Haunt

Autumn Learns the Ropes - Part 1 of 3

Weekend One - Thursday Night

September 15, 2022

The energy of the Haunt employees was always high, but never higher than on the first and last nights of the seven-week festival.

Tonight was the first night.

Here in the employee square stood about 500 people, each in some way enamored with the Halloween season. They were frantic to begin despite the thick, humid heat of the Missouri evening. They stood sweating, bright-faced, amped up on caffeine, sugar, youthful hormones, and the prospect of letting loose on a park full of patrons who were just as eager to experience horror as these workers were.

About 80% of the crowd in the square was teens or young adults, ages 16 to 24 - high school and college kids earning extra money. But don't discount the older crowd in fewer but more purposeful numbers. There were teachers, secretaries, woodcarvers, restaurant managers, cable installers, cashiers, tattoo artists, and even a psychologist, some writers, and a private investigator, and most of them were here to fill a need. Maybe they wanted to research human behavior, perhaps just to cut loose for a few crazy nights, or possibly, they needed something more desperate.

Over 400 people in the courtyard were in full makeup and costume. They stood in lines of Halloween horrors: cultists, vampires, ghosts, scarecrows, chainsaw killers, flying monkeys, zombies, orcs, skeletons, plus a cymbal-clanging monkey, his too-bright grin vicious in the dying daylight. The makeup became oily in the heat. Beautiful costumes grew damp with sweat.

The makeup and wardrobe artists joined the night's welcome-back celebration in separate groups.

The other people present consisted of park management (look for the yellow shirts for mid-management and blue shirts and laminated cards on blue lanyards for upper management). A line of the yellowshirts stood before the heaving, perspiring crowd. The employee square had a fortunate landscape characteristic, a gently sloping hill that provided a natural stage at its highest point, and the yellowshirts and speakers had their place atop it. The screamsters watched from the lawn below, wriggling with excitement for the two-month Halloween Haunt season to officially begin.

*****

The scene was visible to Ramis Ranjbar, who watched from her softly lit office through a one-way window. She carried the air of a dangerously confident woman, fully aware of her distracting beauty. She had spent her life letting people focus on her appearance while they failed to notice the knife at their belly. Near sixty, she was a vision still, a dark-haired fairy tale queen needing only a magic mirror. Her wry smile was a bit predatory as she watched the young people below, all of them so eager to feed her park's voracious appetite. How fun it was to see what might happen next.

There was a soft knock at her door. Without turning away from the show, she invited her visitor inside. From the smell of piney aftershave, she recognized Seven Wonders' Head Manager, Calicus. No doubt he came to bore her with numbers.

As predicted, he said, "We have seven - possibly eight - extremely encouraging employees starting this year."

She glanced back to see him offering her what looked like a hand of cards. He actually held eight Polaroid instant photographs displaying wan, overexposed faces. A thin old goat, Calicus wore the khaki trousers and blue shirt of park administration, though he would have looked more natural dressed like a Victorian gentleman or a college professor.

"Eight!" he said again, waving the photographs. "Or, at least seven. Ramis, this is excellent news for us. A bumper crop. Have a look at them."

"I never pay attention to such things." She waved him away.