‘The Monster Simulator’ is billed as the first of a series of unmanned attractions to be installed all along the country’s interstates but I’ve never seen another and it’s been… a decade or two. ‘The Monster Simulator’ itself doesn’t look like it’s seen much maintenance in that time, its parking lot overgrown and its turnstiles spinning freely in their sockets. The building isn’t much to look at- a rusted tin-looking little shack, like the visitor centers you see at the less frequented national parks.
The inside, though…
‘If this author were to take the sum of his experiences on the Wayside and attempt to identify some secret piece of wisdom that had been shared between its founders, his guess would be: “Make it underground.”
So much of the Wayside is underground, reader, and here I am not speaking with double meaning. There seems to be this drive to amongst Wayside entrepreneurs to include some subterranean portion in their plans. Sometimes the fancy strikes right away, as one might see in ‘The Museum of American Darkness.’ Sometimes it strikes late, as with the many hidden passages beneath ‘The Absolutely Mundane House’ outside Springfield, Ohio.
Often it is done in secret and then presented as a little surprise for the unsuspecting visitor. This is the case for ‘The Monster Simulator.’ There is more to it than presents on the surface.’
Having read this passage prior to stopping, I enter the false-upper of ‘The Monster Simulator’ with a puffy jacket and a flashlight, both of which are almost immediately necessary as the inside attempts no further illusion and descends, on stairs dangerously steep, into the sort of hollow pitch black that indicates a chamber. When the door closes behind me, the darkness becomes absolute. I shake out a glowstick and duct tape it to the bottom stair.
For the first time in a while, I feel like I know what I’m doing.
‘The Monster Simulator’ has me on edge for about ten minutes before it starts to do its thing, which is to say, it starts to do something other than let me wander in the great vacant space beneath the shake. I begin to hear a voice, distant at first, but unmistakably miserable. As the program progresses, the voice becomes loud enough that I’m able to make out the clear boo-hoos of a small child, probably a boy.
After about ten minutes, that sadness becomes deafening. I deploy ear plugs.
Dim lights appear at the edges of the chamber, revealing it to be rectangular. There are curtains draped haphazardly along the walls. They shift and sometimes pull up entirely. It’s all fairly eerie but the first real shock I get is when the ceiling above me bulges downward and again when the bulge moves to one edge of the chamber and massive mechanical fingers descend along the wall to tentatively feel along the dusty pavement.
The fingers retract suddenly and the bulges reappear, pressing downward toward me one after the other until the ceiling threatens to crush me into the ground. I suspect there are safeties in place to prevent this sort of thing happening but the place is old and I don’t want to die alone so leap out of the way, kicking off the sudden protrusion as it begins to retract. With that touch, the room is silent, again, and still and it remains that way for a minute or so- long enough for the fight-or-flight to leave my body, anyway.
I take the walk back to the exit slowly, in case there are more surprises in store. It isn’t until I’ve stepped onto the first stair that I notice something glowing behind me: two luminous eyes, each my own height in diameter and positioned to form the illusion of a giant, its face upside down, peering down at me from above what I now understand to be a child’s bed.
I’m the monster, here.
-traveler
