Portrait of a Ghoul

Growing up, our church youth group presented a haunted house every year as a fund-raiser. (How wrong is that? Christian kids making profit off a satanic holiday?) We had some pretty cool displays in the house: a surgical table with open wounds and a sadistic doctor; a traffic accident with detached yet moving body parts; and a gorilla in a special cage which was missing one of the bars so the gorilla could escape and chase the visitors.

One year, my brother volunteered to pose as the portrait of a creepy-looking old guy. This feature consisted of a square hole cut into one wall surrounded with a frame with a drape of cloth hanging behind it.  My brother wore a rubber mask and stood very still between the framed wall cut-out and the velvet background. In the dark, he looked like a picture until you were just close enough to wonder... and then he'd either lunge out or move just slightly. (Depending on the group moving through at the time, either act had equally frightening results.)

It was during a lunge when one smart ass teenager got the fright of his life. As my brother came at him through the wall, this young man forked his fingers and poked them through the eyeholes of my brother's mask.

Both my brother and the teen hollered.

My brother reached up to his rubber-masked face and clutched at it, pulled at it, stretched it into new forms of ghoulish horror.

The teen backed away quickly, startled because his fingers crushed against something not at all eyeball-like.  In fact, it was solid and rather *gulp* skull-like in solidness. 
Horrified by the creepy and  (now) contorted face in the frame, the kid stumbled into the opposing wall, then ran down the dark hallway.

My brother, meanwhile, continued to calmly adjust his glasses under the stretchy mask.

We can only hope the gorilla got the teen.

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Happy Halloween!