Most people on the street just walked right by the dark, brooding Victorian mansion that was mostly made out of cheap plywood covered in styrofoam. A few kids were drawn to it and became curious enough to go inside, but the adults usually just ignored the booming voice, overloading a tinny speaker, that was trying to grab their attention.
"I... am the Haunted House of Holbrook Hill!" The lights in the fake house's windows were synchronized to the voice, brightening when it spoke like glowing orange eyes above the mouth that was the front door. "My spirit is cursed to terrorize this mortal realm for but one night each year. And when the night is over, so they say... I will mysteriously disappear! So... do you dare to come inside my lair? Can you navigate the bowels of my darkest dungeons and escape with your life before the stroke of sunrise?!"
As Luke finished reading out the script he'd been given, he leaned into the microphone and gave his best maniacal laugh. Just as he stopped, he heard the door behind him clicking open. He quickly turned off the mic and swiveled his chair around to find his boss. The man was a little out of breath from climbing the narrow stairs up to the haunted house's attic, the nerve center of this fly-by-night operation. They were in a cramped crawlspace, lit only by the dim glow of the monitor full of security camera feeds. Up here, you could see inside every room of the house at once, and most of them were empty. The boss's eye fell on one of the few exceptions: a terrified-looking kid with a white painted face and a fuzzy-eared headband was making his way through the halls, while a lanky teenager in a bad werewolf costume was preparing to jump out at him.
"You're doing a great job tonight, Luke," the man said, turning his attention away from the live feed. "Usually I have to pull teeth to get someone to man the control center up here. You're sure you wouldn't rather be down there in a costume? Everybody else does..."
"Honestly, sir, when I'm up here, it's like the whole house is my costume. And it really suits me, I think. I mean, scaring the kids is great and all, but someone's got to get them inside in the first place if they're gonna be scared at all!"
Luke's boss was still watching the monitor. "Yeah, well, uh, keep up the good work on that," he said flatly. "If you can get a hundred more customers before the end of the night - and they have to be paying customers - then we'll just about break even for the season." He opened the door behind him and started down the stairs before he finished his sentence. "Otherwise, I don't know if we'll be able to do this again next year," he muttered as he pulled the door shut and left Luke alone at his post again.
Sighing, Luke had just turned back to the microphone and hit the big red "on" button before his whole vision blurred. Everything felt fuzzy for a second or two before his senses all snapped back into place - and immediately he knew that they were all wrong. The darkened room where he sat was gone, and when he opened his eyes now, he just saw the street below. It was like he was peering out from one of the windows with the eye lights sticking out - but how did he get down there? And where had his precious bank of security cameras gone?
At the very same moment that that thought struck him, Luke's whole field of vision shifted once again. With a mere thought, he could switch to seeing any one of the rooms down there, but now they were in full-color high-definition rather than a grainy green night-vision feed. And somehow, if he unfocused his vision, he could see all of them at once, surveying the entire house just as he had before. It was as if the security cameras had all become his eyes, and now he could see from a dozen different angles, all of them fighting for his attention. What the hell is going on? Luke asked himself, disoriented.
And as he flipped unintentionally from watching one room to the next to the next to the next, he could see that his co-workers were not just doing their jobs as normal, either. For one thing, their costumes all looked a lot more... professional than they had just a minute ago. The people inside the costumes, for the most part, seemed just as confused as Luke was. Right now, he could see a vampire experimentally prodding a sharp, glistening fang and wincing as he touched it. His attention flicked over to another eye's viewpoint, and he saw a grimacing mummy peeling one of its bandages back, staring with horror at the decayed brown flesh underneath. Another flick, and there was a tiny white rabbit, running down the hall as fast as its legs could carry it, while a giant, furry, snarling monster chased it from behind.
All these sights together were starting to make some sense to Luke, even if it was a particularly nonsensical kind of sense. He tried to speak, in a low whisper, to each of the monsters he had just seen, and to the others whose presence he could just feel in the dark recesses of the house. "Guys, listen to me!" he said, and he watched them look up with startled expressions. The werewolf stopped his chase, cursing under his breath when he realized he was letting the bunny get away. "I don't know if you can hear me, but I think we all just... turned into whatever we were dressed up as!" He heard someone mutter, "Yeah, no shit, Sherlock," but decided to let that slide.
Of course, it didn't take long for Luke to realize what that bizarre fact meant for himself. After all, he wasn't just seeing the people, or formerly people, in each room. He could feel their footsteps hit the floor, as though things were walking around inside his stomach. And he could feel the whole shape of his body grossly distorted - no arms, no legs, completely immobile like his behind was superglued to the ground. It was just like he had said earlier - the house was his costume. Which meant he was now the house!
"Do you guys realize what this means!?", Luke said, in maybe a little too excited of a tone for the situation. Nobody answered his question. "It means we have the perfect opportunity to make this the best, most realistic haunted house this town - hell, the whole tri-state area - has ever seen!" He was met with several annoyed grumbles. He could make out a few snatches of words from the collective groan: "Did you do this to us somehow?" "You put drugs in the punch bowl, didn't you?" "Are we going to be stuck like this???"
Luke tried to smooth over their overlapping concerns. "Guys, guys, come on," he pleaded. "The only way something this magical could happen is if the Halloween gods are like, fucking smiling down on us right now! We've been chosen for this - we can't turn it down! And I'm sure by the time the night is over, we'll all be back to normal - and we'll have a crazy-ass story to tell."
The werewolf snorted. "Yeah, a story so crazy nobody will ever believe it." He examined his claws. "But I am totally down to scare the shit out of a bunch of kids right now. I'm in."
Nobody else was going to argue with 350 pounds of raging muscle and razor-sharp teeth, so that was that. "Just embrace your nature, guys," Luke told them once they were all reluctantly on board with staying and continuing the haunt. "For right now, you're monsters - all you have to do is act natural and you'll nail it." Then he turned his attention outward and prepared to embrace his own nature - a shameless promoter, a carnival barker, an effective salesman. He repeated the spiel he'd been given - a script that he now somehow knew by heart - and this time, the words had power. His deep, resonant voice shook the surroundings of the street with its bass tones, and people couldn't help but pay attention now.
Soon, there was a line of people waiting to get in. But as he drew in the crowd, Luke couldn't help but notice that it wasn't just him and the people inside him who'd been affected by this strange seasonal magic. "I can't believe how realistic they made the Fall Fair this year," he heard one waiting person say to another. "All over town, I saw people in these crazy high-quality costumes - how do they do it?" And more painful to Luke's attention-grabbing new persona was the fact that people were frequently getting into the line, checking their phones, looking horrified by whatever it was they read, and running off. He would have tried looking at the news on his own phone, but he was pretty sure his phone didn't exist right now. And he certainly couldn't run off anywhere even if he wanted to - his foundation was firmly planted in the ground. The only way he was going to pick up any more information about... whatever this was... was to wait and listen.
As the night wore on, the crowds thinned out. Soon the house that was Luke was just as still and empty as it had been before, the only difference being the admissions box stuffed full of cash. The people who were at first oblivious to the magic all around them had eventually put the puzzle pieces together and gone home to flip on CNN. Luke and his co-workers had put the pieces together, too. "See? What did I tell you?", Luke told the others when the coast was clear. "They're saying everybody's gonna go back to normal at dawn. We just have to sit tight for a little longer and this will all be over. And people are definitely gonna believe our story now!"
"Yeah, okay, okay, ve get it," said the vampire. "I just vish I could text my mom right now. She must be vorried sick."
—
Luke was in a perfect position to watch the eastern sky as the darkness gave way to brilliant pinks and oranges. Any moment now, the sun was going to rise, and the moment it crossed the horizon at the base of Holbrook Hill, all of this would be over. As he waited for the bright glow to peek its way over the trees, his mind wandered. The script he'd been trained to read kept running through his head - or his attic? - like a mantra. When the night is over... I will mysteriously disappear... Can you escape with your life before the stroke of sunrise?
Did those fictional rules still apply? he wondered. Am I going to disappear the moment dawn finally breaks? There was only one way to find out... he just had to watch the sky and wai—