Chapter 4: Metamorphosis
There were two unopened doors at the museum that had always haunted me since I started: The first being the locked steel door I had passed countless times at the museum yet remained locked and never accessible - a peculiar haunting that amounted from itching curiosity. It had been swimming around in my mind since that young girl visited the museum a few weeks ago and her curiosity prodded away at its potential. Secondly, and more horrifyingly, was the shut doorway to Johnny Razortongue’s display, the only exhibition I never entered out of unadulterated fear.
Johnny Razortongue is to blame as to why Mariette, the previous guide - the one that walked the museum’s halls before me, went mad. It has been said that his plastic ventriloquist-dummy tongue only speaks in mind-shattering truths or lethal lies. He chooses either truth or lie based on whatever brings him the most entertainment at the time from his deprived, sealed exhibition-cell in the corner of our paranormal wing. His disturbed mind knows only disarray, and it thrives in all manners of consequences from his cruelty. Mariette knew this all too well. The dummy poured pestilence into her ear from the moment she visited him, contorting and twisting her once fortified mind like molten glass under his heated will. And so, Mariette’s ill-fated psyche bent. It bent and bent until Mariette was no more, until all that remained of the old guide was her doll-like shell after she gave in to Johnny’s razor tongue. After she believed his lies, after she injected herself with plastic to become a ventriloquist dummy, just like him. After she decided to please the museum and to please Johnny, nothing remained but her tortured soul inside of her plasticized and reanimated body.
It was snowing the day I decided to leave the museum. My hand braced the cold windowpane iced with white clumps, and the warmth sucked out of my hand easily like cigarette smoke.
Years prior when I had started as the museum’s tour guide, I received word that my daughter’s cancer had taken her. A letter - that’s all I was given by the oncology ward. The hospital informed me that my daughter had passed away by mail - which meant she had been dead for a few days before the paperwork actually arrived. The fact of that shattered me. I decided I would rather live with the burden of insanity before carrying on in this cruel world with the burden of a child dying. Thinking back, it had been snowing that day, too. Before deciding to venture into Johnny’s exhibit to let his toxic words take me just as he had Mariette, the snow outside reminded me of holding her gloved hand at Wintertime shows, and her face in my mind’s eye begged me to keep living. I didn’t visit him that day.
Though, until recently, I felt no obligation to ever try to break my contract and leave the museum anymore. Sophia, my world, my darling, was dead. Why would I ever leave? I could stay and hold the ghastly hand of her ghoulish reflection against the interface of our museum’s horrifying haunted mirrors. Here, Sophia was with me, and I was never alone.
Stopping to gaze up at the enormous foyer, I was reminded that I, too, was an anguished exhibition in this rich man’s contraption. The poor guide to push and pull at, the man who survived fifteen years of torment. Look at his hollow eyes, the wealthy visitors probably thought. Look how dead inside he looks.
No more misery. My daughter wouldn’t want me to wither away like this, a pawn at the hands of the rich and famous. It was going to be freedom or death.
On my way to visit Johnny I found myself walking past the locked steel door, past the arts and music exhibition and downstairs next to the living wall and into the paranormal exhibition, when something caught my eye.
It was Mariette, the reanimated plastic shell of the previous guide, in her display. She clicked her pale joints stiffly and fluttered her heavy eyelids against tough friction. She was deceased and on show, but her soul was still very much alive. A soul that pushed her hand up and against her glass prison as if to say: Stop, guide. Look what Johnny did to me, and what he is going to do to you.
I’m sorry, Mariette. I thought. Believe it or not, Johnny is going to help me leave this horrible place.
I was so focused on organising my plan to see the dummy and to leave the museum I had almost forgotten to feed Earnie. I could never forget about Earnie.
Beyond the insect exhibition hallway and to the left was our Animals and Evolution room. It was quite frankly rather dull, but Earnie always stood out to me like a hairy, clawed thumb.
I found myself walking swiftly through the marble halls, climbing upon the balcony that stretched above the open-plan exhibition room. From the balcony overlooking his iron-barred pen, I tossed him heads of purple and green lettuce which he chomped with an effortless wet crunch.
See, Earnie was a bear-sized mole. And he had a secret.
He was a gentle giant, and I loved him. It was so difficult to find a kind soul in this abominable place. And so, I kept his secret. I found the hole he had dug through to the museum’s garden, and I let him have it. He could have his freedom if I couldn’t.
Completely dreading it, I took my time on my way back to the paranormal wing. Visiting Johnny was a necessary evil.
The plan was based around the belief that I was well-adjusted enough to figure out if Johnny was telling me a truth or lie, and adjust my plan to leave the museum accordingly with new information. If he lied, I would in turn unveil it, flipping his lie on its head and use the opposite, a truth, to my advantage. Fifteen years of experience as the tour guide was behind my back, something Mariette never had when his words broke her down. Becoming accustomed to the museum’s horrors had made my mind a steel fortress. Though, I just hoped Johnny couldn’t melt my mind as easily as he did Mariettes.
My master key met the rustic, untouched lock and twisted with a clank. With one slow reluctant pull I opened the door to the ventriloquist doll’s chamber for the first and hopefully last time.
It was foolish of me to assume the lights would still turn on after fifteen years. I turned to grab the torch from my hip, my eye catching Mariette a few metres behind me in her display, facing away in disgust from the room which had been her demise years ago. I swallowed tightly and smacked my flashlight alive against my palm.
Johnny was sitting on a black stool in the center of the small room. The light from my torch lit up his pale skin which contrasted against his baby-sized tuxedo. From the corners of his lips straight downward to his chin were thick red lines cutting into his plastic face, forming a mouth.
His voice was croaky yet dripping in sickening enthusiasm. “Hiya Michael!”
His words had already broken me - I hadn’t heard that name in years. A decade, even. I was lucky to even remember it - after a while my name simply became ‘guide’. But how? How could he-
“Buddy, pal!” His eyes wandered loosely in his sockets left then right like rolling marbles as he spoke. “How’s it hangin’, Mikey?”
There was no dust on his combed hair nor suit, as you would expect for an animated plastic horror who kept tidy by wandering the confines of his room.
His mouth was ever smiling as he leaned to one side. “And… How’s my girl?” His stiff dummy frame moved and peered at Mariette over my shoulder behind me. “Oh, isn’t she just gorgeous now, Mikey! Look at that plastic shine!”
This… thing… was revolting. I thought.
“And,” Johnny turned his stiff head to me, smirking under the bright torchlight. “How’s your girl? Dead in a hole, Mikey?”
My stomach plummeted. I would have torn his tiny, disgusting head off in an instant if I didn’t need him.
The puppet laughed with a menacing whine. Heheheh… “Sophia, she rotting in the dirt?”
My fist clenched, and the spotlight from my torch shook over him like the light from a swinging chandelier.
“Maggots probably crawlin’ outta’ her cheeks. Eh, Mikey?” Heheheh…
“Stop!” I suddenly bursted out; my echo carrying for a while through the empty halls of the museum.
For a while he sat quietly on the stool, his legs freely kicking the air like a kid sitting on the edge of a pier. He stared up at me with horrifying, glassy eyes and a devilish smile that never quit.
“I’m leaving the museum for good at six o’clock.” I gulped, watching his every move for hints of the truth or lie response that was about to come out of his plastic mouth. “What do you think about that, Johnny?”
His head suddenly spun around several times as he spoke. “Wow-wee friend-o! I have lots to think about! I do, I do!”
For a while, I watched his puppet eyes roll around and show only white. He was contemplating, of sorts.
“You won’t find any freedom outside, Mikey.” His mouth pulled open mechanically and clasped shut as he spoke. “Though, you will find freedom,”
One tiny arm beckoned me to lean closer, and I did.
He was whispering when he spoke. “Through the steel door.”
“What?”
He leaned back on his stool; one plastic square chin dancing in the light as he laughed to himself.
Heheheh…
I thought about it for a while. That steel door had remained sealed since I had started this awful job.
He kept chuckling to himself before abruptly going quiet. His eyes were locked on the old guide behind me. “Oh Mariette...” He called out a childish croak.
I slammed the door shut and locked the door. Outside that room’s tense atmosphere I felt like I could breathe again.
If only I could have gotten more information out of Johnny than a simple, straightforward lie. To avoid the lie of entering the steel door would be no drama. All I would have to do is run from the museum, as I always thought I would have to do.
When I checked my watch and saw it was five minutes to six, I came bolting around into the enormous foyer. The guests would be arriving in a matter of minutes.
The towering ornate museum door opened with its usual mechanical groan. I pushed past a man with a salt and peppered beard, his blustering coat nearly catching my face in the cold wind.
Lady weather was against me this evening, but the plan was already in motion. The plan was to run.
I almost tumbled when one of the rich pricks snagged me by my arm as I jogged down the stairs. I couldn’t hear exactly what he said - the swirling breeze swam in my eardrums like a cold stream, a sound that I didn’t often hear from inside the rich man’s prison. It was beautiful.
Every step into the museum’s wide frozen garden made a gentle hushk beneath my shoe in the soft snow. I couldn’t look back until I met the tree line. When I did, I noticed a few of the men that gave chase.
I launched through the spiny bushes ahead, taking exaggerated steps over rough terrain like a horse that walked with a proud gallop. Cuts and scratches against my flesh from branches felt liberating. It was painful, but it was not the museum’s contraptions hurting me anymore - it was the fresh lashes of wild, unpredictable freedom.
I’m almost free, Sophia. I could feel the warmth of my daughter smiling down on me. She wants me to be free.
“Guide!” A deep voice of one of my pursuers boomed through the forest with reverb and my heart spiked in my wheezing chest. They were closing in. Though, why were they after me? I had left the door wide open for them.
Turn around and burn the museum down, you horrible bastards.
There was no doubt in my mind that if I stopped, one of the rich brutes would bash the brain-juice out of my skull with a sharp rock. How dare I, the suffering guide, threaten the fun of their wealthy expedition and take off into the woods?
Quick clapping and crunching of bark behind me made my ears prick. Without warning, one red silk shoulder of my waistcoat was snagged in an angry balled fist before I was yanked backward, making me tumble into mud and muck.
I pulled my head up with a groan, my joints aching dully and skin searing like a full-body carpet burn.
The museum guest straddling my chest was a mere silhouette, the backdrop of stars behind his head only lighting up greying hair at the edges. His cold fingers met my throat, tightening, tightening.
Wriggling left and right was hard with legs against my chest.
Clumps of snow fell gently onto my face in bites of cold as his hands crushed my neck. I swung and swung at his kidney with my fist, but he didn’t let up.
The stars above became a blur, and the top of his head filled the bottom of my vision.
One of my keys I had clenched between my knuckles punctured his side, and he went rolling down a snowy bank.
Gripping my purple bruised throat I stumbled forward, but wheezing meant I wasn’t getting enough air to keep up a jog.
“Stop!” His voice called.
With each step the snow had seemingly gotten thicker, though it still gave way to my feet with the same distinct hushk.
I couldn’t let up. Not when I was this close.
Yonder the snowy bank in front of me was a large building I had never seen before. It was quite smaller than the museum, bigger than the off-site cottage I slept in during my days off. A warehouse.
It didn’t take long to limp to it and break inside.
The smell of rotten wood and mold inside the warehouse crawled up my nose like invisible, pungent fingers. Bars of starlight came through boarded windows, covering the walls and floor in crooked glowing streaks of the moon’s azure silver gleam. It was dusty, unkempt. Dry, grimy particles coated and tickled my throat; the dust in the building was so awful that my cough might have looked like billowing steam.
Silhouettes of all shapes and sizes lined the walls and shelves, most with flaps of paper attached to them. It was a haven for retired exhibitions. That, or their hell.
Thudding came from behind me as someone pushed and pulled at the door trying to follow me inside. Unsettled flakes of crumbling wood drifted down from the ceiling with every shake from the banging door.
The shoddy place couldn’t possibly hold the wealthy brute outside for long. As my heart raced, my departed Sophia’s face suddenly glowed on the black canvas of my tight eyelids. I think I’ll be seeing you soon, darling.
I stumbled forward, coughing and glaring around the murky warehouse as the thuds became impatient. I needed something to get me out of here, anything.
“Where ya’ think ya’ going?” A man’s muffled voice boomed from under the door. It was the same man who had gripped me by my throat minutes prior. His tone was strained and fed up; I pictured his face flush and the cables of his neck sticking out as thick roots.
My cold digits wrapped around one of the planks sealing a window. Boarded shut. My options of flight or fight narrowed to the latter.
Thud. The door was stubbing shut against something, but not for much longer.
One of the lines of light pouring inside the dingy space sparkled upon something a few feet away made out of glass.
I walked closer; each step the floorboard spat out a dying croak. When I was near enough to make out what the thing was, a cold feeling bloomed in my stomach.
The thing I approached in the blanketing dim starlight was animatronic and ghoulish. Clumps of its brown artificial and fraying fur were clumped together in sticky balls of black grease; its glass tennis ball eyes held tiny, startling black pinhole-sized pupils. It was a human-sized depiction of a vintage stuffed monkey holding brass cymbals. Stuffing had come away from its middle in spongy yellow bunches, exposing rusty metal gears within a mechanical chest.
I tried not to make eye contact with it out of fear of it following my gaze. I still had to think quickly about defending myself - the door hadn’t stopped thudding.
Messily stuck to one furry ear of the mechanic being were a few pages of forms, faded and dusty. I puffed away dirt from the paper with one labored wheeze.
It read: Exhibition name - KELSEY. Children’s mechanical mascot that once educated schools about the importance of healthy teeth and gums.
I hadn’t noticed it until now, large and eerily human-shaped teeth stuck out from the monkey’s fur lips. An animatronic monkey to tell your kids to brush their teeth. Of course.
Out of commission: 1983. Reason: Excessive homicidal tendencies. Signed and approved: MARIETTE.
Mariette and I… connected by threads of time after all these years. This must have been an especially terrifying item to warrant locking it up in a warehouse to rot. I couldn’t believe that I had found something retired by the previous tour guide of the museum – it made me feel less alone.
I hadn’t felt that flavor of deep-chested and rotten fear in over a decade - a time when I was unacquainted with what lurked around the museum’s ornate corners. However, this evening I was again in unfamiliar and petrifying territory. Why was I not informed of this place? I would have decommissioned Johnny Razortongue in a heartbeat. If not for me, then for Mariette’s tortured soul.
Without warning, the stuffed mechanical abomination switched on. It chilled my blood to see golden iridescent bulbs flickering in the place where its lifeless, beady globes had been.
Its jaw gnashed wildly, lagging and biting. It was stuck in a loop for a while, seeing through eyes that hadn’t seen the world in decades as it woke from its slumber.
It turned to me: gleaming gears and yellow eyes all feasting on the one who broke its sleep. Me.
Kel-Kel-
The speaker tried to sing in a child’s voice, but the rusty electronics could only cough up distorted noise. When it finally started the tune and began walking, I made for the door.
Kelsey yum,
Kelsey yum,
Drink milk for bones,
put it in your tum!
My hand met the handle of the door. I went tumbling backward as the man kicked it in first, my elbow collapsing into one rotten floorboard. The mechanism behind me sang and sang, and her cymbals crashed and crashed.
Bones, bones, bones,
strong teeth for bite,
No moans, moans, moans,
brush your teeth at night!
The intruder’s hand was immediately aiming for my throat once more, but I was faster.
I turned quickly, catching one of his arms and pulling them behind his back in a lock.
Twisting, I faced his kicking legs outward at Kelsey. The cymbal-clapping animatronic monstrosity approached slowly, gears churning in its open chest.
Crash, crash, crash, went the cymbals. They crashed until the gears caught both his boots in its exposed core as he tried to kick her away. But he was locked in my arms. And he was locked tight.
From then, it took a while for the man to stop screaming. His feet met the unyielding gears of animatronic innards in a red cloud of skin and bone.
Calci-yum, calcium. Drink milk for bones, put it in your tum.
The once childlike voice coming out of the thing’s speaker became choppy and deep-pitched like a singing birthday card with a dying battery. At that moment I could only hope my daughter wasn’t looking down, watching me ghoulishly smile as my rich pursuer struggled and screamed in my locked arms. Close your eyes if you’re watching, honey. Daddy is going to be free soon.
The man screamed and screamed, and the dying speaker’s voice lines sung and sung: Calciyum, calciyum.
Metal gears were up to his calves. His cartilage popped; his leg bones buckled and broke with a stomach curdling crack as Kelsey snapped his femurs like thick white pencils through her gears as if the man was fleshy mulch.
I only let go when he finally became limp. His screams were no longer; all that could be heard in the dusty room was the mechanical spinning and clunking of gears from the animated monstrosity to my side.
For a while I sat in the dark as it ate him whole. It felt good to finally fight back, but it was never meant to feel this good. The sound of his bones crunching, the sound of his voice extinguishing like a wet flame. I was no longer going to be the one being tortured and tormented. I was going to be free.
Though, as the age old saying goes - ignorance is bliss. I wish I hadn’t looked down at the mutilated man. I wish I hadn’t seen that he was not someone wealthy nor a guest after all. Catching a proper glance at him in the dim moonlight shining over his overalls and glistening keys, it became terrifyingly evident that he was museum security.
I killed a man that was just trying to do his job.
No, I didn’t.
I didn’t.
The museum did.
Deep down I think I knew I was responsible, though. And that I might have enjoyed watching it happen.
But it was time to keep moving.
I swiftly bent down and swooped a metallic lighter and a ring of many keys before leaving the stuffed horror alone to eat. Most of the keys were long and identical to mine from the looks of things.
Snow was blowing outside the warehouse; I had to squint freezing ice-peppered eyes to see and orientate myself away from the museum’s grounds.
For a while I walked aimlessly in the blistering snow, not seeking a goal but salvation in as much distance I could make between the museum and myself.
The weather was relentless, and I was ill-equipped from the get-go. At some point I had a call with the museum's curator as I stumbled around the barren icy wilderness, but reality bordered with delusion.
“You can never leave the museum, Michael.” The voice was buzzing through the speaker. “You two are entwined.”
My jaw was chattering; I watched the steam from my mouth and lips escape me.
“This money,” The curator continued. “The type of money to let you run something like this… Your contract simply does not end if you leave our borders, sonny, you should know this.” He was speaking in a condescending tone.
All I could hear for a while was the clinking of a lighter opening and the curator sucking through a cigarette over the phone. Occasionally, the wind blew a strong gust and pulled away my coat.
“I think it is time you expire, boy-o. See, we even have a new guide lined up to replace you. It’s over.”
“I’m going to be free.” My voice was slow and hard to hear over chattering teeth.
The curator scoffed. “No, Michael, you’re not. I want to thank you for letting those… Those people that are lonely at the top of the financial mountain... Those rich and famous who are under constant judgemental eyes - those akin to exhibitions at a museum... Letting them truly be somewhere and be someone where they are not themselves. At our museum, they can be the audience, not the newspaper’s nor the public's exhibitions. And you were instrumental in such success.”
Breathing didn’t come easy - the air swirled and chilled my lungs like inhaling menthol.
“I’m going… to be.. free...” Words were labored from my lips.
“Farewell, Michael.” The phone clicked off.
I staggered for a while after the call had ended. Hypothermic brain-fog had me going in every which way. I had no chance of making it back to the museum in such delirium.
Did I want to return, however? No. Of course not.
It was cold.
And I was tired.
I laid down in a pile of snow under a naked tree. The evening’s snowy breeze no longer felt like anything at all across my numb face.
Just for a little while. I’ll sleep in the cold for a little… while.
I tilted my head back, letting my eyelids drift shut and the stars above sing me a final lullaby. For a while the constellations looked like my daughters face, and I smiled.
If I held a handful of snow tight enough, it didn’t feel like I was dying alone. It felt like someone was holding my hand, and the fear started to blow away with the wind.
But the snow in my hand was hairy.
And it was warm.
And it was breathing.
A cold pile beneath my arm erupted into the air with a snort as if from a whale’s spout.
His brown fur looked unworldly against the field of snow. He couldn’t see much with his two black, beady eyes beyond his whiskers but he knew it was me.
And I knew it was him. Earnie.
I swiftly buried into the thin layer of concave snow that Earnie’s pink and brown head came from. It was hard to see anything inside the hole, if at all, but it was a lot warmer than the surface. Inside, the lighter I had pulled from the security guard no longer faltered in any wind in the tight space, and I caught the tail end of the mole’s pink hindpaws in the lighter’s soft glow as he began to scurry back through the tunnel towards the museum.
I crouched a slog through the tunnel using only the lighter and Earnie to guide me. Warmth returned to my extremities and spread in waves.
Coming to think of it, the lighter was not the only thing I had found on the man’s body.
Upon the keyring I had taken was a peculiar long and winding key I had never seen before. One that I had never owned.
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Credits
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