said it. He was trying to make her feel better by making her laugh.
“I bet you’ve never picked up a girl in a haunted house before,” she said, using the banter to distract herself. But suddenly, she was thinking of some girl shrieking and grabbing Cameron’s hand for “comfort.”
“Well, there was this barn portion of the haunted hayride, and it was really, really dark in that barn…”
Hmm. Elise said Cameron had burned down a barn in his youth…There was also the rumor that he’d gotten a girl pregnant. She really wanted to know about that one. She could see how young Cameron, if he was as handsome and wild as the current incarnation, would be a total heartbreaker.
A low, ghostly moan came from the speakers that pumped “ambience” onto the sidewalk, and Jane winced. She tried to think of a teenaged Cameron mixing red food coloring into spaghetti. It was all fake, she reminded herself. Fake, fake, fake.
“You ready?” he asked.
She gulped, but…what the hell. “Ready.”
They stepped into the house and were plunged into total darkness.
Her heart rate quadrupled, and she grabbed for his hand. She tried to tell herself that nothing had even happened yet.
Follow the red dots of light. That’s what the kid out front had said. The faster they did that, the faster they’d be done. She searched the floor, and when she located them, she gave Cameron a shove.
“We really don’t have to do this,” he whispered.
“Go!” she said, and shoved harder.
It wasn’t actually so bad once she got the hang of it.
And by “got the hang of it,” Jane meant, “figured out that if she plastered herself to Cameron’s back and closed her eyes, she could move through the haunted house without actually having to see anything.”
She could deal with the sounds, it turned out. They were mostly people screaming, chain saws, eerie moans, that kind of thing. They were scary sounds, yes, but without the accompanying visuals, she could more easily classify them as generic haunted house noises.
“Go faster,” she kept whispering to Cameron. To his credit, he was obeying her. He had dropped the teasing and wasn’t trying to force her to experience any of it.
So she was getting into kind of a…well, not a groove, but they were moving forward, and her coping mechanisms were working. She was even starting to feel kind of smug that she’d managed to game the whole system. Suck it, Nightmares Fear Factory.
There was also the part where being plastered to Cameron wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Surprisingly. His back was solid underneath her, hard where she was soft, and his muscles bunched and shifted as he moved.
Then they started touching her, and that was the end of her little swoony moment.
It was a hand on her back first. A light touch—there and then gone. But she screamed and hugged Cameron even as she tried to shake the hand off. She had been holding on to the back of his T-shirt, gripping handfuls of the fabric and resting her forehead on his back to hide her eyes as they shuffled forward, but now she wrapped her arms around him like she was riding behind him on a motorcycle.
“It’s not real,” he said as he continued to press onward. “None of it is real.”
She nodded against the muscles of his back, unable to speak.
“Do you want to say the password and get out of here?”
“No!” She feared what saying the password would bring. The kid outside had said, “something” would come for them. Would that “something” separate them? Because she would rather be here with Cameron, where she didn’t have to open her eyes, than on her own for even a minute.
But then something latched on to her leg. Something low, on the ground. And it grabbed. Took hold and pulled so hard that she lost her grip on Cameron as he continued to move forward. She stumbled, trying to catch up to him, but she couldn’t get her leg free.
“Jane!” Cameron called, but then there was something else, right up against her face, whispering low and gruff in her ear, “Jaannnnneee.” Whatever it was ran a finger down the back of her neck.
She was beyond screaming. She started to cry.
But then there was Cameron. The thing that had been terrorizing her had been touching her lightly, after that initial sharp grab anyway, running a finger almost imperceptibly along her skin. But now Cameron’s hands were on her, and his touch was the opposite of light. A strong hand grasped hers and pulled her toward him, away from the thing behind her. He pulled her tight to his chest and wrapped his arms around her. She tried to think about the many colors of his tattooed arm, shielding her from the darkness.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his tone urgent, almost like he was scared, too.
“No,” she tried to whisper, but nothing came out. She was ready to shout the password, to do whatever it took to get out, but she couldn’t seem to make her voice work. She shook her head violently back and forth against his chest.
“I’ve got you,” he said, and he scooped her into his arms. She spared a passing thought for what a baby she was, and also for how heavy she must be, but then he started to move, and all she could do was bury her head against his chest and try to stop crying.
Well, shit. That had been a mistake. Cam had thought it would be like the CN Tower. Jane would be spooked, but then she’d conquer her fear and surprise herself by having fun.