This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, Longevity and Other Stories. If you are daring, why not subscribe to my newsletter (they come few and far between), and I’ll send you a PDF copy of the book?
The creature dropped into the middle. The lights above it crashed, and a fog was still going off somewhere with a soft pink glow of lights. The rock on which the creature landed cracked, then it slid down the middle, and everyone could see re-bar and Fiberglas under it. The rock was hollow.
It stood on two sturdy legs. They ended in great huge clawed feet that grabbed onto the destroyed fiberglass like it was nothing. It cracked under its feet as it clawed and jumped to the floor. Most of its torso was still in deep shadow or leftover artificial fog, but its chest was enormous. It had a great hard shell and covered its arms in the same shell, ending not in hands, but in great huge crab or lobster-like claws.
It snapped them, and he roared, not the sound of an animal, but of a man. His face had bits of the hard shell here and there, as did its legs, but it was a human-shaped head, with long unkempt hair and a very human voice.
He snapped at the adults.
He screamed at the kids, and everyone scattered.
“This way,” yelled Janet. “Through this crack!”
She waved them her way. A tunnel was there they could all fit through. It was knee-high, but no one cared. Only cable noticed there was still a working handicapped door to the side.
They crawled through, but the creature cut them off. He slammed into their exit, sending kids scattering. Left and right.
Janet ducked and rolled out of the way as he swiped at her. He took the bait, running to chase her. He was jumping, loping, and running, his clawed feet still kind of skittering on the floor where they weren’t destroying it.
“No!” she said to the creature. Who seemed to listen, then to her group, “Through the hole! I’ll meet you on the other side!”
She ducked another swipe, and smiling up at the creature, swept her legs under him, and he tumbled gracefully to the ground. He landed, rolled away, and then scrambled to the hole to follow her group through it, the last of them making it through the hole.
She avoided one snap from his claws as he tried getting up and getting her footing. She scampered and led through the hole. The others, who were now backstage, couldn’t believe what they were seeing. She scrambled through and the creature, still snapping, got a hand through, and snapped, but he couldn’t, for his big shelled torso got through. He growled and snarled, and yelled, then after exhausting himself from all the scrambling, slowly withdrew,
“Janet,” they could hear him say, briefly, among the snarls and whimpers.
“Does it know your name?”
Tears were streaming down Janet’s face. She was on the floor crying. “I guess it’s not too late to tell you. The falls are fake.” She sniffled.
Everyone stood up, the shadow of the creature still pacing around on the other side of the hole. They were on the back side of the caverns, the reverse of the rock wall, hollow and unpainted. It was all fiberglass and re-bar, two-by-fours, and catwalks. They could see the backside of a tall wall and a hole in the cavern where a green floodlight was. There were catwalks up to it so you could change it out.
“The caves are fake. I’m sorry, but the monster, as you can tell, is real. It’ll figure out how to get to us soon. I’ve got to get you out of here.”
The creature snapped its claws, then it started beating on the handicapped escape door.
“It only has to pull, but I don’t think it knows how.”
It beat on the door again. Everyone jumped.
It banged a third time. Janet thought for sure she heard a crab shell cracking, and the door came down. Fog filled the busted doorway, fog, and pinkish light.
“This way everybody.” She jumped up. “No more time for laying down.”
She grabbed several shaking kids by the Gabe’s and ran.
They turned a corner, leaving the doorway behind them, and started running down the halls. “I think I think I think…” she was saying, while in her mind, Janet was trying to figure out where to hide everybody.
“The elephant rock,” she said, “down to the fang rock,” she gathered the group. There was plenty more backstage to run through, nice wide open spaces, but she wanted them back in the caves. Janet could hear an alarm going off somewhere in the distance.
“Janet? Are you okay, dear?” Came a little old lady voice over the public address system.
“No, it’s after us!” she yelled to the ceiling as she brought everyone through a doorway, usually used as an emergency exit out of the so-called caves, and was waving everyone back in. They were running the wrong way on the trek, headed down the corridors of a cave, the wrong way.
You could see it all, where the lights were, where the fog machines were, where speakers and spy security cameras were.
“Oh my,” said the old lady over the PA.
Supplies for haunted attractions lined the room.
“How many people ever just look back and see all this stuff?” said Cable.
“No one.”
“Never?”
“Never.” They were moving fast, so she could only get little phrases out.
They turned another corner. “People just don’t look. “
They came around to Elephant Rock, and it was a sight, especially from this angle. To be of hand-holds, tons of ways up. The shape looked like a colossal statue of a hairspray elephant with human eyes, and as they climbed up the feature, they could all feel him despite its dressing. It was not a slick, stiff piece of rock, but a fiberglass shell.
“Head for the eyes, everyone up there now, tell find us any minute!”
“Will we fit in there?”
“There’s room inside. We sometimes use it as a spot to trigger Halloween effects, up up!”
They climbed. The kids made the trip easier. They just followed the pattern, and as she said, get up there, but the adults were slower. They were still fighting two major thoughts in their minds, which were I don’t want to be the jerk that breaks it, and I don’t want to slip.
They heeding have worried, but that’s fine. One by one, they dived through the eyes and slid into the room inside, behind the elephant. Janet sludged in behind the last kid, feet first.
“Everybody quiet, right?”
“He’s getting closer.”
In the room, which was pretty big for being up here, was a desk table, a sort of temp table set up with a computer and a couple of monitors.
“Alice, turn on that computer?”
Alice got under the desk and found the switch, which was an older tower model. It woke up. The screens came on. There was a mouse. Keyboard and a little plastic microphone hooked up to it.
The room itself was lit with a bare bulb, and the floods were old scruffy tile.
Janet yanked the chain to turn out the light. There were also a couple of metal cabinets back there filled with plastic Halloween decorations from three or four years ago, and a door,
“Where’s this lead?” said one adult.
“Bathrooms, and another corridor we can get out through. I just got to call the office quick.”
“You can from the…”
“Computer.”
It flipped up, ready, a series of icons. One kid, still watching through an eye, saw him. “There he is. He’s down there!”
“Shhhh.”
She pulled them down, so they weren’t right in the eye, then clicked an icon for the microphone. It opened up.
“Can you hear me in the office? Janet here.”
“Hello Janet, where are you?” said the old lady behind the register.
“Looks like our creeper is real. Boy, is he real.”
“Ooh, yes! I always wanted a real…”
“Hit the alarm. You can’t let anyone else down here.”
“You want me to call the park?”
“Yes, everybody should know.”
“Where are you?”
“In the elephant’s head. Can you see him in the monitors, this old computer?”
“Oh yes, I see him. He’s so cool. Isn’t this Frankie? God makeup.”
“Fran, Frankie is off today. This is not him.”
“Oh, well, whoever it is… he’s clumping the elephant. Look at those claws!”
Everyone could feel the wall shake as the creature jumped from the floor twenty feet over to land halfway up the elephant. It crushed the fiberglass with each major punch and grabbed underneath at the rebar and iron framing and climbed up the side; it scrambled and grabbed, pulling and yanking at the fiberglass until its face was up in the eyehole’s cavity, it stuck its head in.
“Everybody out, I think!” They scrambled out the back door.
Over the speaker, the old lady said “oh dear, ugh, here he comes!” As he flung his clawed arm in through the eye, knocked the monitors out, and tore one of them away. He couldn’t fit through. But this was no challenge. He reached in and tore the eye open, and landed on the floor of the room as the last kid scrambled out, with Janet shutting the door behind them.
They cluttered the corridor with boxes, mostly seasonal supplies, “help me, shove this stuff in front of the door,”
They toppled a great pile of boxes. At the least, they could slow him down.
The pack was breaking up, with some kids and adults way ahead, but lucky enough she knew where this hallway went. There was just one way out at this point.
The pretty straight hall came to a junction filled with boxes and junk, and they opened through an exit door under the Great Blueberry Falls themselves. They came out one by one, through an exit door on one side. There was a grand circular room with great falls. It looked magnificent, cascading down from a big hole that appeared to be a great indoor cavernous waterfall, heading into a large pool at the bottom.
A pump brought the water up out of the pool. The water came up to an enormous fountain at the top again.
“This way, the other exit on the other side of the falls!” yelled Janet. They ran around the walls, each one of the, looking up. And wishing this is what they saw in the first place before the moment was over, they ran around the falls, some under it, to the other exit on the other side, they passed through those doors, then after about half of them were careening down a brightly lit hallway, piled with boxes and junk, the monster exploded from the falls itself and forcing a huge spray of water all over everyone down there, it jumped, arms out, then pulled them in and dived into the pool below splashing everyone again. Janet, who had Cable by the hand, took most of it in the face.
She ducked and continued pushing people out of the way and through the exit door until she was the last one there.
A claw reached out and stopped the exit door, holding it closed.
She was last and trapped, face to face with the beast.
Everyone else flopped through a nondescript door in the gift shop. Half of them were wet. Half of them had a crazed look in their eyes, and all of them were out of breath,
They flopped on the floor and sat on display tables to gather their breath and recover just a little. Outside, police gathered, and a fire rescue crew stood by. They came in and started helping properly, taking their blood pressure, and looking into their eyes.
Behind the counter, the old lady hit a switch, and metal doorways closed over the nondescript door and the entrance.
Then she quietly hit another switch and started a spark, a fire inside the elephant’s face where the little office was. She flipped off her monitor before a cop could see.
“Janet!” said Cable, “She’s still in there!”
