Behold the second chamber, its colors ablaze: red Sharpie, white correction fluid, and oily orange paint meant for indicating where it’s not safe for construction crews to dig. Monstrous features emerge from great blobs of Liquid Paper—gaping maws, weeping boils, clusters of eyes. There are seven of them in all—Seth and his attention to detail—and each bears its number underneath it, marked with a pound sign: #2 has no eyes; #5 boasts fingernails that look like scythes, some fluid dripping from the index and middle digits of its right claw. The numbers scatter: #1 and #3 are on the right wall, staring across the distance of the booth at #2, #4, #5, and #6, whose gored scalp is infested with small worms. Surveying them all is #7, who takes up the entire back wall of the booth, his body the shape of a great stone fortification, a single eye peering out from a small aperture near the top and crude flames shooting out from either side of his face. Beneath him, the only words in this chamber, terse flowing cursive in heady contrast to its disordered, loquacious neighbor: BEAST KINGDOM.
Behold the third chamber, form without knowable function, shape without evident purpose, symmetrical waves flowing down each wall from ceiling to floor, dazzling to the eye, not painted but carved, like ancient symbols from cave walls in the deserts of the West or on the surfaces of planets as yet unconquered; yet bearing, if the onlooking eye survives the maze, along the ascending lines of several peaking points, a name, in pencil, David Hell-son, distributed six times throughout this labyrinth of jagged and increasingly frayed waves, and a final time in careful capital letters upon the plastic protector of the television monitor. Behold the hypnotic sway of David Hell-son’s chamber on the eye, how he beckons from within, a deceitful oasis from the arcade’s horrors; yet behold the pornographic tape still playing in the booth, casting its light onto the design around it and emitting its distorted squall into the blue air, a garden of bleached perversion handpicked by Derrick for its purpose before leaving for aye. “The worst tape in the store,” he’d said, assigning it to the booth with a grimace.
Behold the fourth chamber, the witch booth, upon which the luxury of spray paint has been bestowed! Alex is no apprentice, but has known one or two in his travels, seen them bestow their hurried work onto the sliding back doors of parked semitrailers in rest stop lots. From them he has borrowed a quavering line, an easy slope to his turns; the witch is bloated and her breasts sag. Over them hang the strands of her long, white hair, crossing each other in loose braids all the way down to her spindly ankles. On the floor of the chamber, stray symbols— stars and planets and letters from imagined alphabets. Her eyes are red X’s within black circles; from her place on the back wall of the booth, she surveys her domain’s original graffiti, lewd offers and phone numbers. Alex with the natural touch. Some things are scarier when you leave them as they are.
Behold, then, her mate, lord of the fifth chamber, namesake of the wizard booth! A new hand announces its presence herein, meticulous and excessive; she means to distinguish herself, to leave her mark in the moons and stars of the wizard’s robes. Behold the terrible demons in the skies around him, mouths agape with sorrow, drifting among white outcroppings of stardust that threaten to bury them but from whose caked, clotted smears they yet emerge, in eternal servitude to their lord, whose beard teems with six-legged insects. See, scrawled in cribbed, hasty felt-tip, the word Satan, inserted here and there amid the tableau, clumsy, awkward, effective. Note the slashes in the cushions, grouped in twos and threes like the marks of a nesting animal that hopes to return to its lair. Behold the work of Lady Angela, fair knight among knights, game for the hunt, there when you need her, tight-lipped when pressed for confession.
Behold the sixth chamber, repository of congealing paint left in supply closet cans, the very face of disorder: paint poured onto the vinyl seat, paint smeared on the screen, pools of spilled paint on the floor, their surfaces muddily reflecting the blackness of the ceiling above, and words, yet more words scratched into it while still wet, seeming now ready to recede into the lakes that gave them voice: HURT, alone on one wall; 7 alone in the screen, a clue, a sign, the tail of the red herring. Behold this obscure and unreadable signal to the coming invaders, curling question marks splashed onto the ceiling, a dozen of them at least, jumbled, mocking, senseless.
Behold, finally, the seventh chamber, the glass house, the room that gives the castle a name by which to be remembered: for someone has succeeded in shattering the screen, and affixing broken shards to the walls of the booth with glue, and nesting more of them in dug-out crevices here and there, so that everywhere one looks, one sees a partial reflection: enough to direct the eye toward the ceiling, where, behold, in marker, a portrait of a man in profile, five-o’clock shadow dotting his jawline, a swarm of flies around his balding head, a jagged line where his neck terminates suggesting rough decapitation; and, indeed, this caption beneath him telling the tale: ANOTHER ENEMEY OF THE HOPELESS ONES. Framing all, on the back wall, written sidewise, in evident haste, unadorned, a farewell to the onlooking eye: