by Val Crowe
I had to try anyway.
Carefully, I reached over and lifted her wrist. It was tiny. She had such delicately small wrists and hands. Her fingers were thin and long and elegant. She seemed so lovely here, lying motionless in the lights of the amusement park, displayed for us. Her skin was warm. I encircled her wrist with one hand, my fingers probing, feeling for a pulse.
Lily’s eyelids fluttered.
I was so stunned, I let out a cry and dropped her wrist.
She blinked hard. “What…?” She sat up, looking around wildly. “Molly?”
Patrick grabbed her and hugged her hard. He was crying. “Lily, oh God, Lily, I thought—”
She pushed out of his arms. “Where is she? I was following her. He had a gun.”
“Who had a gun? What?” I said.
Lily got to her feet and she started to walk. Ahead of us, there was nothing but the fence that encased the park. It was on the other side of the roller coaster, maybe thirty feet away. She shook her head. “She was going this way. She was going to get out.”
Patrick grabbed her again. “Jesus, you scared me. You scared the hell out of me.”
* * *
Lily seemed okay physically, but it took a long time to get her to respond to us normally. She seemed preoccupied with finding Molly, who she seemed to think would appear at any moment again. But Molly didn’t come back.
And after a few more moments of us trying to redirect her, and Lily attempting to get free so that she could go after the ghost of her sister, the lights in the park abruptly shut off, bathing us in darkness, as if to say, “Show’s over, folks.”
We made our way back through the park to the campers, and it was awful, walking through that dark, dead place. Everything seemed to be whispering at me. I got the distinct impression that all of the rides were coming to life when I wasn’t looking at them and then when I turned to see them, they stopped, only to get moving again when my back was turned.
And that feeling of everything being awful, of the place being rotten and horrid, it was the undercurrent to everything.
We finally got through, though, and we got Lily to sit up and have some hot chocolate, which my mother made for her. Swathed in blankets and sipping from her mug, Lily started to calm down enough to speak to us.
“I ran after her,” said Lily. “And that thing that was chasing her, it kept changing.” She looked at Patrick. “I think sometimes it might have been Dad.”
Patrick’s face seemed to get paler at this news.
“But other times,” said Lily, “it was a man with a gun, and Molly was screaming.” She turned to me. “We need to find more about this place’s history. I don’t know who that guy was the ghost of, but maybe besides the molestation, there were also murders here?”
“Honestly,” said my mother, “it would be a perfect place for a mob hit, wouldn’t it? Who goes looking for dead bodies in an abandoned amusement park?”
I shivered.
“We need to go back in,” said Lily. “Maybe try the seance under the roller coaster. We need to reach Molly again.”
“Maybe tomorrow,” I said. “When it’s light.”
“But I think it’s better in the dark,” said Lily. “Maybe if we all went back now—”
“No,” said Patrick. “There’s been enough excitement for tonight. Lily, you need to get some rest. I’m putting you to bed.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “I don’t need you to treat me like a baby.”
Patrick looked away. “When I saw you lying on the ground like that, I thought… I just can’t let anything happen to you.”
“Hey,” said Lily, her voice soft. “I’m okay. It’s okay.”
“You’re all I got left, Lily,” said Patrick. “We don’t have Mom or Dad. We don’t have Molly. It’s just you and me.”
“I know that,” she said.
“So, don’t do crazy things, okay? Please?”
She didn’t suggest we go back into the park again that night. And not too much later, both Patrick and Lily went back to their RV to turn in for the night. Leaving me alone with my mother.
“Listen,” I said. “I know you saw it.” We were sitting outside her motorhome, and we were both drinking hot chocolate as well, only our hot chocolate had a dollop of whiskey in it.
She stood up. “I’m going to go check on Oscar.”
“Mom, don’t run away from this,” I said.
She set down her mug on the picnic table and started to walk towards his tent.
I came after her. “You saw it. You have to acknowledge that. You saw the ghost turn into you. It was you, the way you looked when Negus had possessed you.”
She walked faster.
“Mom, come on. You did see it. You reacted. Now, you can’t tell me that it’s all in my head.”
“Oscar!” she called. “You doing all right?”
“Mom, please.”
She had reached Oscar’s tent. She tried to knock, but of course that didn’t work. “Oscar, I’m going to open this up. If you’re in there, just give a yell, and I can leave you here, undisturbed.”
I came to a stop, folding my arms over my chest.
My mother unzipped Oscar’s tent. She poked her head inside. Then she removed her head. She turned to me. “He’s not in there.”
I shifted my gaze to the dark amusement park. “He’s still in there.”
We were quiet.
My mother spoke, finally. “We should go after him.”
“It’s dark, and the park is huge,” I said. “We should wait until morning.”
“But if he’s still out there—”
“We won’t do him any good in there tonight,” I said.
She snapped her head over to glare at me. “You don’t like him. You wanted him gone, and now he is. So, you’re pleased about this.”
“I’m not,” I said, and I was telling the truth. I didn’t like Oscar, but I didn’t wish him any ill will or harm. I wanted him to leave, not get stuck in that place. “Look, maybe I could go in on my own and look for him?”
“No,” said my mother. “Too dangerous.” She sighed. “I guess you’re right. We should probably wait until morning. Then we can have help from Patrick and Lily.” She walked past me and headed back to her motorhome.
I trailed behind her.
She went to the door and started inside.
“Mom, I was talking to you about what you saw tonight,” I said.
She paused, hand on the doorknob. She didn’t look at me. “How do you know that I saw what you saw?” And then she opened the door and flung herself inside.
I gazed after her, feeling frustrated and annoyed. Why wouldn’t she talk to me about this? How could I make her talk?
No answers to that question swam to the forefront of my brain. So, I went back to the Airstream. I was tired, but I was also keyed up, too antsy to sleep. So, instead of crawling right into bed, I shaved. It took a while, because my chin growth was at a stage where you might fairly call it a beard. I had to hack everything back before I could get a smooth shave against my jaw.
When I was done, my face looked naked and thin in the mirror. It was odd how quickly I’d grown used to my mountain man look.
Now, I finally felt tired enough to sleep. I climbed into bed and I was asleep right away.
Hours later, I awoke with a start.
My eyes snapped open.
A shadowy figure was standing at the foot of my bed.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I sat up, heart in my throat. My first thought was that it was a ghost, maybe that man I’d seen before, the one who’d lured the kids into the park, and I felt an instinctive fear of him, a kind of crawling horror.
But the figure moved, and it was too small to be that man.
It was Lily.
I licked my lips. “Lily? You okay?”
“Come with me.” She held out her hand to me. Her movement was a little jerky, and when I looked at her face, which was half in shadow, she seem
ed to be staring through me, not looking at me.
I got up out of bed. I was only in my pajamas, a pair of pajama pants and a t-shirt. The floor of the Airstream was cold on my bare feet. “What’s going on, Lily?”
“Come with me, Deacon. I have things to show you.” She was wearing pajamas too, a button-up shirt and matching pants.
“You’re not, uh, sounding like yourself.” I put my face close to hers.
She didn’t blink.
“Maybe,” I said, “we should go and get your brother? What do you think? I think that’s a great idea. If you see Patrick, maybe you’ll snap out of this—”
“I know about Negus,” she said.
I froze. Okay, so up until now, I’d been trying to convince myself that maybe she was sleepwalking, and that she was just having a weird dream or something, and that I’d find Patrick, and he’d tell me that she’d always been a sleepwalker and laugh it off with some funny stories about things she did growing up, and then we’d wake her up for real, and she’d laugh too, and we’d all go back to bed, no harm done.
But, no, it was pretty apparent that whatever had happened to Lily when she’d been knocked out under that roller coaster, it had done something to her. And now, Lily was probably possessed.
I shouldn’t go with her, because I didn’t know what had control of her. I didn’t know if it was the ghost of Jason Wick. Maybe he was pulling her strings. And who knows what the specter might do to her.
No, clearly the right thing to do was to wake everyone up and get Lily help as soon as possible.
But…
Negus.
I had come to this place for information, and I had been thwarted at every turn. My mother wouldn’t talk to me about it, even in the face of proof that it had happened. And all the spirits in this place seemed to want to show me was stuff about that maze and Wick. Which was all very intriguing, but it wasn’t what I needed to know. It wasn’t going to help me.
Still, I couldn’t use Lily like that. I couldn’t just let her body be fodder for some foreign spirit to screw with her and move her around and…
“If you know about Negus, then just tell me here and now,” I whispered to her.
“Come with me,” she said.
I sighed. What the fuck was wrong with me? Why was I even considering this? “Can I change out of my pjs?”
She turned and went for the door. “Follow me.”
So, I guessed that was a no.
I managed to get my boots on and get out of the door. She was already halfway to the arch into the park. I hurried to catch up to her.
She walked in measured steps that were very even and precise, and she was very graceful. She almost seemed to glide over the ground. I walked next to her. She didn’t speak.
I tried to talk to her a few times.
“So, how do you know about Negus?”
Nothing.
“I know you’re not really Lily. Who’s in there? What’s your name?”
Nothing.
So, we walked in silence.
She took us to the carousel. She climbed up on it and straddled one of the horses. She gestured to the one next to it.
I found I didn’t want to get on that thing. It looked as if it had never moved at all, and it was still overgrown and strange, and it looked like an awful place to sit. “Why don’t we just sit on that bench or something?” I said.
She pointed at the horse next to her.
Damn it. I’d come this far, right?
I swallowed hard, feeling guilty, and also beginning to think that I might be getting myself into something that I wasn’t going to like very much. “Uh… would you come back with me to the campers if I asked?”
She pointed at the horse.
Yeah, I had missed the opportunity to help her. I was using her. I was a dick. And there was going to be karma for that. I just knew it. Squaring my shoulders, I started for the carousel. I went around the tiny metal fence around it to the place where the gate had once been. Now the gate was lying on the ground, choked out by growth. I walked inside the fence and climbed up on the carousel.
It swayed under my weight.
I moved slowly, using the poles as handholds when I needed to. Finally, I reached Lily, or whatever the thing was that was wearing Lily. I sat down on horse that was next to her.
Everything was still and quiet.
She slowly turned to her face to me. Her neck moved. Nothing else did, including her eyes, which stared forward the whole time. When she was facing me, she was also looking at me.
I shifted uncomfortably on the horse. “Negus,” I said. “Tell me about him.”
“Negus wanted your power,” she said.
“Yeah, I know that already,” I said.
She reached out with one hand and ran her fingers over my chest. “You are bright. Like a furnace burning in the winter. So much heat and light and movement.” She sighed breathily.
I caught her wrist. “Hey, don’t make her do that.” Ghosts had taken control of me and forced me to do things that I didn’t like. Kissing things. I had remembered it all afterward. I had been unable to stop myself. It had been the worst feeling on earth, such a violation. And now I realized that Lily was probably in there, watching all of this. “Lily, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry. I just need to know—”
“We want you,” said Lily. “Many of us. You are like nothing we have ever seen.”
Okay, this was starting to get weird. I tried to back off the horse, but she reached out and grabbed me by the knee, digging her fingers into me. “We have tried to please you. We have dispatched the one you hate, and we see the way you look at this girl. You can have her.” Lily started to unbutton her shirt.
“Stop,” I said, my voice choked.
“You will stay. You will have her. We will have you,” said Lily, continuing to unbutton her shirt. Since she was in her pajamas, she didn’t seem to have anything on underneath it. She was uncovering her bare skin, a triangle of pale skin opening between her breasts.
“Stop,” I said again, and I grabbed her hands, trying to stop her.
But she kept trying to unbutton the buttons, and my fumbling there only served to expose her. I caught sight of one of her nipples, puckered in the cool night air, and I was instantly aroused and ashamed all in the same moment.
I scrambled off the horse and climbed off the carousel. “Let her go,” I growled. “Get out of her.”
“Don’t fight,” said Lily, following me off the carousel, her shirt gaping, her breasts bouncing. “It’s so much nicer if you don’t fight.”
Clenching my teeth, I went back to her, and I began buttoning her shirt back up. I did a bad job of it. It was crooked. But she was covered, that was the important thing. The idea of what was happening, the obscenity of being complicit in what was being done to her, it made me feel like vomiting. It made me want another scalding shower like the one I’d taken after the time I’d been taken over. I was trembling.
“Don’t you want this?” said Lily.
“No,” I bit out. I grabbed her by the arm. “We’re going back. We’re going to get this thing out of you. Maybe if I use the oil I have I can dislodge it.”
“It is the other, then,” said Lily. “The one you brought with you, the wraith. The one we cast out. She is the one you want.”
“Are you talking about Mads?” I said, stopping. I grabbed Lily’s other arm, forcing her to face me. “What did you do to Mads?”
Lily put her hands on my forearms. Her mouth twisted into a semblance of a smile, but it looked plastic somehow. Her fingers crawled over my arms, over my biceps. “You will stay.” And then she seized my face with both hands and her face loomed close.
And it was happening again—
I was being sucked at, my essence being drawn through my mouth and nose and ears and eyes. The world was so blurry that I could barely make anything out. I tried to fight her.
But she held me firm.
This had happened t
o me before.
This was what Negus had done to me when he had possessed my mother. This was what had happened to me in Boonridge. The spirit of David Mosely had sucked me so dry, I had barely been able to move. Whenever this happened to me, I was helpless. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t fight. I couldn’t even yell for help.
So, I stood there, vainly trying to save myself, and the thing inside Lily continued to feed on me.
The world went blurrier and blurrier and then gray and then cold.
And then…
Dark.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I dreamed I was back in the maze. I was running through the various pathways, and all the mirrors were broken and cracked, filtering back distorted reflections of me. I was running as fast as I could. Whenever I looked behind myself, there was no one there, but I could feel a presence pursuing me. I knew someone was there.
Panic spurred me on, but my body was breaking down. There was a sharp pain in my side. My legs were screaming at me with every time my muscles lengthened or contracted. Everything hurt, and I was exhausted.
But I couldn’t stop running. I knew that if that thing—whatever it was—caught me, I would be destroyed. So, I tunneled through the maze as quickly as I could, fighting through the pain.
Then I rounded a bend and I came to a dead end. In front of me there was only a broken mirror. I couldn’t go through it.
I skidded to a stop, and—desperate—began feeling at the walls, looking for an escape somewhere. A trap door. A secret passage. A doggie door. Anything.
But there was nothing, and I could hear the thing approaching.
I flattened myself against the far wall and waited, eyes wide, breath coming in harsh gasps, sweat pouring down my skin, soaking my pajamas.
