"Hey there, listeners! This is Rockin’ Rick with WMDK!" Balding and middle-aged, Rockin’ Rick appeared to have been rocking for the better part of the last century. "With me is paranormal investigator Greg Deckard," he added, punctuating his sentence with an eerie sound clip. "Greg here has explored an abandoned prison, slept in a five hundred year old castle, and wandered the streets of a ghost town. Tonight, we’re going to follow him on his most terrifying mission yet: Hal’s Hell House, on Tenth Street!"

Greg glanced skeptically at the haunted house in front of them. Weathered vinyl bats and plastic spiders were duct taped to the bent, warped gutter. Purple tinsel was strewn randomly about the property. An unidentifiable wax figure with beady red eyes stood in the front yard. It resembled a lawn gnome after being struck by lightning. A sign above the door read "Hal’s Hell House." Hal’s. The name made it sound like you could get your spark plugs changed while you went through.

"That’s right," said DJ Dan, Rockin’ Rick’s sidekick, "And from the looks of it, we might not make it out alive!"

DJ humor. Greg couldn’t help but wonder how WMDK stayed in business. Not that he could really criticize anyone’s business plan. Greg himself was struggling to make a living. He had envisioned paranormal investigation as an exciting field…traveling the world, facing unknown terrors…but the reality turned out to be much more horrifying. In ten years of hunting the supernatural, Greg had discovered nothing. No vengeful spirits embittered by their bloody demise. No prehistoric aquatic beasts that had eluded mankind for hundreds of years. Not even a grizzled old man wearing a cheap rubber costume in an abandoned amusement park.

Sure, a few times he’d thought he had found something, but whenever he delved a little deeper into the circumstances surrounding the alleged paranormal activity, the ghosts had vanished, leaving behind nothing but optical illusions, hoaxes, and three months’ unpaid rent.

Since no one buys books about houses that aren’t haunted, Greg was forced to supplement his income. Every year when the DJs called him up and offered him easy money, he gladly accepted their invitation. Evidently, they thought it was funny to take a real paranormal investigator to a fake haunted house.

"Whatdya say, Greg? We won’t blame you if you chicken out now!" Rockin’ Rick held a mic up to Greg’s face expectantly.

"Tempting," said Greg. "But I think I’ll be able to make it through the front door."

The line to get into the house was short, which wasn’t surprising, since this was the least successful haunted house in the city. Perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy, it was the first to open every year, thus capturing the desperate early Halloween crowd. The only reason the radio station had agreed to come to this house was that the owner had promised them free admission, and Rockin’ Rick had already used up his monthly budget holding a contest in which radio listeners competed for concert tickets by calling their bosses live on the air and making sexual overtures.

Within minutes, they got their free tickets and went inside. The first two rooms were unremarkable: rubber rats, fur-covered tarantulas, red food coloring striping the walls, and dummies stuffed with pillows and positioned in corners to conceal their fluffy, cushioned faces. In the third room, two teenagers wearing plastic monster masks crouched around a fabric fire pit and intermittently growled. On the floor next to them, a pile of hard plastic body parts awaited their opportunity to be cooked in the Easy Bake Oven.

Corpses by Mattel, thought Greg wryly.