Chapter 2: Michelle McCool has Weaknesses?!

"Uh, I'm sorry I was late in getting here, Sir, I was uh…I ran until a flood of Divas in the hallway. They just got back from somewhere pretty interesting from the sound of it," Rey explained.

"Oh, don't worry about it Rey. You were what, five minutes? That's nothing in the scheme of things," Mr. McMahon assured him.

"Still, I'm sorry I'm late," Rey apologized.

"Think nothing of it. How are you doing today?" Mr. McMahon said.

"I'm doing well, sir. Thanks for asking. You?" Rey responded politely.

That's something Mr. McMahon always liked about Rey. He was polite without being required to. And he didn't kiss ass. He didn't even know how to. He was a rare breed- a genuinely kind soul.

Mr. McMahon's opportunistic grin spread out across his face. "I have a business proposition for the male half of the roster, and I'd like you to inform the rest of those lugs about it."

Rey smiled nervously. "Um…what is it?"

"Will you tell them for me, Rey?" Mr. McMahon pressed gently, coating his voice in sugar.

It felt more like processed chemical sweetener than real sugar to Rey, though. And he would know. He was practically made of real sugar.

Rey wondered if Mr. McMahon knew about all of the wrestlers' secret crushes on him.

Rey looked at his boss discreetly for second and recognized that Mr. McMahon probably knew everything. After all, some of the guys were so loud about their love for Rey it was hard not to notice. John Cena for one. If Mr. McMahon had just come out and asked Cena if he liked Rey, the wrestler would have blurted "Hell yeah, all of us guys do."

Rey gave a short sigh.

"Ah, well, I'd be glad to talk to them if I knew what I was supposed to talk to them about."

Mr. McMahon laughed heartily. "How right you are, Rey!"

Rey fidgeted a little.

"So," Mr. McMahon said, suddenly serious again. "To get right down to it, I was thinking of proposing a Halloween special."

"Like Halloween Havoc?" Rey asked hopefully.

Mr. McMahon smiled, but shook his head. "Oh, no. There won't be any wrestling. It's not going to be a pay-per-view, either. We'll just air it on the USA channel the night before Halloween. Devil's Night, as the kids call it."

"Uh, yeah," Rey confirmed anxiously. "But…what will we be doing if there isn't any wrestling?"

"You see this map here, Rey?" he asked the luchador, swiveling his monitor to face Rey.

Rey leaned in carefully and saw a map on Mr. McMahon's computer screen.

"Yes, Sir."

"Well, what we have right there on that little green triangle is our destination for this week. Instead of filming for our wrestling shows this week we'll be filming for this special at this location right there," Mr. McMahon tapped the glass demonstratively.

"What state is this in?" Rey asked.

"Massachusetts."

"Okay. Um…what's there? What's the location? A stadium?"

Mr. McMahon grinned devilishly. "A haunted mansion."

Rey flushed. "Oh."

Mr. McMahon laughed.

"Well, it's allegedly haunted. I don't believe in any of that crap. Do you, Rey?"

"Um, no, not really, Sir."

Rey didn't know whether or not he believed in ghosts. He'd never had an experience with the paranormal before but he considered himself still young (which he was) so he didn't like to rule out that he would never see a ghost in his life. Rey was very much open to being proven or disproven about something before he would pass judgment on it. For instance, he had no clue if he would like sushi until he tried it. And once he did, he decided he liked it. A lot of the guys refused to try it in the first place because of the stigma attached to eating raw fish. The trouble with that is they still have yet to find out if they like sushi.

"Well, that's good. Then you wouldn't be opposed to spending a week with a camera crew filming at night and sleeping during the day in this house, would you?"

Rey fidgeted slightly. "I can't say I would mind too much."

"Good. Good. So what we're thinking of doing is having you and all the guys who sign on stay in the house all week. Like I said, the cameras will only be on at night and we'll film you guys trying to contact ghosts, wander around scared, or something like that and we'll take all the best footage of people being frightened and reacting to dust bunnies or whatever the hell is in that old house and paste it together and call it our Halloween Special."

"So, what do you think?" he asked Rey.

Rey considered it for a minute. They would have spent the week filming wrestling if they weren't filming for the special. If might be safer to stay in a haunted house than to wrestle, but he and all the other guys were definitely more in their comfort zone in a nice, safe, closed-off ring than out in the middle of nowhere in a haunted building in Massachusetts.

"Where is this place?" Rey thought to ask all of a sudden. "You said Massachusetts, but like…where in Massachusetts?"

Mr. McMahon's eyes flashed. Rey couldn't ever quite tell why.

"Oh, it's a small abandoned town called Sassafras."

Rey snorted a little. "That sounds more like the south than the north, don't you think?"

Mr. McMahon chuckled and shrugged; conceding. "Well, evidently the settlers didn't think so. They named it Sassafras, Rey, not me."

"Why is it abandoned?"

"Oh, well, I did my research on it, don't you worry. There was a town there once. But it was bulldozed─ or horse and carriage-d to death, God knows what they used to demolish things back then─ in between 1865 and 1914. You see, Sassafras had become a ghost town when practically everyone in it moved to the cities during the industrial revolution. People demolished the buildings to preserve the land out there. There's something about several rare species of owls or some such nonsense living out there. So the house is within what is now a National Park, basically."

"Oh," Rey said, trying his best to follow along with all this information.

"So aren't you wondering why only that one house is still there if the rest of the town was torn down?" Mr. McMahon coaxed.

"Is it because the house is haunted?" Rey ventured.

Mr. McMahon winked at him. "Right on the money. Supposedly when they tried to tear it down all those years ago, ghosts started pushing workers down the stairs. Scared people off. So it's the only building out there, I'm afraid."

"Is there any indoor plumbing?" Rey asked, knowing there wouldn't be.

Mr. McMahon surprised him. "I'm afraid we only managed to hook up one bathroom in the house. But it's got a sink, toilet, a shower, and a bath tub."

"Oh, Okay. Well…that's great, actually," Rey admitted.

That was much better than he'd expected.

"Okay," Rey said, summing things up. "So I'll tell the guys that it's a house─ or a mansion, sorry─ in a deserted town called Sassafras, Massachusetts?"

God, that was a mouthful of a name for a single location. There were eight s's in there. He counted them in his head.

"Yep. You got it, Rey."

"I'll ask the guys who wants to agree to the special."

"Thank you, Rey."

Rey stood and walked to the door.

He remembered that Michelle McCool was waiting for him out in the hallway, and how nervous she was. He didn't want whatever happened to her to happen to any of the guys.

"Sir, I'm sorry, but I can't promise I'll agree to it. I can't promise that anybody will," Rey warned bracingly, his hand on the doorknob.

Mr. McMahon met his eyes.

"That's fine, Rey. I'd just like you to try."

Rey nodded and walked out, shutting the door quietly behind him.

Things were getting odder and odder lately. He wasn't sure he liked this current development about the haunted house.

Rey hung back a bit in the hallway. He saw the nervous Diva while she got a pack of powdered donuts from the vending machine.

He made his footsteps audible so he didn't sneak up on her.

"Michelle?"

He stood beside her. She looked at him, brushing her hair out of her face.

"Can we…can we talk outside?"

"Why? Do you think there are cameras in here or something?" Michelle demanded, her pupils dilating. She whipped around, searching for them.

Rey set his hand gently on her shoulder. "No, no, I don't think that. But it wouldn't matter if there were some in here."

Michelle looked into Rey's eyes. Her mascara was runny. She'd been crying.

"Its okay, Michelle, it wouldn't matter if there were cameras here. They're here for our security, not for Mr. McMahon to spy on us."

Michelle's shoulders relaxed slightly. She searched through his eyes and he didn't look away. It was then that she could tell she was safe with him.

"I'd just like to get some air while we talk about this," Rey assured her.

Michelle nodded and walked out with him.

He watched her carefully to make sure she didn't do anything crazy. He just stood there while she plopped down onto the curb and gave a long exhale.

She pulled out her donuts and unwrapped them.

Rey knew that women tended to have some sort of comfort food. He was very calm about it when he saw them eating it. Most of the guys would tease the Divas if they saw them eating the stuff, because it was usually junk food and everyone in WWE was obsessively health conscious. (Plus guys love to tease girls for no reason.)

But Rey, being married, knew better than to tease. Angie had informed him once that he was prone to eating certain foods and acting a certain way when he was upset, too, so he had no right to judge women for doing that.

The girls tended to seek Rey out for relationship advice because his marriage was so successful. They'd ask him why he respected Angie and what men liked in a relationship.

Rey would usually smile and say, "Whatever makes you both happy is the best thing."

Michelle sought him out for different reasons. He didn't know himself why McCool took a liking to him. She hardly ever took a liking to anybody, but she liked Rey.

Michelle sought him out simply because she knew Rey was one of the few people she could afford to be vulnerable with. She was a tough woman, and in a world with too many overconfident men, she would be laughed at if she ever showed her emotional side to the wrong guy. Rey was not the wrong guy. He didn't know it, but he was drawn to strong-minded, independent women. His mother and his wife Angie were both that way. And they could both be vulnerable with Rey. He understood strong women maybe without really realizing that he did.

He sat down beside her and slipped off his mask, habitually running his fingers over his scalp front to back and then back to front a couple of times.

He looked down at his mask and fingered it, stretching it flat as though he were putting it away.

"Are you all right?" he asked her quietly.

She swallowed. "Yeah. Do I look bad to you?"

That was the test question. If he answered it wrong she wouldn't confide in him and he knew it. The Divas were full of trial questions to rat out the sweet guys from the dirty rotten bastards.

"No, you look good," Rey assured her.

He sighed. "You just look really stressed."

Michelle seemed somewhat distracted. It was a nice day in autumn and the weather was cool but sunny. The air should have warmed her up some.

"You were right," he told her.

"I was?"

Rey nodded. "Mr. McMahon wanted me to talk to the guys about going to that haunted house you were talking about. You were talking about some weird place in Sassafras, Massachusetts, right?"

Michelle smiled at him in spite of herself.

Rey had to make an effort to enunciate the name of that place in order to say it correctly. It was a difficult pronunciation for a West Coast-born Spanish speaker.

"What?" he asked, looking at her.

She shook her head and smiled. "You just sound funny when you say it, Rey."

"Well, there's this place in California called San Buenaventura. I'd like to hear you say that."

"San Buenaventoola?" Michelle tried.

Rey chuckled. "You have to roll your 'r's more in Spanish."

"San Bwenaventura?" Michelle tried again and ended up giggling at herself. "Oh, forget it. I can't say it."

"Same thing. I can't say 'Sassafras', you can't say 'San Buenaventura'."

"Same difference?"

"Yeah," Rey nodded, smiling.

There was a comfortable silence between them.

Michelle sighed after a moment. "It was a really…odd place, Rey."

He looked at her, his expression silently concerned. "He wants me and the guys to film there this coming week."

"You shouldn't."

"Is it that bad?"

Michelle bit into another donut and shook her hair into her eyes so he couldn't see her face clearly.

She shook her head and swallowed. "I don't know…"

"Was it scary?"

Michelle snorted. "Rey, do I honestly look like the type of woman who'd be easily scared off by some schoolgirl bullshit like fake ghosts?"

Rey shook his head. "No."

"Well, that's what I thought I was in for. I even convinced Melina to come along because I told her that it would probably just be a bunch of the tech guys in bed sheets and Mr. McMahon himself under the floorboards making spooky sounds to scare us. I thought it would be fake, and staged out the whazoo. I really did. I thought it would be a piece of cake. Actually, you know what the first thing I did was when I saw a picture of that house?"

Rey shook his head.

"I laughed. I nearly laughed my ass off looking at that photo online, it just looks like some stupid breakaway set on the computer screen."

Michelle swallowed and her smile faded.

She looked at him and there was a sorrow and a fear in her eyes that was unusually heart-wrenching coming from her.

Rey didn't turn away from that look for a second.

"But when you get off that bus, Rey, and you see it in person…it's a different story. It's a beautiful house, Rey, it really is. It's beautiful but it's so, so, old. It's the most beautiful ugly building I've ever seen in my life. Maybe even in the whole world."

She smiled, her lips tinged with melancholy as they turned upwards. She couldn't seem to explain it any better than that.

"Why do you say it's ugly?" Rey asked carefully.

Michelle rustled around in her jacket for a minute. She pulled forth from her pocket a folded pamphlet. It was creased slightly and the binding was softened from it being put to good use.

She held it out to him.

"Take it."

"What is it?" he asked, accepting it from her.

"It's almost like a brochure for the place."

Rey folded it outward very carefully, and saw that the front of it bore a picture of what did in fact look like Hollywood's take on a haunted house set.

It was set against a very blue sky in the background and the rest of the pamphlet was colored in that same blue. It was the saddest, loneliest looking shade of blue they could find. It looked like it must have been tinged with purple at some point in time when it was mixed, but you couldn't quite put your finger on what made you think that.

"It's official. Mr. McMahon ordered them from this one travel website based in a town in Massachusetts that sells pamphlets about all the tourist attractions in the whole state. This haunted mansion is one of those 'off the beaten track, little known treasures'. You know those places that are almost like an inside joke to locals. Full of lore and all sorts of bullshit. I don't know if you have that stuff where you're from, Rey. California might be too new for that."

"It's not. You hear stories of haunted Spanish missions every now and then," Rey said quietly, and was about to open the booklet when Michelle set her hand over his, stopping him.

He looked up at her.

"Read it when you're on the bus. It'll give you something to do. If you decide to go there, read it then. But don't read it right now. I don't know if you're the superstitious type, Rey, but that information in there would reel you in to wanting to go there if you are."

"I'm not very superstitious," Rey said. "Religious, yes. Not like…is it like black magic related or something, this house? What is it that's got you so spooked? Maybe I do need to read the stories about it before I decide whether or not to go there."

Michelle shook her head. "You don't need to read it right now. It'll just tempt you. It tempted me."

Rey exhaled. "Then why give it to me? Why give me something I'm not allowed to use?"

"You can use it on the bus if you go, Rey," Michelle repeated. "But just ask me whatever you want to know about that place. I can tell you."

Rey thought for a second. "Are you afraid of it?"

Michelle swallowed. "Yes," she admitted reluctantly.

"Why?"

"It's real," she said limply.

"What do you mean?"

"It's…it's not fake, Rey."

"You mean it's really haunted?" he asked, his brow furrowing.

"Yes."

She knew he'd judge her at this point. She might as well tell him the full extent. At the minute she said 'yes' he would have passed his final judgment anyway.

"There's this little girl, Rey," she began slowly.

There was a depth; a desperation in her voice now. It was that that made Rey listen to her.

"A girl?"

He was thinking of his daughter Aalyah: a beautiful, feminine little thing full of love and blind devotion towards her father. Michelle could see it in his eyes.

"Go on, Michelle," Rey prodded gently. And she saw that he would believe her.

"There's this little girl in an old-timey dress. And it looks new. And she has long blonde hair. She can't speak. But she'll come up to you, I know she will. She's friendly."

"Where are her parents?" Rey asked worriedly.

"She doesn't have a mother. But hope that you never meet her father, Rey."

Rey's expression shifted from confusion to concern again. If there was one thing that worried him on a very personal level it was another man mistreating his family.

"And she's dead, Rey."

He blinked at her in surprise. "What?"

"She's dead. I saw her, but she's dead. Her story is in the pamphlet. She died in the nineteen hundreds."

Rey looked at the thing in his hands as though it were some unspeakably powerful object. Like a crystal ball or a Bible.

He looked back up at Michelle.

"She's dead? You mean she's a ghost?"

Michelle nodded firmly.

"Can you…how did you know? Can she walk through walls? Could you see through her?"

Michelle shook her head. "No. There weren't very many signs. There are just her clothes. I thought they looked old. And there's just that she doesn't talk…"

Rey looked at Michelle, thinking.

Why doesn't she talk?

"So it's really haunted?"

"Yes, Rey."

"And that's what scares you?"

"It's not the girl that scares me, Rey. It's just that something very bad happened there. Maybe you could feel it too, if you went there. But I felt it the minute I got in that house. It just felt like a murder scene to me. I know that that's why it's haunted. Something terrible must have happened to the family that lived there. It must have been that little girl's family."

"I should go there too, so that I can confirm your story. So that nobody thinks you're crazy, Michelle. This sounds serious. Did any of the other Divas see any of this stuff? Did they see the girl?"

"They did."

"And they'll admit to it? They're not gonna act like you're crazy and ship you off to some therapy you don't need, will they?"

"I don't think so, Rey, but I don't think you should go."

"Why not? You tell me all this tantalizing information and then you won't let me look at the proof of it when it's sitting right in my own lap! You're forbidding me from going to this place you're telling me stories about! If what you say is true, then why wouldn't you want me to see it, too?"

"It's because it's true that I don't want you to go there! Don't you get that?!" Michelle screamed, her eyes tearing up. She turned away, wiping her eyes.

Rey's face fell.

Carefully, he reached out to her and laid his hand on her shoulder.

"Michelle…"

She turned slightly towards him but her blonde hair hid her eyes again.

"Michelle, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I just…I do believe you. You don't have any reason to lie to me. I know that."

She gazed up at him, her lips trembling. "Rey, you can't go."

"Why not?"

"I mean, you're a grown man, you can go anywhere you want, I'm not forbidding you, I just would prefer it if you didn't go."

"But why, Michelle?" Rey pressed.

"Because I can see it in your eyes. You're already concerned. You care about your kids and so you see them in any kids you meet. You're worried about the girl. And I don't want you to get scared out there. I don't want you to find out that terrible thing that happened to her. I don't. It might break your heart, and I wouldn't want that."

Rey dropped his eyes, embarrassed that he was so easy to read.
"People tell me I worry too much," he admitted, smiling sadly. "But I…I can't help it."

She put her hand over the one he had resting against her.

He met her eyes again.

"Don't go there, Rey. Don't take this the wrong way, but you seem almost like a woman or something, like you have women's intuition. Like you can sense things. I think you'd be very sensitive to that place and I think it might hurt you."

Rey swallowed. "You don't have kids yet."

She shook her head. "Not that I know of, thank God."

Rey smiled a little at that. "Oh, you'd bet the first to know, believe me. Or you can ask Angie," he said, chuckling at the thought.

Michelle smiled at him.

"But if you ever have kids then call me and let me know if you don't get Spider-senses all of a sudden. I swear to you, I feel like the second they get hurt, I get hurt. No matter how many times they come crying to me, I just give in right away like it's the first time I've seen them that way. You'll panic at every little scratch they get and they'll beg you to get off their backs and stop reminding them to be safe as they get older."

Rey sighed. "I could go on and on. But my point is I feel like my children are a part of me."

"That's because they are," Michelle reminded him.

Rey laughed. "Yeah. But maybe that's why I'm sensitive now compared to when I was younger and on my own. Maybe it's not women's intuition. Maybe it's father's intuition."

"But that's exactly why I don't want you to go, Rey. I don't want you to meet that girl."

Rey shook his head. "I don't know if I'll go or not. If you ask me not to, I won't ever go there my entire life."

Rey crossed his heart.

"I promise you that."

"I won't make you promise. It's your decision. It's up to you."

Rey exhaled through his nose somewhat forlornly.

He thought for a second.

"You know, another thing about being a parent is that there's a certain point. I don't know when it happened, but there was a point in Dominik's life when he suddenly seemed like his own person. He didn't seem like a little me anymore. He seemed like an entirely different person. And it scared me. But…I knew that that was the shadows of how he's going to be as an adult. He's going to have his own life and his own decisions, and his own mistakes to make. And I'll be biting my fingernails the whole time, trust me, but I'll have to let him go one day. It'll be scary then, too. But he is separate from me. He's a part of me, and nobody on earth can change that, but he's separate, too. He's got his own heart to worry about; he can't sit back and worry about hurting his Papi's heart all day long."

Michelle squeezed Rey's hand and he smiled at her gratefully.

"If I take his life too personally, then it's my fault. It's my fault if my heart gets too hurt because of my children's mistakes."

Michelle swallowed and wondered if she could ever manage to be that selfless if she ever became a parent.

"Whatever happens to my heart is not your fault, Michelle."

She stared at him, transfixed.

"Okay?"

She nodded. "Okay, Rey."

Rey looked down at his lap and caught the pamphlet suddenly just before the wind blew it away from him.

"I'll give it back to you later," he promised.

Michelle shook her head. "I don't know if I ever want to see another thing connected to that place ever again."

Rey nodded.

"I'll go talk it over with the guys."

She nodded.

"Should I tell them about the girl?" he asked.

"If you think it'll help. If you think it's appropriate."

"All right."

"Don't you dare tell them I was crying, Rey," she warned all of a sudden.

"But I think some of them might have seen you crying in the hall. Do you want me to li- I mean, what would you like me to say?" Rey asked, correcting himself.

"Tell them I got something in my contact."

"You wear contacts?"

She smiled and shook her hair out of her eyes. "But of course."

Rey smiled. "For the color or for your sight?"

She shrugged. "To see better."

He leaned in close to her teasingly and said, "Now…where are your eyes again?"

She blushed and blew her hair out of her eyes, blowing a little air in his face, too.

He laughed and leaned back. "Oh! Now I see them!"

She grinned and he offered her his hand. She took it and stood up beside him.

"Ready to go back in now?" Rey asked her, shifting his mask and the pamphlet into a different hand.

"Yeah, I feel better."

"That's good."

They started to walk back.

"Rey, why do you wear contacts in the ring, anyway?"

"Because nobody can see my damn eyes otherwise," he admitted with a sigh.

"Who cares? I love your eyes!"

Rey smiled. "You're the only one outside my family who does; my irises are practically black."

"There's nothing wrong with them!"

"No, there's nothing wrong with them," Rey agreed. "I just don't like them. Everybody has eyes like this. Everybody's got brown eyes. It's not really a nice color when you see it on every single person you meet. You get sick of it. Plus they're so dark it looks like I don't have any pupils. "

Michelle chuckled and shook her head. She walked backwards and got in front of him.

"Rey," she said.

"Yeah?"

"I don't care what you say; nobody has brown eyes like your big brown doe eyes."

Rey smiled gratefully. "Thanks, Michelle."