As the title says, we give every one of our demons a human to go home with. Think of it as an adoption center without the humans knowing. To be fair, our website clearly states what occurs when you walk through our haunted house. It says the house is haunted, but people don’t appear to care or believe us.
I’m currently on my lunch break and bored out of my mind. It has been a slow day. Mainly because we don’t open today– anyway, I thought it would be a fun idea to tell you all about my workplace. It has good pay and decent hours. Not to mention the uniforms are comfortable and decent looking.
You can find us in NorCal, and we’re open Monday through Friday from 11 AM to 12 AM. My boss first built this house twenty-ish years ago. He has this sick fascination with the other world. I thought he was the creepiest man I had ever met upon meeting him at my first interview. He still is, but the pay keeps me coming back and doing whatever he wants me to do.
As I said, this man is obsessed with the other side and collects haunted artifacts. I have no clue where he gets them, and I don’t ask him either. They are locked in the basement with at least ten locks on the door. Every month some “priest” comes to do a cleansing on the door. There is nothing holy or innocent about that man.
I’m not allowed to go down there but meet the boss at the door and take whatever artifact he has to one of the rooms. It varies every time. The house is three stories with nine rooms, each one having a different theme, but they all tie together. It’s like a story, and each room tells a separate part.
In each artifact is what I call a “pet.” Boss said to stop calling it that because it’s disrespectful. I don’t care.
When I reach the room, I place it down on a table or in a cabinet (it depends on the theme) and leave. A group of people will come through later in the day, and that’s that.
All of the doors are locked and can only be unlocked from the room I’m stationed in. There’s a moment when I have to lock the room and shut off all the lights. That’s when the pet leaves the artifact and selects its human. Sometimes the pet chooses one of the actors in the room, and we aren’t aware of that until the next day when they return yelling about some “that thing tried to drag me across my apartment last night.”
You may be wondering why the inhabitants are so patient and obedient for demons. Well, just like me, they listen to whatever the boss says. He tells it when it can leave the artifact and when it can’t. That’s probably why I’ve never been “chosen” even though I’m the one handling them.
That should give you some idea about the type of man I work for. I mean, even demons obey his every word. Makes a fella wonder.
After it has chosen its human, it will follow them throughout the rest of the house. I’m not sure how it can leave the house, but I suspect the boss has something to do with that. When they’ve reached the door, the boss is there to greet them. He thanks them for coming to his house and being such kind guests. As a goodbye, he says, “-and I hope nothing follows you out,” followed by me cutting the lights. He’s gone by the time I turn them back on.
I’ve asked the other staff members if they’ve noticed he always says this, but they haven’t. I don’t know if that’s because they aren’t close enough to hear or simply pay no mind to this creepy man when they aren’t the one being addressed.
What happens after they leave the house is not our fault. Whatever happens to the human is not our fault. We are not liable for any accidents or deaths after they have left the house. There is no way of knowing if it’ll harm its human the moment they’re down the road or when they’ve reached their home. Hell, we don’t know if it’ll do any harm.
But more times than not, it does.
There is a contract people sign upon purchasing tickets online. If you do not read it carefully, then that is on you. We cannot be charged for anything once your name is signed. As a matter of fact, we cannot be charged for any harm that occurs while you’re in the house either. That doesn’t mean we haven’t been visited by some stranger trying to serve the boss papers.
We win every court case because people are nonbelievers. I guess that’s a good thing.
We’ve been seeing this woman near the front gate at random times throughout the day. The boss recognized her as a guest who had visited nearly a month ago. And accompanying her is a “figure darker than the pits of Hell,” as the boss puts it. I don’t see that. All I see is a strange woman staring at the house.
She doesn’t come up the driveway, nor does she bother us. The boss says to steer clear of her, so I do.
Some of the guests have even assumed she’s one of our actors. I thought that was kind of funny, but the boss didn’t. He had gone out to talk to her earlier today, but she didn’t react well to that. She started screaming at him.
By that, I mean just straight screaming in his face. Said nothing but screamed this horrendous, high-pitch scream. I was standing at the front door watching when the screeching started. It startled me enough to move toward them. Although the man does scare me, I couldn’t let him get hurt either.
The boss seemed shaken by this sudden reaction and backed away from the woman. If a man like him was unnerved by her, I had every reason to be afraid of her. He met me halfway and told me to call the cops to get her escorted off the property. She was gone by the time they arrived but agreed to stay for a little bit just in case she returned. She didn’t.
There isn’t much police can do here. You can’t exactly have them parked out front just because some woman screamed in your face. They did tell us to call them the second we saw her again.
Anyway, that’s all the time I have right now. In ten minutes, I have to meet the boss and take a new artifact to the baby’s room. It’s a lamp of all things. Honestly, that is one of the only rooms that scares me. According to the tag it had when it first arrived, something called Belhale or Begluigh was attached to it. It was ranked a level two, so I hardly think it matters if I get its name correct.