Highway to Hell

by Val Crowe

  I tried to punch her. Didn’t work. I tried to grab at her hands, but I couldn’t do that either. Instead, I got a finger into my mouth and hooked it around the pearls. I began to pull the long string out of my mouth, out of my throat…

  And Molly was gone.

  I vomited jewelry onto the ground. But it faded out in midair.

  * * *

  “Hey!” Patrick’s voice. “There you are.”

  I was still recovering, coughing and gasping on the path next to the maze.

  Patrick was running up to me. He’d come from the camp area, obviously.

  I coughed one last time and wiped my lips. Okay, so that sister Molly of his? Total bitch. Why she wouldn’t pony up the information promised, I didn’t know. Maybe she’d been disagreeable in life too. I thought about asking Patrick about it, but then he’d start pestering me with stupid questions. He wanted that jewelry pretty bad, after all. I didn’t feel like getting into that. “Look, I haven’t found the phones,” I said.

  “Yeah, screw that,” he said. “We don’t need phones. We need bolt cutters.”

  Seriously? Couldn’t this guy let up for two minutes? All I needed was my information, and then we could leave this place. But no, he had to screw everything up. I glared at him. “Great idea,” I said tightly. “I’ll help you look.”

  “Great,” he said. He smiled at me. “Sorry about accusing you earlier. I guess I’m just stressed out. I mean, not only is it awful about what happened to Oscar, and I don’t think I’ve even come to terms with that, but I’m kind of freaked out, because what if something happens to us? If there are malevolent spirits in this place, and they can possess people, well… I mean, anything could happen.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s cool. I get it.”

  “Well, all the more reason to get out of here,” he said.

  I nodded.

  He looked around. “Okay, well, I think that I saw something that looked like a big shed out behind the roller coaster. You want to head that way?”

  “Why not?” I spread my hands. I smiled at him, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t reach my eyes.

  He didn’t seem to notice.

  We set off for the roller coaster.

  “Hey, uh,” he said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you about what’s going on with your mom.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I couldn’t help but notice that when Molly’s ghost appeared during the seance, she was being chased by, um, something that looked like your mother. It was changing into different things, but sometimes, it was your mother.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” I snapped. There was no point in talking about any of that. My mother wouldn’t talk about it. She wanted to pretend it never happened. Maybe that was the best thing to do, anyway.

  “Okay,” he said. He furrowed his brow. “Well, I guess it doesn’t really matter, because what I’m thinking about, it’s got something to do with me. That thing that I can’t remember. It’s associated with your mother somehow.”

  “You just met my mother,” I said flatly.

  “I know.” He shook his head. “Not her, not exactly her. Something… about the feeling of that thing that was chasing Molly.”

  And then, suddenly, as if we had summoned her by invoking her name, Molly was there, screaming and running between us, clutching the jewelry to her chest. “You double-crossing bastard!” she shrieked.

  Hot on her heels was a man with a gun with a beard and a shaved head. He was shooting after her, spitting bullets every direction.

  Patrick cried out and doubled over, blood spurting out of his chest.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Patrick fell to his knees, gasping.

  I caught him, bracing him by his shoulders. I’d seen this before. “No, come on,” I said. “It’s a ghost. It’s not real. It’s an echo.”

  “It feels fucking real,” said Patrick. He lifted his bloody fingers and stared at them.

  “But it’s not,” I said. “They’re not here. They’re ghosts. Come on, if you stop believing it, it goes away.” Damn it, I hoped I was right. This had been true in Boonridge, but what if that was a special case? What if the spirits here were even stronger than the spirits in that ghost town? What if—?

  Patrick let out a noisy breath. “Oh, okay, okay. You’re right, it’s gone.” He was feeling around his stomach, making sure.

  “Thank goodness,” I said. And then I had another thought at the back of my brain, a thought that slithered out. Should have just left him. Would have tied off the loose end.

  Patrick turned, looking in the direction that Molly and the gunman had gone. “That was… my sister. She had my mother’s jewelry.”

  “Yeah,” I said, rolling my eyes. Great. Now, we were going to get all preoccupied with trying to figure that out. But who cared? His sister was dead. She’d been shot by that guy. He hadn’t taken her jewelry. Or maybe he had taken it after he shot her. But if she was giving it to him anyway, why bother shooting her? Wasn’t that a lot of extra work for nothing?

  Didn’t make a bit of sense, if you asked me, and I didn’t want anything to do with it.

  “Look,” I said. “There’s the shed you were talking about.”

  “Right,” said Patrick, but he sounded distracted.

  I started for the shed, even though I wasn’t sure why I was doing that. After all, I didn’t want him to find any bolt cutters, now did I?

  Patrick brought up the rear, trailing behind me, seemingly lost in thought.

  When I got to the door of the shed, I wished for there to be a lock there, so we couldn’t go in.

  And wonder of wonders, there was a padlock, but it was hanging open. I could lock it myself. Maybe he wouldn’t see

  But I didn’t. I simply stood there, staring at it, and trying to think what my next move was going to be.

  Patrick stopped behind me. “I think I’m remembering,” he whispered.

  I turned back to look at him.

  He looked pale, his lips bloodless.

  Wait, had that bullet actually hurt him after all? My heart leaped at the prospect, but then I could see that there wasn’t any blood, and that he was fine. No, he was reacting to whatever he was remembering. Probably some stupid revelation about his sister that would help us all understand how she died out here and what happened to the jewelry, and then we’d probably have to go dig it up from somewhere and—

  “My father used to hurt us,” whispered Patrick.

  Okay. I hadn’t been expecting that.

  “I blocked it out.” He was shaking his head in disbelief. “How did I block it all out?”

  “People do that with trauma,” I said blandly. I leaned against the door of the shed. Well, if he was talking, he wasn’t looking for bolt cutters. Gift horse, mouth. I shrugged.

  Patrick dragged his hands over his face. “We were young, all of us. Molly was the oldest, but I remember that I used to try to distract him when he was mad at the girls, or even at Mom. Because I was the boy, and I thought that it was better if I took it, not them. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.”

  I sucked in air. I didn’t really want to hear this. I was thinking that it was lucky that I didn’t have any brothers or sisters when my mother had gone all crazy with Negus in her. I was thinking about the things she had done to me, and I—

  “He never left marks,” said Patrick. “He would do this thing where he would grab me by the neck and he could make me just… pass out. I remember never knowing if I was going to wake back up or not. And he used to lock us inside this closet in my house. It was dark, and there were no windows, and he wouldn’t let us out, not even if we had to go to the bathroom—”

  “Okay, dude.” My teeth were clenched. “You had a shitty childhood. Who didn’t? Can we skip the trip down memory lane?”

  “Mom left him.” He folded his arms over his chest. “She should have had him arrested and thrown in jail, but she didn’t. She settled for getting away. We ran from him and he
never found us. But then… Mom passed away. She was in a car accident. I was seventeen. Lily was fourteen. Molly was twenty.” He swallowed. “Molly was so freaked out about Lily and me going back to Dad’s custody. But I’d blocked it all out. I didn’t even remember.”

  I waited.

  He was silent, contemplating his shoes.

  “So, what happened?” I said finally. “You had to move back in with him? What did he do?”

  “No.” He raised his gaze to mine. “No, our Dad died too. He was killed in a break-in. And then we went into the system for a while. But after I was eighteen, we filed paperwork to get Lily emancipated. She came to live with me. We inherited a little money when Dad died. Enough to keep us going for a while, enough for us both to go to college. It all worked out.”

  “Well, I’m glad,” I said. Although, what was I saying? I was glad a man was dead? He didn’t sound like a particularly nice man, so I guessed it was all warranted.

  “Yeah,” he said softly. He gestured at the door. “I guess we should look in the shed.”

  “Fine,” I said, moving away from the door.

  He opened it up and walked in.

  I stayed outside, peering in after him. “You, um, you see any bolt cutters?”

  “Not right off,” he said. “Oh, wait! Actually, yeah, right there. They’re hanging up. I might need something to climb up on to get to them.”

  I slammed the door of the shed on him. Then I locked the padlock, clicking it into place.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  After all that, I found that I was hungry, so I went back to the camp area to see if my mother had made anything for lunch. But she hadn’t. She wasn’t even there.

  Lily was.

  She had found the broken cell phones and she had them all spread out on the table in front of my mother’s motorhome.

  I walked right past her and the phones and went into the Airstream. I opened my fridge and began getting out the things I would need to put together a sandwich.

  The door to the Airstream opened and Lily came in. “Where’s Patrick?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, smearing mayo on a piece of bread. “Why would I know?”

  “He said he was going out there to find you and that you guys were going to try to find bolt cutters to open the gates.”

  “Well, he never found me,” I said, slapping some swiss cheese on top of the mayo. “I see you found the phones, though.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I don’t even know what to make of that. Someone did that to them. I don’t think it was a ghost.”

  I shrugged.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  I looked up at her. “I thought you were on my side, Lily. Aren’t they still inside you?”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. But I have this weird memory of being out on that carousel, and you were buttoning my shirt crooked.”

  I snorted. Yeah, great. So, back in Thornford, my friend Wade was a gentleman with this chick named Charlotte, and he got rewarded for that move by getting to become her no-strings-attached fuck buddy. But when I tried to be a gentleman, what happened? Yeah. “I’m guessing they’re not in there anymore,” I muttered. I looked her over. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry they did that to you. I know what that’s like.” Then I turned back to my sandwich. I arranged some sliced ham on it and then put another piece of bread on top. I took a bite.

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “And you did smash those phones, didn’t you? And you also put the lock on the gate.”

  I chewed, shrugging. I swallowed. “What if I did?”

  “Why?” she said. “Why would you do that?”

  “Because we came here for answers,” I said. “And we haven’t gotten them yet. Don’t you want to know what happened to Molly?”

  She bit down on her lip. “Well… Oscar’s dead. I mean, nothing’s that important to know.”

  “Who knows?” I said. “Maybe the thing that killed your sister is still here. Maybe you can kill it. Maybe that’s what she needs to move on, to be at peace.”

  “You said that spirits were just echoes of traumatic events. You said there wasn’t any moving on.”

  I shrugged again. “I don’t know anything, really. But I’ve seen spirits dissipate when they take care of unfinished business, so it’s all theoretically possible.” I ate another bite of my sandwich.

  “I think you should… let me tie you up or something,” she said. “I think you’re dangerous. And I don’t think we can trust you. Somehow, because you’re sensitive to the spirits here, they’re influencing you. Did you kill Oscar?”

  “No.” It came out forcefully. “Of course I would never kill anyone.”

  She surveyed me.

  “Let’s go find your sister’s ghost,” I said. “Come with me to the roller coaster.”

  “I don’t think I should go with you anywhere.”

  I chuckled. “Oh, come on, Lily. Don’t you want to find out what happened to Molly? Don’t you want to solve the mystery?”

  * * *

  It was not exactly easy getting Lily to come with me back into the park, because she was struggling a lot.

  I was stronger than she was, though, and I managed to drag her along with me for most of the way. When she decided she would stop walking and that she didn’t care if I pulled her over the hard asphalt, I picked her up and slung her over my shoulder.

  She beat on my back with her fists and screamed her head off.

  There was no one to hear her.

  She was a tiny little thing, but I wasn’t exactly used to carrying around another hundred and fifteen pounds or whatever she weighed, so when we got to the roller coaster, I dumped her onto the ground and panted, wiping sweat off my brow.

  I wasn’t even really sure what I was going to do with her.

  It was only that I couldn’t have everyone else running around the place, screwing everything up. If I could contain them all and get the stupid park to tell me the information I wanted, then this could all be over. Everyone seemed to be working against me, though.

  She vaulted up from the ground and launched herself at me, clawing at my face.

  I seized her by the shoulders and pushed her away. “Come on, calm down, Lily,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “You think you haven’t hurt me already, dragging me around this place like you have?” Her eyes were wild and she was struggling to get at me, even though I was holding her at arms’ length and my reach was farther than hers.

  This was not cool. I was tired, and I needed to figure out something to do with her.

  But suddenly, she went slack, her eyes widening as they focused on something over my shoulder.

  “What?” I said, turning to see what she was looking at.

  A man was stalking across the path toward us. It was the man from the carousel. The one with the crew cut and the stained undershirt.

  Lily’s lips parted. “Daddy?” she whispered.

  Great. Now, we had the ghost of Lily’s and Patrick’s abusive dad in the mix here too? How did that even work? It must be like me and my mother. Patrick and Lily brought the energy with them, and this place was so powerful that it could manifest their trauma.

  “You been a naughty girl, Lily,” said her father, and his voice had a quiet power. He didn’t sound angry, just disappointed and sad, and that sadness ripped into me, making me feel ashamed.

  This guy was a royal bastard, all right. It was amazing that Patrick and Lily weren’t more screwed up.

  Lily was shaking. “No, Daddy. No, you’re dead.”

  Her father smiled, but the smile was too wide. One side split up the side of his face, and I saw a glimpse of something there, a caved-in cheekbone, bone protruding through flesh, so much blood.

  Lily screamed. She ran.

  I muttered some swear words under my breath, turning from the approaching ghost and then back to Lily, who was disappear
ing around a bend. Man, I did not have the energy to run after her.

  The ghost flickered and then he was right in front of me. “Come here, you little shit,” he snarled, reaching for me.

  I sidestepped. “Hey, you want to drop the bullshit and tell me about Negus?”

  He reached for me again. “You must give, Deacon.”

  “Oh, fuck that. Like this whole place hasn’t gotten all juiced up just because I’ve been around,” I said, gesturing in a wide circle. “You always have the sparks to turn on all the lights, huh? To manifest specters that everyone can see? To make bullets that can penetrate skin? I’m giving. I’ve given lots.”

  He snatched at me.

  I ducked.

  And then—screw it—I ran after Lily. They wanted Lily for some reason, apparently. That was why they’d manifested her father, sent him after her. That was probably why I’d brought her out here in the first place. For them. So, fine, whatever, I’d give her back to them.

  But I didn’t understand why they hadn’t just continued to possess her.

  Wouldn’t that have been easier?

  Maybe they wanted me to do it. Maybe that was the giving that I had to do. I had thought that Molly’s ghost was just being a bitch, but it seemed that it was something that the whole park wanted. Whatever. I had come this far, hadn’t I? I had to finish it.

  * * *

  But I couldn’t find Lily.

  I ran around until I came to a fork in the path, one way went to the Tilt-A-Whirl, and another to the Ferris wheel. I stopped and checked behind me. I wasn’t being followed by Lily’s father’s ghost anymore.

  I rested my hands on my knees, bending over, and struggled to get my breathing even. I wasn’t used to running this much. Also, I felt… thin in some way, as if the pounding of my heart was about to go through my skin, which was stretched too tight over my muscles and organs.

  “Deacon!” It was my mother’s voice.

  I steeled myself, expecting a ghost—her stringy hair in her dirty face, calling me names and ready to hurt me. But it was my real mother, older now and looking normal with her hair pulled into a ponytail at the nape of her neck. There was gray around her temples. She spotted me, and there was such relief in her expression that I could almost feel her love for me, like a physical sensation that surrounded me.