A Real Monster

When I worked as an actor in a halloween theme park, I was a scarecrow: overalls smeared with fake blood, gloves, a sackcloth mask with its mouth sewn shut. In costume, even in good light, I was unrecognisable. Horrific. A gory, gaudy character from a slasher flick.

My job was to hide alongside a narrow, poorly-lit path in the woods, surrounded by other scarecrows. Straw ones. Unliving ones. I’d stand still. Wait for a group of punters (nervous, clustered) to appear and edge their way through the congregation of straw men. I’d be patient. Very still. I’d pick my moment. And then, at whatever point I thought might get the biggest scream, I’d lunge.

For a sadist it was satisfying work.

One night the woman I was fucking came to visit. She’d booked tickets with a big group of friends weeks before she ever met me – a strange coincidence. We talked about it the night before.

“Will I recognise you in there?” she’d asked.

“I don’t know. It’s dark. Confusing.”

“Will you recognise me?”

“Maybe. My eyes adjust to the dark after an hour or so. But there’s the mask. That makes it difficult.”

I hadn’t told her what my costume was, or where I was usually stationed. We had decided between us that it should be a surprise. That is, if it happened at all. A thousand guests a night wandered through the Spooky Forest. To pick out just one of them, in the dark, from behind a mask…

As it happened I recognised her easily. She was lingering at the back of her group, close but separate. Visibly nervous, but looking out for me. She looked past me, though. Didn’t discern that I was anything other than another lifeless prop. I let the group go by. Let her pass, then followed silently behind.

You’re not allowed to touch the guests. The guests know this. She knew this. So when I put a gloved hand on her shoulder and another on her arm and pulled her roughly into the woods beside the path she must have known it was me. She didn’t scream.

Away from the path the darkness was instant, complete. You could see only the edges of things, the lines of the trees. I found, then, that I couldn’t see her. Nothing but the outline of her, the vaguest of shapes.

I put her against a tree, her back to the trunk, my hands on either side of her. She caught her breath as I put the nose of my mask an inch from hers. The night before I’d been to see her after work, still with traces of makeup on my face, hoarse and tired. That night I had spanked her over my knee and fucked her in the ass. I had stayed inside her while she masturbated to a shivering orgasm that I could feel pulsing through her body. Clutch and release.

Now I couldn’t even see her face. Couldn’t be sure it was her. It smelled like her. The breathing was hers. But in the dark I could be anyone and she could be anyone and we both knew this. We were at an impasse. I could hear her mouth opening, lips parting, then closing again. The sound of her struggling not to ask if it was me. It was a struggle she lost.

“Kristan?” she said. And it was her. Her voice. Her voice exactly. I turned her around against that tree, pushed her body into the crook of it. Hard already. I could hear voices on the path, but where we were – just steps away – we were utterly invisible. I fumbled at her clothes, pulling down her leggings and keeping her tight against the tree at the same time. It took only a moment or two. I was hard already, and it was a cold night, and her cunt felt like the warmest thing in the world.

She told me later that her friends waited for her at the exit of the Spooky Forest. None of them had noticed her wander off. None had noticed her absence. They joked about her copping off with one of the actors, she told me. They joked about her being abducted. This would be the perfect place to do it, they had said, laughing; with all the people milling about in costume, a real monster would go unnoticed.