Highway to Hell

by Val Crowe

  One thing remained the same.

  I hadn’t left.

  I dug out my cell phone, and I started to compose a text to Wade.

  Hey, man, what you were saying about coming here? Do you think you could do that?

  My finger hovered over the send button. Could I really ask Wade to drop everything and come to my rescue? It didn’t seem right. Furthermore, I’d probably only be putting him in danger.

  I deleted the text.

  What are you up to?

  I deleted that too. Too generic.

  This place is getting freaky.

  Before I could talk myself out of it, I hit the send button.

  Immediately, I regretted it. Wade was going to feel as if he had to come here, and I was pretty sure it was a bad idea. But I’d just have to talk him out of it whenever he responded.

  I stared at the phone’s screen.

  Sending message, it said. A few dots were moving across the screen.

  I waited.

  Message failed, it said. No network.

  Oh, wow, wait a minute. There were no bars. But I hadn’t had any problems with reception before, had I? This was probably just some weird pocket where the phone didn’t work. That happened all the time.

  I got up off the swings, walking and glancing down at my phone screen every couple feet to see if the bars returned.

  They didn’t.

  And then I looked up, and I saw a kid there. I recognized him. He was the kid from the maze. He was running up the walkway as fast as he could, eyes wide, a look of terror on his face.

  I moved to intercept him.

  He saw me and came to a stop, gasping for breath. “Can you help me? I need to find my mom and dad.”

  “Uh, yeah, maybe I can help,” I said, even though I knew he was already dead. I’d try to lead him out, but if I couldn’t, knowing his name might help me find information to help him move on. “What’s your name?”

  “Theo Forrest Alexander,” he said promptly. He looked over his shoulder. “Please, I want to go home now. I’m really scared.”

  “Okay, Theo. Let’s go. Let’s get out of here. Come with me.”

  “I want to get out of here,” said Theo.

  I beckoned and started to walk down the path. “Let’s go.”

  “I try to go,” said Theo. “But he always finds me.”

  “Who finds you?”

  “The man in the maze,” he said.

  Suddenly, a man rushed out from behind us. He spotted Theo. Then he looked around, as if checking to see if anyone would spot him. Seemingly satisfied, he rushed us.

  I stepped into his path. “Hey!”

  The man went right through me, dousing me in frigid air.

  Theo screamed.

  “Hey now,” said the man. “It’s okay. It’ll be fun. We’re just going to play a game. And I have ice cream.” He scooped Theo up into his arms, making a sound that was supposed to sound like an engine or something, but instead sounded demented.

  “No!” screamed Theo.

  “Hey!” I went after the man and Theo, but the man kept going and then faded out in a puff of black smoke.

  I stopped running, bending over and panting.

  What the hell?

  CHAPTER NINE

  Theo Forrest Alexander, I typed into my laptop. I had service now, enough to connect to the internet on my phone and tether my computer. My text to Wade had permanently failed, though, which was probably for the best. I didn’t need to get him mixed up in this.

  Maybe everything was weird here because I needed to do something. Like figure out what was going on with these kids and find some way to free their spirits.

  Maybe if I did that, then I’d be able to find out answers about Negus. It could be that the incarnation of the spirits of the kids was so traumatizing and so strong that it had some ability to block out the other spirits, the ones who could give me answers. Yeah, that had to be it. I’d figure this all out, save Theo, and then my reward would be to find out all about Negus.

  I scrolled through the results.

  First thing to come up was some guy’s Facebook profile, which was no good, because this Theo was obviously dead. He’d been killed as a little kid in this park, I guessed. I didn’t know what had happened to him, but it had something to do with that man I’d seen.

  I kept scrolling, looking for some old obituary or article about a kid being missing or something.

  I didn’t find it. I wondered if maybe it was too old to be on the internet. I mean, this park had closed down sometime in the mid 1980s, from what I understood. Which meant that news articles from before that time period would definitely not have been posted online.

  Knowing his name was no help at all, I thought.

  I scrolled back up to the top of the search results.

  After the social media was a news article from a few years back. ‘We were molested,’ say survivors thirty years later, read the headline.

  I clicked on it and began to read.

  It was about a guy named Theo Alexander who had gotten together a group of kids, all of whom had visited Point Oakes before it closed. Thirty years later, they were testifying against a man named Jason Wick, who had allegedly molested all of them when they were minors. Jason Wick was on the staff of the park. He did maintenance work and sometimes manned several rides. Apparently, he would lure the kids with the promise of sweets or ice cream, which he would give the kid. It would be laced with something that would knock the kid out. Then Wick would do horrible things to the kids, usually while they were passed out, but sometimes the drugs didn’t last long enough, and the victims had woken up during.

  Alexander himself was one such kid. He had fought Wick, gotten free, and gone running out of the maze to freedom, Wick on his heels. When Alexander found his parents, “I was just so glad to see them that I didn’t tell them what happened.” Alexander said he hoped he would forget it, like a bad dream. But the events had haunted his entire life, affecting his relationships and his ability to function. Finally, he had come forward and discovered that Wick was still free and currently working at a children’s daycare in Delaware.

  Horrified, Alexander knew that Wick needed to be brought to justice. He had started looking for others who had been victimized by Wick. “More and more people started coming out of the woodwork,” he said in the article. “We all felt it was time for justice.”

  The article went on to say that Wick had been arrested and that a court date was pending.

  I searched for Jason Wick. I found out that he had been convicted for his crimes and was currently locked up. He wouldn’t ever get out.

  So, now, I was even more confused. None of this made any sense. I had obviously come across “ghosts” of these events. The man I’d seen was Jason Wick. I’d seen Theo as well, and also another little boy in the maze. But Wick hadn’t killed anyone, at least as far as I could determine.

  Some of the kids said that Wick had convinced them that what happened to them was their fault. He had said that if they were to speak up, they would get in bad trouble with the law and be sent to a jail for kids. He said that he wouldn’t tell if they wouldn’t.

  The guy was a real creep. I was disgusted by him, and I was glad he was locked up for the rest of his life.

  But I still couldn’t understand why there were ghosts.

  And furthermore, if all this had come to light thirty years after the park had closed, why had the park closed in the first place?

  I looked that up and found that the owners had simply gone bankrupt. They’d let the park start to get rundown and fall into disrepair before they finally closed their doors. By the time they tried to sell the place, it was in need of so much work, it wasn’t attractive to buyers.

  So, there was no shocking, tragic event that had closed this place. It had simply started to fester, and then closed down, and then deteriorated to what it was now.

  The molestation, that must be the trigger event that was causing this haunting. B
ut it was strange, because it didn’t involve death.

  Truth be told, the trauma of the molestation fit with the trauma of my childhood abuse. I’d seen ghosts of both myself and my mother. Neither of us were dead either.

  * * *

  “I’m just wondering if…” I blew out a huff of air. “Maybe what I see sometimes isn’t really a ghost in the way we think of it.”

  It was lunch time, and my mother had gone crazy with food again, making sandwiches and several different cold salads—pasta salad, potato salad, cole slaw—and now we were all eating at the table outside of her motorhome. I was drinking coffee since I hadn’t had any that morning. I’d also put away two sandwiches in addition to the various salads, because I was starving. I hadn’t eaten breakfast either.

  “What do you mean?” said Lily, furrowing her brow.

  I had told them all about Theo Alexander and Jason Wick and the stuff that I had found on the internet. I figured it was important for them to know about this stuff. And besides, I was also trying to work through it, and it helped to talk it through out loud. Lily and Patrick were there, but Oscar wasn’t. I guessed he was holding a grudge.

  “Well, they’re not dead, but I saw their ghosts,” I said. “And this has actually happened to me before. So… I’m kind of wondering if maybe these ghost aren’t really ghosts. They’re something else. Spirits, yes, specters, phantoms, whatever you want to call them. But they’re not simply dead people huddled on the wrong side of the veil.”

  “What?” said my mother, who was dipping potato salad onto her plate. “Of course they are. What are you saying?”

  “Look,” I said, “you know that oil you gave me? The dandelion and wormwood?”

  “Yes,” said my mother. “It’s a conduit for spirits.”

  “Right,” I said, “and I can use it to summon powerful energy. If I get a bunch of ghosts hanging around me, and it starts bothering me, I use that oil.”

  “Hold on, what do you mean?” said Patrick. “Ghosts hang around you?”

  “Yeah, always have,” I said. “They’re attracted to me for whatever reason. I don’t know why that is. Sometimes they want things from me—”

  “Like unfinished business,” said my mother.

  “That’s true,” I said, tapping my fork thoughtfully against my plate. “I don’t know if that fits or not.”

  “Fits with what?” said Lily. “You’re talking but you’re not saying anything.”

  “Right,” I said, “well, if I get a bunch of ghosts that won’t leave me alone, I’ll go out somewhere private, and I’ll use that oil my mother gave me, and I’ll summon the energy to me. If it’s powerful enough, that energy absorbs the ghosts, and then they’re attached to it, and they leave me alone. Also, last month, I tried something that was sort of the same principle with some very nasty spirits. The spirits were attached, so we went to a place of spiritual power, and the spirits were absorbed into that power. They stayed there. We left.”

  “Interesting,” said my mother, furrowing her brow.

  “So… okay, what I’m wondering is if it works differently than we think. What if, after something really traumatic happens, like a violent death or molesting children in an amusement park, there’s powerful energy that’s created? And what if ghosts are just things that are attracted to that energy. They come to find it, and they get absorbed into it, and then they give life to the energy there, reliving the traumatic events again and again? I mean, wouldn’t that explain why we see ghosts of people who aren’t dead?”

  “But if that’s the case,” said Lily, “then you’re saying it’s not my sister in the park?”

  “We haven’t even seen your sister,” I said.

  “But your mother contacted a spirit that said that she’d seen Molly,” said Lily.

  “Right, but…” I shook my head at her. I had told her that was fake. Why wouldn’t she believe me?

  “That spirit might have been confused,” said my mother. “Didn’t it admit so at the end of the seance before I lost it?”

  “Well… well, that’s good,” said Patrick. “If it’s not really Molly, but just some echo of her, some impression left behind, that’s good.” Patrick raised a finger. “Hey, maybe that’s why the spirit we spoke to said she had moved on. Because she’s gone off to a better place, and the things here are just imprints. I’d like to believe that my sister is at peace.”

  “Of course,” said my mother. “If she isn’t, we will help her find peace.”

  I shot my mother an annoyed look. She was not helping things. “But maybe it’s not like that at all,” I said.

  “Except for the fact that you often speak to spirits with unfinished business,” said my mother.

  “Yeah, but… maybe it’s not like that exactly. Maybe it’s the energy that gets resolved. Maybe if the trauma is taken care of in some way, then the energy dissipates, leaving the ghost free to find some other form of energy and take another form.” I wished Mads was around. I could ask her about this. Of course, if it was true, it didn’t explain Mads at all. Nor did it explain Negus.

  I remembered Mads saying that there were different kinds of spirits. So, maybe, all I was describing was a certain type of spirit, the most commonplace form of ghost. However, I was pretty sure that I was right.

  “Well,” said my mother, “one thing I’m sure you’re right about is that the trauma left in this place has caused a great deal of power. And from what I understand, things like molestation and perverse sexual activity are very powerful and very dangerous. So, it’s no wonder that the place was able to hurt your sister.” She turned to Lily.

  “So, we do think she was hurt by ghosts,” said Lily.

  I thought to myself that it explained a lot about the way the place felt. It was so enticing, but then underneath it seemed awful and rotten. Like candy from a sinister stranger.

  “What else could have happened to her?” said my mother.

  “Maybe Molly’s not even dead,” said Lily. “If what Deacon is saying is true, then there can be ghosts of people who are still alive.”

  “We haven’t seen Molly’s ghost,” I said.

  “I had that dream about her,” said Lily.

  “I know that, but we have no real, hard evidence that she was even in the park. Any number of things could have happened to her.”

  “Wait a second,” Patrick spoke up. “If whatever is here is simply a reflection of Molly, not the real her, then will it have all her memories? Will it know about the jewelry?”

  “Of course,” said my mother. “Don’t worry about that at all.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Mom knew she couldn’t produce the jewelry, and yet she made these assurances to Patrick. Was she that desperate to keep him here?

  * * *

  That night, my mother set up for another seance. I guessed she had some trick up her sleeve to try to repair the damage that she’d caused thus far. I wasn’t entirely sure it was a good idea at this point. She had to see that Patrick and Lily were not going to be taken in by her typical tactics. She had to see that she was setting herself up for a fall here.

  Oscar didn’t come to the seance. My mother sent Patrick to go and get him from his tent. She said that she would have sent me, but that she didn’t know if Oscar would come with me. She said that maybe we owed Oscar an apology. But Patrick said that Oscar wasn’t in his tent. Since he also wasn’t around the camp area anywhere that we could see—unless he was hiding inside one of our campers—that meant he was somewhere inside the park.

  I wasn’t sure why that made me feel so uneasy, but it did.

  My mother’s seance began in the same way. She had Lily and Patrick hold hands and then she began to call the spirits and ask them to show themselves. She got smoke flowing into the room, she knocked over the same book, and then she started asking the questions that required knocks.

  “Is there a spirit among us? Knock if you can hear me,” said my mother.

  Abruptly there was a cacaphony of
knocks. My mother must be banging her foot against the pedal underneath her table over and over again to get so many of them and so fast.

  Except that when I looked at my mother, I could see from her face that she wasn’t doing it.

  She took a deep breath, though, and gathered herself. “It seems that we are joined by many presences tonight. But we seek only one. Molly Fletcher. Are you among the spirits here? Knock if you can.”

  One knock.

  I looked at my mother, trying to tell from her face if she had made the knock happen or not.

  “Molly?” said my mother. “Are you at peace? Once for yes, two for no.”

  One knock.

  Then two, right on the first knock’s heels.

  “What does that mean?” whispered Lily.

  My mother looked a little unsettled. She turned to me. “Deacon, do you see anything?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t.” I got up. “Do you want me to check outside the tent?”

  “Should we all go?” said Lily.

  “No, don’t break the circle.” My mother raised her hand, which was clutching Lily’s. Lily was holding hands with Patrick, and Patrick was holding hands with my mother.

  “I’ll be back,” I said. I stepped out of the tent. There was nothing there. But the lights were on in the amusement park. I turned to take the place in, a feeling of icy unease crawling up my back.

  Everything was lit up. All the rides. But the place still looked rundown and decrepit, and the lights only illuminated all the choking vines and the peeling paint and the rust. In the light, the place looked sinister and dangerous.

  I stepped back into the tent. “Uh… so the park?”

  “What about it?” said Lily, straining to see me while still clutching the hands of my mother and her brother as tightly as she could. “Did you see Molly?”

  “No Molly,” I said. “But the lights are on. All the lights are on.”

  “What are you talking about?” said my mother.

  “Holy shit,” said Patrick. “I can see them through the tent.” He was looking in the direction of the park. He got up, dropping hands with the others, his chair clattering to the ground behind him.