Highway to Hell

by Val Crowe

  I stared at the sky for a while, and then I got terrified that my mother was in there, making that freaking potion since I wasn’t watching her. She was intent on doing whatever she could to save me, but what she didn’t understand was that I wasn’t ready to let her go.

  I ducked back inside.

  “You all right?” she said. She had the piece of paper in her hand with all of the strange, arcane symbols. It was crumpled and ragged around the edges, but it still looked readable. “Are they trying to get to you out there?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” she said. “If they start feeding on you, I need to be close to stop it.”

  “Fine,” I said. “But you don’t take that potion. Don’t even mix it.”

  “Deacon—”

  “At least…” My voice cracked. “At least wait until we have the chance to… to…” Say goodbye.

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  I went back out of the trailer and looked up at the stars again.

  And then, despite the fact that I’d told her I wouldn’t go anywhere, I went up to the fence. I grasped the chain links and I shook them, as if I could shake the whole thing off. Wait a second. Why weren’t we climbing this fence?

  Maybe the ghosts would try to stop us, but we needed to try to do that first, before she did anything with that stupid potion.

  “Mads?” I whispered. I wouldn’t ask her to fight the ghosts. I couldn’t ask that of her. But maybe she would have some advice for me, some insight.

  She didn’t answer.

  Maybe they’d driven her off.

  Or maybe she was right there, and I couldn’t see her. Ghosts could make it so that you saw and felt things that weren’t there, just like the bullet that had hit Patrick. So, they could be hiding Mads from me.

  Hold on…

  I ran to the gate, and I grabbed hold of it. I could see the chain, locked tight, and when I rattled it, it wouldn’t budge. I felt the resistance of that strong chain.

  But I persisted anyway.

  Not real, I thought.

  And the gate burst open.

  Now, I could see that the chain was cut open, and the lock was open too. The bolt cutters were even lying on the ground right there next to the gate. I pushed the gate wide open, and then I yelled for my mother.

  “Mom!”

  Wait, what the hell was that?

  A dark, dark haze had gathered above the park. It was congealing, and it had taken on the look of the same thing that crawled into my mother’s eyes and mouth and nostrils all those years ago. A brackish liquid. It was descending on my mother’s motorhome.

  “Mom, I told you not to do it!” I screamed, running for the motorhome. My feet pounded against the pavement, and I tore down there as fast as I can. “It was a trick, Mom! The gate’s open.”

  But when I got there, my mother was locked in the bathroom.

  I yanked the door open.

  She was writhing on the floor, and the liquid was coming in through a crack in the window, wrapping her up in long, seeking tendrils. She looked at me, and she gasped. “I love you, Deacon. Go!”

  Damn it.

  I slammed the door to the bathroom.

  Okay, okay. Think. Think.

  Ghosts were usually tied to a place. Sometimes a person, if they needed to be, but usually a place. The spirits here were tied to the park. Maybe if I got my mother away from the park before they got into her…

  But the keys.

  We didn’t know where the keys were.

  Well, it had been hiding them. I bet they were right up there where my mother usually kept them, lying out on the dashboard.

  I rushed through motorhome and into the cockpit. I sat down in the driver’s seat, and I felt around on the dashboard.

  At first nothing.

  Maybe she’d put them somewhere else?

  No, no, it was a trick. They were here.

  And my hands closed over the keys. I jammed them into the ignition of the motorhome and turned the key.

  Nothing happened.

  Trick, I thought, and sure enough, there was the hum of the engine beneath. The motorhome was moving.

  I put the thing in gear and jammed my foot down on the gas.

  The chairs and the table were still outside. Also, the awning was still hanging off the side.

  I didn’t care. I zoomed past them, knocking them over and then made a wide turn, heading for the gate.

  Which, of course, looked closed.

  But I knew that I had left it open, so I just gunned it and drove the motorhome right through the gate.

  There was a crashing noise and a tearing noise.

  That would be the awning. It was toast.

  But, yeah, otherwise, we were out. I zoomed out onto the dirt road that led to the park, leaving it behind me.

  Two seconds later, Mads popped up, sitting next to me in the passenger seat.

  “Mads!”

  “Hey, Deacon,” she said, a smile on her face. “You’re out.”

  “I’m out,” I said.

  “But, um… you’re just bringing all the power from the park with you. It’s all inside your mom.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I skidded to a stop in the middle of the road and pounded the flat of my hand against the steering wheel. “Damn it. I wasn’t in time.”

  “No,” said Mads, shaking her head.

  “So, what do I do?” I dragged a hand over my face. “Am I going to have to kill my mother?”

  “It’s going to do that on its own,” said Mads. “Her body can’t contain all that. But there’s the thing. When it comes out of her, it’s going to be free. It’ll attach to you. You’re the nearest source of energy.”

  I hit the steering wheel again.

  From the back of the motorhome, my mother rattled the door of the bathroom. “Let me out of here, you little shit!”

  I shut my eyes. I couldn’t handle this right now. “So, she dies, and then all the energy from the amusement park is feeding on me, attached to me, and then we both—”

  “I won’t let it hurt you,” said Mads.

  I pointed at her. “Don’t you even think about it. I’m not losing you too. I…” I slumped down in the seat and I tried to think of something to do, some way out of this. But all I could think about was that my mother had done this without even giving me the chance to say that I loved her or to tell her goodbye or to do anything at all. She had the best of intentions, and I knew she wanted to atone for the things that she’d done to hurt me, but she didn’t understand that the best way to atone for all of that was to just be there for me. Every day for as long as I needed her. Just be my mother. That was what I needed. More than anything else.

  Well, okay, in this moment, what I actually needed was some way to kill ghosts, but—

  I sat up straight. “Okay, but what if I did kill her?”

  “What?” said Mads. “I didn’t think you’d want to do that.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “But is it different? If the ghosts are inside her when she dies is that different than them escaping?”

  She bit down on her lip. “Well, I don’t know. I’ve never seen what happens if a person is killed when they’re being possessed.”

  “This isn’t like possession, though, not exactly,” I said. “Look, these ghosts, the ones in the park, they were given form by the psychic imprints left in that place. But if they latch onto something more powerful, they change form, yes?”

  She nodded slowly. “I think so.”

  “And I’ve seen ghosts sort of… go away. Like if they resolve their unfinished business, the energy that’s powering them goes away. They break up and disappear.”

  “We can’t resolve all of the unfinished business of the park,” she said.

  “No, but if they’re all tied to my mother’s energy right now, and my mother’s energy goes away, it’s the same thing, right? They lose their form, they go back to being whatever they are… neutralize
d energy sources searching for something to feed on.”

  “Right,” said Mads. “That’s what I’m saying. They’ll go for you.”

  I scratched my chin. “So, it’s not different. I can’t be near her when it happens. But when it does happen, they’ll… they won’t be vengeful anymore? They’ll be released?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mads. “Maybe.”

  I laughed softly to myself. Maybe. Great. Yeah, story of my life. No one had any idea. We were all just making guesses.

  “What are you going to do?” said Mads. “Leave her here?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Deacon, that much energy attached to you, even if it’s neutralized and not vengeful…”

  “No, I know. Whatever they are, they’re hungry. They want energy to feed on. And I’m an all-you-can-eat buffet.”

  “It would destroy you.”

  “It needs to be attached to something else,” I said. “Something that could be contained and destroyed.”

  “Like what?”

  I put the motorhome in park, yanked out the keys and tossed them on the dashboard.

  “Deacon?” said Mads. “What are you going to do?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  I stalked back into the motorhome, and I yanked open the door to the bathroom. My mother tumbled out of it. She started clawing at me. Her voice was grating. “You didn’t break your arm. It doesn’t look broken to me. You’re just a whiny crybaby, and I think you need to take your medicine.” She slammed me back into the wall.

  Oh, yeah, I remembered this.

  I smiled at her. “You don’t want her. You stay in her, and she falls apart. You want attached to something else, something stronger, something stable. Something with a lot of traumatic energy, like…” I pounded the wall. “This motorhome here.”

  My mother staggered backward.

  I nodded. “Yeah, yeah, look at it. It’s not an amusement park, and no one got murdered here, but you know what she did to me in this place? She cut me and punched me and pushed me face down into that table and dug her nails into that space just under my ear lobes.”

  My mother looked up at the ceiling of the motorhome.

  “And that’s not all she did,” I said. “Oh, no, that’s not all. This place is full of pain and misery and stuffed-down emotion. There’s plenty for you to feed on here. Leave the body. It’s no good to you. Stay in the motorhome.”

  My mother hesitated. Then she fell to her knees and began to cough. Blackish liquid started to spew out of her mouth.

  It came for me right off.

  I sidestepped. “Mom, I can’t be here, or it’ll come for me. Just let it out, and then leave the motorhome. You got that?”

  The liquid reached through the air for me, forming into tendrils like fingers.

  I moved out of its way, and then I dove out of the motorhome, throwing open the door and hurling myself out onto the road. I had to go through the tatters of the broken awning on the way out, but then I made it. I sucked in a gasping breath.

  Mads flickered into sight next to me. “Good thought,” she said.

  I nodded. “Yeah, well, let’s hope it works.” I couldn’t be sure my mother was strong enough to hold on while it all came out of her. I couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t just come for me instead of settling into the motorhome.

  I went around to the back, where my mother stowed her generator fuel. She had a dual-fuel generator that ran on either gasoline or propane. Luckily, she had some gas. I pulled out the extra gas she had and began to liberally douse everything in gasoline.

  “Um, what are you doing?” said Mads.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  “If the ghosts realize—”

  “Just stay quiet and maybe they won’t,” I muttered. I knew that my mother had a lighter she kept handy, just in case the starter on the grill didn’t work. I found that.

  Then I left the motorhome, dribbling a trail of gasoline behind me. I walked down the road as far as I could, out of sight of the motorhome, until the gasoline was gone.

  Then it was just a waiting game.

  I wasn’t sure if I was far enough away. The ghosts could sense me, I was sure of it. They could leave the motorhome in search of me if they weren’t satisfied with the energy there.

  I couldn’t wait forever.

  But I had to wait for my mother. I had to hope she would get free.

  I watched the bend in the road, waiting for her to run around it, into my view.

  She didn’t appear.

  I had no way of knowing if my mother was okay or not.

  The back of my neck broke out in a sweat. I should yell for her. But what if I did that, and it made the ghosts realize that I was out here, and they left the motorhome, and then all of this had been for nothing?

  Maybe it was a risk I had to take.

  I opened my mouth to call out her name.

  And there she was, stumbling down the road toward me.

  “Mom!” I yelled.

  She kept coming, nearly tripping over her feet.

  I lit the trail of gasoline. “Stay back!” I yelled. I ran for her, yanking her out of the way.

  The flames licked over the ground, heading back toward the motorhome.

  “Deacon,” she whispered. “Deacon, what’s going on?”

  I tugged her to her feet. “We have to run,” I said.

  We were halfway down the road when the thing exploded.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  It worked.

  Mads said it had worked. That when the motorhome was destroyed, the incarnations the ghosts had been clinging to were destroyed with it. They flitted out, blank pieces of energy, searching for something else to latch onto.

  Some of them did come for me, Mads said, but she managed to keep them off. The others were thrown wide by the explosion.

  For my part, my mother and I took off in my truck, dragging the Airstream behind us. We went the opposite way of the burning motorhome. And we called the fire department as soon as we got to a phone. We didn’t want to start a forest fire or something.

  I was exhausted. I’d been drained by those ghosts, and I hadn’t completely recharged when I went running down the road. We checked into the campground that the police detective had told us about and I promptly went to sleep.

  Apparently, I slept for fifteen hours. At least, that’s what my mother said. She spent the time trying to save the stuff from the fridge that hadn’t already gone bad. She tried to cook me something to eat, but all her cooking skills seemed to be gone. I guessed the amusement park had influenced her to do that, all part of its seduction to try to keep us there. Those had been some hungry ghosts.

  We went out for some food instead.

  It turned out that Patrick and Lily were at the campground too. They were afraid to leave town because the detective had asked us not to. They also had been debating turning me in for attempted murder.

  My mother talked to them while I was asleep. I’m not sure what she said to them, but she convinced them not to press charges against me. Neither of them were real keen on spending time with me, though, so I didn’t actually see them. Everything I found out about them was relayed to me from my mother. Patrick and Lily didn’t want to pay my mother for her services, and she didn’t press them for the cash. She said she understood that the experience had been too harrowing for them to feel as though they had been well served.

  But I pointed out to her that they’d gotten all their answers about their sister. Molly had been killed in the park by some pervert who had then taken their mother’s jewelry. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t found out what they came for.

  This was one of the things we discussed over our meal at the diner in town after I slept for fifteen hours. While we were eating there, the police detective sauntered up to our table. He had some questions about the motorhome we’d left burning out there.

  “It was an accident,” my mother said to him.

  “It was pretty clearly do
used in gasoline,” said the detective.

  “Is there a fine a for burning a motorhome, sir?” I said.

  He pressed his lips into a firm line. “Well, not as such, I don’t suppose. But it is a public nuisance, and it’s in the middle of that road out there.”

  “The road that only goes to the abandoned amusement park that’s private property,” I said.

  “You got a point, boy?” he said.

  “We’ll have it removed,” I said. “Soon as we can.”

  “See that you do,” he said.

  “Uh, about Oscar Milton?” I said. Now that I wasn’t being influenced by the spirits in the amusement park, I felt pretty awful about what had happened to Oscar. He hadn’t deserved the end he’d received, and I wanted to do what I could for him now, even though he was gone.

  “What about him?”

  “Well, if there are arrangements that need to be made for his body, or—”

  “We already contacted his wife, and he’s been transported back to her and his children.”

  “He had a wife?” said my mother, horrified. “Children?”

  “Yes,” said the police detective, giving her a funny look.

  “He… he never told me that,” said my mother, drawing in a breath.

  Well, well. I knew there was a reason I didn’t like that guy. Still, even if he hadn’t been a great person, he hadn’t deserved that death. I felt responsible, and that heaviness wasn’t going to leave me any time soon.

  The detective eyed us both. “You can both leave town, I suppose. I’d rather not have you around any longer. Lord knows what worse trouble you’d cause.”

  “Thanks,” said my mother.

  He didn’t respond, just left.

  Once he was gone, I turned back to my mother. “I’m sorry about Oscar. They killed him for me.”

  “You aren’t responsible for what happened back there,” she said.

  Maybe not, but it still felt shitty. “I’m sorry about the motorhome,” I said. “You’d had that thing for a long time.”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “You saved my life, killing the motorhome instead of me. I’m grateful. And it was probably time to get a new motorhome, anyway.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe that the gate was open the whole time. I did it all for nothing.”