Don’t read this. I’m telling you right now, all of you. Your finger’s on the mouse or scroll pad. You can turn away. Click the back button. Don’t enter the house. I wish I hadn’t.

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You’re still here?

I guess I haven’t earned enough clout yet. Fine. I’ll take a deep breath and count to ten.

And. Go. 

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Six.

Seven.

Eight.

Nine.

Ten.

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Okay. Your last chance has been revoked. Welcome to the horror show they call Johnny’s Skate Rink. 

How I found out about Johnny’s, the preferred abbreviation in the small town of Clinksdale, Indiana, a town I was passing through, is neither interesting nor informative, but I’m in the business of providing facts for my readers, so facts I shall provide. I went on a date two weeks ago with a man I met at the grocery store. He met my bare minimum requirements – appeared showered, had all of his teeth (that I could tell; I was wrong), no track marks – and complimented my Chucky T-Shirt. I came for chicken wild rice ingredients, I left with a phone number and dinner plans at Olive Garden.

The following evening, over Caesar salads, he told me his real name was Spencer, even though his friends called him Nick, on account of the time he stole a case of baseball cards from a collectibles store when he was an adolescent. He used the word adolescent, not kid, or dumbass. He also licked the parmesan cheese off each breadstock before sticking half into his mouth until his eyes bulged cartoonishly. He bit the stick in half, swallowed the piece that must’ve curled around his mouth, and continued his story.

I told you. None of this matters to the point of the haunted skating rink. It’s my website, however, and writing is therapy, and writing about Spencer aka Nick, is necessary for me. As my mother asked all too recently, “You’re a lovely woman. Why are you still hanging out with people like him?”

And that was about a guy three rungs below Spencer Nick. 

I took a sip off my pop and asked him what he did with the stolen baseball cards. 

“I sold those fuckers, that’s what I did!” His laugh revealed two missing teeth midway down the top right of his mouth, not incisors, the ones next to them. I’d have to look them up but my fingers are moving too fast. The gumline where the teeth were missing was red and black, and now caked with bits of parmesan and bread. 

“But not the case by itself. No. It ain’t, what’s the word? It ain’t marketable as a whole. You sell a case like that, you get maybe $300. You sell the Griffey Jr. rookie, the Michael Jordan Sox card. You make $600 in a pop.”

I didn’t like how loud he talked. A kid with curly hair in the booth across from us kept looking over after each explosive syllable. His parents politely redirected his gaze to his plate of macaroni. I didn’t blame him. I would’ve looked to. Only now I didn’t want to look and had no choice. Why had I said yes to Spencer aka Nick in the rice aisle?

You ever get so bored you start picking fights with yourself? 

“Just like that,” I said, egging him on. 

“Just like that, baby!” His laugh sounded like it had chunks of bread in his throat. I wouldn’t know. I had no intentions of going near his mouth. “Then I bought an eighth, got high, and spaced for the weekend.” He popped a crouton in his mouth and savored it. “Mother. Fucker,” he moaned. 

The kid blinked at the cussing. I did, too. 

“Say, what’re you doing after this? You’re free, right?” He said it like I didn’t have a choice.

I answered like I didn’t have one. “Nothing in particular.” I hesitated. Why ask? Because lethargy is real. “Why?”

“I want to show you something.” 

For what he lacked in teeth, he also lacked in taste. I hadn’t roller skated since I went out with my brother and his friends, the older sister trying to be as cool as him. I was fifteen, the fall before he died. He and his friends skirted around in roller blades. I used mom’s old roller skates, the one with the Grateful Dead bear pins on the side. The boys took hairpin turns around our neighborhood, skidding to stop on a dime at stop signs to let the puttering cars pass. It was a safe neighborhood. Dad wasn’t lying in his quotes to The Griffin Daily Times. 

I hadn’t grown into my body yet. I was chubby and disproportionate back then, unathletic as a fence post. I’m not much better today. I sprouted six inches in college, and  at least I can tie my shoes without falling over. I was the type of teenage girl who chaperoned her brother and his friends on their roller blades and ended up on my ass. Scraped knees, then my right elbow, the one with the white scar stark as the day the scab fell off. 

So yeah, Spencer Nick leading the way in his tombstone gray Corolla out of town, past where the cow pastures began, to the ramshackle parking lot of Johnny’s Skate Rink, wasn’t my idea of a good time.

And yet. I’m writing about it, aren’t I?

He stepped out of his car with half a cigarette dangling from his lip, his face beaming under the neon block letters of Johnny’s sign. The building looked like a warehouse for forklifts. And yet, inside, faintly, I heard a steady thumping.

“Gotta love that bass, baby,” he yowled. “Friend of mine is the dee jay here. Can get us backstage. Come on.”

He led the way. Out of intrigue, I followed. What was backstage at a skating rink I’d never heard of that smelled like popcorn soaked in formaldehyde when we entered through a door with frosted glass windows?

I expected a security guard and was greeted by worn green carpet and a rush of air conditioning. It was late summer, heat fading but humid. The blasts of A/C tasted like wax. The skating rink was an oval in the center of the building, busy with a boisterous group of teenagers, two families with tyke-like children, an older couple skating side by side, and a man in a beanie with headphones skating backwards. The sides of the rink came up to my hip, or a kid’s head, and were decorated with advertisements from local companies. Spencer Nick headed to the bar. I checked out the flooring, hardwood pocked and scarred from skidding roller skates. The disco balls dangling over the rink gave the hardwood a speckled quality. 

“Brewski,” Spencer shouted over the music, pulling a bottle from a metal bucket.

I could be shy with people, ironically, given my interests in journalism. I was never shy with alcohol. I was a goddamn social butterfly when it came to spirits. 

I twisted the cap off and tossed it into his open hand. He loaded it between his thumb and middle finger and flicked his thumb like starting a lighter. The bottle cap shot out of his hand and into the Gaming Corner. I waited for him to brag but he didn’t. 

“Boring show tonight. Bunch of kids and families. No one’s old enough to booze, so no fights. You should see it when the Kornheiser crew shows up. Bunch of fucking hillbillies. They don’t bother picking fights with other people. They end up slobbering each other aside the head. Skating around like banshees, yipping about this and that, someone stole someone’s pig feed. Someone’s cousin cheated on him with his step-brother.” He pulled half his beer, belched, and then finished the rest. “Fucking Kornheisers. Wonder what they’re up to tonight?”

The question wasn’t asked rhetorically enough so I matched his half beer, belch, finished my beer, handed him the empty, and held my hand out for another. After he’d taken my cap and fired it towards the claw game, I said, “Didn’t you have something to show me?”

He did, but first I had to meet Zane, the DJ. Zane was a bigger man, balding, with a silver bar pierced through his bottom lip. He wore a white jumpsuit adorned with patches from gas stations: Sunoco, BP, Circle K, Speedway. 

They did a handshake with claps and snaps. I drank my beer faster, wondering if anything was ever worth doing. The bass beats quieted next to the DJ booth. I could finally think clearly, and I didn’t like where it was taking me. 

“Zane?” I asked with a clarifying raise of the voice.

“Zane,” he nodded, one earmuff headphone to his ear, his fingers flat on the turntable, spinning one song into the next. “You have my shit?”

He was asking Spencer, who did not have Zane’s shit from the frown on his face. “On back order. Delay in shipping. Driver dropped it off at the wrong house.”

Zane’s hand flew from the turntable to Spencer’s throat. Spencer stumbled, then stood on his toes to try to lessen the pressure. He wheezed, then coughed. One thing I have going for me in the ghost game: violence, action, the bad things that happen to people, alive or dead? Doesn’t bother me a lick. Not since my brother. Before that, the horror movies we watched with my mom were exhilarating, but because they were terrifying. I felt alive from the fright. After my brother, also named Johnny – I KNOW, I’m not a fucking idiot. I understand the irony here – died, it’s like eating the spiciest hot sauce to try and feel something. 

“Friday,” Zane said. His fingers turned red from squeezing. Spencer’s throat gurgled. A line of red cracked inside the white of one eye. He nodded.

I drank and grinned.

Zane released him. Spencer dusted his shirt off and cleared his throat. “Anyway, as I was saying, any chance you can let us backstage? I want to show her that crazy shit you showed me.” 

Zane’s fingers stuttered on the turntable. The beat skipped. The roller skaters had no idea. They were laughing and screaming and having the type of fun I figured stopped being possible after a certain age. And the two old timers were leading the way.

“I don’t know, man. It’s gnarly. I stopped going back there unless I have to flip a fuse.”

Spencer slapped a twenty on the DJ booth. Zane considered it, flicked an auto switch on the turntable, and snatched the bill. “Why not? I’m not the one dying.”

I haven’t visited any haunted amusement parks yet. This is only my second post. But the concept of paying to be scared dates back to 1915, with the Orton and Spooner Ghost House. If you want to check it out, head to Liphook, England, and look for the steam-powered haunted house. One of the first places designed specifically to terrify. If you’re looking for the first horror film, you’ll rewind a few years before that, to 1896, for George Mellies’ 3-minute, “Le Manoir du Diable.” Some call it “The Haunted Castle,” some call it “The House of the Devil.” You’re wondering about the first horror story, right? That slope is more slippery, be it a focus on “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” (1800 BCE) or Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto” (1765), neither of which I’ve read, but I have heard snippets of the Bible throughout my four decades, and scholars widely believed that the Bible authors were aware of Gilgamesh. 

Point being, I was no stranger to the concept of paying to be scared, all mediums considered. Yet, I was shocked Spencer Nick coughed up a twenty when he couldn’t afford dinner at Olive Garden. He hadn’t used the words haunting or ghost yet, but the vibe had shifted. I saw it in Zane’s eyes.

Zane took us behind a black curtain and to a locked door. He unlocked it, twisted the nob, and stopped. “Don’t listen to him,” he told me. “And trust your gut.”

“Shut up,” Spencer said. He barged through the door.

I chewed a canine before following him. I could’ve been cooking chicken wild rice. “Thanks,” I told Zane, who grunted and closed the door behind us. 

The pitch black hit hard. The bass thumped on the other side of the door. Spencer grumbled before finding the light switch. When I tell you I began to sweat instantly, please know for now and for future reports, that I do not exaggerate. Some of you will read this and take it as make believe. That’s okay. I know what I see. And I tell it. 

And I’m telling you the AC didn’t work in this room behind the rink. Dust motes floated in the air like tenants milling outside a burning apartment building.

Spencer took a stained gray rag from a wooden barrel and wiped his face. He offered it to me. I waved him away and smeared the sweat from my forehead into my blouse top. Yes, I wore a blouse to my date. Yes, it had flowers on it. Yes, it contradicted Spencer’s t-shirt with a collegiate logo that read “Sex Education Instructor.”

“So this is what you wanted to show me? A storage room?”

The room was shallow, but wide. The back wall was made of unfinished cinder blocks. The grout hadn’t been smoothed, so clumps of cement stuck to the exposed blocks like warts. The sides of the room ran the length of the building, and felt even farther. The lighting faded ten feet to either side.

“It wasn’t always like this.”

He didn’t bother with the milk crates spilling over with loose papers and the set of banquettes – what you call a booth where only one side is a booth – and chairs. A stack of cracked boards the same color as the rink leaned against the far wall. He counted his steps to that, considered left, then right, and turned on his heel to the left. “This way.”

I traced his steps, weaving through the abandoned clutter, wondering whose story it belonged in. Maybe mine, depending on how things played out. Spencer hummed to the beat from what I was calling rink-side. It felt like we were on another plane. The left turn had switched us over. Those of you who’ve experienced it know what I’m talking about. The tilt of the world shifts. The temperature either drops or elevates, it never stays the same. I ranked them drop, increase, or status quo, at least in that moment. Sweat beads broke into rivulets across my forehead. I took a mental note that the temperature change in the plane shift could be an indicator of what type of spirit haunted the area. 

I secured a finger hold on the handle of the knife attached to my hip. Why a blouse? To better conceal my self-defense tools. And, yeah, I like looking cute on occasion. “So who died back here?” 

Spencer staggered like he’d bumped into a wall. The light was fading. Darkness began in the next ten feet, without a light switch in sight. “I was getting to that,” he said unconvincingly.

Ghosts in the dark didn’t scare me. I would not, however, walk into the darkness with Spencer Nick, the baseball card thief. He took a flashlight from his back pocket and clicked it on. It wasn’t a heavy duty one you see security guards use, but its beam carved a white path through the thinning junk. I wiped my face and stepped around a set of bowling pins arranged like at the end of the lane. I’d read Johnny’s used to have a small, two-lane alley back here. Until.

“Here we are,” Spencer said. He panted like we’d hiked a few miles. The plane switch hits some harder than others.

The flashlight showed two tri-colored horseshoe booths, sharing a side like siamese twins, a bowling ball return, and two lanes. Old balls rested on the return, blue and orange and a pink ran through with fissures of purple. I held my hand over the vent, hoping for a blast of cold air. None came. A memory did, of Johnny throwing a turkey one Black Friday at Park Lanes, and strutting around the walk up area with his arms at his sides and his neck jutting out and gyrating, his throat making clucking noises so loud they stayed with me all this time.

“Let me guess,” I said, spinning the pink ball until the finger slots appeared. “Guy takes his girlfriend back here for a surprise date. He thinks the machines are kept up. They aren’t. He throws his first time. The ball doesn’t come back. He reaches inside the return the way they say don’t reach inside garbage disposals. The return eats his hand. He comes up with a stump. The girl screams bloody murder, only we’re back here. No one can hear her. We can’t even hear Zane’s jams anymore. Right? He bleeds out on the lane floor. Is that what those stains are from?”

Spencer checked where my gaze aimed. I expected fright from him. He had the tell-tale signs. Arrogant, but out of defense. Confident, but only with what he could control. Clueless, at least with what he knew about me. 

His laugh surprised me. It was genuine. Not so much demeaning as pleased. He leaned in and kissed me on the cheek before I could dodge. His lips left a smell of tabasco-flavored tobacco. “I knew I liked you for a reason. You’re clever. And you’re close, but no cigar. Ball returns can’t eat hands, to my knowledge. The pinsetter, however.”

He let the scenario linger, pointing his flashlight down the right lane. The one with dark stains smeared its entire length. “Guy brings his girl to the bowling alley behind the skating rink. Throws the ball down. Gets a strike. He’s pumped. They’re hugging and kissing. They’ve had some drinks, not unlike us. The ball doesn’t come back. So he throws another ball. Nothing. He figures it’s stuck, but why not try one more? Sure. Nothing happens. That leaves one ball. He tells the girl to wait. He’s read about these machines. His uncle used to work in an alley, too. He stumbles down the lane, falling twice on the slick surface. He’d considered making love to her on the lane, but it’s too slippery, even after the shutdown. He makes it to the pinsetter. It’s stuck alright.” 

His words stuck in his throat, like the ball in the tall tale he so confidently spun for me. The flashlight darted to a spot behind my back. He silently waived his hand, frantic like a panicked mime. “Don’t move!” he whispered through clenched teeth. I hadn’t known what to expect in the old two-lane bowling alley behind Johnny’s Skate Rink. But I had my hunches.

The temperature dropped. The heat had been a misnomer, the barrier between the plane shift.

“It’s okay,” I reassured him, embracing the cold air on my wet face.

The flashlight swung across me to his right, to the ceiling, and down the blood-stained bowling lane. Spencer’s back was turned to me. It heaved with fright. “This never happens. It’s a joke. An excuse to get us riled up. You know how people in movie theaters get scared and hug each other?”

The beam of his flashlight barely reached the pinsetter mechanism that had crushed an old man’s chest thirty years ago. The light wavered under his shaking arm. 

“I do, Spencer. But there are other ways to meet a nice woman. Turn around.”

I felt something move amongst us. An icy breeze in the cold air that comforted me. Spencer felt it too, jumping on the edge of the lane. His feet came down on the slick surface and slipped. He crashed face-first, croaking like a frog. The flashlight skittered to me. 

“I got it! Get up! I’ll help us out of here.” 

I shined the light at Spencer, and the real ghost appeared behind his shoulder.

It wasn’t a guy who had taken his girl for hanky panky. It was an old man, pale as a bedsheet and gaunt as an undertaker. Being dead hadn’t changed his appearance, based on the newspaper clippings I’d collected. 

“It’s gone,” I said. “Retreated into the lane. Go ahead. Check.” 

I thought I would have to coerce him into confronting the ghost. His neck was frozen stiff. It budged slightly left to right in a nod of no fucking way. I rolled my eyes. 

“You came all this way to show me your supposed haunted bowling alley, and now you won’t even look at it? What would Zane say?”

The magic word. 

“He’d say pay me my money, unfortunately,” Spencer said, relaxing his body. “And that I’d be better off–” He turned as he spoke, and his screams are why I do this. High and guttural, from the core of his fear center. Every childhood nightmare packaged into one atom bomb of a frightening. Delivered by yours truly, to help her feel something. I paid for dinner, so in a way you can say I paid my entrance fee to the haunted house.

The old man’s sad face didn’t react to Spencer’s shrieks. He acknowledged me with interest and then silted into the shadows. 

Spencer screamed once more, head tilted back. “He’s gone,” I said firmly to keep a laugh in. “I promise.” 

“Gone my fucking ass. He’s gonna shove my head down that ball return. Stick a bowling pin up my ass.”

There was the Spencer I had just gotten to know. I shined the flashlight through the junk path back to the skating rink. “Can I show you something?”

Back in the regular AC, on the human plane, amongst the music and cheerful shouting, I showed Spencer Nick my research on the Johnny’s Skate Rink ghost, Mr. Trumble. 

“I read about the lover getting his head crushed by the pinsetter, too,” I told Spencer. We had another bucket of beers, but this time I was relaxed. Spencer seemed different. Less stressed. Zane shot a wink our way when he flipped over to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”. 

“That’s been the story forever,” Spencer said.

I flipped my notebook open to several newspaper clippings. “Check your sources next time. And dig deeper.” I could’ve dug him, talked about his inability to see beyond surface level. There were some emotional intelligence jokes lingering. I put them away, trying to remember I wasn’t hot shit either. I’d just willingly tricked a sleazeball into witnessing a real-life ghost to get my kicks.

Spencer read from one article. “Barney Trumble, 71, died late Saturday night when the pinsetter machine malfunctioned and collapsed on his chest. Trumble served as the maintenance man at the skate rink and bowling alley, and had worked in the building for forty years. He held numerous jobs, and was described as a jack-of-all-trades by owner, Gareth Macintosh. 

“‘Barney retired three years ago,’ said Macintosh. ‘His wife passed one year into retirement. He asked to come back. I couldn’t say no. Our customers love him. He’s always cracking jokes and making balloon animals. And he’s always been handy. It’s a shame.’”

“A shame!” Spencer said, slapping the article. He drank his beer. “Where’s Gareth Macintosh? I’ll show him a shame.” 

He was drunk on beer and released fear. I loved to see it.

“He sold the skate rink when people began to feel something off. First it was Gareth. Then it was the staff working the bowling alley. Then it was families throwing bowling balls, asking if they could turn the heat up. Finally, he shut the bowling alley down and used the room for storage. One day Mr. Macintosh goes to remove the bowling balls and donate them to Goodwill. The lane where Mr. Trumble died? Where he escaped from the pinsetter, and slipped his way for help, leaving blood smears? They tried cleaning the blood, but there was no chance. It was there for good. So they replaced the lane, resealed and slicked it. And that day Mr. Macintosh picked up the pink ball with purple fissures and promptly dropped it when he saw the blood stains had returned. He never went back there. He sold the rink the next week, citing exhaustion and a change of pace.” 

Zane’s “Thriller” bled into “The Freaks Come Out at Night.” I bobbed my head, waiting for Spencer. 

“How do you know this?” he finally said, eyes scrunched in confusion. That’s not in those articles.”

None of this was rocket science, although it felt like revealing a magic trick at times. “I visited Mr. Macintosh at the nursing home last month. He’s Mr. Trumble’s age, but worse for wear. He’s heard the rumors. About lovers dying at the alley. About people bringing dates back there for a quick thrill. An old man who just wanted to sleep, was my impression, but couldn’t because he knew Mr. Trumble would never rest.” 

We drank our beers and watched happy people skate. I couldn’t decide on what side of happiness I fell, and how much it fluctuated in any given moment. 

“How long have you known?” he asked me. “About me? Were you really going to cook chicken wild rice?”

I finished my beer and clunked it into the ice in the bucket. I burped, which made him smile. “A little bit. And yes, that’s still the plan.”

“Hmm.”

“Stop taking women to haunted bowling alleys for a first date. They don’t want that.” I didn’t believe my lie.

When Spencer used the bathroom before we left, I gave Zane an envelope with enough cash to cover my entrance and Spencer’s debt. It wasn’t for drugs, but for a flat screen he’d bought to show women scary movies.