House of Horrors

For other uses of House, see House (disambiguation).

House of Horrors – One of the attractions at the Coney Island Amusement Center, it featured screams, maniacal laughter, ghouls with claws dripping blood, bursting out of smoky mirrors. In Indulgence in Death, Ava Crampton was murdered in the House of Horrors, Subsection B, Torture Chamber. “A holo-image of a monster wielding a bloodied ax leaped forward and [Ava] felt the air from the strike shiver by her shoulder. He (a disguised Winston Dudley IV) yanked her through a door that clanged shut behind them. On a yelp of surprise and disgust, she swiped at cobwebs. Caught up, she spun to try to escape them, and came face-to-face with a severed head on a spike. The light fluttered, a dozen guttering candles with the red glow of a fire where a hooded man, stripped to the waist, heated an iron spike. The air stank - they’d made it just a little too real, so it reeked of sweat and piss and what [Ava] thought was blood. The scream and prayers of the tortured and the damned crowded the room where stones dripped and the eyes of rats glowed in the corners. A woman begged for mercy as her body stretched horribly on the rack. A man shrieked at the lash of a barbed whip.”

Ava “let her date back her into a shadowy corner behind a figure moaning as it turned on a spit,” playing along that she was frightened, and then he stabbed her with a bayonet through her heart.

The lighting in that amusement was deliberately low, and there were sections with fog or other effects. They used droids, anitrons, and holos rather than live performers. It was motion-activated, programmed to follow the customer’s movements. There was a feature that funneled customers in their groups, or individually if they came in alone, into different areas to enhance and personalize the experience. There were sections inaccessible to minors under fifteen to conform with codes. Roarke, who has been through it several times during the design and construction stages, called it “appropriately gruesome and terrifying.” Eve commented that it wouldn’t scare her because she had “the gruesome and the terrifying greet [her] at the door every freaking day,” referring, of course, to Summerset.

It was a huge, spooky-looking house with lights flickering in the windows where the occasional ghoul, ghost, or ax murderer would pop out to snarl or howl. The door knocker was in the form of a bat with shivering, papery wings and glowing red eyes. Inside, cobwebs draped the shadowy foyer like shawls over a body back. Light, such as it was, came from the flickering glow of ornate candelabras and a swaying chandelier where a very lifelike rat perched. Shadows seemed to swoop and dive from the ceiling. Up a long curve of steps a door groaned like a man in pain, then slammed.

Eve decided it was creepier with the lights on, in the bright and the still. Anitrons stood frozen on the floor, in the air, on the stairs. In a mirror a face held in mid-scream while a severed hand holding a two-bladed ax hung suspended.

Gumm told Eve there was no danger, but they have had some customers pass out. A loss of consciousness triggered an alarm in Medical, but there was a glitch, a kind of blip, when Ava was killed, since a loss of heartbeat should have triggered an alarm.

Roarke told Eve the torture methods in play were historically accurate. The instruments were carefully crafted replicas of those used. Eve was astonished that people pay for the experience of being frightened.

The narrow corridor by which Dudley exited was illuminated with torches on the walls. It emptied into a wide cavern with what appeared to be a deep pool of water. On it sat a boat where men in dingy pirate garb were frozen in mid-sword fight. A couple of decaying corpses lay piled under jutting rocks. The topmost had a crow on its belly, beak buried in torn flesh.

“When the ride is running there’s head-severing, disemboweling, a bit of keel hauling, and the skeletal spirits of the damned. It’s fairly impressive,” according to Roarke. There was a sign at that exit reading: “IF THE PIRATE’S BLADE YOU FEAR, TAKE THIS CHANCE TO ESCAPE FROM HERE.”

Eve retraced Winston’s route, winding through a vampire’s lair, a graveyard with zombies dragging themselves out of the ground.

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