by JL Bryan
“Definitely not for ghost hunting,” Wes said. “If you want to do something that really matters, we should try to assess the risk of any additional sinkholes in the area. If we determine where it’s safe to build, it could revitalize at least some of the beach.”
“Wouldn’t the town have already done that study? Or the state? Or somebody?” David Huang asked.
“The town is run by a bunch of ignorant rednecks,” Wes said. “And so is the state.”
“Then we could try to determine why the biggest sinkhole in Florida opened here in the panhandle, instead of in central or south Florida like most of them,” Sameer added.
“What about you, Carter? Did you want to propose a project?” Mr. Plum asked.
“I’m okay with whatever,” Carter told him.
Later, as Carter started walking home, he happened to glance back over his shoulder and see the fresh graffiti on the back of a stop sign in front of the school. It was a crude shape in red paint, little more than a stick figure, but it had horns and gripped a pitchfork in one of its red stick arms.
Maybe there was some kind of renewed interest in the park stirring deep down in the small town’s subconscious. If so, Victoria had a point—maybe the missing kids had gone exploring in the park, even though it was taboo for locals. Maybe they were too young to understand.
With his phone’s browser, he located the small article in the Tallahassee newspaper that mentioned Reeves and Kevin. It was only a couple of paragraphs long, and he didn’t learn anything new from it, but a week was a long time for a couple of kids to be missing, even if they were known delinquents who might have run off intentionally.
He thought it over for a minute, then touched Victoria’s phone number in his contacts list.
“I’ll go,” he said when she answered. “We can at least walk around the outside fence and see if we find anything.”
“You know we can’t see much through the fence,” she told him.
“We aren’t going to break in—”
“Never mind,” she interrupted. “We can do whatever you want. Are you at home?”
“I’m still at school.”
“You got detention on your first day?”
“Worse. Science club meeting. Come pick me up before I change my mind.”
While he waited, pacing the sidewalk in front of the school, he felt himself beginning to shiver. He glanced at the devil graffiti again.
We’re not going inside, he reminded himself. If we see anything crazy, we’ll just call the police.
The sky was gray and overcast, which matched his mood as he watched Victoria’s little black Fiesta approach along the street. She smiled when he got in, but he couldn’t bring himself to return it. He sighed as he placed his heavy backpack between his feet.
“This is exciting!” she said as she drove away from the school. “Isn’t it?”
He shrugged. “We have to be quick. It looks like it’s going to rain. Plus we want to get out of there before dark.”
“Why? Is that when the ghosts come out?” A little smile played around her lips, and it annoyed him.
“Do you care at all about the missing kids, really?” he asked. “Or do you just want something exciting to post on your blog?”
“Of course I care.” She scowled at him. “You think I’m that shallow, don’t you?”
“I was just asking.”
“Sounded more like accusing.”
He sighed and looked out the window as they passed through the center of Conch City. There was no “downtown” area, just strip malls that had sprouted up along the Gulf Coast Highway, most of them half-vacant now.
They turned south off the highway and down Beachview Drive toward the ocean.
“We can’t park at Starland or the cops will see your car,” he said. He pointed at a crumbling pink motel on the beach. “Pull around and park behind the Fancy Flamingo Lodge.”
“You’re the tour guide,” she said.
They found a shaded spot in back of the old motel where her car wouldn’t be seen from the road. Victoria lifted her camera bag and a flashlight out of her back seat. She took a picture of a faded aluminum sign that read BEACH CLOSED.
“Nobody’s allowed on the beach, either?” she asked.
“There’s a public section at the east end,” Carter said. “Not many people go there, though. We don’t get many tourists anymore, and for those of us who live here...when you live by the beach, you don’t really think about going to the beach.”
“Because you can go anytime.”
“Pretty much.” He didn’t feel like explaining how sad the empty dunes were to people who remembered throngs of visitors in years past. Tropical storms had churned up and eaten away the big white beach, leaving only a brown strip of sand in its place.
As they hurried across Beachview Drive, Carter cast a worried look at the heavy gray clouds above.
“We need to finish up fast,” he told her.
“We’ll just look around and go. It’ll take less than an hour.”
“I was thinking less than ten minutes,” he said.
A knot of fear formed in his belly as he crossed the broad expanse of the Starland parking lot, where weeds jutted up through the cracked blacktop. Sand filled the concrete gutters around the perimeter of the lot, and would eventually bury the whole place, given enough time. The devil grinned at them over the fence as they crossed the open wasteland toward the overgrown front gate.
We are not going inside, he reminded himself, but he could feel Victoria’s determination to do exactly that.
When they reached the rotten castle towers of the front gate, she lifted a rust-speckled padlock in her hand.
“I’d say the police haven’t been here,” she said. “These locks and chains are old and rusty.”
“Not so rusty they wouldn’t work. I’m sure Chief Kilborne has a key.”
“Do you see any sign they’ve been inside?” Victoria crouched by the gate and ripped away a small patch of the thick vines. “I can see weeds growing on the other side. They don’t look like they’ve been trampled down.”
“The weeds around here are pretty tough. They spring right back.”
“Now you’re a botanist?” She stood up and cupped her hands around her mouth. “Kevin! Reeves! Are you guys in there? The whole town’s looking for you!”
Carter doubted that. Most of the students at his high school, anyway, seemed to have lost interest in the missing kids long before the day was over. He supposed his town might be more hardened to tragedy than most.
“We should check around the fence,” Victoria told him. “Maybe we can find where they went inside.”
“If they ever did.” Carter looked up at the thick clouds again. “Which I doubt.”
“We at least have to look.”
“And if we don’t find a hole in the fence, you’ll be satisfied, right?”
“They could have climbed over.”
“Even with barbed wire along the top?” Carter pointed.
“Maybe that’s how they got injured. Come on.” Victoria started walking along the fence, toward the high hill of the Log Drop jutting up over the vine-infested chain link.
They followed the fence into a stand of palm trees thick with undergrowth and insects, where the fence turned and continued on into a wooded area. Despite the buzzing cloud of mosquitoes and the swampy, muddy ground, Victoria plunged onward. Carter reluctantly followed, wondering how he had let the girl talk him into doing this.
Because you wanted to come here, a little voice said somewhere in his brain. You wanted to see it again for yourself.
Carter shook his head. He definitely did not want to go inside and see the destruction. He didn’t need to see that at all. The sinkhole’s ripple of destruction had already spread to engulf his life. He saw enough evidence of it every day.
“Somebody’s been here.” Victoria pointed. Carter couldn’t argue with her. A path of weeds stomped down into the mud led along the f
ence, deep into the wooded area beside the park.
The walk grew gloomy, between the palm trees overhead and the heavy shadows of the log ride and Crashdown Falls blotting out the low summer sun. Victoria clicked on her flashlight. If she hadn’t, she might not have noticed the glint of metal from the weeds ahead.
“What’s that?” she asked, veering to one side of the path they’d been following. Near a spot where large pipes jutted out of the ground, drooling dark water into a mostly dried creek bed, Victoria reached into the weeds and pulled up the handlebar of a bicycle. “You think it’s that kid’s bike?”
“Maybe...” With a sinking feeling, Carter helped stand the bicycle up on its wheels.
“There’s a skateboard, too.” Victoria picked it up from the patch of ground they’d exposed from under the bike.
“We should probably report them to the police,” Carter said.
“We can’t call them yet,” Victoria told him. “It’s inconclusive. We should keep looking. I bet the two kids went in through there.”
Carter felt disheartened as she stepped toward a low section of the chain-link that had been pulled free of its post, directly over a swampy puddle of water. He knew she wouldn’t stop now.
“This is it, Carter,” she said, squatting beside the fence and pulling it open.
“Let’s check.” He cupped his hands and shouted “Reeves! Kevin! Are you in there?”
He listened, but there was only silence inside the fence.
“I guess they’re not here,” he said.
“We should go inside and check,” Victoria said.
“Don’t say that.”
“Come on, they could be hurt or unconscious in there. Maybe they stumbled into the sinkhole.”
“If they did, they’re already dead. It’s a long way down.”
“Are you scared of this place?” she whispered.
“No. It’s just a bad place now. It used to be the happiest place in the world, and now it’s...exactly the opposite.”
“We’ll only go in for a minute.” Victoria took his arm and stared into his eyes. “Please?”
“I’m still going to stick with ‘no’ on that.”
“Is there no way I could change your mind?” She smiled, squeezing his arm a little tighter.
“It’s a really bad idea. We should get out of here, tell the police what we found, and that’s all.”
“Fine. Do what you want.” She unzipped a pouch on her bag and slipped out a small pair of wire-cutters, with which she began to snip along the top of the loose section of chain link.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m not crawling through that mud.”
“I told you, we’re not going in there.”
“You might not be going, but I am.” Victoria gritted her teeth as she cut through both a strand of the fence and a thick green vine tangled around it.
“You brought wire cutters? You were planning to break in, weren’t you?”
“I just thought they might be useful. And I was right.” She clipped through the next metal strand.
“You’re seriously doing this?” he asked.
“I seriously am.”
He watched her snarl as she sheared through another length of vine, another bit of fence.
“You should let me do that,” he said, squatting down beside her.
“Why?”
“You could hurt yourself.”
She snorted and kept cutting. When she’d cut all the way across the top of the loose piece, she packed away the wire cutters, wiped sweat from her forehead, and pushed aside the newly cut flap of fence. She hunched down, squatting on her heels, and ducked through the fence.
Inside, she stood, stretched, and adjusted the shoulder strap of the camera bag.
“You can’t go in there!” he said, still squatting outside the fence.
“I just did.” She looked up at the enormous leaky underbelly of Crashdown Falls, a simple waterfall ride in which a boat with fifteen people went up, around a curve, and right back down a steep water slide, getting soaked in the process. “It seems darker in here. Weird.”
“You can’t do it by yourself, either,” Carter said. “You don’t know your way around the park. You could get seriously lost. Or hurt.”
“Then you’d better come with me.” She gave him a long look, then turned around and walked deeper into the park.
“Wait!” Carter sighed as he ducked and crawled through the fence. She smiled as he joined her.
“I know you couldn’t resist a mystery,” she said.
“You’re a mystery.”
“Am I?” Her smile wavered before she looked away. “Let’s go.”
Victoria took snapshots of the old Crashdown Falls and Log Drop, both of them decrepit and filled with scummy dark water.
They followed a broken, uneven path from under the water rides and out toward a wider plaza. Carter remembered the ground shuddering beneath his feet, the pavement buckling and breaking into the jagged moonscape they were now crossing. They had to watch their step to avoid tripping on the uneven ground.
“This was Pirate Island,” he told her, pointing toward the overgrown pirate ship, still hanging from its axle high above. “That’s the Swingin’ Scalawag, over there are the bumper boats...”
She took pictures, then drifted over to check the ruins of a row of game booths.
“That’s Harpoon Lagoon. I was good at this.” Carter stepped to a booth with its front panel left open and one wall blackened by fire. The big fake harpoon gun was still mounted on the front counter. It creaked as he turned it toward the three cardboard cutouts hanging at the back of the booth—a whale, a shark, and a jaunty seahorse, each one with a hole through the center of its body. “You try to shoot a ball through one of the fish. Three shots for a dollar.”
“What did you win?”
“A plastic snake. Loved that thing.” Carter lined it up on the seahorse, the skinniest and most difficult target. He closed one eye, aimed the harpoon a few inches to the left of the hole—that was the critical part—and squeezed the trigger.
He jumped when the gun actually fired a softball with a hiss of compressed air. The ball sailed through the hole in the seahorse, through which it just barely fit, trailing string behind it like a harpoon.
When the ball reached the end of the string and the line went taut, a foghorn blew in an upper corner of the booth. Carter and Victoria both yelled in surprise.
“What the hell was that?” Victoria asked.
“The winner bell,” Carter said. “It must be automated.”
“You should have warned me!” She punched his arm. “That scared the crap out of me.”
“I didn’t even expect the gun to work.”
“I’m surprised anything still works here. Pose with the harpoon thing. Show me how proud you are of your kill.” She snapped a picture while he forced a grin. “What did you win, Carter?”
“One of those crocodiles, probably.” He pointed to three big plush crocodiles with happy grins, all of them filthy with mildew. “But technically, I didn’t pay a dollar first, so I don’t win the prize.”
“You’re so ethical.” She rolled her eyes.
They continued past the collapsed remains of Pinchy Pete’s Sandwich Stand, which had once looked like a big red crab, and on out to the midway. He thought he could smell faint traces of popcorn and cotton candy, as though the ruins had been permanently imbued with those aromas.
The midway looked just like Carter remembered from the day the sinkhole opened, the asphalt broken into chunks that had jutted up or sunken down, inviting you to break your leg if you walked too fast. A few wooden buildings along the center had collapsed into heaps.
“Look at that.” Victoria pointed past the row of rotting, vine-infested game booths—Bat Ball, Whack-A-Frog, Knock-’Em-Dead Bowling—toward a cheerful red popcorn cart on golden bicycle wheels, shaded by an umbrella striped red and white. While everything else in the park was
rotten and falling down, the cart gleamed as if its glass windows and brass frame had been recently polished. Even the umbrella was spotless, its red and white stripes crisp and bright.
“What the hell?” Carter walked toward it.
The glass display window glowed with inviting yellow light, and it was filled with a mountain of golden popcorn. A big red scoop was shoved deep into the popcorn, its handle pointed out toward a small open window in the side. The smell of freshly-popped corn, dusted with salt and drizzled with butter, wafted out from the cart. Red and white striped paper bags were folded and stacked neatly on the little shelf by the open window.
“It smells so good,” Victoria whispered beside him, her chest brushing his arm, and he jumped a little. She gazed at the salty, buttery puffs inside. “I kind of have a weakness for popcorn. If it’s good popcorn, if it’s made just right...” She nudged past him and closed her eyes, leaning in toward the window and sniffing, and her lips broke into the first real smile he’d seen on her face. “That’s amazing.”
“It’s insane,” he said, though his mouth was watering and his stomach rumbled. It had been hours since he’d eaten. “We can’t eat this. It must be so old...”
“It’s fresh,” she whispered. She opened her eyes and looked at the stack of popcorn bags, neatly folded and ready to be used.
“We aren’t going to eat it.” He touched her arm. “Victoria?”
“Huh?” She blinked as she looked up at him.
“We aren’t eating this.”
“Oh, yeah, of course...” Her voice had a disappointed tone, and she looked back longingly at the popcorn.
“I wonder who did this. Those kids?” Carter looked around the ruined, overgrown midway.
“What kids?” Victoria’s brow furrowed as she stared at the popcorn. “Oh, yeah, the kids. They must be living in the park, surviving off preservative-filled candy and delicious...popcorn...”
“Reeves! Kevin!” Carter shouted. “Are you guys here?”
Victoria jumped when he yelled, and she blinked a few times, as though he’d startled her out of a trance. She raised her camera and took pictures of the popcorn cart. Then she shouted, “You guys, are you okay? Come out if you can hear us.”
