Further Down

It's damp and cold and dark and all the things I start worrying about the great hereafter being like start creeping into my head. It's not quiet. This is worrisome. What if there's just as many distractions when you're dead? Of course you can't really do anything about them then can you? And what is this little cycle of thoughts about? Sounds like bad high school poetry. I start fiddling for my flash light because I hear that high-pitched whail bellowing. The one that sounds like Thom Yorke on "How to Disappear Completely" a quick shitty copy of which is jammed into my walkman. I fear that I left it playing and that the batteries will eventually die. But no, the tape's not playing and I realize it's just one of the rotten sounds that permeates out of this place. They have CD's for these things. Women screaming and men howling, sounds of random violence. Ghosts and goblins and black cats. All that shit.

It's dark down here. They actually dug holes this year. Right into the ground. It's OCtober and it's freezing. It feels like it hasn't stopped raining in two weeks. It's cold but not winter cold. Just the kind that tackles you out of your illusion of warm summer nights. October is cold and weird. It's weirder in an artificial graveyard. It's important to drink enough to make all the weird and scary things look level.

They bring groups through and it's fun for a few seconds: the guide brings them up to the exit and gives them a speech about this being a haunted graveyard. I actually no the whole speech because I've heard it at least 50 times already this evening. And there's been a lot these kind of evenings over the past 4 Octobers. I pull myself out of the hole, through the flaps of turf that make it look like an open grave. I crawl slowly at the people and then I quickly claw at them and hiss and pull myself upright. This isn't always the best strategy as a girl freaked last week and gave me a reflex kick right in the head. But I think it looks kind of cool, and it usually scares people a little bit. Which is much better than having them just stare at you while you wait for the guide to take them out. Then I go back to the hole or if it sounds quiet I sift through the black plastic tarp mazes and head to the dining room where some pseudo pagan ceremony is usually going on.

Ryan and BLumes are there doing their act and I hang behind one of the tarps and get behind the line and when they notice me they jump a little bit. Ryan and Blumes and I do a little banter, full of inside jokes that no one really gets but no one is really listening anyway. They just see a man caked in blood and makeup carrying a big metal post that he repeatedly slams into the table. Eventually they scatter out and we talk about groups that went through or what we're going to do later.

And the girl is gone. She took off with a bottle of vodka and later I find her passed out behind my tombstone looking like a dead angel. I sigh a disgusted sigh and throw a jacket over her. She'll disappear back to whatever movie she came from in a few days and in the end all I'll remember about her are strange little scenes like this.


It's the last night. Halloween. Busy with fratboys trying to prove that no one working here is really a zombie and girls who don't stop screaming from the second the lights go down. There's parties going on and bars with costume contests but we'll probably just go to a diner and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes until 7am like we do every weekend this month. It's easier that way. The last night, last chance for all this nonsense. It's like going to high school in a nightmare. An acid-trip down memory lane. But it's over.