The Haunted House- What he Feared

Haunted House- His Greatest Fear

The smell of spent gasoline and day-old garbage assaulted Derrick as he stepped onto the street.

He always waited till the sunset to head to McClouds; that was when the best prospects were out.

Derrick had wanted the alcohol almost an hour before sunset, but he knew that if he intended to go to bed with someone tonight, he needed to pace himself. A woman might accept a man's advances if she was drunk, but they would rarely spend time with a strange drunk while they were sober. This was a lesson Derrick had learned early on, and it was likely the only thing that stopped him from being a full-blown alcoholic.

His phone chirped, and Derrick fished it out hopefully, wanting to see what cutie was texting him so early. He sighed when he recognized Charlene's number, asking if he would be at the bar tonight. Charlene, the one-night stand who wouldn't take a hint. He had slept with her about five months ago, and the sex hadn't been worth the constant dodge he now had to run with her. Despite his better judgment, he'd taken her out a few times since their hook-up, but he had never taken her to bed again. Derrick didn't stop for seconds, and as he put the phone back in his pocket, he knew he'd have to cut her off soon.

Besides, he had other prospects these days.

As he rounded the corner, Derrick couldn't help but see the spotlights in front of the old warehouse that had once been a cannery. The man standing out front was doing his best to catch people's interest, but most of them were heading past without a second look. Derrick could feel the urge to drink, almost as strongly as the urge to bury someone who lived rent-free in his head, but he stopped for a moment as he looked at the sign strung over the door of the warehouse.

Derrick scoffed as he read the sign, "A truly frightening experience or your money back? What bullshit."

The man looked like the titular carnival barker. His jacket was black with red thread to accent the cuffs and collar, not to mention the garish gold buttons that glimmered from the dark cloak. He wore a tall black hat handlebar mustache, and his grin made Derrick think he was not to be trusted. He stood before what looked to be a very old and decrepit warehouse, a place Derrick had driven by a thousand times and never looked at twice, and now it was hung with streamers and cast in the buttery light of two searchlights. The windows of the warehouse danced with a murky half-light, like a fire slowly burning out, and the lack of screaming and giggling teenagers coming back out the front made Derrick wary.

This time of year, an empty Haunted House was always suspicious.

“Come one, come all. See your greatest fears realized, or your money back!”

Derrick turned to fix the man with a disbelieving eye, “That so?”

"That's so, young man. Be warned. This haunted house is unlike anything you've experienced before. This house will show you things you didn't know about yourself and tap into what truly scares you."

Derrick scoffed, but he fished out a twenty and crumpled five, and laid it in the box.

"This better be worth it," Derrick grumbled.

The Barker smiled toothily as he slid the bills into a locked box, "I can assure you, sir. It will be worth every penny."

As Derrick went inside, his phone chirped. He stopped in the entryway and looked down, seeing a picture of an empty stool with a text that asked where he was. It was from Charlene because, of course, it was. She appeared to be waiting to ambush him at his favorite watering hole. He considered just going home and drinking the vodka he had been ignoring in the fridge since he'd come home from work, but decided that he wouldn't let her stop him from having a good time.

Maybe tonight was the perfect opportunity to break it off with her and make it stick.

Derrick stepped into a cloud of smoke as a nearby fog machine belched its payload and was suddenly surrounded by an active bar scene.

It was pretty well done. It looked just like McCloud, the place he’d been heading. McClouds was where he often picked up the best trim, and he would likely find himself there tonight sometime. Derrick didn't like to go to bed sober or alone. When he was alone and sober with his thoughts, he inevitably thought of her.

He groaned as he walked into the bar, wondering if this was one of those religious haunted houses by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. It had all the earmarks. Hazy bar, people milling around, shadowy corners where bad actors just waited to jump out and startle you. Derrick couldn't believe he had just given his money to one of these religious nuts and their revival miracle tents. He supposed he couldn't be too angry. The man had offered a full refund when he got out. Derrick might as well see what there was to the house and then get his twenty-five bucks back.

He approached the bar, not imagining they had any alcohol but willing to play along. The man behind the counter dressed in the usual attire that Thomas always wore. Thomas seemed to love dressing like the odd man out in a barbershop quartet. Suspenders, handlebar mustache, striped waistcoat, shiny black shoes, and immaculately coiffed hair. As he approached the bar, however, he noticed something different. His face looked like someone had used an eraser to make it a flesh-colored smudge. He looked up at Derrick, silent as the grave as he stared eyelessly at him.

Derrick tried to order a gin and tonic, but the Not Thomas just shrugged and went back to what he was doing, turning away from Derrick as he got back to work.

"Hey, I'm talking to you," Derrick yelled, but as he tried to reach over the bar and grab the Not Thomas by the sleeve, the man walked away and went to serve some other oddly smudged individuals at the end of the bar. They all seemed to have that weird thing going on with their faces. Derrick wondered if it were a theme or something and if so, he didn’t get it.

He sighed as he sat back down, waiting for the bartender to come back.

The smudged Thomas clone was more like the real Thomas than he knew.

He and Thomas had gotten into a fight three nights ago, and Derrick's reception at McClouds had been icy ever since. It was Thomas's fault, really. If he wanted to bed Jennett, he should have made his move. Derrick wanted her, Thomas wanted her, but Derrick had struck first, and now Jennett was just another notch on his bedpost. The problem was that when Jennett realized she had been nothing but an evening distraction for Derrick, she had switched to one of the other dive bars in town, and now Thomas blamed him for running her off.

"I don't know why I'm bothering to talk to you," Thomas had said, "It's like being mad at a dog for eating your sandwich. He's a hungry mutt that only knows he wants to eat."

"Seems like the bartender might be a little upset with you."

Derrick jumped and glanced over at a familiar-looking brunette who had set down beside him. She was dressed in a short black dress, her legging artfully ripped, and her shiny black hair hung in her face. When she smiled, he could see teeth that were slowly slipping into unevenness, but he found it charming.

The longer he looked at her, the more familiar she seemed and the less like anyone else he had ever known.

"You must have slept with some girl that he liked."

She was drinking something through a straw with a distinctly fruity smell, but the thickness and the color reminded him more of a bag of blood. As he watched it slide up the straw, he felt a little sick to his stomach. He could see her throat working as she drank, her eyes closing as she enjoyed it, and Derrick was powerless to break her stare as much as he wanted to look away. As a trickle ran down the corner of her mouth, he finally found the strength to clear his throat and glance around the smokey bar.

This was definitely the oddest haunted house he had ever been to, and he was beginning to doubt his previous suspicions of a religious experience.

"Do I know you?" he asked, scanning the bar to see if there was someone else he knew here. The girl was cute, but looking at her made him feel weird in a way he hadn't in a long time. She grinned as she drank, the soupy sound of her drink disappearing up the straw making his skin crawl. It was like listening to someone drain a corpse with a bendy straw.

"Not for long, though you think about me often enough. In a way, I'm the reason you do the things you do. I'm never far from your mind, though you wish I wasn't. You can try to drink me away, Derrick, but I'll never truly be gone."

Derrick laughed, but there was no mirth in it.

He was thinking that the woman had captured his earlier thoughts perfectly.

"Do you always talk in riddles to people you just met in a bar?"

He turned back, but something was different about her. Had she been wearing glasses before? They didn't really fit the elegant dress she was wearing. They were the thick kind that librarians sometimes wore, the kind that are more function than form. She was still pretty, but the glasses looked like a prop on this well-dressed young woman rather than something she needed.

"Only to people who can't understand plain speech."

His phone buzzed, and Derrick checked it to see that Charlene had sent him another text. She wanted to know how he was, to let him know that she was thinking about him. She was so clingy. Why couldn't she take a hint? Didn't she realize that he wasn't being coy when he went home with other women? That he wasn't playing hard to get when he didn't return her calls or answer his door. She wanted to lock him down, but he couldn't stay with her. He'd start seeing that body as it lay in the casket, hear her words as she told him she was leaving, and the only thing that would make it go away would be the drink.

"I'd like to say you've grown into a fine man, but we both know it isn't true. You've changed very little since Highschool, and I doubt you ever will."

"Well, that's something to work with. Did we go to high school together, then? Were you some little nerdlet that I never called back? Maybe some one-night stand who I ghosted after I was done?"

Had she had the pimples when he first started? He had only looked away for a second, but she had just the slightest hint of acne across each cheek, like a dusting of freckles. They weren't the livid pustules of a teen experiencing their first crop but the last light kiss of puberty that an eighteen-year-old might experience before they simply dried up and were no more than a momentary problem after that. She smiled as she noticed him noticing them, and he thought again that her teeth seemed odd. Had she once had braces, maybe?

"Oh no, we were never intimate. I think you would have liked to be, but," She paused long enough to take a sip of her drink, the liquid having returned by some unnoticed bartender, "you were so painfully shy around me. You could speak confidently to any cheerleader or popular girl in school, but you were utterly befuddled by me and my braces and my glasses."

Derrick was speechless.

This girl couldn't be who she was claiming to be.

Lisa was….

"I'm sorry," Derrick said, glancing over and seeing someone he hoped he recognized, "I see someone else I know. I should really say hi to them."

He slid off the barstool and onto wobbly legs that almost spilled him onto the floor.

The young woman, younger now than she had been at the start, smiled at him as she showed off a mouthful of metal, "Take your time, Derrick. I don't have anywhere to be. I'll be waiting for you. I'm always waiting for you." she said, throwing the last at Derrick's back as he rushed off into the small crowd.

He thought the woman's name was Cindy or maybe Chelsea. He only recognized her from the back because that was the most memorable image of her he had in his head. Her blonde hair was still long and soft as it rolled down her back, and when he approached, she was talking with a small group of hazy people. Their faces looked scrunched, their features swirls of eraser marks, and when he touched her, she turned around slowly.

"Thank God, Cindy. Did the guy on the sidewalk talk you into this weird little," but he stopped when he saw her face.

Her face was as smooth and featureless as the others, and she took one look at him and walked away without a word.

"Cindy?" he called, taking a step towards her before catching sight of a familiar brown ponytail as its owner leaned over the bar.

Mary was a staple at McClouds. She might have been a little too old for Derrick, her status as a cougar established before Derrick had taken his first drink at the bar, but she had been sweet for an evening. He batted at the ponytail playfully, waiting for her to turn around so he could ask her what the hell was going on. She had been a little icy to him since they had slept together, but surely she would help him figure this out before he had a freaking breakdown.

She turned around angrily when he batted her braid, and Derrick saw that she was also smooth and featureless from eyebrows to chin.

She huffed and took herself elsewhere, and as Derrick watched, he became aware that most of the people in the bar were women who looked very familiar. One-night stands, old girlfriends, sexual conquests of every flavor, and all of them milling about him like they couldn't see him or couldn't care less. They pressed in as their numbers swelled, but Derrick remembered them all. It was impressive and depressing how many women you could sleep with in a six-year period, and Derrick found that he was adrift in a sea of jaded barflies. They had their own tidal pull, and as Derrick tried to push his way to the door, they seemed to pull him back towards the bar with each push he made to escape them.

When someone wrapped a hand around his and pulled him back towards a stool, he accepted it without protest.

It was the Not Lisa, and she looked a lot more familiar now.

She wore the same ripped leggings and puffy sweater dress she'd been wearing the night of the party. The leggings were no longer just ripped artfully. Derrick could see glass shards and torn skin beneath them. The sweater was dotted with red splotches, and he might have thought she'd been shot if he hadn't known what had killed her. The left lens of her glasses was a spiderweb, pristine ice broken by a stray rock, and he did remember that. After all, they had buried her in those glasses, and he remembered it being the only thing imperfect about her as she lay in her casket.

It was the only thing real about her after the coroner was done making her beautiful again.

"Why are you here?" Derrick asked, watching the throng of women as they surged around the bar he was sitting on, "It's not enough that I live with your ghost every day. Now I have to see you too?"

"Oh gee, I'm sorry that I'm the stick you jab yourself with on every occasion. Unfortunately for you, I am your greatest fear. Not me, not really, but what I represent. You can't let yourself be close to anyone like you were with me. You can't open up and embrace intimacy. In a way, I am the manifestation of your issues with intimacy. You bury your fears and woes in an endless sea of sex and are never satisfied. No matter how much you drink or how many women you go to bed with, you'll never lose my ghost, not until you let yourself forget me."

His phone buzzed again, and he saw that Charlene had texted him. Her message was a little different this time. She told him she was sorry for bothering him so much and how she would stop trying to insert herself into his life. She apologized for not being enough for him and hoped he had a good night. Derrick looked at the phone, feeling his stomach knot as he thought about how he had run off another one.

"She seems nice. Maybe you could give her a chance."

"I can't." Derrick said, "What if I let her down like I let you down? What if I accidentally kill her too?"

Lisa smirked, and it did interesting things to her broken face, "You blame yourself for my death, but did you really have anything to do with it?"

Derrick scoffed. How had he not caused her death? He'd been too focused on drinking and partying to make sure that his girlfriend got home safely. He had stood right there and let her leave with someone else instead of taking her himself.

"Why do you think that's your fault? I would have left regardless. You no more caused my death than the tree we hit did. Let it go."

Derrick could see that night, the same night he always saw when it haunted his nightmares.

They had been at Marty Jenner's party, the one he held before Christmas break every year, and Derrick was drunker than he'd ever been. Lisa didn't drink, he had dragged her to this party mostly so he could show off his new girlfriend, and it was clear that she was done with it. When he'd tried to kiss her, she had pulled away, telling him that his breath smelled like rotten fruit. He had told her not to be such a prude, and she had told him that she was leaving. Kyle Warren, one of the guys on the football team with Derrick, had been leaving too. He was less drunk than Derrick, but that wasn't saying much.

Derrick had been hung over the next day when her mother called to give him the bad news.

Kyle had wrapped his vehicle around a tree three blocks from his house, killing both of them instantly.

Derrick had never forgiven himself for that, and he'd stayed pickled for the rest of his life.

Looking at Lisa now made him feel even worse.

"Forget about it, and forget me. Stop torturing yourself. You had nothing to do with my death. Let yourself be happy, and let go before it's too late."

She swam before his eyes, and it was only then that Derrick was aware he was crying.

His phone chirped again, and he saw that Charlene was calling this time.

As he picked it up, he saw the woman part, leaving him a clear path to the exit.

"Give her a chance, a real chance, and let yourself be happy for a change."

Derrick left, apologizing for being so distant as he and Charlene made plans to meet up at McClouds in a half hour.

"So," said the Barker as Derrick stepped back onto the street, "Did you discover something truly terrifying?"

Derrick nodded, "Yeah, I think I might have also found something I'd lost too."

He dropped another twenty onto the box as he walked, and the Barker smiled as he watched him leave shakily.

“Another satisfied customer.”