Our bounce house, somehow, became a haunted place.
Has anyone else experienced this?
I can’t explain it, but I know I felt it.
Let me describe what happened, if I can.
It was one of those typical southern-Arizona days. All hard white sunlight. Dry heat. I was making an appearance at my niece’s fifth birthday party. My sister–older, nearly a decade of age-difference between us–had thrown the gathering in the front yard of their home. She had rented a bounce house, too. Because with children that age, honestly, what more do you really need? It keeps the kiddies occupied; it tires them out; and it’s cheaper and more fun than some goofy magician.
The bounce house was huge, too. A pricy extravagance for my sister and her husband. But it’s your kid’s birthday. You gonna skimp? You gonna pinch pennies? Of course not! At that age, you’re looking to seed happy memories into their eager little brains.
By the time I arrived, the kids were already leaping around inside the structure, and my sister, my brother-in-law, they had lost themselves in raucous parent chatter. My brother-in-law, you see, he’d put out a cooler of “Mommy and Daddy Drinks”–cans of lager and hard seltzer–and the grown-ups were enjoying themselves. After a time, my sister–a little blitzed, I think–needed to run inside to pee, so she slapped my shoulder and pointed me into the bounce house, told me to keep an eye on the birthday girl and her cronies.
I hadn’t been inside a bounce house in like eight or ten years years. Total throwback for me. It was one of those great, big inflatable ones. P.V.C. vinyl walls in red, blue and yellow-colored panels. Crude, oversized stitches seaming the panels together.
As I climbed in, the kids were bounding and screeching, thumping against each other. But as I hovered back, observing, I noticed they were coalescing into some organized activity.
As it turned out, they were initiating a round of Mummy, Mummy, Come Alive.
You heard of this game? Maybe you played it yourself as a kid? It’s designed for trampolines, I think, but you often see children playing it inside bounce houses too.
Works like this: Basically one kid who’s been designated “It” lays down in the middle of the bounce house floor, eyes closed. The other kids circle around them, chanting the rhyme: “Mummy, mummy, come alive/When you hear me count to five.” Then counting in rhythm to their bouncing steps, they go, “One, two, three, four, five.” As promised, the “Mummy” then rises, eyes still closed, and chases the other kids, groping and fumbling for them till she tags one. The child who got tagged takes over as the Mummy, and the game starts again. It’s like Marco Polo, except in a bounce house.
For this first round of play, a wispy little girl laid down at center, crossed her arms over her chest, closed her eyes. An older boy–a little chunker, maybe seven or eight–had deputized himself as leader, and he shouted for the others to begin.
They bounced, chanting in tandem, their voices reverbing about the structure’s interior. “Mummy, mummy, come alive…” Chorusing altogether, they fell into that weird incantatory rhythm of small children. “By the time I count to five…” My niece, all her pals, they bounced in unison, circling around the laid-down girl, counting all sing-songy as they moved. “One, two, three, four, five…”
But then something went wrong.
In that way of small kids, they fumbled the game. See, you’re supposed to stop counting at “five”, but several kids had so much momentum, so much hyped-up energy, that they kept counting. And the others followed suit.
“Six, seven…”
The humid air in the bounce house seemed to shift somehow.
The atmosphere seemed to churn.
The kids, catching their mistake, bumbled to a halt. They chided each other. The game unraveled. Too late, though. They had counted to seven, instead of five, and some change had occurred. But the kids, they were too oblivious to notice.
I heard my sister’s voice, as if from the far end of a tunnel, shouting outside. “Cake time!”
The cluster of children broke apart. Screaming, surging, they fumbled in a horde through the netted entry and disappeared into the daylight, leaving me alone inside the bounce house. I glanced about, trying to grasp what had just occurred. Trying to identify the uncanny pressure that had begun pulsing on the air. In springing steps, I roved about the space, and my perspective shifted. A strange sense of dislocation took hold.
I noticed a corridor that I hadn’t seen earlier. Inflatable walls of that same red, blue, yellow patterning. Had it been there all along and I was only now noticing it? No, I don’t think so. It had only just manifested. The layout of the bounce house had somehow altered itself.
This new hallway, it fed into a separate, unseen space.
I went hippity-hopping along the length of it, the muscles of my legs burning from all the exertion of leapfrogging foot-to-foot. At the end of this corridor, the passage bent into a right-hand turn. I followed the turn, only to see that it simply opened to yet another corridor of primary-colored inflatable walls.
Around then, I became aware of the growing heat.
The bounce house was warming like a sauna. All that trapped humidity seemed to prickle at my pores. I could feel sweat dribbling from my hairline, could feel it dampening the pits of my tee shirt.
I advanced down this next corridor.
I turned rightward again.
There before me: another garishly colored corridor. Terminating in another hard turn. Leftward this time.
From just out of view around that next bend, I sensed a presence approaching. Was I hearing it? Seeing it? No, neither. I simply felt it somehow, like when you walk into a dark room and perceive someone there, lying in wait. It was like that.
I could sense some stranger advancing toward the crook in the hall, advancing toward me.
Mummy, mummy, come alive…
The kids, ecstatic, they had bungled the rhyme. They had accidentally altered the spell at the heart of their game. You know how certain people say consciousness can alter physical reality? The children, collectively joining their wills, had done that somehow.
They had released something.
Mummy, mummy…
I stood there, rapt, eyeing that far-ahead turn in the hallway. Above me, along the ceiling of the structure, all that heat had gathered into condensation. It winked and glistened.
A droplet dripped loose and tapped into my hair.
Another drop landed on my cheek–warm, runny–and slid toward my chin.
Mummy, mummy…
Moisture drip-dropped. It pecked the floor.
Come alive…
The presence, I could feel it, came creeping nearer that turn in the hallway. Soon now, it would round into view.
My body went fluttery.
A wild sense of terror.
I heard it now. A shuffling sound. Fully audible.
So I bolted.
Fumbling, bounding and lurching, ungainly on that inflatable floor, I fled back to the main chamber of the structure. My legs tangled, and I tumbled into a fall. Bouncing on the floor. Rolling. Rebounding upright again.
Was the stranger pursuing me?
Felt like it, yes, but I never looked back.
I sighted the netted portal, the point of entry/exit, and sprang for it.
I escaped into the pale daylight, the screech of voices.
Out there, it was still just a child’s birthday party.
Has this happened to any of you before?
Help me, please.
Explain it, can you?
Did the children, with their unmolded imaginations, rip apart reality and stitch it back together differently?
Most of all, though, tell me this: What was it that came shuffling toward me in that bounce house?
And what else lurks in there?