“There used to be several people working here, believe it or not,” Ryan said, leading me past a series of dusty offices cluttered with yellowed paper and old furniture and crates. “I remember that from when I visited as a kid in the nineties. Somebody working the gift ship, the snack bar, the ticket window, a couple of tour guides. It was kind of a must-visit spot for tourists in the old days. It's hard to believe now. This is the workshop.”
We reached a large room full of cobwebs. A couple of long workbenches lined the walls. One was thick with dust, but another looked recently used, the dust wiped away, the tools shined up.
A life-sized mechanical bear in a jester hat sat in the middle of the room. Its fur was moth-eaten. Half its face was gone, revealing an unsettling metal and rubber skull underneath, and an unblinking glass eye. Its belly had been opened up to show rusty gears inside.
“My uncle would prepare his exhibits up here. Artifacts and bones had to be cleaned, you know, and other random junk repaired. And when they were ready...” Ryan stood among several ropes attached to the floor and reached for a crank attached to an overhead pulley system. “Uh, the surprise effect works better if you're standing over here.”
I stepped closer to him, and the floor wobbled under my feet.
“Hold my hand,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows.
“Just for a second. That first drop isn't always smooth.”
“This is getting to be less and less of a surprise as we go,” I said.
“Yeah, maybe it'll still be a little dramatic.” He took my hand, and I felt the strength in his grip, the calluses on his palm and his fingertips.
With his other hand, he turned the crank.
The floor dropped away beneath us, and I swayed, grabbing him desperately for balance.
The large square of falling floor jerked to stop after a couple of feet, then began to descend more slowly, swaying and creaking on the ropes at its corners.
“I doubt this is legal under OSHA or whatever,” Ryan said. “But anyway, this is how he moved exhibits between the workshop and the actual museum.”
We descended through the first-floor ceiling, the pulleys above squeaking and rattling as they lowered us to a stop in the lobby at the front and center of the museum. Doorways and wide corridors branched off around us. The two heavy doors where I'd originally knocked stood at the front of the room, sealed tight.
“Where would you like to go first?” he asked. “Settlers' Row? The Hall of Monsters? The Medical Maladies Exhibit? The Tomb of History?”
“Wherever you've encountered problems,” I said. “You said you had unsettling experiences down here, right?”
“I've been fixing up Settler's Row most recently.”
“Sounds like a good place to start. The other exhibits actually sound kind of awful.”
“Oh, they are,” he said. “I'm sorry about that. I wish it was a museum of happy paintings of frolicking puppies, believe me. I hope you don't think I'm, like, personally creepy or into this stuff. I mean, I liked it when I was ten, but...” He looked suddenly embarrassed.
“It's fine. You inherited it. Any idea why your great-uncle left it to you instead of somebody like your dad?”
“My mom. He was her uncle. But she hated this place, remember? And she thought he was mentally ill for creating it, much less putting it out in public for everyone to see. It embarrassed the family, apparently. She said the town ought to close it down. She couldn't believe all these mansion-dwellers with their expensive estates tolerated it all these years. The museum was here first, though, or at least the tourist-cave version was.”
“Are the caves still open?” I asked.
“Nothing is open now,” he said. “Not for months. But yeah, the cave exhibit is still part of this place. It's at the end of the Tomb of History.” He pointed to what looked like a heavy crypt door, propped open with a big stone skull, which led to the historical exhibit beyond.
“We can hold off on it,” I said quickly.
I followed him through a square archway of heavy beams and rocks, modeled to look like the entrance to a mine. The room beyond was dark, its walls and floor rock.
Ryan clicked a button on the wall, and a light crackled to life. In front of us, a couple of mannequins knelt at a stream bed holding metal pans.
A scratchy recording began to play, hissing and crackling. “Foxboro was founded in the 1820s, during the Carolina Gold Rush, by settlers searching the local caves for wealth. No wealth was found, but the town remained as a trading post for fur trappers and other hardy mountaineers.”
“That's an actual record playing back there,” Ryan said, his tone a little awed. “My uncle's set-up is like nothing I've seen. It's rigged together from all these crazy parts, back behind the walls, lights and record players operated by switches. But that's where I started, you know. Sound is something I understand. I was in a band back in high school, and a while after, but with Paula and the twins, I couldn't tour or anything. Dropped that. The other guys went on for a while. Touring. They even got a big record deal, but it turned out to be more of a one-hit wonder kind of thing. You ever heard 'Karma's a Wrench?' That was the radio title, anyway.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, vaguely recalling the ghosts of radio hits past. “When I was in college. They played it all the time for a while.”
“For a while, yeah. The guys had it big for a couple years. Big festivals around the world, but just for a while.”
“What was the band? Sorry, I'm not good with music.”
“Denial of Self.” He snorted and shook his head. “They never had a second hit, though. Everything falls apart. Still...I bet it was a great couple of years.” He stared at the mannequins, one older and bearded, the other younger, searching for gold they'd never find.
We continued on, around a bend and into an exhibit showing a female mannequin in a log cabin, working at a stove with crudely made pots and a matching kettle.
A small wood-plank table was overturned, and dishes and lumpy-shaped forks and spoons were scattered on the floor.
“Every time.” Ryan shook his head and cleaned up the mess. “The kids say it's not them. And I'm starting to believe it. So I've been in here, rebuilding all of this, and I'll hear things.”
“Like what?”
“Footsteps. Breathing, one time.” He knelt on the raised wooden floor of the cabin-interior exhibit. “I was rebuilding this whole floor—I know it looks like old wood, and it is, but it's not rotten old wood. I did go for authenticity.”
“Looks good,” I said.
“So I'm over here working,” he said, on his hands and knees, doing a convincing mime of hammering an imaginary nail. “And then I hear the footsteps. I look. Nothing. Call out my kids' names. Nothing. No more footsteps, so I'm back to work. Bang bang, hammer hammer.
“That's when I feel something on my neck, soft like a breath, but kind of ice cold. Now, it does get really cold at night, but...this felt wrong. So I turned...and there's nothing there, but the exhibit decides to turn on right then. Do you mind?” He nodded at the large button on the wall.
I pressed it.
The small wood-burning stove lit up, glowing fiery red from tinted bulbs inside. The red glow reflected off the female mannequin's face. Her face seemed alive, with shadows flickering across it, her eyes staring into the depth of the hellish red glare from her stove.
“Pioneer women helped carve our fine town from the wilderness,” said a woman's voice on a scratchy unseen record, “bringing the first signs of culture and civilization to the hamlet of rough trappers and hunters, transforming it into a modern city.”
“I'd say 'city' is a pretty strong word,” Ryan said. “But anyway...you can see how it makes you jump. The footsteps, the cold breath, then the mannequin coming to life for no reason.”
“I can. But the mannequin's pretty scary on her own, isn't it? I mean, she's sort of staring into the depths of the infernal abyss over there, whenever the oven light's on.”
“So you think I'm just making it up?”
“It's just procedure for me to consider all the options. Your mind can play tricks on you.”
“This place is pretty much designed to do that, too,” Ryan said.
We rounded another bend, looping back toward the central lobby of the museum. The final exhibit down this way sat in gloomy shadows, until I found the wall button and pressed it.
A pale light flared above, through a silver circular filter, doing a fair imitation of moonlight.
On the scratchy record, wolves howled.
A baby cried.
“In 1838, the discovery of gold in the Appalachians led to the removal of thousands of Cherokee Indians, in the event remembered as the Trail of Tears.”
In front of us, a couple of mannequins draped in blankets sat over the ashes of a burned-out fire. A woman held a plastic baby in her arms. The charred remnants of a wooden house stood behind them, recalling their lost home. Though the mannequins wore factory-standard blank looks as they stared into the ashes, their posture and circumstances made it easy to see their faces as shocked, their eyes blank after witnessing too much horror.
“Did you experience anything in this area?” I asked.
“No, though I guess it seems like it would be haunted, right? I spent half a day restoring this Trail of Tears exhibit and nothing unusual happened. I guess it's haunting enough on its own.”
I nodded. The pale fake moonbeam clicked off, leaving us in darkness.