How do you get a funder to wire $55,000 to a business that only makes money in October?
That was my problem on a Tuesday in September, sitting across a folding table from a man named Gus who had fake blood dried in the creases of his knuckles.
Gus ran a haunted attraction on a farm forty minutes past the last streetlight. A barn, a corn maze, a hayride, and a quarter mile of plywood hallway built to make teenagers grab each other. Eleven months a year, his bank statements looked like a coma. Two grand here, a birthday party there, a team-building night in April for $3,100. Then October: $214,000 in deposits in thirty-one days.
He needed $55,000 by the fifteenth. An $18,000 animatronic from a fabricator who wouldn't ship until paid. Generator rental and the liability policy. A payroll deposit for seventy scare actors, most of them high schoolers and very sincere about it.
His account had $2,600 in it.
The underwriter was a woman named Lund who had never once, in four years of my sending her files, used an exclamation point.
"We don't fund Halloween," she said.
"You fund landscapers. Landscapers don't work in January."
"Landscapers make money in more than one month."
She sent an offer anyway, the way underwriters do when they want you to go away. $55,000 at a 1.45 factor. $79,750 back. $590 a day, every business day, starting the morning after funding.
I ran that against $2,600. Gus would bounce on day five. By opening night he'd be in default to the people paying for his opening night.
"Weekly," I said. "First pull in October. He'll pay you back faster than anybody on your book."
A long pause. "Then I want it walked. Not photos. Photos are cheap. Somebody stands in it."
So on Thursday I stood in it.
In daylight, a haunted house is a construction site with a smell. Plywood, spray foam, fog-juice film on everything, a guy in a bloody butcher's apron eating a turkey sandwich on a hay bale. Gus walked me through with a flashlight like a realtor. The meat locker. The clown hallway, where the floor tilts four degrees so your brain thinks you're drunk. The swamp room, ankle-deep in actual water.
"Last one," he said. "This is the one people talk about in the parking lot."
He opened the door, and it was an office.
Twelve desks. Twelve headsets. Twelve cheap phones, all ringing. A whiteboard across the back wall that said FUNDED in red marker, and next to it a brass bell. Overhead speakers played voicemails, real ones, stacked on top of each other until they blurred into one long pitch with no breathing in it.
"...Approval sitting on my desk..."
"...Expires at five o'clock today..."
"...Gus, is this the business owner..."
"In October I put kids at the desks," he said. "They chase people out yelling, 'Is this the owner?' Grown men run. I had a roofer hide behind a hay bale for ten minutes."
"Where'd you get the voicemails?"
"I financed a tractor three years ago. Somebody put my name on a list. Eleven hundred voicemails since. I saved every one."
I laughed. Then I stopped, because I knew the next voice before it finished its first word.
"Hey Gus, following up one more time, I've got a number for you that I really think..."
It was me. My first year, back when I dialed lists eight hours a day and said "really" in every sentence like a tic. Pitching a haunted house I'd never seen, in a voice I didn't recognize until it was much too late.
Gus watched my face the whole time.
"Track nine," he said. "Why do you think I called you back?"
I didn't have an answer that made me look good, so I took my photos. The desks, the bell, the swamp, and the empty pedestal with a sticky note on it: $18K, FRIDAY.
I sent Lund forty-one photos that night. She replied the next morning at 7:02.
"Approved. Weekly. Twenty-six pulls of $3,067. First pull October 6."
Then a second line, which for Lund was practically a love letter.
"Is the last room real?"
Gus funded Friday. The animatronic shipped Monday.
On opening night he texted me a video from inside the office. Strobes, phones screaming, a kid in a headset backing a woman in a cardigan against a desk, yelling "THIS OFFER EXPIRES TODAY." Behind them, somebody rang the bell.
Under all of it, faint, I could hear myself: "...I really think..."
Gus had turned me up.