Chapter 3: The Contract
This week, I found myself scrubbing away at the SCATTERBRAIN mirror in the paranormal wing of the museum. The premise was simple: the mirror’s deep navy and galaxy-sparkled reflection would read your eyes, and the deepest horrors and fears from the recesses of your mind would scatter onto the mirror like brain-paint. If I’m being completely honest, I utterly dreaded cleaning the mirror. I hated seeing my daughters distorted face staring back at me, or the reanimated horrors of the museum eating away at my flesh. Yes, I’m talking about you, Mariette. I peered my head out the large doorway to the plastic doll in her display.
My microfiber cloth polished the blood and muck from the corners of the mirror’s golden ornamental frame. It reached between the crevices of the perched gargoyles it depicted in its etchings around the rim of its face. Around the center I swirled and swirled until it was squeaky tidy. When I saw my daughter Sophia, I met her imaginary hand at the interface of the reflection with mine. When I saw monstrous exhibitions standing behind my shoulders, I rolled two unimpressed eyes. Cleaning carried my mind to the clouds, and I thought about the museum rather than the labor ahead of me.
I guess there is great fear in unknowing. And, like a disease, the fear I once had for the museum’s daunting artifacts soon spread to another host once I became accustomed to its horrifying mechanisms while living in its belly for so long. The unpredictable fear and excitement of the building bit the wealthy visitors like a rabid dog, and my panic no longer grew from the museum’s walls but blossomed from the cruel diseased hearts of the deplorable rich people that visited. I could always predict the way the museum would react, never the manner human malice could. And, every week, I had no choice but to confront those who visited the museum and mold myself to their erratic and sickening behavior.
It was the same fear that gripped me fifteen years ago before I signed the employment contract. The fear I had in my twenties, the fear that came from finding out my daughter’s cancer was untreatable without chemotherapy. We were young, and my job didn’t pay enough for costly therapy. Hopelessness met me at the end of an empty whiskey bottle, which had stared at me accusingly until the very last drop. I was a failed father with nothing but time on his hands to watch my daughter Sophia wither away and observe her joyful, smiling soul fall through my fingers like sand. That was, until, the day I saw a strange article in the newspaper.
TOUR GUIDE WANTED, it read. When I saw the salary listed, I saw not dollar signs but my daughter’s bright smile. My mind’s eye witnessed her future graduation, her wedding - the second chance from the cruel illness that had been pulling her from my arms and into a child-sized coffin.
The employment contract to be the tour guide at the private museum was simple, yet unforgiving. The paycheck was huge, enough to solve my personal woes and help my family. Though, the paperwork was littered with strange clauses. Most of which ended with: IN EVENT OF BREACHING THIS AGREEMENT, EMPLOYEE IS SUBJECT TO IMMEDIATE TERMINATION AND EXSANGUINATION.
If you don’t know what exsanguination means, it’s a showy word to describe draining your circulation of blood. I was twenty-something, desperate, and I had guessed the word meant that they were going to forcibly take me from the property. Later, when I found out what it meant, I consoled myself it was merely a sick joke – no organization simply murdered unruly employees. My wife, however, didn’t find it amusing. Though, desperation took me, it propelled me to sign up for Sophia’s sake. And the museum held me in its jaws for fifteen years. The contract was indefinite, and early termination would result in one thing: EXSANGUINATION. This was no known organization, no one would hear me scream - not even God. And in this place, there was no God, only the rich and famous.
Last week when I picked up the phone, a voice sprinkled with familiarity met my ear. It was the voice of someone I had heard before, sounding deep and curdled between obese lips. It was the museum curator, and I had not spoken to him in fifteen years since the day he presented me with my contract.
“Hi there boy-o!” He boomed; a hissing of stubble sounded through the archaic museum phone.
“Who is this?” I murmured.
He bellowed a fat man’s laugh. “Oh, you don’t recall?”
My stomach sank when I remembered the curator’s voice.
We spoke for a while, and the conversation was short and terrifying. He was understanding, but beneath his bubbly tone was an underlying and unsated desire for cruelty. He was just like the rest.
After a short chat, he coughed into the phone to break the catchup. “What I’m trying to say, lad, is that I appreciate your commitment to the museum. That I do, that I do. For the guest list tonight…” He paused, murmuring gibberish as he read something. “Yes, yes. Five will be attending the function tonight, four of which are guests.”
I nodded to myself, I was off the hook. But why was he calling me?
“Great, I’ll-“
“The last attendee is not a guest, rather, will be there for your aforementioned exsanguination.”
I think my heart stopped.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Oh, it’s not all bad, chap. If the attendee is incapacitated and unable to carry out this clause of your contract – uh, kill you, we’ll be seeing you on time for work next week. Cheerio!”
The phone clicked off.
It was a painful week after that night, and my heart never left my throat. Every waking moment my mind would drift and be reminded that someone was coming to the museum to end me. I supposed that was always a risk when giving tours to the deplorable brats that visited. But this was different. Whoever it was, their sole goal was to leave my body cold and lifeless.
I checked my watch after I had finished polishing the mirror and began walking towards the enormous foyer.
Uneasiness, as well as my turning stomach, almost made me forget it had to feed TOOTHFAIRY.
Up the stairs I went and down the halls, passing the locked steel door on my way. I had never opened that door and it always tickled my curiosity, though there was absolutely no way inside without a key. Besides, it was a matter for another time. The guests were going to arrive in fifteen minutes. So was my executioner.
At the end of the flowing walls of the music and art exhibition was a dimly lit doorway that I rarely entered. Outside on a large golden placard above the entrance: TOOTHFAIRY. The room inside was a dark cubed space with painted black walls. A single spotlight illuminated the painting hung in the center of the furthest wall.
A horrifying face of an anguished man was brushed across the canvas that looked like a hairless, burning corpse. Its mouth and eyes were vacant holes; distant white specks could be made out in the open cavities of its face. Teeth. Throatfuls and eye sockets lined with hundreds of teeth.
We were given this painting from a woman who saw the face move on her bedroom wall. Obviously, no art dealers would take her up on a donation.
Our cleaners kept the teeth from our deceased visitor’s corpses for a special reason. It’s grotesque, sure, but completely necessary. From my maroon waistcoat pocket, I pulled a handful of bloody teeth and fit them snugly in the rim of the artworks ornamental frame.
Monthly feeding became a ritual so he didn’t leave the painting and walk the halls. I hated the times I forgot to feed him. The times he crawled out of the canvas dye and slogged around the halls, looking for me.
I checked my watch, it was five-fifty-nine. The museum was about to open.
Quickly adjusting my waistcoat and brushing my hair, I came tapping down the marble staircase of the vast foyer. With two hands, I pulled open the enormous door.
As usual, the rich folk sauntered into the museum on their invisible high horses. My wandering eye scanned and assessed them quickly, any one of them could be my undoing. In the group of five there was two men: one plump and stubby, another gaunt and scraggly. Out of the three women, two were bony and frightening to look at like fleshy scarecrows with long, pompous noses. Lastly was a lady that was quite pale and beautiful, her eyes quite small on her face which was framed by ash-black bangs and a ponytail.
That woman, however, stood out to me long after we had begun the tour. The ponytail of hers didn’t stick out from her rich-girl high horse, rather her middleclass mannerism. She carried herself with a pride that was of a hardworking businesswoman, content and happy with her nine-to-five, not the accomplished grandeur of reeling in millions of dollars of fortune from multiple estates. Was this her?
I took them through a couple exhibitions, passing the glass-walled hallways between our greenhouses where Holly had eaten a man the week before. They clapped at the Venus flytrap’s enormous, olive mouth as it twisted under the evening starlight, oblivious to its horrific history. Though, maybe one of them knew. The one the curator had spoken to must have known everything.
We had stopped at the paranormal wing. They saw Mariette for a while before their eyes then set on something else.
“What’s under here?” A woman said, pulling at a display cabinet’s blanket.
“Take a look.” I said, pulling the fabric away with one shaky hand like a magician terrified of a failing stunt.
He had no human mouth nor teeth; his snout was the long hairy tube-appendage of a blowfly. You could see his black eyes in the incandescent light at certain angles – they had faded to pitch after the many years of anguish and isolation in his glass prison. His face was a charcoal black, not gray; so was his gangly body that broke out wings and spiny limbs through his hairy graphite flesh. There was no white in his eyes, only a screen-door pattern upon two bulging, dark eyeballs that housed a thousand more. He watched us unblinkingly through the glass, one deformed wing buzzing and clicking. Moving. Half human, half fly. Below the display on a golden placard, it read: BEELZEBUB.
The woman in a long brunette ponytail leaned in and gawked, pressing her done-up nails against the glass with a clack. As she turned her head to say: “Shouldn’t he be in the insect exhibit, guide?”. The thing inside the glass turned his revolting head, too, as if it could understand her. As if he felt mocked.
There were a couple chuckles from the rich crowd. My jaw tightened, though. They were upsetting him.
“He was there originally, yes.” I wiped one sweaty palm against my trousers. “He was brought into the museum by an anonymous donor, describing it as being the product of experimental chemical warfare.”
The lady nodded pensively; the thing buzzed inside the glass.
“However,” I continued. “Our team quickly disproved this. Our museum was unable to understand what this creature was, nor what happened to him. And so, he rots his days away stuck in the paranormal wing. It’s tragic, but necessary. I personally believe the person who donated him thought we were his last resort to dispose of him.”
Suddenly, one hairy feeler braced the glass and stuck against the barrier like a sickly black hoof. I felt queasy and wanted to move on, but the questions kept pouring.
“How did he get that name?” A man’s voice said from the back.
“In theology, Beelzebub was one of the seven princes of hell. In Ugaritic, the name roughly translates to lord of the flies.” My eye briefly caught the thing in the display cabinet bending its head to the side like a confused dog, one disgusting tube-snout rocking back and forth like a pacifier.
“Does it think? I mean, like you or I?”
“We simply don’t know.” I said. “Not many staff come into this exhibition chamber, let alone try interact with the pieces.”
Extending one arm forward, I ushered the crowd to walk on. We did for a while, until I noticed the woman with the black ponytail still pressed against the glass gawking at the blowfly’s body.
“Ma’am?”
She pointed an index finger at it for a couple moments before speaking. “I want to try speak to him. He looks like he’s in pain.”
“I don’t think that’s a good ide-“
“You- You probably pass him every day you work here,” She interrupted, her tone searing me like hot coal. “Giving tours, cleaning cabinets. And not once have you tried to find out if he’s still human in there?” Her finger darted against the glass to his bulbous, hairy black head.
I glared at her for a while and brooded. Did this museum guest have compassion? No... I swallowed. Was this her? The curator’s inside woman? The one trying to kill me? If she got any closer to the fly, she would be as good as dead. Though, I might be the collateral damage.
“We should move on.” I asserted.
She snorted. “No, I don’t think we shall.” The lady nodded her head towards to the enclosure. “Open it.”
“You are welcome to try to communicate with it through the glass.” I rapped my knuckles against the boundary.
She stared at me with shark eyes. “With the glass, he’s an animal. Without, he’s equal. I want to speak to him as such, now open the goddamn cabinet.” She boomed.
I couldn’t think straight anymore, the curator’s game was plaguing me. This had to be her, right? She was going to let Beelzebub free and kill us.
Still, I had a plan.
My shaky hand gripped the master key and slowly fumbled it into the cabinet’s lock. Inside, the abomination sucked its tube-snout pacifier back and forth in excitement. Its thousands of eyes saw fresh meat; he was hungry.
The woman reached her arm around and climbed into the cabinet with the creature, her expensive slippers skidding along the flooring with a screech. She was talking brave before, but confronted with the towering, contorted thing ahead, the lighting painted her pale face a horrified grimace. At that moment, she knew she wanted to get out.
The back of the woman’s still hung out past the cabinet’s doorframe in case she needed a quick exit, she didn’t dare stand fully inside the fly’s enclosure.
My heart was beating out of my chest. She was going to let him out, and Beelzebub shall suck my flesh through his face-straw like a human strawberry milkshake.
Breathing was hard, I felt like I was going to pass out.
Without warning, I kicked the woman forward. My foot planted itself on her back and she went tumbling into the enclosure and against the far end of the glass, screaming, screaming. I shut and locked the door swiftly. The curator will not have my head this evening. I found her. She’s the one who wants me dead.
“Help me!” She screamed. Gasps of the crowd behind me sounded like they were wheezing into balloons.
I leaned one hand against the door. “You wanted to speak to him face to face.”
The abomination was reanimated. Spiny insectoid hooks spread from its hairy half-human flesh; it spread and beat its ghoulish, torn wings. It was ready to feast.
“What the hell are you doing?” One of the men behind shouted.
I turned my head to him. “Complying.”
Suddenly, the woman’s drumming fists did something the frail insect’s hooves never could. She smashed a hole in the cabinet from the inside and came tumbling out onto the floor in a cascade of glass.
One of the pompous rich men laughed. He turned to run, but the buzzing monstrosity caught him.
From its glass prison, it spurted from its mouth tube; slime covered the man’s face like sage jelly dotted with smaller, black blowflies. It was like something out of my nightmares of Sophia.
The blowflies bored holes into his flesh, into his cheeks. Crawling didn’t get him far. The flies were already digging, digging. He screamed and the rest of the guests screamed, too. Flies buried under his cheeks and came crawling out through the corners of his eyes. Red gaping holes emerged beneath skin that popped like peach-colored balloons filled with bloody paint. The flies were even inside his gums, and the man screamed. He screamed and screamed until the screams were no more, until it was just me alone beside his corpse with the flies that crawled and squirmed inside his spiny flesh suit.
On my knees I vomited against a marble wall, my hand meeting his pool of life fluid on the floor. Exsanguinated.
Beelzebub’s mouth-tube met one of the man’s calves and sucked chunks of his fleshy soup up with a thurp like Satan’s vacuum cleaner.
From crawling to standing I broke into a sprint, managing to steady by dragging my hand against the marble as I ran, leaving trails of bloody finger-painted lines – a grotesque artwork only the TOOTHFAIRY could appreciate.
My feet skidded around the ground as I bolted around corners, past the living wall and deep-sea exhibition. At the end of one hallway, my eye caught her ponytail that darted into the museum’s theater. She was up to something; her plan failed, now she was finding something else to kill me.
Inside, the theater was vast and ornate, with rows upon rows of silky lilac seats. Marble balconies reached out over the stage like great, expensive white clouds. Small holes projected streams of light from the theater’s corners, ceiling, and stage. A brilliantly blue humpback whale suspended in shifting light floated from the entrance beside me, downhill the slope of seats before blubbering and disappearing into the wall as the projectors flickered. Specks of light from its shooting spout had hit my face like droplets of rain and felt like cold fingers against my cheek. For a short lifespan, our theatre and its holograms were real.
The brunette woman didn’t know that. Though, she was my executioner. Maybe she did.
I slowly stepped down the staircase.
She was shaking, screaming at me from the stage, her voice echoing in the enormous decorative room. “Get- get away from me!”
I stepped closer, closer. And she didn’t stop screaming. “You- You locked me in the cabinet with…” As she trailed off, the lights dimmed to a pitch-black. The next show was about to commence.
Trumpets suddenly boomed and shook the theater, spotlights illuminated a single holographic soldier cleaning his rifle to the right of his stage. The next showing was a war performance I had seen many times before.
My heart was beating in my chest, the fly was searching the halls for more food, and we were the closest feast.
I was pleading for us to leave at the top of my lungs over the loud roaring trumpets, barely hearing my own voice. The woman backed away, tears streaming down her face and distorting her mascara.
As if possessed by the museum, the soldier finished cleaning his gun, turned and gave me a sickening grin. White light flickered a show of revoltingly sharp teeth as he loaded his rifle. I had watched this presentation hundreds of times, and this was a first.
I screamed; the trumpets boomed and boomed. She kept walking backwards, away from me and into the soldier’s line of fire. My mouth was agape, my shriek rumbled my lungs with reverb, my soundless voice tearing away at my coarse throat.
The holographic bullet tore through her skull, a hammer meeting fleshy coconut. Bits of blood and brain painted chickenpox specks of death upon my maroon waistcoat. And the projected soldier showed teeth.
I thought back to the mirror I had cleaned earlier. SCATTERBRAIN.
Animated, the museum’s horrifying specter slowly bent to one knee and began loading his rifle with the next non-existent bullet.
I tumbled over seats and stairs as I sprinted from the stage towards the entrance, holes tearing away at the lilac fabric of the chairs as he shot, opening flaps like blooming verbena flowers.
I might have thrown up again if I didn’t have to keep running. Beelzebub slogged behind me distantly at the end of the hallway; his spiny, hooked feet screeching against the marble. Buzzing mocked me from behind as a deformed wing that was never meant to fly twitched in the starlight that flooded over his hairy thorax.
Guests were still screaming in the foyer, they darted in every angle like shaken ants.
My hand reached for the museum’s front door. My lady executioner was dead, but my eyes were traumatized with gore. I couldn’t bare it anymore. I reached to pull the door open and-
The museum’s phone rang.
Once again, my heart felt like it stopped beating.
I let go of my shaky grip around the cold doorhandle.
Up the stairs I went, wiping one sweaty hand against my trouser leg. Reluctantly, I reached for the phone.
“Hello?” My quiet voice fell out of my mouth.
“Oh, guide,” The sound of the plump curator pulling from his cigarette. “Your debt in punishment has been paid. None of tonight’s guests were anything special.”
I swallowed sour spit. My throat was tight. “What do you mean?”
“They’re middle-class volunteers on a luxury sponsored trip to a private museum - none were there for the exsanguination. And boy-o, did you prove that you belong here or what?”
I slammed the phone on my reception desk, the sound of plastic echoing throughout the foyer and ringing in my ears.
A cold feeling flooded my chest, my horrible realization dismantled me: This week, the guests never did anything particularly dreadful. It was me alone who had cornered them into hell from fear of losing my own life. My punishment from the curator was never death. It was torment.
Was I a monster, too?
For a while, I cried in the foyer, oblivious to the screaming and carnage unfolding throughout the museum. Tears flowed down my face and stained paperwork of dead guests; my hands still shaking from fear and dread from the museum's looming and reanimated monstrosities. Beelzebub was coming.
I didn’t like what I was becoming. I was going to leave this dreadful museum, no matter the price.
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Credits
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