Chapter 5 (FINALE): The Next Guide
I was spitting out specks of dirt by the time I made it back to the museum through Earnie’s tunnel. An earthy taste coated my tongue and throat; soil stuck to my grazed elbows.
When I finally emerged in the evening light that came through the windows of the building, Earnie’s snub-nose was sniffing and snorting as I pat him on his furry brown head.
Pompous cackling beckoned me from the hallway - the type of egotistical rich laughter that came from throwing a heavy, inflated head back. Wiping muck away from the face of my watch, I saw it was already nine o’clock. The deplorable guests had already been roaming the museum for three hours - I didn’t want to ponder what unimaginable damage they had done.
I was about to leave through the doorway of the Animals and Evolution exhibition for the foyer and make my way towards the sealed door, but when it suddenly began, my heart felt as if it had stopped.
One after another, the display cabinets throughout the museum that once held the imprisoned exhibitions exploded into clouds of broken shards. Shattering bangs echoed down the hallway, the floors above me, the greenhouse. It was a symphony of broken glass clattering throughout the entire building in bursting pops, a cacophony of impending frenzy.
The air inside the museum was intense, scalding. Me, its tour guide - the eyes and ears of the place - was trying to leave it for good, and the building exploded in a hot retaliating rage. The museum abhorred me for attempting an escape, and the exhibitions were let free.
From the halls: The once cackling guests soon found quietened confusion, and silence swiftly grew screams as delirium blossomed into blind fear. Glass displays still distantly popped and met the marble like clattering hail.
It occurred to me in that moment of sharp terror that the museum itself was an exhibition in and of itself - a wealthy man’s pandora’s box. And, staring around at the violent exploding glass that had housed our precious artifacts, her message was hauntingly clear: If she couldn’t have me, then no-one else could.
Two men frantically bolted into the room, running from an unseen horror. Their faces were polar opposite expressions: One spoke volumes of fear under a furrowed brow, the other had a jaw that was tightened with invisible bolts of disdain. Mister Frightened and Mister Angry - a rigid dichotomy which showed their contrasting feelings in the face of death. Here, in this abominable rich man’s graveyard, they knew they were going to die, and to hear the museum narrow their death sentence with every pop of distant glass felt intensely euphoric.
“What’s going on?” Mister Frightened’s voice was a helpless drone. ”Where were you?”
“I was-” I held my breath.
From their demeanor beginning to calm it was evident that they felt relatively at ease in the seemingly dull animal wing of the museum. I would have felt the same if my eye didn’t catch the finger-length Chameleon crawling up Mister Angry’s wrist.
The other man caught wind of what I was looking at. He looked down at Mister Angry’s forearm and his bulging eyes looked like they could have fallen out of his head.
“Oh, God.” The man with the chameleon up to his elbow said. “I’ve read about these. On the placard. How did it get-” His voice was shaking.
I wiped one sweaty hand on my leg and began to back away. This… All of this didn’t concern me. I had to escape the museum, I had to find out what was behind the steel door.
“It’s going to bite me, r-right? It’s venomous, right guide?” Mister Angry shrieked. “Get it the hell off me!”
I interjected, stepping one foot back then the next. “No, though it-”
Without warning, the man peeled it from his skin, one thumb pushing against the Chameleon’s neck to expose fangs. Mister Angry swiped the reptile at the other man with force, and its mouth stuck to his skin like a dartboard. And he laughed.
The rich and famous that visited were never going to change. I thought, watching Mister Frightened squirm and hold the blood that slowly drizzled from the freshly carved holes in his neck. Never.
The bitten man looked like a chameleon for a while. At least, part of him did. His wounded neck-skin bloomed orange, violet. Scaly flesh beneath his jaw was iridescent in the moonlight. Human cells were never meant for camouflage, and the man was soon testament to that. Mister Frightened didn’t make a sound, only an anguished grimace in pain as his skin cells flowered sage, then ocean blue. The pain was clearly insufferable, enough to turn him mad, enough to want to spoon the bloodshot eyes out of their sockets. Though, the worst stomach-curdling process was yet to come.
There was never venom, though the chameleon’s bite was turning his skin. When his human shell could bear the stress of chameleon evolution no longer, the blotches of scales that his flesh had morphed into soon became clear as glass. Transparent areas of the man’s skin bloomed in circles, growing slowly and easily like puddles in rain.
He went to grab a banister with one ghoulishly crystalline hand, but he couldn’t have known that the chameleon’s contagious clear pigmentation would also make his flesh as thin as paper. Pointy finger bones tore through the tips of his fragile paper-skin like spiny white staples as his hand touched the wood, and he screamed and screamed. Mr Frightened fell to one knee, the only limb that still showed the true color of his flesh.
As he toppled over, I saw his liver, his heart. All organs and gore were on show as I stared through his back that looked like a mere translucent veil or a jellyfish.
The Chameleon’s contagious pigment miraculously started to spread to his neckbones and his skull, and his skin and bones bloomed as clear as a window. No sound came out of his mouth when he screamed then, only that of the sickening tearing that came after his brittle see-through neck snapped under the weight of his brain.
His head made a splash as it dived from his shoulders onto the marble floor. Watching his facial skin flake away to translucent dust, I was reminded of the venomous Glass Butterflies we housed in our Insect Exhibition. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was how they originally came into being.
There was a brief, satisfying respite after I watched the rich man meet his demise. When my heart and standing hairs upon two shaking arms settled, I recalled how vulnerable he had looked with his organs showing; how scared he must have felt in the moment before his head broke loose from his body. His memories, his hopes and fears, his rich ego all ending in an instant as his fleshy mind-bubble met marble. How gratifying.
The other man tore me out of my moment of ecstasy as if he had plunged me in a freezing bath. Mister Angry was wildly swinging a hammer in front of me, it narrowly missed the bridge of my nose.
“We’re completely fucked because of you!” His voice lashed me with a searing culpability. He swung again and missed because that time I was already on the move.
I bolted for the door; my feet skidding as I turned in the hallway towards the foyer.
Angry guests, exploding cabinets - It’s all too much, Sophia. I thought. I know you’re watching me, honey. I’m going to be free.
I reluctantly passed the steel door as I swiftly climbed the grand staircase of the foyer. I was going to open it this evening to find freedom just as Johnny had told me I would, but not until I could shake the angry, wealthy prick on my tail.
The floor inside the Arts and Music Exhibition was littered with the shattered glass of the displays of free exhibitions, and when I entered the room I immediately went straight for the back wall. Above me on a golden placard: THE TOOTHFAIRY.
Mister Angry followed me into the dimly lit space, wielding his hammer tightly over one shoulder. “Nowhere to run, guide.”
The man turned left, then right. “No reanimated freaks left here to do your bidding either, eh?” His eyes scanned the floors for smashed glass - the remains of any escaped displays.
But the Toothfairy didn’t do my bidding, and it didn’t need broken glass to be set free - only the deep, nauseating hunger that rumbled within its canvas belly for the guest’s mouth-bones was needed for it to wake it from its dye. An ash-colored hand tore out of the painting beside me, slowly reaching, wanting. Strings of oil pigment like bloody tree sap or syrup hung from its arms and neck as it hoisted itself out of the canvas. Its face had no eyes; its head was only half of that - only the jaw, mouth and cheeks remained below its jagged outline of a missing scalp.
The man turned, but the Toothfairy’s fingers were long, and its famine even longer. It leaped from the canvas, pinning him tightly against the ground. His hand was limp, the hammer slipping from his grip.
My heart was racing, skin gooseflesh, but watching the animated painting pull the man’s teeth felt intoxicating. There was a vile amusement that burned within as I counted the number of teeth the ghoul had to unroot before the man’s words became a wet indiscernible mess. Six, seven.
When there were no teeth left, it started at his lips - pink leeches that peeled away, syrup strings and nerves.
“Hel’ me, ‘lease…” The man gurgled.
I smiled back because the tortured tour guide that I once was proved to be no salvation for him - perhaps only dentures were. And so, I picked up his hammer and left him there to expire.
The museum foyer outside was as it always was - ornate and grand. I looked up at the mosaic ceiling and laughed as I walked down the stairs of her belly; an orchestra of exploding glass displays and screams drowning the sound of my chuckle like a loud, swirling drain of disarray. The horrifying museum for the rich and famous was absurd, and it ate me whole.
I had the key to the steel door, and with it, my misery would come to an end. I can feel you smiling, too, Sophia. Dad is leaving.
The hallway wasn’t very far - the steel door wasn’t far. Not much longer, Sophia. You’re going to be so proud of me.
My stomach sank.
I didn’t anticipate the museum’s curator to be situated outside the metal door; two stumpy legs beneath him that looked as if they hardly held up his grape-like frame which busted at the seams.
“Michael,” He said sternly, his back almost flat against the cold metal barrier behind him. “Please don’t do this.”
The head of the metal hammer in my hand shined brightly at the right angle. I walked towards the curator and the door.
“Oh, boy-o.” The curator said. “You’ve gone mad! That grin,” He shook his head. “The museum has gripped you, hasn’t it?”
My fingers reached up and patted my lips like they were going numb. Oh, God. How long had I been smiling for? How long...
“If you turn and leave,” His thick voice was shaky. “We won’t come after you. You have a choice, Mike.”
I contemplated for a while. Cold from the snow outside came through the broken foyer windows and chilled my bones, and I watched the steam of my breath rise from my lips.
“Retire, be free. Live what years you have left. Or enter the door, and you will never leave. It’ll break you, boy-o. It’ll break... her.” He was holding his hands up submissively. “Please, Michael. Do you want to leave?”
I wanted to reply.
I wanted to say ‘Yes’, but the museum held my tongue, my arm.
And the hammer swung and swung.
Each blow was half Michael, half museum, but all of it - every cracking of his skull, every slosh of the curator’s brain under my hammer, was the bite of fifteen years of torment.
It was surprisingly easy to turn his skull into broken shards of bone and a gurgling fountain. Blood ran freely onto the ornate white floor like long, branching worms. In the poorly lit greyscale blanket of the evening, the curator’s life-fluid stood out vividly as a red pool against surrounding dull, washed colors.
My breath was labored through smiling teeth that were speckled with red paint. He’s dead. He’s really dead.
It took a while for me to catch my breath, but when I finally did, I fumbled around for the key in my pocket and found that it slid it into the steel door with ease. Surprising ease, as if the door had been opened regularly. But it can’t have been, I was here once a week and it was always locked tight.
The steel door groaned open. Circular lights adorned the short metal hallway in rows, leading to a second wooden door a few steps away. Above the door, a golden placard. It read: THE NEXT-
My stomach plummeted.
In bold letters: THE NEXT GUIDE.
I reluctantly brought myself towards the second door and pulled. If I had been wearing a smile again, it was soon gone.
Pink wallpaper plastered the walls inside the space and peeled off occasionally in curled rips, save for one wall that was well-kept - most likely because it was decorated with polaroid photos. The shelves were littered with teddy bears, the ground with clothes, the ceiling with fairy-lights.
I moved to the wall with the images and braced it with one hand as I peered closer. As I picked up one of the pictures, I caught the scent of iron from the dry blood on my hands.
It was dated three years ago. Centre frame was the curator, slimmer back then, alongside a blonde teenager in a tidy ponytail. They were smiling.
Another polaroid unstuck itself from the wall as I pulled. Upon the white bar beneath the picture there was some writing that was messily scribbled in vivid: FLYTRAP’S BIRTHDAY. Dated a couple years prior, it depicted the curator and the girl, younger this time, beside our giant venus flytrap we kept in the greenhouse. This photo had been taken at the museum while I was working.
What is this place?
Reaching all the way to the end of the wall, I picked up the earliest photograph. It was dated fifteen years ago. The curator was sitting next to a hospital bed, the slimmest I had seen him and with a full head of hair. Beneath the polaroid, more writing: CANCER FREE! Right of the picture on the bed beside the curator was the same young girl, maybe five or six years of age. She had bright blue eyes and-
Sophia.
The pink room was spinning, I felt like throwing up.
This can’t be happening. It wasn’t happening. The curator was right, I was going mad. I’m going mad. I’m just going-
“Dad?”
Her words were quiet, distant, and afraid. Her voice broke me in two.
I turned.
Those same eyes, that same smile. My sweetheart was older, she was in her early twenties. After all, it had been fifteen years since I last heard her voice.
“Sophia?” The words trembled from my lips.
For a while I cried as she hugged me. I thought about how the curator doctored the hospital's notice of death that I had received so many years ago. I thought about how Sophia had been beneath my feet the entire time, caged like an animal and enslaved as a future pawn for the rich and famous. But after some time, I only thought about her smile.
When she pulled away from me, her eyes caught the bits of the curator’s skull upon my maroon waistcoat. We still caught up; we had a lot to talk about. But after she had seen what was on my coat, her smile had faded, and the sparkle in her eyes was long gone.
Still bawling, she sat upon her bed. “Where have you been?” She asked.
“Right here at the museum, honey. Once a week. The other days I spend off-site, never far.” I spoke. “They don’t let me visit the museum on off days, they have lots of cleaning to do.”
She was choking up as she spoke, her words took a while to come loose from her lips. “No, they don’t.” She sniffed. “Dad, the curator shows and teaches me about the museum on those other six days.” She pointed a shaky finger to the polaroid pictures on her wall. “He says I’m going to be a superstar tour guide, loving every moment of working here, just like you.”
I thought back to the golden placard on the wall. THE NEXT GUIDE.
It felt like my heart was going to give out.
This world was cursed. It was cruel.
“Honey, it doesn’t matter what he said, he’s a terrible man. He has been raising you to be-” I shut my eyes tightly, inhaling a deep breath. I didn’t want to tell her who he was, I didn’t want to tell her that her life was a lie, and her caregiver was a monster. “He’s grooming you, darling. Like cattle for slaughter. You’re going to be a pawn for the rich and famous, just like me.”
She was shaking her head. “No!” She sniffled. “That’s not true! It’s not!” She bolted up from her bed and made for the door. “The curator is my friend; he wouldn’t do that.”
I was shouting. “He’s as bad as the rest, honey. Listen to me. They’re all monsters, all of them. All the rich and famous that visit this God forsaken horror house!”
There’s no way she ever saw the rich people – she was hidden away through the door the nights I had given them tours. She didn’t know where to begin when unravelling my incoherent rambling, and at that moment, she was just a sobbing mess.
I went to hold her arm to settle her down, but she screamed.
“Get away from me!”
I felt helpless. “Listen to me, please,” I said. “The rich are deplorable, and they are here once a week, you just don’t see them because you’re locked-“
She sprinted through the door.
“Sophia, don’t-“
Her slipper splashed as it met the maroon puddle of blood that pooled outside the doorway.
She screamed and screamed not only because she was beside the curator’s face that had been mashed to a bloody pulp of broken bones and flesh by my hammer, but she might have screamed because at that moment she knew her father was a-
“Monster…” The words fell out of Sophia’s trembling lips. “You’re a… You’re a m… monster, daddy!”
I went to grab her by the arm and hold her and tell her it was alright and that we were free, but she slapped my hand away and shrieked.
My voice was quiet, pleading. “I’m not a monster, honey, I-”
She was backing away from me. Pale moonlight flooded in and painted bloody steps upon the museum’s marble floors where her slippers had been.
Looking down at the ground, she didn’t see the disgusting man lying there that had tormented me for fifteen years, nor the man that had kidnapped and groomed her to be the next guide. All she saw in the museum curator’s lifeless body were the remains of the honest man that had raised her in her father’s stead. And I had just haphazardly scattered his brain across the marble floor with a hammer.
She broke off into a sprint down the hallway, around the corner and down the steps she had walked many times before.
I screamed after her and gave chase. When I finally saw her again, she had stopped in the middle of the foyer a few steps from the door.
Beezlebub and the Toothfairy were patrolling the halls, slowly making their way towards us. The museum’s abominations did not wander aimlessly, they were searching for me. The museum was searching for me. It was not going to let me run free.
The back of her blonde hair was facing me as she wrestled with the door locks. Sophia shrieked as I made my way past her and jammed my master key into the door and twisted.
My heart was racing. The key that had worked for fifteen years was not turning the lock. I kept twisting and turning my wrist, cussing as the museum’s exhibitions loomed.
It would never open, of course. Not this evening.
Because something was amiss.
The museum had no guide.
Inside the foyer, Beezlebub fluttered a broken fly-wing as it sucked his disgusting mouth-tube in and out like a pacifier.
When they would reach us, they would pull my teeth and flesh from my bones as easily as boiled meat. Sophia would be next.
No, she was going to be free.
The ground scratched as Beezlebub dragged one contorted spiny foot across the marble. Closer, closer.
And that’s when I knew what I had to do.
My arms were wide. “I will be resuming tours at ten o’clock, please leave your coats on the rack in the foyer.” I said, my voice echoing through the museum.
The sound of scraping and glass displays smashing was no more.
“Is that what you want to hear?” I screamed at the museum. The two horrifying exhibitions inside the foyer stood frozen.
“Is that what you want to-“ I trailed off, falling to my knees. Tears streamed down my cheeks and onto the ornate floor.
The museum would have been satisfied with either me or Sophia as the guide, but it was always meant to be me. Always.
A clack chimed from the door behind me, and Sophia and I both turned.
Snow drifted slowly to the ground through the large doorway to the outside gardens. I managed to make out the gloss of the curator’s black sedan underneath piling snow parked near the steps outside.
“Do you see?” I said.
I took Sophia’s hand, and held her cold grip tightly mine.
“This museum is cursed; the people that visit it are cursed.”
Reaching forward, I braced her pale cheek with my other hand before she could squirm away. “Look at what I’ve become.”
“Look at me.”
Staring into her, I saw my sweetheart, my world, my everything. Sophia was here, and she was real. She was alive.
“Look at me, darling.”
Tears streamed down my face and met my shirt collar in blotches.
“I may not be your father,” I muttered. “Not to you, not anymore,” I brushed her hair from her brow. “But I want you to know that I love you, Sophia.”
When her wet eyes met mine, I knew she hadn’t seen her Dad. She saw the museum. And I’m glad she did, because if she hadn’t then she might have stayed.
“I will always, always love you, my girl.”
I like to remember her smiling in that moment, but it may have been a trick of the mind. I let go of her hand, leaving the curator’s car keys in her shaking palm.
“You get in that car, and you go.” I said.
She sniffled and nodded.
“You go and go and don’t stop until you are safe, honey.”
Johnny was right about finding freedom through the door, though it was never mine. The museum had possessed me, just as it had Mariette, and I could never leave.
But Sophia could.
“Goodbye, Dad.”
For the first time in years, my smile was warm and genuine.
False memories of her future flashed through my eyes as I watched her breathe the cold air on the outside steps.
I saw Sophia’s first day at her real job. The smile on her face at her wedding. Her children starting school.
My eyes followed her as she disappeared into the snowy evening in the curator’s car.
When I faced the museum, the exhibitions had wandered on, and the building was silent.
I put on a ballroom waltzing record before I began sweeping the glass of the museum’s cold floors.
The exhibitions were free, of course, but it was no secret as to how I survived fifteen years of trauma. The museum had protected me from its exhibitions because I was her guide.
As I made my way around the ground floor of the building, I noticed one glass display that had not broken in the chaotic evening. It was when I had passed the paranormal wing that I saw her.
Her hand braced the window of her prison, and her fingers slid down with a screech.
“Come on then, Mariette.” I said as my key fit snugly inside of the glass cabinet.
The music from the record player was a divine tune of strings and soul. A song to dance to. I felt a spring in my step as the old tour guide and I made our way to the main hall of the museum.
The beautiful evening stars above the mosaic glass ceiling painted the marble foyer a beautiful azure. My grip made its way through Mariette’s cold, plastic fingers until we were holding hands under the night sky above. Her face was that of a shiny doll, but it did not matter - she still had the soul of the young woman that once walked these halls, and she was stunning. This evening was her time to feel young and alive again.
Leading, I held her hand, and together Mariette and I slow-danced in the moonlight.
“Mariette, my daughter is free. Sophia is free. She’s out there somewhere, starting a new life.”
The moon, the museum’s marble and my heart: The color of cold lips.
The old guide and I waltzed left, then right. “Isn’t that lovely, Mariette?”
We twirled under the stars.
---
Credits
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