The Dark Somnium - "I work at a private museum for the rich and famous" Creepypasta

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

This creepypasta scary story is from the nosleep subreddit, written by L.C SimpsonNarration, SFX and Music by The Dark Somnium--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/darksomnium/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The museum opened without public warning. Once during the week, and only at 6 o'clock in the evening. No earlier, no later. Any brady excuse, such as a sluggish private jet, simply did not cut it. Only those outside the gate at 6 o'clock were permitted inside. No one knew where this giant playground for wealthy men was, not even God. And in this place, there was no God. My gods were the rich and famous, and they were merciless and cruel.

There was no security here, nor staff besides me, on opening day. It was a grand lawless building only made for the top 1% of the top 1%. Our reason for lack of employees was the same reason Michael Jackson shut down a supermarket for a day visit in the 2000s, uninhibited fun without judgmental eyes. I did the same thing I did every opening day, adjusted my maroon waistcoat, combed my hair, shined my shoes. At 5.59, I came tapping down the marble staircase with a spring in my step. Not from excitement, rather a jumpiness that came from instilled fear.

The museum was about to become their toy shop yet again, and me their plaything. This time, I could only pray they waited until midnight before asking to see our paranormal relic displays. I could only pray they didn't let her out. The foyer was huge, towering golden pillars wedged between ivory-flavored marble flooring and a mosaic-glass ceiling that let starlight beam through. With one hand, I braced the door that stood three men high, my other hand turning to check my watch.

It was six o'clock. Four pompous men and two posh women smugly marched in. They were dressed in fur coats, alligator skin, diamond jewelry from head to toe. It was quite frankly comical. Not to me, though, of course. I had seen it all many times before. However, there was one man at the back who didn't care to show his wealth. He was dressed in his finest outfit to visit a convenience store.

two scuffed jeans and a green t-shirt. I pondered what he did for a living, but I simply didn't know. What I did know is that within minutes, the look on his face said he wanted me dead for sport. I announced. The tour will begin immediately. There is a coat rack to your left if you need to leave any belongings. I do not recommend venturing off. I must press you all follow me for the tour. However, it's completely optional. It was as if I read off a script. The route started like any other. I led the rich brats through the left side of the museum.

We walked past the history in war rooms, past the living wall, past the Mariana Trench exhibit. We housed creatures from the bottom of the ocean in there that the public hadn't seen before, inside immense, pressurized titanium tanks. I liked that exhibit the most, but it wasn't time. were always hauntingly quiet on opening day. The museum's property outside stretched for miles too, so no cars nor people provided any consolation for my lonely mind on long nights such as these. It was just me, the rich savages, and the exhibits.

Walking into a hallway intersection leading left to the paranormal display, and to the right, the insect room, we had stopped. Please don't see it, please don't see it, I thought. This way, please. Why are you all stopping here? I knew why. They saw the glass cabinet that towered by the door to the paranormal exhibition hallway, and curiosity beckoned them.

It was covered by a dust blanket, only I knew what was underneath, and I knew it was best untouched. Can we take a look at these? A voice said quietly from behind and shattered me like a toppled vase. My smile had to be kept up. I couldn't crack at the start of our tour. That would be tragic. We will return here after midnight once we've explored the rest of the... One of the men sternly interrupted.

We paid good money for this. He shouted, Give us a look. I pulled hard enough at my hair. I'm surprised it didn't come out of my scalp. Please don't make me show you. I don't want to wake her. Yeah, give us a look.

More bullies chimed in. I was no rookie to the psychological wedgy, but it was in my contract to not put up a fight. Swallowing hard, the words escaped slowly and unwillingly. Yeah, sure. My hand reached for the fabric reluctantly like it was a hot stove. I pulled the graphite sheet away from the case and flipped the light switch. The fluorescent lights popped and ticked as they flickered within the glass oblong that towered above us. The woman inside was goolishly tall, at least seven feet so. If she were any bigger, her head would have to tilt to the side. Sometimes it did.

Her black hair flowed onto her pale, shiny shoulders like an ashen willow. Her face, plasticy and silky smooth. The flesh of a child's doll. Beneath the glass cube, Mariette, 1973 to 2004. The fat man's plump face stared upward, utterly transfixed with the thin, soaring woman. How? He cleared his throat. How did she die?

I thought for a while. My face contemplating and changing in the dim lighting. They clicked and blinked once more. It pains me to say, but she was once the tour guide for this museum. My hand met the cold glass. Sadly, after a few years, she had a mental breakdown and passed. passed away. There were a couple of gasps from the rich folk.

Passed away. A woman's voice from the crowd. She, my jaw tightened. She injected herself to death with plasticizing agents. In fact, that is one of the loopholes as to why we keep her body here on display. Her body is more plastic than flesh and bone. The lights went out. They'll be back on any second.

I soothed reassuringly. That story is absurd. A man boomed. Unfortunately, sure, but woefully true. The other loophole being her will, she wanted to give herself to the museum, just as I paused. The museum had given itself to her. The light inside the case came back on. My heart sank into my stomach.

The clicking noises had not been coming from the lamps after all. It had come from her plastic joints twisting and contorting, old plastic grinding against She sensed itself like a cursed figurine. Now visible, her head had been creaked to one side. She stared unblinkingly at me with glass eyes. Dampening the sheet with my sweaty palm, I narrowly managed to quickly toss the fabric, covering the glass before anyone noticed that she had readjusted her head when it had been dark.

"'Is that it?' Someone said. "'Can we touch her? I want to feel her rubbery, plasticy skin. chills at my spine." Another one said. I couldn't say no, as per my contract. Hell, these wealthy scumbags could kill me for fun and get away with it if they didn't

get what they wanted, and nobody would hear me scream. I had to think quickly. We shall be moving on. I extended an open hand to the hallway. This way, please. For some exhibits, I held on to the harrowing details. To feed them specifics would be like planting seeds of the whole. trickling intrigue in their minds, and intrigue leads to an unsated curiosity.

Curiosity always killed the cat, no matter the feline of rich breed or a stray tom. I didn't tell the wealthy people that the doll hated her glass prison. I didn't tell them that we closed her eyelids so she could sleep. Things were going smoothly for a few hours. I let them hold and handle the child-sized beetles we had imported from Madagena. Gascar. They were beautiful and fluorescent like sunlight through crystal. I got so caught up in my presentations, I had almost forgot about Mariette's snapping plastic head. Mr. Jones, the rich guy dressed for a convenience store, clicked his tongue as he spoke. Hey, uh, guide. He threw one thumb behind

his shoulder, pointing backward. We're going to go back this way and have a look at something. I nodded reluctantly. Shoddy sneakers tapped away at the marble floors. as both he and a woman disappeared down the hall. For a short time, things truly were going great. I even let one woman into the space where we held the glass butterflies. They were gorgeous insects, almost invisible to the naked eye, translucent yet poisonous. The remaining billionaires were silently yawning. Deep down I knew what they wanted to see.

My chest tightened. At that moment, I thought that I was beginning to hate my job. From the hallway came a loud crashing of broken glass. Curiosity had killed the cat. Please excuse me. I muttered and sprinted into the dim alley of the museum towards the paranormal wing. Moments after I started running, I realized I left the doors open to the butterflies. Behind me, the sounds of shouting and pitter-pattering as tourists sprinted the opposite direction.

They were running from the floating creatures, running for their lives, running from deadly venom. It was too late. I had to keep going. My heart sank. I already guessed what I was about to find ahead. The evening was no longer going swimmingly. Around the bend, I found one woman crouched against the wall by a window. She was a ball of tears and clasping her head with two hands. What the hell happened? I yelled. She... Her throat glaringly tight. Her word struggled to escape her. I didn't... I didn't do anything.

I looked up. Glass lined the ground and edges of the walls like rain had come down and left the devil's hail. A few steps away, the graphite dust blanket half covered a gaping, sharp hole in the cabinet. Lights flickered from its mouth, mocking me, glaring at my watch, my stomach nodded. It wasn't midnight yet. It wasn't midnight and somebody broke Mariette's display and she was gone. Like the woman crying beside me, I think my throat became tight too.

Come with me, I said, holding out one hand. We got up and we ran. We ran until we caught our breath outside the ocean exhibition and the living wall. What is this thing? She said, staring at the peach wall. Don't touch it, please. I couldn't think clearly. She was out there somewhere, clicking her coolest joints, towering in the halls, searching,

and searching for more plastic, more plastic so she could become the perfect ventriloquist doll. The doll she had become so fixated on while working here, she would be a doll, and we would play with her, just like she would play with us. It looks alive. The woman reached a hand to the slimy, greasy wall. I felt lost. I couldn't breathe.

It was too much. The butterflies, Mariette, the sick rich people breaking things for fun. with no repercussion. Finger-like blobs from the wall reached back out at the woman. Thick apricot worms searching for warmth. I slapped her hand away. You mustn't touch that! I yelled. She gasped, and I realized my mistake. My contract was broken, and my head shall be on a spike. Don't you dare touch me! She spat back at me, large, angry veins sticking out of her neck.

I raised my hand to calm her. I apologize, ma'am. This strange thing is made of living, cells. Without knowing, I was back on our tour guide script, despite the trauma. The very thing you're trying to poke at could eat you. I don't want to hear it. Thank you. We stood there a while, both unable to think nor speak. I stared at the wall unblinkingly, like watching a hot fire. Its flesh molding, changing. Peach goo flowed in waves across its surface, inviting me to look closer. Underneath on a golden placard. The living. wall. I shook out of it. Richard Jones had made it back to us. His green t-shirt was torn at the neck. His

eyes sunken and traumatized. The door is locked, guide. We need your key. I nodded. Right away. I started jogging towards the direction of the foyer. He wasn't following. Mr. Jones? I turned to him. Richard Jones was still standing next to the woman who had been crying in a ball minutes prior. He didn't speak. only glared back at me in the dim starlight that flowed through the window. When he placed his hand on the woman's back and smiled, I knew it was too late. He shoved her with force. The woman shrieked and went tumbling headfirst into the gooey peach wall.

Her bones snapped and buckled as blobby fingers wrapped themselves around her spine, her neck. It flowed into her mouth with ease, slowing only to pull at her teeth like it was eating meat off a rough bone. She screamed and screamed until she gurgled vile slime. The wall ate her whole, fleshy goo displaying her features and flesh wide on its waving surface. Bits of arm and mouth suspended upon a hungry blanket. Richard laughed. He laughed and laughed and laughed. For him, money did buy happiness. Horrifying, horrifying happiness. I felt sick, I was going to throw up.

The wall's voice was deep and hard to make out at first. A woman's voice deep in its slimy crevices. It moaned. I turned to run, but I had seen he had disappeared and I was safe. He had got the kicks he was looking for and made off with them. It was hard to block out the voice before it all stopped. I lay crouched beneath the window, blocking my ears and rocking in a ball. My heart was out of my chest.

My stomach was a knot. I didn't want to be a tour guide any longer. Sprinting and sprinting, I never looked back. I climbed the stairs swift enough that my thighs felt like they were going to give out. Much time passed that night in the museum. Hours. Opening nights were long and terrible. Nothing like this was ever worth the money.

I found myself hiding in a janitor's closet on the second floor, occasionally peering through the cracks into the horror beyond. After some time, when the vile people finished exploring the museum, I heard Jones crack a joke about the woman and the wall. He and the rest of the rich people laughed. They laughed and laughed and laughed all the way back home on their private jets to their estates. When it was midnight, Mariette was asleep, and I shut her plastic eyelids for her. I had glass to sweep, cabinets to repair. I had learned time and time again that nightmares were not in our walls. The horrors were within the people that visited, in their sick pursuit of amusement and

the games they would play, and I was their plaything. I'm sorry they played with you too, dear Marriette. The exhibition that made me quit was the sickening consequence of true human freedom, and it was only for me to see once a week. still walks the halls at night without her glass prison. Maybe I couldn't quit. I needed to repair it to make things right. She has such a slow, slow walk, glassy eyes darting left and right, rolling loose like

marbles. Her head pivoting left and right aimlessly looking for more plastic, needing more plastic to please the museum, to be the perfect exhibition. Before shutting the gate, I pensively peered around the grand foyer. The museum was large and harrowing. For a moment, I wore grimace on my face, remembering a time when all I needed to satisfy our guest was to show them insects. I had been here a long time.

Tales dripped from the walls like an endless, flowing tap of horror. There would be more wealthy visitors. I think I might have more stories to tell. This week, I found myself alone in the ocean exhibition room. The anglerfish circled endlessly in the abyss of its murky tank, searching for an exit it would never find. It met me at the glass interface of its pressurized prison, bumping its luminescent fishing lure against the glass.

It grinned at me with thin white pencils. Hello, little guy. I found myself staying a while in our deep sea exhibition, watching the creature as he bathed and flicked around in his own little cube of the world. He could never know why he was in the museum, nor who put him there. Instead, he swam. He swam and swam and hoped that just one day the glass would crack, just an inch. Luckily, feeding the shaggy frogfish didn't take long.

The yellowfish knocked away clouds of dust along the bottom of its tank as it skis. scurried along on its leg-like fins with the awkward gate of a geriatric golden retriever. It was hard to keep happy in this schoolish museum, but that room always made me smile. Upstairs I went before working through some paperwork for a few hours. I'm not sure at what point I mistakenly fell into a catnap at my desk, but I soon paid the price in nightmares. A deep, muffled voice. Blowflies sprawled across her face that was framed with golden hair.

Black winged spots covered her eyes and mouth. She didn't sound like Sophia. The face of my dead daughter, nothing more. It must have been hard for her to speak. Flies coated her mouth like popping candy, bursting and buzzing as she spoke. She giggled in a voice that was not her own. Flies crawled around her face aimlessly, whirring, buzzing, buzzing until I swat one crawling up my arm.

I woke groaning with a jolt, my wrist pink where I'd slap myself awake, the monstrous foyer of the museum still clapping with an echo. My paperwork sprawled everywhere across my desk, stressing me again just as easily as it had put me to sleep. of last week's casualties, notes on tonight's guests, complaints, all forms of boring. Paper unstuck itself from my arm and fluttered to the ground floor from my reception desk one floor up. The ocean exhibition and the unconscious escapeism that Naps brought me was my only liberation

from the museum, though that was the time before sleep brought nightmares. When I went to check my watch, I noticed I hadn't smacked my watch. a fly after all. A glass butterfly had become mere bits of translucent wing that coated my fingers like glitter. I rubbed my hands, and the clear fragments floated gracefully down the marble stairs in a breeze, like tiny mosquitoes or dust specks, sparkling in the beams of moonlight that trickled in through the glass ceiling. For a moment, I wish it had stung me and taken me to a better place. At least then I couldn't dream of blowflies coming out of my dead daughter's mouth. Ron and Jill, and the rest of the maintenance staff, had packed up and left. The bustling noise was gone. There was no more work to be done, except wait for more wealthy, deplorable people to arrive. I was alone again. The only staff member in the museum. And I let my mind freely slip into a different time, a time before I was the tour,

guide. It was time to open shop. I combed my hair, pulled my shirt collar free from my waistcoat, shined my shoes. Down the marble staircase I went, tapping down the steps through the butterfly dust like headlights in fog. The clock struck six o'clock. The museum was now open for the evening, and only for the rich folk waiting outside. I pulled the large door open.

It groaned and creaked in the museum's annoy. The enormous foyer. Seven aristocrats haughtily strode inside. Three men and four women clad in fancy dresses and coats. One man took a while to come up the front steps and into the museum, carrying his wooden cane. The tour will start immediately. There is a coat rack to you. I trailed off.

A girl, maybe eight or nine, came quietly through the door in a teeny black dress. Her unsure gaze scanned the foyer top to bottom. Her eyes, large, glossy globes. She shouldn't be here. I didn't see her on the register, I thought. She won't survive here. Kneeling, I spoke. Hello, miss.

The girl, shyly leaned from behind the frame of the front door, her skin turning as pale as the ivory marble flooring. This must have been the first child to set foot in this godforsaken place, and for good reason. Which of these are your parents? I tried hard to keep up a warm smile. Nothing. She simply glared at me with two shiny eyes under a blonde curtain of hair. She doesn't speak, Sonny.

The man with the wooden cane cleared his throat. Didn't speak the whole right here. Won't speak now. Doesn't respond to anything at all, really. One beaked-nosed, snobby woman put her coat on the rack. Probably deaf. I stood thinking for a while. My face contemplating, changing in the light, looking around at the billionaires in the

foyer. They already looked ready to sink their teeth into the exhibitions, or worse. Bringing her along with the rest of the group on the museum tour was simply not an option. Fortunately for her, it was a requirement for me to understand the basics of at least 20 languages to allow for appropriate interaction with the museum's guests. This included sign language. my understanding tended to be rather broken. I could usually only make out the main words. Nealing down, I spoke to her with my hands. The girl gestured back to me that mommy and daddy had sent

her on a visit to the museum as they were called away on a business trip in Dubai. How was the flight? I gestured. Good. The big-nosed woman was very annoying. She giggled and gestured that I didn't need to do hand signs. She could read my lips. I liked her already. My smile didn't need much effort anymore. It came naturally. Though I was still stuck with a child in an unforgiving place.

She was a rabbit running in an open field under the shadows of the museum's eagle-clod exhibitions. Worse, the unsated bloodlust and curiosity of the wealthy and free. That's when I remembered a clause in my employment agreement. one tour every open evening. Gesturing wide and confidently, I stood up and winged away for the girl's safety. My apologies, ladies and gentlemen, I exclaimed. Due to unforeseen circumstances this evening's tour has been cancelled. Groans from the crowd.

The tour clause in my contract never stated how many people I needed to bring with me. We just got here. A man bellowed. Do not fret. The museum is all yours to explore. I extended one arm to point them towards the deep sea exhibition. Please don't wake the anglerfish. Tapping and screeching sounded against the floor as the crowd disappeared down the halls.

Starlight beamed through the windows, lighting up the girl's face. She beamed straight back with excitement. Now our tour can begin in peace. Peace was a lie, however. Unsupervised, the crowd would soon find some way or another to demonstrate that they were worse behaved than the kid standing before me, a demonstration that would likely involve death. What do you like to do? Drawing.

She signed. I know just the thing. Many minutes passed that evening as me and the girl began exploring the museum. Her name was Rosie, and she was very nervous about all the scary exhibitions. At the intersection between the art and music showcase, between another hallway leading to a locked door, we halted. What is down there? She pointed a tiny finger down the dark hall.

The room with the metal door. What's in there, guide? I know the museum from front to back, I spoke, but I have to say I've never been in there. Tightly sealed shut, no key. Oh, okay. She gave a sulking look. Yeah, I know the feeling. I swiftly smiled to cheer her up as I ushered her into the art and music space.

It was like nothing she'd ever seen before. her bright eyes could have lit up a candle. The towering walls and ceiling of the art exhibition were flowing waves of sand that changed and hissed as they rolled. One moment, the walls painted a shifting mural of starry night, waves of blue and yellow sand curling and shifting from one famous artwork to another. The wall to our left painted the scream. She spread her fingers into the sand waterfall. It flowed between her digits like she had pinched salt.

It's so beautiful! She gestured, her mouth agape at the ceiling. I tapped on her shoulder so she could read my lips. We don't just house paintings here. Take a look at these. Leaning one hand against a small glass cabinet, we gazed in. Two brightly colored shoes were sat upon an ivory silk sheet, iridescent against the changing, colorful backdrop of the sandy walls.

They gleamed bright enough to show their true crystalline translucency. Beneath the glass cabinet, it read, The Clumsy Dancers. She wasn't truly impressed until I heartily slapped the cabinet. The knocking suddenly turned the empty shoes alive, tapping and dancing upon the silk beneath them. One dance changed to another, another became a twirl. They gracefully ended their tango with the famous moonwalk shuffle. Wow. What are these?

She pressed her hands against the glass. If she were any closer, they might have kicked her. Well, some people might have a good voice, a fantastic, fantastic singing voice. I took out my satin cloth and began polishing the glass as I spoke. Some people have the rhythm for soulful moves. These shoes right here, they bridge the gap. She was glaring at me with wide eyes, listening with them too, pulling the weight of ears that couldn't hear.

They were developed sometime between the 60s and 70s, helped push the dancing and up singers into superstardom by giving them a dancing edge, too. I gestured her onto the next display against one sand waterfall. For a moment, I caught a sparkle in her eye. Her hair and bright grin reminded me of my dearly departed daughter, filling me with a long-forgotten warmth. I bet I'm having more fun than you are right now, Rosie. She took a seat.

What's this, guide? Upon the table before her, a small white pen lay over a graphite and ash-speckled stone tablet. When I pointed to the thin edges of the black plate, she caught the stretched golden placard that said, ballpoint stone. Her head twisted around at me, eagerly waiting. Go ahead, you'll see. I nodded, and she turned back around. Her hand grabbed the pen. It met the plate with a blocky tap.

Abruptly, the wall of sand bloomed a pale white, say, for tiny imperfections of dotted peach-colored sand, that gave it the impression of an art canvas rather than plain paper. As her hands swirled upon the plate, blotches of black sand circles formed and swirled against the wall's coarse current. Draw something, Rosie, I spoke. The plate knows what you will draw and will guide you. Unsure at first, she shook the back of her golden head a few times.

An eight-year-old perfectionist. In that moment I smirked when I pictured her rolling up her suit sleeves to get the work done right. I laughed when she really did it. Is that me? I let out, staring at the sand wall. A man with brown hair emerged on the moving canvas. dressed in an absolutely dashing maroon waistcoat. Must be me.

The drawing was a bit beyond an eight-year-old's range of skill. We had the pen and plate to thank for that, though she was doing a beautiful job showing off. Wow, I said. That looks great, Rosie. She had all my attention when she began drawing another figure. Who's that beside me now? In the sand of the towering wall before me,

A gawky shape appeared that bloomed big black blobs. It looked familiar yet terrifying. Diabolical sharp nails protruded from its lanky black arms. Rosie? Nothing. She kept scribbling away tirelessly at the plate. The thing loomed over my figure on the drawing on the wall, the sand flowing, the creature looming, looming, looming.

It was a sickening animation. One ghoulish jaw hung free over its disgusting long neck. Rosie! It engulfed my head. Thin penceline teeth cut through my childishly drawn throat. Red sand suddenly coughing and spitting out of the wall and onto the museum floor, staining Rosie's shirt like bloody rain. Rosie!

I grabbed her by the arm. What the hell are you drawing? She glared up at me with glossy eyes like she was about to cry. It wasn't me. She signed. I lifted her from the seat and plopped her onto the floor that was littered with speckles of red sand. She turned to the wall and pointed at her depiction of me. See, that's you.

My heart was racing. Did the museum make her draw this? And... Her shaky arms slowly drifted to the black figure. That's Mr. Sleepy. I felt sick. I had tried so hard to pull her away from the mayhem, but the museum had bitten back. Come with me. I said sternly, and she took my hand. Off we went quickly, downstairs to the indoor forest

exhibition. I had to keep her safe. No more misadventures. As we left, Mr. Sleepy turned his head and stared at me with his vacant, horrifying, sandy eye sockets. I didn't tell her that. We saw a few distant visitors along the way to the forest room. They roared with laughter, screamed. I ushered her along with me, holding her hand tight. For a while, things were much calmer in the forest room. I explained to the girl that it was partly an aviary and reassured her that the birds still got sunlight through the glass ceiling when it was daytime. Though this evening only moonlight beamed through into the museum's indoor forest. Rosie and I startled a few birds crunching the bark upon the ground

as we dove deeper. Quiet, Rosie. I gestured this time. Yes, we have to be quiet. I pointed to a display next to us that was wedged between two well-trimmed trees. It was dark, but we managed to make out the shape of a person inside. That tree looks like a man. She gestured.

That's because it is. Her eyes lit up as I whispered, still clenching my hand tightly. An experiment gone wrong. We house it here so it can sleep. He's not human. Not anymore. Feasts through his roots or anyone stupid enough to get close to him. Nothing could be heard in the dark, indoor forest, only that of the crunching of leaves as

she moved to press her nose against the glass with a screech. Rosie, I whispered, don't make too much noise. What's his name? No name. I gently pulled her away from the exhibit, though some guests call it the slumber ghoul. He's relatively harmless, though. One of our poor janitors fell asleep in here during one of these long evenings, never woke up.

Her hand tightened around mine. They say he eats you through your dreams, I whispered. And if you're really tired, you don't even have to be asleep to feel it happening. That was all I had to say. She pulled my arm in a hurry towards the door. Sorry for scaring you, Rosie. We had almost made it to the back door when a couple of blue butterflies fluttered and landed on her hair.

She had almost lifted one onto my finger when leaves crunched behind us. One of the deplorable rich people had found us. He was scrambling around in the dark, reaching out his hands, unable to see. His hand met the cabinet that housed the tree man. The idiot sounded aloud as his finger slid across the glass. Without warning, he smashed the glass, cackling as he ran out of the forest aviary and back to the halls. We tried to free my hands grip, breaking into a sprint to no avail.

It's okay, Rosie. The back door, let's go. We jogged quickly through the trees, crunching bark and waking birds as we went, running, running. The door to the aviary sounded. Somebody was locking us in. I jimmied the rusted door knob at the back to no avail. The door first clicked, then bumped with no groan, as it stubbed to a sudden shut.

It widened little enough that I swore I wouldn't be able to even fit a few fingers in the gap. Mr. Sleepy. Mr. Sleepy is coming. Something's in the way. I grunted. Suddenly the girl drummed a few fist hammers on my leg. She kept hammering on the side of my leg. Rosie pouted a worried face to the artificial tree line before rummaging her face into one

of my black pant legs away from something horrible. Donder the trees, it towered with flesh irregular and charred black like an ashen log. Its mouth hung unhinged, wide open and ghoulish. Its eyes of vacant white. It was watching us. Rosie, I held the girl by her shoulders. Rosie, it's okay. He can't get us.

The girl looked up with glossy eyes. Monster. She gestured. It cannot touch us if we are well slept. I spoke. Stay awake, okay? I gave her a warm look, but it was quickly cracking. Mr. Sleepy.

We shared a gaze for as long as she could muster before her eyes met the ground. Rosie, I want you to stay calm when you answer my question, okay? I had to balance my gaze between her and the thing in the trees. Rosie sniffed, then nodded. Did you sleep much on the flight to the museum? My eyes darted to movement behind us, black in stumps where legs should be slogged under the ghoul, moving weighted. like an unrooted oak.

Every slow step it took made its dorso contort with a sickening crack as if its bones had snapped and twisted. Its mouth had since widened enough that it could fit Rosie's beautiful, ripened head inside. Rosie, did you sleep? Rosie! Like a fever dream, I saw blowflies crawling over her eyelids and her mouth, just like my dead daughter, Sophia. I snapped out of it.

Rosie, please! I boomed. shaking her. I had to get her out. I couldn't lose her, not again. I shot up from my knees, launching her onto my shoulders and bolted towards the other door. Her head bounced around while I ran, but when I steadied, we made out the ghoul. It was looming, close, a mere 20 paces away. Its torso flailed with a disjointed crack in directions perpendicular to its body. Hold on! I announced as I held Rosie to my chest. I extended a leg and launched a kick into the door.

Curses under my breath could not drown out the sickening sound behind me. All I could think of was that I had to get Rosie out, and that its steps sounded like boots meeting a snail. Get in! I said, as her shoes popped on the ground. This time, I held my kick as one shoe planted against the door. I could not open it wide enough for myself, but pressing the door with my boot made it groan wide for her to enter.

For a split second, I worried about the rich people through the door and in the halls, too. One long, unending nightmare. I finally broke through. The rich people who had been blocking the door shut went sprawling like cockroaches under a bright light. They cackled maniacally as they ran through the halls. Almost got you! One of the rich men laughed as he went around a bend, his voice becoming distant as he ran.

They couldn't keep getting away with this. They couldn't keep tormenting me in the museum for sickening entertainment. Wait here, I told Rosie. She was a ball on the ground, shaking and sobbing. I shot up on two legs in a rush and gave chase. The rich prick ran and ran, his hands screeching against the walls of the tight corridor, our museum's greenhouse on the other side. You almost killed Rosie.

Sprinting, I had almost caught up with him. He was in arm's reach. Stop running! His leg caught itself beneath one foolish stride. He went tumbling into one wall before pushing off of it and into another, smashing the glass and halfway tumbling into the greenhouse. Spectacles had come away from his face. Blood drained and trickled towards his scalp as he hung over shards of broken glass.

Starlight flooded in from the greenhouse and blanketed his face in a greenish hue. Help me! He coarsely pleaded, one arm reaching up at me, one arm, watching up at me, one. wanting to be pulled away from the glass into safety. Inside, Holly, our greenhouse Venus fly-trap with the mouth to fit a man, twisted and loomed in the evening light. She was a ginormous, beautiful plant, hungry too. The man's head tilted backwards and set eyes on the plant.

He wriggled and wormed, trying to free himself from the glass that stuck through him. I reached one hand outward to lift him. Then stopped myself. Rosie's smile glowed in my mind like hot steel. My daughter, Sophia, had that same smile. A smile he wanted to take away. My arm attracted. Lift me out of here!

He croaked. Hurry! I glared at him, unblinking. Then it was over. With one swift swoop, Holly swallowed his torso. Green hairy fingers from her lips snugly tightened around his body like mossy bandages. My employment contract has been broken, and I shall be punished. Globules of thick slime dripped from the fly-trap's lips, arms and legs burst out of her mouth as she chomped.

When I returned to Rosie, I held her hand tighter than I had the entire evening. I held and held her hand all night until it was time for her ride to pick her up from the museum's courtyard. glass and escaped exhibitions tended to be the majority of the damage, and for a few hours I slept. When everyone had left, all that was left for me to do was to sit at my reception table and wait for sunrise. My contract had been broken. I had let a guest die at my hand.

They were always all despicable, I suppose, but that one had to die. Rosie's warmth that had gripped me so tightly dissipated hours after the museum turned quiet, everything was cold again. I miss my daughter. I'm sorry I couldn't protect you, like Rosie. There would be more rich guests to torment me next week, and there was no escape. I thought about the ocean exhibition I visited earlier in the evening. The angler fish and I are one and the same.

I love you, Sophia. Slumped at my desk, I lay broken and bruised. I rested my head upon folded arms, ready to let sleep come to me. I hope I don't dream of you, my girl. I don't want to see the blowflies again. For a while, nothing. Then something quite curious. For the first time in fifteen years, the museum's phone rang.

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 daughter's 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 exhibition 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 when 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. 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 observed her joyful, smiling soul fall through my fingers like sand. That was, until the day I saw a strange article in the newspaper. Torgaid wanted, it read. When I read the salary listed, I saw not to do that.

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 standard clauses, most of which ended in. In event of breaching this agreement, employee is subject to immediate termination and exangination.

If you don't know what exangination means, it's a shoddy 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. When I found out what it meant, I consoled myself by saying 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, exanguination. 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, Boyle. He boomed. A hissing of stubble sounded through the archaic museum phone. Who is this? 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 underlie. lying and unsated desire for cruelty. He was just like the rest. He coughed into the phone to break the catch-up. 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. We'll be there for your aforementioned exanguination. I think my heart stopped. Excuse me? Oh, it's not all bad, chap. If the attendee is incapacitated and unable to carry out this clause of your contract, 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 the 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 finished polishing the mirror and began walking. towards the enormous foyer. Uneasiness, as well as my turning stomach, almost made me forget I had to feed tooth fairy. 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's 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 music and art exhibition was a dimly lit doorway that I rarely entered. Outside on a large golden placard above the entrance, it read, tooth fairy. 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. no art dealers would take her up on a donation. Our cleaners kept the teeth from our deceased visitors' 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

artwork's 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 feel. 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 5.59. 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 eyes 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, a lady that was quite pale and beautiful.

Her eyes quite small on her face, which was framed by ash-black. bangs in 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 middle-class mannerisms. She carried herself with a pride that was of a hard-working businesswoman, content and happy with her five to nine, not the accomplished grandeur of reeling in millions of dollars of fortune from multiple estates, was a good-average of her five to nine, was a good-auntled, was Is this her?" I took them through a couple of exhibitions, passing the glass-walled hallways between

our greenhouses, where Holly had eaten a man the week before. They clapped at the Venus fly-trap'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 spoke to must have known everything. We had stopped at the paranormal wing. They saw Marriette 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 clipping, 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 he could understand her, as if he felt mocked. There were a couple of 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 I felt uneasy 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, Bielzebub was one of the seven princes of hell. In Eucharitic, the name roughly translates to the Lord of the Flies. My eyes 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 to 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 of moments before.

I want to try to speak to him. He looks like he's in pain. I don't think that's a good idea. 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 curators 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 the enclosure. Open it. You are welcome to try to communicate with it through the glass. I wrapped 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 shaking 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 grouch. grimace. At that moment, she knew she wanted to get out. The back of the woman still hung out past the cabinet's doorframe in case she needed a quick exit. She didn't dare stand fully inside the flies enclosure. My heart was beating out of my chest. She was going to let it out, and Beelzebub will 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 can't. I picked 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. Gasp 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 fist 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 spurred it 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 bore holes into his flesh and into his cheeks. Crawling didn't get him far. The flies were already digging. He screamed, and the rest of the guests screamed too. Flies buried under his cheeks and came crawling out through the corner of his eyes. Red gaping holes emerged beneath his skin, the 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 blood on the floor, exanguinated. Bielzebub's mouth tube met one of the man's calves and sucked chunks of his fleshy soup up with a, 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 tooth fairy could appreciate. My feet skidded around the ground as I bolted around corners past the living wall in 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 rose-ableness. upon rows of sickly lilac seats. Marble balconies reached out over the stage like great, expansive white clouds. Small holes projected streams of light from the theater's corners ceiling and stage.

A brilliantly blue humpback whale suspended and shifting light floated from the entrance beside me, downhill the slope of seats before blubbering and disappearing into the wall as the projectors flickered. 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, I theater and its holograms were real. The Burnett 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 away from me! I stepped closer, closer, and she didn't stop screaming. You locked me in the cabinet was... 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 the 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 chicken-pox specks of death upon my maroon waistcoat, and the projected soldiers showed teeth. I fought 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 sprangirling. printed from the stage towards the entrance, holes tearing away at the lilac fabric of chairs as he shot, opening flaps like blooming verbena flowers. I might have thrown up again if I didn't have to keep running. The Elzebub slogged behind me distantly at the end of the hallway, his spiny, hooked feet screeching against the marble.

Buzing 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 executioner was dead, but my eyes were traumatized with gore. I couldn't bear 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 door handle. 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, God!

The sound of the plump curator pulling from a cigarette. Your debt and punishment have 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 exanguination.

And boy, oh, did you prove that you belong here or what? I slammed the phone on my reception desk, the sound of plastic echoing through 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 corned. I 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 in stained paperwork of dead guess. My hands still shaking from fear and dread from the museum's looming and reanimated monstrosities, Bielzebub was coming.

I didn't like what I was becoming. I was going to leave this dreadful museum, no matter the price. There were two unopened doors at the museum that had always haunted me since I started. The first being the locked steel door I 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 its curiosity prodded away at its potential. Secondly, and more horrifyingly, was the shut doorway to Johnny Razertong's display, the only

exhibition I never entered out of an unadulterated fear. Johnny Razertong is to blame as to why Mariette, the previous guide, the one that walked the the museum's halls before me, went mad. It had 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 manner 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 window pane, 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 had 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 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 lock-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's going to do to you. I'm sorry, Mariette. I thought, believe it or not, Johnny is going to help me leave this whole whole day. horrible place. I was so focused on organizing my plan to see the dummy and leave the museum

I'd almost forgotten to feed Ernie. I could never forget about Ernie. Beyond the Insect Exhibition Hallway and to the left of our animals and evolution room, it was quite frankly rather dull, but Ernie 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, while he chomped with an effortless wet crunch. See, Ernie was a bare-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 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 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 the 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 Marriette never had when his words broke her down. Becoming accustomed to the museum's horror had made my mind a steel fortress, though I just hoped Johnny couldn't melt my mind as easily as he did Mariette's. 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 time, and hopefully, the 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 meters behind me in her display, facing away and disgust from the room. 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 a 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 and sickening enthusiasm. "'Hi am, 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 hanging, Mikey? There was no dust on his combed hair nor suit, as he would expect for an animated plastic whore 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 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 wine. Sophia, she's rotting in the dirt. My fist clenched in the spotlight from my tor. The porch shook over him like the light from a swinging chandelier. Maggot's probably crawling out of her cheeks, eh, Mikey? Stop! I suddenly burst it 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.

Wally, friendo, 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 to me to lean closer, and I did. He was whispering when he spoke. Through the steel door.

What? He leaned back in his stool, one plastic square chin dancing in the light as he laughed to himself. I thought about it for a while. That steel door had remained sealed since I started to 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 it. 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 was 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 exactly hear 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 guard. and made a gentle crunch 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, unprejudiced. predictable freedom. I am 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 my 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 bald fist before I was yanked backwards, 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 against his head only lighting up graying hair at the edges. His cold fingers met my throat, tightening,

tightening. Riggling left and right was hard with my 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 the skyline. 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 crunch. I couldn't let up. Not when I was this close. Yonder, the snowy bank in front of me, was the 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 floors and 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

them. It was a haven for retired exhibitions. That or their hell. Fudding 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 do you think you're going? A man's muffled voice boomed from under the door. It was the same man who had gripped me by the 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 ladder. 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 field. blooming in my stomach. The thing I approached in the blanketing dim starlight was animatronic and coolish. 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 symbols. 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 in one furry ear of the mechanical being were a few pages of forms, faded and dusty, and puffed away the dust 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 the 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 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 dead.

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 Razor Tong in a heartbeat. If not for me, then for Mariette's tortured soul. Without warning, the stuffed mechanical abomination switched on. It chilled my bone to see golden, iridescent bulbs flickering. in 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 a decade 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. The speaker tried to sing in a child's voice, but the rusty electronics could only cough up distorted noise.

When it finally started to tune and began walking, when it finally started to tune and began walking, I made for the door. My hand met the handle of the door. I went tumbling backwards as the man kicked it in first, my elbow collapsing into one rotten floorboard. The mechanism behind me sang and sang, and her symbols crashed and crashed. 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 symbol clapping animatronic monstrosity approached slowly, gears churning in its open chest. Went the symbols. 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 the animatronics innards in a red cloud of skin and bone. The once childlike voice coming out of the finger 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's going to be free soon. The man screamed and screamed. and the dying speaker's voice lines sung and sung. 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 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, 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 orient myself away from the museum's ground. For a while, I walked aimlessly in the blistering snow, not seeking a goal, but salvation in as much distance as 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 a museum, Michael. The voice was buzzing through the speaker. You two are intertwined. 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's time you expire, Boyle. See, we 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 people that are lonely at the top of the financial mountain, those rich and... famous, who are under constant judgmental 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 newspapers, nor the public's exhibitions, and you were instrumental in such success. Breathing did not 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 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 sea.

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 me sing a final lullaby. For a while, the constellations looked like my daughter's 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. Ernie. I swiftly buried into the thin layer of concave snow that Ernie'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 hind-paws in the lighter's soft glow as he began to scurry back through the tunnel towards the museum. I crouched and slogged through the tunnel, using only the lighter and Ernie to guide me.

Warmth returned to my extremities and spread in waves. Come to think of it, the lighter was not the only thing I had found on the man's body. Upon the key ring I had taken was a peculiar, long, and winding key I had never seen before, one that I had never owned. A key to the steel door. I was spitting out specks of dirt by the time I made it back to the museum through Ernie'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, Ernie'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 headback. 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 had once held the imprisoned exhibitions exploded into clouds of broken shards. Shattering bangs echoed down the hallways,

the floors above me, the greenhouse. It was a symphony of broken glass clattering through the entire building and bursting pops, a cacophony of impendent. 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 turned quiet and confused, and silence quickly

grew into 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 tear 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 could. New 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, and the other had a jaw that was tightened with invisible bolts of disdain. Mr. Frightened and Mr. 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 sentences with every pop of distant glass felt intensely euphoric. What's going on?

Mr. Frighton'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 Mr. Angry's wrist.

The other man caught wind of what I was looking at. He looked down at Mr. 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 his elbow said, I've read about these on the placard. How did it? His voice was shaking.

I wiped one sweaty hand on my leg and began to back away. This. All 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, right? It's venomous, right, guide? Mr. Angry shrieked.

Get it the hell off me! I interjected, stepping one foot back and then the next. No, though... Without warning, the man peeled it from his skin, one thumb pushing against the chameleon's neck to expose fangs. Mr. 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 here were never going to change. I thought, watching Mr. Frighton 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.

Mr. Frighton didn't make a sound, only an anguished grimace in pain as his skin cells flowered sage, then ocean blue. The pain was utterly insufferable, enough to want to spoon the bloodshot eyes out of his 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 the 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 the chameleon's contagious, clear pigmentation would also make his flesh as thin. In his 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. Frighton 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 a translucent veil or a jellyfish.

The chameleon's contagious pigment miraculously started to spread to his neck bone and his skull. The chameleon's contagious pigment miraculously started to spread to his neck bone 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 is 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 moments 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 into a freezing bath.

Mr. 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 the 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 hallways toward 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 door, above me on a gold. golden placard, the tooth fairy. Mr. Angry followed me into the dimly lit space, wielding his hammer tightly over one shoulder. Nowhere to run now, guide. The man turned left, then right. No reanimated freaks left here to do your bidding either, eh? His eyes scanned the floor for smashed glass, the remains of any escape displays. But the tooth fairy 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 treasap 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. the jaw, mouth, and cheeks remained below its jagged outline of a missing scalp.

The man turned, but the tooth fairy'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, goose flesh, but watching the animated painting pull the man's teeth felt intoxicating. There was a vile amusement that burned within as I can. 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. Help me, please! 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 chuckles 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, and 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 hammer in my hand shined brightly at the right angle. I walked towards the curator and the door. Oh boy, help. The curator said. You've gone mad. That grin.

He shook his head. The museum has gripped. The museum has gripped you, hasn't it? My fingers reached up, and I patted my lips like they were going numb. Oh, God! How long it 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. A 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, Boyle. 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 and half the museum, but all of it, every cracking of his skull, every slosh of the curator's brain under my hammer was the bite of 15 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, and the poorly lit gray-scale blanket of the evening, The curator's blood stood out vividly as a red pool against the 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 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 toward 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. 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. Center frame was the curator, slimmer back then, alongside a blonde teenager in a tidy ponytail.

They were smiling. Polaroid unstuck itself from the wall as I pulled. Upon the white bar beneath the picture, there was some writing that had been messily scribbled. 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?

All the way to the end of the wall, I picked up the earliest photo. It was dated 15 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 am 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 15 years. 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. visit the museum on off days, they have a lot of cleaning to do.

She was choking up as I 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 cruel. It was cruel. Honey, it doesn't matter what he said. He's a terrible man. He's 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 pond for the rich and famous, just like me. She was shaking her head. No, 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 the tours. She didn't know where to begin when unraveling 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. The rich are deplorable, and they're here once a week. You just don't see them because you're locked in... 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... Monster, father!

I went to grab her by the arm and hold her and tell her it was all right and that we were free, but she slapped my hand away and shrieked. My voice went quiet, pleading. I'm not a monster, honey. 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 killed. kidnapped and groomed her to be the next guide. All she saw in the museum's 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 brains 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 floor. a few steps from the door. The Elzebub and the Tooth Fairy 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 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, the Elzebub fluttered a broken fly wing as it sucked its disgusting mouth tube in and out like a pacifier. 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 Bielzbo dragged one contorted spiny foot across the marble, closer, closer. And then I knew what I had to do.

My arms were wide. I will be resuming hours 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 smell. smashing was no more. Is that what you want to hear? I screamed at the museum.

The horrifying exhibitions inside the foyer stood frozen. Is that what you wanted? 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 in mine. The museum is cursed. The people that visited 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 there 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 sniffed and nodded. You go and don't stop until you're 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 floor. The exhibitions were free. of course, but it was no secret as to how I survived 15 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, Marriott."

I said as my key fit snugly inside 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 in 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. Mariette.