Darkness Creeping

by Neal Shusterman

  Yeah, I know what roller coasters mean to Trevor. And I also know what it means when the ride is over.

  Trevor furiously hurls another baseball, missing the stacked gray bottles by a mile. The guy behind the counter is a dweeb with an Adam’s apple the size of a golf ball that bobs up and down when he talks. Trevor flicks him another crumpled dollar and takes aim again.

  “Why don’t we ride the Skull-Smasher or the Spine-Shredder,” I offer. “Those aren’t bad rides—and the lines aren’t as long as the Kamikaze’s was.”

  Trevor just hurls the baseball even harder, missing again. “Those are baby rides,” he says with a sneer.

  “Listen, next summer we’ll find a better roller coaster,” I say, trying to cheer him up. “They’re always building new ones.”

  “That’s a whole year away,” Trevor complains, hurling the ball again, this time nailing all three bottles at once.

  The dweeb running the booth hands Trevor a purple dinosaur. “Nice shot,” he grunts.

  Trevor looks at the purple thing with practiced disgust.

  Great,I think. Trevor’s already bored out of his mind and it’s only this amusement park’s opening day.As I watch my brother, I know what’ll happen now; five more minutes, and he’ll start finding things to do that will get us into trouble, deep trouble. It’s how Trevor is.

  That’s when I catch sight of the tickets thumbtacked to the booth’s wall, right alongside the row of purple dinosaurs—two tickets with red printing on gold paper.

  “What are those?” I ask the dweeb running the booth.

  “Beats me,” he says, totally clueless. “You want ’em instead of the dinosaur?”

  We make the trade, and I read the tickets as we walk away: GOOD FORONERIDEON THERAPTOR.

  “What’s the Raptor?” I ask Trevor.

  “Who knows,” he says. “Probably some dumb kiddie-go-round thing, like everything else in this stupid place.”

  I look on the amusement-park map but can’t find the ride anywhere. Then, through the opening-day crowds, I look up and see a hand-painted sign that reads THE RAPTOR in big red letters. The sign is pointing down toward a path that no one else seems to be taking. That alone is enough to catch Trevor’s interest, as well as mine.

  He glances around furtively, as if he’s about to do something he shouldn’t, then says, “Let’s check it out.”

  He leads the way down the path, and as always, I follow.

  The dark asphalt we are on leads down into thick bushes, and the sounds of the amusement-park crowd get farther and farther away, until we can’t hear them at all.

  “I think we made a wrong turn,” I tell Trevor, studying the map, trying to get my bearings. Then suddenly a deep voice booms in the bushes beside us.

  “You’re looking for the Raptor, are you?”

  We turn to see a clean-shaven man dressed in the gray-and-blue uniform that all the ride operators wear, only his doesn’t seem to be made of the same awful polyester. Instead his uniform shimmers like satin. So do his eyes, blue-gray eyes that you can’t look into, no matter how hard you try.

  I look at Trevor, and tough as he is, he can’t look the man in the face.

  “The name’s DelRio,” the man says. “I run the Raptor.”

  “What isthe Raptor?” asks Trevor.

  DelRio grins. “You mean you don’t know?” He reaches out his long fingers and pulls aside the limbs of a dense thornbush. “There you are, gentlemen—the Raptor!”

  What we see doesn’t register at first. When something is so big—so indescribably huge—sometimes your brain can’t quite wrap around it. All you can do is blink and stare, trying to force your mind to accept what it sees.

  There’s a valley before us, and down in the valley is a wooden roller coaster painted black as night. But the amazing thing is that the valley itself is part of the roller coaster. Its peaks rise on either side of us in a tangle of tracks that stretch off in all directions as if there is nothing else but the Raptor from here to the ends of the earth.

  “No way,” Trevor gasps, more impressed than I’ve ever seen him. “This must be the biggest roller coaster in the world!”

  “The biggest anywhere,” corrects DelRio.

  In front of us is the ride’s platform with sleek red cars, ready to go.

  “Something’s wrong,” I say, although I can’t quite figure out what it is. “Why isn’t this ride on the map?”

  “New attraction,” says DelRio.

  “So how come there’s no crowd?” asks Trevor.

  DelRio smiles and looks through us with those awful eyes. “The Raptor is by invitation only.” He takes our tickets, flipping them over to read the back. “Trevor and Brent Collins,” he says. “Pleased to have you aboard.”

  Trevor and I look at each other, then at the torn ticket stubs DelRio has just handed back to us. Sure enough, our names are printed right there on the back, big as life.

  “Wait! How did—” But before I can ask, Trevor cuts me off, his eyes already racing along the wildly twisting tracks of the gigantic contraption.

  “That first drop,” he says, “that’s three hundred feet.”

  “Oh, the first drop’s grand!” DelRio exclaims. “But on this ride, it’s the last drop that’s special.”

  I can see Trevor licking his lips, losing himself in the sight of the amazing ride. It’s good to see him excited like this . . . and notgood, too.

  Every time DelRio talks I get a churning feeling in my gut—the kind of feeling you get when you find half a worm in your apple. Still, I can’t figure out what’s wrong.

  “Are we the only ones invited?” I ask tentatively.

  DelRio smiles. “Here come the others now.”

  I turn to see a group of gawking kids coming through the bushes, and DelRio greets them happily. The look in their eyes is exactly like Trevor’s. They don’t just want to ride the coaster—they needto ride it.

  “Since you’re the first, you can ride in the front,” DelRio tells us. “Aren’t you the lucky ones!”

  While Trevor psyches himself up for the ride, and while DelRio tears tickets, I slip away into the superstructure of the great wooden beast. I’m searching for something—although I’m not sure what it is. I follow the track with my eyes, but it’s almost impossible to stick with it. It twists and spins and loops in ways that wooden roller coasters aren’t supposed to be able to do—up and down, back and forth, until my head gets dizzy and little squirmy spots appear before my eyes. It’s like a huge angry knot.

  Before long I’m lost in the immense web of wood, but still I follow the path of the rails with my eyes until I come to that last drop that DelRio claimed was so special. I follow its long path up . . . and then down . . .

  In an instant I understand just what it is about this ride I couldn’t put my finger on before. Now I knowI have to stop Trevor from getting on it.

  In a wild panic I race back through the dark wooden frame of the Raptor, dodging low-hanging beams that poke out at odd angles.

  When I finally reach the platform, everyone is sitting in their cars, ready to go. The only empty seat is in the front car. It’s the seat beside Trevor. DelRio waits impatiently by a big lever extending from the ground.

  “Hurry, Brent,” DelRio says, scowling. “Everyone’s waiting.”

  “Yes! Yes!” shout all the kids. “Hurry! Hurry! We want to RIDE!”

  They start cheering for me to get in, to join my brother in the front car. But I’m frozen on the platform.

  “Trevor!” I finally manage to say, gasping for breath. “Trevor, you have to get off that ride.”

  “What are you, nuts?” he shouts.

  “We can’t ride this coaster!” I insist.

  Trevor ignores me, fixing his gaze straight ahead. But that’s not the direction in which he should be looking. He should be looking at the track behind the last car—because if he does, he’ll see that there isno track behind the last car!

  “The coaster doesn
’t come back!” I shout at him. “Don’t you see? It doesn’t come back!”

  Trevor finally turns to me, his hands shaking in infinite terror and ultimate excitement . . . and then he says . . .

  “I know.”

  I take a step back.

  I can’t answer that. I can’t accept it. I need more time, but everyone is shouting at me to get on the ride, and DelRio is getting more and more impatient. That’s when Trevor reaches out his hand toward me, his fingers bone white, trembling with anticipation.

  “Ride with me, Brent,” he pleads desperately. “It’ll be great. I can feel it!”

  I reach out my hand. My fingers are an inch from his.

  “Please . . .” Trevor pleads.

  He’s my brother. He wants me to go. They allwant me to go. What could be better than riding in the front car, twisting through all those spins and drops? I can see it now: Trevor and me—the way it’s always been—his hands high in the air, wrestling the wind, and me gripping the safety bar.

  Only thing is, the Raptor hasno safety bar.

  I pull my hand back away from his. I won’t follow you, Trevor! my mind screams. Not today. Not ever again.

  When Trevor sees me backing away, his face hardens—the way it hardens toward our parents or his teachers or anyone else who’s on the outside of his closed world. “Wimp!” he shouts at me. “Loooooser!”

  DelRio tightly grips the lever. “This isn’t a ride for the weak,” he says, his hawk eyes judging me, trying to make me feel small and useless. “Stand back and let the big kids ride.”

  He pulls back on the lever, and slowly the Raptor slides forward, catching on a heavy chain that begins to haul it up the first big drop. Trevor has already turned away from me, locking his eyes on the track rising before him, preparing himself for the thrill of his life.

  The coaster clackety-clacks all the way to the top. Then the red train begins to fall, its metal wheels throwing sparks and screeching all the way down. All I can do is watch as Trevor puts up his hands and rides. The wooden beast of a roller coaster groans and roars like a dragon, and the tiny red train rockets deep inside the black wooden framework stretching to the horizon.

  Up and down, back and forth, the Raptor races. Time is paralyzed as its trainload of riders rockets through thrill after terrifying thrill, until finally, after what seems like an eternity, it reaches that last mountain.

  DelRio turns to me. “The grand finale,” he announces. “You could have been there—you could have had the ultimate thrill if you weren’t a coward, Brent.”

  But I know better. This time, Iam the brave one.

  The red train climbs the final peak, defying gravity, moving up and up until it’s nothing more than a tiny red sliver against a blue sky . . . and then it begins the trip down, accelerating faster than gravity can pull it. It’s as if the ground itself were sucking it down from the clouds.

  The Raptor’s whole wooden framework rumbles like an earthquake. I hold on to a black beam, and I feel my teeth rattle in my head. I want to close my eyes, but I keep them open, watching every last second.

  I can see Trevor alone in the front car. His hands are high, slapping defiantly against the wind, and he’s screaming louder than all the others as the train plummets straight down . . . into that awful destiny that awaits it.

  I can see that destiny from here now, looming larger than life—a bottomless blacker-than-black pit.

  I watch as my brother and all the others are pulled from the sky, down into that emptiness . . . and then they are swallowed by it, their thrilled screams silenced without as much as an echo.

  The ride is over.

  I am horrified, but DelRio remains unmoved. He casually glances at his watch, then turns and shouts deep into the superstructure of the roller coaster. “Time!”

  All at once hundreds of workers crawl from the woodwork like ants. Nameless, faceless people, each one with some kind of tool like a hammer or wrench practically growing from their arms. They all set upon the Raptor, dismantling it with impossible speed.

  “What is this?” I ask DelRio. “What’s going on?”

  “Surely you don’t expect an attraction this special to stay in one place?” he scoffs. “We must travel! There are worlds of people waiting for the thrill of a lifetime!”

  When I look again at the roller coaster, it’s gone. Nothing remains but the workers carrying its heavy beams off through the thick underbrush.

  DelRio smiles at me. “We’ll see you again, Brent,” he says. “Perhaps next time you’ll ride.”

  As the last of the workers carry away the final rail of the Raptor on their horribly hunched backs, I stare DelRio down. I can look him in the eyes now, unblinking, unflinching.

  “Tell your friends about the Raptor,” he says, then he pauses and adds: “No . . . on second thought, don’t tell them a thing. Wouldn’t want to spoil their surprise.”

  Then he strolls off into the dense bushes after the workers, who are carrying the Raptor off to its next location. I just stand there. Nothing is left but the breeze through the valley and the distant sounds of the amusement park far behind me.

  No, I won’t tell anyone—ever. What could I possibly say? And if I encounter the Raptor again someday, I can only hope I will have the strength to stare DelRio down once more, dig my heels deep into the earth beneath my feet . . . and refuse to ride.

  TRASH DAY

  This story was a challenge. Literally. I was in a car with a friend, who was complaining that she had no ideas for stories. I said there are always ideas, and that you can write a story about anything. She said. “Okay, then I challenge you to write a story bout the next object you see.” It was a Dumpster.

  TRASH DAY

  It began long before that thingarrived on their lawn.

  In fact, it began long before Lucinda Pudlinger was born. There was no way to know all the strange and mysterious forces that had created the Pudlinger family. Nevertheless, all those forces bubbled and brewed together and spat out the Pudlingers on the doormat of humanity.

  As for Lucinda, it had never really occurred to her how serious her situation was until the day Garson McCall walked her home from school.

  “You really don’t have to,” Lucinda had told him, more as a warning than anything else. Still, Garson had insisted. For reasons that Lucinda could not understand, he had a crush on her.

  “No,” said Garson, “I really want to walk you home.”

  Lucinda didn’t mind the attention, but she did mind the fact that Garson was going to meet her family. There was no preparing him for that.

  As they rounded the corner on that autumn afternoon, the Pudlinger home came into view. It was halfway down a street of identical tract homes—but there was nothing about where the Pudlingers lived that matched the other homes.

  True, they had a small front lawn like every other house on the block, but on the Pudlingers’ lawn there were three rusting cars with no wheels—and a fourth piled on top of the other three. The four useless vehicles had been there, as far as Lucinda knew, since the beginning of time. While others might keep such old wrecks with an eye toward restoring them, the Pudlingers, it seemed, just collected them.

  There was also a washing machine on that lawn. It didn’t work, but Lucinda’s mom had filled it with barbecue ashes and turned it into a planter. Of course, only weeds would grow in it, but then weeds were Mrs. Pudlinger’s specialty. One only needed to look at the rest of the yard to see that.

  As for the house itself, the roof shingles looked like a jigsaw puzzle minus a number of pieces, and the pea-green aluminum siding was peeling (which was something aluminum siding wasn’t supposed to do).

  The Pudlinger place didn’t just draw your attention when you walked by it. No, it grabbed your eyeballs and dragged them kicking and screaming out of their sockets. In fact, if you looked up “eyesore” in the dictionary, Lucinda was convinced it would say See Pudlinger.

  “Look at that place!” said Garson as they w
alked down the street. “Is that a house or the city dump?”

  “It’s myhouse,” said Lucinda, figuring the truth was less painful when delivered quickly.

  “Oh,” replied Garson, his face turning red from the foot he had just put in his mouth. “I didn’t mean there was anything wrongwith it—it just looks . . . lived in. Yeah, that’s right—lived in . . . in a homey sort of way.”

  “Homely” is more like it,thought Lucinda.

  Out front there was a fifth rusty auto relic that still worked, parked by the curb. A pair of legs attached to black boots stuck out from underneath. As Garson and Lucinda approached, a boy of about sixteen crawled out from under the car, stood in their path, and flexed his muscles in a threatening way. He wore a black T-shirt that said DIE, and he had dirty-blond hair with streaks of age-old grease in it. His right arm was substantially more muscular than his left, the way crabs often have one claw much bigger than the other.

  “Who’s this dweeb?” the filthy teenager said through a mouth full of teeth, none of which seemed to be growing in the same direction. He looked Garson up and down.

  Lucinda sighed. “Garson, this is my brother, Ignatius.”

  “My friends call me ‘Itchy’” (which didn’t mean much, since Ignatius had no friends). “You ain’t a nerd, are you?” Itchy asked the boy standing uncomfortably next to Lucinda.

  “No, not recently,” Garson replied.

  “Good. I hate nerds.” And with that, Itchy reached out his muscular right arm and shook Garson’s hand, practically shattering Garson’s finger bones. It was intentional.

  “Hey, wanna help me chase the neighborhood cats into traffic?” Itchy asked. “It’s a blast!”

  “No thanks,” said Garson. “I’m allergic to cats.”

  Itchy shrugged. “Your loss,” he said, then returned to tormenting the fat tabby that was hiding under the car.

  “What’s with him?” asked Garson as he and Lucinda made their way toward the house.