The fellow in the armband signals a girl standing by a control board, who presses a button that halts the tour. She takes a microphone down from the wall. “We have to stop now to take on some ’late’”—she pauses, lowers a voice charged with joke menace—“visitors.” “Visitors” is pronounced like a question.
The machinery grinds down — it’s as if some solemn, tender armistice is taking place — and Colin, Mary, and the boys are helped in the dark into an empty gondola, are settled into seats that have some sort of built-in stereo arrangement. They begin their tour. Which is rather enhanced than otherwise — something has been done to the air in here, a tampered humidity like the wet, faint chill of a catacomb — by their having been plucked from the bright sunlight into the damp darkness.
Their faces move against cobwebs, break them like phantom finishers in a phantom race. The same raven seems to appear over and over. Resisting death, a suit of armor, its old fierce metals sweating, its hinges groaning, transcends rust, swells into life. The eyes of night creatures blink on the wallpaper. A teapot pours a poisoned tea. Specters, translucent as the tea, move in the air like laundry. A living woman is entombed in a crystal ball. All about them they can hear the wails of the dead, insistent and hopeless as the demands of beggars. It’s this note, the noise of desperate petition, that causes the children more trouble than the conventional props of death: the bats, the coffins set out like furniture. They’re still upset. Mary Cottle senses it; Colin Bible, still seeing the afterimage of the twenty-year-old boy who’d winked at him, who’d touched his hand a fraction of a section longer than he was required to when he’d handed him Charles’s wig, does.
“They’re trying to say something,” Noah Cloth whispers to his companion, Tony Word. “What is it, you think, they’re trying to say?”
“Dunno. It’s like the lowing of cattle.” Both boys shudder.
Only Charles Mudd-Gaddis’s trapped, soft screams go almost unheard among these professional spookhouse shrieks and cries of actors, the funhouse arias of the dead. If the others are upset, Mudd-Gaddis is terrified; if they hear him at all they mistake the sound for the low-priority complaint of the infant dead. He has been whimpering like this since the strong tall girl had raised him to her shoulders and carried him into the mansion, and who sits beside him now, holding his hand, mindlessly squeezing his arthritic joints, amiably mashing them while she makes her own soft noises at him, noises which he not only cannot hear but which he will not listen to.
Because, in darkness, his ancient eyes are almost blind; and outdoors was riding — his back to them, too — so high up on the big girl’s shoulders he dared not look down, did not pick up, and would not have accepted if he had, the hale fellow, semaphore reassurances of the cast members. Indeed, he is barely aware that the girl who sits beside him now is the same young woman who had swooped down on him in his rage and lifted him from the ground he had been stamping on and kicking at only seconds before, raised him, removed him from earth, torn him off that lying, hideous yellow wig he had been trying to muddy back to the brown he remembered. He is not in remission now, not enjoying a lucid moment, is uncertain, for that matter, where he is, and has the sense only that he’s somewhere underground, riding along a narrow-gauge track in a coal mine, perhaps, or being pulled on a sled, though he’s not cold, through the six-months’ midnight of the Arctic Circle. He is not in remission, does not enjoy the crystal clarifics of only twenty minutes before — though he remembers all that clearly enough, in perfect detail, in fact, not a single thing slipped or blurred, not one, even the at once humiliating and infuriating business of the wig as clear to him as if it happened years ago — and recalls the day he was seven years old. His whimpers a sort of nostalgia, his memory of the day so sharp and poignant the whimper becomes a snuffling, the snuffling a sob, the sob a cry.
“Oh, my lost youth!” he cries.
“Hush, cutie,” the girl beside him says, “the tour’s almost done. Another two minutes.”
Charles Mudd-Gaddis begins to scream. Colin, the children, Mary, are frightened. He screams. He screams and screams.
“Another two minutes,” the big girl says. “Two minutes. I promise.”
He screams.
“Stat!” shouts the girl to cast members behind the scenes. Charles knows the word. Mary, Colin, all the children do. It is the code word for emergencies in hospitals. Mary, Colin, and the kids think something has happened to Charles. “Stat! Stat!” the girl shouts. The gondola stops abruptly.
“Hey!” a tourist jokes. “Whiplash!”
Cast members rush up with flashlights.
“What is it?”
“What’s happened?”
“I think he’s scared of the dark,” the girl says.
Colin starts to climb over the seats to get to Charles.
“Please don’t do that, sir. Please sit down. Arlene’s got the boy.”
“He’s—”
“I’m going to have to ask you to sit down, sir. For your own safety. The little boy will be fine. We’re going to evacuate him.”
“He moves like he’s a thousand,” Benny Maxine says. “He’ll fall and break his hip in the dark.”
“There’s an ample catwalk. He’ll be all right.”
All have scrambled out of the car; the children are led away by solicitous cast members. It’s as if they’re being guided through tear gas. Then lights come on through the Haunted Mansion like the stark auxiliary lights in theaters and hospitals, like emergency lights in subway cars. Props fade, patterns disappear from the bare canvas walls, the specters are snuffed out, the crystal ball is empty, the bats’ eyes on the wallpaper are tiny light bulbs, the puppet teapot spills a ribbon of twisted, colored cellophane, the coffins and old chests seem only a reliable wood, the ravens some hinged taxidermy, the illusionary space they have been traveling through a sort of warehouse. Visitors to the mansion groan.
“Just look at this place,” Noah Cloth grumbles. “I bet there’s no such thing as ghosts.”
“I guess not,” Tony Word agrees dispiritedly.
“Dying blokes like us ain’t got a snowball’s chance in Hell,” Benny Maxine says, moving along the pavement beside the curving tracks, the baffled architecture, up the trace inclines and down the indifferent slopes which, in the dark, had seemed so formidable.
“There’s probably no such place as Hell,” Noah says.
“No,” says Tony Word.
“No,” says Benny Maxine, “it’s just an expression.”
“Like Heaven.”
“Let’s don’t tell the girls,” Benny says.
And the three boys dissolve in tears.
Charles Mudd-Gaddis was inconsolable.
So was Mary Cottle, who, practically bleeding from the nerves by this time, her mile-high tensions actually giving her a sort of pain, managed to shake Colin, who received the four children at the same door through which they’d been admitted, accepting them like prisoners formally surrendered by the good- looking attendant who’d dusted off the boy’s blond wig and handed it to the male nurse (“Still got the little fellow’s yellow hat, Dad?” “Oh, I’m not their dad.” “No?” “I’m just the nurse who travels with them.” “Is that so?” “I’m nobody’s dad.” “Not the daddy type?” “Never have been, never will be.” “Where you staying?” “At the Contemporary.” “Swell health club at the Contemporary. You ought to check it out.” “Maybe I will”), and extricated herself from the crowd on the ramp at the Transportation and Ticket Center, using it as a shield and positioning herself behind a lone gate on the platform, and now sits by herself in the dark, empty car on the same monorail on which Colin Bible and the four boys ride, her skirt hiked above her knees, her hand down in her panties and two fingers on her dry clit, pulling the till-now dependable flesh, ringing it like a bell, but distracted, her mind not quite blank this time (which, frankly, her body abandoned to a merely mechanical friction had always been an ally in this business) but filled with a whole catalogue of vagrant images (rather, she thinks, like the Haunted Mansion itself), from the could-be-trouble exchange between Colin and the tall, good-looking attendant to, for example, the skirt, the dresses she’s packed, how proud she is of what can only have been a keen sense of her own character, a trained forethought, anticipating, she supposed, that there would be scenes, that there’d have to be, and so eschewing pants suits (though she had known that these, in all likelihood, would be the standard mode of dress, as indeed, they quite turned out to be) for the skirts and dresses which would be more convenient in emergency. So on the one hand — even the idiom distracts her, takes her still further from that state of mind, not desire, not lust, but merely the bleeding nerves, the mile-high tensions, the sort of pain — pleased, but on the other bothered, the absence of soap and water, for another example, being a damned nuisance just now, most inconvenient, for if she brings herself off or, for that matter, even if she doesn’t, it won’t do to touch any of the children without first washing her hands, so she’ll have to continue to hide from them, duck into the Ladies’, though none of this constitutes even a fraction of her real nervousness, for if she is able to bring herself off, why, she’ll be cool as a cucumber, able to cope, but she’s not so sure now she will. For one thing she hadn’t paid close enough attention on the way out, can’t recall how long it takes to get to the hotel, whether there’s a stop. There is, at the Polynesian Village Resort Hotel, and though more people get off the monorail there than on, and absolutely no one comes into her car, the doors automatically open and Mary is forced to do some very fancy cape work with the skirt — thank God she’s wearing one, otherwise she’d have had to stand, she’d never be able to get the pants up over her hips in time without becoming something of another attraction at Disney World, at least for the people passing by on the station platform — and now she’s quite sure it’s clear sailing back to their hotel and she might just be able to make it if only the recorded voices on the car’s loudspeaker that keeps nattering on about Disney and the “imagineers” who built this place would just shut up for a minute, and if only she could get that damned vision of Colin Bible out of her head. The silly sod. The poof nurse would have to go making googoo eyes at the kid from the Haunted Mansion. Blast people who make scenes, she thinks.