Highway to Hell

by Val Crowe

  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?” M
y 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.

  “Spirits can’t affect the material world,” she said. “How are they doing all this?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they’re really powerful now that they’ve absorbed all of my juice. Maybe my power is making them solid and strong.”

  “So, we can’t move my motorhome, and we can’t move your truck,” she said. “I mean, maybe I could figure out how to hotwire a car if I had access to a youtube tutorial, but we don’t have cell phones anymore, so no internet.”

  I groaned. “I’m really sorry about the phones. They got in my head.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” she said. “If anyone understands a supernatural entity taking control, it’s me.” She started to pace the length of the motorhome. “What do we do? What do we do?”

  I shut my eyes but struggled to keep conscious. To help with that, I talked. “Well, I had this barnacle on me.”

  “What’s a barnacle?”

  “That’s not really what it’s called. I just called it that,” I said. “It was a thing that was stuck on my neck and was trying to make me kill myself.”

  “Deacon!”

  “Well, it’s fine now,” I said. “We went to a place that had a lot of really strong supernatural energy, and it absorbed them into it, and then we got away, and left them there.”

  “Oh, this is what you were talking about before, when you were spinning your theory about ghosts. Who’s we?”

  “Me and Wade,” I said. “And this girl named Rylan.”

  “Oh, a girl?”

  “She’s a lesbian, Mom.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting anything,” she said. “I really don’t see why you’re telling me this.”

  “Mostly, I’m trying to stay awake.”

  “Then open your eyes.”

  I opened them. The light inside the motorhome seemed especially yellow. A dim, depressing yellow. I groaned. “Anyway, we can’t do anything like that here. We can’t take the entire place with us somewhere and release it.”

  “No, we can’t,” she said.

  “I mean, I took everything that was haunting Ridinger Hall out with me,” I said. “But it was all in the barnacle. I don’t have a barnacle.”

  “But if we got all the energy in the park contained in something?” said my mother. “Would that work? Could we get away?”

  “You got a magic genie lamp or something in here?”

  “Well, no,” she said, sighing. “No, I don’t.”

  We were quiet.

  I shut my eyes again.

  This time I did fall asleep.

  * * *

  My mother was shaking me awake again.

  I sat up, feeling as though I had just a little more energy. I guessed that sleeping might have helped. That was interesting. I wondered if the ghosts really did want to kill me or not. Maybe if they kept me barely alive, they could get me to regenerate more and more energy, and that would power them for ages. It would probably be in their best interest not to kill me after all, just to keep me captive. Was that their endgame, or were they not really intelligent enough to know to do that?

  I blinked hard. Sitting out on the table were those same strange bottles and odd herbs that my mother had used in the spell to summon Negus.

  Wait. Was this a dream? Was I awake? Was this another vision from the past?

  “Deacon, how are you?” said my mother. She came into view, and she looked like her present self, gray around the temples and all.

  “Mom, what the hell?” I gestured to the stuff.

  “Well, I was thinking about what you said,” she said. “If we could contain all the energy, then, um, you could get away. That is, if you’re strong enough. I’ll do this ritual and I’ll absorb the power in the park. It will be contained in me. I still have all the ingredients, do you believe that? I couldn’t throw them away, because if I did that, I’d have to acknowledge to myself that I had them in the first place.” She let out a bitter chuckle.

  “Wait a second, Mom, you can’t do this. This whole park had a lot of power. If we put it inside you, I don’t know what might happen.”

  “That’s why you get away from me as fast as you can,” she said. “You just run. If you have to, there’s this. I did go back and get it while you were sleeping.” She reached behind herself and pulled out the ax from the shed.

  My eyes widened. “No.”

  “Deacon, I’d rather be dead that be possessed by… by that.” She pointed out there. “But if you can’t kill me, especially with an ax, I suppose I understand. Promise you’ll find some way to do it, though, even if you just bring the cops back and they shoot me.”

  “I don’t want you to die!” I was on my feet now. “There’s got to be another way.”

  “Okay,” she said, spreading her hands. “So, tell me what it is.”

  I stepped back, sucking in breath through my nose. I tried to think. I rubbed my thumb over my chin, which was no
w very prickly with growth, and I was actually sort of glad of it.

  The shaving obsession wasn’t me. That was something the park had put in my mind. I was myself again. My mother had saved me. She had gotten to me when no one else could. She was like Mads in that way. Mads had gotten through to me before when I’d been under the influence of a spirit.

  But I couldn’t get to Mads now. She was blocked from me. I didn’t know what she’d do, anyway. The last time she’d fought a spirit for me, it had been Negus, and it had weakened her so badly that she couldn’t contact me for years.

  No, it wasn’t better to ask Mads to put herself on the line for me, even if I could get to her.

  “Well?” said my mother.

  “You don’t even know if it would work. It was supposed to summon something completely different, right?” I said. “So, say you try it, and you don’t get the spirits of the amusement park. Say you get something else, something worse. Then I’ve still lost you, and it’s for nothing.”

  “Well, I have to do something,” she said. “All of this is my fault. I’m the one who let you play with that stupid necklace. I’m the one who made you into this catnip thing. So, it’s all, all my fault, baby. You are my son. There’s no question about whether or not I’d die for you. I will. I will save you.”

  “No,” I said. “You can’t.”

  “Well, I’m going to do it whether you like it or not,” she said. “I have to give you the chance to get away. It’s only a matter of whether or not you’re strong enough to run.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “Mom, there’s no way I’m going to agree to this.”

  “You don’t have to,” she said.

  “I don’t want to lose you,” I said. “I just got you back, and now…” I shook my head. “No.” And now a lump was forming in the back of my throat, and I was fighting them, but my eyes were stinging, and—

  I threw myself out of the motorhome and stood outside.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  It was full dark now.

  Above me, the sky was full of bright pinpoints of light glittering on a velvet background. It was beautiful. It shouldn’t be allowed to be beautiful. Not when everything was about to fall apart. Not when all this was happening.