by JL Bryan
He took a deep breath, lowered his head, and forced himself to walk through it. The tunnel of collapsed fencing was dark and smelled dank, and he had to push aside heavy sections of pitchfork-topped fence blocking his way. Unseen things scurried and hissed near his feet, but he continued on.
He made it through the gauntlet, but he still couldn’t stand up straight, because the roof of Inferno Mountain’s loading and unloading station sagged low and steep. He moved in a crouch toward the weedy tracks ahead.
A trail of dark spots led toward the front corner of the waiting area, where the head of the train would have braked. It occurred to him that these could be bloodstains from Tricia herself, the remains of her neck dripping while they wheeled her away, the stains on the concrete protected all these years by the slowly collapsing roof above.
Or the blood drops could have belonged to her last-minute deathmate, the teenage tourist boy who’d taken Carter’s place next to Tricia, gotten his head sheared off, and left Carter to a life of morbid confusion and an inescapable feeling that he was supposed to be dead already. He didn’t feel much guilt over the unknown guy who’d died in his place, but felt deeply guilty about leaving Tricia to die alone. His cowardice had saved his life but cost him his heart and soul, leaving him a zombie.
He reached the edge of the platform and looked down at the overgrown black-steel tracks below. He could barely see them in the post-sunset gloom.
Across the tracks, the body of the ride operator lay on the unloading platform, next to the control console. The years had reduced him to little more than a filthy skeleton wrapped in a blue star-spotted Starland uniform. The side of the skull was caved in. Carter remembered the operator had been knocked out, but he didn’t know the guy had died, and apparently nobody had bothered to collect his remains. Carter shivered—a little at first, then harder and harder.
Don’t be a shiver-shit, a voice whispered somewhere in his brain...or maybe it had come from out there, in the darkness that filled the overgrown park. It was a boy’s voice, but he wasn’t sure whose.
Carter told himself he had to go back through the maze of collapsed fencing, find Victoria, and get the hell out of here.
Then he felt the platform tremble, and he wondered if the sinkhole was still active, still expanding after all these years, swallowing more and more of the park and making the remaining ruins less and less stable. Cold sweat broke out all over his skin.
Rusty squeals and heavy mechanical thudding sounded inside the black volcano of Inferno Mountain, as though enormous, decaying gears were being forced to turn deep within the ride.
The red pitchfork gate at the base of the mountain, the ride’s exit, swung open. The black train came rumbling and squeaking down the tracks, under the station roof, and clattered to a stop. The train radiated an immense heat that rippled the air, and it hissed and popped as it settled into the station.
All the seats were vacant except one—Tricia, sitting in the front car. The seat beside her was empty, waiting for him to sit down beside her.
It was just her body, her head still missing, her necklace of pumpkins and black cats still damp with gore around the brutalized stump of her neck, the blood fresh and red all over her white dress, soaking her hand-painted dragons and unicorns.
When Tricia spoke, he could hear her voice soft and clear, though her body did not move at all and she lacked the mouth to speak.
“You were supposed to be with me, Carter,” her headless body said. The voice didn’t sound angry or vengeful, just flatly stating the facts. “Why did you leave me, Carter?”
Carter’s mouth made some movements, but he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t even think. He was filled with dread and horror, and he couldn’t move.
“I need you with me, Carter.” Tricia’s dead body shifted just a little, and the arm closest to him began to rise, her pale forearm and hand spattered with droplets of her own blood. Her fingers opened and closed, clutching blindly at the air. “Where are you, Carter? I can’t see you, Carter...”
Carter was frozen by fear, but he didn’t know whether to run away or try to help her.
“Why can’t I see you, Carter?” A note of panic crept into her voice. She waved her hand more frantically, and she shrieked, “Carter, why can’t I see you?”
His heart pounding, Carter turned away from the ghost in the train and ran to the rat-warren of fallen fences. He dug through them, trying to find a way out, but they were much heavier now, and sometimes swung or slid on their own. He found himself caged and trapped by the pitchfork fencing.
“Help me, Carter!” Tricia’s voice screamed.
The roller coaster train rolled forward, out of the station and up the steep hill. Carter banged on the impossibly heavy fence rails that caged him, but he couldn’t budge them at all. He was a prisoner in a strange red-pitchfork cell, and he could only watch through the bars as Tricia rode up and up, alone on the clanking train as it approached the devil’s open mouth.
He could still hear her screaming as she waved her hand in the empty space over her bloody neck, as though she was just now discovering her head was missing.
“Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” the devil laughed as the train climbed up into its fanged mouth and vanished. The tiny red lights in its pupils glowed.
* * *
When Carter awoke in the darkness of his own bedroom, shaking and sweaty, he thought the devil face was still staring at him outside his window with one glowing eye. The large face-shape slowly resolved into the outline of a familiar palm tree, a yellow parking lot streetlamp shining between its branches.
He glanced around his room, looking into the dark corners and the open closet for any sign of a headless girl ghost. The glowing clock on his table said it was three in the morning.
Another nightmare. He turned on the lamp, knowing he would never get back to sleep without it.
In his dream, he and Victoria had gone into the park. He tried to piece together his memories and sort reality from nightmare. In the real world, he carefully told himself, he hadn’t let Victoria talk him into trespassing inside Starland. She had taken more pictures of dilapidated amusements and motels, and eventually she’d brought him home.
And nothing else happened, he reminded himself. We didn’t go into the park. I would never do that.
With a shaky but growing sense that everything horrible had been part of the dream and not real, Carter tried to go back to sleep. He wasn’t quite comfortable enough to close his eyes, though.
Instead, he checked out Victoria’s blog, the “Eye of Tori,” which mostly featured pictures of deteriorating buildings and neighborhoods around Detroit. The most recent post included a few pictures of dilapidated attractions along the Starwalk, including one of Carter staring through the chain-link at the empty Eight-Track course. The look on his face was pure sadness, and he felt embarrassed to see it, especially since Victoria had some followers on Tumblr and deviantART who had apparently already seen it.
“That boy looks so miserable,” someone named Jking22 had commented on the blog. “Great pic!”
Chapter Six
The first day of school, for whatever reason, was a Tuesday. Carter rode the bus since he didn’t have a car. He’d saved up a few thousand dollars in the bank over the previous couple of years, but he knew he would need it for college. A car was good for running around with friends, having fun, and other things he didn’t really do.
Black and white fliers hung on the steel front doors of the school and in the front hallway, with the word MISSING and pictures of a pair of middle-school kids. One was a winking kid in a do-rag who already looked like a delinquent—Reeves Mayweather. The other was a very chubby kid with his mouth hanging open, as though the photographer had caught him by surprise—Kevin Gordy. Carter didn’t know either of them.
His first class was Advanced Placement Biology. While many of the seniors took light loads with lots of electives, or a “vocational” program that led them leave school early to work a
part-time job, Carter’s schedule looked like a year of hard labor—AP Biology, AP Chemistry, AP Calculus, and AP English and History, which would help him get into college and take care of some college credits, assuming he could handle the load and not have a nervous breakdown by Christmas.
Mr. Pluminowski—his long name leading to his more common nickname, Mr. Plum, or occasionally “Professor Plum”—handled the advanced science classes and also advised the school’s science club and coached the chess team. Carter had joined both of those, though he wasn’t particularly good at either chess or science.
Essentially the same group of kids were in all Carter’s classes, the ones he would find in the science club and chess team, the school’s hyperintelligent social rejects. Carter was an outsider among them, too, because he didn’t have a borderline genius IQ. He just worked hard, studied, and missed a lot of sleep. Each class also had a rotating share of preppy kids, who each took a couple of AP classes to get ready for college.
Victoria, it turned out, was only a junior, so they had no classes together. He didn’t see her until lunch, where she was sitting alone in a nook of the concrete courtyard. She waved, and he walked over to join her.
He walked past the concrete planters holding little palm trees at the center of the courtyard. Those were the domain of Jared and his group, who weren’t exactly popular enough to claim the picnic tables by the lawn, but they had an elevated spot to sit. The concrete lips of the planters were as wide as park benches.
Carter and his old friend Jared didn’t even look at each other. They barely noticed each other anymore. Jared had a group of his own, kids who dressed in concert t-shirts and ripped jeans and were known for their wild parties. Jared was now a senior, which made him a leader in that circle, mainly because most of its elders had already dropped out. The guys and girls around Jared were mostly sophomores and juniors, and they paid close attention and laughed when he talked. He still wore a ratty Joker cap.
Carter reached Victoria in the unclaimed nook she’d found for herself, where a locked steel door led into the band’s storage room. The nook offered a slice of shade from the hot sun overhead.
“Hi,” he said.
“Want to have lunch?” she asked, gesturing to the empty shady spot beside her. “I made reservations.”
“Nice lunchbox.” He sat down with her, enjoying the partial shade.
“It’s a benefit of the flea-market-and-thrift-store lifestyle.” Victoria opened a heavy metal lunch box that depicted the Fonz from Happy Days giving a thumbs-up while reclining against his motorcycle. “Fine vintage lunchboxes. We need to work on yours.” She pointed at his brown paper lunch bag. “I see you as a Flash Gordon, or possibly a Night Rider.”
“Yeah, I can’t let you be the only one in school who brings a lunch box,” he said.
“We could start a trend. Brown-bagging is bad for the environment.” She opened her lunch, stored in reusable plastic containers—carrot sticks and an apple.
“The brown-bag tree must be an endangered species by now,” Carter said.
“It is.” She unscrewed a thermos and poured a thin green liquid into the plastic cup.
“What are you drinking?”
“I can’t remember whether I packed Merlot or green tea this morning.” She sipped it. “It was green tea.”
“Is it gross?” Carter asked.
“It’s the second healthiest drink after water.” She held out the cup. “Try it.”
Carter sipped it. He thought it tasted bitter, and it clearly hadn’t been sweetened at all. He grimaced and returned the cup. “Yep, definitely gross. Good thing you have those...carrots to make your lunch exciting.”
“What gourmet dishes did you bring?” Victoria took his bag and brought out a sandwich in a plastic wrapper. “Watercress and brie?”
“Peanut butter and jelly. Grape jelly.” He took the sandwich from her.
“Three ingredients—bread, peanut butter, and jelly—and only one of them potentially healthy.”
“The jelly?” he guessed.
“And to cleanse the palate...Cool Ranch Doritos.” She brought out the blue aluminum-foil bag, which he snagged from her. She cocked an eyebrow as she peered into his bag. “And what complements peanut butter and Doritos? Is it a full-bodied red? A sweet white? No...a Mello freaking Yello.” She held up the can. “Is ‘Yello’ with no ‘w’ even a real color?”
“I think it refers to a specific greenish shade of yellow.”
“How do you even drink this stuff?”
“It’s the second healthiest drink after Mountain Dew.” Carter popped the can open. “Try it.”
She took a hesitant sip, then grimaced and passed it back to him, shaking her head.
“You’re crazy,” he said.
“You’re crazy.”
This led to a quiet truce while they ate.
“I was looking at your blog last night,” he said after a minute.
“Really? What did you think?” She smiled, looking a little nervous.
“Rusty playgrounds, burned-out houses, overgrown streets...”
“That’s what the Eye of Tori sees. Or what I saw back home.”
“The Eye of Tori sees a lot of desolate and depressing things.”
“It does.” She bit her lower lip for half a second, looking him in the eyes. “I was thinking about those missing kids.” The principal had mentioned Reeves and Kevin in the morning announcements, too.
“Yeah?”
“They’ve been missing for like a week, right? No sign of them?”
“That’s what people are saying.” Carter tore open his Doritos bag and offered her one, which she declined.
Victoria cleared her throat, then asked in a very careful tone: “Do you think maybe they went into the old amusement park, or somewhere around there?”
“Why would they do that?”
“It seems like it would be a huge temptation, wouldn’t it? I mean, I find the place tempting and fascinating, and I’m not as impulsive as a teenage boy. But I still want to go in there.”
“Maybe if they were from out of town,” Carter said. “Local kids wouldn’t go in there. It’s too...intense, if you have memories of it.”
“Would the police look there, though? Or would they say what you just said, that local kids would stay out?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’ll check. Look, I realize you want some cool pictures for your blog, but it’s not a good idea to go in there.” Carter shifted uncomfortably. His appetite was fading, though he’d only eaten half his lunch.
“It’s not just about me, Carter.” She scowled a little. “You can’t imagine that those kids would want to go exploring in there...but if they did it and they got hurt, nobody would ever find them. I know everybody’s used to trying to forget and to pretend that place isn’t there, but maybe that turns it into a kind of blind spot for the whole town...”
“They’ve probably checked there,” Carter said.
“How can we find out?”
“I don’t know. Those kids probably just ran away.”
“That’s what everyone else is saying.” Victoria shook her head. “‘They were delinquents, they just ran away.’ They’ve been gone a week. They brought nothing but their bikes and skateboards. So what did they do? Stay at a hotel? Join the merchant marines? They’re only thirteen and fifteen.”
The end-of-lunch bell rang, and Carter tossed the remains of his lunch into the trash. She shook her head and picked up her lunch box.
“How do you know so much about it, anyway?” he asked.
“I read the newspaper article. Look, why do you want to become a doctor?”
So if I’m ever surrounded by people screaming and dying again, I won’t just stand there clueless with no idea what to do about it. “I guess to help people.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.” She smiled and gave him half a hug before going to class. “Think about those kids, okay?”
“Yep.” Carter watched
her enter the cinderblock school, trying to figure out just how he felt about her. He definitely had no idea how she felt about him, if she felt anything at all.
Chapter Seven
The Science Club did not waste time. Their first meeting was on the first day of school, and they had to debate their group project for the year. David Huang wanted to study environmental effect on the beach as the old businesses along the Starwalk decayed. Sameer Upadhyay proposed a sociological study on the impact of the park disaster on the town. Emily Dorsnel suggested a parapsychological investigation of the park.
“I don’t understand,” Mr. Plum said, looking among them. He was a beanpole of a man with a thinning brown comb-over and cheap glasses. “Why so much interest in the old amusement park this year? Has something happened?”
“It’s the five-year anniversary,” said Wes McKinley, a pimply junior with bright red hair. “Simple-minded people find a kind of numerological significance at certain essentially random intervals.”
“Why do you say ‘simple-minded’?” Emily Dorsnel asked. She was a chunky senior with frizzy hair, a painfully prominent mole on her cheek, and a flawless academic record. “Five years since it happened. It’s on everyone’s minds.”
“Why is five more significant than four or six?” Wes McKinley asked her. “Because your astrologer says so?”
“I don’t believe in astrology,” Emily said.
“But you want to go ghost hunting in the park,” Wes snorted.
“That’s different. I want to do it scientifically,” she told him.
“I should point out that any access to the park would require special permission from the authorities,” Mr. Plum said. “Permission we can safely assume they will not provide.”
