by Val Crowe
“I’m Deacon,” I said. “Cora’s son.”
“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t know that Cora had invited her son along.”
“I won’t be in the way,” I said. “I’m doing my own thing. I swear.”
“Don’t listen to him. He’s going to be a big help,” said my mother, flying out of her motorhome to greet the newcomers. “My son is sensitive.”
I rolled my eyes. I was possibly going to have to take back the thing I’d said about my mother never trying to use my abilities to make money.
“Deacon, this is Patrick Fletcher,” said my mother.
I nodded at him. And then I turned to her. “Seriously, Mom, I’m not here to get involved in whatever you’re doing. I feel like I can find my own answers in this place.”
“Okay.” My mother shrugged. “Just stay close. You’ve got half the food in your fridge.” She laughed.
The sister came out of the RV now. She was younger than her brother. She wore glasses too—cat-eye style. She wore her hair in two knots on either side of her head. She wore a shirt that had a picture of Spock on the front. It said, Illogical in big yellow letters.
She grinned at me. “Hi, I’m Lily.”
“Deacon,” I said. “Big Star Trek fan?”
“Oh, the biggest,” she said. “In my spare time, I write Star Trek fanfic. Mostly Next Gen stuff, but sometimes I dip out into other casts of characters. I’m such a sucker for the Riker/Troi stuff.”
“Uh huh,” I nodded. She had lost me.
She laughed, cocking her head. “You’re, um, not a big Star Trek fan.”
“I’m not not a fan,” I said. When I was a kid, in fact, I used to watch Star Trek reruns, but I had to admit that I got the various different shows confused. I was pretty sure I’d mostly watched Voyager, but maybe I had seen some of The Next Generation too? Or what was the one on the space station? I was probably most familiar with the original series, though. I remembered seeing reruns of it in the afternoons on some channel or other. But I hadn’t watched Star Trek of any kind since I was about ten.
“Right,” she laughed, offering me her hand. “Don’t worry. Patrick doesn’t get my obsession either. He likes Battlestar.”
Patrick shrugged at me. “Utterly superior show.”
“It’s completely not fair to compare them,” said Lily. “Besides, there would be no Battlestar without Star Trek. It’s like trying to compare A Song of Ice and Fire to LOTR.”
Patrick spread his hands. “I’m not denying that. But just because something comes first doesn’t mean it’s automatically better.”
“Um… actually, it kind of does,” said Lily. She eyed me. “I think my brother and I are going to be arguing the whole trip. He already claimed the queen bed in there because he said he was taller than I was.”
“I am taller,” said Patrick. “And bigger. You’re tiny. You’ll be fine on one of the twin bunks.”
Damn it, I liked them. Or maybe I just liked her. I didn’t like the idea of them getting suckered by my mother.
“Listen,” I said to Lily, “are you sure you want to go into this park with my mother? I feel like I should tell you that the things she’s promised you are—”
“Deacon,” said my mother, eyes wide.
“What?” said Lily. “The things she’s promised us are what?”
“Deacon, do you believe in ghosts?” asked my mother.
“You know I do,” I said.
“Then I don’t see what there is to talk about,” said my mom. “If Patrick’s and Lily’s sister is in there, we’ll find her.”
“And find out where she stashed that jewelry of our mother’s,” said Patrick.
“And that,” said my mother.
I raised my eyebrows at her. What the hell? Why would she claim she could find that out?
* * *
Oscar and I opened up the gate that was closed over the road into the park. It wasn’t locked or anything. It was a tall chainlink fence, and the gate was closed but not locked. I wasn’t sure why the guy who owned this place wouldn’t bother with a lock. Maybe he’d had one and someone had taken it off with bolt cutters or something and the guy had never bothered to replace it. Or maybe he simply didn’t care about the park at all, like my mother had suggested.
Once the gate was open, we all drove our campers into the place.
Well, Oscar didn’t have a camper. He was going to pitch a tent, he said. Wasn’t the least bit afraid of roughing it for a few days. Besides, he felt he’d be closer to the phenomena in the park if he only had a bit of nylon between him and the outside.
I might have liked Lily and felt a little bad for Patrick, but I found that I really disliked Oscar, and I wasn’t exactly sure why. It was partly because I knew he was a phony, like my mom. He was taking advantage of Lily and Patrick, who had lost someone. Oscar was exploiting their grief to make a podcast. I had to admit that I didn’t listen to podcasts myself, so I wasn’t sure if he was making money doing this, but whether it was for profit or not, it was still exploitation. That made him kind of a dick in my book. Also, I don’t know. He rubbed me the wrong way.
Once we got through, we shut the gate after ourselves, and an overgrown parking lot spread out in front of us. The asphalt was cracked and weeds were growing up through the breaks in the blacktop. Tall black lamp posts jutted up in one long line down the center of the lot. But the lights at the tops were busted out and shattered.
Beyond the parking lot, the amusement park sprawled.
It had once been surrounded by a smaller, inner fence, but that had come down in several places, and more growth choked it out in others.
A big sign over the entrance still read in faded letters, Welcome to Point Oakes Park. Beneath it was a brick walkway that was similarly overgrown. It turned around a bend and disappeared behind the overgrown inner fence.
I found myself peering eagerly around that bend, wanting to go running for it, to go skipping into the place. I couldn’t understand it, but the closer we got, the more a sense of enthusiasm seemed to attach to me. I was intrigued by this old place. It was, as Wade had said, neat.
As I looked at the place, I could almost imagine what it might have looked like back in its heyday. Then, the parking lot would have been teeming with glittering cars, and families would have been rushing underneath that arch into the park, which would have been lit up and moving, all of the rides full of people screaming and whooping. It would have been a place of joy and excitement.
Even now, though that excitement had been muted and hidden, I could still sense it underneath everything.
We were here, finally. We could go in.
I couldn’t wait.
We parked the campers near the archway. I got out right away and hurried forward to that archway. I felt a lightness in my step. I was excited.
“Deacon, wait!” my mother called after me.
But I didn’t.
I rushed through the arch, over that brick walkway and around the bend so that I could see everything.
Inside, there was a big open square, flanked by benches and fenced off areas that had obviously once been landscaped, but were now nothing more than snarled undergrowth. In the distance were the rides, choked out by vines and rust.
I came to a stop right in front of a pendulum ride. It was half rusted out, and the way that the rust was overtaking the structure, breaking it down, it suddenly seemed as though it was… diseased.
I coughed, taking a step back, feeling uneasiness creep up my arms and the back of my spine. Everything here was diseased, wasn’t it? This was a good place that had been infected by something rotten. Like rot, it had a sickly sweet smell and a nasty finish.
The whole park put me in the mind of a piece of hard candy that had fallen in the dirt. The muck stuck to it, covering all the sweetness beneath.
I started to back up, to try to get out of there, but then I saw the others coming into the park, and they all had that same eager look on their faces that I�
�d had.
Lily waved at me. “It’s nifty, huh?”
I nodded, putting my hands in my pockets. “Yeah. Nifty.”
She broke away from the others to catch up to me. She looked around appraisingly. “I mean, it’s obviously all messed up now, but can you imagine what it was like back when it was open?”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I said.
She turned in a circle. “I used to love amusement parks when I was a kid. We lived near Busch Gardens, and one summer I bargained away all my Christmas presents that winter for a season pass in the summer. I went every weekend. It was amazing.”
I hadn’t gone to amusement parks too often as a kid. After all, my mother hadn’t had a lot of money. Scamming people about ghosts doesn’t exactly make a person wealthy. It had been a special treat to be able to go to a place like this. I’d been maybe twice as a kid, and then not to one again until senior year, when it was a big class trip. “Yeah, amusement parks are cool. You like the rides?”
“I do.” She nodded. “Yeah, it’s fun to do scary things when you know you’re actually safe, you know?”
“Right,” I said.
“And also, the whole carnival atmosphere. The games and the lights and the food. It’s just fun.” She tapped her chin. “But this place… none of that is here anymore. Even though you can almost sense it underneath, like it’s trying to break free again, to be whatever it used to be. Still, it’s past its expiration date. I don’t know why it’s still so cool.”
I didn’t answer.
Everyone else caught up.
Oscar was beaming. “I went all over the other night. I feel like there might be some activity in the center of the park. There’s a mirror maze there, and I got a bit of a vibe from it.”
A vibe, huh? I wanted to roll my eyes, but I managed to keep myself in check.
“What about over there?” said Lily, pointing. “That roller coaster? Can we check that out?” She turned to look at Patrick. “I feel like Molly might have gone to see that.”
“Maybe,” said Patrick, and now he took the lead, heading toward the roller coaster, which twisted through the air like a metal serpent.
Lily went after him and the rest of us trailed behind. After a minute, I caught up with Lily. I didn’t want to pry, but I had to admit that I was curious. “So, your sister came to this park because she was checking it out? Like how people go and explore abandoned asylums?”
“Could be,” said Lily, glancing at me. “Honestly, we don’t know. We think she came here, or the police thought so, anyway. Right after Molly went missing, they looked into her search history on her computer, and she had been looking this place up, and she’d pulled up directions to drive here. They found her car, along with her cell phone, about a half a mile down the road from here. Also, when we were working with Oscar, he said that this place had the most vibrations or something.”
I glanced over my shoulder at him. “He said that?” Because the guy was probably simply angling to try to get the best podcast he could. And a haunted amusement park was a pretty cool setting. Oscar didn’t care about actually finding her sister or figuring out what happened to her. Of course, with the other evidence, it did seem likely that Molly had come here.
“It’s weird, though,” Lily continued. “Because she came alone, and she didn’t tell anyone she was coming. If she was just coming for a fun exploration, then why not bring someone along? Why the secrecy?”
“So, you think there was some other reason she came?”
“Had to be,” said Lily. “But I have no idea what it could have been. That’s what we’re hoping to find out.” She shrugged. “Well, that’s what I’m hoping to find out. Patrick, he’s just focused on the money. The jewels that are missing—my mother’s—they’re worth a good deal.”
We had arrived at the roller coaster. It loomed over head, its twisting tracks rusting, covered in moss and vines.
Patrick was surveying the thing, a look of wariness on his face. “This place is creepy, all right. I’m sure Oscar will have a field day.”
“It’s full of supernatural energy,” spoke up Oscar, who was right behind us. Man, I hoped he hadn’t been listening to what Lily and I had been saying. Of course, I hadn’t called him a hack out loud or anything. Maybe it was fine.
“Do you think so, Mrs. Garrison?” said Lily, looking at my mom.
“Call me Cora,” said my mother.
“Do you sense anything about my sister?” said Patrick.
My mother turned to look at me.
I shook my head. I had a general feeling of unease here, but I hadn’t seen anything yet. Didn’t mean that there was nothing here. I was pretty sure there was, after all. It had called to me. Maybe the ghosts were being coy.
“Let’s keep going,” said my mother. “Show us that maze you’ve been talking about Oscar.” She smiled at him. Oh, ugh. Was my mother flirting with Oscar? Gross. Another reason I didn’t like the guy.
I shouldn’t begrudge my mother finding someone, I suppose. It wasn’t as though I had an attachment to her being with my father or anything. I had never really known the guy. He hadn’t been around while I was growing up. So, overall, it should be no big deal for my mother to have a thing with a guy. And yeah, I’d be fine with it if she found someone that wasn’t a big douche, like Oscar seemed to be.
But Oscar had taken the lead now, and we were taking off through the park toward this mirror maze.
We walked past bumper cars and some ride called the Caterpillar. Everything was damaged and faded.
Eventually, we reached the mirror maze.
It was about three stories high, and it stood directly in the center of the park. It had a sign in front of it, rust going down it in long lines, but still readable. Slappy Happy’s Mirror Maze.
Slappy Happy was apparently a clown. One of those white-faced, red-nosed guys with a big smile painted on his face. He wore a polka dot costume with baggy sleeves and legs, at least that’s how he was depicted on the sign. He was dancing and presenting the words.
The entrance to the maze was Slappy’s mouth. His face was over top of that—wide eyes and a big ball nose, and then a red mouth stretched impossibly high and wide to allow people to walk inside over his long tongue.
Inside, I could see sets of mirrors, some broken.
The place didn’t look inviting. It looked demented.
The second I saw it, I shied away from it. Something about that place was wrong. If there was a source of the rot here, that was the source. As much as I didn’t like Oscar, he was right. This place vibrated. It buzzed, humming as if it knew a secret that it wasn’t ready to share. Not unless I came inside.
I felt cold.
The others went closer to the maze, talking about it. I hung back.
“Probably dangerous inside,” said my mother, peering into Slappy’s mouth. “Looks like there’s a lot of broken glass.”
I had a sudden thought that Slappy’s mouth might close on her, swallowing her into that awful red mouth.
I almost called out to her, but I choked it down, feeling ridiculous.
“Doesn’t seem structurally sound, no,” said Oscar. “I didn’t go in last night, but if we think it will be important, then obviously, we’ll need to see what happens if we enter.”
I licked my lips. I wasn’t sure that anyone should go inside that place.
“Do you sense anything that has to do with Molly?” said Lily.
“I think this has got to be tied to Molly’s disappearance,” said Oscar. “If something in this park harmed her, it came from here.” He patted Slappy’s tongue.
I felt ill.
“Something like… something paranormal,” said Patrick. “Is that what we think happened?” He furrowed his brow.
“We don’t know what happened,” said Lily. “That’s what we’re here to find out.”
I was glad when we left that place behind.
We walked around the rest of park in a wide arc
, following the trails that weren’t overgrown to look at various other defunct rides and attractions. There was an amphitheater that was cut into a hill, rows of seating looking down on a stage that had trees growing up out of the rotted wood. There was a free-fall tower and a set of towering spiral slides. There was a whole section of kiddie rides, now lost in a tangle of vines and moss.
Eventually, we came around to a ride called The Tunnel of Love. It looked as though it had been a water ride, where couples had boarded small, gondola-like, floating cars that went into a tunnel.
No one else seemed to pay it much mind, but I found myself ambling over to it when I saw it. It seemed to pull at me in a way that I couldn’t quite explain. I didn’t feel frightened by it, but only a bit bemused. I stopped at the place where the line for the ride would have queued up.
Faintly, in the distance, I heard music playing. The Cure, I thought. “Lovesong.”
But then, the whisper of a small child, echoing from the darkness of the tunnel.
“Stop it!” A sob.
I was chilled again. Shaking it off, I hurried to catch up to the others.
CHAPTER THREE
Once we had explored the park thoroughly, we were all tired and hungry, but luckily, my mother had purchased the entire grocery store. She had a grill that she fired up outside her motorhome, and she started making a veritable feast. Sausages and peppers and grilled potatoes. She had tables in the motorhome too, and I helped set that up.
Soon, we were all breaking out the alcohol we’d brought. Everyone was sharing wine and beer and gin and tonics—my mother’s contribution. We sat under the awning in the fading light, under the shadow of the amusement park, and everything was good.
I remember looking out as the shadows stole over the park, and thinking it was the most horrible place that I had ever seen. Why had I been so drawn to it earlier? How could anyone be drawn to something like that? I couldn’t stand the place. It slithered and crawled. It felt like something live that prodded at the edge of my consciousness. I hated it.
