by Val Crowe
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I got lost. I think the park got me lost. It’s doing something to you now.” She brushed my hair off my forehead.
I peered at her.
“I was trying to find you,” she said. “I could see before, when we spoke, that something was wrong. I should have tried harder then to get you to leave.”
Why had I done these things? For information. For Negus. “I need to know,” I murmured.
“I know you do,” she said. She held out her hand to me.
I grasped it.
I didn’t think I would have the energy to stand, but somehow I found it.
Then, once I was standing, I was sure that I wouldn’t have the energy to walk. It felt as if my entire body had been sapped of all my vitality. My muscles cried out at me as I asked them to move.
But soon, my mother and I were walking, hand in hand through the park.
I thought she would take me back to the camp, and that we would leave, drive out of that place.
But instead, she led me to the center of the park, where the maze was standing, the clown’s face taunting us, beckoning us.
My mother and I climbed over the clown’s tongue and into the gloom inside.
It still smelled awful. It was only yesterday that Oscar had been removed from the place. It was like going into the depths of some ancient, awful dungeon, but we knew we had to face it.
We turned a bend.
And stepped into the interior of my mother’s motorhome.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
It wasn’t the way that it looked now, but the way that it had looked years ago, when I was a small boy. My mother and I stood at the edge of the scene, but my mother was already there—looking younger, like she had when I was a kid. We watched her.
As I looked around, I realized that it was the night that my mother had been possessed by Negus. I could see that the table was full of the same strange bottles and weird-smelling herbs that had been lying out. And there was a piece of paper too, scrawled in strange, archaic symbols.
My mother sat at the table, her head bowed in concentration as she mixed together things from the bottles. She crushed some of the herbs in her fist and sprinkled it into the bowl she was using. She kept consulting the piece of paper before doing anything else.
Finally, she pricked her finger with a needle and squeezed blood into the bowl.
She licked her lips, and then she whispered some words that I didn’t understand. She appeared to be reading them off of the paper. When she was done, she picked up the bowl and she brought it to her lips.
I cringed. I could smell that concoction she’d created there, and it didn’t smell good.
Or maybe it was the latent smell in the maze.
Were we still in the maze?
Next to me, my mother let go of my hand and lunged for her younger self. “Don’t!” she cried.
Of course, she couldn’t stop what had already happened. She went right through her younger self, right through the table, as if it were all nothing but a hologram.
I held out my hand to her.
She came back to me and held my hand.
And together we watched as my mother, in the past, drank every drop of what was in that bowl.
Then, she stood up from the table and seemed to have trouble keeping her balance. She clutched her stomach, as though she was in pain. She fell down on her hands and knees, knocking a few things off the table.
And then her spine rippled. Her face twisted.
Her head went backwards. She arched her back. And something was coming for her.
It was inky greenish black, and it was like a rushing fluid that came through the air. It was seeping in the windows and under the crack of the door. It was coming through the vent in the roof.
It flowed through the air to my mother. When it touched her, it sizzled.
She screamed.
The liquid crawled over her skin, slithering over her like a live thing. It forced its way into her mouth, into her nostrils. It pried open her eyelids and flowed in there.
All the while, she screamed and clawed at herself and tried to stop it.
But she couldn’t stop it.
In a moment, it was done.
My mother lay on the floor of her motorhome like a broken doll.
It was quiet.
Several long moments passed.
And then my mother coughed.
She convulsed and turned over, moving like something strange—like an animal trapped inside a human’s skin. Everything that she did seemed unnatural and painful.
She rolled her head on her shoulders. Too much of the whites of her eyes were showing.
She raked her nails through her hair, over her face.
She tugged at her clothes.
It was as though she was uncomfortable in her own skin.
She let out a harsh sound—maybe it was a word, maybe it was a moan.
And then she climbed back up to the table and sat down. She started to dig her fingers into the surface of the table. One of her nails snapped. It bled. She didn’t react. She just kept digging her nails in.
The door opened. I came in. I looked at myself, and I was so small. So young. So helpless. “Mom?” I said.
She raised her head and looked at me through her stringy black hair, her head moving in tiny, ticking motions, like a curious bird.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“You,” she said, standing up from the table. “Come here, you little shit.”
* * *
We were back in the maze now, and my mother was on her knees, sobbing and hugging herself. She was saying something, but I couldn’t make out what it was. I knelt down to look at her. I took her by the shoulders. But she was crying too much.
So, I just folded her into my arms and I held onto her.
It was odd. I’d never held her like this, and it felt like everything was reversed. I was bigger than she was now, and she seemed frail and confused. As if she was the child and I was the parent. At the least, she needed comfort.
And I was giving it to her, but I still didn’t understand.
It had looked to me like she had invited Negus in. She had done it on purpose? But that made things bad again. It wasn’t as bad as when I thought it was her—that Negus was her true face and that everything else was simply her pretending to be a good person. But it was bad, because… because…
I pulled back. “Mom?” I said softly.
She was still crying.
I didn’t have the energy to crouch like this. I still felt incredibly drained.
I sat down on the dirty floor in the maze. Sitting down seemed to remind my body that I was in bad shape. For a moment, my head lulled forward, and I felt as though I was floating.
“Deacon!” My mother shook me.
I blinked hard. I had fallen asleep for a minute there. Like I had narcolepsy or something. Yeah, I was not okay.
“They did something to you,” she said. “The things in this park.”
“They can feed off of me,” I said. “Just like Negus did. Just like… like you did when you were—”
“It wasn’t me!” Her voice was shrill. She got to her feet and she sank both of her hands into her hair. She let out a noisy sob.
I tried to get up. Couldn’t. Rested a moment. Tried again. Managed it, clutching the wall.
“Let’s get out of this place,” she said.
I had to lean on her to get out. It was laborious work. When we made it out of the maze, my mother led me over to a creaky-looking bench. I wasn’t sure the bloated, splitting wood would hold my weight, but I sat down on it anyway. It groaned but didn’t give way.
My mother perched next to me. “I didn’t know it would be like that.”
“What are you talking about?” I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.
“…help you.”
I blinked, raising my head. “What? Did you say something?”
“Deacon, what did they do to you
?”
I groaned. “I don’t really know. I think…” I rubbed my face. And it all became clear. “They tricked me,” I breathed.
“The spirits?”
I nodded. “They plucked the name of Negus out of my head, just like they plucked that tableau they just showed us out of our past.” I pointed at the maze. “They don’t know anything. There are no answers for me here. They used it to lure me into their influence so that they could drain me. And the weaker I got, the more they filled it in. They made it so that I couldn’t feel any pain.” I didn’t totally understand it. It wasn’t like possession. With possession, something had been controlling my actions even though I had tried to fight it.
At least, it had been that way once, when something had taken control of my body and made me go walking in the woods.
But another time, when I’d been in the top of Ridinger Hall with Rylan, I hadn’t fought. It had been like watching myself do horrible things.
This was closer to that, but it was different. It was worse, even worse, because they’d left a sliver of me behind to reason it all out. They had taken things I wanted and twisted them, and they had influenced me to behave in ways I wouldn’t, but it had all felt like I was making my own decisions. It was insidious. It was bad, because it made me question myself. Was there some part of me who could take an ax to a person? Was that buried in the recesses of my psyche? Had they simply sorted through everything and pushed that to the front?
No. It was them. It was this place. This place was awful. It had absorbed bad, bad energy. Molestation and murder. And now it was a cesspool of malevolence. It twisted me for power, and it was hungry.
We needed to get out of here now.
Every moment I stayed in this place made it stronger.
And every moment made me weaker.
“Deacon.” My mother took both of my hands. “I didn’t know that it would take control of me and hurt you. It wasn’t supposed to do that.”
“It? You mean Negus?”
“It didn’t give a name,” she said. “There was a name, though, a girl…” She shook her head. “But that’s not important. I was looking for some way to help you. Some way to get that necklace out of you.” She tapped my collar bone. “To make it so you didn’t see ghosts. I was trying to help. I told you I would, don’t you remember? You were lying in that hospital bed and the doctors were acting like we were both insane, and you were so small and so scared, and I promised you that I would fix it.”
Mommy will fix it. I heard her voice echoing over the decades.
“And I would have done anything,” she said. “Anything at all to fix it. So, when I got someone to give me that… that spell and potion and incantation, they told me it was dangerous, but I didn’t care. Because I thought that the danger would be to me.” She touched her chest. “I didn’t know it would use me to hurt you.” Her voice broke.
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t say anything. I grabbed her hand.
“I don’t know what happened. I was supposed to make contact with some sort of spirit, someone who could block you from seeing anything again. The name was in the incantation. But I guess something else heard. I opened myself up to the spiritual realm, and something else came inside me.” She grimaced. “You don’t know how sorry I am.”
“But… you never once apologized.” I didn’t mean for my voice to sound the way it did, but it came out bitter.
“I know.” She stood up. She looked out over my head, her gaze unfocused. “Like I said, I think I blocked it out. I think I did it by sheer force of will. Whenever the memories of it came back up—and they are blurry and confusing—I pushed them away and told myself it was a bad dream.”
My jaw twitched. “Why would you do that?”
“I don’t know.” She still wouldn’t look at me. “Maybe I thought that if I could forget it, I could force you to forget it. Or maybe I thought that if I didn’t face it, it wouldn’t be real. Or maybe I just couldn’t believe it. Maybe there was no way to fully understand what I had let happen to my little boy, to the most important person in the universe, without breaking my own mind.” She spat out the words.
“Your mind doesn’t seem broken now.”
Nothing from her.
Nothing from me either.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry for what I did to you. What I invited into our lives. And I’m sorry for the fact that it scared me so badly that I never tried again to help you. That you have had to live out your life connected to the spirit realm. And that I stopped trusting myself to be any good for you. When you ran away when you were sixteen, I could have tried harder to bring you home.”
“We never had a home, Mom,” I told my palms. “We had that damned motorhome, and you pulled up stakes every three weeks.”
“I could have tried to get you back, to keep you with me,” she said. “But I didn’t. Because something told me that you were probably better off without me. I knew that I had… damaged you. So, I let you go. I told myself it was okay because I sent you money and I made sure you were all right. But I have never forgiven myself for any of it.” A long, long silence. “I’m so desperately sorry.”
I tried to stand up from the bench. I failed. I grunted. “We need to get out of here.”
She looked at me, and her lower lip was trembling.
Oh, whatever. She could cry about all this. But I was the one who… I gritted my teeth and concentrated, and I managed to get up off the bench.
The world tilted sideways.
And surged up to meet me.
With a thud, I collided with the ground. Pain radiated through me. The pain was the only thing keeping me awake. More than anything, all I wanted right now was to sleep.
“Deacon?” My mother’s face loomed over me, too big.
I blinked, trying to focus. “Help me up,” I managed.
She tried.
We got up together, but I could tell that she couldn’t support my weight, and I couldn’t support it either. I ended up toppling over again.
And when I did, I saw something approaching out of the corner of my eye. It was my mother—my younger, possessed mother, her stringy dark hair in her face, her fingernails bleeding, blinking at me like a hungry lizard as she approached. She was crawling toward me.
My real mother saw her, and she shrieked. She tried to kick the thing away.
Her foot went right through the wraith’s head.
The wraith-mother climbed onto me, and put its face against mine. It began to feed.
My mother grabbed me under the armpits and dragged me away, dislodging me from the thing.
My head was pulsing with excruciating pain.
And then—blissfully—everything faded into blackness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I woke up and I was on a chair outside my mother’s motorhome. It was growing dark.
I could see the Airstream, but not Patrick’s and Lily’s RV. It was empty where they used to be. And everything was at a strange angle, because I didn’t seem to be able to move my head.
My mother’s face came into my vision. She looked tired. Her hair was sweaty and pasted to her forehead. Her face was red. “You’re awake?”
“You dragged me all the way back here?” My voice was barely audible.
“It doesn’t seem to be able to stay on if you aren’t still,” she said. She pointed at the empty space where Patrick’s and Lily’s RV had been. “Patrick and Lily must have left. Who can blame them, after everything? I certainly can’t. But the gate is still locked. I don’t know how. It’s obvious that they cut open the chain to get out. The piece of chain is lying on the ground up there. But the lock is just fastened to a different link of the chain. And the bolt cutters aren’t anywhere to be found. I looked.”
I tried to lift my head. I couldn’t. “They don’t want to let me go. They want to drain every last drop of me.”
“Why?” said my mother. “What is it about you?”
“I don’t
know,” I said. “Apparently, I’m ghost catnip.”
Her hands fluttered over her lips. “This is my fault.”
“It’s probably mine,” I muttered. “For years, I ignored ghosts as much as I could, and I used that oil you gave me to get rid of them when they got attached, and I never got involved. I didn’t go into haunted places. Now, the minute I do, all hell breaks loose.”
“No, you can’t blame yourself,” she said. “Stop it, this instant.”
“It’s really not doing either of us any good to play the blame game,” I said. “We need to focus on getting out.”
“You’re right, you’re right.” She nodded. “Well… the police have to come back at some point, right?”
“In theory,” I said.
“But maybe that will be too late,” she said. “We can’t count on that. We need to find the bolt cutters.” She took a deep breath. “I could go and look. But if I leave you here all by yourself, I’m afraid they’ll get at you, and I’m afraid…” Her face twisted. “I don’t know how much more you can take.”
I wasn’t sure either. I felt practically dead. I didn’t have the strength to lift my head, let alone stand up. I eyed the fence as best as I could from this position. It was a typical chain-link fence. It wasn’t a fortress. My mother’s motorhome was pretty strong. I had seen vehicles in movies take fences like that. “How about we load up and rush the fence?” I said.
“What?” she said.
“Drive your motorhome into it,” I said. “We can probably topple it. You think?”
She nodded. “Great idea.” She tried to help me stand up. That wasn’t happening. So, she dragged me inside. I did my best to help out as much as I could, which wasn’t really very much.
She set me down at the table in the kitchen and she disappeared into the motorhome’s cockpit.
Sprawled out over the table, I immediately fell asleep.
* * *
“Deacon.” My mother was shaking me.
I blinked hard. “Did we make it?”
“I can’t find the keys,” she said.
I chuckled to myself. “Of course not. They wouldn’t make it that easy, would they?” I tried to feel in my own pocket, where I usually kept the keys to my truck. But I had trouble moving my arms, so I made my mother do it. Of course, my keys weren’t there either.
