Deborah stood beneath the crucified Christ. Moonlight angled through the stained glass to illuminate the green warts she’d rubber-cemented to her face. She was dressed as a witch and had dyed her hair red for the evening. Its shade matched the painted blood that dripped from the Savior’s wounds. “Your mask’s almost sacrilegious,” she said as I emerged from behind the altar with the candles. “How perfect.” She’d stopped believing in God months ago. She claimed she only continued with church because it gave her a chance to stare at Lucas Black, the pastor’s eighteen-year-old son.

My father honked from outside, where he and my mother waited in the pickup. When the four of us squeezed together in the seat, my parents looked uncomfortable beside each other. Deborah and I should be between them, I thought.

“I’ve got to be on the job in twenty-five minutes,” my mother said. Her uniform was the color of rye bread. Her gold badge spelled out M. LACKEY. KANSAS STATE INDUSTRIAL REFORMATORY patches covered each shoulder.

“Got to drop these two off first,” my father said. Our truck passed the YOU ARE LEAVING LITTLE RIVER, KANSAS! COME BACK AGAIN! sign. He turned onto the abandoned road that led to the Haunted Mansion.

I checked my mask in the side rearview and adjusted one crooked horn. My breath slivered from the slit in my fleshy maroon lips. I wore new wire-rim glasses beneath the mask, the ones Deborah swore made me look like an owl, the ones kids at school had already teased me about. To get a better look in the mirror, I cracked a window, and Deborah’s hat fell off, her red hair flying back. “Close it,” she said. Her mouth displayed a blackened front tooth.

The world sped past. Out there, the moon hovered above the flat horizon like a jewel surfacing in a black lake. Below it, shadowy farmhouses, silos, and haystacks scattered the fields. A German shepherd chased a rabbit through weeds. Fog began its nightly slide over Kansas, as thick as peaks of meringue.

My father coasted the truck toward the Haunted Mansion. The headlights shone off the house’s murky windows. “I won’t be home until four in the morning,” my mother said. “They make me spend the entire night in that lookout tower as if I’m Rapunzel or something. Thank God I’ve got only one more month of this shift.” She looked at her watch. “Your father has accounts to balance tomorrow. He’ll be falling asleep early, so you need to ask someone’s mom or dad or, better yet, Pastor Black to drive you home.”

My mother kissed two fingers. She touched Deborah’s forehead, then mine. “Don’t be too loud when you come home,” my father said. I hopped from the truck and walked toward the house, Deborah following.

The Haunted Mansion stood in a collar of trees. Rumors claimed a man had slaughtered his family there, years earlier. Little River high schoolers tried to prove bravery by parking in its driveway, most zooming away when no indoor light switched on or no forlorn ghost stared from a window. The house, two stories of gray wood, displayed a surface of loose boards and nails, a roof with shingles bleached to a light tan. Its windows had been cracked or shattered by falling limbs or vandals’ rocks. It looked as flimsy as a matchstick cabin.

A sign on the porch read ARE YOU BRAVE ENOUGH? ADMISSION: $1.00. The letters were written in a “blood” our group had concocted with Karo syrup and food coloring. I sidestepped a welcome mat stained with a splash of the fake blood.

The front room had once been a kitchen. Two jack-o’-lanterns sat in the sink, faces grimacing as if they’d felt every jab and slice of the knives that had carved them. Rubber bats and tarantulas bounced from strings Deborah had tied to ceiling hooks. She hadn’t bothered to sweep away the spider webs in the ceiling’s corners. “Leave them. They add atmosphere,” she had said, even though Breeze Campbell had stepped face first into one.

Leaf, Breeze’s older brother, lurched through the rooms, spilling the counterfeit blood from a plastic milk jug on the floors and walls. He was fat and always wore a black stocking cap. His costume consisted of a bloodstained sheet, the stocking cap, and a knife unconvincingly wedged in his armpit. “All the adults took off,” Leaf told Deborah, “except for my dad, and he’s out back drinking.” Mansion tours were scheduled to begin in fifteen minutes.

Pastor Black had advised us to keep the scares to a minimum. We hadn’t obeyed his rule. Upstairs, in one bedroom, Leaf and his friends had decorated the floor with knives, saws, drills, and hammers. They’d cut a hole into a rectangular table, draped it with a sheet, and lined it with candles. One of them planned to sit beneath the table and poke his head through the hole. A saw’s blade would rest against the neck he’d stained with syrup and food coloring. When the tours began, the boy’s “dead” eyes would open, and his mouth would spew blood.

Deborah pulled a compact from her purse. She touched her earrings, gigantic lightning bolts she’d cut from foiled cardboard. She checked her warts and teeth in the mirror. Her face looked sculptured from pea soup. “The man who lived in this house got up from dinner one evening and went to the toolshed.” She was practicing for her job as tour guide. “When he came back, he led his wife and each of his eight children one by one to the nine rooms of this house, and then…”

She looked through the door of the next room, where Lucas Black was rearranging weapons. Lucas was acting the role of the father-murderer. The Campbells and the other older kids got the jobs of the slaughtered family. I was the youngest in the group. “You can wander from room to room,” Lucas told me, pointing a screwdriver. “Try to scare any kids who think they’re brave.”

That night, my shyness had smothered, and I was eager to do the scaring. Two Halloweens ago, my father and I had driven to Topeka; we had passed a roadside Haunted House similar to our Youth Ministry’s. My father stopped the truck. “Let’s try it.” A bloody-mouthed polar bear and a mummy had stood at the front door, beckoning people in. But I chickened at the last minute, crying when the mummy’s clammy finger slimed across my face. “You’ll never go anywhere with guts like that,” my father had said. “This world’s not all peaches and cream, son.”

Deborah and I stomped upstairs. The red syrup lent the whole house a breakfasty smell. Someone had tied a plastic doll to the banister, her eyes driven through with the spears of scissors. Her dress was lifted to reveal her naked, dimpled butt. I covered it as I passed.

Light striped the master bedroom wall. Breeze’s face lit up, her mascara and lipstick suddenly as obvious and as crude as smears of jam on a pancake. “A car’s pulling in the driveway,” she yelled. She ran to her hiding place.

Downstairs, a tape player clicked on. Horror movie soundtrack music lifted through the air, a droning bass punctuated by a high, screechy violin’s staccato. I took my place in the smallest bedroom, grabbed a broom, and crouched in a musty corner. On the room’s opposite side, in front of the window, Breeze hung from a noose. She looked dead, in spite of the hidden sling around her shoulders and the foot she propped against the window. I waved the broom at her, and she winked back. She adjusted the rope. The candlelight glowed a pair of pink Vs against her face.

Lucas Black whistled from downstairs. Three seconds of silence. Outside, car doors slammed.

I listened as Deborah assembled some kids. “We’ll have tours every ten minutes,” she said in her regular voice. Pause. Then, gravelly, “Greetings to all. I hope you’re feeling brave. This house is haunted. The man who lived here was a cold-blooded murderer. One night he left the dinner table…” I closed my eyes and imagined a bundled-up, chickenhearted row of kids, their gazes fixed on the witch tour guide.

The rubber mask made my ears feel as if tiny hands were squeezing them. Slowly, the assembly began climbing the stairs. “The youngest daughter was the first to go,” Deborah hissed at the kids. “He brought her into this room, where he told her to open her mouth and close her eyes. She thought she was getting a nice mouthful of candy corn or cinnamon bears for dessert, but boy, was she wrong.”