Chapter 1: The Man in the Sequined Glove

Chapter 1: The Man in the Sequined Glove

The salt spray and the sticky-sweet smell of spun sugar were the twin perfumes of my life. From my cramped ticket booth at The Black Tide Manor, I had a perfect, framed view of the boardwalk's chaotic symphony. The rumble of the wooden roller coaster, the distant screams of joy and terror, the tinny chime of arcade games—it was the soundtrack to my summer, and I loved every second of it.

Most people see the boardwalk as a place of fleeting fun. For me, it was home. The Manor wasn't just a job; it was a sanctuary of manufactured fright, a place where the monsters were on payroll and the screams were on a schedule. My coworkers—a collection of art-school dropouts, goths, and general weirdos like me—were the closest thing I had to a family. We were the carnies, the freaks, the ones who kept the machinery of cheap thrills grinding along.

"Slow night," Maya said, leaning her head through the open side of my booth. Her half-shaved hair was dyed the color of a toxic waste spill, and a silver ring in her septum glinted under the flickering neon.

"The tide's coming in," I replied, not looking up from my book. "Always slows them down. They're afraid the ocean will swallow them whole if they stay out too late."

"Or they're all over at 'Mermaid Mel's' watching that guy try to breathe fire again," she snorted. "Heard he singed off an eyebrow last night. Again."

I smirked. The boardwalk had its own ecosystem of performers. There was Mermaid Mel, a fifty-something woman who wore a plastic tail and sang off-key sea shanties; a unicyclist who juggled rubber chickens; and, of course, the legend. The ghost of the boardwalk. Our own personal cryptid.

"At least it's not him," I said. "The bad Michael Jackson."

Maya shuddered theatrically. "Don't even joke about that. I swear, if he shows up tonight, I'm quitting."

The 'bad Michael Jackson' was a local myth, a boogeyman we used to spook the new hires. The story went that a man, impossibly skinny and unsettlingly committed to the role, would sometimes appear on the boardwalk after dark. He didn't dance. He didn't sing. He just… stood. Staring. Sometimes he'd let out a high-pitched "WHOOO!" that sounded less like an exclamation and more like the air escaping a punctured tire. Everyone had a 'friend of a friend' who'd seen him, but in my three years here, he'd remained firmly in the realm of folklore.

"He's just a guy, Maya. A sad, weird guy," I said, turning a page.

"He's a menace," she insisted. "Liam said he saw him last week by the Ferris wheel, and he just… glitched. Like a bad video game character, just sort of vibrated in place."

"Liam also thinks hot dogs are a government conspiracy."

"My point stands," she said with a grin, before a call from inside the Manor pulled her away. "Break's over. Don't get abducted by any washed-up pop stars!"

I waved her off, settling back into the comfortable quiet of the booth. The flow of tourists had slowed to a trickle. A family arguing over the price of a ticket, a couple of teenagers trying to look tough. Normalcy. I craved it. In a haunted house, the only thing you want when you clock out is boring, predictable reality.

That's when I saw him.

He wasn't in the line. He was just… there. Standing by the 'Test Your Strength' game, half-hidden in the shadow of its towering frame. At first, he was just a silhouette, but as he shuffled into the light cast by my booth, my blood went cold.

He was scrawny, dressed in a nondescript grey hoodie and jeans. But on his right hand was a single, grimy, sequined glove that caught the light with a pathetic sparkle. A cheap, busted wig of black curls sat askew on his head. He was exactly as the legend described, but worse. The stories hadn't done justice to the wrongness of him.

He moved toward my booth, his walk a jerky, unnatural shuffle. It wasn't a moonwalk; it was like a marionette with its strings hopelessly tangled, each limb fighting the others for control. My professional cynicism kicked in. Just another weirdo. Handle it.

He didn't get in line. He walked right up to the side of the booth, to the thick pane of glass that separated me from the world, and pressed his face against it.

My breath hitched in my throat. His features distorted against the glass, his nose flattening, his lips pulling back from his teeth in a grin so wide it looked painful. It was a rictus of a smile, a black-painted slash in a pale, doughy face. And his eyes. They weren't eyes. They were pits. Dark, flat, and utterly devoid of light or reflection. I was looking at two holes punched through reality.

"Hee-hee," he breathed, the sound a faint, wet whisper against the glass, fogging it for a moment before clearing.

I flinched back in my chair. "Sir, the line is over there. Can I help you?" My voice was tight, my customer-service persona cracking at the seams.

His grin widened, if that was even possible. He didn't speak. He just tapped a long, pale finger on the glass. Tap. Tap. Tap. The sound was sharp, insistent.

"Do you want a ticket?" I asked, my heart hammering against my ribs.

He tilted his head, the wig slipping further. A sound tore from his throat, a sharp, piercing "WHOOO!" that wasn't human. It sounded like a recording, like a soundbite stolen from somewhere else and played through a broken speaker in his chest. A group of tourists walking by flinched and hurried on, laughing nervously. A prank. It had to be a prank.

"You let people in," he whispered, his voice a dry rustle. It wasn't a question.

"Yes. It's a haunted house. You buy a ticket, we let you in." I tried to sound bored, in control.

His dark eyes drilled into me. "What's his name?"

"What?" The question was so out of left field it threw me completely.

"The old man," he rasped, his grin unwavering. "The one who stayed. What's his name?"

I froze. He couldn't possibly know about that. The Manor had one 'real' ghost story, a bit of morbid history we usually kept under wraps. An old man had a heart attack in the 'Hall of Mirrors' back in '98. It wasn't something we advertised.

"I… I don't know what you're talking about," I stammered. "If you're not going to buy a ticket, I have to ask you to leave."

"What's. His. Name?" he repeated, his voice dropping lower, each word a separate, chilling command. His head began to twitch, a tiny, repetitive spasm that made the busted wig jiggle.

Suddenly, I felt a strange, dizzying sensation, like the world was skipping a beat. The neon lights of the boardwalk seemed to blur, their colors running together. My eyelids felt heavy, impossibly heavy. I blinked.

When my eyes opened, he was gone.

I shot up in my chair, my gaze darting wildly across the boardwalk. There was no sign of him. No jerky shuffle, no sequined glove. It was as if he had evaporated. My entire body was trembling, a cold sweat slicking my skin. I glanced at the digital clock on my register.

8:42 PM.

That couldn't be right. It was just 8:15 a minute ago. I remembered checking it right before Maya left. Had I zoned out? Fallen asleep? No. The terror was too real, too immediate. It felt like no time had passed at all, and yet twenty-seven minutes were just… gone.

I tried to take a deep breath to steady my nerves, but it came out as a ragged gasp. It was a prank. A really effective, creepy prank. That's all it was. A local weirdo trying to live up to his own legend.

"Alex? You okay?" It was Liam, coming to relieve me for the night. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

"Worse," I muttered, grabbing my bag. "I think I just met the bad Michael Jackson."

Liam chuckled. "Oh man, for real? Lucky you. Did he do the 'hee-hee'?"

"Something like that," I said, unable to meet his eyes. I just wanted to go home, to lock my door and wash the lingering image of that terrible grin out of my head.

As I walked away from the booth, I rubbed my tired eyes. They felt strange. Gritty and out of sync. I stopped in front of the funhouse mirrors near the exit, their warped surfaces twisting the laughing faces of passersby into grotesque masks. I looked at my own reflection.

My face was pale, my eyes wide with a fear I couldn't hide. I blinked, watching my reflection do the same.

And then I saw it.

I blinked again, slowly, deliberately. My right eye closed and opened perfectly. But my left eye… it lagged. It closed a fraction of a second after the right one, and opened just as slowly, as if it were moving through molasses. It was a tiny, almost imperceptible delay, a flutter of disharmony in a movement that had been automatic my entire life.

Right. Left. Open. Open.

It was wrong. It was broken.

He had been there for minutes, maybe longer. And in that lost time, that terrifying blank space in my memory, he had done something to me. He had left his mark. A tiny, rhythmic glitch in the machine of my own body. The bad Michael Jackson was no longer a joke. And he was no longer just a legend.