by JL Bryan
The man finally descended the stairs and approached them. His smile was almost warm now, though his eyes were not. He stood on the edge of the canal, looking down at them.
The drumbeats sounded louder and faster inside the dome.
“Watch for snakes and alligators,” he said. “And the jungle natives and their dark rituals. Sometimes they need a human sacrifice or two to prime the pump.”
He gave them his first real smile, full of perfectly straight, bleach-white teeth.
“Enjoy the ride,” he added. “I know I will enjoy watching.”
The boat jerked to life, rolling forward on its underwater tracks. It nosed through cattails and slime toward the entrance cave, where the bamboo doors were already swinging open to admit them.
Kevin and Reeves shared a smile—and for the moment, Kevin felt like they were real friends, that Reeves might even stop picking on him in front of other people after tonight.
The boat followed a tight curve through a cave full of stalagmites jutting up through the water, under stalactites thick with moss—possibly real moss. The ride still smelled dank, the water swampy and dark. It was hard to tell what was part of the ride and what was real Florida jungle creeping back to swallow the old amusement park.
They reached a spacious, tropical cavern resplendent with Jurassic-sized flowers and trees thick with blooming vines. A waterfall spilled into one side of the boat canal. Beside it, a big Venus flytrap munched on an insect the size of a seagull. The insect, with most of its body trapped in the flytrap’s jaws, kept rolling its cartoony eyes as though to say just my luck or ain’t that life?
In one of the tree limbs, a pair of miniature pink monkeys playfully wrestled a banana back and forth between them. Brightly colored mechanical birds occupied other tree limbs, and as the boat approached, they waved their wings and whistled overlapping rounds of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
“This is lame,” Reeves said. “It’s so fake.”
Kevin kind of liked it, though. The look on Reeves’s face said he was enjoying the ride, too, even though he was pretending it was beneath him.
The boat moved closer to the whistling tropical birds, some of them perched on flowery, leafy limbs that extended out over the canal.
“Okay, we get it, birds and flowers,” Reeves said. “This the most boring--”
Three dinosaur-sized alligator heads lunged up out of the water, their jaws opened wide to reveal rows of teeth. There was one on each side of the boat and a third straight ahead, all of them close enough to bite. The whistling-bird sounds above turned into frightened, confused squawking.
Reeves and Kevin screamed and pulled close to each other, away from the monsters menacing the sides of the boat. It took a moment to realize that the gator heads were fake, the open jaws were not even moving, and the deafening snarls were actually blasted from hidden speakers in the rocks along the tropical shoreline.
“You were totally scared,” Reeves snorted, pushing Kevin away as though he hadn’t been clinging to him. “Wuss.”
“You were scared, too!” Kevin squeaked.
“They could have been real.” Reeves watched the three alligator heads sink back beneath the dark, slimy surface. The boat resumed its slow glide through the water. “There could be real snakes or anything in this place.”
“But they’ve been working on it,” Kevin whispered. “Fixing it. That guy said.”
“Maybe he’s lying,” Reeves said. “We don’t know who that guy is. Maybe he’s just a random freak who kills kids in old amusement parks.”
“Don’t say that!”
The boat passed through a narrow, dim cavern, its walls and ceiling shaggy with green growth. Unseen things slithered and hissed among the cattails. Kevin glimpsed an enormous water moccasin near one of the sparse underwater lights, but it dove away before he could tell whether it was fake or not.
The cave grew darker as the boat advanced. When it grew a little brighter—just a little—Kevin saw they were traveling through a rocky cave with no greenery. Instead, hundreds of black spiders with strange red markings scurried among the rocks, spinning thick webs overheard.
“That’s not real, right?” Reeves was pale. “I hate spiders. I really hate spiders.”
“They can’t be,” Kevin whispered, but he thought that there seemed to be an awful lot of them, and their movements were pretty quick and nimble for cheap mechanical contraptions.
The cave grew dark again, leaving no light at all.
“Oh, come on, not with all the spiders,” Reeves said. The sound of narrow, hairy spider legs rustled in the shadows all around them.
Kevin and Reeves felt the sticky filaments of webbing all over them, as if the boat had carried them directly into the dense tangle of thick spiderwebs. They screamed again, but then the boat continued on, leaving the spiderwebs behind.
“I think that was part of the ride,” Kevin whispered. “The little strings.”
“It wasn’t funny,” Reeves said.
Ahead, Kevin could see the narrow tunnel widen into another cavern with more jungle trees and high grasses, lit by moonlight. On the canal bank a few yards away, pairs of glowing yellow eyes watched from the high grass. Kevin gradually discerned the shapes of giant jungle cats waiting to pounce.
As they pulled out of the narrow channel and into the wider jungle-cat cavern, a saber-toothed tiger struck around the side of the boat with a roar, its claws extended. The mechanical tiger ripped through Reeves’s shirt, scratching four red lines into his shoulder.
“Ow!” Reeves yelled and tried to pull back from the thing’s claws, but he was locked into place by the seatbelt and safety bar.
The mechanical tiger swung back out of the way, retreating among giant plastic leaves to lie in wait for the next boat. Reeves scowled back over his shoulder while the boat continued onward.
“That thing scratched the shit out of me!” he said. “They need to fix that. Damn.”
The boat floated along the high grass where the other tigers crouched, watching. Kevin kept waiting for these other fake beasts to pounce or attack somehow, but they only stared and growled at the passing boat.
The next display was lit from behind by dim red light. Kevin could see the outlines of three shaggy, apelike creatures, all of them swinging what looked like sticks at some indistinct dark mass in front of them. The primal drumbeats sounder closer, louder, and faster now.
The boat eased closer to the hairy ape-shapes, mechanically swinging their sticks over and over again. Even two feet away, Kevin couldn’t see exactly what was happening.
An overhead spotlight flicked on, revealing that the three apes were actually swinging large, blood-stained bones, the femurs of some giant animal. They were repeatedly bashing a fourth ape, one of their own kind, who lay facedown on a boulder, its head a shapeless, bloody mass from the repeated, relentless pounding.
When the light turned on, the three bashing apes all swiveled their heads toward the approaching boat. All three apes wore huge, happy, blood-spattered grins, as if they were having the time of their life.
“Sick, dude,” Reeves said. Then, as an afterthought, “That’s pretty cool, though. That’s how life really is, you know?”
“Yeah,” Kevin replied, though he wasn’t sure exactly what Reeves meant. If he asked for an explanation, Reeves would probably just thump him in the head and call him stupid.
The next section of the jungle had a little village of straw huts decorated with totem poles carved to resemble stacks of animal skulls. Red-bulb “torches” lit the scene. The drumbeats were loudest here, accompanied by chanting voices, but there was no sign of the village’s inhabitants.
The words TURN BACK NOW were painted in red on the side of the hut closest to the boat canal, followed by a skull and crossbones.
The boat continued on, and the village grew stranger. The totem pole carvings started to resemble stacks of human skulls overlooking low, glowing-red fire pits, probably lit from underneath with
more red light bulbs.
They reached a stone temple area lit by skull torches, with very real-looking human skulls heaped in its alcoves and niches. A large stone skull overlooked a raised altar, which appeared stained with a fresh pool of blood. A bloody stone knife lay near the head of the altar.
The boat stopped here, as though the ride wanted them to contemplate this scene. It was as if a blood sacrifice had only just happened, and all the people involved had scattered for some reason.
The boat slid forward again, taking them into a darker jungle area lined with high grass. Kevin’s eyes had to adjust to the dimness before he saw the mannequins lurking in the grass on both sides of the canal, their face painted like skulls as though they were some kind of death cult, holding long bamboo blowguns pointed right at the boat.
If they were real, Kevin knew, those blowguns would be loaded with poisoned darts.
A series of short compressed-air blasts fired from the blowguns, and Kevin felt sharp little impacts on his face, arm, and hip. He and Reeves both screamed, and then the boat turned out of the dim jungle into a much brighter cave. Kevin realized they were unharmed—the blowguns had fired no darts, just air.
The bamboo doors of the exit lay straight ahead. Beyond them glowed all of the lights outside. Kevin and Reeves broke down laughing, both of them feeling relieved.
“That wasn’t bad!” Reeves said as the boat carried them toward the light. “Kind of cheesy, but it had good parts.”
“It was awesome,” Kevin breathed.
“It’s still broken. I’m going to show him where it scratched the hell out of me.” Reeves touched the torn shoulder of his shirt.
The boat squealed to a halt, its prow three feet from the still-closed bamboo doors.
“You think it broke down?” Kevin whispered after a few seconds.
“Probably. This thing’s a piece of junk.” Reeves pushed against the safety bar on their laps. “Help me out here, Beefball.”
Kevin pushed the safety bar alongside Reeves, until he was grunting and sweating, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Hey!” Reeves cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hey, mister...dude! We’re stuck here!”
An ear-scraping sound like rusty metal gnashing on gears boomed from beneath their boat. The boat turned sideways while sinking lower in the water, as if changing from the main track to another one. It creaked forward down a short, dark tunnel with paint-primer walls. The water lapped against a gray door marked with the words MAINTENANCE and DO NOT ENTER in plain red stencil.
“Hey, hey, hey!” Reeves twisted to shout toward the still-closed exit gate.
The boat jerked and shuddered through the tunnel until its prow hit the gray maintenance door. The gray door swung open, and the boat plunged forward and down a steep ramp into darkness, riding a wave of putrid water.
The boat track flattened out abruptly, jarring and rattling Kevin’s spine. The boat drifted forward into a lightless, sour-smelling cinderblock tunnel, following some kind of underground track. Rivulets of slimy water drizzled down from the ceiling above.
In the initial gloom, Kevin could see an array of rusted tools hanging on the tunnel walls. There were hand saws, strange curved blades, long needles, and things resembling jagged-tooth scalpels. Chains hung from the ceiling, tipped with hooks gone red with rust.
“This must be where they worked on the boats,” Kevin whispered. “Right?”
Reeves didn’t say anything. He shivered as the boat rolled forward into darkness.
Kevin thought he saw new, softer shapes along the edges of the canal, but it was too dim to make out what they were.
The boat thudded to a halt, shuddering against some kind of underwater obstacle. As if by an automatic signal, the big gray maintenance door through which they’d entered gave a rusty squeal and slammed shut high above and behind them, blocking out all the light.
Kevin drew a big breath to yell for the guy to come get them, but then he heard something splash in the water near the boat. Then he heard another splash somewhere ahead of them.
“Do you hear that?” Kevin whispered.
“We have to get out of here,” Reeves whispered back. “Push on the safety bar again.”
They pushed, but it was locked tight, trapping them in the boat, which had come to a complete halt inside the pitch-black tunnel.
A third splash sounded, then another, and another.
“Fish couldn’t live in here, could they?” Kevin whispered.
“I can’t even unbuckle my seatbelt,” Reeves told him. “It’s stuck. I can’t see what’s wrong with it.”
“I can’t see anything.” Kevin tried his own seatbelt, but his clasp seemed stuck, too. The air in the tunnel grew icy cold, and Kevin trembled.
“Why would it get cold in here?” Reeves whispered in the dark. “Kevin? Why the hell would it get cold? Tell me!” Reeves was panicking, and Kevin felt the same way.
Kevin started to cry. He suddenly wished his mom was here to save him, but she was a couple miles away, and there were no security clowns to rescue him this time. There was nobody in the park except the psycho guy in the red-striped hat.
A little splash sounded right beside him, and then a small, wet, mud-dripping hand brushed the back of his neck. It was much too small to be Reeves.
Kevin screamed and kicked, and the boat sloshed a little, but there was nowhere to go. Reeves screamed and pounded the safety bar that trapped them.
“Something touched me!” Reeves screamed. “Kevin, something touched me!”
The cold hand lay on the back of Kevin’s neck again, and this time the ragged, sharp tips of its icy fingers dug into his flesh.
“We’re still down here,” a little girl’s voice whispered, almost too soft to hear. “We’re all still here.”
Kevin’s blood turned cold, and he wanted to scream but couldn’t.
The safety bar quietly lifted away from his lap.
A dozen little hands, all of them cold and muddy, seized his neck, his arm, and his leg and pulled him sideways over the edge of the boat. He heard Reeves scream, and then the hands dragged him down into the dark water. He felt small bodies, cold and stiff, swimming around him. As the thick, foul water filled his ears, nose, and lungs, he thought he could hear the echoes of the little girl’s voice giggling underwater.
Gifts from the host are presented at the end, just before departure, the man in the pinstriped suit had said. Kevin could see the man’s bland face in his mind, the dull dead eyes looking out under the brim of the cheerful candy-striped hat.
The little hands covered Kevin’s face and dragged him to the bottom, holding him under the dirty water until he stopped struggling.
Chapter Four
I’m stalking you, said Carter’s new Facebook message. It came with a friend request from VICTORIA SAMARIS, from GROSSE POINTE, MICHIGAN, with a picture of the dark-haired girl he’d met at Dr. Larson’s house a couple of days earlier. Want to be ‘friends’? she asked.
Sure, Carter replied, and he accepted her friend request.
He got out of bed and stretched. It was almost ten in the morning, and he felt sore from a week of hard work, but it was Wednesday and he had the day off. He glanced out the window of his small bedroom at spindly palm trees lining the parking lot. He’d had another bad dream about the amusement park, and he was eager to get busy doing something, any activity to put the nightmarish memories out of his head.
His phone chimed, and he checked it.
I want to go here, Victoria had typed. She’d linked a Google map set to an address he recognized, the AA Flea Market just north of town. Come with me?
Now? he asked.
I can pick you up in 20 mins. What’s your address? she texted back.
Carter sent his address and apartment number, then hurried to take a shower. The apartment was cluttered, dirty, and embarrassing, especially compared to the tall, cheery gingerbread house where Victoria lived.
Carter’s dad was leaning
against the kitchen sink, eating a bowl of generic Frosted Flakes and wearing a faded Journey t-shirt and boxer shorts. Carter decided to wait outside.
“Where you going?” his dad asked as Carter headed for the door.
“That girl Victoria wants to hang out.”
“Who?”
“Moved into the old Woodman house.”
“Have fun. Stay out of trouble.” His dad tilted up the cereal bowl and slurped the sugar-and-corn-flavored milk.
Carter sat on the concrete outdoor steps, feeling a little nervous. If the girl liked him, he wasn’t sure how he would handle it. Tricia’s death had traumatized him so much that he’d avoided relationships since then, and even lost what friendships he’d had. He told himself that he was focused on his future, but he knew he was also scared to get close to anyone.
She doesn’t like you, he told himself. She just doesn’t know anyone else in town yet.
A polished black Ford Fiesta pulled into the spot beside his dad’s elderly Toyota pick-up, which was marred by paint and scratches from the odd jobs his dad had taken for extra money over the years. The Fiesta wasn’t an expensive car, but it looked brand new. Victoria was behind the wheel, wearing oversized dark sunglasses that made him think of old-fashioned movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn.
Carter opened the passenger-side door.
“Ready?” she asked.
“I’m ready,” he said as he dropped into the seat beside her. “I don’t get why you want to go to the flea market, though. It’s depressing.”
“I don’t mind depressing.” She drove to the parking lot exit and double-checked her phone before pulling out onto the main road, which was virtually deserted. While most of the girls around town would be wearing shorts and tank tops this time of year, she wore black jeans and a matching blouse, as though indifferent to the summer climate. That made him think of Tricia, how she’d held her own identity against all the lame popular kids picking on her.
“Flea markets are the best spots to find super-cheap prices on old vinyl,” Victoria said. “That’s why we’re going.”
“Old vinyl?” Carter asked.
