Page 12 of Phobia

Olivia was.

Livy was the middle child, and the perfect Scream Queen in the making. Not only was she a budding actress with her sights on Hollywood, but she made scaring her downright too easy.

Keeping my footsteps featherlight and sneaking up on her in the kitchen while she was making herself a sandwich, she’d let out an eardrum-shattering screech.

Hiding behind her bedroom door… cue the blood-curdling shriek that earned me Ma’s holler in Portuguese,“Katrina Fatinha!Stop!” from somewhere in the house.

I lived for the thrill of fucking with people, of scaring my family, of being scared myself.

Which was why I couldn’t understand for the life of me what was so off-putting about these wax figures. Maybe it was the way their eyes seemed to follow us as we traversed around the room. The lifelessness in their human features. The nuances and detail that made them feel like they’d lunge for me.

I lurched back when it did just that, its arm distending out for me, a gruff "boo" falling from its lips. Adam caught me when I hit his chest, the roar of his laugh vibrating through me.

I frowned at the scare actor as he slunk back into place, returning to his sentinel state, awaiting his next unsuspecting victim.

“He got you good,” Adam said, righting me back into place, his commanding hands lingering on my waist.

I blew out a raspberry, nodding my head weakly. Yeah, he and the other two actors who’d done the same thing in the last fifteen minutes when I’d gotten a little too close, trying to get a better look. Pulling out of Adam’s hold, I hugged my upper body, running my fingers along the pimpled flesh on my arms. I’d knotted my coat around my waist, the heat from the mounting anxiety and adrenaline rush making me too warm.

I couldn't believe that this building wasn’t a Halloween attraction three-hundred-and-sixty-five days of the year. They had transformed the galleries into a series of mazes, but beyond the disguises, the historicalness of the building’s architecture and interior work was impossible to ignore—flying buttresses lined the arched stone ceiling, crown molding along the panels of the walls adorned by macabre paintings depicting hell and medieval executions, complimented by heavy drapery over stunning tracery on windows.

It was a labyrinth of eeriness. While the scare actors were a six-week addition, the phobia-inducing trepidation the stationary wax figures created all on their own was no joke.

A shriek up ahead startled me, ejecting me from my thoughts.

I watched as an actor charged toward a group of teenage girls up ahead, catching them off guard. They squealed, their circle splitting up. One shoved the other forward as a pleading sacrificial lamb, before bursting out into peals of laughter when she nearly toppled over from fright alone, her arms flailing miserably to keep herself upright.

Shaking my head, I released the embrace on myself, and exhaled the breath I’d been holding with control. Despite the beauty within the architecture, there was something not quite right about this place… and it wasn’t just because of the theme of the event.

It was the figures themselves.I could chalk it up to paranoia, but there was something I just couldn’t put my finger on about them that left me uneasy and my chest hitching with anxious breaths that failed to inflate my lungs.

After we’d crossed the threshold of the entrance, we worked our way through the first section of the museum, finding ourselves in a gallery paying homage to infamous American criminals and serial killers. There were tiny placards pitched nearby, identifying them, alongside a brief history lesson printed on paper in a hard plastic shell, illuminated by display lighting.

Try as I did to focus on the words, letting their story marinate in my mind, my focus would always wander back to their faces. The penetrating effect in their unblinking beady stare forced each hair on my body upright, an uncomfortable tingling stretching across my scalp.

It was disturbing how lifelike they were.

The extent of the details hand carved into their faces, their carefully selected clothes fitting their time period, meticulously pressed, not a wrinkle or crease to be found. Each strand of hair styled with care, lowlights catching on the dim lighting in the room.

But it was their immobility and the way their eyes created the illusion of stalking you around the room that sent my heart rate soaring, each beat pounding closer to a tachycardia.

The anticipation of what-if curdled the blood in my veins, my stomach roiling. I couldn’t look away, no matter how much I wanted to. As though I was waiting for something to happen, and I needed to remain on guard until it did.

It was almost like beneath the wax… there were real people involuntarily trapped within their fiberglass frames, desperate to break out. Their eyes fixed. Limbs motionless and encased in wax. Eyelids glued in place.Their silent screams tunneling against the seal of their lips, trapped within their own mind.

I swallowed. Or maybe that was just my overactive imagination.

No one would go to that extent, and I’d spent too many nights on a Wikipedia rabbit hole, reading about some of the infamous murderers in the room with us. The lengths in which they’d gone to for the dopamine hit from the kill.

I eyed each figure with distrust as we wandered through the rooms. None of it was real. It was a form of art, someone’s livelihood, but there was just something not right about this place.

“Check this one out,” Adam called, canting his head toward Ed Gein—the Butcher of Plainfield—the inspiration of Leatherface from theTexas Chainsaw Massacrefranchise.

Although, to my knowledge, there had been no actual chainsaws involved in his butchering.

Stubble lined his set jaw, his cheeks slightly hollowed in, his lips fixed in the faintest sneer like he didn’t have a single fuck to give for any of his atrocities. Proud, glacial blue eyes stared right back at me, the left eye drooping just a little. His hair thinned at his hairline, the tufts unkept at the top and shorn near his protruding ears. Somehow, the inspiration of the movie was more terrifying than the Hollywood interpretation.

“I’m good right here.”