Why I’m Running the Spookshow Now

by Douglas Ford

Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:

The spookshow was dying. As an institution, I mean. I almost said “art,” but nothing Cal Edwards ever did could properly count as an art. He sure wanted to revive it, though, so he gassed up the vehicles and took us on the road to Florida.

Not to Gibsonton, where we spent the off-months with the carnies and freaks, but to Cassadega, an even stranger place on account of the psychics and mystics who settled there in the 1800s. My mother warned me about Cassadega people when she tried to teach me how to use the cards to tell fortunes. She said those Cassadega people didn’t hustle like the rest of us. No sir, they actually believed they could talk to the dead and forge deals with the devil. They founded a whole town to prove it.

I reminded Cal of the town’s reputation. No sense of running the spookshow down there, not in front of people who believed they could perform the tricks not only better but for real. A ghost on a wire wouldn’t impress them. But Cal waved me off. Said he didn’t want to go there to perform. He wanted to recruit someone. An actual witch.

Never mind that I’d wanted that job for years. I needed a break from my usual role, the girl who got chased around the stage by the Frankenstein monster. We usually ended the spookshow with some lightning effects and the monster coming to life. He would lumber after me, his arms grabbing at my clothes and hair. Depending on the dimensions of the theater, I might even run into the audience, where I would have to evade the eager paws of over-eager men. On more than one occasion, one of them had managed to tear my blouse so that by the time I made it back to the stage, I had one tit hanging out, with the whole theater clapping and cheering in a way that made me feel fearful and ashamed.

We still ended the routine the usual way, me running to Cal, who would urge me to escape by climbing into a big box. With me hidden inside, the monster pretended to become frustrated and confused. Once he shambled off the stage, my head, arms, and legs would appear through strategically placed holes in the box. Cal would pretend he couldn’t find the latch to free me, so he would pick up a saw and declare his intention to cut me out. You can probably guess where that went. Only unlike traditional magic shows, we used fake blood. Lots of it. I made some good faces during the sawing, too.

After one of the wardrobe incidents, I threatened to stop performing these antics, sending Cal into a panic.

“You can’t. That’ll put an end to us and the whole spookshow game. It’s dying for real. And it’s all Lewis’s fault.”

He meant Herschell Gordon Lewis, the huckster who released Blood Feast into the drive-ins that year. All that gore in full color on the silver screen meant trouble for us, unless we could find ways of making our show more lurid.

“How about more creative instead?” I asked. Then I told him my witch idea.

“Let me think about it.”

Well, he did, and what does the bastard do but take us to Cassadega so he could find us a real witch? Not only that, but he insisted on meeting the witch by himself and told the rest of us to go and enjoy the sights. “Get your palms read or something,” he said. “Consider it a day off.”

That only worsened my mood. I decided to get back at him by stealing some of his beer and setting off for a walk that led me to the local cemetery. Not the most scenic place in the world or even Florida thanks to all the weeds, but quiet enough for a person to sit and think. If the spookshow was dying, then I needed to explore my options, especially with my thirtieth birthday only months away. I didn’t want to give Cal the best years of my life and have nothing to show for it.

I found a good place to do my thinking, a large bench in the heart of the cemetery. Not the most comfortable resting place, but better than a hole in the ground. And quiet.

It didn’t remain that way for long. Before I could crack open the first beer, a figure came into view. I found myself looking upon an angular face topped by a slouch hat and a stooped body covered by a coat that looked too warm for the Florida weather. Oh good, a vagrant, I thought.

“You have another one of those?” this individual asked, pointing toward the bottle in my hand.

It so happened I did. He opened it and saluted me before emptying half of it in one chug. As he wiped his lips, he seemed to stand a little taller. I made a mental note that beer can cure a stooped back.

“Got to love Cassadega,” he said. “About a hundred reasons people come to visit it. What’s yours?”

I waved off the question, telling him he didn’t owe me for the beer. The bench where I sat could have accommodated us both, and I wondered if I should show him my knife in case he got any ideas.

My expression evidently conveyed the message. “Relax,” he said. “That’s no ordinary seat. That’s the ‘Devil’s Chair,’ or so they say. Anyone so bold as to have seat on it earns a visit from the Lord of Flies, who might grant a wish. Or so it goes. Hence my reason for asking what brings you here.”

I heard something new in the person’s voice. Leaning close, I detected feminine features and realized that the face belonged to a woman wearing man’s clothes. That made me relax a little.

“You know what a spookshow is, don’t you?” I asked.

“Why, certainly. An American tradition. Get the suckers to open their wallets, show them a good time with ghosts and magic. Live on stage.”

I nodded. “Plus music and magic tricks. All leading to a monster getting loose to chase a girl around the stage. And now we’re looking for a witch.”

The woman cackled at the audacity of this premise. “So you’ve come to Cassadega to find a witch.”

“A real one. Cal thinks authenticity will keep us viable.”

“To do what? Cast spells? Raise the dead?”

“All that. Hopefully enough to distract the men from grabassing and tugging at my titties.”

“No woman should endure that.”

“No ma’am,” I said, and a funny thing happened. I never overshare my troubles, but right then I did. The words poured out of me, all my frustrations. I even sniffled some, maybe on account of all the pollen growing under that Florida sun. I didn’t need comforting, but I accepted it anyway, letting her climb on that Devil’s Chair alongside me where she wrapped her arms around my shoulders and rocked me like my mother never did.

I must’ve fallen asleep because I awoke with Cal calling my name. “Goddammit, Belle, we’ve been looking for you.”

I sat up and looked around. I saw no trace of the woman except for that old coat. She left it behind, with me all tangled up inside of it. I supposed she didn’t want it anymore.

Cal kicked over a beer bottle. “Drinking my stash again?”

I grumbled. “Just one.”

“I count two bottles here.”

I started to say that I didn’t drink them both. Or did I? Now I couldn’t really say for sure, though the coat offered some hard evidence that I didn’t hallucinate my visitor.

“And you’re in the Devil’s Chair,” Cal said.

That got my attention. “You know about that?”

“Everyone here does. The Devil show up and grant you a wish?”

I hopped down and tucked the coat under my arm. “Appears I wished for some winter wear,” I said, half-joking. A bit worn, but solid workmanship, and only partly eaten by moths. I decided to keep it. “How did the witch thing go?”

“As for that,” he said before his voice trailed off. He held something under his arm. A box.

“She didn’t show up?” I asked.

“Got something better here.” He opened the lid of the box and gestured for me to lean in for a peek. I did so with caution. People in spookshows love gags, so I didn’t get too close, lest something should fly in my face—confetti, a paper snake, maybe even a live bat. We’d kept a few of those around until one of our stagehands got bit and came down with a nasty case of rabies.

“Go on,” Cal said, “it’s not a gag.”

I almost did gag when I peered over the lip of the box and saw the red and black veined thing inside.

“You can touch it,” he said.

I extended a finger to do just that, until it contracted. All on its own, no trick about it. I lurched back and stayed clear.

“Is that–?”

“A heart? Yes, it is. Not just any heart either. It’s a witch’s heart. And it’s going to save the spookshow.”

I suppose we should’ve asked Cal more questions, like how exactly he came across such an extraordinary item. One could come by lots of strange objects in Cassadega—spirit boards, crystal balls, and the like. But a heart that still had the propensity to beat? That certainly went beyond the norm, even for Cassadega.

We departed after that. Quickly, too, despite not having far to go to reach our next engagement in Tampa. The Tampa Theater, not an easy venue to book, and an even more difficult one to play.

Things tend to go wrong in that old building. Lights go out, props fail, people even fall to their death. Regardless, I love its ornate ceiling and its fine architecture. If one must fall to one’s death, I can think of no finer place.

Prior to our show date, Cal avoided letting people get too close to the heart. The way he lorded over it and protected it led some in our group to question its authenticity and call it a cheap fake. After all, we peddled illusions of monsters and death, all in the name of wild scares.

But I knew it to be real. In fact, Cal trusted me enough to let me become its caretaker.

And it did need care. It needed love.

When depleted of blood, a heart loses its deep, rich redness. Colorless, it looks pathetic, its color changing to an opaque white. Cal gave me one simple instruction: “Keep it red.”

Every time that heart beat, it would let out a little bit of blood. We kept it inside the sink in one of the trailers no one used. Over time, a sticky goo residue lined the sink thanks to expelled blood. After a while, it needed a fresh infusion.

In other words, it needed to eat.

Thanks to a lizard that wandered in, I learned how it accomplished that feat by using its stubby ventricles to trap its prey and squeeze out its blood.

Quite a sight that. Fascinating, even. “You take care of it,” Cal said. He could tell I liked watching it do its thing. It became my regular chore to bring it a meal, mostly different animals I caught. Lizards barely filled it up, so I started looking for rodents. Over time, it needed larger meals, so I started looking for rabbits. Eventually other things, too.

“What’s happening to the pets?” I overheard someone ask Cal. Folks working the spookshow loved their cats and small dogs, maybe even as much as I came to love that hungry witch’s heart living in the sink of that lonely trailer. I also found it required a cold, frigid environment. Fortunately, the trailer’s A.C. worked, so I turned it real low to keep the air nice and frosty.

Because of that, the coat I acquired by sitting in the Devil’s Chair came in handy. I made an odd sight, though. “What’cha all bundled up for, Belle?” I can’t count how many times I heard that question, usually when I had something alive hidden underneath the coat trying to get free.

“Cold, is all,” I said, hoping I could leave it at that, lest the raccoon or snake I held under the coat manage to squirm away before I could deliver it to the waiting ventricles of that hungry witch heart.

With the time for the show fast approaching, I asked Cal the same question I posed to him many times: “Exactly how is that heart going to play a role in the spookshow?”

I braced myself for the same evasive answer he’d given me before, usually something along the lines of, “Don’t you worry, Belle, you’ll love it. It’s got just the sort of audience appeal we need to keep going.”

But this time, he did the unexpected and gave me a straight answer.

“Know how we like to saw you into the pieces at the climax? End it nice and gooey?”

Yeah, I did. After getting my clothes practically torn to shreds and groped by the men in the audience.

“Well,” Cal said, “we’re going to try something a little different. Know how Lewis made that movie about the nutjob carrying out human sacrifices and cutting out the hearts of his victims?”

I affirmed I did. We all claimed to hate that movie since it had taken such a bite out of our business. Secretly, we all loved it as much as the rubes who paid a dollar to see it at the drive-in.

“We’re going to make you a sacrifice victim instead. I’m going to cut open your chest—well, pretend to at least—and then I’m going to hold up the witch’s heart for all to see. Let it beat once or twice. Then—get this, Belle—then I’m going to take a huge bite out of it. Like it was an apple.”

He stared at me, expecting a reaction.

“People’ll love it,” he said when he got none. “You know they will.”

I had nothing to say.

“Don’t worry about it,” Cal said. “It’ll heal up good as new. You’ll just need to feed it a duck or chicken afterwards.”

Still nothing from me.

“That bother you, Belle?”

“No. Why would it bother me?” The sound of my own voice made me cringe. I said it exactly as if it did bother me.

“It’s not a pet. It’s an organ,” he said.

“What happened to the rest of her?”

“Her? Who?” As if the heart had never taken a beat in the chest of an actual witch.

“You know what I mean.”

He sighed. “Couldn’t tell you. Let’s just say I procured it from a third party. You can buy anything in Cassadega.”

I knew that all too well. I knew someone who bought an actual mummy from a curio shop there. The mummy disappeared after the buyer was found strangled right inside the doorway of their own home. Police called it theft, but we all knew the mummy did it after running off.

“I guess you’ve got to do whatever you can to keep the spookshow going,” I said.

“That’s the spirit,” he said.

Only I couldn’t get the image out of my head—Cal pretending to reach into my open chest cavity, grabbing the heart, and taking a big bite out of it. What if it didn’t heal like he thought? What if it not only couldn’t recover but actually died?

I couldn’t let that happen. A simple enough solution presented itself. I’d hide the heart somewhere to keep it safe and substitute something else. The heart of a pig, maybe. I plotted while spending more and more time in that trailer. The heart seemed to like it when I stayed close to it. Sometimes I napped right there on the kitchen floor, using that old coat to stay warm. The heart liked my closeness so much that I even tried holding it. It beat soft and regular when I did that, almost like purring. I could feel my own heart thumping in time with it, so I eventually tried pressing it close to my chest.

Within minutes, our syncing rhythms lulled me to sleep, the heart cradled in the folds of my coat.

How long that sleep lasted, I don’t know, but I awoke with a start, my chest now hammering in panic. I looked around, trying to judge the hour. Moonlight flooded through the window, providing just enough light for me to discern the awful truth.

The heart was gone.

I looked everywhere, wondering if it had found a way to use its arteries as stubby little appendages to move around. If so, it would have left a trail of blood, and I could find nothing of the sort. I looked in the sink, thinking it might have crawled back in there, or maybe it caught the scent of some rodent and went off hunting.

But nothing. No sign of it.

I shuddered to think of what Cal would do to me once he found out I’d lost the one thing that could save the spookshow, our one and only salvation. He’d ram those swords into me for real. He’d rip open my chest and pull out my innards just like Ramses in Blood Feast, and he’d probably let Herschell Gordon Lewis film every second of my evisceration to make his displeasure extra clear.

“Think, girl, think,” I told myself. Where could it have gone?

Then it dawned on me.

I’d probably eaten it in my sleep, taking one bite of it after another, like Cal planned to do, only I couldn’t stop until it was gone completely. I touched my stomach, as if I might feel it roiling around in my digestive juices. Then I felt my chest, noticing a weird lump under my left breast. Had something even more uncanny occurred, like absorption?

I couldn’t wait to figure it out. I needed a replacement, and I needed it fast. And I couldn’t go to Cassadega to get it. I needed to use my wits.

I found a replacement alright. It looked almost the same, too, though it didn’t beat on its own. It also didn’t eat rodents and squirrels. It did require lots of ice to keep it fresh. A top-notch A.C. unit alone wouldn’t do the trick.

I also had to ward off any suspicion on Cal’s part. “You taking good care of it, Belle?” he asked.

I nodded. “Fit as a fiddle.”

“Keeping it fed and happy?”

“It ate a bullfrog not two hours ago.”

“Good, good,” he said, though he gave me an extra glance before turning away.

You don’t want to know what I had to slaughter and dissect to get the replacement. Fortunately, by that point, no one thought anything of an animal carcass or two. Not even one that belonged to a sizeable pig that happened to go missing from a local farmer.

I secured it with only a day to spare before the big event.

Cal commissioned some new posters that went up all over Tampa. As usual, they featured my likeness in skimpy clothes. In place of the Frankenstein monster that used to hover over me menacingly, Cal substituted a mummy and a gory illustration of a bloody heart in the foreground. Underneath that, a promise in blood red ink:

See! A living mummy and a heart ripped from a screaming girl’s chest!!

Lastly, a stipulation that no one, absolutely NO ONE under 18 would be admitted into the show.

We all knew that virtually guaranteed a full house of old and young alike.

“You understand the new routine?” Cal asked me as we watched people crowd the box office. They arrived in droves despite a protest outside. Local crusaders—or “witch hunters,” Cal called them—who saw our presence as an affront to public decency.

I reminded Cal he could always rely on my professionalism and instead he should worry about how the mummy fared. The switch from the Frankenstein monster didn’t go over well with the make-up crew. Cal dismissed their misgivings by saying they only needed ace bandages and a bunch of greasepaint to get the right effect.

“Besides,” he said to me, “the real star of the show will be the witch’s heart.”

Once the mummy interrupted my dance number by chasing me around the stage, I would pretend to hide in a sarcophagus (in reality the old box we used for the sword gag), decorated with some fake images made to suggest Egyptian hieroglyphics. I painted them myself, making up the designs myself since nobody would know the difference, especially horny ticket buyers who just wanted to see the bare flesh of some poor scared girl, namely yours truly.

Cal still criticized the symbols I came up with.

“They don’t look the least bit Egyptian,” he said.

I shrugged and kept painting.

“They look more witchy,” he said. “They don’t give me mummy vibes at all. How’d you come up with these?”

I studied what I’d painted and realized he had a point. My inscriptions did look odd with their circles and squiggly lines. I created them without much thought, just letting my imagination have free reign. I’d found my own thoughts drifting to strange places since the heart vanished. I felt cold all the time, too. I spent lots of time huddling under that old coat I’d inherited while sitting in the Devil’s Chair, but no matter what, I couldn’t get warm.

“Maybe I’m coming down with something,” I mused out loud.

“Not until after the show,” Cal said. “You can get as sick as you want when it’s done.”

I looked sick, too. My skin stretched right over my cheekbones, emphasizing the length of my nose. On top of that, my complexion appeared sallow, unhealthy, and I wondered if the audience wouldn’t prefer if I stayed completely clothed during the show.

But Cal only cared about the witch’s heart and the notoriety it would earn us. Inside the phony sarcophagus, I would scream and gurgle as Cal pretended to cut me open while declaring himself a priest of Ramses, or whoever. After it took a beat or two, he would take his bite in front of the screaming, fainting audience, and the curtain would fall.

It almost went that way, too.

As the show neared its climax, I grew so sick that I could hardly move fast enough to stay two paces in front of the mummy. My bones ached, and my head throbbed. “I can’t go any slower,” he whispered to me as he maintained that shambling, foot-dragging walk everyone knows from the creature features. At least I think he said that. All those bandages around his mouth made him hard to hear.

Cal watched me lurch my way toward the sarcophagus. Without his help, I wouldn’t have made it over the lid and into the box. His eyes showed more impatience than actual concern. My bones creaked and groaned, as if trying to break through my skin. Still, nothing mattered to him more than the show’s pièce de résistance.

My coat waited for me inside the box, the replacement heart wrapped in its folds. Despite my care, it had grown rancid and showed the kind of decay that the witch’s heart was immune to. At that point, I hardly cared. I held that rotten thing to my chest so that Cal could lift it forth and take the greedy bite he had planned.

Would it make him sick? No doubt.

Would it kill him? Maybe.

I only cared about cocooning myself in the box and letting the mysterious affliction that had come over me run its course. Cal delivered the lines he’d rehearsed and added some last-minute improvisations. The audience cheered him on, anxious to see him consume the heart in front of them and not recognizing the signs of hesitation. He still laid it on thick as he pretended to cut me open. “With this sacrifice, I, Ramses, will undergo a powerful transformation.”

Only the real transformation occurred inside me, faster now, my skin contracting as my bones pushed their ways out. Even my hands looked different, wrinkled and gray, with clawlike fingers that escaped Cal’s notice when he reached down to take the heart from me.

But the show needed to go on. He held it forth so the audience could gaze upon it. Of course it wouldn’t beat as he planned, and he fully noticed now how foul it looked, how gray and withered and nothing at all like what he purchased in Cassadaega.

Sweat broke out on his brow as his speech went on. He knew something had gone wrong. He knew I’d tricked him. Eventually, the audience began to boo and hiss, goading him into taking that bite.

Finally, I couldn’t take it. I stood up in the sarcophagus, ready to improv some lines of my own, bring the whole show to a close.

Silence fell over the theater once I became visible. Someone screamed. I heard someone shout, “She turned into a witch!” I couldn’t see myself then, but later, in the mirror, I saw what they meant.

I looked a sight. I still do. Better than any make-up job. Better than anything Herschell Gordon Lewis could concoct in one of his gore movies.

I even rendered Cal speechless. Especially when I began to float above the box.

That led to the mad stampede for the door. Then the mummy fainted.

Cal stood frozen, the rancid heart still in his hand.

I reached down, thinking I would take it from him. Only my hand had ideas of its own.

Like blades, my fingernails pierced his chest, drilling straight toward his terrified heart as it gave one or two final beats before going still in my hand.

He died right there, in the greatest spookshow ever.

And I run it now. I do it my own way, with real effects and nothing cheesy about it. I don’t need to wear make-up either, and I hear Herschell Gordon Lewis plans to check it out.

He’ll need to pay a pretty penny for me, though, a witch who can fly across the stage. And wait until they see the heart I keep in a jar, the one that used to belong to Cal.

Maybe in a future show I’ll take a bite out of it, like a big, red apple. Maybe I’ll even let Lewis film it.