Learning The Ropes

Back in October 2009, my friends Angus and Seán and I got jobs working at a Halloween haunted house in County Meath. Even though it was for kids, the area was really well set-up and the artwork had been done by a professional so it was pretty damn scary. The whole place was rigged with ropes and levers so stuff was liable to jump out at you and help you to void your bowels at any time.

Angus, Seán and I had many jobs to do in the haunted house, from leading tour groups around to fixing the props into place. One job we took turns at was pulling a rope in the graveyard's control room that caused a skeleton to burst out of a coffin and rise menacingly up in the air. Yeah, you read that right. That haunted house was pretty bad ass...

Anyway, one evening a woman came to the haunted house with her two young kids. Within five minutes of arriving, one of them was running haphazardly through the main office and the other was randomly punching and kicking a wall. This is to be expected from young children so no one panicked and everybody just patiently waited for their mother to instruct them to stop.

That's when it became evident that their mother was one of the contemporary "my-children-must-never-be-yelled-at-as-they-are-only-expressing-themselves" parents. So she simply smiled proudly at her offspring as one of her sons creatively began rocking back and forth on an office swivel chair and her other son expressed his anger at society by stealing sweets from some other parent's bag.

The younger son also made it clear from pretty early on that he was a kicker. Every worker at the haunted house was dressed all in black and since the mother had taught her child to be an inventive little fiend, he decided that the people who were wearing all black were "Halloween monsters" who should be fiercely and relentlessly kicked.

The next hour or so was characterised by the little ogre yelling his head off, his mother laughing with sheer pride and the sensation of aching shins.

When the tour group they were with had finished going around and were busy colouring pictures and constructing things out of glue in the activity room, Angus, Seán and I went to hang out in the graveyard until we had to tend to the next group. We were just sitting around, drinking cans of Sprite and eating Halloween candy, when we heard the sound of someone coming towards us.
We also heard the sound of a child screaming happily while his negligent mother chuckled fondly at his antics.

"It was so nice of you to lead us around this part of the haunted house again," the mother was saying sweetly. "They both just loved the graveyard!"
"No problem," one of our fellow workers replied. "They were both really excited about coming back in here!"
Poor guy. I felt his pain as if it was in my own shins...

Angus, Seán and I looked at each other in alarm. We gathered up our cans and wrappers, threw them behind a plywood gravestone, ducked under the neon light and ran for the exit.
"Wait!" Angus hissed. "Someone needs to pull the rope!"
"Yeah, you're right," Seán answered. "And we need somebody to be the demon as well."
Let me explain...The "demon" was a guy who dressed up in a grim reaper costume with a freaky mask and skeletal hands and jumped out of the graveyard's crypt to scare the groups that came through. We had a main guy to be the demon but Angus, Seán and I had taken turns playing the part too.
The group were coming closer so we had to act fast.
Somewhere in the confusion it was decided that I would be the demon although I never remember agreeing to this. Seán threw the cloak over me, Angus shoved on my gloves and it looked like I was all set...except that we couldn't find the mask.

"Shit!" Angus whispered as the three of us searched frantically for it and the footsteps of the group came closer. In a few moments, they would round the corner and see us. We looked everywhere and I'll never forget the sensation of trying to locate a Halloween mask while wearing a cloak that someone else had been sweating furiously in a mere hour earlier.
It ain't pleasant.
"We'll just have to leave it!" Seán decided.
"Leave it?" I hissed. "Without that mask I'm just Aimee in a black poncho! How is that scary???"
"Eh..."
The sounds of their feet on the ground got closer, feet that would soon be kicking us all...

The three of us exchanged looks of panic and then dived behind a black curtain into the control room.
That would have been fine except that the control room was designed for one person and we were all crammed in there together.
Squashed together in the dark, I suddenly found myself relating to and sympathising with tins of sardines. Poor little fishes...

We could hear the group close by us in the graveyard now. Seán put his hands on the rope, ready to pull, and Angus and I waited with baited breath.
But then I noticed something.
The gloves that I was wearing had light-up fingertips and I realized that they had all burned out except the one on the index finger on my right hand.
I looked at my glove, I looked at Seán standing beside me. The comedic opportunity was too great to pass up...
"Elliot," I said to Seán in my best E.T. impression as I extended my glowing finger to his forehead. "Be good."
Don't judge me, being funny is all I've got. Seán turned around and instantly saw that something had snapped within me and I had reached a new level of psychosis."Aimee, shut up!" he pleaded.Angus also put a hand on my shoulder and shushed me. I turned around and looked at him innocently."E.T. phone home?" I inquired, showing him my finger.Angus snorted with laughter. So did Seán. I grinned too, my purpose in life being fulfilled for the night."Hey, what was that?" the little boy suddenly shouted from outside.
The three of us froze in fear. I put my hand behind my back.
Unless E.T. wanted a pair of fractured shins, E.T. would shut the hell up now...

The kicker's attention quickly went to something else so Angus, Seán and I let out sighs of relief and went back to being quiet.
"All I have to do is wait for them to get near enough the exit and I'll pull the rope," Seán whispered to us. "Then we just wait for them to leave and we can get out of here."
"Sounds good," I whispered back and Angus gave the thumbs-up.
I smiled. This fiasco was nearly over.
Seán was holding onto the rope, ready and waiting to pull. In the dim darkness, I followed the trail of the rope with my eyes and saw that it had come away from the metal clasp above the control room.
That's weird, I remember thinking. We'll have to fix that later. Will it still work alright now?
Squinting through the darkness (never rely on neon lighting for following the paths of ropes, trust me), I suddenly made a shocking discovery. The rope had come loose, had dipped into the control room......and was now wrapped around my neck.

The group were so close to the control room now that they would have heard a pin drop in there. I grabbed at the rope around my neck and desperately started whispering to the man whose hands my life was in.
"Seán! Seán! Seán!"

"Shh Aimee, we're almost done!" Seán murmured.
"No, Seán, I-"
"Shh!"
"But Seán-"
"Shh!"
The group were getting closer. Seán pulled on the rope slightly and it tightened around my neck.
I think Angus might have seen my struggling with my neck but, being my closest friend, he was used to my flights of madness and probably just wrote it off as "Aimee working on a new dance."
That was when I frenetically began treating Seán's back the way a cat treats a scratching post.
He pulled on it faintly again and the rope squeezed my neck harder.
My hands went up to the rope, fastened around it and I accepted my fate. I saw a bright light in a tunnel with my Aunt Bethany standing at the end of it.
I had never liked her so I decided to try and save my own life one last time.
"Seán," I rasped. "Whatever you do, don't pull the rope!!!"
Seán turned around, clearly exasperated by my shenanigans, and gasped.
"Oh my God!" he cried and immediately let go of the rope.
"Thank you!" I choked as Seán and Angus both rushed to untangle me from my doom.

We didn't bother with making the skeleton jump out of the casket after that. The fun Halloween prank just didn't seem worth a human life...
We waited for the group to leave and then rushed right out of the graveyard.
As I stood in the courtyard outside the haunted house, wearing a flickering alien hand and covered in somebody else's sweat, I muttered one thing out loud.
"Sorry Aunt Bethany, maybe next time..."
"What?" Angus asked me.
"Nothing," I said. "Let's go get some more chocolate. I think we've earned it."
And so we strolled away from the graveyard, shins, necks and dignities all in tact.