“Thanks.”
“Take your tickets around to the side, and Rhonda will provide you with your audio equipment.”
“Thanks,” Owen said again.
“Enjoy the tour.”
“Thanks.” He stepped away from the window.
“Over this way,” Monica said.
He followed her around the corner of the ticket shack.
“Good morning,” Rhonda greeted them, smiling and somehow looking too young and too shy for the job. “May I see your tickets, please?”
Owen gave them to her.
She tore them in half. “Be sure to save your stubs,” she said, returning half of each ticket to Owen. “You can get into the Beast House Museum on Front Street for half price.”
“We’ve already been told that,” Monica said.
Rhonda blushed. “Oh. Anyway.” She shrugged, then turned around. The outer wall of the ticket shack looked like a huge, open cupboard. It was lined with shelves. About half the shelves were empty. The others held audio cassette players.
Rhonda pulled one down. It was slightly smaller than a paperback book, black plastic, with a bright orange strap. Earphones were attached. “Here you are,” she said, and handed it to Monica. “You just hang the player around your neck by the strap.”
“I can see that.”
Rhonda blushed again.
Owen felt like smacking Monica.
When Rhonda gave a player to him, he smiled, hung it around his neck, and said, “Thank you very much.”
“You’re welcome. It’s a self-guided tour, and the players are all ready to go. You should wait until you reach the porch, which is Station Number One. You’ll see a sign with the number one on it. Then stop there and push Play, which is the oblong button on top.” She pointed it out on Owen’s machine. “And this is the Stop button here. After the porch, you proceed from station to station. The tape will tell you what to do. But feel free to take as long as you wish with the tour. Okay? When you’re done, just bring the players back to me. I’ll be right here.”
“Okay, thank you,” Owen told her.
They started up the walkway toward Beast House.
“I love it already,” Monica said. By the snide tone of her voice, Owen figured that her remark was inspired by the sight of the mannequin hanging from the porch beam.
“That’s poor Gus Goucher,” he explained.
“Yeah, I remember them lynching some guy. Which movie was that in, number two?”
“The Horror 3 in 3-D. But it happened in real life, Monica. Gus was a real person.”
“I know that.”
They halted behind a small group near the foot of the stairs. All wore headphones. Some turned this way and that as if surveying their general surroundings while they listened. Some looked down. A few whispered comments, nodded, chuckled. But most stood motionless and gazed up at the dangling body as they listened to their tapes.
“Lovely,” Monica muttered.
“He’s not supposed to be pretty,” Owen whispered.
"He isn’t.”
Gus’s eyes bulged. His black, swollen tongue stuck out.
His head was tilted sideways at a nasty angle so that his right ear almost touched his shoulder. But the worst part, for Owen, was the neck.
It was way too long..
That’s why they call it "stretching his neck.”
He’d seen photographs of such things.
But he didn’t like how it looked.
The stretched neck made things seem a little too real.
From the shoulders down, Gus looked all right. He wore a plaid shirt, blue jeans and boots.
Monica lowered her head, inspected her cassette player for a moment, then thumbed one of the buttons on top of it. Owen heard the click. He started his own player, then gazed up at Gus.
After a brief, hissy sound, a woman began to speak.
“Good morning, and welcome to Beast House. My name is Janice Crogan.”
Janice!
Her voice was rich and exciting, but not the voice of a teenaged girl. This was Janice grown up.
“I’ll be your guide today, with the help of old Maggie Kutch. Maggie created Beast House as an attraction after her family was murdered here, many years ago. If you had come here before her death in 1979, she would’ve been your guide. Old Maggie, fat and scarred, would’ve stood on the porch steps just in front of you, cane in hand as she introduced herself.
"'Howdy, folks,’” said a low, husky voice that clearly didn’t belong to Janice. It sounded distant and a little scratchy like an old-time recording of a live concert or political speech. ‘“Welcome to Beast House. My name’s Maggie Kutch, and I own it. I started off showing the place just after my husband and three children was butchered by the beast. Now, you might be asking yourselves how come I’d wanta show you my home after it was the scene of such awful grief to me. The answer’s easy: m-o-n-e-y.’
“What you just heard was the actual voice of Maggie Kutch,” Janice explained. “She conducted her tours for a great many years until her death in 1979. Even though she had rules against bringing recording devices into the house, quite a few people sriuck them in anyway. We’ve been lucky enough to obtain several recordings of the tours, so you’ll be able to hear Maggie tell the story in her own words, as if she herself were hobbling through the house as your own personal guide.
“You are now at Station One, which depicts the hanged body of Gus Goucher. Maggie never had a figure of Gus. He was added to the attraction in recent years, after my purchase of Beast House. If you’d been here in Maggie’s day, she would’ve pointed her cane at the beam from which Gus now hangs, and told you...”
Maggie’s voice returned. “‘Right here’s where they strung up poor Gus Goucher. He was only eighteen years old, and stopped by town on his way to San Francisco. He was going there to get a job at the Sutro Baths, where his brother worked. You know the Sutro Baths? They was like giant indoor swimming pools of hot water— salt water—right on the coast over near Cliff House. Cliff House, it’s still there. Some of it is, anyhow. The Sutro Baths’re long gone, but you can see the ruins down the bluff if you go to Cliff House.
“I reckon the Baths was quite a swell place, back then. Only Gus never made it there, because he showed up at this house on August 2, 1903.’” Owen heard a couple of hard thumps and pictured Maggie pounding the tip of her cane against the porch floor. "'Lilly Thorn, the outlaw’s widow, lived here then, along with her two children and her visiting sister, Ethel. Gus split some firewood for Lilly, late that afternoon, and she paid him with a supper. Then he was on his way.
“‘That night, the beast struck. No one, but only Lilly, lived through the attack. She ran into the street, screaming like a madwoman and waking up half the town. Well, the sheriff come along and searched the whole house from top to bottom. He didn’t find no culprit. He found nothing but the torn up, chewed up bodies of Lilly’s sister and two little boys. So then a posse was got up. They all went tromping around in the hills near the house, and who should they stumble on to but poor Gus Goucher, fast asleep by his campfire.
“‘Some of the posse recalled seeing him around Lilly’s house. And there wasn’t nobody to stand up for him, since he was just a stranger passing through. He might’ve sailed by, anyhow, if he’d only had them two strikes against him. But the third was the clencher. Gus had some blood on his clothes. So they dragged him back to town and had a trial for him over at the court house, which ain’t around any longer as it burned to the ground back in 1916.
“‘At the trial, Gus said he was innocent. He claimed the blood came from a cut on his finger, and he had the cut, sure enough. Only the prosecutor said he might’ve cut himself on purpose so he’d have an excuse for the bloody clothes. And the jury, they believed him.