![]() Of being able to glance at a room and memorize all the details. Staying safe, the stories seemed to say, was just a matter of attention. The books were frightening, but in a new way, cool and arch, evil reduced to a solvable puzzle. When I heard the giggling behind me, people clutching one another while proclaiming that they weren’t scared, not at all, that this was stupid-that’s when I’d spring up and yell as loud as I could.īetween groups, I read Sherlock Holmes, speeding through these civilized stories of murder, populated with poison darts and exotic jellyfish. I could track the group’s movements by the domino of screams from the other rooms. Whenever a group started through the haunted house, the girl taking tickets would shout “Bloody buckets!” I’d freeze, my head down on a cobwebby desk, my heartbeat in my ears. Working at the haunted house was a precise punishment of my own design, a way to force myself to undergo a kind of psychological conditioning. I lay awake at night, tortured by the belief that I would be murdered in my sleep. ![]() ![]() It wasn’t a particularly good job for me-even at thirteen, I was deathly afraid of the dark. I wore the uniform from my Catholic school, and an older girl did my makeup, ghoulish black circles around my eyes. Mine was a school scene, detention for eternity: skeletons chained to desks, a looping soundtrack with creaking doors and chuckling ghosts. There were a number of rooms, each assigned to a teen-ager working for six bucks an hour. It was inside an old dairy barn, repurposed with plastic sheeting and black lights, the air tinged with chemicals from the fog machine. When I was thirteen, I worked for a season at a haunted house.
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