By midnight my girlfriend had turned into a gelatin. She had gone from human, to lupine, to fuji apple in three hours flat. I tried my best to reverse the process, but ultimately her fate was wobbly and green.
Is it, could it be, growing? I thought, hours before this all happened. An itch of paranoia hit me there as I looked out at the line ahead. Such cruel length! It caused my hooked hands (imagine now, the claws of an anteater) to seek and destroy the itch at my collar, ass, face, while assessing whether it might not be better to jump off the curb and into sweet, sweet traffic. No, not yet. I would stay for love. After we each took five grams of mushrooms, my girlfriend had grown eyes all over and I knew what she needed was to be scared out of her mutation. Go to a haunted house—somehow it made sense. We scraped forth towards Blood Manor.
At the gate, months later, now drenched in sweat, I gulped. After all this time I was still not ready. It had only been seconds. My bones were dried leaves. My girlfriend, taller than before, skin like the shell of a peanut, asked, “What’s your problem?” She looked worried or annoyed.
I did not answer. I needed focus.
“Ticket please,” the man in the booth said. He had eyes that changed with each blink. All-black pupils, pupils like money signs, Nixon in a cowboy hat having sex with my mother. Where were those goddamn tickets! Getting impatient, his hand slithered out, coming closer and closer. I frantically searched my person for the microscopic piece of paper.
“Just get it. What’s your problem?” my girlfriend hissed, then turned and smiled to ease the horde at our backs.
I was drowning in a sea of fabric. I was a gnat in the sheets of a giant’s bed. How did I have this many pockets? Had they learned to reproduce? I reached down into deep holes, grasping. Then, in a moment of true glory, I felt the tickets, clutched them tight as not to lose them again in Jean Cave, and gave them over to the golem holding us up.
We entered.
The first room was set up to look like a woman chained to a bed, ready and waiting for some sinister demon. She was chewing gum, and did not seem to appreciate the direness of her situation. I ran over and tugged at the chains, but, to my surprise, was not met with relief but a tisk. The woman was telling me to stop? I was ruining it for everyone else. “You’ll be asked to leave if you keep it up,” she said.
Confusion forced my thoughts to burrow deep. Was what I had done incorrect? Had I offended her? Introspection sucked my whole body through the left eye socket (the eyeball had deflated to allow passage) and into my core. I found myself in grainy blackness. My external senses had shut down completely, and when the little man in my head flipped the lights back on, we were moving through a tunnel. The tunnel itself was moving around us. I was in a hell I could only describe as the Land of Inner Ear Madness. Vertigo. Walls dancing, gravity betraying me like an unfulfilled housewife. I threw myself at the ground and the mercy of my captors. I crawled along, my girlfriend, miraculously having no trouble at all but mutating still, tugged at my collar. Seeing this show, the group behind us started to laugh. Their sounds cut the flesh of my eardrum and I pawed at the side of my head, feeling the warm orange liquid spill down my jaw. This heckling was far more terrifying than the haunted house.
Tisk, tisk, tisk—the orange liquid spurted like a cut artery. Where it went after leaving my earhole, I could not actually see.
I decided my only choice was to start praying to God. Something I had never done. With my hands together forming a single white monolith, I asked, if you could please, please only let me out of this unscathed, I will change. I will go and donate all my clothes to Goodwill. I will stop drinking. My good man, I will cut back going to Sapphire! But no relief came. I’m sure now God knew it was only the panicked offerings of an animal backed into a corner, and thus my check was not cashed. Instead, I was further plunged into sharp insanity. This was Halloween! God had no business here! This was going to a place on Halloween with too much in your head.
I looked up from my knees. My girlfriend’s head had reformed into Dolly Parton and Dolly was singing Hard Candy Christmas, dancing in sequins. Her eyes fused into one and that great eye studied me and judged me and I felt heat thumping in my temples. Lord it’s like a Hard Candy Christmas!
The rooms kept coming like the changing channels of a putrid television set. It had a screen made of obsidian, imbued with the souls of those sacrificed to the Gods at the center of the earth. Wires of banshee hair. Housing unit constructed from, well—it actually just looked like regular wood. All around me teeth gnashed. Frankenstein was eating an uncooked steak with his hands, sitting in a lawn chair wearing Raybans. A skeleton played the piano. My girlfriend, my girlfriend a floating fuji apple, furrowed her apple brow. Goo and slime and chains crawled out from everywhere, inching towards me.
“Get a fucking grip.” I heard an agitated, if not fed up whisper. My girlfriend now a warden, was poking me in the back towards my fate.
At the anus of the ride, I emerged as one would from such a place. Lowly and without purpose, I pleaded with her to forgive me. But it was all lost. My life there was filled with stuff I could not explain. What had I learned? Was the evil I saw just moments ago really just some hallucination? A hallucination, sure, but there was something else too. The drugs had just uncovered it. She was not the one for me. In fact, she was not my girlfriend at all. Just a gelatin I had stole from Juan’s Halloween party. I was free! I was alone in that barren lot. The moon was large. I had pissed my pants.
