The Haunted Hayride (100th Post Party)

It's a nice, crisp evening out. There are still more leaves on the trees than the ground, but the world has turned a melancholic shade of harvest brown. The horse-drawn wagon full of hay creeps in my direction, with Misty holding the reins. She's been my inner voice of poetry since I was thirteen. And even though we don't talk as much as we used to, I always know she's there for me.

The sunlight has about half an hour left, and it's probably going to get a little chilly, but there's no indication of rain. It's going to be a nice ride.

My unnamed journalist character from Scooby Doo's Unsolved Mystery is snapping pictures while I'm gabbing with the Big Bad Wolf who towers over me by at least two feet. And that's when the Carousel crew shows up, sans Molly. Caris is her usual chatterbox self, scurrying up to the wolf and throwing her arms around him like they've known each other. Brandon and Zel make their way over and greet me politely, perhaps with a bit of apprehension. When you're a fictional character, interacting with your primary writer is always a little awkward.

Marguerite regrettably won't be attending the hayride as I think she's still a little shaken from her experience, but we'll be picking up Walter P. Sullivan along the way, since I feel as though I owe him one. The journalist won't be joining us for the ride, but gets a shot of the five of us in front of the wagon, with Misty in the background. And then we all pile into the hay and we're off.



"So what exactly is this?" the Wolf asks me.

"I don't know, really. It's the hundredth blog. I thought it might be fun to try something off the wall."

"Is it that big a deal?" laughs Brandon.

"Probably not. But, you know? I honestly thought I was going to stop writing it after that whole Food Network thing, but then I got attached to it. And I've certainly been writing a lot more this past year as a result."

"Here, here," Caris raises an imaginary chalice to me. "To the power of fiction."

Brandon shakes his head. "I just can't get past how weird this is."

"Do you have a favorite blog?" asks Caris.

"A favorite? Not really. I'm probably proudest of the Scooby Doo because it was so thorough. But, no. I wouldn't say I have a favorite."

"I like the questionnaires," she tells me. "Those are always entertaining."

"So is that what we're doing to celebrate?" Brandon chimes in again. "Just a series of links to other blogs?"

"Well no. We're still doing a month long Halloween theme, so I thought it might be fun to take a memory stroll through  the nightmares of my childhood."

Zel sighs, rubs her eyes, and mutters, "theme park attractions".



Walter P. Sullivan now sat in the wagon with the rest of us, unspeaking and expressionless. We'd spent a few awkward moments trying to casually acknowledge his existence, but quickly relegated him into the background of our focus.

"So our first sight on the tour is this braying donkey, which you can see off in the distance."

"Why so far away?" Caris asks.

"This was actually not one of my memories, but my mom's. She said when she was a little girl she rode this ride called 'The Old Mill' and this donkey appeared at the very end. It was apparently meant to be a surprise. Left quite an impression on her, because she spent the rest of her life afraid of dark places."

"Like an actual phobia?" says the Wolf.

"Inconsistently, yes, but it clearly affected her in a way that probably rubbed off on me a little. She said it looked like some kind of monster, and she was so petrified that she bit my grandfather's arm."

We pull up into children's attraction with Humpty Dumpty frozen in time with outstretched arms and legs. Just behind him are several other depictions of nursery rhyme characters. Zel moves closer to Caris and stares down at the ground.

"And up here is old school Storyland from City Park in New Orleans. I used to demand being taken there every time we came into town."

"So why is this a nightmare?" the Wolf asks.

"Look at them. They've got an uncanny valley thing going for them. This one afternoon I asked for permission to walk through it alone. By the time I got to Jack and Jill I was out of sight from any living person, and outnumbered by King Cole and Miss Muffet and company. The looks on their faces suddenly seemed to have a sinister subtext, and there was no direction I could turn without making eye contact with one of them."

We pass fairly close to an ostrich made from plaster with a stiff neck that moves up and down.

"This old girl is from Gooney Golf in Baton Rouge. I think she was the seventh hole, maybe? I always had to get my grandmother to retrieve my ball from under her beak."

Brandon stifles a snicker. "So why did you keep going there then?"

I think for a minute. "That's a really good question. I don't know exactly."

"I mean, if you're afraid of something, doesn't it make sense to stay away from it?" he continues.

"You'd think so, but you guys are all fictional characters. Your motivations tend to be a little more simplistic just by virtue of story clarity. In the non-fiction world, people are strangely drawn towards the things that frighten them."

"Do you like being scared?" Caris asks.

"No. I hate it."

We ride on to the indoor portion of the trip, where the next encounters all come from various theme park water rides that I've been on. There's a giant bear from Opryland's Grizzly River Rampage, the one that stood motionless at the entrance to the cave. There's a smaller but equally intimidating bear roaring from inside a smaller cave, from some river ride at Six Flags Over Texas. And of course I have to include the huge animatronic spider from The Spelunker's Cave.

"So this thing," I say, completely shielding my eyes from it, "I had my cousin who was ten years younger than me in the boat, and I'd been talking very casually about the different characters we'd seen on the ride, so she wouldn't be scared of the dark. We went right by this spider, and I didn't make the connection as to what it was. We came back later and rode the ride again, and this time I figured out what the hell I was looking at. I must have called out about nine obscenities right into her ear."

"Do you still go on rides like this?" the Wolf asks.

"Yep."

"And they still scare you?"

"Most of the time I don't even look."

He folds his paws thoughtfully. "So where exactly is the fun in that?"

"Maybe it's not about fun," offers Caris. "Maybe it's about understanding. These things aren't real threats. Nothing is going to step in here and get you. But even if you understand that consciously, your brain has a chemical reaction to it that you experience as fear."

The Wolf turns his massive snout to Caris. "So you think he's trying to overcome his fear?"

"Maybe not quite," she answers. "Those fears can't ever be fully overcome. But at least to the point of comprehension where you can override the flight impulse if the need ever arises."

Brandon asks, "What are you guys most afraid of?"

Caris is ready for the question. "In character, or as a character?"

"Well in character, you're afraid of heights," he says, "But as fictional characters, what is our biggest fear?"

The Wolf points nonchalantly at the immobile Walter P. Sullivan. "Him."

The Carousel Crew looks to Mr. Sullivan and back to the Wolf. "Is it the grey hair?" says Brandon.

"It's the complete vacancy," says the Wolf. "Walter's whole life was contained in one single story. He was born, lived and died all within a space of about a thousand words. Where does a character go when their purpose is fulfilled?"

Walter P. Sullivan offered no reaction to Brandon's appraising of him. "I have to admit you're onto something there. This guy is a blank slate. He's pretty much the equivalent of the grim reaper."

"It's Our Town," says Caris, "And he's Julia Gibbs. Is that what we have to look forward to?"

Six human and two canine eyes suddenly focus on me as if I have the answers. "I really don't know," I say, feeling a little ill-prepared for the direction this hayride has taken.



We must be pushing eleven at night. We've been through the whole Disney-themed section, including Snow White's Witch, Peter Pan's crocodile, and that doubly damned abominable snowman from the Matterhorn. The finale of the tour was the big guy himself; the King Kong head of legend that once graced Astroworld's River of No Return (I swear I almost left the boat the first time that bastard laid his eyes on me).

Walter P. Sullivan is gone, probably forever. Both Caris and Brandon have fallen asleep against the Big Bad Wolf's furry shoulders. He's probably the warmest thing in the wagon at this time.

Misty has been completely quiet up until now, but with accompaniment from no sound other than the horse's rhythmic clomping she chants a lullaby I've not heard before.

"In solitaire are you still there, imaginary friend?

An empty prayer. I'm unaware, imaginary friend.

Though wear and tear and disrepair, the mavens dare to mend,

We rarely share a sitting chair, imaginary friend.

Perhaps 'tis worse immersed in verse the curses left unpenned

Than face the wrath, and aftermath of tokens that offend.

With full reprieve, inapt, I grieve. Believe, not comprehend.

And yet, I tell you, rot in hell. Imaginary friend."

I lean into Misty's ear. "You're a bitter woman. You know that?" She smirks at me.
 

And then comes Zel's voice, with the words I've been expecting all night.
 

"I need to ask you something."

 

I look at this sweet creature. Zelphina, my lost princess of Lotus; a world from the second edition setting Planescape. Lotus no longer exists.

 

I've known Zelphina for almost twenty years now. She was designed to have had everything in her favor, and yet everything else working against her. She's been through more heartbreak than I have. Every insecurity I've felt, Zel has had to work through. She has (in as much as a fictional character can) literally been to Hell and back. Twice. She suffers from my own depression, augmented, with no foreseeable end. Death is a hope she gave up on a long time ago.

 

Because of me.

 

I won't insult her by smiling at her. She deserves honesty. "Whatever you'd like to know."

 

"Do you hate me?"

 

"Hate you?" I say, not having been ready for that. "Of course not. Why would you think that?"

 

"You took away my home."

"No, Zel. Your home slipped away from both of us."

"Why do I have to feel the loss? This sadness, loneliness, anger? I used to be fun. Maybe a bit shallow, but I used to have my own dreams. Why did I have to become the dumping ground for everything nightmarish in the world?"

 

I sigh, because she has a valid point. "Would you prefer a happy ending?"

 

"I don't really know what I want."

 

"Yes you do. It's the same thing you've always wanted."

 

"I just wanted to...be important."

 

"Zel," I sit down in the hay with her. "Lotus had almost two hundred characters with different personalities and mannerisms. And about half of them were in my head. There was everybody from Sailor Moon characters to the Olympian pantheon. And somewhere in the nebula of it all, there was you. You kept coming to the surface, sweetie. No real story arc, but something demanding the attention."

I brush her hair out of her face. "And you wanted it badly enough."

 

"What?" she barely controls her voice. "What was it I wanted?"

 

"To be a star. A protagonist. You wanted the story to be about you, and you were willing to die for it."

 

Her face turns completely blank. "And you keep putting me through misery for that?"

"Zel, you're not a writer. You're a character. I'm debatably a writer, but before that I'm a real person in a real world with headaches and stoplights and small talk and tons of extraneous details that I'd love to edit out. I don't deal with the threat of monsters. My tension comes from ennui and clutter."

"I'm not trying to be rude," she says, "but that doesn't exactly sound like real problems."

"Point taken. But I went from kindergarten to twelfth grade and then into four years of college hearing the horror stories of what was going to happen to me when I got into 'the real world'. And being told that- all of those nightmares we just rode past, that I could defeat by covering my eyes until the wagon moved on? Those would be nothing compared to terrors 'the real world' was going to throw at me. So I got my B.A., walked to the door, and braced myself to be impaled by the tentacle of a kraken. And I waited. And nothing happened. And I kept waiting. And nothing happened. And the next day nothing happened. And the day after that. And days turned into weeks, and months. And I started working at jobs that didn't matter. And that became years. And my twenties started slipping away and they hadn't mattered."

I shift my position in the wagon so Zel and I are leaning against the same side, staring up at the beautiful Halloween sky.

"See, the biggest nightmare in the real world is irrelevance. In stories, everything has at least some purpose. In the good ones, everything is irreplaceable. Out there, we all run the risk of being superfluous. You're the one who outlived Lotus because I knew you weren't done. You had some real potential in you, like you were just getting started. And I've been writing you for seven nanowrimos. You and Caris are actually in a book on the shelf in the library where I work."

"Can you maybe ease off on the hyperlinks?"

"Sorry sweetie. But you go through pain for three reasons. One, you're my star; you're obligated to be dealing with the struggle or else there's no story. Two, because you can take it. Any issues I find overwhelming, I always know I can work out through you. You're stronger than I am."

A single tear trickles from Zel's eye. "And three?"

"This one is cruel, and uncomfortable for me to admit. But writers who love their characters put them through sheer torture. We abuse them, break them, and tear them apart. All in the name of watching them overcome us, and loving them for it. And you, Zelphina Blade-"

"That's a stupid last name," she grumbles. I chuckle.

"Zel? You're my favorite."

She takes my hand and gives it a gentle squeeze. "Okay. I'm in." We smile together.

Misty glances over her shoulder at Zel and politely offers her the the horse's reins. Zel looks to me for guidance, and I tell her, "Go ahead. Take us home."