Highway to Hell

by Val Crowe

  “No, I just took the TV to make it look good,” she said. “I threw it over the ravine the next day, to get rid of it. I figured if they found it in our house, it would be evidence.”

  “Geez, Lily, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You never seemed to remember, Patrick. I wanted to protect you.”

  “But I’m your big brother.” He sounded near tears. “I’m supposed to protect you.”

  This wasn’t good. I paced outside of the shed, wishing there was some way to shut them up. Hearing them talk about this, hearing their emotions, it was making me feel guilty. They were like me. They’d been hurt as kids, and they’d had to grow up fast, and here I was, sacrificing them.

  It wasn’t cool.

  I paced some more, trying to think of what to do. Part of me wanted to let them out. Get the bolt cutters, find my mom, and get the hell out of here.

  But another part of me was annoyed that I had put so much into this for no reward. I still didn’t know about Negus.

  I wandered around with my bottle of water, drinking it all down, thinking about whether or not this was really much of a gift to the spirits here. I mean, what were they supposed to do with these guys, exactly? I had sort of expected the park to swallow them whole, for Patrick and Lily to simply disappear.

  A nagging voice at the back of my head tried to speak up to say that I couldn’t actually be sacrificing—

  I shut it down.

  I guessed it didn’t make sense to think that the park could consume them. There was no evidence of that. We had thought maybe that was what had happened to Molly. But it had turned out that Molly had been shot by a gun. Nothing supernatural about it. Of course, the fact that it had happened in the park had probably strengthened its supernatural energy. Violent events seemed to do that to places.

  So, that meant that the park probably couldn’t get rid of Patrick and Lily without possessing them. And I wasn’t sure, but I bet that possessing the two of them would be an expenditure of energy. Which wasn’t really much of a gift, was it?

  The spirits kept saying I needed to give.

  I sat down on the ground. The sun was bright and merciless. Sweat was forming at my brow. I rubbed at my cheeks, which were rough with stubble, and I wished I would have had time to shave.

  I was pretty sure that I knew what I had to do.

  But I didn’t want to. That voice inside, the one that was objecting to all of this, it got pretty loud when I started to even consider it.

  No, it said, no, no, no.

  And it projected images at me of red blood spattering everywhere and a putrid smell and the biggest, most important reason of all. I couldn’t kill people. It was unthinkable to actually kill someone. It was… no.

  I mean, okay, of course I’d considered killing someone before. Who hasn’t?

  But it was always pretty abstract. I had never thought about it down to the nitty gritty details. What would I use to do it? What would I do with the bodies? That sort of thing, I’d never considered.

  Here… I didn’t have to worry about bodies. The park would take care of that, I was sure.

  And as for what to use…

  I looked around, and it was just sitting there. Had it always been there? It must have been.

  It was an ax, gleaming in the sunlight, lying just a few feet away.

  I swallowed.

  I thought again of the image I’d imagined when I’d come into the park for the first time. Red hard candy, fallen out of its wrapper, sticky and melting in the afternoon sun, liquid, bright red…

  I picked up the ax.

  I unlocked the shed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “All right,” I screamed, running into the shed and brandishing the ax, “how’s this for a gift?”

  It was dark in the shed, I couldn’t make much out. The sun came in through bright cracks in the wood in a few places. Lily yelled, putting up both of her hands to ward me off.

  I raised the ax above my head.

  Patrick tackled me.

  We fell on the ground, him on top of me. The ax fell out of my hand. I scrabbled behind me, trying to get to the handle.

  “What is wrong with you?” Patrick was shaking me, his face twisted and angry.

  Better not to talk to him. It would only shake me from my purpose. I had to know about Negus. It was the only thing that mattered. If they had to die so that I could get my information, then that was just the way it had to be. Anything that would knock me off this path was something I had to guard against. And talking to him might make me soft. I scrabbled to find the ax handle.

  Patrick seized my hand. “Stop. What are you doing?”

  I punched him.

  He cried out, falling away from me.

  I pressed my advantage, climbing on top of him, hitting him again and again. It was funny, because it didn’t hurt, and hitting people usually did. I didn’t really hit people all that often. I’d hit Wade recently, and it had hurt like hell. But I didn’t feel anything. I wondered what that was all about.

  Lily was on my back, wrapping her arms around me, pinning my arms down. “Leave my brother alone,” she shrieked.

  I threw her off and staggered to my feet. I felt… invincible now. Different. Not like a regular man, but like a hulking beast of a thing, something that could run and hit and kill and feel nothing. Maybe I was really a demon.

  I spied the ax on the ground and took several steps toward it. They seemed to be echoing, lumbering steps, as if I was a giant.

  Patrick got to his feet too. He shoved me.

  I backhanded him.

  He yelled.

  I reached down to pick up the ax.

  Lily kicked me in the back.

  I pitched forward, narrowly avoiding the ax blade myself. My face skidded against the floor of the shed. But that didn’t hurt either. Nothing hurt. I was the invincible man, after all. I laughed.

  Lily tried to pick up the ax.

  I snatched it out of her grasp.

  “No!” said Patrick.

  I used the ax to push myself to my feet.

  “Deacon, what is going on with you?” Lily was crying.

  I raised the ax over my shoulder and looked at them. I had never used an ax on a person before. I had a little bit of experience with splitting wood. I expected this would be easier than that. Although, maybe not, because they’d be moving. And also, they’d be trying to fight me. I should take down Patrick first, I figured. Lily would be easier to fight than him.

  I thought about the way the blade would cut into the flesh, the way the blood would splatter, the bone splinter.

  I could do this.

  Patrick rushed at me.

  I gripped the ax, flexing my muscles. Idiot. He was coming straight at me, and I was going to bury this ax right between his eyes. In four seconds, he would be close enough.

  Three.

  Two.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “Deacon!” The screeching voice came from behind me, and it startled me so much that I jumped. It was my mother. She was standing in the doorway to the shed.

  And then Patrick plowed into me again. He grabbed at the ax.

  I struggled, trying to keep hold on it.

  “What are you doing?” my mother whispered.

  I yanked on the ax.

  “Deacon, this isn’t you,” said my mother. “I know you. This isn’t you. You would never, ever do something like this.”

  What was I doing? I blinked.

  “Deacon, stop,” said my mother.

  “Look, mom,” I growled. “You don’t understand. I have to do this. They want me to give them something, and this is a sacrifice. If I kill Patrick and Lily, it’s a violent event that releases more energy. It feeds them. And they won’t help if I don’t feed them. So, just back out of the shed and don’t watch.”

  Patrick yanked back on the ax. “You’re batshit insane, aren’t you?”

  “It’s not him!” My mother was coming into the shed.r />
  “Damn it, I told you to leave,” I said to her.

  She stopped right next to Patrick and me. “It’s the park, Patrick. It’s doing this to Deacon.”

  I tried to get the ax away from Patrick again, and I managed it.

  Patrick went stumbling backwards, and I lost a bit of my balance too. But I brought the ax up—

  And my mother was there, right in front of me. “Stop it, Deacon.”

  “Move,” I told her in a grating voice.

  “No,” she said. “If you want a sacrifice, use me. I’m the one who hurt you.”

  “Oh, you’re admitting that now?” I sneered. I took a step towards her, and I imagined bringing the ax down, just cutting lengthwise into her, shoulder to hip.

  “It’s making me remember,” she said. “The park has shown me so many things. So many terrible things.” Her face twisted.

  I didn’t like to see her upset like that. When I was a kid, I still remembered the rare times I saw my mother cry and how it wrecked me. I never wanted her to cry. “Stop it,” I whispered.

  My mother looked back at Patrick and Lily. “Go,” she said.

  Patrick reached for his sister’s hand. They started for the door.

  “No!” I tried to get to them.

  My mother blocked me. “You’ll have to kill me first.” To Patrick, “Go! Go now!”

  Patrick and Lily ran.

  I tried to bring the ax into my mother.

  Couldn’t.

  “Fuck!” I screamed.

  “Deacon!” My mother put her hand on my cheek.

  I started to shake.

  “Kiddo,” she whispered. “Stop.”

  I lowered the ax. I let my arm fall and the ax rested against the floor of the shed. “Mom…” I was starting to feel a creeping tiredness stealing over my limbs.

  I let go of the ax. It clattered harmlessly against the floor of the shed.

  “Deacon, sweetheart.” My mother put her other hand on my other cheek.

  I felt bile rising in the back of my throat. I shoved her off, and I staggered out of the shed. With every step, pain and exhaustion rushed into my body. My hands hurt where I had hit Patrick. My cheek hurt where I’d hit the floor of the shed. All my muscles felt tired. Plus there was a halo of exhaustion running through me, like the way I’d felt after being in Boonridge, where the spirits had feasted on my essence.

  They’d been feasting on me now, hadn’t they?

  It was what Mads had told me, but I’d been too stupid to listen to her, and now…

  I made it through the doorway and then collapsed on the ground.

  My mother knelt in front of me. “Deacon? Baby?”

  I just gazed up at her, barely sensible to the fact that she was even there. I was trying to make sense of everything. It all seemed odd now. Why had I done all those things? I had locked us in the park, and I had crushed the cell phones, and I had locked Patrick and Lily up here. I remembered doing it all, and I remembered that at the time, it all seemed perfectly reasonable, but now…

  “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 b
ack 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.