The cab driver’s eyes gleamed as he glanced back at the young couple.

“You staying for a while?” he asked.

The man smiled and took his wife’s hand. “No. We’re just tourists.”

The red lights of the airport tarmac gleamed on the cabbie’s teeth as he grinned. “That’s good. That’s good. We’re a tourist town.”

The woman beamed, she was a petite blonde who seemed to be missing a few screws. The cabbie wasn’t prejudiced towards blondes, his own sister was one, but this lady would have fit any of the jokes. She hadn’t spoken except to giggle when her husband complemented her and she seemed content to allow him to take care of her—loading her luggage, talking to the driver, returning the luggage trolley. That was okay though. She was pretty, and that was all the town needed her for.

Her husband was tall and lanky. He might not be the best looking fish in the sea, but he was certainly amongst the richest, judging by his expensive clothing and the size of the diamond on his wife’s finger. They were like a couple from a soap opera and the cab driver had no idea what they were doing in Fallbrook. They were much more interesting than the usual tourists. That was a good thing. A very good thing.

He dropped them at their hotel and tipped his ball cap at the large tip. Then he drove away, watching them in his side mirror and grinning.

“Do you think that there was something…odd about that man?” asked the husband, a Robert Blagger.

Josephine Blagger smiled coyly at him. “Just get my bags. I want to be in our room as soon as possible.”


Josephine sat on one of the luxury waiting couches and nibbled on a complementary cookie while her husband checked them in. The place was cute; she could give it that, though it wasn’t exactly five star. Oh well, she thought, Next time I get to pick the vacation spot.

The hotel was an old antebellum house, all white with large pillars on the front porch and a grand staircase in the foyer. From the ceiling hung a giant crystal chandelier. Josephine was admiring it when her gaze hit upon a face pressed against the window. It was a child, staring at her opened mouthed. She reclined into a more high fashion pose. She was used to being stared at. It happened all the time.

She glanced at the boy out of the corner of her eye to see how he was reacting and sat up quickly, breathing hard. The boy was still there, still staring, but past him, across the street, there stood a man under the street light. He was wearing a running suit and his breath was coming in rapid little white puffs as if he had been running for miles, but he stood as if he had been rooted for years. He stood, and though she could not see his eyes, his head was pointed towards her.

The way they were staring at her wasn’t admiration. It was…something else. For a moment, a cold shiver of fear ballooned across her body, but she squashed it down. Staring was staring, and she liked staring.

Right?

“Josie? Is there something the matter?” asked Robert, puffing slightly under the weight of his wife’s multitude of luggage.

“No…no, dear. Nothing at all,” she said, smiling, but she hurried to the hotel room and when she was there she had her husband draw the shades tightly shut.


The next day, Robert, as per usual, rose before his wife. He made himself a cup of coffee, thoroughly enjoying the absolutely terrible taste as opposed to the much too fancy, much too flavorful ones they served at the hotels his wife preferred. Hotel coffee was not supposed to be good. Not in the world that he was from.

He took a short, but hot, shower—another habit from his penny pinching days—then dressed in jeans and a tee shirt. Expensive jeans and a tee shirt. His wife came from the world where money was a given. It meant status. It meant luxury. It meant that “pinchers” were inferior. Sometimes he hated that world. But he loved his wife and he loved his company, so he dove head first into that world for the both of them.

Robert strode over to the window and exuberantly threw them open, letting the sunlight in.

It was beautiful outside. The street was lined with thick, tall trees and the sunlight was filtered softly through the leaves. The streets were cobbled and the sidewalks were dotted with charming, old-fashioned street lamps. Robert smiled at the beauty. Fallbrook was uncannily like his childhood home. The major difference was that Fallbrook was more geared towards tourists. It took the words “tourist town” to a whole knew level.

He was shocked that Josie had even agreed to come. Her idea of a vacation was a 7 star hotel in Paris. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford that lifestyle; he simply preferred things more humble, more like life and less like a movie.

Though this place almost seemed as fake as his wife’s choices. There was something a little bit odd, something just slightly off about this town that Robert really couldn’t put his finger on. Maybe it was the sense of eerie perfection. Each brick on the gently sloping cobbled road was exactly the same size. Each hand painted sign on each charming little boutique was perfectly straight, the letters the same height and thickness, all with the same stenciled little flowers and fish surrounding the words. The lampposts were all impossibly clean, as was the sidewalk, and measured to exactly the same height and with width and what looked to be perfectly even spacing between them. Maybe this, this incomprehensible discard of inevitable human error was the thing that felt off.

Or maybe it was the people, the creepy cab driver that seemed perfectly amiable and normal, but that left Robert with an indescribable feeling in his gut or the way that Josephine had acted that previous night, as if she had seen something that terrified her, as if she had seen something inexplicable and maybe even monstrous. And then…and then there were the watchers. The people that he had noticed on the cab drive, in the airport, and again in the hotel. The last glimpse that he had of the outside world before his wife bid him close the curtains was a group of school children standing bellow the window, allowing a soccer ball to roll away unnoticed, staring up at him. Behind them stood a jogger, a dog walker and an idling car. All were halted as if frozen, never to move again, mid-activity. All were gazing at his window. Some seemed shocked, one or two seemed frightened, but most seemed creepily happy.

On his way to bed, Robert had felt the unhappy feeling that someone was behind the front door. Someone was peering through the peephole, trying to get a glimpse of the couple, but when paranoia drove Robert to open the door, the only thing he saw was a glimpse of somebody’s shadow turning a corner at his speed.

In the light of the new morning, these nagging suspicions seemed unfounded.

Maybe I am simply uneasy to be away from the company, he thought.

There was nobody outside today and it was possible that he had imagined the fleeting shadow on the wall yesterday.

“Robert?” called his wife from the bed. He turned. She was tiny, totally dwarfed by the queen size bed. He loved her, of course he loved her. He loved her more than he loved himself and clearly he loved her more than his company since he had agreed to take his first vacation in ten years for her.

Everyone he knew thought that he was blind. His mother, who was still the love of his life, god bless her, his coworkers, his employees, his brothers, everybody. But he wasn’t. He knew her flaws, knew them probably better than anyone else in the world, and lord knew that she had a lot of them. But still he loved her. No doubting it. No explaining it. No understanding it. He simply loved her and that was enough for him. And as long as his wife believed that he thought she was perfect, if it was enough for her too.

“Robert? Are they gone?” she asked.

“Who, darling?”

“The people. The staring people.”

Robert’s blood ran cold. So his wife, the most unobservant woman in the world, had noticed as well. His heart flipped once in a spasm of fear, but he hushed it and forced a smile.

“No people out here!” he said cheerfully, motioning for her to look out the window.

“No! Ah! Robert! The light! Oh, where’s my coffee?” she asked as she reached for it on the side table, where he always left her morning coffee, no matter where they were.

She took a dainty sip, the started to gag. “Oh! Robert, what is that horrible excuse for a breakfast beverage?”


The Blogger’s had decided that after a charming breakfast in a charming café on another charming street—Robert was getting a bit sick of the word charming by that point—they would visit the famous Fallbrook Wax Museum. It had been highly recommended by the young, redheaded waitress, the one who had always moved to block out the staring people with her body so that Robert couldn’t see them, but had pink and white checkered aprons etched eternally in his mind.

“Oh, you’ll love it!” she said, laughing nasally. “It was a real good ghost story, too. You’ll just die screaming!”

Robert had gotten the uncomfortable sensation that she had been a little too dazzled by her own joke, but his wife—shocking him to the point that he wasn’t sure that he would ever recover—had insisted.

Now they stood at the doors of the museum, which looked much more like a chocolate factory. Robert was feeling much more comfortable than he had in years in his t-shirt and jeans set with black convers on his feet and no watch (this was something that he took especial delight in).

His wife was in a lovely blue sundress with a purse that he was pretty sure had cost $4,000 from Fendi. But he was not going to complain. Not today.

“Darling?” Josephine asked. “Why are we going to a wax museum on our vacation?”

“Because you suggested it, dear.”

“Did I? That doesn’t sound like me,” she said, furrowing her brow.

Robert looked down at her. “Josie? Are you feeling alright?”

“Oh yes, I feel quite perfect. Plus, I feel the inexplicable urge to see some wax! Would you care to join me?”

Robert looked alarmed. His wife was acting very strange. He had been under the impression that words like ‘inexplicable’ were out of her vocabulary range, but she was already inside and he was compelled to follow.

The inside of the museum was lit by several heavy-duty lights in the towering ceiling. The walls were dirty, smudged white and the statues seemed to be on some sort of out of date conveyor belts, all adding to the feeling of a factory. In the foyer, before one could get up close to the wax figures, there was a large, gold plaque.

Josephine stood in front of it, wringing her hands.

“It’s not true, Robbie, it isn’t, is it? It’s just a story, right? It’s just a stupid story to attract tourists, right?”

Robert went up to the sign and began to read:

Welcome! You are tourists!
We are hungry! Do you know
How wax figures are made?
First, you encase the tourist in wax.
Then, you boil it until the insides melt
And all that is left is the wax exterior.
Then, each of us gets to insert a straw
And drink up the tourist! Yummy! Yummy!
Hurry up, we’re hungry!


Robert took a deep breath, reading it again and again, trying to imagine who could think that this was funny.

“Why are we here?” Josephine asked. “I don’t want to be here.”

Robert put an arm around her trembling form. “It’s alright. We’re going now.”

“No!” Josephine shrieked in a strange voice, shoving off his arm in an altogether uncharacteristic gesture. “I want to see.”

She ran off towards the heart of the factory, not so much as fuming to catch a glimpse of the figures around her.

“Josie?” Robert called as she turned a corner and disappeared. “Josie, I think that you’re sick. I want to get you to the doctor!”

Robert began to run after her. He couldn’t help but observe the wax people that he passed. There was a large, fat man. There was a woman in clothes that looked like they came from several decades ago. There were two little boys hiding behind their mother. There was a teenage girl wearing a University of Miami sweatshirt and holding onto the leashes of three barking dogs. There was a man stooping to pick up a fallen wristwatch. There were hundreds more, but they all seemed so real, so lifelike. Too lifelike.

“Josephine!” Robert yelled.

Finally, he turned the corner where she had disappeared. There she was! Josephine was lying on her back on the floor, her blonde hair scattered around her face, her eyes closed. Robert dropped to his knees beside her and felt her pulse. It was nonexistent.

“Oh my god. Oh my god, no. Come on Josie. Come on.”

Robert started chest compressions and mouth to mouth. There was no reaction. “No,” Robert whispered.

There came a high-pitched laugh from an illuminated corner. “Who are you?” Robert shouted. “Help me! Please, help me!”

The door, one that he had been unaware of passing through, swung closed, leaving him in complete darkness. Robert suddenly felt the distinct impression that he was surrounded, that there were people—things—all around him.

“Her mind was so easily corrupted,” the voice said. It didn’t sound human. The closest way that Robert could think to describe them was that they sounded like many reptilian voices speaking at once, each at a slightly different pitch and at varying volumes. There were hisses, there were snorts, and there were guttural, throaty noises. It was horrifying but intriguing at the same time.

“You’re the towns people, aren’t you?” Robert asked.

“This is what we are without our masks. This is what we looked like when we are hungry. We are very hungry.”

“What did you do to her?”

“Don’t worry. Death does not detract from the flavor. And what a stunning statue you will be. A man, devastated, looking down at his dead lover. Is there any better way to go? You are going to be stunning,” the voices said. “Now, look at your wife. Look at her. There. That’s…perfect.”

Robert fixed his eyes on Josephine and allowed one single tear to trickle down his cheek.

There was a rush of excruciating heat. We should have gone to Paris.


“Oh, honey, look!” Megan cried.

Her girlfriend, Gianna, turned from the girl with the dogs and made her way over to Megan.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Megan whispered.

Gianna nodded. It was true art, gorgeous. A man kneeling tenderly over his dead lover, one tear forever fixed on his cheek.

“Wow.”

The couple stood for a long moment, taking it in. Then Megan gasped, her voice taking on a strange, unnatural quality.

“I want to see what is around the corner.”