by JL Bryan
“We’re just friends.”
“Like actual platonic friends, or that thing where she thinks it’s platonic, but you think it’s going to lead somewhere?”
“Shut up,” Carter said. “We’re just investigating the park together. Do you want a ride to the police station or not?”
Jared sighed and slumped.
“I feel dead,” he said. “But yeah, take me to the fucking cops, I guess. They might as well do something useful around town for a change.”
They drove up the highway toward the strip mall housing the police station.
“Let me off here,” Jared said. “I’ll walk in by myself.”
“You sure?”
“No reason to drag you into it. Thanks for coming to get me.”
Carter felt he should insist on going in with Jared, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He’d had enough problems with the police lately.
“If you think that’s best...” Carter said.
“Yeah, I’ll just walk in off the streets, more dramatic or something that way.” At the next red light, Jared opened the door and hopped out. Carter watched him dash across the street, then turn back and wave before stepping into the police station.
Good luck, Carter thought, and then he drove back home.
He texted Victoria to tell her Jared was back from the park, and she immediately called him for all the details.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Jared wasn’t at school on Tuesday. By lunchtime, a rumor had swarmed through the school that the police were going to open up Starland for a full-scale search. Carter knew it was true, because Jared had texted him about it early that morning.
Like many of the students, Victoria and Carter decided to drive over to Starland after school and check it out. Hundreds of other people had done the same, creating a weird sort of carnival atmosphere around the place, the crowd pushing up as close to the front gate as the police barriers and yellow tape would allow, newspaper reporters, a FOX affiliate van shooting footage, and cars parked at all the old attractions, where vandals and scavengers had long since removed the orange cones and sawhorses blocking off the parking lots.
Everybody seemed to be whispering and taking pictures.
Carter and Victoria arrived just in time to see the event unfold. Theodore Hanover Junior stood at the front gates, sweating copiously under his curly toupee, looking like a nervous, hunted animal. Town and county police had assembled for the search, along with a number of firefighters, EMS workers, and three police bloodhounds. Jared stood next to Chief Kilborne, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. He was too far away for Carter to speak to him.
“I wonder what they’ll find,” Victoria whispered. She took a few pictures of her own as the professional search party quietly moved aside the accumulation of presents, cards, and pictures at the front gate.
The crowd fell silent as Theodore Hanover Junior fumbled out a thick spool of keys and opened the padlocks on the front gate, pausing between each lock to search for the next key. By the time he opened the final lock, the only sound was the surf rolling against the beach across the street, beyond the old motels.
Hanover removed the chains and set them aside. He stared at the thick vines shrouding the gate for a moment, took a breath, and pushed it open. A long, rusty squeal pierced the silence. It was a sunny afternoon under a blue sky, not a cloud on the horizon, but a chill seemed to spread through the crowd.
Dozens of cameras snapped pictures, and people began to whisper. For a moment, Carter was reminded of the whispering crowd of shadows rising from the ground in Haunted Alley, and he shuddered.
The amusement park’s midway was a wreck, the pavement shattered into uneven pieces, some of them jutting up like sharp boulders. Waist-high clumps of weeds sprouted through the broken asphalt. The concessions and games were unidentifiable, many of them collapsed, most of them buried under thorny vines and spindly plants, their once-bright paint faded and peeled away. It looked just as it had when Carter and Victoria had gone inside the first time, a dilapidated and forgotten ruin.
“It’s hiding itself,” Victoria whispered as the police advanced inside. “I bet they don’t find anything at all.”
“You’re right,” he whispered back.
She raised her camera and took a picture of the wreckage along the midway.
“I wonder why he let us go,” Victoria whispered. “The carnival barker guy.”
“Let us go? He threatened to kill us.”
“And then he let us go. Why? If the park swallowed up everyone else, why did it spit us back out?”
“I don’t know.” Carter thought it over. “He said something like ‘we’re all staffed up for the season.’ Right?”
“He said that to us on Friday night. On Saturday night, he took four more kids, those freshmen, and they’re still missing. So he specifically rejected us.”
“I don’t mind being rejected if it means we’re still alive.”
“But why us?”
“We did resist the Popcorn Cart of Temptation,” Carter said.
“Maybe.” Victoria frowned. “But he eventually let Jared go, too. And you said Jared drank some of the park’s beer.”
“Jared barely made it out alive.”
“There must be some reason, though. Some kind of connection.” Victoria was bouncing nervously on the balls of her feet.
“Jared and I were both there on the day of the sinkhole,” Carter whispered. “So there’s that.”
“You saw it happen?” Victoria’s mouth dropped as she looked up at him. “You were there?”
“I was there.”
“You never said that before.”
“I don’t like talking about it. It was terrible. The worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
“I’m sorry.” Victoria touched his hand, and he took hers. Both of them felt clammy and shook a little bit. “You and Jared were both there and lived through it. Maybe that means something.”
“Maybe. I’m not sure what. It’s hard to know, isn’t it?”
“I found out where Artie Schopfer is,” Victoria said.
“Seriously? Mr. Hanover actually got back to you?”
“No. His receptionist shoved me off the phone yesterday, said she’d call back but didn’t. It was actually an editor at Amusements and Attractions magazine. She emailed me his contact information, sort of.”
“Sort of?”
Victoria pulled up the email on her phone. “It’s the address and phone number of a nursing home near Silver Springs. She said he apparently doesn’t like to speak on the phone, but we can visit.”
“That’s five hours away.”
“We can do it on Saturday if we get up early enough.”
“It would have to be Sunday. I work at the hospital on Saturdays.”
“This Sunday, then?” Victoria raised her eyebrows. “Will you go on a road trip with me?”
“You’re sure you want to do this?”
“How else will we get any answers?”
Carter shook his head. “Okay. If the cops don’t find anything today.”
“I don’t think they will.”
After a couple of hours, the crowd had thinned as people grew bored waiting for the searchers to emerge from the old park. Carter and Victoria waited until sunset, when the police and their dogs returned to the front gate.
Jared was still with the police chief. Neither of them looked happy. Jared saw Carter near the front of the crowd, shook his head, and shrugged.
“We should go,” Carter told Victoria, while Theodore Hanover Junior locked up the gate and the police returned to their row of vehicles. “I’ll learn more from Jared than we’ll find out hanging around here, anyway.”
“If they didn’t find anything, that means it’s up to us to figure it out,” Victoria said.
Carter didn’t like the sound of that.
When he returned home, his dad was watching the local news on the DVR. Carter sat beside him to see what they
would report about the park.
“Starland Amusement Park in Conch City,” the anchorman finally said. The news image that had once gone all over the country appeared over his right shoulder, the devil leering down at a burning cotton candy stand. “Five years ago, it made headlines when the largest, deadliest sinkhole in Florida history opened beneath it. More than a hundred park visitors and employees died, and much of the park burned, earning it the nickname ‘Inferno Park’ in the national news.”
“It wasn’t a nickname,” Carter’s dad muttered. “They just got the name wrong.”
“Today, the park was re-opened, but not for fun and games,” the anchor continued. “Correspondent Brandi Orchid has the story.”
The TV cut to the crowded scene where Carter had been, with a tanned blond woman smiling brightly with the ruins of the amusement park behind her.
“Thirteen teenagers have gone missing without a trace here in Conch City,” Brandi said. “The gates of Starland Amusement Park opened for the first time in five years as local authorities widen their search for the missing. What did they find?”
The view cut to footage of police poking around the wrecked midway.
“The answer: not much,” Brandi’s voice continued. “Police and trained rescue dogs spent hours in the ruins, but found none of the lost kids. Still, the world got its first glimpse inside these gates in years. It was a scene of destruction and desolation, a sad reminder of this park’s tragic history, and for local authorities, just another dead end in the mystery of the missing children.”
Then the news moved to the story of an apartment fire in Pensacola.
“That didn’t really tell us anything,” Carter said.
“It’s the damn TV. It never tells you anything,” his dad said, then flipped to a reality show about garage bands. “Hey, have you been watching this? The Marshmallow Deadbeats replaced that Tyrell guy with a new bassist. Probably for the best.”
“I haven’t been watching, sorry.”
Carter went back to his room and tried to focus on his homework, hoping Jared remembered to call or text him. He was drowning in calculus problems when the phone rang.
“We didn’t find her,” Jared said when Carter answered. “We didn’t find anybody, alive or dead. The whole place changed, man. When I was in there, it looked all new. Now it’s just a wreck.”
“Nobody saw anything strange? Did you check Dark Mansion?”
“That was one of the first places. We pulled it apart. I mean they pulled it apart, because I was just supposed to stand there like a dog on a leash in case the pigs wanted to ask me questions.”
“What do you mean by ‘pulled it apart’?”
“Oh, it turns out some of the walls in Dark Mansion were built to come down fast in case of a fire or if some fat old tourist had a heart attack or whatever,” Jared said. “So they pulled down all these walls, and the place just looked gutted. It was falling down anyway. I mean there was a tree growing out one window. When they opened up the walls like that, you could just tell there was nothing in there. They searched it and they didn’t find any sign of Becca, but the place looked completely different, man. It wasn’t the same place where I got trapped for three days, not at all. It shrank.”
“Victoria said it looked like the park was hiding itself,” Carter said.
“Did Victoria have any ideas why? Or how?”
“Who knows? Maybe because it was daytime, or it was adults, or it just didn’t want to be seen that publicly.”
“What’s behind all of it, though?” Jared asked. “Why is any of it happening?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m so worried about Becca,” he said. “Everybody else, too...but especially her, you know? Because I should have been able to protect her in there, or rescue her, or...maybe I should go back tonight.”
“Don’t do that!” Carter told him. “You barely survived the first time, and you already searched all day. Wait until we figure some stuff out. Victoria and I will talk to that Schopfer guy, and we’ll see what else Emily Dorsnel can tell us. Are you going to be at school tomorrow?”
“Why not?” Jared said. “Nothing else to do.”
After their phone call, Carter studied until his eyes were bleary and heavy. He went to sleep and dreamed again of standing on the platform of Inferno Mountain, looking down at a trainload of corpses, with Tricia’s headless body in the lead car, reaching out her cold, pale hand toward him.
“You almost missed the train,” Tricia’s voice whispered in his ear, “But we came back for you.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Carter asked Emily Dorsnel to have lunch with them again on Wednesday. He invited Jared, too, but Jared instead took up his usual seat at the concrete planters, surrounded by a few dozen others who wanted to hear about his time in the old amusement park.
Carter and Victoria began to tell Emily about their second visit to the park.
“First, it looked like everything had been restored,” Carter said. “The way it was when I was a kid.”
“Time slips. We discussed that previously,” Emily said, nodding.
“A lot of the concession stands were open,” Victoria told her. “Jared and his friends drank beer and ate all kinds of food offered by the park.”
“Truly?” Emily’s eyes widened. “That’s unwise, of course. One should never accept food or drink in the underworld, the fae world, or any supernatural locale. Myth and lore are clear on that point.”
Carter then told them about the man in the striped hat and his horde of dark ghosts, and seeing Tamara and Elissa among them. Emily grew more and more pale as he described it.
“Some dark places are self-feeding,” Emily said, her voice very low so they had to lean in to hear her. “Like Tuen Mun Road in Hong Kong. Ghosts appear in the middle of the road to make people swerve and crash. Then those people become ghosts haunting the road, so it becomes more and more haunted over time. A spiral of death.”
“Great,” Carter said.
“If that’s what we’re dealing with, then there are two layers of problems,” Emily said. “The first is all the ghosts of people who’ve died in the park. The second, deeper layer is the evil behind them, the one who’s turned the place dark and basically enslaved all of these lost souls.”
“What would the deeper layer be?” Victoria asked.
“Something evil and powerful.”
“We’re going to meet with the artist who designed the park,” Carter said. “Inferno Mountain, Dark Mansion, all the good stuff. Maybe he’ll know.”
“You are?” Emily frowned. “I would use great caution in that case. You could be dealing with a very dangerous individual.”
Carter and Victoria shared an unhappy look.
“One more question,” Victoria said. “The park has taken all these kids, but they let us go. The man just told Carter and I to leave, and then Jared eventually escaped, too. Why wouldn’t he take everyone? Why didn’t he kill us?”
“Not that we’re complaining,” Carter added.
Emily considered this.
“A couple of possibilities,” she said. “One is that he specifically didn’t want your souls for the park. I don’t know why that would be. The other is what Jared is so ably demonstrating for us here.” Emily pointed to Jared, talking on and on to an enraptured crowd, mostly freshmen and sophomores with their mouths hanging open as they listened to his story.
“He’s telling everyone about it,” Victoria said.
“Exactly,” Emily said. “Think of what’s happened since Jared returned. The police searched the park, the news covered it, and now people want to hear more about it from him. A soul trap wouldn’t be very effective unless it could lure people inside.”
“So we’re supposed to be walking advertisements for the park,” Carter said.
“A mythology is now forming around Starland,” Emily told them. “A lure to draw in the rubes, the people who just have to see it for themselves. Starland might
have been in the back of our collective mind this summer, but now it’s at the front, under spotlights. People from all over the country might be hearing about it. People will come from out of town just to have a look, or to try and sneak inside.”
“He said all the rides and attractions would be open soon,” Carter told her. “He even said ‘Tell your friends.’”
“There you go,” Emily said. “You’re part of his promotional strategy.”
Carter felt ill as he remembered pushing Jared to hurry up and go to the police, hoping they’d do a full-scale search of the park. He’d gotten his wish, too.
Emily stood as the lunch bell rang.
“Be careful about meeting with that artist guy,” she advised them. “He could be connected to the underlying evil somehow. Maybe even a part of it.”
After Emily walked away, Victoria whispered, “Do you want to hang out tonight?”
“Can it include doing homework together? I have a ton of it.”
“That’s fine. I just don’t want to sit by myself in that strange house, thinking about all the evil things in this little town.”
“On the bright side, we still have one good pizza place,” he said. “We should go there.”
They went to Sharkfin Pizza that evening, now a small dive tucked into a narrow slot in a rundown strip mall facing the highway. Nets, mounted sharks, and shark memorabilia crowded the walls. They sat down in one of four small booths.
“This used to be the best pizza on the beach,” he told her. “It was so popular, they opened this second location just for deliveries. Now this is the only one left, but it’s still something.”
When the pizza arrived, Victoria squinted at the taste of the extremely salty crust.
They sat there for more than an hour, quietly doing their homework, the only customers in the place besides a few who came by for pick-up orders.
It became their ritual for the rest of the week, sitting at the library, the park, or the beach studying together. Sometimes they talked about Starland, and their growing fear at the idea of meeting the man who’d designed it, but they would quickly move away from the subject.
