Inferno Park

by JL Bryan

  Becca wriggled through the window and dropped to the floor with a crash and a scream. Then it sounded like she was sobbing.

  “What happened?” Jared leaned through the window. Becca lay on the floor, not crying but laughing.

  “I fell,” she said, rubbing her head, still laughing. “I fell so hard.” She used the bed of nails to pull herself to her feet, then carefully touched the point of one nail. It bent like rubber, and she frowned. “It’s not real.”

  “Of course it’s not real. This isn’t a museum.”

  “I just thought, for a second...” She frowned more deeply and opened the iron maiden casket propped against the wall. The interior had a few rubber spikes and a leaking plastic blood pack, but nothing else. “I guess there’s no point bringing Mitzi here.”

  “Nope. Are you coming back out?”

  “I don’t know.” Becca walked toward him across the room, unbuttoning her shirt. “Want to have sex on a bed of nails?”

  Then the floor opened beneath her and she dropped out of sight, screaming. She’d stepped onto the grate in the floor where all the blood drained, and it had swung open like a trap door. Jared instantly flashed back to the sinkhole opening up and swallowing the carousel full of kids.

  “Becca!” he yelled, banging the wall beside the window. “Are you okay?”

  “Help me!” she screamed. “It’s crazy down here!”

  “Okay, wait.” Jared hoisted himself up into the window, but he had to hunch in his shoulders to try and wiggle through the small opening.

  “Jared, hurry! Open the trap door!”

  “I’m coming!” He finally shoved himself through, then fell to the musty wooden floor painted to look like stone tiles. He scrambled on his hands and knees to the floor grate and pressed down on it.

  It wouldn’t move.

  “Help me!” she screamed below, but he couldn’t see her. The grate wasn’t real, just painted onto the floor. He couldn’t find a handle or hinges, or even the edges of a trap door. He banged on it with his fists, but it didn’t move.

  “Jared, I’m scared!”

  “I’m right here.” He stood up and stomped on the grate with one foot, but he didn’t feel it give at all. “Look out!” he shouted to her.

  “How can I look out when I can’t see anything?”

  “I’m coming down.” He braced himself, then jumped onto the painted grate with both feet, ready to grab onto the edge of the trap door as he fell.

  The floor boomed beneath his feet, but it didn’t moved. There was no trap door at all.

  “That’s impossible,” Jared whispered.

  “Help me! I’m trapped!” Becca screamed.

  “I can’t get it open!” he shouted to her through the floor. “I’ll try to find another way down!”

  Jared ran to the window and struggled to crawl back through, listening to her scream. It seemed to take forever before he wiggled through into the narrow attic corridor.

  He regained his feet, raced back to the stairs, and ran down to the landing with the Captain Dark portrait and the two doors that were both locked and possibly fake, located midway between the first and second floors of the haunted house.

  “I told you to stay out of my attic!” the scowling picture shouted at him, its eyes glowing solid green.

  Jared began kicking the locked door beside the portrait. If it was real, it would lead directly toward Becca.

  He felt it creaking and cracking, so he kicked it harder. The door splintered around the handle and toppled back into the darkness behind it.

  Jared rushed into a narrow passage lined with plywood, narrow wooden studs, and exposed clusters of electrical wire. He’d broken through into some hidden passage of the mansion used only by the amusement park employees.

  He ran toward a dim light ahead, which led him into a small raw-wood room that must have been located somewhere near the center of the mansion.

  A rumpled sleeping bag and a few beer bottles thick with cigarette ashes lay in one corner. Across from it was a sort of altar on cinder blocks, with burning candle stubs arranged around some kind of animal skull, maybe a dog. Pentagrams, inverted crosses, and the word SATAN were painted in black all over the walls.

  “Becca!” Jared shouted. “Becca, where are you?”

  She didn’t answer. Jared shined his phone up at the wooden planks of the ceiling above him. Someone had drawn a square on the ceiling with a pencil and written the words TRAP DOOR in a hasty scrawl.

  “What the hell?” Jared whispered. “Becca! Becca!”

  There were three ways out of the room, all of them narrow hallways framed in raw plywood and particle board like the one through which he’d entered. The passageways were just gaps between the mansion’s walls, barely wide enough to pass. Each one would take him toward a different part of the mansion, but he didn’t know which way to go.

  “Becca!” he shouted. “Can you hear me?”

  He thought he heard a faint scream down one of the dark passageways, though he couldn’t tell if it was her or one of the many recorded screams playing on loops all over the house. He started running in that direction, barely fitting through the hidden passage between the walls.

  He shouted her name again, his heart pounding. He heard the scream again, a little louder this time.

  Jared chased the sound to a gap in one wall, where he faced a door made of fake bamboo. A scrap of paper was Scotch-taped to it with the words EVIL TIKI GODS scrawled in pencil. Chanting sounded beyond the door.

  He pushed it open and stepped into a room he’d seen before, though only through the viewing windows cut into the front wall. Large, angry Tiki-style carvings were set all around him, on different platforms connected by steps and hung with fake jungle vines. Dull red bulbs glowed in their eye sockets. A row of shrunken heads hung from the ceiling.

  Another loud scream interrupted the chanting. The scream was just another part of the recording, not Becca at all. Jared cursed to himself as the chanting resumed.

  He went back through the hidden door from which he’d emerged, back into the inner passageways of the mansion, and he resumed running and calling her name. He thought he heard her voice down another passage and started running that way, in the direction of the funeral parlor and the haunted library.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Carter and Victoria again parked in the shadows of the peeling pink Fancy Flamingo Lodge to hide her car from the road. They hurried across to the dark ruins of the amusement park, past the shrine at the front gates, and around the corner of the fence near Crashdown Falls.

  They slowed as they approached the spot where they’d entered last time.

  “What the hell is that?” Carter asked.

  Victoria shined her flashlight over it. Instead of a loose, partially cut away piece of rusty fence, they looked at a full-size door made of chain link, held in place with a simple unlocked latch. It looked brand new and had none of the thick, thorny growth of the fence around it. An aluminum sign on the front read STAFF ONLY.

  “It definitely wasn’t here before,” Victoria said. “I wish I hadn’t left my camera at home.”

  “You feel like you’re in more of a photography mood now?”

  “I’m getting there.”

  “Let’s go in and rescue them, if they need it.” Carter lifted the latch and pushed the gate open.

  Instead of dark, slippery mud, a concrete path now lay on the ground beneath their feet, leading from the new gate to the blue and green lights of Pirate Island ahead. They shared a troubled look—things already looked very different from last time, and they hadn’t even stepped inside the park.

  They took each other’s hand as they walked up the path under Crashdown Falls, which no longer dripped sour water on them at every step. Carter couldn’t have said whose idea it was to hold hands, but they gripped each other tight as they emerged into the glowing central plaza of the Pirate Island section of the park.

  Most of the rides and attractions were fully
lit and looked open for business. The big Swingin’ Scalawag ship sat in its cradle, freshly polished and dripping with lights. The winking pirate sign out front looked freshly painted, as did the big pelicans lining the Log Drop. The Harpoon Lagoon and Gone Fishin’ game booths were lit and open, and the big red crab of Pinchy Pete’s Sandwich Stand looked freshly rebuilt with a new coat of paint, and Carter knew it had been a wreck last time they were here, just a few days earlier.

  “This is messed up,” Carter whispered as they walked the path toward the midway.

  “It’s a lot of work for just one crazed psycho,” Victoria whispered back.

  The midway looked new—the pavement no longer cracked at all, most of the little booths open with their neon signs glowing. People had clearly been there recently—greasy paper plates with pizza crusts, corn dog sticks, and half-eaten funnel cakes crowded the serving counters of the booths, now crawling with ants, flies, and worms.

  A big barrel-shaped booth called the Keg Stand had dozens of plastic cups on its counter, most of them overturned with just a little foam left at the bottom. Carter didn’t remember the Keg Stand from childhood, but he’d been twelve last time the park was open and probably would have ignored a place that sold boring adult stuff like beer.

  “Looks like they helped themselves to everything,” Carter said, remembering how tempted Victoria had been by the shiny red popcorn cart and its golden-yellow offerings.

  “It’s so quiet,” Victoria said. Though all the lights were on, none of the attractions played their customary music, and there were no voices, either from game and ride operators advertising their offerings or from Jared and his friends. The park was lit up like Las Vegas but silent as a graveyard. All the rides were in their stations, waiting for passengers.

  Carter called Jared’s cell phone, but only reached the voice mail. He left a quick message and hung up.

  “Jared!” Carter shouted. “Other people who came with Jared! Are you guys here?”

  No answer came. They walked slowly down the midway, still hand in hand, calling for Jared and friends, but the park lay silent around them.

  They continued on toward the central plaza, with the wishing well surrounded by benches and colorful arrow signs.

  To the left, where there should have been a gaping sinkhole, the thousand bright lights of the carousel circled around and around, the horses and dragons bobbing on their poles. The Ferris wheel was no longer a rusting heap slouching on the lip of the sinkhole—it was brightly lit and turning, just like the swing ride beyond it. The high wooden track of the Starland Express glowed behind it, fully restored.

  “This isn’t possible, is it?” Carter whispered. “Even the biggest construction company in the world couldn’t do it in a few days. Right?”

  “It was dark before we came inside,” she said. “We didn’t see any of these lights from outside the park.”

  “Jared!” Carter shouted, turning slowly. He faced Haunted Alley, where the Dark Mansion’s eerie green light glowed through a thin haze of dry-ice fog. The little attractions looked open—the Haunted Souvenir Shop on the back side of Dark Mansion, the Beat the Devil and Ghostly Gallery games, the Devil Dogs concession stand—but Inferno Mountain rose above it all, its lights still off, a dead volcano towering into the dark sky above. Only a hint of the devil’s face near the top was visible in the colorful lights from the park below. “Jared, where in God’s name—”

  The door to the Haunted Souvenir Shop creaked open, giving a recorded ghostly “Wooooooooo-ooo!” instead of a chime or a bell. A very bland-looking man in a candy-striped hat and a matching striped suit, like some old-time carnival barker, emerged onto the rickety-looking wraparound porch in front of the store. Carter thought he recognized him, but he couldn’t remember where he’d seen him before.

  “I’m sorry you missed the party,” the man said. His voice was a dead, flat monotone. “An extraordinary time was had by all, and you may take some comfort in that.”

  The moment he heard the man’s voice, Carter remembered—he’d seen him in his dream on Dead Lake, just after the headless ghost of Tricia had shushed him from the bough of a skeletal cypress.

  Carter shivered at the recognition. The man had walked right out of his nightmare and into the middle of Starland Amusement Park.

  “Where did everybody go?” Victoria asked. She looked calm, but Carter could feel her hand trembling in his.

  “Your friends have all purchased their tickets and boarded their rides,” the man replied. He stepped down from the shop porch and walked to the center of Haunted Alley, facing them. “We will find permanent positions for them here at the park.”

  “What does that mean?” Carter asked him, trying not to look as scared as he felt.

  “We have closed for the evening,” the man said. As if to illustrate his point, the galaxy of lights in Space City vanished, followed by the bright lights of the roller coaster, the carousel, and the Ferris wheel. Darkness rushed in around them as the midway lights disappeared like ten thousand candles blown out at once.

  Only the Haunted Alley lights remained, and they were growing dim around the man in the striped hat.

  “I want to see Jared,” Carter said.

  “You can see him eventually.” The man’s voice fell to a quiet whisper, but Carter could hear him clearly, as if the man stood just behind Carter’s shoulder, whispering into his ear. “When the park is open, perhaps you can visit.”

  The remaining lights turned red and went very dim, leaving a thin glow like a fire that had burned to its final coals.

  A sound like a hundred whispering voices rose in the dark alley, and then a black fog rose from the pavement. It resolved into the shadowy shapes of dozens of people, most of them the size of children.

  “As you can see, we are all staffed up for the season,” the man said. “Soon all the rides and attractions will be open to the public—nearly all, in any case. Be sure to tell your friends.” He gave a faint hint of a smile.

  The crowd of dark shapes swelled toward Carter and Victoria, whispering louder, creating a shadowy wall in front of the man. They grew more distinct, their skin pale, many of them smeared in dark mud, their eyes colorless and dead.

  Carter thought he recognized Tamara and Elissa, two girls who’d hung out in Jared’s barn, among the shadows. He pointed and began to open his mouth to tell Victoria about them, but they melted away into darkness.

  “I recommend you depart through the nearest exit,” the man said, “Or I will be forced to contact security.”

  A security clown grew more distinct among the whispering shadows, his orange wig filthy under his blue hat, his rotten face streaked with remnants of white and red paint.

  The crowd of shadows swelled closer, their whispers growing into shrieks and howls, pale and muddy hands reaching out like hungry claws.

  Carter and Victoria looked at each other for a second, and then they ran.

  Pirate Island lay dark, and Victoria had to shine her flashlight so they could find their way to Crashdown Falls. As they ran, voices whispered in the darkness around them. He clutched Victoria’s hand tightly, afraid the hissing, whispering ghosts would seize her and drag her away. He expected to be grabbed and ripped to pieces at any moment.

  They made it to the fence, and the door opened easily for them. It slammed shut behind them, and Carter noticed the sign had changed from STAFF ONLY to KEEP OUT.

  They didn’t even check for traffic before bolting across the road. They hurried into Victoria’s car.

  “I think that place is really haunted,” Carter panted as he dropped into the passenger seat.

  “No shit.” Victoria started the car and punched the gas.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  They sat in the parking lot of Sand Dollar apartments, Victoria’s engine idling.

  “I have to go home,” she said. “Curfew.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do we do now?” she asked.

  “I don’t know
.” He told her about glimpsing the ghosts of the two girls. “Maybe Emily was right. It’s a dark place, a trap for souls.”

  “So if you die inside the park, you become one of the ghosts haunting it. And the park just killed seven people.”

  They didn’t speak for a minute, and then he climbed out of the car.

  She called him almost immediately as she drove home, and they stayed on the phone together for more than an hour, sometimes talking about what they’d seen, sometimes just staying silently connected so neither had to face their thoughts alone.

  When they were done, Carter took down the yearbook from a shelf in his closet. It was from seventh grade, and it fell open to the customary place, the only reason he ever looked at the old book at all.

  She smiled, showing a little gap in her teeth, her pale blond hair drawn back in braids for picture day. The faces around her had aged into teenagers, and many of them had moved out of town with their families, but her face would never change, and she would never grow up and escape this town.

  This was how he needed to remember her, young and full of life. He was determined to keep this vision in his memory instead of the headless ghoul who haunted him in his nightmares.

  He touched the name printed under her picture: BEATRICE CALHOUN.

  “I’m sorry, Tricia,” he whispered. It was not the first time he’d said it.

  On Saturday, he began his weekend volunteer duties at the hospital, spending half the day delivering flowers and pushing wheelchairs. The work relieved the insanity in his brain. When he returned home, he immediately dug into his pile of homework. It helped him avoid thinking about anything else.

  He tried Jared’s cell number a few times, but only reached his voice mail.

  He spent the rest of the weekend absorbed in schoolwork, getting frustrated with how often Victoria called and broke his concentration. He wanted to deal with this situation by keeping his mind on other things, but she clearly wanted to deal with it by talking it over again and again. He turned down her invitations to hang out, and by eleven p.m. on Sunday, he was almost entirely caught up with homework. It helped that he couldn’t sleep at night, and could only manage short naps during the day. Closing his eyes meant seeing the ghosts again, either Tricia or the horde of dark shadows in Haunted Alley.