Travis stands up before she gets close enough to hand him the bag. He clamps his ball cap over his nose with one hand and waves a fist jingling of keys with the other.
“Stop your crazy talk and get that damn thing away from me. I’m not playing anymore. Go to the car. If we weren’t kin I’d say to hell with ya and leave right now.”
Ashlyn takes a step back, just enough to hold Travis fully in view as she continues.
“I wore a rodent necklace. Like the legends say. Bound their tails and paws together. It was hard. They squirm so much, like they know what’s coming. Biting, shrieking, clawing my neck with their back legs. I thought I might faint. When he leaned in close I wish I had. I didn’t move a muscle, though. Not until he chewed the last screaming field mouse from my neck. Then I told him what I wanted. What Mom had always wanted. I didn’t know what he would do. Not until I saw it happen.”
Travis steps forward shoving the lumpy bag against Ashlynn with enough force to send her stumbling. His hand recoils from the strike as if snake-bit, but not before the sack smooshes inward like a pillow case holding a rotted turkey.
Ashlynn peers at him through her ragged bangs as he races for the door.
“All those things in life we can’t swallow, they have to be spit out before the change can happen. The Owl Builder made her vomit up the bones that weighed her down. This town had left an awful lot stuck in her craw. We have to bury mom’s pellet, Travis. You said you wanted to help.”
Travis is not listening. He’s running full bore into the moonlit night. He doesn’t believe her. He doesn’t believe Maebeth was anything more than a gold digger who finally got her comeuppance. Whether her daughter did it or some ghost from the past is something he can puzzle out on the ride home.
A swift thump sounds loudly from the front yard, a noise like a dirty rug being beat against a tree. Ashlynn hears the telltale shriek that follows and knows the owl has snatched her prey. Her wings are so quiet. They never hear her coming. Ashlynn reaches the door in time to see the massive owl swoop upward towards the moon. The body of a young man hangs limply from her great talons. For a fleeting second she sees the creature swivel its downy head and regards her kindly with ghostly blue eyes. Husky Blue.
The moment is broken by a metallic glint flickering like a lightning bug from the darkness of the yard. Keys. Ashlynn lifts them up to eye level, staring through the keyring at the Firebird parked a short distance away. She smiles, knowing the time has come for her to fly this place as well. A heavy price, perhaps, but she’ll swallow the costs.
She’ll miss Travis, of course. He may have been wrong about a number of things but he got two absolutely right; Maebeth doesn’t like him much, and she is a man-eater.
BIOGRAPHY: D. Morgan Ballmer lives in a small town just outside of Seattle. His previous work has appeared in Three-Lobed Burning Eye Magazine and the Not Your Average Monster Anthology. Upcoming releases include stories in the Silent Screams anthology and on the Pseudopod.
TRAGEDY PARK
Chris Pearce
Everybody who’s heard of Crimson Sea Water Park has heard the stories about it; it’s part of the fun of going there. Everyone knows, for example, about the time they tested a new ride by having a teenage employee go down it and he came out the other end with a broken neck—just nobody knows which ride it was, exactly. That is supposed to be part of the fun, I guess.
There’s nothing actually dangerous at a waterpark—it’s all just for fun.
There had been deaths at the park—you can’t run a place for thirty years and have a completely clean record, I guess, but when the papers had tried to nickname it “Tragedy Park” it hadn’t really stuck and people had kept on lining up to ride the rides anyways.
I knew all the stories, obviously, because I find that sort of thing fascinating—hence explaining why I was down to so few friends. Pretty much just one to be exact, Jason. And with the last day of summer fast approaching we had decided to spend the day at the park.
Well, Jason had decided and asked me and Lisa to come, and the next thing I knew my mom was dropping me off at the park. I made her leave me at the other end of the parking lot because Jason already had a learner’s permit and I didn’t want him to see me getting driven around by my mother.
I was only thirteen, the youngest in our group of friends, so I still had to wear a wristband. It was only a few weeks away from my birthday so my plan had been that I would lie and say I was fourteen so I wouldn’t have to, but when we got to the ticket booth I instinctively held out my hand and before I could pull it back I already had the loop of paper firmly wrapped around my wrist. I immediately tucked my right hand into my pocket—a pretty meaningless gesture since you could still see it and I wasn’t going to be able to keep my hand buried in my pocket for the whole time we were at the park.
“I’m almost fourteen. I shouldn’t have to wear one,” I said to Jason as we headed to the changing room.
“I hear the reason they make you wear one is because of all the kidnappings,” he said. “Back a few years ago, there were like five kids who got abducted, but nobody could prove that it happened at the park, so they started making everybody who was underage wear wristbands so you couldn’t leave with anybody you didn’t come in with.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
“You never believe anything,” he said, giving me a shove before disappearing into one of the shower stalls to change. I walked along the row of stalls, looking for one that was open but the curtains were closed on every single one. I thought about trying to peek in one to see if anybody was in it but that seemed like a bad idea. I could hear the showers running in most of them, so I just stood there waiting for Jason to finish so I could use his stall.
It seemed like pretty much everybody, including Jason, had decided to take their sweet time that day, and I wasn’t the only one waiting for a stall to open up. Somebody walked in soon after Jason disappeared into the shower; I glanced over at them, trying to not make it obvious I was looking because waiting here was already making me so nervous. He glanced over at the shower stalls and when he realized they were all occupied he started to change right there, without missing a beat. I must’ve made a noise or something because he finally looked over at me—he hadn’t seemed to have noticed me when he first came in.
“What are you doing?” he said as he put on his bathing suit. It was one of the lifeguards—I could tell by the red bathing suit he wore, the same as every lifeguard everywhere. He was older than me—he was just a teenager, but seventeen still seemed like it was an eternity away.
He had a tattoo on his arm, which seemed kind of weird. I thought you had to be an adult before they let you get tattoos. I couldn’t exactly make out what it was—at first I thought it was an octopus because I had spotted what looked like a tentacle on the side of his arm but I couldn’t see what it connected to. I tried to follow it with my eyes but it traced down his arm and the side of his chest and I couldn’t tell where it went from there.
“Hey, you there?” he said, smiling at me. There was something about his eyes—something about the way he was looking at me—I couldn’t explain it, it made me shiver. “What are you doing?”
“I’m waiting for a shower,” I said, glancing over at him, squirming in the chair.
“They’re all pretty much open,” he said, nodding towards them. That didn’t make any sense—I knew they were all full—at least I had thought I did but now that I looked over there I realized they were all empty, except for the one that Jason had gone into. I looked over to say something to the lifeguard, but he was already gone, and Jason was stepping out of his stall.
“Slowpoke,” he said, grinning. Everything was always a competition with him, which I was pretty much okay with; it meant that he would actually listen to me when I started talking about something morbid like death rates at theme parks, even if it was only because he was trying to think of a way to top me—most people would just tune me out.
So then we headed out to look for Lisa. Jason chattered away about how he was going to try out for the basketball team and he was sure that he’d make it this time, and he asked me if I was going to try out even though he knew the answer was no.
Jason asked me to let him and Lisa go down the Vertical Leap together; I pretended to be a little miffed at them but honestly I was relieved; I hated that slide, I hated how it felt like you were going to go flying off the inner tube, I hated how fast it went, I hated the feeling in my stomach that I got going down it. I headed off to the Lazy River to wait for them to be done, ignoring the twinge of anger perking inside me as I figured out why he had asked to go on the ride with just Lisa, and why he had probably asked me here in the first place. If he had needed cover for a date he could’ve just told me and I would’ve gone along with it but I would’ve liked to have known what I was being involved in.
After about fifteen minutes or so I figured that Jason and Lisa had enough alone time together and since I had been invited I didn’t want to just spend the whole day floating on a raft, looking up at the sun and thinking vaguely resentful thoughts about my last friend. I got off of the river and started to look for them. The Vertical Leap was grouped with a bunch of other slides—so there were always a bunch of people there, which made finding Jason and Lisa harder than it should’ve been.
I headed towards the line, trying to pick them out of the crowd, but I couldn’t see them. They were either on the stairs or at the pool at the end of the slide. I backed up, looking up the stairs to see if I could spot them; at the top of the slide I saw a middle aged woman in a black bathing suit, a lanky teenager, and a little girl who looked like she probably should’ve had a parent with her but didn’t. I looked to the end of the slide, waiting for each of them to come out: first the woman, and then the girl, and then someone I hadn’t seen at the top of the slide, and then another, and another. I looked back up, wondering where the teenager had gone; I couldn’t see him anywhere in the line or even near the ride. I was just about to go to the stairs to try and look for him when I felt Lisa tugging at my arm.
“C’mon Finn,” she said.
“What,” I said as she dragged me along the sidewalk. I wished that Jason hadn’t invited her, when he called me he hadn’t said anything about her, just that it was going to be with some friends. “Where’s Jason?”
“You’ll see,” she said, dragging me along to the far end of the park—to one ride that towered above all of the others, a long twisting mix of black plastic and wooden scaffolding, the sort of ride that everybody always just had to go down because you’re chicken if you don’t, the sort of ride that had taken me almost fourteen years to finally get to where I was willing to consider even going down:
The Black Vortex.
It was the biggest slide in the whole park, and I had heard that it was the biggest water slide in the whole state, and not a single person had ever gone down it. They had been advertising it all year long, or at least it seemed like it, on TV and in the newspapers. Come down to Crimson Sea Water Park and disappear into the Black Vortex! And everybody had lined up to ride it the first day the park had opened—and they hadn’t let anybody go down it yet.
“They tested it and it’s too dangerous,” said Lisa. “They’ll tear it down once the park closes for the year and next year they’ll act like it never existed at all.”
“Why do they keep the water running then?” I said.
“Because it’s not really dangerous,” said Jason. “It’s all a stunt. They’ll open the ride at the end of the season.”
“It is the end of the season,” I said.
“There are still a couple of weeks left,” he said, and then he pointed to the top of the ride. “See, they have the water going and everything. I’ll bet the lifeguards take turns going down it when the park closes.”
You could hear the sound of water coming from the slide, and if you looked at the places where the tube opened up you could kind of see water flowing through it. It was kind of hard to tell because the whole slide was black, other than a few whirling purple designs painted on its side in a couple of places.
“I’m going to ride it,” said Jason, walking up to the gate before looking back at me and Lisa. “And you two are coming with me.”
I swallowed, trying to think of some excuse to get me out of this, suddenly wishing that I had just let Jason and Lisa hang out on their own—I could’ve called my mom and told her I was feeling sick or something. I wouldn’t really have wanted to go down the Black Vortex normally, but since it wasn’t even open I really didn’t want to.
I looked over at Jason and then at Lisa and realized I wasn’t quite ready to give up—maybe I could talk some sense into him, and maybe I wouldn’t even need to—probably we wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near the slide in the first place.
There was a big old padlock on the gate, which I thought would be the end of this little adventure, but Jason kept looking until he found a part of the fence that he could pull up just enough that somebody could probably slide under it, probably. Jason certainly was able to, and Lisa too, which left just me standing on the side of the park we were actually supposed to be in.
“Come on, Finn, somebody’s going to see you,” said Jason, his face peeking out from under the hole in the fence. “Throw the inner tube over, okay?”
I considered just throwing the tube over and then hightailing out of there, but just for a second; then I threw the inner tube over, just like he had asked me, and crawled under the fence. Jason and Lisa were already at the bottom of the stairs, which was farther away from the gate than I would’ve expected—I started to run over to them but then I noticed something out of the corner of my eye.
I stopped; there was something curled up in the grass behind the gate, right where the edge of the park gave way to the wilderness. At first I thought that—well, that it was somebody’s arm or something because that’s what it looked like, and I about shouted but I stopped myself. Then it moved a little and instead of screaming I jumped about a foot backward, stumbling into Jason, which was maybe worse than screaming.
“Did somebody throw up?” he said, leaning over my shoulder to look at whatever it was curled up in the grass. It could’ve been; there had been an outbreak of some bad bug a couple years back, rumor was that the park had been skimping on the cleaning chemicals, which led to half the attendants getting sick. Jason had been the one to tell me the story; he liked the way I gagged when he told me stuff like that. He looked down at the pink thing and scrunched up his face, before grabbing a stick off of the ground and poking it. It moved when the stick touched it, circling in on itself—it was a snake, a sickly pink snake—it must’ve been shedding its skin.
“Oh, gross,” said Lisa, jumping back from the snake. “Leave it alone, guys.”
“I wonder if it’s poisonous,” said Jason as he dropped the stick and continued towards the Black Vortex. I kneeled down, still far enough from it that I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be able to bite me.
“You can play with your worm later, let’s get going,” said Jason, as he headed towards the stairs. There was a gate over those two but they were easy enough to jump. The universe was making it pretty clear to me that I didn’t need to be here.
“Why can’t you just go with Lisa?” I said as we started to climb the stairs.
“C’mon, Finn, don’t be a spoilsport,” said Lisa, looking back at me and sticking out her tongue. I rolled my eyes at her, stopping immediately when Jason glared at me, and returned to walking up the stairs behind them. They seemed to go on up forever. I vaguely remembered reading that the Black Vortex had included the largest wood structure in the state, but that couldn’t be right, surely there was something bigger than some stupid waterpark ride? Regardless, you could see pretty much the entire park, and the parking lot too, and a little bit more—and looking out at all of that I realized something.
“Where is everybody?” I said, looking down at the park b
elow. It had been kind of late so people should’ve been filtering out of the park but it seemed almost completely empty. I could just see a handful of people, and it looked like most of them were employees. I looked out at the parking lot. It was still mostly full, which didn’t seem to make any sense.
“Stop stalling,” said Jason, pushing me forward and up the stairs. We were almost to the top of the slide now. Had this been a regular ride it would’ve been too late to chicken out, to force myself to march past all the other people waiting in line, half of who would be younger than me, but there was nobody else here other than me and Jason and Lisa.
“This is a bad idea,” I said just as I stepped onto the landing at the top of the slide. “I’m going back down.”
“No, you aren’t,” said Jason, stretching out his arms and legs and wrapping his hands around the railings on both sides of the stairs. I tried to push my way past him, but he didn’t budge an inch. “We’ve gone this far and I’m not going to let you chicken out now.”
“Let me go!” I said, trying to tense up so he’d have a harder time dragging me onto the slide, but I shuddered when he grabbed a hold of me and I felt myself go relatively limp—limp enough that Jason didn’t have any trouble sitting me down on the tube. He sat in front of me and Lisa in front of him. I definitely didn’t want to sit at the back of the tube so I tried to get up again but when Jason glared at me I sat back down again. Jason started to count—one, two—and then he pushed us forward, shouting three as we sped down into the Vortex.
The Vortex was one of those slides that were mostly covered, except for a few spots where it was open to the air. Maybe so the people waiting in line could hear the people on the ride screaming. And it wasn’t very steep. It was mainly long and winding. At least, that’s what I thought. But we were going so fast, it made me think of the time I had gone down the Vertical Leap. My stomach was churning—I kept waiting for the parts where we would be under open air, even for just a second, so I could tell how close we were to the bottom, but everything just stayed dark, and we were going so fast. Every turn we took my head would whip back and forth because I couldn’t brace myself. I realized I was holding on to Jason—I hadn’t even noticed it, and he hadn’t pushed me off of him. He would surely make fun of me when we got to the bottom, but I kept my grip as tight as I could.
Tales from The Lake 3 Page 2
