by Val Crowe
“Oh, how fabulous,” said my mother. “Well, maybe we can eat together this evening, then. This is my son, Deacon.”
“Deacon, how nice to meet you.” Oscar came for me, hand outstretched.
I didn’t get up, making for an awkward hand shake. I didn’t want this guy here, interrupting the very important conversation that I’d been having with my mother.
“Are you going to be helping out?” said Oscar.
“Me?” I said.
“Oh, you should,” said my mother. “At least stay. This is a genuinely haunted location. Lots of energy. Maybe we’ll find something here that had help to fix your, er, condition, sweetheart.”
“What’s his condition?” said Oscar.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Deacon is sensitive to the supernatural,” said my mother.
Oscar raised his eyebrows. “Really? What an amazing gift that must be.”
I rolled my eyes and went back to the cookies. They were actually really good.
“It’s honestly a bit of a burden for him,” said my mother. “I think he’d do anything to be rid of it. It keeps him from getting close to others.”
“Mom.” I glared at her. Would it kill her not to share my personal stuff with complete strangers?
“That’s so true,” said Oscar. “Those who are given such gifts are rarely prepared. Sort of the sick sense of humor of the universe. Now, if either you or I had been sensitive, we could have put that to good use.”
My mother nodded. “Indeed.”
I had to say, to my mother’s credit, she had never once attempted to cash in on my abilities. It would have been easy for her. There she was, sitting in the tent she sent up in each town, fawning over her crystal ball and pretending to hear the voice of dear old departed Uncle Bill. But she never asked me if I could actually speak to Uncle Bill.
Probably because she knew real spirits might not stick to the script the way she needed them to. People paid her money to hear certain kinds of things. They wanted to believe their loved ones were happy and at peace. They wanted to be told that they could move on and let go of the past. They wanted to be told that their pain would fade and that they would find happiness again someday. She sold them what they wanted to hear. Real ghosts were immaterial.
“But Deacon isn’t interested in capitalizing on his gifts,” she said. “He’s made that very clear.” She laughed. “Not going to follow along in the family business.” She winked at me.
“Listen, Mom, I’m not really interested in… whatever it is you’re doing.” I swept one hand in a wide arc to encompass the cookies and the table and the motorhome and all the surroundings. I got up. “I guess if you’re busy with, uh, Oscar here, then I’ll be on my way.”
“No!” My mother was across the room in seconds, grasping both my hands. She looked imploringly into my eyes. “Don’t leave yet. You just got here.”
I couldn’t handle the nakedness of her expression. I looked away, but I didn’t pull my hands away. It was funny, how strangely nice it was to have my mother touching me again, after all this time when I’d avoided being close to her.
“Stay, Deacon,” she murmured.
“I can be on my way,” said Oscar. “I’ve got some exploring to do.”
I looked down at the place where our hands were joined, and then I slowly pulled my hands away from hers. “If you’re busy, and you don’t really have time to talk, then there’s not much point, Mom.” Or, if she was in denial about everything, then that was about the same thing too. She couldn’t help me.
I might sort of have my mother back, but it all came to the same thing in the end. I was on my own.
I moved across the room toward the door. “I’ll walk you out, Oscar.”
“Deacon, wait,” said my mother, coming after me.
I didn’t. I went out of the motorhome, into the vaguely autumnal September air outside. (It was in the seventies that day, sunny and pleasant. Couldn’t ask for a nicer day, really.)
My mother came after me and Oscar brought up the rear.
Once I was outside of the motorhome, I could see my camper—a 1965 Airstream Ambassador trailer. It gleamed silver in the sunlight. And beyond that I could see the outlines of the abandoned amusement park Point Oakes, that my mother was here to visit.
I didn’t understand any of that.
I peered at the tangle of vine-covered ancient roller coaster track and ancient Ferris wheel against the horizon. A sudden feeling of quiet came over me. It was a deep silence, as if everything had completely cut off—no animals, no insects, no cars in the distance.
And then…
A rustling noise from within that place. It was soft, but I heard it anyway. The amusement park whispered to me.
Negus.
I licked my lips.
So, the way I’d found out about Negus was that a crazed ghost had told me about him. That particular ghost had once been David Mosely, a mass murderer—or it had been part of him, anyway. I wasn’t really sure how it all worked. Often times, ghosts didn’t seem to be as fully rounded as a real person. They seemed to be obsessed with one thing—getting a message across, doing the same action over and over, replaying one afternoon of their lives. I wasn’t sure if a ghost was all of a dead person, or just a sliver of one.
Or if ghosts weren’t something else. After all, they sometimes changed form around me, shifting in and out of various personas, even taking on the form of my own mother, who wasn’t even dead.
I didn’t understand any of it, not truly. I was working my way through it as best as I could.
Anyway, if this ghost had told me about Negus, and the ghost didn’t seem related to what had happened to me at all, it stood to reason that some other, unrelated ghost might know more. My mother didn’t seem to know anything.
I needed to know.
I turned back to my mother. “Uh, what is it exactly that you’re doing here?”
“There’s a brother and sister,” said my mother. “Nice kids. Well, they’re in their twenties, around your age. Not little kids, but still young. They lost their older sister in this place.” She gestured at the amusement park. “People tend to disappear in here, after all.”
I looked back at the rundown roller coaster and I could hear the rustling whisper again, but this time, it didn’t form words. I shivered, feeling suddenly cold.
“They want to know what happened to her,” said my mother. “They want closure.”
“I’ve actually been following their story for a while now,” said Oscar. “I do podcasts about supernatural incidents.”
“Podcasts,” I repeated.
“That’s right,” said Oscar, grinning. “It’s really exciting, let me tell you. Anyway, at first, it was just going to be the three of us. The two of them and me. But then they decided that they’d do better with a medium along.”
I raised my eyebrows at my mother.
“I was happy to help, of course,” my mom said.
Sure, she was. I wondered how much they were paying her. But I couldn’t begrudge her it too much. She had to eat, after all. I didn’t see her getting a regular job any time soon. She was stuck in her ways. And for that matter, I wasn’t exactly the regular job type myself.
I supported myself through a combination of skimming at an inheritance left to me by my father and working odd jobs. But I didn’t stay put in one place for very long either. Guess I’d inherited that antsiness from my mother.
“So, now we’re a foursome,” said Oscar. “Unless you stay. And then it’ll be five of us.”
I looked back at the amusement park. “Yeah, I’ll stay. I’m in.”
“Really?” My mother looked overjoyed. “Oh, that’s so exciting. We’ll get to really catch up.”
I nodded slowly. I was here to find out about Negus. That was all.
CHAPTER TWO
“Wait, you’re doing what?” said the voice of my friend Wade on the phone.
“I’m going to stay here with my
mother and check out this haunted amusement park,” I said.
“Oh, dude, that actually sounds wicked cool. How long has it been sitting empty?”
“Not sure. Maybe thirty years or so?” I said. “I haven’t really looked into the history of the place. It looked pretty wrecked, though. Everything is overgrown and rusted out.”
“Neat,” said Wade. “I want to come.”
I just laughed. I was inside the Airstream now, and I was drinking a beer. At the prospect of spending an indefinite amount of time with my mother, I had started to get nervous. That was why I’d called Wade. He was my family, at least as far as it counted. We weren’t related by blood or anything, but we were closer than brothers.
“How long are you going to be there?” said Wade. “Like a couple days?”
“I really couldn’t say,” I said. “As long as it takes to dig something up on Negus, I guess. I don’t even know how I’m going to do that. But, um, the place sort of called out to me, and I think it wants to give up information.”
“You think it’s going to be longer than a couple days?”
“Could be.”
“Man, I really can’t skip classes this semester. I’m trying to actually graduate, you know?”
“Wade, you don’t have to come. That’s not why I called you.”
“I want to come. I want to go exploring an abandoned amusement park. That sounds totally insane. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“I called because I’m just… I’m nervous about my mother.”
“Why? What did she do?”
“Nothing,” I said. “But she still insists that she doesn’t remember being possessed.”
“Maybe it was too traumatic for her. Maybe she wiped that out of her memory bank.”
“Or maybe she’s lying.”
“Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know. But I do know that I didn’t trust her for years and years, and now here I am planning on spending a lot of time with her, and I’m nervous.”
“I’m going to come.”
“No, I know you need to stay and go to class. You don’t need to come here. I can handle this. I’m not ten years old anymore. My mother is not a physical threat to me.”
“Still, it could be hard,” said Wade.
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“Well, keep in touch, though, because I can’t say that I’m exactly thinking it’s a good sign this place called out to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know, aren’t you like a ghost battery pack? They get around you, and they get strong. So, if they’re already strong enough to call out to you, how much worse are they going to be once you’re in there?”
He had a point. The truth was, last time I’d been in a haunted place, it had gotten powerful enough to eat Wade and nearly force me to kill someone. And all because it wanted whatever it was that I had. I didn’t know what I had, but it was also what Negus wanted. They wanted my energy. My power.
Not that I had any power. Except the power to make them strong, which I couldn’t control. I would have liked the power to zap them or something. That would have been helpful.
“Hey, Deacon?” said Wade. “You there?”
“I’m here,” I said. “Just thinking about what you said.”
“Maybe you should back out.”
“No, I have to know about Negus. Because if what that specter back in Boonridge told me is true, then Negus is still out there, looking for me. Until I find him, I could be in danger. I have to find out everything I can about him. It’s the only way that I can stop him.”
“No, I know,” said Wade. “I guess nothing will stop you from going in there.”
“Not likely,” I said.
“So, then you just promise me that you’ll be careful.”
“Of course,” I said.
* * *
After I finished my conversation with Wade, I finished my beer and then settled in on my bed with my laptop to surf the internet a bit. I waited for Mads to show up, but she never did.
That wasn’t that rare. Sometimes I went weeks without seeing Mads. She came and went as she pleased.
Mads was a ghost. Well, a spirit. I didn’t know if she was what was left of a dead person or if she was something else entirely. She was more powerful than most ghosts, and she was all there in a way that they weren’t. Mads was a fully formed personality, and she didn’t have any unfinished business or obsessive behavior that kept her from being able to interact like a regular person would.
She seemed very normal. Except for the fact that she was incorporeal and she could walk through walls, of course.
Mads was like my guardian angel. Guardian ghost? She had driven Negus out of my mother. She had gotten me free of ghosts in Ridinger Hall possessing me. She looked out for me. She made sure that I was okay. I didn’t know where I would be without her.
And that was all that there was to our relationship. Because it’s not like a person can be, you know, involved with a ghost.
And I wasn’t. Involved. That would be impossible. And weird. Really weird.
So, none of that was going on.
Eventually, I got ready for bed and laid down. I slept fitfully, plagued with odd dreams about my mother, who was stalking after me with her hair in her eyes, waving a shard of broken glass above her head. I knew that if she caught me, she would use the glass on me, but I wasn’t sure if she’d stab me or cut me or use the glass to carve patterns into my skin.
When I woke up, I was sweaty and out of breath, and I felt as though I’d been up all night running, as if I hadn’t gotten any rest at all.
My mother was knocking on my door.
I got up and answered it.
“Hey,” she said, “could I take your truck into town to get groceries? You can come if you want. I’ll buy you breakfast.”
“Uh…” I scratched my stomach, yawning.
“It’s easier than trying to take the entire motorhome.” She gestured at her vehicle, which was huge. “And we need provisions. I’d rather not be running in and out of that place, especially when we’re sort of technically trespassing.”
“What?” I said.
“Well, the guy who owns Point Oakes lives across the country and seems to have washed his hands of the entire property. I went to some online forums for people who visit haunted locations, and people claimed that whenever they’ve tried to contact him about the place, he ignores their emails and won’t return their phone calls. We could have tried to do this through the proper channels, but he wasn’t going to give us permission. People break in all the time to go exploring or to camp out. It’s not a big deal for us to do the same.”
“Not a big deal, huh?” I shook my head at her. My mother was not big on rules. I mean, I’m not exactly a letter-of-the-law guy myself, but this was her job. If she got in trouble with the authorities, it could really affect her ability to continue to make a living. She wasn’t being very responsible.
I guessed she never was.
Maybe my mother had never abused me, but she was right when she said that she hadn’t been a perfect mother. There were certain things she’d never really taught me, like how to hold down a normal job or how to follow the rules.
“Mother-son breakfast,” she said. “My treat. Come on.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay,” I said. Breakfast did sound good, but the prospect of pushing a cart around the aisles of the grocery story while my mother chattered incessantly at me did not.
Still, I got ready and grabbed my keys. My mother and I drove to the closest town, Springton, which wasn’t exactly a bustling metropolis. It probably stretched over six square blocks, and most of that was housing, not businesses or anything like that. We didn’t see much in the way of restaurants, especially not ones serving breakfast.
Eventually, we settled on a diner called The Springton Diner. Wow, were they creative.
I ordered an omelet with hashbrowns and bacon on the side. My mother got corn beef hash.
I expected her to talk my ear off during breakfast, but she didn’t. We talked a little, about boring things like whether the food was good. But mostly, she just glanced up at me from time to time, as if she kept expecting me to disappear in a whiff of smoke, and every time she discovered that I was still there, she seemed to grin in relief and gladness.
I tried to bring up the abuse and Negus again, but she shushed me, saying I shouldn’t talk about that kind of stuff in public.
So, I gave up on it.
We went to the grocery store next, which was outside of town in a strip mall on the outskirts. The strip mall also contained a Burger King and a Goodwill. My mother then proceeded to purchase the entire grocery store. I didn’t know what she was thinking, filling up the cart like that. She kept babbling about how we’d need to use the refrigerator in my Airstream.
“Wait,” I said. “There’s no electricity in the park, right?”
She put her hands on her hips. “Don’t tell me you don’t have enough batteries to keep it running with a quick daily recharge from your generator. I raised you better than that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s a waste of fuel—”
“I’ll buy you fuel,” she said, patting my arm.
So, that was how I ended up with a refrigerator jam packed with sliced cheese and ground beef and bacon and chicken breasts. There was barely any room for my beer, but there was some room. And I guessed I was glad to have the fridge on after all, because warm beer isn’t as good as cold beer.
By the time that all the groceries were in, the brother and sister who had hired my mother showed up.
They had a rented RV that looked like it had never been driven off the lot, let alone been camped in. I knew it was rented because the rental company’s sign was plastered on the side of it.
The brother had his hair pulled into a ponytail at the nape of his neck. He wore glasses and he looked like a college professor. Well, a young college professor. He shook hands with me when I offered my hand.
